Suburban Growing

More Great Garlic…

I know this is two posts on garlic, but what a great vegetable, right? It deserves two posts. What other vegetable is planted at Halloween to be harvested in June/July? What other vegetable growing through the winter months captures from its soil such intense flavors that one half a thumb’s-worth Can season entire casserole or pot of soup? Almost anything I cook at supper benefits from garlic, the only barrier being removing that little skin and crushing its fragrance into the pot.

Edward and I had a bit of a disagreement over garlic harvest this year. My instincts related to years of growing garlic in Maryland. I grudgingly acquiesced and we waited until very last week of June as he suggested (backed up by a quick search of AI’s compiled data) to give this Pennsylvania garlic a little more time in this the hours more northern location. Edward had planted that garlic after all, last fall when the as yet mysterious chronic pain in his hip meant that he had hardly done any gardening. He earned the right to make sure the heads were big enough. We went up to our garlic garden with trepidation, hoping for the kind of success we had last year.

Wow. Ok dear you called it.

Edward planted the bed (October? or was it November by the time we remembered?) using cloves of garlic saved from last year’s harvest. Harvesting and planting your own seeds from the best of your plants is supposed to yield over time a variety that likes the microclimate of your particular garden. So far so good. It inspires me to try more consistently with our other veggies…

Further AI double-checking by my gardening buddy revealed that we have been drying our garlic wrong all these years. My favorite guru Ed Smith in Vegetable Gardeners Bible says to cure the bulbs by laying them out in the sun. But everybody else apparently says dangle them in an airy location with indirect light – a barn, a porch. Well. Shet my mouth.

No expense to be spared for this crop. My proposed folded over old wire has been rejected and replaced by a dedicated drying rack sped to our door by Amazon’s lackeys. If we keep growing our own garlic for about five more years it may even pay for itself.* Sooner maybe if the rack moonlights for drying wool socks.

Bon appetit!

*Addendum: Edward objects that the rack was only $20, and a clove of garlic being say $3, and consuming let’s say two heads of garlic a month, that’s about $72 in a year. So the pay off is much quicker than I guessed. Even without wool sock drying.

So grow yourself some garlic! And buy a drying rack.

Holy Cherries!

I kind of hate to reveal this secret stash…but not too far from our house is a mature cherry tree that we share with another family. It actually belongs to neither of us, but we cheerfully share what we don’t own. History tells us that this is not always the case with humans…

At first I thought it was a sour cherry tree, but now I have learned that I was harvesting the cherries too early. When the cherries are deep dark red they are best. But of course you have to somehow beat out the birds and the mold. The weather has to be just right so that everything has enough water and gets ripe, but not too humid or within days the berries are spoiled. It’s a short window and we missed it last year.

This June we remembered the magical cherry tree in time. We ran over with ladders’n’ baskets ‘n’ buckets ‘n’ ropes (and permission of course), and picked 10 lb of cherries! Note: Deer also like cherries& berries, so the ground under these plants is often loaded with their poops. Owen got terribly sick once from eating fruit fall while Edward and I were above picking. To solve this problem we lay sheets down under the tree. If the ground is wet, lay down a garden plastic tarp first and then a clean sheet (if your tarp looks like our garden tarps).

Then we brought them home and of course immediately processed them so that they wouldn’t rot on our kitchen counter. Which can easily happen.

HOW TO PROCESS: I rinsed them, picked out all the bad ones, rinsed them again, poured them out on a towel and picked out more bad ones. Then I poured them by handfuls into a wonderful German-made cherry pitter (one of the great gifts I have received in my life) — And picked out more bad ones as they headed down the chute.

We spread them on parchment paper on a cookie sheet and froze them. Then we collapsed!!

Next day I put them into a ziplock bag, 4 cups each, and sucked the air out with a straw.

Tadum! So far I’ve made one great pie and some excellent cherry sauce. I guess I better hide a bag at the bottom of the freezer if we are going to make it to cherry pie at Christmas…

The Great Garlic ‘Scape – Recipe

Early to mid-June:

‘Scape from dinner prep with this quick last minute meal recipe using garlic scapes. “Scapes” issue from the growing hard- necked garlic. You can find them at farmers markets, and other places selling local produce. My Organic Market (MOM’s) in my area. Or in your own garden! Garlic is very easy to grow. (Garlic harvest coming up next week!)

Garlic Scape Chicken

4 frozen Chicken legs

A couple handfuls of garlic scapes, stems chopped into shorter lengths.

