Spring is a fleeting season in DC. If you blink (or, because of pollen allergies, you sneeze), you’ll miss it.  Case in point: I started experimentally sowing seeds for cool-weather plants, like radishes and peas, in February. The first ones that actually came up were in mid March, because before that, there were too many freezing nights.  I also bought some lettuce seedlings at a nursery, just so I’d have some.

But by mid April, in DC, we’re already having 80-degree days. Not every day, but it’s hardly uncommon.

The trouble with lettuce is that it’s a cool-weather plant, and if the weather gets too hot, even for a day, it bolts.  “Bolting” is a technical term for what members of the lettuce family do when they go to seed, and it’s very descriptive, as I’ve recently found.  I walked into my garden one afternoon this week to find that the central stems of my greens were all 6 inches taller than they’d been that morning.  A couple days later, the stems were taller still, and flowering.  They had bolted; it’s as if the plants all said “Dude, it’s hot out. Let’s get outta here.”  And away they went.

So if March is too cold, and April too hot, when oh when should I grow my lettuce?

Also in the New York Times, Michael Tortorello tries to start a garden with foods from his kitchen.  There are two “surprises” in this article that shouldn’t actually surprise you, if you think about it.  The first is that a whole lot of foods in your kitchen – spices, beans, fruits – are basically seeds, and you could in theory plant a bunch of them and make them grow.  (This is the same surprise I feel every time I open a seed packet of peas, beans, or dill: “Hey, this is the stuff I cook with!”)

Unfortunately, the second surprise is that most kitchen foods have been specially treated – irradiated, freeze-dried, etc – especially to keep them from sprouting and growing.  Some of the fruit has even been bred to have tiny, non-viable seeds.  That’s why you would bother to buy packets of seeds in the first place, instead of planting your spice collection in the ground: seeds are cared for so they’ll grow up to be plants; their kitchen counterparts are supposed to stay food as long as possible.  It’s logical, because food producers don’t want their products to start sprouting when they meet moisture, but it does mean that the food we eat has been removed rather forcibly from its own lifecycle.

The best way to plant your garden from your kitchen, is if your kitchen came from your garden.  Seed-saving is a big part of organic gardening and farming (though it’s too involved for me, with my tiny patio garden), and if you’re careful about how you grow your vegetables, you can in theory save their seeds for next year’s crop.

Have you ever tried saving seeds? What about planting food from your kitchen?  I can’t say that I ever have.

The general advice I’ve heard about potatoes is to wait until the plants die back (or until fall, if they don’t die), and then harvest them.  A week ago, our potato plants were tall, green, and happy.  Then, over the past week, they died on us.  Leaves wilted, stems turned brown, and they clearly weren’t going to grow anymore.

It was time to find out what was happening under the dirt.

My hopes and fears were great.  On one hand, I had visions of armloads of spuds in that bag, just waiting for us to find them – we’d be eating potatoes from our garden all winter long.  On the other hand, there was no evidence I could see that there were any potatoes at all.  We would dig, and dig, and get only dirty hands for our efforts.  (That, I told Nathan, would make me cry.)

My expectations were somewhere in between, but much closer to the side of no potatoes than too many.  If there were any at all, I’d count it as a success.

And what did we find?

Potatoes!  Not armloads, not a year’s supply. but handfuls of them, enough for a good meal.  (Incidentally, the biggest single crop of anything from the garden so far this year.)  Pretty little purple-skinned potatoes.  Success.

They were tasty, too, and I understand now why people grow them rather than just buying them at the store. They had a flavor all their own, more potato-ey than other potatoes, and they were light and fresh.  We had them for breakfast, sliced and pan-fried with olive oil and chives.

We just might have to do this again next year – and perhaps even devote a second container to them.

This isn’t the greatest picture (my camera wasn’t cooperating), but you can see part of the problem right here. The tomato plants are growing out of control – due to insufficient sunlight, I think, they’re growing taller and taller but producing no fruit. I also lost 2 plants to spider mites, but hopefully they’re gone now.

One of the plants does have a whole bunch of flowers, and one actual tomato, so I’m crossing my fingers to see if it ripens. It may be that, like last year, we’ll suddenly get fruit when the leaves fall from the trees, and let in more light, leaving us with a late crop that would be much better than nothing.

But ultimately, I’ve come to terms with the fact that our patio just isn’t light enough for tomatoes in the summer. It’s sad, even tragic. I’ll probably keep trying… but on a much less ambitious scale, with much lower expectations.

