3. March 2017
Planted: A Year of Gardening
The series starts here
Even cold March days have a very mild spring-like feel with the month’s longer days and higher sun. Bad winter weather happens in March and even April, but it doesn’t last long as a rule (as if there are still rules), and 2016 was off-the-charts.
I like to joke that we seem to now be Kentucky, but without the good booze and horses. (I ate these words the following year, when 2017’s April placed us squarely in Hudson Bay.)
As at the old place, I set up a seed station in the basement, starting herbs and dragon’s claw millet as they tend to be slow starters, but they came up fast, in less than a week. I thought the Breezeway would be too cold for seed starting. Ideally the temperature needs to be no lower than 55 even with the heat mats, but in subsequent years I learned the Breezeway is good for seed starting, if you wait until April (even a cold April like we had the following year). Because of the bright sun in the room, what I lost in temperature, I gained in light.
Seed-starting is critical for production-level vegetable gardening like mine. When you grow 20 tomato plants it is unsustainably expensive to purchase nursery seedlings at $5 to $10 each, so I learned to propagate and save seeds for everything I grow. People find vegetable gardens expensive when they commodotize them–you don’t need more than seeds, soil, a trowel, and some sticks, really. No need for all the attrative tools and tchotchkies in the garden center.
Some seeds are easy to collect; for instance for beans and corn the seeds are the part you eat. Just leave them on the plant until they dry, and you have seeds. Tomatoes have to be mildly processed (leave the seeds, goop and all, in a jar until, essentially, they start to mold, then clean and dry them). Leave peppers and eggplants on the plant until they’re a ways past edible. Lettuce, other greens, some annual herbs, and some root vegetables will “bolt;” that is, they start a flowering stalk. Leave them all season and they’ll reseed themselves, although this also takes up space in the beds. Doing this, you discover that lettuce plants create an astonishingly beautiful flower stalk. You don’t have to leave it, unless you have space for the self-seeding option; you can collect the tiny seeds if you need to open up the space for a new planting.
Some seeds can’t be saved without special steps to protect them from cross-pollination. There are wild carrots that will make inedible carrot hybrids; dill will mate with fennel. Squash will cross-pollinate with unpredictable results. If your corn is within a quarter mile of a different breed, even the ones you just planted won’t necessarily come out the way you think they will. If your plants are what they call F1 hybrids (it will say on the packet), it means they aren’t “stable”–the next generation plant may or may not have the same characteristics regardless of pollination; those will need to be purchased from a commercial grower. I grow the same F1 “Provider” beans every year, because they’re so good. But my tomatoes are all “heirloom” varieties, that is, they are stable hybrids, and will reliably create the same thing year after year.
I haven’t bought tomato seeds in 20 years. It’s fun, and it’s satisfying to take your food production the full cycle from seed to seed.
My other March task—filling the raised beds—was definitely made easier by the unseasonal weather. With the soil already unfrozen (I’m not sure it ever froze that year at all), I hauled about 2 cubic yards in 15-gallon storage tubs from a friend’s yard; enough to fill one large and one small bed. My housemate provided enough for another 1/3 bed from pots under the porch at their old place. This took five trips and was the start of a season of hauling heavy things. Since I ended up (a couple months of hauling down the road) with a badly sprained wrist, I think it’s safe to say my days of massive hauling projects probably need to be behind me.
Right at the end of the month, the tulips I had planted in the fall started peaking through. I had a garden.
Then, just as we had decided it was spring, and planted out a few things, it decided it actually was winter after all, and dumped a load of snow and a week of unseasonal cold. Chicago didn’t get as slammed as the east coast, but we still ended up with more than 8 inches of snow in two very lovely falls over two days. Not too cold, and the streets were cleared pretty fast, although oddly, even though seriously this was not a bad storm, traffic shut down.
With my blank slate before me, I started with the big projects to get the various garden “rooms” ready for plants. This meant navigating a new regulatory system. Chicago is pretty much “ask forgiveness, not permission.” My new town seems to have ordinances, fees, and permits for everything, and they apparently drive around looking to catch you. If they do, the fines are burdensome. It’s easy to fly under the radar in Chicago; even though each ward and even neighborhood is a town unto itself, the regulatory regime just doesn’t care all that much about what you do in your front yard, much less the back.
Nevertheless, not wanting to be told “no” or have to pay a fee, I took a chance and contracted with a tree company without bothering the mention it to anyone to remove all the junk trees along the alley so that the Farm would have full sunlight. Their method was a cliché “Tim-berrrrr!” – notching the trees and then pushing them over. They managed, through skill and luck, to avoid the power lines under which they were growing, as well as the cars both parked and driving down my street. The biggest tree was probably 40 feet tall, so this was fairly terrifying. The same day they were doing this, workers in a nearby suburb died when a tree they were removing fell on a power line.
Not Dabbling In Normal 