Coarse sea salt (I like Celtic grey sea salt in the blue bag)

2-3 tablespoons dried garden thyme

A cup of water

Arrange some garlic scapes under the frozen chicken in large skillet, and lay some curling around the pieces and over top too. Sprinkle sea salt on top of the pieces, then the dried thyme. Pour water in the bottom of the fry pan (amount is approximate).

Cover with a lid and set to cook on low. Put your legs up. You had a long day.

Serve with garden snow peas or sugar snaps on the side. Summer is here!

Read more about garlic and scapes in last year’s post, July 2025, or next post…

PS I get no paybacks for anything I recommend. I just tell you what I like. ❤️

Ice Matron

Photo by Anna KT, prints available on RedBubble!

Cold…cold…. cold….. GOOD!

YES I am shivering on my walks as the temperature plummets. But I love it. Cold weather makes me feel great. (Full disclosure: as long as my sinuses are covered.) Deep freezing must be death to mold spores, right? — everything smells so clean outside. Death also to some bacterias. My energy rises as the temperature drops.

I am not fooled out of my vigilante stance. I know there are always more molds, more bacteria. I know that different molds prefer all kinds of different conditions. Some molds survive at thousands of degrees, according to Evan Brand, my functional medicine practitioner. Ok, so dormant not dead. But hey, dormant is good, I’ll take it!

I want to know if my garden also appreciates the deep chill. Does a deep chill mean a deep kill of invasive bugs? Instinctively I feel this should be true: death to the predatory overwintering insects and their eggs? Death to Lyme ticks? Was it my imagination that the asparagus beetles were worse back in Maryland, after the mild winters without a hard frost?

I checked in with soil scientist Sam Schaeffer- Morrison (also my nephew-in-law) who studies soil life and soil communities. He said that there are several ways that freezing temperatures benefit the soil. For instance at the macro level “freeze-thaw cycles physically disrupt the soil, breaking up large aggregates and improving soil texture.” Ok, I get that, breaking up the soil is a big part of gardening.

There are also benefits at the chemical and biological level, Sam says, where the freezing can cause the formation of higher concentrations of the mineral ions such as nitrogen and phosphorus to be squeezed from the icy soil. This can allow greater access to those ions to plants/organisms outside the freezing zone. Well, at least it’s good for somebody, if not my frozen garden. “Freezing can also kill cells of both roots and microorganisms and cause them to rupture,” Sam says,”releasing nutrients into the environment for use by other organisms once the soil thaws. From an ecosystem standpoint freezing also slows down soil respiration and therefore helps to increase the capacity of soil to store carbon.”

Wow, that’s a lot for this organism to digest. I knew there was a reason I didn’t get a PhD in chemistry. Thanks Sam! Back to your research.

Then what about insect pests? The Farmers Almanac tells us not as many bugs die in the cold as gardeners could wish. On the one hand, “When winter temperatures never reach extreme lows, [certain insects] survive until spring unharmed and ready to reproduce.” But on the other hand, “the emerald ash borer… can generally withstand temperatures as low as -20°F.” Not likely to happen outside Philly. A continued goodbye to our ash trees.

And then there’s this piece of Grinchly news: …”many insect pest species that can cause economic damage in Pennsylvania (e.g., potato leaf hopper, black cutworm, armyworms) are migratory and come to Pennsylvania from southern states where they spend the winter.” (Embrace the Cold, PennStateExtension) Great. Apparently slugs are killed in the cold, but not if there’s heavy snow which insulates them. I did notice fewer slugs last growing season in my strawberries compared to the year before.

And then ticks. I am depressed to tell you, gardening friends, that ticks are not much impacted by freezing weather. The PA Ticklab says don’t let down your guard: “…ticks in the winter climates still find a way to survive, even during spells of below-zero temperatures. ” ( https://www.ticklab.org/blog/2021/01/08/surviving-winter/)

Ok! Time to get chickens! — although the jury is out on how many ticks backyard chickens consume. Not as many as we were told, and contrary to urban legend, opossums really don’t eat ticks at all.

In looking at how to control our garden problems, it may be wise to take a meditative stance. Cycles of freezing and thawing break up the soil, as Sam said. We get impatient with cycles. We want a straight line from our desires to our desired result, asap. But if we pause, observe, and study, we learn that “there’s an app for that” already existing. There is the freeze and thaw cycle. There is in the cycle of birth, predation, death, and replenishment of soil. All cycles of nature work within each other, but in incredibly complex relationships that will take us more than a lifetime to understand— and that’s if we pay attention. As organic gardeners, we want to work within these cycles.

So, freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, and have a cup of tea. Study your seed catalogues. Watch The Biggest Little Farm documentary one more time. And get ready for whatever and whoever is happening in your soil this winter to reveal itself (themselves) in the coming season. ❤️

Peach buds dormant, waiting under January snow

Reflecting at Harvest Time

I didn’t grow this cauliflower although I would love to say I had. It is organically, locally grown but not in my backyard.

But I DID grow these sweet potato cubes! See:

(Contents: ground turkey with fennel, onion, cauliflower, and golden berries, seasoned with salt, coriander and Garam Marsala.)

Every year I learn something new. And or I have a mysterious success in my veggie growing journey. I worked hard for the two or three sweet potatoes that I harvested last week — getting the slips started, potting then transplanting them. but I failed to mulch them and feed them and water then enough once they were established.

Or, maybe I over fed them? this year every plant in the garden grew tremendous amounts of leaves and renegade volunteer pumpkin plants took possession, in a tidal wave of four foot high prickly greenery! until Edward beat it back.

Lucky thing our family isn’t counting on my growing to eat. On the other hand, hunger might incentivize faster learning…

Our first time ever harvesting Lima beans

But back to the sweet potatoes. Remember the slips? Growing like hair on top of the potato stuck in water? Well, they grew great huge plants. Everything was GREAT AND HUGE this year. I thought we would get TONS of potatoes.The videos I watched said “just one potato grows tons… ”

When I dug them out it was late in the season, the signal purple flowers told me long before that a harvest should be there. But under the masses of leaves (too much nitrogen ??) on the first plant there’s was nothing but skinny little potato fingers. Poop! For the second year in a row! I yanked the enormous, worthless, leafy mass out and threw it on the compost pile, growling.

I went to pull the other enormous worthless plant out and — WHAT! lo and behold, there were two big sweet potatoes!!! Some critter had found them before me and started gnawing on them. In fact they were sticking out of the ground, chewed. Sadly, no photo. You will have to believe me.

I certainly still have things to learn about sweet potatoes. And I plan to learn them. There are two things that inspire me. One is failure. Don’t tell me I can’t do it! And the other is success.

2026, here we come.

Summer meal of success: homegrown tomatoes, basil, green beans, and summer squash.

Fruit Harvest?…

Last week’s yield from our gardens…Don’t open your fruit stand yet.

Damned squirrels. They can be blamed for the single peach– our fruit trees were loaded this spring! I know it sounds like the proverbial one-that-got away story. I should have taken photos! Those little trees did produce handsomely, and the squirrels enjoyed the hard, unripened fruit down to the pits, which they left all over under the maple at the back of the property. Little gnawed peach pits, presumably as a thank you gift. Or as a marker: “Yo. Adrian. I was here.” Or possibly a rude squirrel hand gesture.

Anyway, the blueberries are netted (HAH- HAH- HAH so there) which means I can’t blame squirrels nor birds for the palky production. It’s just the bushes aren’t up to speed yet. Still. Maybe the soil’s not right? One bed’s soil wasn’t seasoned a year before being planted, as it’s recommended. And last year’s drought probably slowed some of the root growth down. Our PA blueberry growing has been challenging.

Once we DID have a blueberry bush that REALLY produced (I sound like bad King John) but then our neighbors put up a solid, bright white plastic fence and besides I foolishly planted a water-hogging mulberry too close… And that finished that mama bush off. Edward has a saying: “The hated mulberry.” He has a low opinion of all mulberries. The nursery said the mulberry was a dwarf. It was supposed to keep the birds away from the blueberries. Edward was very nice about being right and didn’t rub it in.

And this week’s single strawberry. Sigh. Well, I purchased those plants frivolously from the grocery store, with no particular plan, and planted them at the edge of the blueberry bed. They are doing great! Spreading beautifully. Blueberries and strawberries like the pine needly soil there. These strawberries are everbearing apparently, so they don’t have one big crop, but produce sporadically all summer. However, the blueberries behind them are not doing great this year. I do wonder if this is a repetition of the mulberry scenario…

Or of the strawberry/rhubarb saga. I tried growing strawberries under rhubarb once as companion plants, and to suppress weeds– and found that the strawberries charged forward, hogging too much of the soil nutrients. My rhubarb didn’t consider them good company.