You’d expect that, if it’s too dark for tomatoes, we should have good luck with greens and root veggies. I’ve been trying to plant more of those, it’s true. But for the most part, anything I plant from seed ends up… well, smooshed. This happened to most of my kale, and all my chard and cilantro. It’ll come up, grow for a few days, then get flattened. I suspect foul play by the local wildlife.

It’s not all bad news though.

Our potatoes have stopped growing taller, and presumably are putting lots of energy into making big tubers. (I’m eager to find out, but want to give them as much growing time as possible before we dig them up.) Our herbs are doing nicely, too: we’ve got plenty of basil, chives, and oregano.

A couple of my experiments, the ones where I said “this will never work”, have actually turned out better than I hoped. I planted some Malabar spinach, a hot-weather spinach substitute, that’s growing slowly but steadily. I started it too late, after a false start with my first batch, but I’m hoping in a few weeks to have enough to eat.

And my scrappy little raspberry plants have actually produced some berries! I wasn’t sure it was even possible to grow raspberries in containers, but I got early fruit from one plant, and I’m hoping for a fall crop from several of them. I don’t expect ever to get more than a handful at a time, certainly not enough for jam or pie, but enough to snack on… good raspberries are hard to come by!

So, knowing what I know now, I’m starting to plan for the fall. I’ll add a bunch of kale (started indoors, probably in the next week), carrots, and maybe even a fall crop of peas. I’m even thinking of building a little cold frame to see if the winter light is any friendlier than the summer.

There has got to be a way to make container gardening work on my patio… I just need to keep trying until I find it.

Can these possibly be the same potato plants I wrote about 2 weeks ago? Those potatoes were just poking their heads above the ground for the first time. These are 8 inches tall and ready for hilling. (Potatoes need their stems covered with dirt as they get tall, to protect the baby taters from light.)

Well, I’m impressed! When we started our seedling indoors, after 2 weeks they were just starting to think about growing leaves. The potatoes are much more ambitious.

Thanks to Spring, my garden is now starting to look like a real garden.  (If you call a patio garden a “real” garden.  I do.)  We’ve been busy filling containers with dirt and putting plants in them, and those plants are growing a little taller every day.  While my baby tomato plants are still hiding away in the basement, waiting for the weather to get just a bit warmer, the lettuce, spinach, and peas have taken off.  Each day when I come home from work, there’s something new to see.

I’m stunned by the greens.  Last year, when we planted greens from seed, literally nothing happened.  They never germinated.  This year, well, this is what we’re left with after doing some aggressive thinning.  We might end up with more spinach, mizuna, and mesclun lettuce than we can eat.  Or at least, far more than I expected.

But what really amazes me are the peas.  We planted these sugar snap peas about the same time as the lettuce, and they’re huge!

My favorite thing about these guys is how they climb.  The first time I trained one over towards their trellis, and it grabbed hold, I bounced up and down.  But more amazing still, now they’re grabbing onto the trellis all on their own.  Look how they’re growing around it:

It’s fun just to watch them, and I can’t wait until they really start growing up the trellis.

We’ve also got potatoes, and I’m optimistic about them because everything I’ve read says that potatoes are the easiest things in the world.  If you believe the stories, it’s hard to put a potato in the ground and not get a plant.  We’re growing Caribe potatoes, which have a beautiful purple skin – I wanted something unusual, that I couldn’t just buy at the store.  They’re in a grow bag, which should make it easy to cover the stems with dirt as they grow (to keep the developing potatoes out of the light).

You can’t see it in the larger picture, but just a few days ago, the first sprouts appeared.

The one real unknown, this year, is the raspberries.  I absolutely love raspberries, and I miss having them in the backyard like I did growing up.  I read in a couple places that you can, in theory, grow raspberries in containers, but couldn’t find a thing about how to do it.  So (after a lot of encouragement from Nathan, who’s in support of my crazy experiment) I ordered some berry canes and planted them in these 4+ gallon plastic buckets that I scavenged from our local food co-op.

I have no idea whether this will give them enough space.  I don’t know if the single stakes will give them the support they need.  So far, a couple have started leaves, which is a promising sign, but I’m just keeping my fingers crossed to see if they bear fruit.

Apart from that, the rest is ordinary: a box of kale, a few herbs, and some strawberry plants from a kind coworker.  I can’t wait to have fresh strawberries off the vine!

Most of the seeds we started indoors (with the exception of the kale) are still indoors.  The peppers never did much, but the tomatoes are starting to look like tomatoes.  Aren’t baby plants cute when they first start to look like tiny, tiny versions of themselves?  But my seedstarting setup in the basement, with the grow light, is working really nicely, and we’ve had really good luck so far with germination – we’ve gotten at least one plant in every pot we seeded.

