Spring report

Today marked my official end of grad school for now and the beginning of gardening season. The yellow rose was part of the graduation ceremony and seemed just ready for a photo.

It will be nice to have some time to get out into the garden. However, the lows here may be close to freezing tonight so I'm not going to put tomatoes, peppers, melons and squash out yet. I hope things will warm up next week. The front yard has the scent of lilacs while the fragrance of clove currants is wonderful in the back yard. The alpine strawberry plants you see in the picture are doing well. They are a bit tedious to pick but are a wonderful treat. Even though it is still early in the season, we have been able to harvest lovage, baby greens, asparagus and rhubarb. We are even thinking of "harvesting" the lilacs after having seeing a recipe for lilac wine. Sounds good or too weird to try?

Urban Garden Project

The Urban Garden Project is relatively new but I find it to be a great resource. They have had interesting posts and great "how-to" videos for projects. Their goal is to encourage and catalog the creation of 100,000 urban gardens by 2020. If this sounds at all interesting to you, I recommend checking out their blog.

We started gardening in 2002 with the goals of seeing how much of our food needs can be met from our gardens and reducing the amount of grass we grow. It has been a fun project that was greatly helped by turning over our backyard to raised bed gardens. Soon after we moved in to this house, we decided that a small scraggly patch of weeds/lawn directly in front of the house was not worth the effort of trying to grow grass. We dug it up and planted red currants, alpine strawberries and flowers. One of the fun parts of it has been the red currant wine we make each year. This years red currant strawberry wine has been a real treat. Definitely an improvement over lawn which I suspect does not make a good wine.

Next we turned our sights across the sidewalk to our good sized front yard. It would be a bit unusual in our neighborhood to use it all as a garden so we have taken this slowly. At first my husband reluctantly agreed to a few feet of garden next to the front sidewalk. This small garden has taken off and creeps forward a foot or so every year. It has a variety of flowers in addition to ground cherries, lemon balm, sage, thyme and lovage. This summer I'm ready to add some marigolds, dill and rosemary.

I was out working in the front yard gardens today and it is great to see many plants growing already. The loveage and chives are doing well and I harvested some of both that I will make into a salad dressing tonight. My seed starting has gone well too and the marigolds are just waiting for our last frost date before making their appearance out in the gardens.

Writing about this garden brings me back to the Urban Garden Project. They had an interesting post on Front Yard Gardening in case you are thinking of giving up the lawn. If this sounds interesting to you, you are already lawnless or even if you plan to keep your lawn, I would love to read your comments here.

We have a plan!

It snowed overnight, the skies are gray and the temps are in the upper 30's. Not a great day to work outside but nice for planning and dreaming.

Gardening and yard work became much more fun once we decided to reduce the amount of lawn we have and add raised beds. However, I have been too busy with school to really use our gardens to their full potential. This summer will be my first in a while without homework so I am planning on really having fun with gardening. We especially enjoy growing fruit and vegetables. Here are the areas we have to work with. I hope to report much tasty success with this years projects:

The Fenceline Garden: Has wild blue lupine, lovage, red currants, black currants, blueberries, raspberries, ground cherries and rhubarb. With a little luck I will get some butterfly weed to survive and thrive next to the lupine plants. I also plan to add some coral honeysuckle.

The Triangle Garden: is new and will have raspberries planted along with miscellaneous vegetables.

The sunny part of the 4 Tree Garden has elderberries, raspberries, lovage and horseradish and I will plant swiss chard. The rest will be ferns and other shade lovers.

The Postage Stamp behind the deck has hollyhocks, bee balm and false dragonhead.

The middle of the yard is our raised bed gardens. The blue squares and rectangles represent what we already have. The purple shapes are on my “dream list”. I’m told by my builder/husband that they will appear late this summer or next year.

The diagram is a little rough and not to scale but it gives some idea of what we are working with. We also have 2 garden areas in our front yard. Overall, we don’t have a lot of space to work with but it is not bad for an in town property I guess. I can’t wait to post the tally of this years crops. The hardest areas to work with have been the shady spots. They still need work but have been a nice cool place to escape to during a warm day of yard work.

Warm thoughts on a cold night

It is -19 degrees and getting colder out. I'm going to take a break from homework and look over my garden catalogs. My main criteria when shopping for seeds and plants are: will hummingbirds be attracted to it, can we eat it or will it make good wine?

Speaking of good wine. We took a sample of the Red Currant Strawberry from the primary fermenter tonight and it has very nice flavor. Now it will go through the usual stage where it doesn't taste very good. Then it starts to get better and better until we finish with a pretty good wine. Even though we know this, we always get discouraged as it gets a "rough flavor" before it ages a bit. Maybe winemaking will help me to learn to be patient!

Lovage

One aspect of edible landscaping I especially enjoy is trying new things. A gem I found along the way is lovage. It is a lovely bushy plant and great for cooking. Most sources I have read state that one plant is enough for a family but the two of us will easily use up all of the leaves from our three plants. I am making a stock now with it and love the its scent. I froze a lot of lovage this fall and enjoy using it for soups and other recipes. It has warmed up to 0 degrees outside. I have it easy today. I'm cooking soup while my husband goes out to battle the snow and ice in our driveway.