Check Out My Tools!: Must-Have Garden Supplies

That's right, it's product promotion time, but I still don't get any money for this stuff. And because of that, you can wager that I legitimately mean what I say!

My favorite spring garden supplies are as follows:

Reusable velcro ties & bamboo poles

Check out my adorable pea trellis! Bamboo usually comes in 5 or 8 foot lengths so it meets many large scale needs, but can be cut down to any size. It's sturdy, attractive, plentiful and cheap. Combined with reusable velcro ties, you can make all sorts of great garden trellises. Here's a link to a simple bamboo trellis from Organic Gardening magazine.

Using plastic zip ties will give you a tighter connection, but I really like the velcro ones instead. I've had the same ones now for years and they are still going strong. Plus I'm not great at building stuff, so I usually need to reposition the bamboo multiple times and that means going through multiple plastic ties. The velcro adjusts quickly, and then you're off and running!

Wall-o-waters

How do you get the earliest home-grown tomatoes on the block? These guys right here. Each wall-o-water is like a mini greenhouse. A series of tubes is connected in a circle. Fill the tubes half way with water and place in the garden for two weeks to heat up the soil beneath. After two weeks, plant your tomato, pepper, eggplant or other summer crop in the wall-o-water and fill the tubes the rest of the way. That's it. The water in the tubes absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, keeping your plant at a consistent cozy temperature. By the time your plant grows too big, nighttime temperatures are safe for those tomatoes to be out of the bag anyway. Using wall-o-waters will give you a serious six week head start on summer vegetables. You can easily have an early (with wall-o-waters in late spring ) and late (without wall-o-waters, and planted at the proper time) planting, which can give you a solid harvest from late spring to frost! These are easily found in any garden supply catalog, but I'm not sure you will find them on the shelves at garden store. But they should be!

Soaker Hoses

Good watering is key to a successful garden, and the best way to do it is to send the water directly to the roots of the plant where it belongs. Regular sprinklers waste water by sending it flying into the air to be lost to evaporation or to land on the entire plant as opposed to the soil. Too much water on the leaves themselves can lead to disease and mildew problems. Also, when a lot of water hits dry soil fast, it initially tends to pool up and run off. That's more water literally down the drain.

Using soaker hoses is the "set it and forget it" method of watering. You don't need to move a sprinkler around, or stand there endlessly with the hose nozzle doing it yourself. Lay your soaker hoses out so that they snake all around your garden beds. Connect your water supply and let the hose drip water slowly to the base of your plant and directly to the roots. Leave your water supply on long enough (depending on your soil type) to water 1-2 inches, and do this once a week. To determine how long that takes, put a shallow plastic container with inch measurements on it under your soaker hose and see how long it takes to fill. Again, these are reusable for many seasons and come in 25, 50, 75 or 100 foot lengths. They are easily found at any big box store or garden center.

That's all for today. I would be putting down new mulch right now, if not for the rain. It won't be long before I hit you with my next topic about the BEST organic method of dandelion weed control! Stay tuned!

Bring It On, Spring!

Early in the week, I got the news. Friday's forecast called for 65 degree temperatures, followed by a weekend of rain. You know what that means? It means that I plant seeds Friday and walk away smiling, and mother nature is stuck theoretically dragging 50 feet of hose all around the yard doing the watering. Sweet! Let's go zone 6, time to mobilize!

Laura's Comprehensive and Probably Still Too Ambitious Spring Garden Plan

Peas: Apparently, the specific date peas should be planted depends on your religious affiliation. If you are extremely religious, peas are planted on St. Joseph's day. If you are only moderately religious, but have a solid appreciation for holidays that allow for excessive alcohol consumption, then St. Patrick's day is your pea planting time. If you are a secular granola crunchy hippie, then March 15th is your day. Regardless, all these bits of advice seem to be different ways to say the same thing: plant your peas in mid-March, as soon as the ground can be worked.

