Category Archives: Gardening

Spring, sprung much earlier than usual

Posted on by
Reply

The calendar tells me that winter remains in effect around Washington. And yet temperatures today hit 81 degrees at National Airport, while at home I found myself distracted by the sight of buds on the trees around our house between doing what I think is my earliest ever weeding of the yard.

Buds on a cherry tree, with leaf-flecked grass in the background.

Old photos taken around this time in February tell a different story. We’ve had snowfall–enough for cross-country skiing, although in some years that’s required placing a sufficiently low value on one’s x-c skis–as late as mid March and not that long ago.

Today’s unseasonably warm temperatures and the too-early harbingers of spring that preceded it could be just a random roll of the climate dice that will be undone next winter. That is my hope, because I like living in a place with distinct seasons and even the occasional blizzard. I would be sad if I had to retire our snow shovels, notwithstanding how shoveling the sidewalk can be exhausting, back-aching work.

It’s supposed to get cold again next week, and Saturday it may yet snow. But if it doesn’t, at least we’ve already had some actual, paltry accumulation this year–which I think elevates 2023 over 2020 even before we get into everything else that went wrong three years ago.

Advertisement

2022 gardening scorecard: a pleasant pepper surprise

Posted on by
Reply

Gardening remains one of my favorite analog distractions from digital chores–even if it doesn’t necessarily yield as much food to eat as I’d hoped. Which is good, since this was yet another year that saw my kitchen garden underperform in some weird ways.

(For your reference: my 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 gardening grades.)

A bell pepper starting to turn red, with a drop of rain on a leaf of the plant partially obscuring it.

Peppers: A–

I take no credit for this addition to the list: My wife bought a wheeled planter and some plants for it, resulting in a reasonably steady supply of bell and jalapeno peppers over the summer (plus an egglant or two that I’m not going to try to factor into this report card).

Arugula: A-

Once again, this leafy green’s performance in the spring was not matched in the fall, when some heavy rains in September washed out promising rows of seedlings. And unlike last year, they didn’t mount any late-fall comeback. Should I have waited another few weeks to try that second set of seeds? Maybe.  

Herbs: B+

Parsley was its reliable self, but I didn’t get enough basil to make any pesto sauce, which makes me sad. My attempt to grow rosemary from seed went nowhere; fortunately, the tiny rosemary shrub my wife put in that planter did much better. And mint, despite its reputation for weed-like growth, was only a springtime contender.

Lettuce: C+

This was yet another year in which lettuce did not grow nearly as well as it did in 2017, but it was still nice to be able to step outside in the spring and collect some leaves to add to a sandwich. The important thing to remember: Lettuce is so much cheaper when purchased in seed form.

Spinach: C

See my above comments about lettuce, then add the disappointment of seeing a late-summer crop get washed out when I’ve been able to make that work in previous years.

Tomatoes: C-

I didn’t expect to get so many cherry tomatoes this year–because I didn’t plant them and instead was surprised by how many grew from seeds left from last year’s volunteer plants. I had worse luck with the plants I bought at my farmers’ market, which yielded only a few handfuls of tomatoes for me to enjoy in sandwiches and sauces.  

Beans: D+

This poor grade mainly reflects my own inattentive care, which left too many green beans on the vine for too long. I’m blaming a renewal of work travel that was not a factor for the first half of 2021.

2021 gardening report card: a belated basil assessment

Posted on by
1

This annual recap of my gardening efforts should have been written last month, but then I got distracted by other topics–much as the return of travel in the second half of last year distracted me from tending to plants during what were, in retrospect, some critical parts of the summer.

In fewer words, I’m still figuring out this gardening thing, more than two decades after my first successful experiments with growing herbs in pots on an apartment balcony.

(For your reference: my 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 gardening grades.)

Herbs: A

Parsley was not as prolific as in previous years, but basil was 2021’s pleasant surprise, between the two plants I bought at the farmers’ market that kept yielding gorgeously green leaves through fall and the smaller crop I got from seeds in a pot in the dining room. Mint and rosemary grew reasonably well too, and the the same indoor pot yielded enough dill to flavor the occasional plate of scrambled eggs.

Arugula: A-

My most reliable green lived up to past performance in the spring but then took a mighty long time getting in gear after I planted a second crop of seeds in September. That second batch looked to be finally coming into its own after we returned from Christmas travel–and then we had snow while I was out at CES, and I think it may be done for now.

