Laying out the game plan

With 2010 seed packets beginning to arrive, my fingers are twitching to start the spring garden. It is months away, but I have promised myself that this year I am going in with a game plan. I used to be one of those gardeners who realized it was Memorial Day and would go to the nursery, buy some plants and plant them in one weekend-long burst of garden energy. I rarely considered eventual height, relative water needs or companion planting issues. If I found some interesting seed packets, I would scatter those about the remaining bare spaces. The resulting garden plot was usually productive, but never as much as it could be. It surely looked haphazard. And, by the time the idea of fall crops crossed my mind, it was usually too late to get anything started.

This year, I will have a more careful approach. This should help me have a true three seasons of harvests and should also help me keep my resolution of not over-planting vegetables. It will let me thoughtfully incorporate companion planting ideas. In a perfect world, this game plan would also limit the impulse purchases in the spring - ha! Inevitably a few wayward specimens will make their way in under the radar -- it is too hard to resist all the spring temptations. But no longer will I impulse buy three Thai hot pepper plants only to realize I have space for one, or purchase zucchini seeds when I already have two packets at home. If I know I am going to need certain supplies (new trellises, or large tree-size containers), I can scour the stores now, prior to the costly exuberance of the new season.

I do wish I wasn't forced to use my space quite so thoughtfully. There are those lucky gardeners who have a long, warm growing season and more than a narrow Chicago lot as their gardening canvas. I enviously imagine them strolling through their acres of sunny backyard, deciding to install berry patches on a whim, or planting a 25 foot row of okra without the slightest concern for the first hard frost. Unfortunately for me, each square foot of garden must be carefully considered. The growing season is short in Zone 5, and I must maximize the heat if I want to get certain vegetables on the table. Moreover, the cruel calculus of urban space rationing means no sandbox in favor of a strawberry bed; no swing-set in favor of one beautiful flowering tree. I remind myself that the sandbox would just be a toilet for alley cats, and that we live close enough to city parks that my child is most certainly not deprived of recreational opportunities.

I have been investigating various on-line garden planning tools. The two that were the most readily accessible were www.plangarden.com and the Gardener's Supply Company. Both have their merits, but neither beat out plain old pencil and paper. Plangarden has a nerdy feature that lets you track the harvest and the relative money earned from your crops. Gardener's Supply offers quickly accessed advice on how many seeds to use per square foot, as well as a printable, personalized guide to sowing and plant care. Neither one boasts a sufficient variety of vegetables, herbs and flowers in their preloaded menu of garden options. Moreover, I can't seem to find a feature in either that lets you plan for a double-use of the space (i.e. radishes followed by kale). In the end, I will resort to a pleasant afternoon of paper and colored pencils.

I am a shameless lover of Martha Stewart Living, and I aspire to the "garden inspiration boards" the magazine often features in its pages. If you read the magazine, and even if you don't, you probably know of what I speak: imagine expensive grosgrain ribbon crisscrossing a fabric-covered cork board (the fabric is usually robin's-egg blue). Beautiful photographs of plants as well as old-fashioned seed packets are tucked into the ribbons, and postcard-sized watercolors of flower beds are pinned carefully about. Usually this work of art hangs over a beautiful antique wooden desk arranged with gorgeous secateurs, unmuddied garden gloves and a few cuttings of rosemary. If only we all had such a station for inspiration! This is a far cry from my scribbles, hung with masking tape on a basement wall above an old laminate kitchen counter. It comes down to hopefulness either way, be-ribboned or not. Stretching before us is the new season, full of promise.

The Obligatory Post of Garden Resolutions

The new calendar year starts today and visions of the 2010 garden dance in my head. I'm sure every garden journal and blog today will be replete with earnest commitments for the coming season, and I gladly join the chorus of hopeful resolutions.

1. Share seasonal feasts. Our family life is marked by the appearance of much-anticipated foods from the garden. The Italians have a word for a festival celebrating the bounty of a single, local ingredient: sagra. Our personal sagre include the first radishes, the four-course chive extravaganza, the first fried zucchini blossoms, the first tomato-basil salad ... the list goes on. I resolve to invite fellow food lovers to our table to share in the celebration. Perhaps even a potluck for spring food, summer food and fall food?

