Spring garden-May 2012

DROUGHT…frost and insects


I decided to be efficient at the beginning of spring…I would work outdoors in my garden on sunny days and write blogs about what I did on the rainy days. After all, it always rains in the spring, doesn’t it? Well today is July 7, and no it is not raining today; it is just hot as blue blazes (108 degrees predicted) and I figure it’s time I got a blog in, precipitation or not.

I began to have a suspicious premonition when we started having consistent 80 degree May temperatures in early March. Could this global warming thing be for real? If so, how could I deal with a new “normal” reality? Where was the silver lining in this black cloud? If life was giving me lemons…how could I make some margaritas? Let me emphasize that everything which follows from here on is based on the fact that my soil (soil?) is pure sand. I read one author who said that when the first warm days of spring hit and he had a terrible itch to put in a garden that he went fishing instead. That is probably great advice for anyone with much clay in their soil. Working clay before it is dry enough supposedly ruins it for years. But I have a garden on high sand which faces southeast and warms weeks earlier in the spring and lasts weeks later in the fall than most gardens. The strong negative to sand (aside from the total lack of plant nutrients) is that the annual drought in July and August burns everything in it to a crisp.

What appeared the obvious solution to my particular dilemma was to plant early and fight the last of the spring frosts but be able to harvest by early July and then let the garden sit mostly idle and empty until rains and cooler weather returned in late August or September. At that time when there was again adequate moisture I would again replant and have a second garden of fall crops. What would I do during the dead heat of summer? Make compost. There should be plenty of dried up crop residues from the first harvest, especially cornstalks. This would be my “brown” material for the compost. The “green” material would be “garbage” in the form of melon rinds and melon culls. Watermelons are a natural desert plant and the summer drought only sweetens them up. Compost really rots quickly if kept moderately damp in really hot weather and so should be ready to be spread for the fall garden…at least as mulch if not completed humus.

So in early March, that was my plan to battle the usual summer drought…battle the frost early, get plants up and fairly good size before the insect hordes hit them and then allow the early summer drought to help ripen the produce. My most important concept for battling insects organically without insecticides is to get out of sync with and ahead of their natural life cycle. This year I have had to do nothing for insect control…not even spraying with soapy water. The drought and heat probably killed some of them too.

That was my plan for dealing with a “normal” summer drought, global warming and high sand ground. But a nagging doubt or premonition lingered in the back of my head. What if there was a bad spring drought in addition to the summer drought? Part of me wanted to blow this idea off; it always rains here in the spring…after all, this is Tornado Alley. Spring storms were bound to come. On the other hand Texas and the southwest had experienced extreme drought last year and Georgia and the southeast the year before. Maybe it was our turn this year. It was. By the time summer arrived we were a full foot behind the normal annual rainfall. According to my rain gauge we’ve received a total of only 3 inches of rain in two storms early in spring; since summer began we have received nothing. The grass died months ago and now the bushes and trees are struggling. If you’ve ever been barefoot on a hot beach you know what plant roots are going through all day long. I tried to get at least a thin mulch down in the garden from last fall’s leaves, dried bush beans, corn stalks and one bale of straw over several ply of newspaper. I read in a gardening book once that water is the elixir of life. How true! Thank God for the aquifer that lies beneath my high sand and my deep well down into it. I have a very rudimentary drip irrigation hose system which I constantly patch with duct tape. These three things along with planting early saved my garden. Nine tenths of my melon and corn patches were parched bone dry, but there was a six inch strip right over the corn and melon roots which the duct-taped drip irrigation kept just moist enough.

Now I don’t mean to brag (Hell, I am bragging and you know it, so why should I even bother lying) but despite the conditions our garden did OK. As I sit typing this in the rear utility room of our home I see three large boxes of newspaper–wrapped tomatoes (in addition there are still four producing tomato plants in the garden), there are probably 50 pounds of potatoes (plenty to last us until sweet potatoes come in for the winter meals), a small freezer filled with corn, beans, asparagus, grated zucchini and a little borsht soup. As I look through the kitchen door there are probably 15 watermelons and cantaloupe behind the kitchen table cooling in front of the air-conditioner vent (plenty more watermelons still out in the patch). The refrigerator and its freezer are likewise packed with corn on the cob, summer squash, beets etc. It is one of those years when there is plenty for us and family and friends, but not enough to sell. Sitting in the heat in a farmer’s market is not much fun anyway; I think I’d rather give produce away.

