If At First You Don't Succeed...

Well, if you're one of the seven people who follow this blog with any sort of regularity, you might have noticed it's been a month or so since we've posted anything. That's because for the most part, there wasn't anything to post, and we were really hoping that would change. But alas, the Rubicon has been arrived at and now we stride across knowing there is no turning back, only moving forward. Or, to put it more succinctly, our first-year garden here on our hill in Lyle is a total bust.

Maybe it was the rush with which we put things together, arriving in late February to our new home and throwing the garden together in less than two months. Maybe it was the myriad birds that call our property home, pilfering the seeds soon after we had tucked them into the soil. Maybe it was the deer who also seem to consider this place their own, ready to nibble the first fleck of green that peeked above ground. Maybe it was the 26 days of 100+-degree weather we had in June alone that withered whatever dared grow. But whether one of these excuses or another all together, the end result is the same - outside of the potatoes we planted early in the year, we won't be getting bupkis in crops this season. 

It's the most confounding thing, especially since our garden last year grown under mostly similar circumstances in Portland thrived. Only half our crops actually sprouted this year, which makes us think thieving birds are the most likely culprit. At first we thought it might be the soil, but then we'd see green beans start to sprout in a box where the jalapenos never appeared. We saw corn get a foot high before abruptly cancelling it's lifespan, while in the same box carrots never took hold. None of our herbs came up, ditto our lettuce and Mesclun. And half of this stuff we planted twice, once on Planting Day back in May and again towards the end of June when the bust was beginning to make itself known. The only things that still show any vestige of existence are the ginger plants, a few green shoots still among them, the grape vines that haven't grown in size but still retain green leaves, and our pair of cherry trees, faring much the same as the grape vines. In these latter two instances, the native soil in which they're planted might be cause for some of the blame, it's very clay-y, to the point we abandoned plans for using exclusively native soil in the garden and instead went with raised beds and a potting mix. As for the rest of it, who knows, all we can do is plan more wisely next time, like replacing the garden-stake/netting deer fence we quickly improvised with a more sturdy and long-lasting one of posts and wire, and maybe laying down some windowscreen over the beds after sewing them, to prevent hungry birds from scavenging our bounty before it even blooms. Maybe adding a scarecrow for the same effect.

We'll try to sew some later summer/early fall crops in a month or so, once the heat has hopefully subsided to a steady low-80s, but other than that, all we can do is learn from our mistakes/bad luck and try to amend things so the next go-around is more plentiful. When we started this blog we said we were going to show you the highs and lows of getting adjusted to country life. At the least we stayed true to our word. 

Garden Update: It's Alive!

It's been two weeks since Planting Day 2015 here on our hill in Lyle, Washington, and in our garden the seeds have taken root and sprouted our first leaves of the season. Every box is showing signs of life, some stronger than others, but all in all it seems we're off to a solid start.

The corn is on the rise, standing a couple inches above the topsoil already. We planted the corn in the box at the northwest corner of the garden. Because of the direction our yard faces - ever-so-slightly northeast - and the slope of our hill, this was the best spot to sew it to ensure it wouldn't spend too much of the day casting shadows over the other crops in its box. There were eight kernels planted, and all eight have sprouted. Provided they survive the summer and the wind up here, and if last year's crop in Portland is any indicator, we can expect 2 or 3 good ears per stalk, roughly a couple dozen all told.

One of those crops we're careful not to overshadow with the corn is the zucchini planted right next to it. We only planted a few seeds this year - last year things got, well, let's just say "out of hand" - and all three are above earth and thriving. Cory loves zucchini, and I, Perry, love Cory so tolerate zucchini. She makes it easy on me by sauteing it in olive oil and butter and dusting it with grated Parmesan. Cheese solves everything. 






In the southeast-most bed where the lettuce-Mesclun mix dominates, it's the green beans that have jumped out to an early lead, with all 12 plants sprouted. We'll thin them down in another couple weeks, trellis them soon after that. The lettuce and Mesclun are showing signs of life, and the jalapenos that sit in the other available quadrant are slow starters but it's still early. The heat hits Lyle at the end of this week - three 90+ days are projected - so we expect that to kick the reticent peppers into overdrive.