2. Vegetables: more variety, fewer plants. As I've discussed before, I usually over-plant certain vegetables -- a family of three, for example, just doesn't need three cherry tomato plants. In a very small garden such as mine, one or two plants of each kind should trump a row of a single species. Usually I dedicate too much real estate to a certain vegetable because a) they came in a four-pack at the nursery or b) the seed pack had 300 seeds in it. I resolve to start my own seeds when possible, and if I buy a four-pack I will gift the excess plants to neighbors. I will either share the excess seed, store it carefully for next season or guerrilla garden it it the vacant lots nearby.

3. Flowers: less variety, more plants. While I over-plant certain vegetables, I tend to take the opposite approach with my perennials. Usually my garden beds are studded with single specimens rescued from the end-of-season bargain table at the nursery. In the fall, I dug up and divided, and tried to mass my plantings more. I resolve to adhere to the design wisdom that even small gardens look nicer with healthy drifts of a single species rather than random scatterings of one or two plants.

Naturally, the garden cycle breaks into yearly increments and I am glad to set these goals for the coming months. Yet I want to move past the short-term, the myopic burst of fecundity that I tend each season. I resolve to be content with, as Wendell Berry writes, the crop I did not plant and that I will not harvest. I want to invest in the decade! In the millennium! On the first day of the year, I usually turn to Whitman. So here, from Song of Myself is my resolution of contentment:

"And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,/ I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait./My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,/I laugh at what you call dissolution,/And I know the amplitude of time"

My first "greenhouse"

Well, my Christmas present has arrived....my first little greenhouse! It probably barely qualifies as one, since it is basically a shelf with a fitted plastic cover. Had I been a little more crafty and resourceful, I probably could have rigged one up myself. But, I received some holiday spending money specifically designated to be used towards gardening supplies, so I decided to try it out. I seriously considered buying this asparagus harvesting knife, but restrained myself. A simple kitchen knife does just as well, and it's not like I'm harvesting from a giant patch!

I have read all the reviews of this type of mini-greenhouse, and people were generally positive. Most of the negative critiques had to do with the propensity to being blown over and that the cover wears out after a few seasons. But, for 50 bucks, I'm not sure what people want. Folks generally say to put it in a protected area, with bricks or heavy pots on the bottom, and it will stay in place. Part of me wanted to hold out until I had the space for a beautiful, more permanent structure. In buying this cheap, intermediate tool to extend my growing season, I am going against some commitments I recently made to myself about long-term investments. In the end, my desire for a different approach to seed-starting won out. Additionally, with space at a serious premium, this was just about the size of sunny real estate I was willing to give up in my yard.

For years, I have struggled with seed starting and getting a jump on the growing season. So many books instruct the beginning gardener to place little pots in a sunny window. But no matter how sunny the window, my seedlings usually turned out leggy. And now, with a curious toddler about, nothing lasts very long on a window sill. I tried grow lights as well, which worked a bit better, but made me feel a bit disconnected from the "natural" process. It all seemed too industrial, and walking into the eerie glow of my basement at seed starting time made me feel like I was on Star Trek.

I did find an interesting suggestion for seed starting in some now-forgotten gardening book I skimmed through at the library. The author suggested that, if you don't have your own greenhouse, just befriend the local independently-owned nursery. Give them your seed packets, have them start the little buggers, and then buy them back at the three dollar price tag that the nursery puts on all of their seedlings. She argued that the premium was worth the labor saved, and that also the nursery gets to sell more heirloom seedlings. I don't have the chutzpah to try this. Nor does one ever, in my opinion, get into gardening to avoid unnecessary labor. So, hopefully this mini-greenhouse will give me a jump start on the season. The shelves can be moved later, to give me more container-garden space. Or, one reviewer did say she grew a vertical container garden of lettuce and microgreens on the shelves, once the summer heat rendered the cover useless.

It is indeed still winter, but the solstice has passed and the new calendar year is upon us. This greenhouse is a harbinger of the new season, like the first sighting of a warbler or the new blades of chives pushing up through spring earth. I will have to wait for March for the latter two, but until then, I can plot my seed-starting on my four tiers of "growhouse".

Quality versus quantity

At my current job, I am occasionally required to provide breakfast for a working group of 16 colleagues. This is always a source of unnecessary anxiety for me: what should I make? what ingredients to use? how much to spend? Most people bring boxes of supermarket-purchased croissants, or Dunkin Donuts or McDonald's. On principle, I am opposed to giving any money to the fast food chains. The temptation is great though: it is quick and easy to procure at six in the morning. Nor do I work with a bunch of foodies -- everyone greets the Egg McMuffins with guilty joy. The same can't be said for the homemade granola I brought a few months ago.