The drought has taught me a few things, like harvesting early. The virtues of a “vine-ripened” tomato or melon are much over-rated. Most produce will continue to ripen after it is picked and be better off for it. I don’t know how many times I’ve told my wife “either I pick it early and I get it or I wait and the worms and bugs get it.” In these temperatures a cantaloupe that is “almost ripe” in the morning can go to “cooked” and ruined after another day in the sun. Tomatoes are members of the night shades and poisonous, I think, to most pests. The only thing that bothers mine when they’re green are those giant horned green tomato worms (and they can be controlled by hand picking and heel squashing) but let one turn red and some bug will take a few bites and rot will set in and the tomato is lost. Best to pick tomatoes when they are opaque green and let them ripen in the house. I had a gardener friend who complained that she had grown nice large green tomatoes but that the drought and triple-digit heat caused them to fall to the ground before they turned red. I suggested that she treat summer tomatoes exactly like she would the last one before a fall frost. Pick them green, wrap them in newspaper and store them one or two rows deep in a cardboard box. They ripen perfectly, no insect damage and you can often check them without unwrapping them with a touch or gentle squeeze…hard, they are still green; soft, and they are turning red. This allows for a longer eating season as a dozen or so ripens each week; leave them on the vine and they will all ripen at the same time. I pick cantaloupe after they turn from green (hard to see, camouflaged among the leaves) to beige (real easy to spot against green background). More often than not I pick them before the vine “slips” easily from the fruit. I take them in the house to just sit out and ask my wife to sniff them once in a while. When the cantaloupe gets that fragrant “musk melon” smell, they are ready to be cut and refrigerated. Get the corn early too, or the ear worm will do too much damage.

So that is where things stand now. Much of the garden has been harvested and is taking a rest under cornstalk mulch. The watermelons and sweet potatoes are drought hardy and will muddle through with a little irrigating. I have Waltham butternut winter squash growing with mulches around their root bases and shaded by the still standing stalks of the corn patch they grew in. Asparagus, rhubarb, four tomato plants, a few egg plants, carrots, and bell peppers still require watering but none take up much room and all should take the heat well if kept watered. Darn…it’s hot! Think I’ll get a big glass of ice tea, eat some salted cold watermelon and wait for rain.

Just Desserts

When I plan my garden I think of my plate…and my bowl. In regards to the bowl I consider what vegetables I need to grow in order to make hardy winter stews and soups. On my plate I envision one third containing a healthy starch, (one of those tuber crops I discussed in the previous blog.) I think of another third of the plate as holding either a healthy cooked green such as cooked cabbage, spinach, asparagus, etc. or a healthy colored vegetable like tomatoes, corn and so forth. Thus what I want on my plate determines what I plant; I hope to grow two thirds of what goes onto my plate and only buy the meat portion. I’ve tried to keep my garden quite small so that most people could try something similar even if they do not live in the country; a 50’X25’ plot should fit in a suburban back yard or on a vacant city lot. Either that or I kept it small so I could water my whole garden without moving my chair.

I have a terrible sweet tooth and so I feel the small garden should also provide year-round desserts. Not everyone has room to plant fruit trees. The southwest side of my garden is semi-shaded because of an old apple tree. I noticed that raspberries were volunteering under the tree so I planted a 25’ row of raspberries along the fence on that end of the garden along with several thornless blackberries. I stretched hay bale string taut between the fencepost and trained the bramble into it. Behind the raspberries (to keep grasses and weeds out of them and to give me a clear walking/picking path) I laid a three-foot wide piece of old carpet. Volunteer butternut squash also liked the semi-shade and grew to cover most of the carpet then climbed over the raspberries into the garden. Just inside the garden fence I mulched up to the raspberries with cardboard weighted down with leaves. Before I put the cardboard down I dug bushel basket sized hole that I worked my best compost into and planted half a dozen rhubarb plants. So on this one end of the garden I have the makings for berry cobbler in the late spring, rhubarb pie through the summer, and squash pie in the fall and winter.

During the heat of July and August I eat the cantaloupe and early Crenshaw melons that usually grow in front of my sweet corn; we can freeze some of the melon balls for winter consumption. Waltham butternut squash can be grown in every other corn row and still allow room to harvest the sweet corn before the squash spreads to cover the entire patch by late summer. Waltham butternut, unlike other squash and pumpkins, is very bug resistant so that is all I grow for winter storage. It tastes like pumpkin but without the huge seed cavity. Of course the sweet potatoes can be made into sweet potato pie which can taste like pumpkin pie to pecan pie depending on how much butter you put in it.