In just a few more weeks, I hope, it’ll be warm enough to plant the tomatoes outside.

What are you planting this year?  Have you gotten any actual food from your garden yet?  (We haven’t – we’re still waiting.)  Or is it still too cold to plant where you are?

Last Sunday, I started my first set of seeds for this year’s garden: tomatoes, tomatillos, and peppers. We put them in dirt, kept them nice and warm and wet, and waited.

Nothing happened!  For days!  Nevermind that nothing was supposed to happen for days.  Those seeds are certainly busy under the dirt, I told myself.  Just because I can’t see them doesn’t mean that they aren’t busy germinating.  But I fretted anyway, because there were no cues to tell me if I was doing it right.

I wanted to start from seeds, because while it’s more work, there are lots of benefits to it.  You can choose from many, many more varieties, which is especially important for tomatoes, and for unusual growing conditions.  You can avoid the diseases and bugs that sometimes come along with nursery plants. You also get the satisfaction of watching the whole process from start to finish – assuming they start at all.

The problem is that deep down inside, I don’t really believe that seed starting works.  How can it?  The tomato seeds we planted are tiny, so tiny they almost slipped through my fingers as I poured them from the packet.  They look like tiny pebbles, or grains of sand.  They bear no resemblance to a tomato.  Rationally, it doesn’t seem possible that such a tiny thing could, with a little water and dirt, grow into a 5-ft tomato plant that will give you pounds upon pounds of fruit.  If you met an extraterrestrial (or, sadly, some humans) who knew nothing about gardening, and showed them the seed and the full-grown plant, and told them that the seed would turn into the plant, they’d tell you that you were mad.  Right?

A lot of gardening books talk about how great it is to garden with kids, so they can witness the “wonder of creation.”  They always seem to put it in quotes, as if we adults all know it’s pretty ordinary stuff.  I disagree.  It’s pretty damn amazing, no matter who you are.

So I’ve got my seeds, and I’ve been caring for them for almost a week.  I got the whole setup: they’re in a warm closet, sitting in egg cartons on a tray over a heat mat.  (I’m not sure if I can recommend the egg carton method – it seems to dry out the soil pretty quickly.)  I’ve got a mister full of water, and another for fertilizer once the seedlings emerge.  I’ve got a big shelf with a grow light in the basement, ready to go.

And there’s still lots of waiting.

But this morning, when I went to water them, I got my first surprise: two tiny white tendrils creeping up from one of the compartments.  Two just-born tomatillo plants!

Magic.

So maybe this will work, after all.

It is the perfect time to make plans for eating more sustainably over the next 9 months or so when good local food is easy to come by. I’ve got my resolution – more like a master plan – for this year already.

In the past, I’ve always tried to go to the farmer’s market every week, and that’s where we get most of our produce and eggs during the local growing season.  My favorite market, in Takoma Park, has a huge selection including almost every kind of vegetable, eggs, dairy, meat, and a handful of specialty items. If you can make a farmer’s market or farmstand part of your weekly food shopping, or even go a couple times a month, that’s a good resolution for eating more locally.

Or, you could try a CSA.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it’s a system where you can sign up with a local farm (most are run by individual farms) to get a weekly box of whatever’s good.  They vary in length (most run from spring through early fall) and in the details. Most have a set of pickup times and locations, and you just need to find one that’s convenient; but some will do an extra dropoff if you get together a bunch of interested neighbors or coworkers, and a few will even deliver to your house.  Some will let you sign up on a week-to-week basis (good if you’re traveling a lot), but in most cases you’ll subscribe for the full season.

The challenge of a CSA is that you can’t usually choose what you get.  Your box will contain whatever is ripe that week.  If the farm has lots of tomatoes, you’re in luck.  If this week it’s kale and collards, you may find yourself flipping through cookbooks trying to find something, anything new to do with greens.  And if, for example, your whole family hates zucchini, there may be a few weeks when your CSA share will make you sad and you have to force most of it on your unsuspecting neighbors.  But it’s a great way to challenge yourself to cook more (you’re more likely to cook vegetables if you have them on hand), it can be convenient to pick up your weekly share, and you’ll be surprised with new, exciting, and sometimes unfamiliar foods.

A CSA isn’t for everyone (it’s not really for me), but if it sounds appealing, now’s the time to sign up.  A lot of CSA’s fill up long before the season starts.  While farmer’s markets aren’t even open yet, it’s the perfect time to research your CSA options.  For DC-area CSAs, check out this listing from the Washington Post. If you live elsewhere in the US, Local Harvest is a great resource for local foods of all sorts, including CSAs.

