Start now? Yes!

Several of you have wondered if it is too late to start a garden. Every time is a good time to start a garden! ...unless the ground is too frozen to dig. I just harvested lots of lettuce I planted in January.

Now is much better than January. Tomatoes are amazingly adventuresome, and homegrown tomatoes are vastly better than anything you can buy. Yes, there are still some tomato seedlings on my front steps. (I think about 250 plants have been taken away this year.) You can also plant beans, but I recommend just putting bean seeds into the soil, about 2" apart and 1"-2" deep.

Anything the garden centers are selling is still timely to plant. Deborah Dowe developed a system in Union County of disseminating the left-over plants at the end of the planting season that the gardening centers were going to throw away to children and senior citizens, who derived pleasure from planting and raising the left-over's. I can put anyone who feels a calling to start a similar movement in Essex County in touch with Deborah. Meanwhile, buy anything you see on sale at the gardening centers, and don't worry about it being too late.

The gotcha is your soil. If you have virgin Montclair clay, you have to dig; and that's no small project. "The more organic matter, the better," was the mantra of ORGANIC GARDENING magazine when I was starting to garden. "You can't get too much." I still believe that. If you are starting in Montclair clay, you might be content with tomatoes and beans the first year, although chard or kale might grow too.

Lettuce needs only 6" of good soil, so you might be able to buy enough topsoil or enough compost to mix with your topsoil to get that needed 6" layer. It doesn't take a lot of space to raise lettuce in good soil. Two square feet can produce a reasonable amount, although more is better... up to a point!

If someone has been gardening in your plot within the past 400 years, your beginning will be easier. You won't know until you dig if someone made your ground a thriving Victory Garden in WWII, in which case you're in luck. But even without such luck, you can have a decent garden this year, and a wonderful garden two years from now. Mine was a central milk delivery spot in the 19th century, so it had not been dug before and I hit a cement layer about a foot down that I mixed with the soil for some handy lime. In my third year the soil was almost as fertile as it is now. I double dug spring and fall each of those years. See HOW TO RAISE MORE VEGETABLES THAN YOU EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE ON LESS LAND THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE by John Jeavons to learn how. However, unless you have plenty of time each day now, you probably want to get started with your tomatoes and beans after a single digging.

Someone wrote about tired lettuce. All lettuce dies in a few weeks, but it becomes spectacular first. "It bolts." If your lettuce isn't thriving, it probably needs more nitrogen in the soil, but six inches will do, as mentioned above. I plant lettuce every 3-4 weeks, so I'm always looking for another spare plot for lettuce.

It's a great year to start gardening. I hope lots of people do!

Pat

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My 50+ Harvests

The May 22, 2008 MONTCLAIR TIMES claimed I raise over 45 edibles in my back yard, and I wrote the following to see whether that was true. It is! Some things thrive better some years than others. Nobody knows why. This was a good year for peppers and basil, but poor-to-bad for parsley and leeks.

1. – 8. I raise at least 8 kinds of cutting lettuce most of the year (including black seeded Simpson, green ice, salad bowl, red salad bowl, red sails, oak leaf, royal oak leaf, and green ice), usually from a blend or two.
9. Arugula
10. Parsley
11. Basil
12. Hakai turnips
13 – 15. Sweet-100, Sun gold, and Burpee Supersteak tomatoes,
16. Peppers
17. Eggplant
18. Cucumbers
19. Celery
20. Yellow beets
21. Malabar spinach
22. Broccoli
23. Green lance
24. Kale
25. Collards
26. Parsnips
27. & 28. Sugar snax and Nantes fancy carrots
29. Zucchini
30. Roma bush beans
31. Pole beans
32. Early corn (the raccoons eat any that ripens in August, but allow me my July crop)
33. Sugar Ann peas
34. Sugar snap peas
35. Jerusalem artichokes
36. Garlic
37. Nasturtiums
38. Strawberries
39. Heritage raspberries (available in garden centers)
40. Raspberries descended from the ones my great uncle took from the Alleghany Mountains before he fought in WW I
41. & 42. Bartlett and Bosque pears
43. & 44. Macintosh and red delicious apples
45. White mid-summer peaches
46. Native plums
47. Arctic kiwi
48. Concord grapes
49 Chinese cabbage
50. Pak choi
51. Leeks
52. Arugula
53. Onions
54. Potatoes and several types of blueberries

No wonder my family enjoys eating so much!

