I want to grow Pixie cabbages. Their heads are only 5 to 6 inches across – no more cabbage growing moldy in the vegetable drawer!
I want to grow Circus Circus carrots, too. They’re white, orange and dark purple, and they’d look so pretty shredded into Pixie cabbage coleslaw, or sliced atop Wine Country Mesclun, a mix of eight different lettuces.
My current unhealthy interest in the Renee’s Garden media kit reminds me of my years as a newspaper reporter in Alaska, during which I wrote a lot of features about gardening. The gardeners there are deeply committed – or should be, because most of them are absolutely dotty about their dirt.
Wouldn’t you be, if you couldn’t safely put plants in the ground until Memorial Day weekend? And then had to spend the summer fending off slugs and moose? (Hint: You can scare deer away. Moose leave when they’re full.)
Southcentral Alaska gardeners have to work pretty hard to grow warm-weather crops like tomatoes, cukes and peppers, but it can be done (especially if you have a greenhouse). Much easier are greens, potatoes, carrots, peas, rhubarb, and crucifers like cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower. Gardeners have the advantage of copious daylight and temperatures warm enough (eventually) to germinate seed yet mild enough to keep plants from bolting prematurely.
And by late August, when they’ve had just about enough of weeding and watering and warring against ungulates and slithering land mollusks? Temperatures drop, the rains begin in earnest (aka “state fair weather”) and everything that doesn’t start to die back can be neglected on the grounds that it’s no longer really productive.
Summer once again seems possible
But that’s late August. Early January is another story. That’s when you see wistful plantsmen and -women at the nurseries, hefting trowels and trying on rubber clogs and surreptitiously poking their fingers into the soil surrounding potted houseplants.
Thank God for seed catalogs, which start hitting mailboxes by late January. I used to tell these folks that seed catalogs were basically porn for gardeners. (Well, I’d say that to the ones who had senses of humor.) I’d accuse them of sitting up late at night, slowly turning the pages and drooling over gorgeous color photos of nekkid flowers and vegetables.
These tantalizing pictures and luscious descriptions completely mesmerize gardeners who face another three or four months of active shoveling, followed by the ritual raking of dead brown lawns to rid them of fluffy coats of gray, lint-like snow mold.
But as they page through the catalogs summer once again seems possible, albeit unlikely. Dream landscapes can be sketched and re-sketched on old envelopes or, if you’re serious about this, on graph paper. Spinach cultivars are debated more hotly than regional politics. And maybe, just maybe, this will be the year the artichokes produce.
These days I’m right there with them, at least as regards vegetables. Seattle is currently abloom with daffodils, cherry blossoms, magnolias, azaleas and rhododendrons. Lovely, but not enough to hold my interest. I want to grow things I can eat. That’s why the Renee’s Garden publicity folder made me really restless. Hungry, too.
Getting my hands dirty
The sight of an heirloom radish called “Watermelon” is enough to make me want to move someplace where I’m allowed to put my hands in the dirt. The radishes are 2 to 4 inches across, with a pale green exterior and an inside the color of a ripe melon.
Alas, no gardening is allowed in the yard of my apartment building. Besides, my daily newspaper gets stolen if I don’t get up early enough to claim it, so what chance would I have of keeping ripe tomatoes out of other people’s hands?
Container gardens haven’t worked out. There’s no balcony and the plants get too leggy when grown indoors. I tried running a fan on them to simulate wind and toughen up the stems but it didn’t do any good.
I couldn’t garden this year anyway, as I’ll once again be house-sitting for an Alaska friend in late spring and then staying to visit until mid-July. In early August I’m headed for the BlogHer 2011 conference in San Diego, and later that month I’ll attend the Affiliate Summit East conference in New York City.
My Alaska friend won’t mind a bit if I weed around the tulips or scrape slugs away from the tiny strawberry patch. It’s a chance to get my hands dirty, anyway. Maybe she won’t notice if I stick a few radish seeds in the ground, but I bet the moose and slugs would. Back to the catalog dream world. Forgive me if some of the pages are stuck together.
Well you are in luck! I’m wanting to set up my raised vegetable beds this year. So you can dig as much as you want, not to mention weed and help fill in the beds with my well cooked compost and soil that will be dumped in a pile on my snow-moldy yard. :0)
School gets out on the 19th. After that comes the gardening in earnest. See you soon!
@AKgirl: Woo hoo! We’ll make a field trip to Bell’s Nursery. 🙂
I completely understand your desire to play in the dirt. Winter does not want to end here in PA – we got another inch of snow yesterday… I’m all set to go as soon as it dries up enough that I won’t sink to my knees tryign to till the garden!
LOL ‘Porn’ is the correct word for describing some of the ripe and luscious veggies and flowers as depicted in these mags. I fell for it once, ordering a bunch of stuff that looked beautifully unreal, photoshopped, as they must’ve been, into another realm. Imagine my disappointment then when I received a bunch of bare sticks in the mail accompanied by their photographic toe tags showing what they could look like weeks, years even, down the line! Dang it, I was expecting fully grown and flowering specimens lol in colors that haven’t been invented yet.
It sounds wonderful! I’m in the mood to get out of the house and start working on the yard or a little garden. It may get to 40 today so we aren’t at a place where it is warm enough to do any fun stuff!
Maybe one of those little green house thingies is what you need. They sit on the counter and you could watch it grow!
You could try to find a community garden to work in. They’re pretty popular here in Chicago with people who live in apartments, condos, or even houses with really small yards. The travel still complicates things, but it’s an option!
You may also find someone in your home town that would be happy to share their garden with you. I have an extra lot and built raised beds on one of them. Every year I ask my network of friends to see anyone knows someone who’d like to garden with me. I can always use the help and have more than enough space to grow food for 2,3, or 4 other people. One of my friends refers to it as “share-cropping.” 😉
@Linda: That wouldn’t work this year, given the schedule I described in the piece.
There’s something called P-Patch gardening in Seattle but there isn’t one close enough to me. But I won’t be living here forever; my next place must have a way to garden. It’s a deal-breaker.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
Thanks for the smile! When my favorite catalogue comes in January (Seeds of Change), my daughter always yells from the porch, “Mum, your plant porn is here!” She has a very good sense of humor.
So true about the moose. I spent a summer in Fairbanks once and was foolish enough to try to shoo a moose out of the garden . . . but I did that only once!
Your are totally right about the catalogs. I live in my garden catalogs. Now, since I made an order this year, I have the Beautiful Brecks bulb catalogs coming. I love those! Sorry you can’t garden–I am stuck with containers only, but no one would dare bother my ripened produce! Your day will come, as will mine someday when I have real ground to plant in.
I was going to suggest P-Patch–too bad there’s not one near you.
My husband is obsessed with growing tomatoes, which are not that easy to do well in the Seattle area. Just not hot enough, long enough. He has done a good job with the catalogues finding varieties that don’t need as much heat and mature in a shorter number of days.
We are planning on digging up some of our small backyard and building a raised bed, square foot garden this year. I can’t wait.
@Nancy: I interviewed a guy in Anchorage who grew tomatoes, green peppers, cukes and even corn outdoors — and he lived on the “Hillside,” up above Anchorage proper. He used wave-selective plastic and floating row covers. It was pretty amazing to see stuff like that growing outside (although under the cover part of the time).
His tomato of choice was a Czech variety called “Stupice.” He said it has a nice tender skin; he didn’t bother skinning it before cooking it down into tomato sauce and canning it. He was (and probably still is) a male Martha Stewart kind of guy.