Then there’s the home garden.  There is no more local food than what you grow for yourself.  If you’re concerned about staying organic, your garden is the only place you have complete control.  And the vegetables will always be fresh and delicious.

It isn’t always easy to garden in urban areas.  Until we moved last year, we had zero outdoor space for growing.  But if you have even a little outdoor space, you can grow something in containers.  And if you have none at all, you can try for a community garden plot, or borrow space in a neighbor’s backyard.  If you really want to garden, there are always options.

Our food resolution this year is to grow as much food as we possibly can on our 8×15, partially shaded patio.  We tried to grow a number of things last summer, after we moved in, without much success.  I blame the rain, which started the same day as our hasty post-move planting, and lasted for a month without pause.  If I can blame it on the rain, it makes me feel better about my chances this year.

Despite (or perhaps because of?) last year’s failure, I feel compelled to go overboard this year.  Since we’re not in the middle of moving (yay!) we can actually plant things at the appropriate times, plan out the layout of our garden, and even start seeds indoors.  And we’re doing it all.  It may end up being madness, but hopefully the madness will give us a decent harvest of our own food. I want nothing more than to get up in the morning and pick some lettuce and a tomato to go on my sandwich for lunch.  Or to come home and pluck fresh herbs and a head of kale for dinner.

We’ll see how it goes.

That’s my resolution.  What are you doing to eat more sustainably this year?  Have you tried a CSA?  Are you starting a garden?  Tell us in the comments!

I have big plans for my garden this year – maybe “grandiose” is a better word, since last year said garden didn’t produce much of anything.  I blame it on poor timing: we bought our new house at the end of May last year, moved in early June, then frantically bought seedlings and shoved them into pots on our patio that very same weekend.

Then it rained for the entire month of June – we were in our new house for 3 weeks or more before we even saw the sun.  So if our chard never reached full size, and our thyme withered away, and our tomato plants grew big and tall but never produced any tomatoes, I blame it on the weather.  That’s what I tell myself, so that I’ll have the will to try again this year.

We have practically no yard at our townhouse, but we do have a large patio that gets more sun than most of the rest of the houses, so we’ll be doing container gardening almost exclusively, packing as much into our limited space as we can.

I’m trying to focus on vegetables where we’ll get the most benefit from growing our own.  Growing my own food is, to me, an important part of eating locally and sustainably, and being connected to my food, but some crops are more important than others.  Peas, for example, need to be eaten as fresh as possible.  As soon as they’re picked, their sugar begins turning into starch, so even an hour after picking they’re already past their prime.  The peas you get at the farmers’ market aren’t bad, but even if they were picked that morning, it’s too long ago.  And the peas you find at the grocery store?  Forget it – at that point, you’re better off with frozen ones.

Tomatoes aren’t quite as dramatic, but there is still nothing like eating a tomato warm from the vine.  Then there are fragile, expensive foods like berries – they are easily bruised, and grow old quickly in the fridge.  I’d rather have them fresh from the plant, and available for snacking.  I miss snacking off the raspberry bushes that my parents had when I was a kid – I want some raspberries of my own.

Herbs are perhaps the most necessary: they’re expensive to buy, and when you do buy them, you get so much you can’t use it all up.  Only by cutting it off the plant as needed can you actually have a steady supply of fresh herbs.

So I ordered a whole bunch of seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange last week, and now that most of them (except the potatoes) have arrived, I’m eager to start them:

• Three kinds of tomatoes (Eva Purple Ball, Hungarian Paste, and Zarnitsa)
• Tomatillos (my new obsession, and they’re hard to find locally)
• Dinosaur kale (which goes by many names, including Obama kale, at my local market – I’m not sure why)
• Swiss chard
• Sugar snap peas
• Basil
• Caribe potatoes (which will be a lovely shade of blue)

I’m hoping to plant a few more items than that – there are some seed swaps coming up, and I’m going to buy herbs and berries as seedlings – but that’s my beginning.

Buying seeds felt overwhelming, but now that I have them, it seems like the hard part really starts.  I don’t know much about starting seeds, including when to start them – all I know is “not yet,” and I hope to figure out the rest soon.  And it just gets more complicated from there: this seed needs to germinate in the dark, that one should be transplanted; this one should be heavily pruned, that one shouldn’t be pruned at all; this one wants plenty of nitrogen, that one will die with too much nitrogen but it needs plenty of phosphorus.

Confused yet?  Me too.  I’m hoping to figure it out as I go along.  I take comfort in the knowledge that all these fruits and veggies have been cultivated for centuries, often by people with access to far less information and fewer tools than I have – and the plants survived on their own with no help from humans for millenia before that.  It can’t be that hard, can it?