My main point is that a small garden can serve you up something to satisfy your sweet tooth year round and still have plenty of room for your other vegetables too.

Roots

I’ve been pondering my roots lately…both the ancestral and garden varieties. First the ancestral. I remember one winter as a young lad going down into the basement cellar of my grandparents’ big white two-story old farm house. I discovered in one room down there a huge pile of potatoes, about a pickup truck load, lying on the concrete floor. These were the fruits of my grandmother’s gardening. This was in the early 1950’s when Americans were meat, potatoes and gravy eaters so in the corner of that cellar was a good portion of my grandparents’ and their Sunday visitors’ eating until new potatoes came in the following year. Mashed potatoes and country fried potatoes were a mainstay on grandma’s dining room table. From an early age I was impressed with my grandparent’s self-sufficiency on their small integrated farm.

Fast forward to my own gardening experiences with root crop for this year. Part of my self-sufficiency gardening plan worked and another part did not. The part that did work was that my stored sweet potatoes from last year did last through the winter until early summer when my new white potatoes matured; the white potatoes in turn have lasted until my crop of sweet potatoes have come in for this winter and next spring. So my idea of succession eating of some root crop year round has been a success and I have been able to microwave me a hot potato for buttering any day of the year. This winter my wife will help me to explore the versatility of sweet potatoes in varied recipes. We are most interested in oven baked sweet potato “fries” spiced with red pepper and also with using sweet potatoes in soups, stews and pies.

I dug my sweet potatoes a little early this year and did not leave them in until the approach of the first frost. It was a trade off; I lost a little in the size of the tubers so I could plant my cover crop of annual rye grass before really cold weather stunted its growth. I really appreciate rye grass as a winter cover crop; it puts down so much root growth deep into the garden so easily. Those root systems produced over winter will be the soils organic material for next year’s garden. It is very easy and cheap; $5 worth of ryegrass seed transported in the back seat of the car. Despite digging them a few weeks early, some of the sweet potatoes were still large enough that one tuber could feed four people for a meal.

The part of my plan for root crops that did not work this year was my delusion that I could plant a succession planting of sweet potatoes in ground where white potatoes came out of. The reality was that the white potatoes were harvested in early July and I planted the sweet potatoes in late April. So successive eating worked but successive planting did not. Still I haven’t given up entirely on successive planting of root crops. White potatoes could be followed with beets, carrots and those huge rutabagas for November harvest. Sweet potatoes (which just sit on their mounded rows for a good month before they begin to spread vines) could be preceded by a quick growing spring turnip like Tokyo Cross® or onions in the valleys between the raised rows. My wife did make some borsht soup with the few beets that I did raise this year and I really liked the flavor so that could become a winter staple. Borsht seems to me to be a stew where the potatoes have been replaced with beets. Good cooking in the kitchen and good recipes are what make self-sufficiency vegetable gardening work.

I have mixed emotions about root crops. They produce huge quantities of food in a small area, they are easy to grow, they store well for long periods and they can be made into a variety of delicious recipes. But they are also inexpensive to buy in the grocery and normally I prefer to grow something expensive like watermelon or cantaloupe or sweet corn. With all the craziness that is going on in the world today maybe it just makes me feel a little more secure knowing there are tubers in the back room and beans and rice in the pantry.

Tight or REALLY Tight

How can you tell if you are just cheap…oops, I mean tight… or if you are REALLY tight? Here are a few examples to help gauge your level of parsimony.

If you grow and dig your own potatoes and add the potato vines to your compost pile and smash any grub worms that you come upon while digging with the back of your shovel then you are being frugal. But if you save the marble-sized new potatoes to be seed for your late straw potatoes and put the grubs in a recycled butter container to use for fish bait and bury the fish heads and bones deep in your garden, then you are really tight.

If you organically grow your own tomato plants and prune the vines to encourage more fruit production and throw the prunings on your compost pile then you are economical. If instead you replant and water the pruned cuttings to try to get a second harvest of free tomatoes just before frost hits, then you are really a tightwad.

If you find a seed company which offers $25 worth of free seeds or plants (Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Co.) and you get seeds for your garden for just the price of handling and shipping then you are pretty parsimonious. If you get several of your siblings to also get the seed catalog and offer for your benefit and buy asparagus spears and blackberries and other perennial plants which may produce food in your garden for the next twenty years then you are truly tight.

