Rattlesnake Pole Beans

I have to recommend Rattlesnake pole beans to all the novice vegetable gardeners out there. This is my first year trying them and they are fabulous. I direct seeded in the spring and every seed sprouted. The vines are robust and they are producing like crazy. The beans taste great, and there are so many of them that we have some to eat and some to freeze for the winter. Another perk is that they are green with purple stripes, so they're easier to find than the all-green varieties that blend in perfectly with the color of the surrounding foliage.
I also tried out some yellow pole beans this year and I am not thrilled with them. Particularly compared to the fabulous Rattlesnakes. Next year I may try a new variety for fun, but I'm definitely growing the Rattlesnakes every year from now on.

What's this?

This bright and charming volunteer showed up in the middle of a large expanse of achillea (yarrow) in early July and it is still blooming. The largest of the daisy-like blossoms is at least 4 inches in diameter. What is this welcome interloper and where did it come from? I hope it's a hardy perennial and that it comes back next year, but if it does, I may move it out of the middle of the yarrow.

Veggies!

After a week away, I was thrilled to get home and see the vegetable garden thriving. A very little weeding was all that was necessary, and everything is progressing nicely. I have already been harvesting the swiss chard -- yum! If I take it frequently when it is small I can use the stems and all and it is tender and sweet. I should be able to harvest summer squash within a couple of days. Tomatoes and peppers are emerging and just need to ripen. The pole beans have blossoms which means that beans aren't far behind. And can you see the size of those onions? I actually don't know what I'm going to do with them all so I hope this variety stores well.

The peppers will be a bit of a surprise. I think I started three or four varieties from seed, then sent the seedlings off in 4" pots to a friend's greenhouse. Alas, the masking tape labels did not return with the mature plants. I randomly planted what I had, assuming that I would be able to figure out what is what eventually.

I have been an enthusiastic perennial flower gardener for many years. I originally didn't have much interest in growing vegetables, but a friend convinced me to try it. Because of the wet clay in my yard, I have to build raised beds for the vegetables. It's a lot of work but I'm gradually adding space each year. I have to say that I am completely hooked on the vegetable gardening now. There is very little I find as thoroughly satisfying as growing my own vegetables organically. I know exactly where each bite of food came from. And the taste! I love inviting people to dinner and telling them what parts of the meal came from my own garden. I am already planning to add more space next year, and thinking about what to grow more of (swiss chard) and what new things to grow (radishes). During the winter, I will pore over the seed catalogs to discover new varieties to try. I even got a second freezer to store the extras. Between the rise in food prices and the increasing safety concerns (salmonella, e coli, etc.) I think I'm coming out way ahead.

Bog Garden

If life gives you lemons... Well, I didn't get a lemon tree when I bought my house, but I did get a very wet back yard and heavy clay soil. There isn't much I can grow without digging out the clay and replacing it with better dirt and compost. I decided at one point that I should have a pond, so I started to dig. If you've ever dug up wet clay, you know that it sticks to the shovel. When you use your boot to scrape it off the shovel, it sticks to your boot. Soon, you are a couple of inches taller than you used to be as the clay turns your boots into platform shoes. Anyway, I dug a sort of oval shape about 6 feet by 10 feet and three to four feet deep. If anyone suggests that it's a good idea to do this with a shovel, I can disabuse them of that notion. Next time I want a big hole, I'm renting a big orange shovel with an engine! Anyway, I had this hole and I was researching what to do about a liner and a pump and all of that when it rained. The water didn't soak into the ground, it just filled up the hole and stayed there. That sort of put the kibosh on my plans to install a liner but I figured it would dry out before long. Now it's several years later, and the pond is a bog garden, filled with water lilies which I planted, and cat tails which I didn't plant. It has never been lined and has never dried completely out. I edged it with rocks and planted marginal perennials such as filipendula and water forget-me-not, which love the constant moisture. Did I mention that the frogs moved in right after it filled with water? They lay eggs each spring and sun themselves on the lily pads and rocks and eat any mosquitoes that hatch (we really don't have many mosquitoes at all -- because of the frogs?). Dragonflies swoop over the pond in the evening. I've even had a couple of visits from a great blue heron. In the early spring I've seen deer tracks in the mud under the water. So far, the deer have munched on the hosta that's way in the back of the back yard but miraculously have left the vegetable garden alone. I'm leaving the hosta there as a treat to them and a bribe to stay away from the veggies!
I will never have a formal pond with a fountain or goldfish. But I love my boggy pond and so do its residents and visitors. I don't need electricity and it pretty much takes care of itself.
By the way, can you quickly tell how many frogs are in the picture?
Five.

