Grabby

As I lurch my way through my new endeavors in gardening, one of the things I hope to learn is what plants I am good with.  I know I cannot reach too-soon or too-sure conclusions about this:  the choices (conscious and unconscious) that I make are a small part of the picture relative to weather, soil, the whims and vagaries of pests, and so on.  However, at this juncture I can state at least that there are some plants that it is not impossible to see thrive under my care, and that is a start.

While a number of my plants seem pretty happy in this benign growing season (people are still shuddering about last year’s conditions, which on balance I now find acceptable to have missed), one in particular is luxuriating, glutting, glorying, and generally having to seem the best time of all, and that is the pumpkin (the variety is Sugar Pie).  I have two pumpkin plants, and the smaller of the two I would consider to be insanely out of control if I did not have its larger sibling to compare it to.

I’m glad to see them doing so well not only in general but also because they had such an inauspicious beginning.  Both are replacements, started from seed.  I had carefully grown bitty little pumpkin seedlings at home under lights, but they never really took after I transplanted them.  First one perished, then the other.  I had little hope for the replacement seeds; I was mistaken.  In general I did not have much luck with any of the seedlings I started at home, so that is something for me to think about and recalibrate for the future (or, you know, give up on, depending).

My now-adult pumpkin plants are so large and fat that they show no signs of slowing down even when the ordinary annoyances of life such as powdery mildew crop up.  The powdery mildew really bothered me; MY PUMPKINS ARE HAPPY AND I DO NOT WISH ANYTHING TO CHANGE THIS.  Ah well, the price to pay for not having a drought or murderous oven-like temperatures this year, I suppose.  At any rate, I filled a spray bottle with one part milk, two parts water, and spritzed the mildew on a sunny day.  This seems to have taken care of most of it, and I’ll repeat the procedure in a week or so if needed.

Lots of plants put out little grabbers – my peas, my mouse melons, my cucumber, my nasturtium – but none shows the ferocity of my pumpkin plants.  We’ll call it hugging and say it’s love.  Here is a pumpkin hugging its neighbor.

This pumpkin is hugging a tomato plant.  I have untangled it from its victim, er, friend several times and tried to refocus its endeavors on the tomato cage.

The nasturtium, after feeling so pleased with itself for having successfully vine-conquered a plant label that I could then not remove, even though the seed it was labeling never sprouted (cilantro), got seriously out-vined.  It is adaptable, however, and realized that it could climb up the pumpkin while the pumpkin was climbing over it.

After all that, of course one hopes that the pumpkins will actually produce something, other than leaves and grabbers.  I may be in luck!  Or, the rats and squirrels may be in luck – we’ll see.  I will fight for my pumpkins; the powdery mildew knows this.

I Declare Myself Qualified

An advantage of growing my own food is that I can have kohlrabi.  This may not seem too impressive a victory, except that I have always liked kohlrabi a lot, but it is not readily available in stores (as you will agree if you have ever happened to look for it, which you probably have not).  At any rate, kohlrabi was not offered to me, and so I allowed my world to contract a little and carried on through the years without it.  Now, I rebel!  Here is the largest of my kohlrabi thus far:

Although I planted all four seeds in this square simultaneously, they somehow managed to stagger their growth, which will be convenient.  It is not that I could not devour four kohlrabies at once; it is rather that I prefer to have an outside force preventing me from doing so.

A couple months ago, the garden had a volunteer day when we built some new raised beds, among other tasks.  A few of us knew what we were doing (notably, and fortunately, the guy using a power saw to cut the wood), but many of us did not.  Still, while it may be a tiring endeavor to screw together a bunch of 4x8 raised beds, it is not a complicated one.  The coordinator broke us out into teams and gave us our instructions, and then left us to it.

What I want to remark upon here though is not the work itself (although it was satisfying) but rather the passers-by walking along the street beside our labors.  They would slow down, sometimes even stop, and stare not just curiously but longingly at our awkward efforts.  I think that our manifest inexpertness was much of the appeal.  “If it’s just random people they want – I am a random person, I could do that!”

I have seen the same effect in play in other volunteering I have done:  particularly when you do not look official, or only semi-official, and you are out and about working on whatever activity that seems as though it might be sort of useful, people suddenly, rather hesitantly, want to do something to help, and they are so extraordinarily happy when they can.  It is encouraging to see, although it also offers the opportunity to reflect upon that this simple, kind, venturesome instinct that is so common is also starved for want of outlets.

There are plenty of tasks in the world that require little to nothing more than the will to embark upon them, and this remains true no matter how often we are told, by means direct or subtle, otherwise.