If you have your wife give you a buzz hair cut at home to save giving the barber $15 and paying for the gas to get to his shop, well that is commendably thrifty. But if you scoop up the cut hair to put around those afore-mentioned free asparagus plants to act as a high nitrogen, long lasting mulch and also as a human-scent deterrent to keep any deer from bothering your garden patch well that is getting darn near being really tight.

If you ask your significant other to make melon balls from excess melons that would otherwise go to waste so that you can enjoy melon frozen desserts in mid-winter, that’s laudable. However when she’s completed the task if you hint that she should also pickle the rind and parch and salt the watermelon seed then (trust me…) you are truly pushing the envelope.

I could go on with other examples but I think you get the idea already. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m one of those FANATICS! I wonder if she could boil the watermelon juice down to make pancake syrup…..

Bees and the Beans

Plants talk to me. Seriously. I planted and heavily mulched four thornless blackberry plants and four raspberry plants in fertile soil in the back yard. Despite regular watering, seven of the eight were dead within a couple years. Meanwhile volunteer raspberries (and lots of them) kept appearing under my apple and apricot trees next o the garden. One day one of the volunteers looked me in the eye and said, “Hey moron, we like the semi –shade; that is how bramble grows naturally in the wild.” So I dug up some of the volunteers, stretched several rows of taut straw baling string between the fence posts at the south end of my garden and replanted the bramble just outside the garden fence under the shade of overhanging apple tree limbs. I intertwined the bramble volunteers in the straw baling string and laid a three foot wide strip of old carpet just behind them as a permanent mulch weed control which also served as clean picking path just behind the row of plants. “It’s about time!” the plants said and took off like gangbusters to form a permanent hedge demarcating one end of the garden. They were receiving both the shade of the apple and the fertility of the garden.

Then the butternut squash made eye contact and said, “Us too…We want the semi-shade too.” I had bought a super hybrid butternut squash and planted it in the field; every plant withered and died without bearing any fruit. There was a volunteer which came up with some cucumbers I planted near the apple tree. Since I didn’t want it choking out my cukes I treated it as a weed and ripped part of it out. It came back. It grew up the carpet behind my raspberries and then climbed over the fence and into my garden. Okay, I get the message; next year you go between the sweet corn rows where you can get both dappled shade and garden fertility and watering.

I didn’t know if cabbage would grow in my type of soil or not so I planted some this spring as an experiment. The plants seemed to love the soil and grew very quickly and I lost every plant. One of the hole-ridden dying plants spoke to me, “Cabbage is a fall crop; do not plant us until you have seen the last white cabbage butterfly.” So I noted that the cabbage butterflies were all gone by the beginning of August and will plant accordingly next year. One of the best organic methods to control pests is to watch their life cycle and try to grow plants out of step with the insects’ natural life span. For a lot of plants that meant planting early in my sandy soil which drains and warms up early but for cabbage it means planting later. Either I use a floating row cover or spray BT or else I plant the main crop behind some earlier crop for fall harvest.

Well, that brings me back to the pole beans. They are trying to tell me something but I can’t quite make out what they are saying. I put in some ten-foot poles. The beans grew to the top of the poles with lush vines and then turned around and headed back down, hanging almost to the ground. The vines were covered with blossoms and insect damage and plant disease seemed to be minimal. But not a single bean has developed…not one. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones…I can’t get no…pollination. They say that things go in cycles. Last year we had honey bees galore…so many that I could not help but commit apiscide as I trench composted over-ripe water melons into the garden from the melon patch last fall. (When I was a kid we didn’t have fancy terms like “trench composting” or “French Bio-intensive Gardening”; Mom just told us to “bury the garbage.”) Anyway a lot of bees got buried last year because they could not resist watermelon rind; this year I bet I haven’t seen two honey bees all summer. This year I purposely laid out some exposed rinds on the compost pile next to the beans to try to draw in a few scout bees but nothing resulted. This whole episode has given me a greater appreciation for garden produce which is not dependent on insect pollination like potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce and sweet corn (wind pollinated). I continue to tell myself that honeybees are a European import and there must have been native pollinators before the colonists brought their bees over.

I strongly considered just yanking up the beans and cantaloupe plants and tossing them on the compost pile but if I cannot understand what the pole beans are saying to me, I can certainly understand what my wife is saying (she has a somewhat irritating habit of being too right too often.) She says let everything be until we get a return to cooler weather after this prolonged heat wave. Maybe Mother Nature will make a last ditch effort to produce fruit when cooler days and longer nights return. Straight-faced farmers tell me “you planted under the wrong sign of the moon,” but I think they may just be secretly poking fun at a greenhorn.