Heck, things are growing so good out there, even the three grape vines we planted at the beginning of the season and had all but given up for dead have sprung to life and are each displaying leaves. We're going to give these guys the season to see how they do, but our suspicion is the clay quality of our native soil here on the hill might not be the best for them. Next year's micro-vineyard might have to be in a long and slender raised bed.

But the real star of the garden thus far is without a doubt our potato box. Now granted, the potatoes went in the dirt about a week before the rest of the garden, but despite that they're still leaps and bounds ahead of the other crops. Each of the nine plants is already standing between 3 and 6 inches high, and the idea of all those ripe little white, yellow, and purple potatoes waiting in the dirt has us salivating. Conventional wisdom says potatoes need about 10 weeks before they're ready to harvest, depending on the date of your last frost. Ours was mid-April, so the potatoes went in the first of May, meaning our spuds should be ready around mid-July. Another method some folks use to determine when to harvest is to wait until you see flowers, because it means the plant has shifted its priorities from developing the tuber to developing seeds. We're going with whichever happens first, because that's the shortest path between us and taters.

The cherry trees shorn bald by the wind are still pretty much leafless, but there are fresh chutes all over them, so the roots are at least finding purchase and giving it a go. In another couple of weeks, once the 3 remaining garden boxes are built and the gravel has gone down and the fence has gone up, we'll plant another pair of trees - peach perhaps this time - and see how they fair. Until then we're in a waiting game, waiting and watering and weeding, and hoping the wind doesn't blow it all away.

So that's our garden as of Memorial Day. But that's not all we got up to over the holiday weekend. Check back over the next few days for posts about our most recent Saturday Morning Hike, and the picnic table that nearly broke Perry's back.

Good gardening!

Windshorn

We get a fair amount of wind here in the Columbia River Gorge. It's part of the reason we're one of the premiere windsurfing, kite surfing, hang gliding et cetera spots in the country. Here in Lyle we have Doug's Beach, which every summer is taken over by extreme athletes cruising the plentiful and robust gusts.

Up at our property where the elevation tops 2,000 feet, we regularly get sustained gusts above 20 MPH, which can make for some howling and house-rattling conditions. Consequences are inevitable: tossed trash cans, relocated lawn gnomes, felled limbs on occasion, and loss of leaf.

Not three days after we put them in the ground, our two new cherry trees are all but bald thanks to high winds over the last couple of nights. There was even the start of a fruit or two, but alas now all are gone and our poor cherry trees are back at square one.

There's not much we can do to protect the trees from the wind - at least that we can think of - so can only hope for fairer conditions as spring tempers into summer. Until then, we roll with the punches and focus on the leaves we have left. That's gotta be a metaphor for something.

Planting Day 2015

Saturday was Planting Day 2015 here on the hill, our first on the property and something we've been planning since before we even knew where we were going to be living. When we were in Portland we had a pretty decent backyard garden the last couple of years - roughly 72 square feet plus potted herbs, peppers, and a pumpkin patch in the back corner - but we knew when we had more space we wanted to expand the variety of what we were growing and add some flowers and other things, so a lot of thought and many sheets of graph paper had gone into plotting this new space.

The rear of the property faces north and gets unimpeded sunshine from rise to set, and constitutes the most open and spacious part of our land. The half closest to the house we intend to keep open for recreational purposes, but that back half is ripe for development, and we've got plans for all of it, the first stage of which is the garden. Because the soil on that part of the property is a touch clayish, and also because of a gopher or two roaming beneath the topsoil like chubby vegetarian sharks, and a touch for cosmetic/management reasons, we opted to go with raised beds filled with a mixture of native soil and potting mix, in our case Kellogg's, not to be confused with the cereal people, although hopefully our veggies will find it as delicious as we do Frosted Flakes.