Being Vegetarian

If you hang around long enough, you'll have the privilege of seeing yourself go in and out of style several times. I became an ovo-lacto vegetarian 20 years ago. It was all about the animals. I had an epiphany, realizing that there was no moral distinction between a dog and a cow, or a deer and a fish. If I wouldn't consider eating the former, I shouldn't be eating the latter. At that time, my decision was cutting-edge, kind of weird, and not at all mainstream. My being a vegetarian provoked curiosity and sometimes hostility in others -- like the summer-camp cook who lied about the ingredients in her food to "see if I could tell the difference." I was asked to provide my Biblical justification for being a vegetarian. People said it was a phase and that I was just looking for attention. My then-boyfriend (now-husband, and still a meat eater) hated it because it was a pain to go out to restaurants, the majority of which were unable or unwilling to provide an edible vegetarian entre. He hadn't yet been turned on to the many ethnic cuisines that were veggie-friendly, although I'm happy to say that has changed.

When you're a teenager or a college student, it is cool to take a radical stand, so the opposition did more to firm up my resolve than to break it. I read vegetarian magazines and bought a tattered copy of "Diet for a Small Planet" at a used book store. I knew the environmental benefits of not eating meat, and about the terrible conditions of factory farming but no one else seemed to care. It was just not an issue for most people.

Down the road a few years, it seemed to become hipper to be vegetarian. By then I had discovered that it was a healthful way to eat, and so had everyone else. The low-fat diet craze and the discovery that eating red meat was bad for your heart made my life a lot easier. Restaurants started offering more (and more palatable) veggie choices. Supermarkets started carrying meat substitutes so those of us living in rural areas no longer had to drive to a city to find a health food store. I had been a vegetarian for long enough that everyone who knew me was aware of it, so I didn't have to explain myself ALL the time.

Fast forward a few more years, and being a vegetarian was routine for me -- I didn't think about it at all. It became common enough that it was easy and the stigma was gone. By this time I had some friends with hobby farms who were pushing the local food movement, and they were mostly saying that it was OK to eat meat that was raised organically and humanely as part of an integrated organic small-farm system. The animal waste was composted for fertilizer which then fed the crops and the parts of the crops that people couldn't eat fed the animals. Among these folks, my vegetarianism was "retro." I was out of style again. I never considered going back to eating meat. It no longer appears to be food to me and I can't remember what it tastes like, so why kill animals? I wasn't swimming upstream, I was just old-school.

Now it seems like, all of a sudden, several things have arisen all at once that are going to make me cool again. For one thing, the global food crisis has been taken up by the mainstream media. Back when I used to read the "radical" vegetarian press, 20 years ago, an often-cited statistic was the one about it taking 8 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat. I can't tell you how many times I have heard those numbers repeated lately in the context of the global food crisis. Another big issue is global warming. Suddenly, Americans accept that it exists and that it is a problem. The greenhouse gases emitted by cattle are a big issue. Eating less meat is on everyone's list of things an individual can do to help cut down on global warming. Water scarcity is also going to be a factor, along with food safety, evolving ideas about animal welfare, and the use of fossil-fuel derived fertilizers.

I'm psyched -- instead of being "old-school" and "retro" I'm going to be able to say I was ahead of my time! I'm glad I didn't throw away my values when I sent my zip-leg jeans to the Salvation Army.

The Lawn

I have always had the following philosophy about the lawn: If it's green and I can mow it, it's lawn. That means that I don't use chemicals on my lawn and I am not too concerned about the grass vs. weed ratio as long as it's green and mowable (but I will dig up prickly weeds because I like to go barefoot). My lawn is made up of lots of clover, lamb's ears, creeping charlie, moss, hawkweed, dandylions, and a host of other unidentified green stuff. Oh, it also includes quite a bit of grass. I never understood why people would risk their children, pets, and drinking water by dumping chemicals on their lawns. Not to mention the time and expense! Last week I saw my neighbor across the road using a broadcast spreader to put something on the lawn. I am hoping that the aquifer feeding my well doesn't flow from her property toward mine. I don't know how to convince someone who is hung up on a golf-course-like expanse of grass that they can live with a few weeds easier than we can clean up the ground water or bring back bird species that have been poisoned. Frankly, when it is neatly mowed, my lawn (from a distance) looks nearly as good as my neighbor's. When you get up close, it's another story, but so what? You would be so busy looking at my colorful gardens that you wouldn't notice the lawn anyway. I'm gradually replacing lawn with gardens. My new plan is to put a garden in anywhere I don't like to mow!
I have to admit that I recently did think of a disadvantage to my weedy lawn. With dismay over the rising gas prices and my concern about global warming uppermost in my mind, I considered whether a reel-type mower would work for me. I couldn't use it exclusively, because there's just too much to mow -- by the time I finished it would be time to start all over again. But having used an old (antique, but with sharpened blades) reel mower, I can say that it did NOT do a good job with weeds, quack grass that grows sideways, wet grass, or grass that was a bit too long. It also didn't handle uneven terrain very well. If anyone has had experience with a more modern reel mower under my jungle-like conditions (my lawn is rarely completely dry, for one thing), please let me know. I'd be interested in one that really did the job well. In the meantime, I'll continue to advocate for a chemical-free lawn, and I won't have to worry about poisoning the local wildlife.