Infinithree

I had read, on one of those infomemes that gets passed around, that even after tossing a bunch of celery into the refrigerator and pulling it out every now and then to chop off another stalk or two and gradually denuding the whole thing, one could actually regrow a living, healthy celery plant from the remaining stump and start the cycle anew.  So, when I reached the leafy center of my next celery purchase, I stuck it in a pot of dirt in the windowsill.  I named it Infinity.  However, it died.  Make of that what you will.

Undaunted, I placed my next celery stump in a wine glass of water on the kitchen window.  This was Infinitwo.  In a few days, Infinitwo decided which parts of its stump it was not going to maintain (they rotted into sog) and started putting out little root-filaments.  I changed its water every couple days, and then I potted it.  Infinitwo got some sort of infestation and also, I thought, died, although I kept it in its pot for the time being, and it has actually started to regenerate.

Anyway, when I thought Infinitwo was no more, I started Infinithree, doing the wineglass-of-water treatment for over a month and letting it grow an impressive hairball of roots.  Fortune smiled upon Infinithree, because when it looked rooty enough to be put in dirt, I had my garden plot:  Infinithree was going to get to be an outdoor celery.  I planted it, it looked happy, and then it got attacked by bugs.  I trimmed off the buggy parts, which didn’t leave a whole lot, but lo and behold, what remained was more than enough.  Here is the prospering Infinithree from a few days ago (note the leggy bits from its windowsill days!):

Like almost all of its neighbors, Infinithree has gotten a lot bigger and fluffier even in just the past two days.  This is the garden as of this morning, and you can see the pumpkins and radishes in particular are going berserk.

 I recognize that one of my greatest liabilities as a gardener is my sentimentality; since this is unlikely to change, I am just going to work with it.  I know very well that individual plants do not care too much, if at all, whether they make it:  they are cheerfully aggressive and take whatever chance they get, however ridiculously small.  And, I have pulled up plenty of weeds whose sin was no greater than simply having rooted themselves inconveniently for my plans.

With that said, I am pleased when I persist beyond sense to give a plant a chance and it pans out, as with Infinithree (and perhaps Infinitwo), particularly given that the heavens know often enough it doesn’t.  On the other side of my plot is a lone little butternut squash seedling.  It sprouted in promising enough fashion a couple weeks ago, but then it got chilly for a while and some marauding bugs did a number on it.  All that was left was one leaf and a gnawed-on stem.  To say it looked unpromising would be an understatement.

But, it didn’t wilt or fall over.  It just kind of…sat there.  For a week.  The leaf was still green, its stem still firm, so I figured, well, okay, this may be all this little guy ever does, but it seems to want to keep doing it, so I’m not going to kick it out of its square of dirt.

Today, it showed a flurry of activity around the gnawed part of its stem:

Yay butternut squash!  I am not sure what will come of it, but it is definitely still hanging in there for the fight.

This past weekend, a few of us volunteered to help plant seedlings in eight beds whose produce is designated to be given away (called the Grow2Give program).  There were of course some leftover seedlings, which anyone was free to take.  Some of us took a couple rescues, and the rest were put in the garden’s tool shed for anyone to have.

I fit in some kale, a sweet pepper plant, and an Amish paste tomato, which was really all I had room for.  Over the next days, people would take a foundling here or there, and the tray of free seedlings slowly diminished.  What is left now is only plants that really have no chance of survival even if they are coddled beyond all measure.  It just happens:  something seems to have eaten them (different somethings in each case) and so they do not appear to have the oomph left to carry on.

I know it is a matter of indifference to them, but I still tell them that their crèche-mates are doing well and carrying the torch forward for everyone who could go only this far and no farther.  I am sure they are pleased to hear it!

Plot 79

The best advice I am ever going to give in this blog I will give right now, at its inception, and in the first sentence:  grow a food garden.  If you are poor, grow your own food.  If you do not trust the food-like substances sold to us, grow your own food.  If you are leery of relying upon the system’s continuing ability to produce and distribute what we need, grow your own food.  If you would rather not be forced to buy from companies you may not actually like, grow your own food.  If you see a need for increased autonomy and localized production in our future, grow your own food.  If you want to learn more about how to build and maintain a human-supporting ecosystem because you recognize this as integral to any hope of establishing colonies on the moon, Mars, and onwards, grow your own food.

