Beth Skwarecki

Check out my post on MyFolia about growing sweet potatoes. It's very possible even in climates like ours - we were successful in zone 5a in New York. Follow the link for all the tips and tricks. This crop was low-maintenance, productive, and tasty.

So our garden gets bigger every year. This year we've got our eye on 1/10 acre of my grandpap's land (which conveniently comes with a tractor, plow, etc). There's more space if we need it.

This is by far the largest we've tried, and we know that what works on a small plot doesn't always translate to a larger scale. We're in need of good resources on mini-farming. We're not afraid of hand work, but there will be a lot of it (50x100 feet) and will use machinery when it will make our lives easier. We're also cost-conscious and don't want to plant a lot of seeds that will need to be thinned, if we could just plant the seeds more economically in the first place.

We'd like to provide for the veggie needs of 2-6 adults: Chris and I would like to eat from the garden as much as possible, and we plan to have enough to share with 4 adult relatives.

There will be lots of potatoes (they grow well here and everybody likes them) and sweet potatoes (since we did such a good job last year). I'm bad at tomatoes but we'll be giving them another try - along with eggplants and peppers.

We're growing plenty of collard greens for the iguana, winter squashes for him and Chris, and a buttload of onions because I can never have enough onions. Same goes for carrots. We have a favorite variety, Scarlet Nantes, that does OK even when totally neglected. Carrot tips appreciated - they are hard to weed and we will be growing thousands of them.

There will be melons (experimental), zucchini, and brussels sprouts in small quantities. No garlic or perennials this time, although we're looking forward to the apple harvest - anyone know where to rent a cider press in Butler, PA?

I've never loved row crops (all the cool kids grow their veggies in beds) but mounded rows worked great last year for the sweet potatoes and they will probably work well for the squashes (For potatoes we will use a potato plow both to plant and harvest).

Do you remember my screenhouse?

It's where I'm keeping the seedlings that are too young and tender to brave the outdoors. I've got a couple dozen each of tomatoes, winter squashes, zucchini, etc. And in the last week or so, I've found a new species.

First it was small:


Then it got bigger:


And this is what it looks like tonight:


I have no idea what they are or where they came from. Probably they're fungus of some sort.

Here's another little time lapse, a happier kind. I planted some lettuce seeds in my garden. I'm always doubtful about whether seeds will actually ever come up.

A few rainy days after planting, this is what I saw:


If I'm lucky, I thought, some of those are lettuce. Here's what it looked like a little bit later:


I've got my eye on the little round ones there. I described them to a friend and she said they sounded like they could be lettuce. I waited a few more rains, and then they looked like this:


Yay! definitely lettuce. If you're not seeing it, click on the photo.

OK, one last time-lapse and then head over to flickr for more garden pix. Sadly, my fenceless garden was not to last. The deer found my lettuce, and took great big bites out of it. I vowed to put up a deer fence ASAP; it took about a week to find the time, get the supplies, and wait for the rain to stop. We put it up today. Stupid deer.

Here is one of my innocent pre-deer lettuces:


And here it is, post-deer:


Stupid deer! Fortunately, the deer were too stupid to come back for seconds. Within a week, the lettuce looked like this:


Beautiful, isn't it? I may have salad after all.

I planted my colder-weather crops today: lettuce, scallions, carrots, more lettuce. Also some "cosmos", which the packets say is a type of flower.

I'm planting in blocks and beds instead of rows, 'cause who wants to bother weeding between rows? I'm also taking a "who cares" attitude toward the deer, since I'm a cheapskate and don't want to put up a fence.

Lettuce is easy. All I have to do is not stomp on it, and I'll have salads in a couple weeks.

Fun fact (and something to look forward to): "hodgepodge" is made from spring thinnings - the carrots and potatoes you pull up to make room for more veggies or just to get an early start on the harvest - mixed together. Here's a recipe.

It doesn't make any sense to call this project a victory garden, but I'm probably going to keep doing it. (I admire the DIY, practical, tightwad sort of attitude of the original victory gardens. I'm just 60 years behind the times.)

Chris went and claimed a garden plot for me this weekend (it's about a mile from our house, rented from the university); seedling planting time is long overdue. I turned my desk into a tiny indoor farm, protected by a structure Chris and I call a "screenhouse". Basically, it's the thing that keeps the iguana from eating my plants.



I'll give you the rundown on what I planted (the details are here):

Brandywine tomatoes, known for being large and delicious. They are the classic "heirloom tomato".

Roma tomatoes, for pasta sauce and bruschetta.

Rosa Bianca eggplants, known for mild flavor and lavender/white color.

Dark green zucchini and Yellow crookneck squash. Will I pick them when they're small and tender, or will I be overrun by vegetables the size of baseball bats? Do I even need to ask?

New England pie pumpkins because man do I love pumpkin pie.

Waltham butternut squash - a favorite of both Chris and the iguana. As I was planting I would sometimes think out loud, "I have 16 (or whatever) more pots available. What should I plant?". Chris would always answer "More butternut squash!" or, sometimes, "more pumpkin!". If the deer don't eat them, we'll have 32 fruits from each. Chris has promised to eat them all.

Rocky Ford muskmelon - I love muskmelon but I've never tried to grow it. Here's hoping.

Greek oregano and italian parsley - these I will grow indoors. I know they can take a while to grow, but it's not like we have any shortage of the dry stuff.

There are a few more seeds that I'll be planting outside this weekend:

Scarlet Nantes carrots - they're red! How gourmet!

Evergreen Hardy Bunching Onions - apparently a scallion sort of thing. If the packet is correct I'll be able to harvest them in July.