Beans: B

We repeated last year’s apathetic strategy of trying to grow beans in random containers around the back patio, but they were not quite as productive this year. My being around less often to tend to them after July also probably figured into this shortfall.

Lettuce: C-

Someday, I will figure out what I did right to get lettuce to grow as well as it did in 2017. That day did not come at any point in 2021, so I had to content myself with just enough lettuce for some springtime sandwich fixings.

Tomato: D+

This grade would have been a D or lower had it not been for all the plum and cherry tomatoes that either volunteered or grew from seeds that I didn’t expect to do much of anything. They contributed to some delicious pasta sauces–but the slicing tomatoes I value most for their contributions to sandwiches fell victim to my being out of town in mid-July and again in August.

Spinach: D

Here’s another vegetable that did much better before, even though I tried growing it in almost the same spot this year and gave it the same overall amount of care. But there’s nowhere to grow but up in 2022, right?

Farewell, cicadas

Posted on by
Reply

I flew out of town Friday morning–my first post-vaccination travel!–and returned Tuesday afternoon. Those four days and change spent visiting my mom, my brother and his family in the Boston area were enough to come home to a Washington area that no longer sounded as it did before I left.

By which I mean, the high-pitched call of millions of cicadas buzzing for each other’s attention no longer greeted me the moment I stepped outside the house. Instead, it was the standard soundtrack of birds chirping that I’d heard most of the previous 17 years. Walking around the neighborhood was different too, without red- or orange-eyed bugs crawling underfoot, flying about, or occasionally landing on me.

Barely a month after Brood X emerged in volume in my neighborhood, the cicadas seem to be vanishing as quickly as they appeared. I now see remarkably few signs of their having been here at all; the weeping cherry tree I planted last spring had one small branch die off and show scars from female cicadas depositing their eggs there, but that seems to be the extent of the plant damage. And so far, the yard does not smell from an excess of decomposing cicadas, something I would very much like not to change.

I do have all the pictures I took of Brood X to remind me, plus a video or two. But as weirdly amusing as I found these harmless bugs and their lifecycle from nymph to adult (maybe seeing their mass emergence for a second time in my life reduced the freakout factor?), that was nothing compared to the interest my daughter developed in them. After more than a year of the pandemic penning in her horizons and, for most of that time, reducing school to a series of boxes on a screen, a fascinating spectacle of nature arrived in our backyard and around our neighborhood that she’d never seen before and wanted to learn more about.

As crazy as it may sound, I will miss the insect word’s answer to short-period comets just because of that. But these little alien-looking arthropods haven’t really gone; their offspring are now beginning a 17-year subterranean sojourn that will lead to them emerging en masse to surprise the children of 2038, and hopefully fascinate some of them.

Waiting for the cicadas

Posted on by
1

The neighborhood is about to get a lot more crowded for the next month or so. The mid-Atlantic’s 17-year cicadas are now emerging–first as holes they make in the ground while crawling out as nymphs, then as exoskeletons left on branches and leaves after molting, and soon as hordes of bugs with beady red eyes.

Around my neighborhood, the local ambassadors of Brood X haven’t yet reached that third stage. Every day I see more of their cast-off exoskeletons (exuviae, if you didn’t know) clinging to foliage like little beige bug bookmarks, but until tonight I hadn’t seen any of this year’s cicadas alive. That’s when I learned that you can hear them molting–a sort of quiet, slow and moist clicking–then spot them slowly tugging their pale selves out of their old shells.

Yes, that is slightly alarming to witness.

But it’s nowhere close to the freakout potential of having thousands of cicadas within a block–meaning you have to watch where you step, and that going for a jog or a bike ride ensures some will bounce off of you. Plus, there is the vaguely extraterrestrial racket generated by their mating calls.

I am fairly tolerant of insects overall (except for mosquitoes, which should be genetically engineered into extinction), but gardening may lose much of its charms until the middle of June.

I learned this in 2004, the previous emergence of Brood X and my own introduction to the evolutionary freakshow that is the periodical cicadas’ survival strategy. Instead of trying to hide or escape from predators, cicadas arrive in such massive numbers that other animals get full and have to take a break from this free buffet. The surviving cicadas can then make millions of cicada eggs that the females deposit in trees–from which larvae will drop to the ground, burrow underground and wait 17 years before emerging to fascinate or frighten the children of 2038.