Lychnis -- Molten Lava Starting perennials from seed!

This is a lychnis (common name maltese cross) called "molten lava" that I grew from seed. It was a highly successful seed experiment. As you can see from the picture, the plant is an eye-popper. The foliage starts out dark purple in the spring and greens up as the season progresses. It blooms for a long time, and it re-seeds itself -- I have doubled the number of plants by gently digging up and transplanting the volunteers the next spring. It grows only about 8" tall, so it's definitely for the front of a border. The seeds were easy to deal with, germinated well, and transplanted beautifully. I highly recommend this plant to any beginner who is thinking of trying perennials from seed. I started the seeds indoors under florescent lights on a heat mat, probably in early April.
Other easy-to-start seeds include many kinds of dianthus, fescue, aquilegia (columbine), verbascum, echinacea, gypsophila (baby's breath) and coreopsis (not the thread-leaf kind, but the types with the larger flowers). I have had good luck with all of these. I get a seed catalog from Morgan and Thompson that includes the difficulty of starting from seed for each plant, and I have found it to be fairly accurate.
Some of my seed-starting experiments have not gone as well. English daisy did very well for one season then didn't survive the winter. Delphinium -- same thing. I started Asclepias (butterfly weed) easily, but it attracted aphids like I couldn't believe. It was covered with them! Big "ick" factor. I ended up pulling it up and getting rid of it before they spread to the nearby plants. I have never been able to get poppies to germinate in the first place, but if I buy mature potted plants they do very well in my garden.
I think that starting perennials from seed is a great way to save some money if you're patient and willing to deal with some failures along the way. Every once in a while you end up with an absolute charmer like this molten lava lychnis which I've never seen in a nursery. I hope this post will inspire someone to give it a try. Besides, it gives those of us with short growing seasons something to do in the early spring!

Favorite Garden Pictures

I'm adding some pictures of my favorite perennial gardens. That's not to say that I like the perennial gardens better than the vegetable garden, they're just more photogenic.

Gifting Green

Hints on Gifting Green:

For gardeners: Give plants from your own garden, make new houseplants from cuttings, give a gift certificate to a garden center, or give a really useful tool that you know she needs and doesn't own.

For anyone: Give your time. Free babysitting, house sitting, dog walking, house cleaning, weeding, etc.

Give tickets to a musical, play, or other event.

itunes gift cards are great for teenagers! (Also for grown-ups)

Give to charity in someone's honor. This is particularly good for the giftee who "has everything." Sometimes older people don't want to accumulate more stuff. My husband's grandmother said, "No more gifts!" when she turned 90. We've been donating to charities for her ever since and she is always appreciative.

Home baked treats -- no one has time to bake and everyone loves a pie or a fresh loaf of bread.

I think it's fine to give "stuff" if someone needs "stuff." It's incredibly satisfying to be able to fill a genuine need in someone else's life. But so many times one needs to give a gift because it's a holiday and not because the giftee actually needs anything in particular. I love the holiday season, but I don't want it to become an environmental liability. Please add your thoughts about other green gifts!

spring aches and pains

(This post was started in May but I didn't get around to finishing it until now)

Due to a rare free weekend, I just spent two days working outside non-stop. I started with the mowing Saturday morning at about 6:30. I don't know what my neighbors thought of this, but the weather was threatening rain any minute and the mowing was the one project on my to-do list that couldn't be done during or after the rain! Hopefully I didn't wake anyone up, fortunately I live in the country and my neighbors aren't that close.

Ever notice that no matter how assiduously you stick to your workouts all winter, when spring finally comes and you spend a day doing real work outdoors, it hurts? I am feeling muscles I had forgotten existed. So much for the Fit Channel's programs guaranteed to pump up every muscle group in your body.

So tell me, where can I find the workout for the muscles I used to pull up those pesky lilies of the valley? Or better yet, what is the right move for working out the hosta-digging muscles? Why does raking always make my ribs hurt even though I've done hundreds of crunches for those obliques? It's enough to make one give up entirely and spend the entire winter in front of the fire with a mug of hot chocolate.

Here's my challenge for the Fit Channel: Find a real gardener to create the Ultimate Garden Readiness Workout. I promise I'll do it all winter!