The moral of the story: fruit can be hard to grow. I just never get tired of trying! Why? Because the two peaches that we’ve eaten from our trees are the best tasting peaches that I’ve had this summer. Same for the strawberries – very good flavor. And the blueberries that Mama blueberry bush used to make (back in the MD garden) were some of the best tasting blueberries. You simply can’t beat food for taste or nutrition that comes right off the branch or vine into your kitchen. ♥️

Mulberries harvested from the wild —
At the edge of the fields waayyy behind our gardens

‘Scape Into the Sun!

Or — ‘scape from the humidity, depending on how you feel. After what feels like weeks of rain ( was it only days?) the sun has come out today and it’s heating up. Time to pull the garlic!

Garlic is planted around Halloween, winters over under a warm blanket of mulch, and is pulled out and cured in the very early summer sun

These are the largest garlics I’ve ever grown. Missing is a photo of me flat on my keester after trying to pull out one that didn’t wanna let go of the nice moist soil. Why are they so gorgeous this time? Dunno! – some combination of the soil, (this plot has been resting?) or extra rain? or perhaps the particular garlic cloves that I planted back in the fall? I am not picky, I use whatever the organic grocery store has to offer that week, and that means I never know exactly what I’m planting.

These gorgeous curling structures are called scapes and I’ve never had so many on my garlic before. I suspect it means that the garlic should have been harvested sooner, and some of the garlicky essence is ‘scaping…. Ah well, just eat ’em. What can you do? Last week I was traveling, since then it’s been raining.

Once you’ve pulled the garlic out, and knocked off the extra soil, you peel off a couple leaves to reveal the clean under-surface. Then the garlic has to cure in the hot sunshine for 2 weeks. So get ready to run out and tarp it over whenever it rains — and then whip the tarp off again! Once cured, it will last a pretty long time… If you don’t eat it up first!

Save some of the biggest cloves to plant in the fall again. I’ve been told if you keep the seeds from the best of your produce, and plant it, again and again, you will create a line of produce that prefers your microclimate! ♥️

Renewed and Reborn

It was early April when I started limas, which is too late but I thought, why not?

And since then an every day miracle is unfolding on my kitchen window sill. In just a few days, three lima bean seeds burst upward, out of the warmth and moisture provided by the useful repurposed plate warmer below and plastic wrap above, throwing potting soil aside to head for the sky.

The seeds were a couple years old, the Christmas gift from a cousin, and the great-great-great- grandchildren of lima bean plants that my father In-Law grew. Every year he harvested lima beans, Doc Martins, and put them in the freezer. Every Thanksgiving we ate them. The year he died, my husband and his brothers found a harvest in the freezer when cleaning out his house, and had a feast.

But old seeds was not an issue. After a boring week where I gave them up for dead, and figured it was too late, and nothing was ever going to change, the soil split open A thick stem emerged, bent over, as if gathering pressure to flng itself into the sky. With a giant seed like a lima, you can see every change, and once begun, they expand hourly. Wow!

I have done this before, so I know it ain’t that easy. Keeping seedlings going without them drying out, or getting too wet and succumbing to mildew, or stalling and not growing, or growing too fast and going all leggy before the transition to the gardens, can be tricky. It’s work.

So, is it really worth it? You can just buy Lima beans.

But Jack knew about magic beans, and I do too.

I feel a call deep in my being to grow food, and I don’t know why. I have plenty to do. It is unnecessary. Did I get farmer genes from some ancestor? Perhaps I was always going to be like this, coming down the birth canal myself dreaming of chickens and eggs, and growing my own food. Or maybe I learned it from my professor father who used to start trays of seeds in the tiny utility room of our home. I remember his tiny quirky script on the labels, “cosmos,” “zinnias,” “ageratum.” These he transplanted into a garden of heavy clay he called the fertile crescent. Eventually he gave up, and grew roses exclusively. But he never taught me to bring food out of the ground.

Whether it was nature or nurture, when I married I discovered the magazine Organic Gardening and that childhood fascination swelled and grew within me, putting down roots in my life. Inspired by my husband and his dad, our gardens expanded, our compost piles multiplied. I kept bees, and then laying hens, and then meat chickens! I put up applesauce and canned salsa. My mother would have been horrified. I don’t seem to get tired of learning how to grow things.