I just read a great post on another garden blog, Daphne's Dandelions, wherein the author admitted that she didn't use her home-grown and carefully-stored produce for a Christmas potluck. She decided to cook with store-bought ingredients. Though she felt this really wasn't in the Christmas spirit, she wanted to save the good stuff for herself and her family. I face this same dilemma with the breakfast I must provide tomorrow. Do I stay up tonight baking bread, and bring in one of my precious cheeses or garden-grown preserves? Do I spend a lot of money on organic and locally-sourced ingredients for a crowd of people who are just as -- if not more -- happy with fast food? On the other hand, why would I serve my respected colleagues food of lesser quality than that which I would feed my own family? In the larger scheme of things, this is a small issue. I have many better things to ponder and wring my hands over. It's not like my own pantry is free of cheap supermarket staples, or that everything I put in my mouth is the hard-won fruit of my own labor. But the tension between quality and quantity is never more apparent to me than with these breakfasts.

It comes to this: no one likes to be up at 6 in the morning in a Chicago winter. I assume that most of us would rather be sipping coffee with our families. I want my colleagues to feel appreciated and valued, especially given the sacrifice they are making of their own time. The way I would demonstrate that appreciation to my own family would be with homemade food, usually a long time in the making. That being said, granola or homemade yogurt -- no matter how lovingly made-- won't be comfort food to a colleague used to more standard American breakfast fare. I am tempted to make McMuffin-like sandwiches with local eggs, home-baked biscuits and home-cured bacon. But I don't want to wake up at 4 in the morning to do so, and I couldn't bear it if it got a bad review. So I'm going to low-ball it with something sweet and rich: scones. These are a crowd-pleaser -- these scones were my mother's signature baked good at her bed and breakfast. They are quick to whip together -- especially if you bake them in a large circle scored into wedges, rather than individual rounds.

In place of the raisins, I will fold in some chopped figs that I preserved in a brandy-laced syrup in the fall. To another batch I will add some dried cherries I've been looking to use up. Will my colleagues care that the scones are made with homemade yogurt instead of store-bought buttermilk? Who knows? Likely not. They'll probably just think I'm crazy for not stopping at Dunkin Donuts on the way in. But hopefully they will feel comforted, and I will have fed a crowd with just enough homemade love to let me breathe easily.

Sarah's Scones

2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

6 Tbsp butter, cold and cut into small pieces

1/2 c yogurt or buttermilk

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla

2/3 cup raisins or other dried fruit (cut into raisin-size pieces if large)

1. Preheat to oven to 400 degrees

2. Mix together all the dry ingredients. When well blended, cut in the butter with a pastry blender.

3. In another bowl, stir together the yogurt, egg and vanilla. Add to the flour mixture, mixing just until moistened. Gently fold in the raisins.

4. Pat the dough into an eight-inch circle on an ungreased cookie sheet. Score into eight wedges.

5. Bake for 18-20 minutes, cool 5 minutes, then serve.

The Christmas plant dilemma

In the wake of the holidays, I always face the decision of what to do with the various holiday plants that I have acquired over the season: the miniature pines, the poinsettias, the bulbs. Should I keep them, and nurse them along for another season? Am I hardened enough to toss them out without so much as a blink? I am loathe to trash them, largely because it feels so wasteful. Yet I have never been particularly successful at maintaining these plants for future use. No wonder, too, since most are tropicals, and ill-suited for my cold, dry house.

My worst case was a potted Norfolk Island pine that I received as a "Christmas tree" in the winter of 2005. I knew I couldn't maintain the light, temperature and especially the moisture levels that it needed to thrive. It plodded on for years in a sorry little corner of two different guest rooms, drying out all too often and dropping needles until it resembled a Dr. Seuss-like umbrella tree. Finally, I read an article by Gerald Klingerman, from the University of Arkansas extension, who advised a hilarious yet very wise approach: the "winter hardiness test". He writes, "Leave your overgrown Norfolk Island pine on the patio and see if it'll survive an Arkansas winter. Of course it won’t, but you can appease any feelings of guilt by saying you were doing it in the name of science." Done and done.

