Lessons from Squanto: Gardening with fish

From This is America, Charlie Brown, The Mayflower Voyagers

This past Thanksgiving, my family watched the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving show, This is America, Charlie Brown, The Mayflower Voyagers.  I was very familiar with the other Charlie Brown Thanksgiving show where Snoopy serves up toast and jelly beans after fighting with the lounge chair.  It's still funny!  However, this Mayflower episode was new to me.  I had never seen it and was surprised to learn so much about the hardships of the Pilgrims and the amazing life of Squanto.  Of course, the gardener in me had another "take-away" from this episode.  Fish!

At the point where Squanto was teaching the pilgrims to garden (the Peanuts gang), he taught them to put a fish in the ground with the corn seeds, and then dirt.  Say what?!  How have I never heard of this and don't the cats want to dig up the fields to find the fish heads?  Then a few nights later, I'm skimming through old magazines and find an article in Whole Living magazine about how to reduce food waste.  And there it is in black and white to use our leftover fish heads by putting them in the garden!  Now in our house, I'm ashamed to say, that the only fish we eat comes out of a tuna can.  Therefore, I might have to send the kids out for some recreational fishing this coming Spring to try this theory.  From what I've read, it looks like tomatoes are especially fond of fish under their roots.  You can also put them in the garden through the winter so you have soil ready for planting come Spring.  Just make sure to bury it deep enough so the critters don't come looking for fish-head dinner!

Growing Roses: Pleasant Outcome in Pennsylvania!

When my husband and I were first married, we rented a 1940s house with two beautiful rose bushes growing on the side of the house.  They were the red long-stemmed kind that any woman would kill to have at her disposal any time she felt like a rose! Although I didn't know anything about roses at the time, I was happy to cut the flowers and bring them in to vases.  Unlike the recommended full sun, these were in mostly shade.  Those rose bushes that defied the odds made me think I could use any condition to grow roses in our new home. 

So when we bought our first home, I tried over and over to grow long-stemmed type roses in our full sun backyard.  That's what the books recommended.  Over and over the roses bushes would die.  Even the existent rose bushes that came with the house all died off within a few years (the ones in the full sun) and the ones in the shady front yard continued to grow.  What gives, I thought?  To this day, I can't explain the success of the ones in the front yard.  However, I just finally had success.  Now, it's only been a few months (and I tend to kill them after the first year), however the growth of this bush gives me hope!

Here's the rose bush only 2 months in the ground, already growing!

If you remember my deck makeover, I had added a cheapy rose bush.  I mean cheap!  I bought it at Produce Junction on a whim for $12.  Then I just plopped it in the ground where the daylilly used to sit.  I wish I could say I prepared the soil with compost or that I really cleaned up all the daylilly roots.  Nope.  I was rushed for time and just added some cheap fill dirt.  I really didn't expect it to live.  Apparently, this hands off approach has worked!  Just 4 months later and the bush has more than doubled in size and the roses are already long enough to cut for a vase!  I'm so psyched.  I wish I could tell you what kind of a rose bush this is, but at the discount store where I bought it, they were just labeled "Roses, $12", nothing more.  Looking back, it not only has full sun for almost 8 hours a day, but being in the surrounding deck bed, it is like a mini-raised bed.  And with all of our Pennsylvania rain, maybe the drainage was the biggest issue in past growing seasons.  Time to get the rose clippers and fill the vase again!

October 2012, already almost as tall as the deck rail!

Frost Watch/Warning: tips for the garden

Frost Watch/Warning!  It strikes fear in the heart of gardeners with young plants in the Spring, or those trying to extend their growing season in the Fall.  Those are the words now popping up on our forcast for Friday night into Saturday.  My initial reaction was the usual "oh no!" until I realized that my garden is now filled with cold weather crops.  They'll enjoy this drop in temps.  However, my zucchini, which does not realize that it is October 11th, might need a little help tomorrow night.  Yes, I will not give up on it as long as it's still producing!  If you're in need of some garden protection, here's a few ideas with links.  Bundle up those plants, it's going to be cold outside!  And if you remember my Spring blog on how I tried to call Mother Nature's bluff, I won't be doing that again. 

1.  Build a frame that can be used for a tarp, plastic sheeting, or mesh.   This is useful for protection from heat, cold, or insects.

PVC pipe for frame (click for more info)

2.  Place some sticks in between the rows to hold up a tarp.


Community Garden at our local elementary school "tucked in" for a night of frost last year

 

3.  Build/Buy a larger-scale cloche.

These garden "tents" look cozy!  Click here for more info.

No matter how you cover your gardens, remember to heed the frost warnings.  Your plants will thank you in the morning!