When did I plant peas? I threw seeds down on March 21st, in between grocery shopping and picking Sophia up from school, because that's when I finally got around to it. Make your own assumptions. And of course, I planted two different varieties but didn't keep track of which went where, and accidentally dug them up a week later when fertilizing the beds. Let the games begin!

Garlic, Onions, Shallots: These bulbs got planted in the fall and are coming up nicely! Three 4x4 beds of garlic gave us enough harvest that we finally ran out only last week. All these can be planted now for fall harvest as well, and you can get onion sets and shallot bulbs at most big box home stores. You might have to head to Agway for the garlic though. You can try planting store garlic if you like, but those are generally sprayed with a chemical that prevents them from sprouting, so it's a bit risky.

Root Vegetables - Radishes, Turnips, Beets & Carrots: Except for the carrots, I always have easy success with this cool weather crop group. Carrot seeds don't seem to like the fact that I'm going to forget to water them regularly while they are germinating, while the others seem to be more flexible about this. That's why I like planting seeds right before the rain is due! The other seeds I pretty much just broadcast around the plot, rake or poke them into the ground and then thin as necessary.

Lettuces & Greens: My favorite thing to do is to buy a mesclun salad seed mix and lightly cover the seeds in the ground in a 2x4 foot patch. In a few weeks, you have a colorful mix of salad greens that will grow back if you cut them an inch or two above the soil line when harvesting. Easy & fresh salad all spring and early summer! If you want to be really particular ( I won't mention any names, but someone in this house meets that description), you can buy the greens separately and make your own mix. Mesclun mix usually has endive, mustard, radicchio, lettuces and a variety of other random colorful greens. This is a great beginner gardener crop, and it can really save you some money when you compare the price of seeds to bagged grocery store salads. My other favorite spring planted greens are spinach, arugula, swiss chard and bok choy, which I usually plant separately instead of mixed together.

I thought I would take it easy this spring, and not start too many summer vegetables under lights in my basement. However, the above scheme does not sound much like taking it easy. Check back for further status reports!

A Walk in the Woods

Today I was driven by the creepy overcast sky and unusually warm air to abandon my groceries in the car, and take a walk by the water. A creek runs behind my house, the kind of water that's too small for a boat but too big for a simple footbridge. It's the main reason we moved here from ten minutes away. Sophia's swing set is by the water, a placement decision that most parents would think better of, but not us. Today I swung facing the water, and eyed the dark woods not far to my right.

Calling it "woods" is a big stretch. It's really just a bit of wild at the edge of our property line maybe 100 feet deep. You could never have a Blair Witch situation in there. Sandwiched between our road and the creek that intersects it, you won't go far before you meet a natural or unnatural barrier. Even though we've lived here a few years, I never go there, and have never until today picked my way along the banks of the water.

In the height of summer, there are good reasons not go to in there. A wall of poison ivy, my nemesis, greets me at the tree line. Even when brave enough to get past it, the thorny brambles and the tangled wild vines are enough to stop me in my tracks. Don't even mention the ground that gives too much as you walk, layered with years of decomposed trees and leaves. What am I stepping on? Am I about to fall into a hole and break my ankle? Holy crap, why is the poison ivy vine FURRY???

In the brittle brown of winter, though, everything's a little clearer. I pick my way along an implied path and discover other sad sights on the way. Rusty pipes and rebar jutting out of abandoned chunks of concrete. Plastic tubs, broken glass. Tires. Who would do this and why? I can't imagine even touching this stuff, much less having the strength to lift it. It's a mess and probably not worth dealing with.

I keep crunching around anyway, finding funny things here and there. An old bird's nest built with feathers and sticks with a nice plastic bag foundation. An argument between two different surveyor's opinions - ribbons of hot pink vs. safety orange. But I kept finding myself veering toward the water until I ran into the fisherman's spot.