In the course of providing substandard care to multiple houseplants, I have learned that unless a plant is particularly delicate, it will soldier on despite a harsh environment and neglectful care. The plant won't thrive, but it will survive. My Norfolk Island pine is a testament to a pathetic, struggling survival. The only thing sadder than a house with no plants is a house with two or three neglected pots of sorry-looking specimens. These plants, dried out, leggy and sometimes infested with various blights, bring a funereal gloom to the house. The worst part is that I placed it in the guest room-- hardly a way to bring a festive, welcoming mood to out-of-towners.

So, now I face my poinsettias. Should I keep them? I could follow the instructions available on multiple gardening websites about putting them in a closet and giving them 12 hours of darkness each night. That way, I could make them bloom again for next year. The cheapskate and the budding botanist in me want to try. But what if they turn out sad and ugly, rather than the lush specimens I have now? I guess I can always try the "winter hardiness test". The larger lesson for me may be to just ask well-meaning gift givers to find a different "gardener Christmas present". Perhaps a packet of seeds, or a new trowel. And as for the other houseplants sitting around the house, I will keep the best, like my beautiful peace lily. But the bedraggled kalanchoe that was a Valentine's present three years ago just needs to go. It is certainly a sorry testament to enduring Valentine's love. But maybe, just maybe, I will find the right care instructions on the Internet and finally figure out how to get it to rebloom. I'm not ready to test it's winter hardiness just yet.

Christmas garden outings

Is there a bigger selling point for the west side of Chicago than the peaceful botanical oasis that is Garfield Park Conservatory? The lush vegetation, the children's room and the events (like the awesome Halloween party with owls, wolves and other critters) make it a regular destination for our family. The first winter with a baby can be a little tough in this windy, cold neck of the woods - cabin fever sets in early. The balmy greenhouse of the Conservatory was a life-saver...a little bit of the tropics in the January snow, plenty of other young parents and no entrance fee at that. As a local Christmas destination for gardeners in the dead of the Chicago winter, the holiday flower show is unmatched. They have some bee-keeping classes coming up. I really want to go, but I know its just going to send me down the rabbit hole of another time consuming hobby. I've pitched it to my dubious husband as an informational session, nothing more. Still, I am pondering the way I could fit a hive into my life. In terms of livestock, after worms, what else but bees to fit into a very small urban garden?

Unfortunately, we have not hit the flower show yet this year, as our first winter garden outing of the season was to the Lincoln Park Conservatory. This, too, is a beautiful destination, but really, in my mind, doesn't hold a candle to Garfield Park. Either way, I remain grateful that the city maintains two of these conservatories given the tough economic times (yes, I know they are uncharacteristically closed today just for that reason). Lincoln Park has an annual model train show that we first discovered last year. The trains weave among poinsettias and models of local architecture crafted from natural materials like bark and seeds. Last year, we were charmed. Now, having been to the model train garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden, it seemed a little rinky-dink, but our little one still loved it. It did look like it had been scaled down this year -- the overhead tracks weren't up. Makes me wonder if the same will hold true for the Garfield Park holiday show. The seed-and-bark houses really intrigue me. Really, they can't be that hard to make as long as you have a crafty bent. I think it could make a fun project with my kid one of these winters. We could build a model of our house and then sneak it into the train show, guerrilla-style. It would be funny to have a rogue representation of an undistinguished Chicago single family house nestled amongst the models of the museums, train stations and Lincoln Park row houses.

The various plant rooms at the Lincoln Park Conservatory have a darker, denser feel than Garfield. My absolute favorite thing is a Victorian glass terrarium perched on a small stand -- in it are a collection of carnivorous plants. They are walled off like tigers at a zoo -- one can only peer in and thrill to the danger. I don't know if they are in there for cultivation reasons-- I assume it's actually because too many folks tried to touch. But it does make them more precious to me, to have them glassed in and set apart. Then yesterday, I arrived home to another pile of seed catalogs. Shumway's is selling seed for Venus fly traps and pitcher plants. I could grow my own carnivorous terrarium! I need to investigate though -- this can't turn into another hellebore situation, where I bought seed prior to educating myself about the "up to 18 months" germination times. Now, to find myself a Victorian glass terrarium with my Christmas money....

K-town test kitchen

Wintertime offers the opportunity to catch up on my reading of all things gardening, cooking and homesteading. The Chicago Public Library's online hold system is sending me a steady supply of books from all corners of Chicago to my local storefront branch on North Avenue. Since I have no weeding or harvesting, I also have more time to experiment with ideas from these books. For example, several have featured recipes for homemade marshmallows. Whenever I read accounts of homemade marshmallows, writers invoke the foodie-est of all labels: "a revelation". "Revelatory" is a related descriptor, oft employed in a similar manner, as in "the taste of the house-cured bacon was revelatory". I picture a cadre of critics and foodies marching around the city experiencing revelations like a band of modern-day mystics. Anyway, I figured marshmallows would be a fun Christmas activity. Christmas is the time for miracles and revelations, so why not? Also, homemade marshmallow shapes would look awesome in my Christmas cocoa.

