Blooming

This spring I had irises, daffodils, tulips, peonies and roses blooming in rapid succession. There were bouquets in each room of the house, and I could tell where I was standing by scent. I am beginning to forget that flowers were once an extravagance. My first spring in New York City, on the way home from a late night in Manhattan, we came upon a corner market that was selling daffodils for $3 a bunch. I don’t remember how many we bought, but I do remember sitting on the couch in front of a vase packed with their luminous yellow and clean scent. It made me feel rich, joyful. Now I pick fist full of flowers and have more than I need; they smell thick and new and so sweet it almost hurts. The spring flowers are gone, the pea blossoms have long ago turned to pods, but this past week was hot and wet and the garden is beginning to bloom again. The spinach bolted, sending up tiny flowers on fuzzed spikes, so we pulled up the plants and picked all the leaves. They were dusty with pollen and I made spanikopita. The heirloom and mesclun mixes have also gone to seed. They are thin and wispy in their rows and I hope that if I let them be they will re-seed and grow--a second harvest in the fall. Our green beans and soybeans have small white flowers that give way to furry pods, miniature versions of what we will pick next month. But the standouts are the squash blossoms. They only last a day and turn our hills to piles of fire--deep pumpkin orange for the zucchini and butter yellow for the cucumbers. Once a fair number of the zucchinis start growing I will pick the new blossoms and make tacos and soup from them. Only the really rich can afford to eat flowers.

The neighbors wonder...

We coo and photograph the garden like new parents.

I have fallen in love with an ant colony that lives in the pea patch, in the evenings I give them the crumbs from my after work snack and ignore Brad when he wonders it they are nibbling the roots of our plants. They are red and vicious looking, the bullies of this bit of ground, busy piling crumbs of earth on the low leaves of my peas.

I squat with my chin on my knees, watching and drifting, pulling the occasional weed. I always thought it would be lovely to be tiny and live in the garden, making my home under a mushroom.

This past weekend our garden partners came over and we put top soil on the half of the garden that the plumbers had turned to clay. Then we planted the rest of our seeds and some plants from the farmers' market. Now all we have to do is wait...

Sometimes it rains and when the weather clears you see that you have a puddle in your yard. This is a good thing. Sometimes it hasn’t rained and you have a puddle in your yard and you think cool, a puddle with no rain, that’s interesting. But then you start to wonder where this puddle came from. This mysterious puddle right outside your bathroom window… Wait, the pieces are coming together… no rain, puddle, bathroom, the shower drain was a bit slow this morning… dear crap! Puddle of sewage in the side yard!! Brad called the landlord, the landlord called the plumbers, the plumbers dug a trench diagonally through my garden. This trench also went from corner to corner of the back yard, sparing the giant maple tree but turning most of our grass to mud. The plumbers put down grass seed and straw before they left so the view out the kitchen window is a bit barnyard. But I’m not really worried about the yard; it’s the garden that I’m fretting over. The peas, lettuce, onions, and radishes we had already planted were spared, but a good half of the garden is a churned up mess. Everyone had been telling us how great the soil is in our back yard, and they were right, when we dug up our garden last fall we turned over this beautiful rich dark brown crumbly loam, soft, sweet smelling and perfect for growing. All this soil is now packed around our new sewer pipe at the bottom of a 4-foot deep trench. We will be planting corn, cucumbers, and tomatoes in greasy black clay that smells cold and dead. This was not exactly the plan. We spent last Saturday with our garden partners, Andrew and Adrianne planting cabbage, broccoli, beets and turnips in the bit of the garden the plumbers hadn’t touched and trying to figure out what to do with the rest. Get a couple of truckloads of old horse manure and till it into the clay? Cover the clay with leaves, compost and whatever organic matter we can find and plant in that? Just poke the seeds into the clay and hope for the best? I’m focusing on the bright side--the peas look good, the cabbage plants are in the ground, and the toilet works.

Eating like a rabbit...

We've spent a lot of time in our garden, and we have many tiny green leaves, but we have at least a month before anything is ready to eat. But it's spring and it feels wrong to buy my leafy greens from the store, so I turned to the yard. I've been told that the pilgrims planted dandelions as salad greens, and I like the thought of them crossing the ocean with a bag of dandelion fluff. You have to catch the plants before they flower, and pick them from a yard that is free of chemicals, but they are a lovely sour/bitter spring green. Brad and I used a trowel to pop the plants from our yard, and they do make a lovely popping sound when the root lets go of the soil and you end up with the whole plant in your hand. Two nights ago we had a dinner of bread, cheese (munster gerome, yum) and wilted dandelion salad. Last night we ate orecchiette with dandelions, ricotta, and pine nuts. Spring, spring, spring!

Wilted Dandelion Salad

Pick a colander full of unflowered dandelion greens, cut off roots.

Wash well to remove grit, pick out anything that isn't dandelion, dry and put in serving dish.

Melt 2 spoonfuls of bacon grease in a small fry pan, (What? You don't save bacon grease in a small jar in your fridge? Fine, use olive oil.)

Sauté 3 large crushed garlic cloves in bacon grease until tan, pour over greens, toss, salt and pepper and serve.

The garden

It’s spring in Ohio and I had forgotten how sudden and lovely and tremulous the change is. The air turns warm before the plants start to poke their heads up, and there are days when I can’t quite believe that the trees will ever be green again. The birds are taking it on faith and making a great deal of noise about their return from the south. Our feeder has been taken over by grackles who squawk and spill the seed. One of the women I work with says you know it’s spring when you start seeing dead skunks at the side of the road. I can smell them sometimes when I leave for work in the morning, and I know they’ve woken up from winter hungry and have been checking our trashcans for early morning snacks. Last weekend, even though things were just beginning to turn green, we spent Sunday in the garden. We are sharing our garden, the work and the bounty, with our friends Andrew and Adrianne. They’ve had a garden before and it’s nice to have some experience to rely on, although I can’t say I ever imagined that I’d be asking Andrew for advice on mulch and cucumbers trellises. I grew up with him, and most of my memories involve his sudden movements and then giving me “two for flinching.” We ordered our seeds months ago from heirloomseeds.com and I have been poring over the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog. We ordered way too much, but it all sounded so good. We are also going to buy heirloom tomato and pepper plants from a local nursery, but that’s still a few weeks away. For now, we’ve planted 4 kinds of lettuce, 3 kinds of radishes, 2 kinds of Swiss chard and peas.

How the Garden Grows:
Heirloom Salad Blend
Mesclun Mix
Key Lime Lettuce
Black Seed Simpson Lettuce
Spinach
Rainbow Swiss Chard
Swiss Chard
Early Frosty Pea
Borettana Yellow Onion
French Breakfast Radish
Long Scarlet Cincinnati Radish
Red Globe Radish
Golden Globe Turnip
Kentucky Wonder Bush Bean
Choggia Beet
Golden Detroit Beet
Golden Bantam Corn
Muncher Cucumber
Boston Pickling Cucumber
Butternut Squash
Zucchini
Golden Scallop Squash
Edamame