Product Placement For Which I, Unfortunately, Receive No Compensation: the Earth Box

Two questions: What is the Earth Box? And why are they not paying me to promote their product?

Well, I guess I'm not getting money or other valuable prizes because they don't know me, or care what I say. But I harbor no ill will. And as for what is the Earth Box? We must got back to the beginning - to the one and only Walter Petrosky.

Walter Petrosky is my 70+ year old Polish grandfather from the Scranton area who has 70+ years worth of wisdom to relay. Aside from being my favorite person, my grandfather is my greatest literary influence because of his particular style of leading his stories with the punchline. However, the punchline in his case usually doubles as the moral of the story. For example, my favorite stories by my grandfather begin with this line, delivered with complete sincerity in a strong Scranton accent: "Laura! (Lare-uh!) You gotta be careful with electricity (lektricity). [Pause - lean in for dramatic effect - commence pointing] Because one time, me, Bobby Touch, Jackie Mancuso (Mancuse) went up the (da) Mountain (Moun-un)...." and then things get weird, and there's something about stealing railroad tracks from the coal mine, an exposed 220 volt wire, and now my grandfather has curly hair. That's the best of the "beware of electricity" themed stories, although it would seem my grandfather has electrocuted himself no less than 5 times, and still lives so that we might all learn from his errors. He has also planted garlic upside down and nearly gotten bitten by a rattlesnake while picking blueberries ("We were up the mountain! We got paid five cents a pail! We shared one pair of shoes!"). Hints from Heloise, look out! These are good tips, all delivered Walter Petrosky style.

So how am I going to bring it back around from an elderly Polish man to the Earth Box? Here I go people, check me out. My grandfather has always sponsored my hobbies. Apparently in college, he felt my hobbies were eating peanut butter and drinking A-Treat lemon-lime soda by the case. Walt had that covered. Then when we bought our first house and took up renovating, we received a constant supply of Sears Craftsman tools. Now that gardening is my latest preoccupation, he's on the lookout for new and better gear for me at all times. So when Johnny Schwartztraubber's tomatoes became the talk of the block, my grandfather was on it.

It was explained to me, with much directional gesturing, that Johnny had bigger and more tomatoes on two plants than the guy with the garden across the street, or so-and-so from down the block, and the reason was that he was planting his tomatoes in a raised plastic box on casters. Not one to dilly-dally, I immediately became the owner of two such contraptions.

The Earth Box is essentially a raised bed on wheels. It's a self-watering system, which means that the bottom of the box is a reservoir that holds water and keeps the dirt above it on a perforated platform. The soil absorbs water as needed, keeping itself evenly moist. All you have to do is keep topping off the water. It also comes with the soil, the casters to move it in and out of the sun, a tight fitting plastic mulch cover and fertilizer. The complete instructions detail exactly how many of each type of a variety of seedlings should be planted, how they should be placed in the box and where the fertilizer goes. It's pretty fool-proof and is great for decks, since it's easy to roll around. An additional accessory kit comes with the trellis for tomatoes or other tall plants.

It's fool-proof all right, but how did I fare? Well, pretty ok, even for me. FOR ONCE, I followed the directions when planting my lettuces and only put in as many as they said and arranged them properly. I didn't even water regularly, but was still rewarded with an entire spring's worth of pest-free delicious lettuces that I cut an inch from the root so that they regrew. They were twice the size of the same lettuces that I planted in the garden at the same time. It really and truly rocked. Now, as far as the tomatoes, I couldn't resist the urge to plant only two, and put in three, which was not good. I also didn't keep watering regularly, resulting in something called blossom end rot, where the tomatoes gets black soft spots. The lack of regular watering and tight spacing stressed the plants, and now they picked up some sort of wilt. However, the tomatoes I did get were the first of the season, I believe because the box heats the soil sooner, speeding up the growth process. The tomatoes are still coming, but the ones in the garden are in better shape.

My final assessment? If you are a new gardener, or have limited space in the garden, or have ample deck space for containers, or just feel like it, get yourself an Earth Box system. And when you do, take a bit of a time out to thank Walter Petrosky for his enthusiasm, his dedication, and his knack for self-electrocution. Clearly, it has worked out for the best.

Notes From the Chopping Block: Tom's Pea & Garlic Scape Soup Recipe

Tom and I genuinely have a good system here: I grow food and he cooks it. Luckily for me, he is a better chef than I am a gardener. The following words are his, including the smart-ass remarks about yours truly.....


Long-in-the-tooth pea & garlic scape soup

What does the cook do when the gardener falls asleep at the wheelbarrow, and allows fantastic, organic produce to enter the agricultural equivalent of our “golden years?” Make soup. It is easy and surprisingly delicious. Even though the fruit, vegetable, tuber, or whatever isn’t pretty and tender anymore, it is still loaded with the flavor that only accompanies food that is freshly harvested.

So, here is just one of many simple soup recipes, and the basic technique works for just about anything coming out of your garden.