Pat

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How to Start

What an opportunity is presented in the following! "I have never gardened and know nothing about growing things. Can you recommend where to start? I took some kids books out of library on "my first garden". I also signed up for adult school lectures on gardening. The thing I struggle with most is where in the yard to create garden and when to start planting?"

Best wishes! You are in for some real excitement. A garden has two basic needs: sun and soil. You can improve your soil dramatically, but you have to CHOOSE the sunniest place. The main criterion, therefore, in deciding where in your yard to create a garden is to consider the amount of sunlight each part gets. Go out several times a day and notice where the direct sun is shining. It would be prudent to write it down, so you remember and can make intelligent comparisons.

The other decision you must make immediately is how big the garden will be. You have seen mine. It took several years to get to that size. When you start digging, you may change your aspirations on garden size.

To improve the soil, you want to get as much organic matter into it as possible. Around here we have "clay" soil, and as you dig in organic matter, you will loosen the soil. I recommend double digging to get organic matter down into a deep garden. The best instructions I know are in John Jeavon's book "How to Raise More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine." It's not expensive, and it's well worth the money. In any case, you and your children need to dig your soil and put in as much compost and other organic matter as you can find.

When to start? That depends on when you have the digging done! I planted some Sugar Ann peas today. They are low growing and don't need a fence. You eat the pods, so you get a lot of pea for the area. They aren't as sweet and tasty as Sugar Snaps, but they don't need a fence and they come earlier. Sugar Bon peas are also good and low growing. I'm told you can plant peas throughout April, but I try to get all mine in during March.

The best crop for beginners is tomatoes. Tradition says you should plant them on May 15 in this part of the world, which is the traditional "frost free" date. However, our last frost last year was mid-April, and the two previous years we had no frost in April or May, so you can cheat on that quite a bit. Depending on how ambitious you are, you can buy wall-of-waters and plant tomatoes VERY early. That requires, however, raising them from seed, which a beginner may not want to do. However, since you are enjoying this with children, you may decide that is worth your time. It's exciting to watch seedlings grow. I wrote about starting seeds last week. I recommend sweet 100 tomatoes, but most "cherry" tomato types will be fine for starting early. I wait until the traditional time for the beefsteaks.

The third crop that is good for beginners is beans. Plant them in mid-April, sowing each seed directly in the soil. This is a great activity to share with your children. You can continue to plant beans through July and expect harvests.

If you have a fence or trellis on which you are growing Sugar Snap peas, Malabar spinach is a fine subsequent crop. I suspect I'll have seedlings to give away in late May. (Pea plants die in July, when Malabar takes off.)

If you have lots of sun and compost, zucchini is fun. If you like chard, it will grow; you can plant it in April. Lettuce and arugula can be sown in April, or earlier if you want to fuss. You can continue to plant them until about September. They will turn bitter and die before the season is over, so if you like to keep eating them, you have to keep planting them every few weeks.

Don't plant any root crops, including carrots, your first year. You need really friable soil for root crops to get through, and there is no way you are going to convert Montclair clay to friable soil this spring. If you aspire to grow carrots, double dig every spring and fall, and try them your third year.

If you don't have reasonable sun, don't try broccoli. Lettuce and collards have grown on my compost heap to edible size, so they need remarkably little light. Three years ago I saw a tomato seedling among never-dug dirt in front of my north-facing house. I looked at it in disbelief.