Lettuce mix - both from my seed packet and from the seedlings I bought at Greenstar today. (I got some Sungold tomato seedlings too, which I need to re-pot because they'll be sitting in the screenhouse for another month).

By the end of the month I should be able to plant corn (Ashworth) and beans (3 types - Provider, light red kidney, and Royal Burgundy). I'm hoping to get a three sisters kind of thing going.

I planted most of my seedlings today. (yeah, yeah, it's late in the season, you got a problem with that?) I had four varieties of tomato growing on my living room windowsill: Brandywine, a big pink Amish tomato; Red Pear, a pear-shaped cherry tomato; Scotia, a determinate Canadian tomato bred for short seasons, and Cosmonaut Volkov, a Russian tomato bred for cold weather (the Cornell Cooperative Extension recommends it as a good tomato to grow around here). I have some itty-bitty eggplant sprouts that took for-freaking-ever to germinate (left those on the windowsill for another week or two), some lemon cucumbers and yellow crookneck squash that have stems almost a foot long already, and a few assorted other plants.

Lesson from today: If you haven't thinned the seedlings yet, do that after you rattle their box around and break some of the stems. Poor lil guys, I killed a bunch.

I was actually going to do the planting early this morning, but I was so sore from my last couple days at the gym that when I woke up I had the sense to go back to sleep.

Let's take a moment here to review the Beth Exercise Plan (I've completed the first three days so far).

Day 1: Go to gym, overtrain legs. bike home.
Day 2: Realize that overtraining legs is a bad idea. Go to gym, overtrain arms. bike home. Try not to fall off bike.
Day 3: Wake up in pain. Declare today a rest day. Spend two hours digging in garden.
Day 4: Realize that digging in garden isn't "rest". Declare today a rest day instead. Play softball.
Day 5: ???
Day 6: Profit.

I'd waited long enough to plant the garden, so it was going to have to be today, even if I had to do it in the rain. (The forecast said rain starting at 6pm. It was 7ish and still dry. Ha!) I packed up and headed for the garden. I figured I'd stop when it got dark. So what if it rains? I brought a towel.

I arrived at the garden with a lot of seedlings, a lot of seeds, and a couple bags of sand and mulch that had to be distributed. Oh, and there were a lot of weeds in the plot. Oddly enough, most of my weeds look and smell like this. The others are probably also other people's garden leftovers. I wonder if they sell field guides of edible plants.

When I was partway done with my tomato/zucchini bed, I made the mistake of looking into the distance. The sky had that "I'm gonna rain on you, mothafucka!" kind of look. I made a mental note not to look at the sky anymore.

I hit the end of that bed - so now half a bed planted with tomatoes and zucchini - and decided to put the rest elsewhere. If disease or pests wiped out a whole bed of tomatoes, I would have another half-dozen plants on the other side of the plot.

I took a break from tomatoes to plant my puny little green onion seedlings in a block next to the salad greens.

It was darker now, and I felt a raindrop on my arm. I took my box of seedlings to another bed, and started planting them indiscriminately. Brandywine tomato? Sure! Lemon cucumber? Why not! Somewhere it occured to me that the forecast was not for rain, but for thunderstorms, and that I was standing in the middle of an open field. I stabbed at the ground with a shovel, hoping that was good enough to loosen the soil a bit, and planted faster. Yellow squash, eggplant - I thought I left the eggplants at home! Oh well.

Just yesterday I'd been reading about a man who was struck by lightning. It shattered his teeth. (The photo with that article shows his tattoo, of a man being struck by lightning.) In my haste, I snapped the stem of every cucumber I tried to remove from its plastic cup, so I stopped planting the ones in plastic cups. If there was time, I would plant them at the end.

Of course there would be time! I'm not lugging the boxes of seedlings back home just to set them on the windowsills and have to pack them back up tomorrow. The rain was still really light, and there were lots of people on the other side of the field that are taller than me. They'd make much better targets, I'm sure. If I got hit by lightning and survived, I'd make sure to get a lightning-bolt tattoo. But it would have to be positioned so my wedding gown's straps don't cover it. That's a tattoo I'd have to show off. It would even be more badass than my bad-ass mo-fo tattoo.

The sky lit up in front of me, really bright. I don't remember if I saw the bolt itself. I grabbed my shovel (hey, it's borrowed!) and RAN. The thunderclap came right away, a quarter of a mile maybe . My plot is really far from the parking. I ran. Wait, is it silly to pick up and run like that? Are the other gardeners looking at me like I'm an idiot? What if the lightning strikes me as I run? Man, that would SUCK.

Well, I made it home alive and unsinged. I wonder if I left anything there that shouldn't get wet.

I got my garden plot over the weekend, and staked it out with string: four 4'x25' beds that I plan to pack full of vegetation, with narrow walkways in between.

Today I planted my cold-weather plants (at least I hope they're all cold-weather plants!): collard greens, broccoli, swiss chard, "mixed lettuce", parsley, and arugula.

Anyhow, I hope the deer leave me some.

Another gardener advised me that since I'm at the South (downhill) end, I might want to dig out my walkways to raise the plant beds: the water flows downhill into the southern gardens, and then the soil there is extra dense because all the sediment has been washing downhill over the years. So on the next nice, sunny, dry day I'm going to start digging out around my beds. Today was a miserable, cold, wet, rainy day. I was determined to plant my greens anyway (I hear salad greens LOVE nasty weather) and of course I got really muddy in the process.

Total investment in the garden so far:
$25 on salad green seedlings
$12 for stakes and string to mark out the beds
$7 on a trowel, a cultivator, and a pair of gloves

15 minutes staking out the plot
1 hour planting salad greens

Also, $22 on seed packets I haven't planted yet, and $12 for some herbs I'm keeping in my window box (some of these will later go in the garden).