Most raised beds these days are built of wood, as were a couple of ours back in Portland, but after a couple of years with them - especially in all that rain - we noticed deterioration that while it wasn't an immediate problem would be in another couple years. Even now that we're in a dryer, milder climate, we're not trying to rebuild the garden every seven or eight years. We're here til they roll us out, possibly longer if we end up haunting the next folks, so we wanted a garden that could stand the tests of time and weather and grow old with us. Which meant we needed a do-it-once material to match our do-it-once mentality. Which is why we went with cinder blocks.

Cinder blocks are awesome. They last forever, they can be rearranged, they don't require tools to assemble, and they're cheap compared to planks of cedar, especially if you're getting them in bulk. We use the 16"x8"x6" blocks Home Depot sells for 99-cents a pop. Our (ultimate) plan is for 8 beds, 4'x4', each of which requires two rows of 12 blocks for a combined height of 16", 12 of which is filled with the soil mix. This will expand our total garden space to 128 square feet, almost twice what we had in Portland. "Ultimate" was a parenthetical above because that's the end goal. We got five beds built in time for Planting Day 2015 and will add the others over the course of the summer. Two of the beds had already been filled with soil and sewn, one with ginger - a new addition this year and a whim crop we're mostly just curious to see if we can grow - and another with a mixture of potatoes, golds, reds and purples that have already started to thrive. Of the three remaining beds, we sewed one with a mixture of Green Leaf lettuce and Mesclun in half the bed, then a quadrant each of green beans and jalapenos, we dedicated one bed to herbs - parsley, rosemary, dill, basil and cilantro - and the final bed is divided between a quadrant of zucchini, a quadrant of carrots, and two quadrants of sweet corn. In the three beds still to be built we'll plant two with flowers, varieties TBD, and the last one with pickling cucumbers, peas, and possibly a tomato plant or two. We're still scouting the property for a suitable spot for our pumpkin patch. It's got to be somewhere out of the way but still comfortable enough to sleep in on Halloween night. We'll keep you posted.

Once the soil was in, the quadrants marked and the seeds sewn, it was onto phase two of Planting Day 2015, as well as the initiation of stage two of our overall backyard development plan: the orchard. Our idea as it stands is to start with a pair of four varieties - cherry, peach, apple, and pear - and line the far edge of the property with two rows 15 feet apart. We started with a pair of cherry trees because they were short enough to fit in the back of our truck without hanging out - it's a twenty-minute, leaf-shearing drive down a state highway to the closet tree purveyor - and because they offered us the shortest time between the present and homegrown fresh fruit.

One of us did the digging (each tree required a 2'x2' hole) while one of us did the supervising and selfie-taking. Planting Day 2016 will feature two shovels. Regardless, forty-five minutes, two blisters and four expletives later - mostly when the wheelbarrow of dirt tipped INTO THE HOLE - the job was done and we were the owners of two finely-dug holes, if I do say so myself. The trees were positioned, the dirt reshoveled, everybody took a good long drink of water and Planting Day 2015 came to a happy and surprisingly snag-free end.

We capped it all off by slow-grilling ears of fresh corn in their husks and four drool-inducing pork ribs procured from a local farmer as a part of a half-pig purchase Perry refers to, frequently, as "The Other Mrs. Horton."

While we sat on the back porch enjoying a couple or few cold Rainiers, we surveyed the work we'd done. Sewing the garden was a familiar experience, but neither of us had ever planted a tree before, and we were a little surprised at the strong sense of satisfaction it gave us. Looking out on the yard that evening, fresh in its first changes, we could see the trees we'd planted and the trees they'd become, the trees we'd plant next to them, and next to them down the line, how their trunks would stretch and their branches spread, and how what was new now would become as much a part of this place as we would in the years to come, more so, even, because unless we can figure out how to pull off the aforementioned Haunting of Rowland Road, the things we plant here could very well remain once we're gone. It was a heady moment, possibly influenced by the fatigue of honest work and diligent attention to our Rainiers. Either way it was a nice moment.

Next up, we build the rest of those beds and fence in the plot, then lay down some red lava gravel so we're not weeding between rows all summer. But those are jobs for another weekend. Til then, thanks for reading, and cheers.