Often I have been too ambitious, my ideas grown wild and leggy, over-spilling their pots, and climbing the walls of my mind. If not pruned, they can strangle me. But I have learned something in 61 years. I know that a little gardening is so good for me, and that a little is enough. If the electrical grid were to shut down, as it did Spain and France did this week, and the supply lines broke, and we had suddenly to grow our own nourishment, I am ready.

But until then, and for the rest of my life, I will continue to put at least a few seeds into the soil each spring, and marvel at the magic.

First Child

As the spring slooowly unfurls, taunting us with a few warm days only to plunge us down into the icy blasts, this first child of our garden reaches skyward on my window sill.

I started the potato soaking in the beginning of February this time, thanks to a note in my calendar. The hardest part of starting sweet potato slips is identifying which end is the bottom. At first I thought nothing was going to happen, so I gave up watching. Sure enough, the tiny sprouts gave way to tall spires and flags flying for Spring.

Unlike white potatoes, sweet potatoes grow from”slips.” White potatoes are planted right into the soil (maybe you have some potatoes in your cupboard now, with scary-looking arms and legs protruding). You mound up the soil on top, and you are fine. With sweet potatoes there is an extra step: the potato grows a slip — and the slip grows new potatoes. I don’t know how that plays out in nature.

You can buy the slips. Or you can grow your own, so that one organic potato grows you a gardenful. In my quest to understand how to create a sustainable food supply for all, learning how to grow my own sweets is a good project. Last year I started way too late. Sweet potatoes are South American in origin– they like heat!! And they need time — 85-120 days of over 65° soil and bright light. You can find videos online to guide you through the process– that’s what I did. Can’t wait to plant them and see what happens

For now, they will climb happily up my kitchen walls…

Thistling

I wanted a wildflower garden…but not this wild.

Our neighbor walked by and observed that there have always been thistles on this property. For decades. Have I considered chemicals?

All summer we have battled these thistles. We tried weed-whacking them. We tried cutting them off at ground level with scissors — exhausting. A gardening expert back in MD told me that this weakens the mother root. We got fed up and just pulled them out — that’s pretty satisfying. We tried a side by side comparison, pulling half the bed, and chopping the other side. It was a prickly draw.

Earlier this summer, I felt victorious if I managed to dig down and pull out nice a long 6-10 inch length of thistle root! But Edward observed that the crafty thistle has evolved to release the upper portion while gripping the soil with a thicker cork screw of residence. Fooled you, sucker.

As I work my way down each deceptively frail looking thistle root… back and back, past the corkscrewing segment that keeps it anchored in the ground…deeper and deeper into the soil, in between the other plant roots, stones, sticks, I am incredibly glad to have a partner in this project. Edward is a lot faster at this. I am more vengeful– I pursue that tap root deeper. After an hour I have only a couple weed-free feet to brag about.

On my knees, deep in soil, I have been thinking of my archaeologist friend Susan. She digs in the dirt for fun. In Ireland mostly. Sounds cold, but at least you get Irish beer. As I try to trace which tiny root belongs to thistle or another plant, I’m about ready to call in the archaeologist’s trademark tiny brush and pick. This root is heading straight down, like a whale fluking. I will not give up. I want this plant’s lineage. I want its name, rank, and serial number. I’m going to rip out every single blasted speck of root so I never do this again—

But I will probably have to.

Research I’ve done on eradicating thistles is pretty depressing. All sources seem to say the only real way to get it done is dig down and dig sideways finding all those little roots. During my enthusiastic excavation efforts, I lifted up an enormous root. Thinking it was The Root, I chopped it in half with a mighty whack! I pulled out the tail with satisfaction! Then I learned it was actually the tree root of a friendly winterberry.

I definitely considered the blowtorch option – a flame weeder. Handheld weed eradication! “Chemical free!” But our horticulturalist friend Rich says although tempting, it’s a very bad idea. He tried a flame weeder. It took 2 years for that garden bed to recover. High heat doesn’t do much for the Good Guy soil bacteria, fungi and critters that make gardens grow.

I am not tempted by the Roundup fix, not only because I am no cowboy. Years ago we succumbed to the glyphosate temptation to manage a terrible weed problem. So we added more poison to the ecosystem. And the terrible weed was back in 2 years. Round Up is no solution, just pollution.

The wildflower garden is looking great. Buried under the thistles I uncovered flowering perennials that I had forgotten I put in last year. Now rearranged, with the taller stuff in the back, I can’t wait for spring to see how this garden will look, at least temporarily thistle-free.