People have been writing about this ritual of life in the mid-Atlantic for centuries, but this year’s cicada onslaught will be different from previous emergences because of a different plague: social media. If you suffer from any sort of arthropod anxiety, you’re not going to enjoy all the cicada Facebook status updates, cicada tweets, cicada Instagram pics and stories, cicada TikToks, and other social testimony that will soon be swarming screens. This could be a really good time to give those apps a rest and instead start reading an intimidatingly long book.

A yard once again in bloom, and in new need of work

Posted on by
1

This morning, the weeping cherry tree that I planted last spring to try to keep myself occupied as the world shut down showed its first blossoms. By this evening, that little tree was well on its way to surrounding itself with a cloud of white flowers.

After years of being a cherry blossom spectator, I feel like I’m being a good local citizen by making my own tiny contribution to one of the D.C. area’s signature spring sights. What also feels good: seeing the work of a previous year come back to life. It’s one of the most satisfying things in all of gardening.

Photo of cherry blossoms, showing base of the tree and my lawn velow

My yard also features a growing collection of daffodils, with lilies making their way out of the ground to bloom again. The redbud trees and a lilac out front are rapidly budding, and the small raised bed outside the back patio has a crop of arugula seedlings planted two weeks ago that should be providing sandwich fixings in another couple of weeks.

And all the time I’ve put in over the last few springs to root out bittercress and chickweed seems to have resulted in far fewer of those pests to twist out of the ground with a weeding fork.

On the downside, an unusually damp February has left large, low-lying swaths of lawn reduced to shoe-grabbing, clay-dense dirt. I would like to think that the grass will make a springtime recovery, but realistically, I need to regrade those parts. And after so many years of low-maintenance lawn care–including 16 years and counting with the same electric lawnmower–it bothers to me think that I’ll have to pay for dirt. But if I do my job right now and them remember to reseed in the fall, next spring I won’t be looking at caked clay in those parts of the lawn. Right? Please tell me I’m right?

2020 gardening report card: a very small hill of beans

Posted on by
2

This year has given me more time to garden than any other in my adult life. Now that the gardening season is officially over, courtesy of multiple below-freezing days and the season’s first snowfall, I’m once again grading myself on how well I did at growing some of my own food–and I’m left wondering how I didn’t make better use of that extra time to play with plants.

(For your reference: my 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 gardening grades.)

Beans: A-

The pandemic arrived in the middle of both planting season and my realization that we had a lot of leftover bean seed packages lying around. So we went a little crazy–in addition to planting seeds in the usual spots in the shabbier raised bed in the side yard, my wife and I repurposed a few random pots we had laying around for bean-growing purposes. For a while, we had more beans than we could eat; although the bean plants in the raised bed didn’t make it past summer, most of the others kept growing through fall, if at a slower pace.

Arugula: B+

I can usually count on two growing seasons for this salad green, but most of the seeds I planted in September got washed out by heavy rains, and then the survivors failed to yield more than a few tiny plants. So I wound up spending more on lettuce at the farmers’ market than I’d hoped, which was somewhat frustrating.

Herbs: B

Flat-leaf parsley once again grew like crazy all spring and summer, enabling me to make multiple batches of parsley-walnut pesto, but then it failed to resume growing in the fall. Rosemary made a comeback: After last year’s rosemary died, I planted a fresh batch in a new pot, and those plants are still going strong. Mint was also its usual reliable self. But the sage plants died sometime in late summer, and basil underperformed, if not as badly as last year. I did finally get thyme to grow–indoors, in a pot in a sunny corner of the dining room.

Spinach: B-

I enjoyed modest success with this in the spring–by which I mean, some of last year’s plants hung on until then, and not all of the seeds I planted this year vanished into the dirt.

Lettuce: C+

See the above entry for spinach, but make everything 20 percent worse.

Tomatoes: C-

Unlike last year, I was able to treat myself to the sublime pleasure of a BLT sandwich made with a just-plucked-off-the-vine tomato. Well, once or twice.