The fisherman can be seen from my house most seasons, casually traipsing through the backyard or picking along slowly through the water. But usually I see them in the same spot far from the house in this patch of woods. If I squint, I can make them out through the trees as shadowy camouflaged figures in their superhero-like rubber waders (read: tights). I stand in their footsteps, and I see why they come here.


A few sections by the water are weed and leaf free because of the natural rise of the stream during a storm. The sediment left behind makes sandy and flat areas, like mini private beaches. A large chuck of moss covered shale, the perfect natural bench, sits in the middle. Trees stretch over the stream and stand tip-toe on their gnarled medusa roots. In front the water is a quiet pool, a little bit of deep stillness that the fish like. For a second, the passing cars fade, and I am aware that I just exhaled in a way that my shoulders thanked me. In the next second I knew that, although I look at the water every day from the big bay windows in my comfortable dining room, I never see it. That makes me just the same as the dude who dumped the tire. How can I respect and appreciate something if most days I don't even notice it exists?

There's still the rusted pipes and broken glass, but the structure is here. This place has good bones and my mind starts to whirr. A meditation garden is what I need. Nothing fancy.
The cleared path to the spot is the easy first step. Then junk removal, and then a fight with the poison ivy and picker bushes as soon as they start to rear up, even though I hate those more than I hate being stabbed by rusty metal. And then when the trees leaf out and I can see how the sun hits, some Japanese ferns and variegated hostas will brighten up the spot and shadow out the invasive wild carrot and garlic mustard. The mossy rock stays, perfect just as it is.

Last fall I was sure I would be blogging in the spring about seed shopping, making up potting mix, and showing off my elaborate homemade grow light system. Normally in mid-March my basement system would be well under way with staggered plantings of tomatoes and peppers, lots of different lettuces and greens and then my chosen experimental exotic weirdo vegetables of the year (leeks and artichokes for 2009). But now I think I'm going to rely on Cierich's garden center for heirloom tomato and pepper stock, and Agway for the herbs. Instead of scattering myself doing a hundred small projects at once, and badly, I will do three simple things.

I will face my fears of the unknown. I will repair what is broken and neglected. I will see the water every day.

I will make it right.

Show Me the Money! (and other abandoned topics)

"If you've been following my illustrious career as a blogger/artist/gardener/funnywoman, then you've likely noticed some recurring themes. 1.) I'm lazy. 2.) I'm cheap. 3.) I have a lot of hobbies, all of which I aim to do with as little effort or expense as possible. "






That's the intro to a never written story about how to shop for and plant deep discount end-of-season perennials. It was never finished because, having purchased about 60 plants for maybe $100 bucks, I spent two weeks maniacally digging holes and throwing plants into the ground as if being chased by a pack of wild dogs. By the time I was done, it was too cold to plant anything else, and I bought all the remaining inventory, so my advice to you would have been useless.





Here's another good one that never got finished entitled "Cast of Characters: Sisyphus"





"Tom and I are busy people - your standard busy married couple that can go for long periods of time, caught up in the "to-do" list of daily life, without having any sort of constructive conversation. What follows is the story of one couple's communication issues, and one cosmically challenged little red squirrel."



What's the point of sharing what I've started but not finished? First, to prove that I'm always Thinking about writing, I'm just not necessarily doing it. And second, whether I am writing or thinking, I am always terribly funny - at least to me.



So to conclude 2008, my first year of garden blogging, I'll leave you with a list of other articles not likely to get written in the next two weeks:



Why Throwing a Rotting Pumpkin in the Woods is the Same as Gardening
Frank vs. Laura: The Final Score
If You're Eating at My House, Don't Ask "What's in the Salad?": An Edible Weed Primer
The Tale of the Tufted Titmouse, and His Dirty Bird Friends


And so goes 2008. But make sure you return in 2009 because man, do I have some stunning realizations for you ... starting right in January with seed catalog shopping time!

Happy Holidays!