Eat The Yard

How many iterations can a single season’s garden have? Since sowing our first sets of Contender bush beans on March 12, I have reconstituted our warm-season plantings four times, resulting in a landscape completely different than that of early March — and certainly one far removed from what I conceived in winter, when all there [...]

Read Full Post »

Sunday we decided to finally do something with a few of the Delicata Squash that have been ripening in a bowl on our counter for about four weeks.  I have been extremely skeptical of how edible they’d turn out to be because they were grown way out of season, and for the last few weeks [...]

Read Full Post »

For about $8 you can buy 1,500 ladybugs.  Since August, I have released 7,500 in my yard. Despite all of the troubles I’ve had getting things rolling in the garden this year, I have avoided dousing my edibles in chemicals to ward off or kill the pests.  It’s felt like a Pyrrhic victory, at times.  [...]

Read Full Post »

When I wrote a few weeks ago about the preponderance of male flowers in my winter squash as the culprit behind the failure my cucurbits to fruit, I had also spent some time researching another symptom that had been plaguing those plants.  The fruitlessness is the result of insufficient pollination, as I previously indicated.  The [...]

Read Full Post »

The Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash has had several weeks of robust growth.  Vines burst through the netting that covers my raised beds, climbing and unfurling 15-inch-wide leaves of deep green, the vines healthy with flowering female fruit. But the squash that grew rapidly to the size of a sneaker have all [...]

Read Full Post »

A few days ago we picked and ate our last Gala apple.  I left it hanging on the tree a while longer than I should have, sacrificing the flavor, because I knew that not only would it be the last apple of the season, but it would be the last anything.  We have no harvest-ready [...]

Read Full Post »

While checking the progress of my winter crop yesterday morning, I watched as a breeze caused the leading end of a Pink Banana Squash to brush against the netting of a neighboring raised bed.  The one-inch-square pattern of the netting forms a perfect lattice for the grasping tendrils of a squash vine to latch onto [...]

Read Full Post »

There’s room for cautious optimism regarding the cold-season crop developing in my yard.  Snaking vines of Waltham Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash dominate the three raised beds I recently built, which have successfully kept the young plants out of reach of most pests.  Bull’s Blood Beets share space with Autumn King Carrots.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Apparently “winter” squash does not refer to the season in which it is grown.  There are cool season crops, like Little Gem Romaine Lettuce and Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard, and warm season crops, like Beefsteak Tomatoes and Georgia Rattlesnake Watermelons.  Those designations clearly denote when the something should be stuck in the ground.  This I [...]

Read Full Post »