Mother of Compost

I lied. I stated in an earlier blog that after I dug my early potatoes in June I was going to replant that spud area in bush beans and get a second crop. We had some bush green beans in the freezer and the pole beans were covered with promising blossoms and I had run out of bush bean seed and would have to go into town to buy more etc., etc. so I changed my mind (that sounds much better than plain old “I lied”).

I had not gotten any free composted horse manure this year. As I looked at the empty ground where my potato patch had previously been, I decided that there was a silver lining in this grey cloud of no manure; there was an opportunity to be more self-sufficient and independent of outside help here. My garden now was considerably more fertile than the pure sand I had begun with in the first year of my retirement but still nowhere near what I wanted and needed. What I wanted was enough organic material mixed into the soil to give me a rich foot deep top soil. Yes… this empty potato patch would be where this year I would build the mother of all compost piles. From what grew mostly on my own property I would get the fertility up to a level where it would only need small increments of green manure and cover crops to maintain it in future years.

Compost requires both brown material (high in carbon) and green matter (higher in nitrogen.) For the brown material I had the weathered leaves that fell from my maples last fall. I also had about eight bales of straw that I had set melons on to sell by the roadside last summer and then used as winter insulation behind my north side crawlspace entry and snuggled around some outdoor water spigots to prevent freezing. This combination of brown material I laid about one foot deep over the bare potato patch. As for the green material, a garden, especially a melon field always has culls and bad plants which are a simple wrist pitch away from the compost pile. Cooking from garden produce leaves a lot of rinds, peels and cores; this is always a good addition to the pile. We only eat a small part of a corn plant, so once we had eaten or frozen the sweet corn, the husks, cobs and chopped stalks were all added to the pile. To chop the stalks I laid them all in the same direction on top of the compost pile and then went at them with a sharp hoe. The key word here is “sharp”.

I always let my lawn get a little tall before I take the riding mower to it, partly to save on high- priced gas, mostly because extra work is against my retirement religion, but also so I can get some nitrogen-rich grass clippings to rake up for my vegetable garden. Grass clippings work great as green material to heat up the pile and towards the end of the summer that is where they go. Earlier in the summer I prefer to use them as mulch around heavy feeding and perennial plants which need a mid-summer feeding side-dressing to keep producing, notably rhubarb and asparagus. Grass clippings are my manure substitute and a mulch to keep weeds down. After that purpose is served it can go in the compost pile.

My main source of green material by far was weeds, especially the ragweed (which grows rampant on our property), poke and what I perceived to be thistle plants (although my plant knowledge is so botanically challenged that in truth I cannot tell my thistle from my thassole.) Using young weeds to enrich my vegetable garden felt like a firefighter using back fires to fight fire. All the organic reading material indicates that succulent young weeds are good in the compost. Ragweed is the bane of every nasal allergy sufferer so it felt like I was killing two birds with one stone as I scythed them from our semi-wooded area and hedgerows. Scything was good aerobic exercise and I worked up a good lather when I wasn’t resting in the shade. When I say I composted weeds, I don’t mean any grasses. No crab grass or Johnson grass went into the pile. Those grasses re-root right away whereas the broad leaf weeds are fine as long as they are cut before they have set any seed.

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words so the photo shows the base of my mother of all compost piles where my early potatoes once grew. I will add material to that base the rest of the summer, till it into the soil late in the fall and then sow a green manure crop of ryegrass. Maybe I won’t sneeze quite as much either.

Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Tomatoes

As I indicated in an earlier blog I devoted about one third of my 25’X50’ garden to a combination of corn, bush beans and cantaloupe. About another third of the garden is in potatoes, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. The white potatoes and tomatoes are of the same botanical family and the white potatoes and sweet potatoes have similar fertilization and avoidance of lime needs. Having both the potato and corn areas and the remaining third of everything else the same size makes annual crop rotation on a three year rotation basis somewhat easier. So in this “spud” third of the garden I’ve grown six short north-south rows of Lasoda potatoes, a row of bush beans, three rows of sweet potatoes, and four caged tomato plants with eight small peppers in front of the tomatoes.