Ingredients
Peas (shucked with pods reserved)
Garlic scape (feel free to use the tough parts and save the tender ends for something else)
Tarragon
Water
Salt (please, not the iodized stuff with the picture of the girl and the umbrella. Go out and get yourself some good sea salt, or grey salt, or kosher salt, anything but the other stuff)

Procedure
Coarsely chop the pea pods (not the peas), the garlic scape and the tarragon. Place in a stockpot, and cover with water. Bring to a boil, and then lower to a simmer. Let it cook, covered, for about 30 minutes or so. Let cool. Puree the cooled stock in a blender or food processor. Pass the pureed stock through a sieve. You now have a stock – congratulations!
Prior to serving, return the stock to a simmer and add the peas and salt to taste. Let cook for just a few minutes until the peas are slightly softened, but retain some bite. Garnish with a pinch of fresh tarragon and perhaps a drizzle of olive oil or cream (not both). Serve with crusty bread.

In Defense of the Lazy Gardener

Who starts a blog and after a month, never posts again? I do, I do! But seriously people, it's not practical to start a blog about gardening in the spring. The spring is full of opportunity and hope, wacky schemes and grand adventures. That's the time my happy self is puttering in the garden, delusional and optimistic, sure that THIS time it's going to be great! Then summer comes, and reality punches you in the face with the quick one-two jab of disease and pest damage, an uppercut of drought and then the full wind up knock-out of Frank the groundhog. Summer, I realize, is the appropriate time to start a garden blog because #1. it's too hot out there and #2. the creatures are winning. When Frank starts his own blog, I will go into even deeper hiding.

In the meantime, I would like to share my favorite triumphant screw-ups of 2008, and point out the merits of my specific version of bottle rocket gardening (fire with good intentions, put on a mediocre show, fail with a lingering whine). It's also good to note that if you are going to be a bottle rocket gardener, it's best to have a spouse/partner/whatever who can pick up the pieces of your failed attempts and, Iron Chef style, still come up with some fantastic meal.

1.) To Pea or not to Pea:

So every year I plant peas, usually snap peas and snow peas, because I love walking around the garden eating fresh pea pods right off the vine. I can't be bothered with shelling peas since that's extra work, and who wants that? But here's the thing, even if I eat 5-10 pea pods every other day for the month or so that peas are producing, that's maybe two or thee plants worth of peas. How many plants do I grow? Like a 20 foot row. So I eat two plants worth of peas, and go start a blog, while the other 118 plants are like WHAT THE FRIG??? Here they are, doing their genetic duty and waving their offspring around in the wind, and I can't be bothered to harvest them. So I finally get around to harvesting, and the pods are way past edible. They're tough and stringy, and no fun at all, and my crop's a waste. Tom, as usual, is aggravated with my lack of follow through, but starts shelling them instead of eating them whole. I'm like, bah! They're not shelling peas, they're meant to be eaten in the pod when they're young. But sure enough, they taste quite lovely. So I go and read the packet and, lo and behold, I bought peas that are good for pod eating OR shelling. Doh! Suddenly with the standards being adjusted, we had a huge crop of shelling peas which Tom made the best soup ever with, and all thanks to the fact that I am not only a bad gardener but I also can't be bothered to read.

2.) The Great Garlic Scape

Ever since moving to this bizarre section of northwest Jersey, I've been obsessed with attending the Pocono Garlic Festival. For some reason, every year we ran into a scheduling conflict until Fall of 2007, when we coerced Dina and Rich to escort us to this extravaganza of garlic. All I knew is that I was going to buy garlic bulbs to plant, and that I was willing to try garlic ice cream just to say I ate it. The overall assessment from the four of us (including a silent nod of agreement from Sophia) was, like Christopher Walken in the famed SNL skit, we needed more garlic. It was your typical fall festival with craft vendors, music, local food stands, but everyone (maybe not so much the soap vendors) had a garlic theme. The local farms all had their fall crops for sale, including lots of varieties of garlic, potatoes and onions, and all the local food vendors had something on the menu that was garlic heavy. We did have an awesome garlic chowder, bought a strange garlic hot pepper jelly, and ate really freaking good kielbasa from a meat joint called Komenski's hailing from Dupont, PA. The heavily touted "garlic ice cream" turned out to be vanilla ice cream with a garlic pretzel topping. Regardless it was a great garlic time, and I bought THREE varieties of garlic, and couldn't wait to plant them in October, as directed.

If you are unfamiliar with the mechanics of garlic, each clove of garlic, if planted in the fall and left to overwinter, will become a full head of garlic by the following summer. This is just like planting tulips, and you do both at the same time. Like tulips, they will send up a stalk with a flower, but unlike tulips, this is a bad thing, since you're growing the garlic for the bulb, not the flower. Producing a flower weakens the bulb because it's putting it's energy into flower production. I knew that at the first sign of flowering, I should have pinched off the top of the garlic so it would keep growing but keep its energy aimed at making a great head of garlic. I should have, but didn't.