"You stupid thing! Don't you know that tomatoes need sun?" But it kept growing, so I gave it a cage. It bore tomatoes! Not as many as the ones in the back with sun and good soil, but delicious tomatoes. Last year I had almost a dozen seedlings, children of the one that had been there the previous year. So it seems that you can grow sweet-100 tomatoes with little sun, although more is better.

Now is the time to dig. Any other questions?

Pat

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October preparations for spring

This is the time of year to take two steps to start (or continue!) a garden next spring.

(1) Collect leaves! People kindly put them on their curbs, and it is legal to relieve municipalities of the expense of carting them away. Fred brings me home about 100 bags of leaves each fall. At 20 lb. a bag, that's a ton of leaves that have disappeared into our property each year for over two decades. They are a major source of what we eat. :) The only other off-site items that I have used for more than a decade are grass clippings, wood chips, and commercial seeds.

(2) If you are going to start gardening next spring, now is a good time to double dig the promising plot. Remove the topsoil from a plot about 2' x 2' and put it on a piece of plastic. (I use old plastic bags in which we have taken others' leaves.) Then dig a second layer, adding organic matter --leaves if you don't have compost. Then you move along, putting the topsoil of the next spot on the "empty" spot where you just worked (instead of on a plastic bag) so you can dig the second layer there.

The books say to drag that first clump of topsoil to cover the last place, but I go around in circles so it's easy to dump when you get back "home." A much more detailed description of "double digging" is in John Jeavons' book HOW TO RAISE MORE VEGETABLES THAT YOU EVER THOUGHT ON LESS LAND THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE. It should be in your local library; if not, order it. Or maybe you want to buy this excellent paperback book.

Excavating in Montclair has its interesting aspects. There are plenty of stones, of course, of varying sizes. About a foot down below my yard was a nineteenth century cement floor, which I dug into the soil to combat its acidity. I was told that ours was the depot for milk delivery at some time, but a map of the 1870's doesn't show that. Maybe earlier? Tools, vases, and toys are other occasional artifacts.

These days there are 2"-5" holes amid my plants. They are dug over night. Bob, the more experienced gardener across the street, tells me the diggers are skunks and I should be grateful because they are eating slugs that I don't need. Mostly the diggers are very considerate of the plants I cherish, but they goofed one night this week and dug up some small green lance seedlings that I had put out from my greenhouse windowsill. Maybe they seemed too small to be worthy. Everyone makes mistakes.

It's harder to explain why the lettuce I sowed two weeks ago outside with 2007 seeds has not germinated. The lettuce I sowed from the same packet a month earlier in the window germinated fine and thrives outside now; we ate some for dinner last evening. Gardening is full of puzzles. I suspect we are not supposed to know everything. "We see through a glass darkly," says the Good Book, a sentiment I find consistent with my observations. Still, I miss that non-germinated lettuce! My own patience seems not to be unbounded, as hard as philosophy and religion try.

Good news includes the fact that Fred and I each enjoyed 13 raspberries this morning for breakfast -- not as many as two weeks ago, but still delicious.

Pat

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Lawn Care Without Poisons, Chemicals, Power Machinery or Watering

Michael Pollen wrote that a lawn is land "under totalitarian control." We Americans are control freaks, and one thing we can control is our lawn. It never talks back.

Still, I find myself wondering why I, like almost all Americans, care about my lawn so much. Why not just let it grow wild? Someone asked me shortly after I moved here how nice I wanted my lawn to look. I heard myself say, "A little bit better than the worst lawn on the block." I was raising children. Why should anyone with such an important activity care about raising a lawn?

Then the kids left and I felt a calling to demonstrate how good a lawn can look without poisons, chemicals, power machinery, or watering. Now, why would I feel THAT calling? Anyway, if you want a carefully thought-out summary of my approach to lawn care, or want a flyer to disseminate my suggestions, you can click on "lawns" on the homepage of my website, most easily accessed via a Google search on "Pat Kenschaft," The short version is mow high, let the grass clippings drop to fertilize the lawn, and NEVER use power machinery or water the lawn. When there are doubtful places, hand-scatter compost that you have made yourself. I've found that fixes the problem; I don't have to ask questions or do tests.