The basic idea is to soften some gelatin in water, boil some sugar syrup, dump it in to the gelatin and beat it into a cloudy mass. This sugary air-whipped mass is then pressed into a pan. Once it cools, it can be cut into shapes and rolled in confectioners sugar. Simple enough, right? As soon as the boiling hot sugar syrup hit the gelatin, and billows of hoof-smelling vapor wafted skyward, I began to wonder if this was a good idea. The whipped product was extraordinarily sticky, rivaling only bubble gum in the way it clumps in toddler hair and clothing. But I wrangled it into the pan. Now, I distinctly remember a Martha Stewart Living Christmas cover from a few years back that featured marshmallows cut into gorgeously intricate snowflakes. Reader, be warned. I could barely cut these into squares, despite all manner of hot water and "nonstick" spray. In the end, I had a pile of white misshapen squares. Okay, they weren't to magazine standards, but the taste could still be "revelatory".

I sunk my teeth in. And that's when I remembered I don't eat marshmallows plain, since I don't really like super-sugary things. It tasted like a marshmallow, a little wetter than jet-puffed. But a plain, sugary marshmallow none the less. My son and husband --who both have a serious sweet tooth-- dutifully tried one each, then walked away. I took them to work and my colleagues gathered around. Much to my delight, they hopefully asked if it was more homemade cheese. Everyone took a sample anyway and a collective "meh" rose from the group. Fortunately, at my office, anything skirting close to edibility will disappear within an hour of placement on the conference room table. The marshmallows were finished quickly, but not with the chorus of approval that met my feta cheese and rosemary crackers.

The book that is occupying a lot of my attention right now is Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by the Centre Terre Vivante. This French research and education center is an authority on four-season and organic gardening. I first discovered them through the writing of Eliot Coleman. The book is a collection of folkways and recipes from European kitchen gardeners. It is both an anthropological archive and a forward-looking tract on low-energy preservation techniques. The recipes use alcohol, oil, dehydration, salt, sugar and lacto-fermentation to preserve garden bounty. Lacto-fermentation has the ring of molecular biology to it, but if you've made sauerkraut (usually the gateway lacto-fermentation experiment for most cooks) then you know what it is. The book has some inspiring recipes (oil-preserved spheres of sun-dried tomato paste) and some that make me a bit queasy (lacto-fermented Swiss chard ribs, anyone?).

There is a shocking lack of food-safety advice in the book, and what there is mostly echoes the pioneer wisdom to "scrape the mold off and if it is slimy or smells bad, don't eat it" . I can't decide if I find this refreshing or disturbing. It also has me hesitating on whether to try the recipes. As an American reader, I am conditioned to reading preservation books that adopt an authoritatively "scientific" voice, berate me with bold-fonted medical warnings, and drown me in pages of government standards. Eugenia Bone's preservation book had clearly been retroactively edited to cut back on some of the recommended "use within" time frames, and I was surprised she was even allowed to admit on those pages that she has occasionally eaten things preserved more than a few years back. Is there merit to all this food-safety hand-wringing , or is this just a manifestation of our anxiety over the wisdom of folkways? How much of those safety disclaimers are just publishers' fears of legal liability? I am willing to eat moldy cheese, and I am an avid maker of homemade alcohol products. But I'm not sure about keeping jars of unsealed vegetables in my cellar. I might be able to stomach it, but I have this horrifying mother-vision of my kid flopping over with an attack of botulism. Are lacto-fermented Swiss chard ribs really worth the gamble?

So, here I sit, reading the recipes over and over again, and deciding whether to have a date with potential danger. In the end, the experimental cook in me will be unable resist the siren call of these heirloom recipes. But I don't think they'll be going into my cellar, unheated or no. I will simply have to cede more fridge space, already limited thanks to the kimchi. This, of course, goes against the whole idea of low-energy preservation. Perhaps when I get a bit older, I'll be less of a nervous-Nelly about all of this. After all, could there be a better exit for a cook and gardener than dying at the hands of your own green beans?