Instead one day I looked out at the three beautiful 4'x6' beds of garlic and notice the tops had all turned into giant curly Q's. What??? Clearly they were going into flowering, and that's no good. I say to myself, I have to get out there and cut those crazy things off. And time goes by, and I pass them and say I REALLY have to cut those things off! And more time goes by, and I pass them and say I REALLY NEED to cut those damn things off. And still more time goes by, and finally I'm like OK DAMMIT! I'm cutting those things off right now! But some voice in my head knows they are called garlic scapes, and thinks, maybe they are edible. So I run to Google.

Turns out, that not only are they edible, but they are some sort of eagerly anticipated food dork delicacy, and people pay offensive sums of money for these at fancy local organic markets. You seem to use them as a cross between an herb and a scallion - like a garlic flavored herb but the flavor is really mild and blends well into lots of foods. A little more digging, and I found some recipes for scapes & eggs, along with garlic scape pesto. This was all Tom needed to know to get rolling, and we ate and served garlic scapes to people for weeks, and stored a bunch in the freezer - all because procrastination rules the day.

3.) Rampant volunteerism

I'm not talking about heading to the local food pantry to plate up stuff for the needy. Volunteerism is my favorite aspect of lazy gardening. It's my reminder that no matter what you do, nature has its own agenda, so you may as well just let it go and see what happens.

So, here's some basic life cycle plant info. Every plant's job is to reproduce itself somehow. Lots of typical garden plants do this by producing flowers which get pollinated and produce seed, at which point the plant knows it has done its genetic duty and can happily die. If you continually pick the flowers or seeds, the plant cannot happily die and has to keep producing flowers until the weather causes it to die or take a long nap. Therefore a good gardener knows, that to keep flowers at proper show stopping production, you must snip off old flowers before they go to seed, otherwise known as deadheading. A good gardener putters about the garden every day, plucking off fading flowers. It is the right thing to do. However, I do not have the time or energy to be a good gardener.

That means, many (most) of my flowers go to seed, put on a crappy flower show, and die proudly as scheduled knowing they did fantastic work, because their seeds have hit the soil and will grow again next year on their own. These babies are called "volunteers" by gardeners, and these can be good or bad .... bad when it's an invasive weed, but awesome when it's your favorite vegetable or herb or flower. I had lots of great volunteers this year, therefore, I have lots of good reasons to never walk around deadheading plants. Did you see that? Once again, I have found a way to justify not working that hard.

In the event that you would like to take up gardening but not do the proper amount of work, here are some of my favorite volunteers:

• flowers: columbine, cleome, impatiens, calendula, cosmos (something with the c's, don't know why), pansies
• herbs: purple basil, parsley, chamomile
• veg: spinach, bok choy, arugula. Tomatoes will also appear again next year anyplace you let one fall off the plant and rot. They are not necessarily going to exactly resemble the plant they originated from, but that's a story for another entry. In the meantime, if you need an explanation, ask Mendel.

I have to give a special shout out to my favorite volunteer, my Sicilian arugula. I bought these seeds literally in Sicily in 2003 and smuggled (gasp!) them home in my suitcase, thinking I was getting some special exotic plant. We went there on a week long tour in the fall and every restaurant we ate in had the same main foods billed as the "typical Sicilian dish" of the season. Trust me, the Sicilians have been on the local-seasonal-fresh bandwagon forever, and after my 18th eggplant caponata, I got the message loud and clear. However, there was also this salad that I swore was called "rocket salad" with this green leaf that was spicy and vibrant and amazing, reminiscent of arugula, yet making arugula the ugly step-sister. It rocked, as the name indicated, and I had to have it. Turns out, once I got home and looked though some books, it was actually called roquette, and is a variety of arugula that is likely referred to as "sylvetta wild arugula." And it's perfectly accessible for purchase online. Not quite as exotic as I thought.

BUT here's the best thing - if you plant something, and let it reseed every year, over time, it will grow to adjust to the specific conditions in your garden, climate, zone, etc. Like, I may have started out with "arugula, sylvetta wild variety," but after years of the strongest plants surviving to reproduce in my particular patch of dirt, I have created "arugula, sylvetta wild variety, laura knott zone" meaning my arugula's internal monologue is "I grow in a zone 6 garden in New Jersey in full sun. Sometimes I get water every week, sometimes I don't. I never get fertilized, and no one cares much about me. One time, this super creepy spider moved into my flower stalks and totally freaked me out and STILL no one cared. *sigh* I'm like, whatever, dude. I'm just here to grow and shit."

Do I need a recap here? I think I do. In summary, it is good to be a lazy gardener because accidents can wind up being beneficial, and Mother Nature will pick up the slack where you fail. Of course, at the moment I'm not telling you about my disease ridden potatoes, broccoli riddled with flea beetle bullet holes, and Frank the groundhog, who I'm pretty sure threw me the finger the other day after he ate every bean plant in the ground. Ah, but that's another entry, isn't it? Biggest garden failures of 2008 - coming soon!!!