There are socially acceptable alternatives to lawns. Maxine Hoffer, my wonderful creative writing teacher at Nutley High School, had a ground cover through which marvelous daffodils arise each spring. "I fertilize it by never raking leaves," she told me. She died a few years ago at a venerable age, but I see that her successors have not destroyed her good property care ideas, so you can see it at 27 Stuart Avenue in Nutley on the corner of Passaic Ave. In her waning years the property required no care, and it continued to look spectacular every spring.

During my empty nest summer, I took my garden cart to the front yard after dinner in August and hand-pulled weeds. After three weeks of filling a garden cart each evening, the yard was weed-free, but a bit empty. I bought "lawns alive" from Gardens Alive, and that's the only time I've put anything commercial on my lawn -- 20 years ago! Those seeds thrived.

Since then I have spent about five minutes several times a year removing dandelions from my front lawn, and that seems enough -- less than a half hour total per year. Once you get them out, they don't come back...much.

Not watering means that the roots go deep. The lawn survives dry spells better than most. When a water ban arrives, my lawn still has a bit of green. When the rain finally comes, mine is the first to be truly green.

The United Nations predicts that 21st century wars will be fought over water, and I've read that 30% of the household water in eastern U.S. is used to water lawns.

Children and dogs that play on lawns with pesticides have higher rates of disease, especially cancer, than those who don't. www.beyondpesticides.org can provide you lots of alarming statistics if you want to read about them.

Leaf blowers destroy lawns, and give landscapers an excuse to charge more money to repair them. Shrubbery needs leaves as natural fertilizer; it especially distresses me to see people blowing under shrubs. I've been told that the main reason they are used off season is to increase the number of hours for which the landscapers can charge the property owners for "care" but one can't be sure of other people's motives; it's hard enough to know one's own.

A distinctive problem this year has been the many baby trees planting themselves around. Fortunately, they come out far more easily than dandelions. Working with two hands, I can remove often two per second, which is more than 100 a minute. Apparently, I've removed thousands in the past couple of weeks, with thousands more to go. Anyone know WHY we have this new abundance this year? I hear it's not just my property.

I spend far less time on my lawn most weeks than the landscapers spend on my neighbors' lawns. Mowing the front lawn typically takes 12 minutes with my human-energy-powered push mower. This week it took only ten minutes.

Someone borrowed it last May and found it took her LESS time than her power mower because she didn't have to be so careful going around the edges. It provides healthy exercise, is safe with children around, and you can talk with passers-by as you mow. When I was a child, Daddy's lawn mowing time was also child time. Human-powered lawn mowers cost about $100, and don't involve the time, money, and global warming acceleration of fuel.

It's a beautiful time of year. Enjoy caring for your lawn...if it's worth having a lawn!

Pat

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Savoring Leaves

How do we use the abundance of leaves that arrive on our lawns each fall (well named)? The easiest activity is raking those near a ground cover into the ground cover. The periwinkle at the back of my property is nourished by leaves from above and leaves that I rake into their midst. You can do the same with ivy, packasandra, or strawberry ground cover. Indeed, for many years, until folks began making Halloween straw available free, my strawberries had to make do with leaves for their winter cover. (Now they are mulched each winter with straw, as their name indicates they should be. Strawberries bear more fruit when winter mulched with straw.)

The most needed thing to do with fallen leaves is to rake them under bushes and shrubs. My decorative mountain laurel and Andromeda and my raspberry bushes are fertilized by leaves. The all do well. They need more than just the nearby leaves, so I put lawn leaves into a garbage barrel and pour them on these, and I also take bags of others' leaves and pour them abundantly around shrubs and bushes.