Accepting Fall

I love autumn, it's a beautiful time of year.  It's the season of my wedding annivesary.  It's the time when my firstborn was born!  The only downfall, is that it means leaving behind summer, which I love so much more.  So in my garden, I try to keep those summer crops going as long as possible.  Today, with acceptance, I went out and pulled the tomatoes.  Normally, they would last until the first frost.  However, many nights in the 40s, combined with endless stink bug bites, and my tomatoes are done.  Correction:  they are beyond done and begging me to put them out of their misery.  They are moldy done.  You get the picture.  So with my Fiscars pop-up gardening bag to catch the debris, and my clippers in hand, I proceeded to pull them out.  And with that one small act of cleaning the garden, I had to accept that Summer was officially over.  Never mind the low 80 degree temperatures we're hitting today or the summer-like humidity, autumn has arrived.  Sunday's forcast shows that today's temps are just a fluke.  Even my cold weather veggies are emerging in the garden (carrots, radishes, spinach, romaine, broccoli).  So bring on the pumpkins, and hayrides, and Halloween decorating.  Wait a minute...my zucchini plants across the yard think it's still summer.  Hooray, they're still cranking out huge zucchini.  I can live out my summer ending at least a little longer.

Sweet Potato finale

That's it?  Only 12 potatoes for 5 plants?!

I wish every blog could be words of wisdom or some great reveal of a harvest.  However, sometimes the lessons from the garden are the kind that make you learn and move on.  In this case, I learned that for our family, growing sweet potatoes were not worth the effort.  When considering the amount of garden space they consumed, the length of time they consumed it, and the tiny harvest as a result, we won't be repeating the process next year.  In the words of my son, they were "an epic fail!". 



Underground pests sampled our potatoes

Ok, so maybe it wasn't that bad.  Afterall, if we learn something in the process, then it's never a fail.  That's a lesson for all aspects of life!  Now don't think that I'd give up on growing a veggie just because it didn't take the first time.  Not at all.  But when you consider that my husband is the only one in the family who likes sweet potatoes (and not so much this gardener) then I'd much rather buy him his sweet potatoes and save the precious gardening space for other much more loved family vegetables.  So until the kids are ready to give up their swingset for me to have another raised bed, then we won't be growing sweet potatoes anytime soon.  That said, there are a few other things I learned like how to harvest them.  For those of you still waiting to harvest, here's a quick and easy description.

1.  Pull up the vines.  Yes, some sweet potatoes might come up with them.  Bonus!  I've read that you can eat the vines. I'll leave that to you to google the recipes.  I tossed mine out.

2.  Use a garden tool to dig them up.  Start about 12" away from the center of the plant so you don't bruise any.

3.  Lay them out to dry but not too long in the sun.  You can eat them right away, or cure them for storage.  Enjoy!

Planting Fall Vegetables

Don't hang up those gardening tools just yet!  There's a whole other season of planting just beginning.  If you're a summer gardener only, try your hand at the cold weather vegetables.  Much like the Spring veggies I planted around St. Patty's Day, the Fall ones also thrive in the cold temperatures and aren't scared away by frost.  They prefer cooler temps!  So clear out the garden, or fill in the bare spots among your Summer veggies still growing (in my case, tomatoes, zucchini and sweet potatoes) and start planting. 

Need to know what to plant, try these great vegetables for the Fall.

1.  Broccoli and cauliflower:  plant small plants at this point in the year if you can find them at a garden center or nursery.  If the broccoli doesn't become full grown before winter, no worries, it will over-winter and come back in the Spring. 

2.  Lettuces and such:  In this category I would place romaine, spinach, kale, swiss chard, loose leaf lettuce, iceberg, etc.  If it's a lettuce, it likes cooler weather.  A bonus with many of the lettuces is that some of them can reproduce for you more than once.  See my cheat sheet for growing lettuce to see which one is best for you.  The spinach and loose leaf lettuces can still be planted from seed.

3.  Radishes:  These are another great veggie to plant from seed.  They take only 28 days from seed to harvest.  That's gardening for those with a short-attention span (think kids!).  Need a reminder of why you should plant radishes?  Click here.

4.  Carrots:  It's not too late to plant these from seed either.  Hopefully you saved your seeds from the Spring plantings.  If not, ask around.  They'll be hard to find in stores.  If you're local, I have plenty to share!

100 days of Patience in the Garden

On the 100th day of school, my kids usually have a party and there's a lot of hoopla leading up to it.  I'm having my own sort of party this week as I realize that it's almost 100 days since the planting of my sweet potatoes.  That seems to be the magical number for harvesting.  Afterall, the potatoes are underground.  I can't look at them to see if they're ready.  It's like setting the timer on the oven with the recommended amount of time for cooking.  If you've planted sweet potatoes this summer, you're probably like me and anxiously awaiting the timer to ding to dig them up.  Patience in the garden is so hard sometimes. This is my first summer so I have no idea if they really grew underground or if I just have a lot of pretty vines.  I have noticed in the past week slight bulging in the soil which I hope means I have some grand prize winners growing underground.  "Patience is a virtue", and "curiousity killed the cat".  So I'm hoping to fall somewhere in between. Maybe next week I'll dig up one plant to check the status.  My own "toothpick" test.  Stay tuned.