Home cooking when you don’t leave home

Posted on by
5

When I used to say “I love to cook,” I was saying that with the understanding that I’d only be cooking half the dinners in the week. Work events and social outings would have me out of the house most of the rest of the time, so I would never feel stuck in a rut.

Well, I’ve now gone three and a half months in which I’ve had every single dinner at home. And while we have treated ourselves to takeout or delivery once a week or so, I’ve cooked most of the other dinners.

What have I learned, aside from profound respect for my mom who did that work for far longer and for a larger family?

The importance of leftover-friendly recipes–soups, stews, chili, stir-fries, risotto, quesadillas–is even more obvious. But cooking a main course that can become a side (risotto, again) helps a lot, and so does making sides that I can use up later on.

It’s also important to have one extra-easy-but-still-homemade option, which for somebody of Italian ancestry like me means pasta. This time of year, that becomes a canvas for whatever herbs I can grab out of the garden and throw into a garlic and olive oil sauce.

But the one thing I didn’t quite expect was how much I would still want to try something more challenging once a week–in terms of ingredients I haven’t used, a cooking technique that’s new to me, or a particularly challenging set of directions. So I’ve tried my hand at deep-dish pizza, hollandaise sauce, and chicken parmesan, among other recipes from which I’d shied away in the Before Times.

And I still look forward to that challenge, which suggests I’m not burned out on home cooking. That would be good, because a return to my old lifestyle seems farther off than it did three and a half months ago.

After the jump: Some recipes from the Post’s Food section that I’ve found particularly useful since March.

Continue reading →

Gardening as pandemic therapy

Posted on by
2

The only way I’m being more productive than usual this spring involves dirt under my fingernails. The added housework from having everybody home all the time and the cognitive load imposed by trying to keep a nine-year-old on track with remote schoolwork may have blown up my settled work-from-home lifestyle–but at least I can still garden.

Planting, weeding, and transplanting are always a distraction at this time of year, but they’re worse when the novel-coronavirus pandemic has scoured my schedule of work events around D.C. or away from it. This ongoing public-health crisis has also left little else in my life that offers any sense of control.

So I don’t step outside too often without taking at least a few minutes to find and rip out bittercress, chickweed, and deadnettles as if they were rogue viruses. I have sunk more time than seems practical into moving lilies and ground cover from overgrown plantings into patchy areas of the lawn that I should have given up on already, then tilling other parts of the lawn before scattering grass seed there just before a night of rain.

And I picked up a few new plants last Monday to dress up the yard, the most important being a weeping cherry for the front lawn. Because I can’t leave enough well alone, I couldn’t just plant that and adjourn for a nap; I also had to yank out an overgrown laurel from one side of the front porch and and move it to a back corner of the yard. Then I moved a smaller shrub into the laurel’s old spot; it will probably grow too big in a few years. I also shifted a few yucca plants around before finishing up with a dessert course of still more weeding.

Two hours later, my clothes were caked with dirt and my joints ached. But today, the new cherry tree looks great. And neighbors who are left with few forms of outdoor recreation beyond walking around the neighborhood have something pleasant to distract them. Giving them that seems like the least I could do under the circumstances.

Housework when nobody leaves the house: The dishes are never done

Posted on by
6

We’re now wrapping up two weeks of staying at home together as a family. It feels more like a month, and I mostly blame the dishwasher for that.

I’m no stranger to housework after almost nine years of working from home full-time. But having everybody else in the family cooped up at home to avoid the coronavirus is a different thing. The biggest surprise, as I suppose many of you have been learning, is how often you run the dishes when everybody eats every meal at home.

For the three of us, that’s at least nine sets of utensils, glasses and plates or bowls each day. Running the dishwasher that we’d idly thought of replacing because of how long it takes has become an every-three-days proposition at best. And now I really hope this appliance that conveyed with the house almost 16 years ago does not pick this season to break on us.

Laundry, meanwhile, has become surprisingly easier. Why? When I rarely leave the house and never do so to meet anybody for professional reasons, I might as well wear the same pair of pants at least twice before washing them. I’m also finding myself okay with getting two days out of a shirt while the temperatures stay below the 70s.

And as long as I don’t work too hard gardening during what are supposed to be brief breaks from work. Fortunately or unfortunately, my seasonal outdoor distraction from my occupation is even stronger this spring. Because removing some plants and moving others around to make our house look better seems like one of the few things I can control in my life right now.