It amazes me that I sometimes see people taking leaves AWAY from the roots of shrubs, especially if it's on my township's property, using up my tax money for both the taking away of nature's fertilizer and for buying chemical companies' substitutes. The latter pollute our ground water; Montclair draws some of its drinking water from wells. How do others feel about people putting poisons on their property that will eventually get into our drinking water? Shouldn't we insist that people nourish trees and shrubs only with fallen leaves? Is it just their own business when they do otherwise? (It also bothers me especially when I see this happening on the property of religious institutions, polluting the only planet that God is likely to provide for the human race.)

I also rake leaves onto my front yard flowers. I raised the chrysanthemums from seed 20 years ago, and they still thrive with only fallen leaves as fertilizer. About twelve years ago the tree in front between our street and front sidewalk was planted, along with the one across the street and across the driveway. Because I have been raising flowers under ours, I have put leaves and compost under it. Originally it was by far the smallest and weakest of the three; it leafed out two weeks after the other two the spring after they were planted. Before long it was startlingly bigger than the others. Norman Pierson, the late arborist of Montclair, remarked before he died about five years ago that it was a dramatic example of the effects of natural fertilizing.

I save leaves to interweave with "green" matter (kitchen and garden waste) in my compost heap during the next year. I use the compost both in my garden and hand-scattered on my lawn when it looks a bit hungry. That is all the fertilizing my lawn has had since I planted it in 1987. It is lush and nice without those expensive items the corporations want to push on us.

Fred brings me 100 bags of others' leave each fall. At about 20 pounds per bag, that's a ton of leaves that have disappeared onto our property (not counting our own considerable leaves) each year for about 20 years.

It amazes me that others waste their abundance by putting them into bags and having them taken away. Waste not, want not. Besides, it's great fun to collaborate with nature's plan.

Pat

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Zucchini sex and more Rabbit tales

Zucchini flowers have appeared in the early morning, pretty and tasty, either raw or mixed with eggs. Late in the morning they have gone. Youth is fragile and fleeting.

They come in two sexes, and God's plan is that bees take the pollen from the males to the females while doing their own thing. Sometimes humans want full-grown zucchini faster than bees accomplish. Such a human can pick the male plant, nibble around the petals, and make sure the female has her male satisfaction. This human just did that today.

How do you tell which is male and which is female? There are generally more males than females, and they come sooner. They bloom on simple stems. The females have fetus zucchini sitting behind the blossom and they look – well -- more female. It takes about five days after sex therapy for the adult zucchini to be harvestable. I'm excited!

My tiny rabbit was (I think) considerably larger when I saw her about ten days later. She was in the inner garden again! I chased her around, and this time she ran up to the fence several times and turned back, the picture of panic. Finally, she squeezed between the fence and the "gate" that I had not firmly fastened at the bottom. I carefully fastened it to the fence, and I haven't seen her again. The "gate" is a foot high, so I step over it, but rabbits aren't supposed to be able to do that.

Meanwhile, while I was sitting reading on an old-fashioned chaise lounge with plastic webbing outside the garden, I saw a HUGE rabbit at a distance. It was about a foot long, not counting the head. I watched it in amazement, until I thought it was watching me. It's hard to be sure you are having eye contact with a rabbit. I tore my eyes away because I wanted to accomplish what I had set out to do.

It began coming toward me. Now I was sure we were looking at each other. It walked within a yard of the chair, and I felt a slight fear at this large critter -- a fear that amused me at the time. Then it hopped to maybe ten or fifteen feet away, turned around, and began coming toward me at a startling speed. I was even more amused at my even heightened fear. It ran under my chair and hit my bottom in an emphatic bounce upward that I could clearly feel through the plastic webbing.

Then it turned around, started to speed toward me again, and this time went under my legs, bouncing upward toward them so that my legs could feel the rabbit "hitting" them. I waited for more, but it turned around briefly to say goodbye, and then disappeared into a neighbor's yard.

The Easter bunny was back yesterday, looking startlingly normal compared to her small and large relatives. She just sat and looked at me from about six feet away for over ten minutes. I was surprised at how sad I felt when she left me. Rabbits are fun.

Pat

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