That last one is maybe mostly just for me, but I mention it in case it might resonate with anyone else out there.  Hello, nerds!  I know, if we’re talking the moon and Mars, we need to talk about underground, and if we’re talking about underground, we need to talk about fungus.  But we’ll save the topic of mushrooms for another day, only partly because I have not yet been as successful as I would like growing them.

SO!  Yes, grow your own food.  Stellar recommendation!  Now we get to the details, and that’s where things get hairy, at least for me.  I live in an apartment that has no balcony and is none too sunny (and contains a cat besides), and for whatever reason I am not permitted to tear up my landlord’s yard.

Also, I have a black thumb.

But, enough with the whining.  What must be done shall be done!  For a landless serf such as myself, the options I am currently aware of are:

grow stuff in containers on windowsills (or grow stuff that does not need even windowsill-level light, such as aforementioned mushrooms)

grow stuff under lights

guerrilla garden

sharecrop or otherwise borrow the use of someone else’s land (with their permission)

start a container garden on the roof

get yourself an allotment in a community garden

I have dipped my toe into 1, 2, and 6.  I started container growing last summer, and this is my first year with an actual normal outdoor garden plot, courtesy of the splendid Peterson Garden Project.  (I’m at Global Garden.)

To get a general idea of what community gardens are near you, you might start here.

Anyway, a few introductory words about my thirty-two square feet of fight the system!

This is what the plot looked like in April, when the garden opened.  You can see it is a raised bed, which makes my life simpler in more ways than I can count.  You can also see happy relics from the previous tenant!  Some trellising, some stakes, some radicchio, and some onions.

This is what it looks like in early June:

The onions are still there (albeit a bit storm-knocked), although the radicchio is gone.  The radicchio grew exceedingly fast, and I harvested a few of its leaves (the ones with red in them, which the Internet PROMISED me meant they’d been frost-nipped and were therefore less bitter) to sauté and then plop in soup.  But then we had some hot days, and it bolted.  (To bolt, for those of you who, like me, are as innocent as an unhatched egg of horticultural knowledge, is when a plant suddenly shoots up very tall and generates its seeds…often getting bitter in the process, as to which, why?  You’d think it’d be happy!  Anyway, heat can provoke this reaction.)  And it was getting beyond huge.  So out it went, and I have not yet filled those interesting two squares of vacancy left behind, although I have plans for them, because I do like to scheme.

This brings up an interesting subject:  squares.  Everything is all laid out in a grid.  Everything is also embarrassingly hyper-labeled, but I promise you that there is NO way I can remember what was even supposed to go where if I do not write it down.  In a location right in front of my face.  So, the square issue.  This is what the PGP folks recommend we do, use a form of intensive cultivation (we don’t have that much space, after all) called square-foot gardening.  The basic idea is that you plant in squares, not rows, and so can plant more densely and efficiently.

There are all sorts of rules of thumb like one square can host four bush beans, but even a cursory amble through the interwebs reveals all sorts of people having all sorts of successes and failures with all sorts of numbers of various plants in their square feet.  This was probably crazy ambitious of me, but when I laid out my garden plan (which I have already deviated from), I used a combination of square-foot and companion planting techniques.  The idea behind companion planting is that some plants are good neighbors that help each other thrive, by bringing in good bugs or warding off bad ones, improving the soil, providing useful ground-cover, etc. etc.  (Also, some plants are bad for each other and should be kept apart.)  So, for example, I have an oregano plant by a butternut squash and a basil next to a tomato, and so on.  That trashes the square-foot calculations beyond even the inherent uncertainty, so, you know, I’ll just take it as it comes.

One of the first complicating factors that I discovered with the fussy and delicate tableau I created for my original garden plan is that a lot of seeds are little, and even if I was very careful in watering them (which I probably wasn’t), wind and rain do whatever, whenever, and however they feel – what I am getting at is that some of these seedlings that come up are doing so a ways over from where I planted them, especially the herbs.

Also, because a lot of seedlings look pretty similar in the newborn phase, I have absolutely no idea what some of these guys are.  They might also be volunteers that I did not plant at all, either weeds (which I have seen some of) or lettuce (which I have seen a LOT of – at first I was pulling it out, and then I realized, wait, it’s lettuce, I can EAT this, that was kind of the whole IDEA…).  And, some of the things I planted also died, by bug (grr) or weather or just because.  So, in a few short weeks, I have had more than one salutary lesson on my inability to overcontrol things!  Plants will busily figure stuff out and do all kinds of work on their own.  Some stuff is surviving, growing, and even looking kind of happy, so I will follow its lead.  Self-correcting systems are the kind of systems that work best for me.