The whole area appears to be one mass of greenery without visible aisles; I have an obsession with getting as much produce into as small an area as possible. Actually the harvesting aisles appear and disappear throughout the season. The outside perimeter of the garden serves as four picking aisles for produce which may need daily harvesting. The tomatoes and bell peppers are along the front side so that I can gather them as they ripen from outside the garden. Next year at the back side of the garden perimeter (on the north where they will not shade any other plants) I plan to plant pole beans on perfectly vertical, cut sapling poles and then harvest daily from outside the back of the garden. When the sweet potato slips are first planted before their vines begin to spread there are natural walking aisles between the hilled rows. When the vines begin to spread after about a month the aisles are closed into one mass of vined-bed vegetation. As the white potato vines begin to wither I harvest a north-south row of new potatoes into the east-west bush bean row in the center of the garden and then dig potatoes parallel to the bush beans. As I daily harvest new potatoes I am also opening up a picking row beside the beans. After a couple weeks of picking bush beans I can pull the plants and lay them down as a mulched central garden path for the sweet potato vines to gradually spread into. Meanwhile I will replant the dug potato aisles which I used to get into the beans to a second crop of bush beans and let that aisle close up again. If I use organic mulches of newspaper topped with leaves or straw and then have this close planting of vegetables as a canopy of living mulch to shade out any undesirables I have minimal weed problems, more retention of soil moisture, more total produce etc. So mostly my rows appear and disappear as needed.

One area where I have had a weed and grass problem is in the foot tall chicken wire perimeter fence I use to keep out rabbits. Left uncontrolled these fence row grasses and weeds would set seed which would blow into the garden. We replaced our living room carpet last year so I took the three foot wide strips of old carpet and laid them up against the fence. This killed out everything in short order and then could be dragged to another problem area. The carpet strips were too heavy to be blown away in the storms and smothered everything underneath them.

I have become somewhat disenchanted with black plastic as a mulch since it seems to require drip irrigation beneath and does not allow all the natural rain water to soak down into the plant roots. I like the natural way so this year I dug four bushel basket sized holes and filled them with the best compost and top soil I had. I bought Early Girl® variety tomatoes because I wanted to harvest at the beginning of July not wait until August. I pulled all but the top couple leaves off the plants and planted the roots and stem (which should produce roots once buried) in a shallow trench. Planting more horizontal and closer to the surface hopefully would keep the roots in the warmer topsoil and let them get an earlier start. I put down thick straw mulch from the bales that had protected my house’s north crawlspace during the winter. All the rain we have had has soaked through the straw mulch and into the compost giving me the best looking batch of caged tomatoes I’ve had in my four years of retirement. Today is July 4th and the first tomatoes are turning red. I think black plastic commercial mulch with drip irrigation is good for cantaloupes grown in full sun but I probably will not use it again for tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers or sweet potatoes.

The thing I appreciate most about this potato/tomato section of my garden is quantity. There is just a huge amount of produce beneath those potato and sweet potato vines and tomatoes are always over-producers. They also provide sequential produce; potatoes and tomatoes for the summer and fall, sweet potatoes stored for winter and spring. Both types of potatoes store well. My wife let me know I wasn’t bringing any potatoes into the house for storage until the vines were completely dried up and dead. Until that time the vine is still feeding the growing tubers and they keep just fine in the soil so I only dig them as needed every day or two. With eating from a garden there is not that much variety in produce; you are probably only eating from a dozen or so vegetables. For this reason cooking recipes and varied food preparation is essential to achieving variety. Cooking is my wife’s forte and (I like to think) her hobby. She makes a hash of fried potatoes, green beans, and chopped ham which is great topped with ketchup and served with a side of cucumber and onion slices marinated in sweet vinegar brine. She makes microwaved large new potatoes split open and filled with a mixture of cooked New Zealand spinach, cottage cheese and grated cheddar cheese. (Be sure to poke holes in a spud with a fork before you microwave it.) She makes both great German and terrific American potato salads. She makes delicious oven-baked French fries covered with chipotle seasoning and cayenne pepper. I do believe she could serve potatoes fixed differently every day of the week. In order to eat heavily from a home garden, cooking and a variety of tastes are important.

Still even a plain old meal of fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes with black- peppered milk gravy, sliced tomatoes, and green beans cooked with bacon is not all that hard to get down. There were some good meat sales in the stores for the Fourth of July week-end. Because we have been eating vegetables from the garden a lot we could afford to stock our freezer with inexpensive pork loin and chicken. I do love the taste of pulled pork barbecue!