<

A Gardener's Life

The First Pie of the Season

A pie never seems to last very long in our house especially if it is the first pie of the year! Even though its early August I have several apple trees that mature around now.  If all goes well the 16 varieties (18 trees) I grow will produce fresh apples well into October.  It is always a pleasant surprise to suddenly find apples falling to the ground at this time of year heralding the beginning of the apple season.  Once they start to fall one must shift gears from the growing mode to harvesting and processing. 

Early apples generally don’t keep very well and under the high summer temperatures they ripen and spoil quickly.  After eating last year’s apples and over-priced one’s from New Zealand most of the year the chance to eat a fresh apple right off the tree is such a joy.  After watering this morning I gathered up some of the fallen apples and picked a bunch off the “Pristine” (that is the variety name) apple tree along with a few apples from the “William’s Pride” tree.  The Pristine apples are light yellow with a blush of red on the sunny side when ripe (see the photo above).  Their early nature comes from its Yellow Transparent heritage along with it’s poor keeping qualities (who cares at this time of year).  While not my favorite eating apple, they make wonderful pies and apple sauce and… they are early!

The Turbo Cooler In Action
Is that an uneven edge I see?As mentioned elsewhere, I’m not much of a pie maker but with Sue gone and Alice (my daughter is a fabulous baker) at work I needed to step up to the plate and take things all the way on my own.  Late this afternoon I peeled, assembled and baked a pie that turned out quite well.  It is not pretty, but mine never are.  Coming out of the oven at about 6:00 pm with the assistance of our turbo cooling system, we had our first piece at 7:15.  As I’m writing this I’m nibbling on it.  We like to refer to it as “evening out the edge”, there’s nothing worse than an uneven pie edge… only problem is that after everyone does their edge evening as they pass through the kitchen the pie rarely sees the light of the next day!  No problem…lots of apples yet to come!

Give Me Something Concrete!

I was once again today reminded of why I like to garden. Yesterday I spent hours attempting to build a backup webserver and moving all the files to the new machine.  Generally speaking it went well up until I had to configure two more server services MYSQL ( database server) and PHP (a scripting engine).  I could not get PHP working with MYSQL even after hours of work.  I finally gave up at 2am, tired and very frustrated.  As I write I’m downloading all the applications and I am going to try it here on my laptop. 

In my line of work it is very easy to feel like a complete imbecile at times.  In fact it seems to happen quite often.  Systems and technologies are so complex and everchanging that it is impossible to be knowledgeable about everything.  I tell folks who ask what I do that I need to know a little about alot of things and occasionally a lot about something.  It is when I have to know a lot that things get hairy.  I may not be real smart but I’m persistent, I’ll work at it until I figure it out.  In this case I seem to have to know a lot!  I’ve set this up before so I’m not sure why it is not working this time.  What happens frequently with new versions of software is that something that played well with some other service in the past suddenly doesn’t in a new release or it has some component that previously just worked with no further manual input.  In this setup the webserver software, MYSQL and PHP are all newer releases than others I’ve worked with. 

So what does this all have to do with gardening?  There is something about scratching around in the dirt that is innately satisfiying.  Earlier in the morning I was cutting lavendar with a group of people for a fundraiser.  The field was alive with bees feeding on the intoxicating lavendar nectar.  The bees were so happy and dazed that you could bump them and just push them out of your way without getting stung.  When I got home I went right to the vegetable garden to tidy things up and begin mulching to hold things while I’m gone for two weeks and Sue, the non-gardener, has to tend to.  It was several hours of hard work but how wonderful the feeling gazing over the neat beds with plants finally of some size (my poor basil is struggling with all the cool wet weather).
Gardening is concrete.  You pull weeds, reshape the beds and it looks great.  You see the fruits of your labors.  There is nothing cerebral about it, if I don’t like what I’ve done I can change it and see immediate results. 

There were no imbeciles in the garden today only the 51 year old gardener intoxicated on the joys of the tangible… bump me I won’t sting!

The Gardener’s Life

I remember summers foraging in my grandfather Serko’s small backyard vegetable garden. When I was very young the garden and fruit trees took up much of the yard. As the years past and he grew older it shrank in size.  Eventually all the trees died (I’m not really sure why) and were cut down, not a one remains today.  He didn’t grow a large variety of things but like many backyard gardeners he always had lots of tomatoes.  What could be better than a freshly picked sun-warmed ripe tomato, the acknowledged star of the summer garden!  Yet, it is the deminuitive carrot that I recall most fondly from those days. 

He would encourage me to help thin the carrots by picking a few before they were ready to harvest.  Parting the surprisingly fragrant green carrot tops, lightly probing the soil to examine the bright orange root tops, I’d look intently as if searching for some buried treasure in the carrot thicket to find the perfect carrot worthy of eating.  When I found a suitable candidate a careful tug so not to disturb its neighbors, a quick rinse with the garden hose and I was soon rewarded with the most marvelous taste treat.  Fresh homegrown carrots bore so little resemblance to their store-bought cousins that they made a lasting impression on me, I had to grow some for myself someday.

It was not until my early twenties in Gainesville, FL at the UF that I had a garden of my own in the student garden plot.  In central Florida one can grow vegies almost year round. However, with sand for soil and intense heat, twice-a-day waterings were a must.  Miss a watering or two and everything would be dead.  Everyday I’d hop on my bike and ride the 3 mile trek through campus past gator infested Lake Alice to my little plot.  My neighbor Ron, an experienced gardener from Belgium, gave me pointers and in no time I was harvesting melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and lettuce.  It was very rewarding and I felt like this was something I could do for a lifetime.

When we moved to Washington I was able to grow vegetables at various rentals and even had a garden at a friend’s house but it was not until we moved into our current home of almost 20 years that I was able to establish a real garden of some scope.  Now you’d think that with such a longstanding interest in gardening that I would buy a house with ample sun, open space, and beautiful rich soil but its quite the opposite.  I live in a place best suited for growing moss and ferns, not vegetables ..... the woods.  Here on beautiful Vashon Island in the heart of Puget Sound we are nestled under a canopy of 100 ft plus douglas fir and hemlock trees.  The native undergrowth is a mix of salal and evergreen hucklberries..beautiful plants in their own right and well mannered garden neighbors!  The soil is sand and rocks with little real topsoil that I’d trade for central Forida soil any day!  Digging requires a strong back, heavy boots, a stout shovel, and a digging bar.  Plant the shovel, stomp hard, go down about three or four inches and you are rudely stopped by rocks intent on having you dig elsewhere.  The 15 lb digging bar persaudes them otherwise but it is agonizingly slow and tiring.  Oh… did I mention that almost my entire property was heavily wooded requiring us to clear a spot for a garden?  What was I thinking?

For about 18 years I’ve managed somehow to coax plants into growing in this less than ideal location.  Our climate in the Puget Sound is maritime, Climate Zone 5 which means it is moderate, not too hot or too cold.  My spot in the woods is even cooler, I don’t get sun in the garden until about 10:30 in the summer and it only lasts until about 3.  The challenge for every gardener is figuring out what grows well in the garden and what doesn’t.  For me there is no sense trying to grow hot weather crops like peppers, squash, tomatoes, etc., there isn’t enough heat for them.  My niche is ideal for crops like broccoli, califlower, lettuce, beets, garlic and assorted other cool weather crops.  String beans seems to do well if planted late and basil always seems to make it but with a lot of TLC.  I grow all my stuff from seed.  This year has been cool and wet most of the Spring and the first few weeks of Summer are about the same.  The garden is about three weeks behind normal yet somehow things are starting to grow and the vegetables are now outgrowing the ever-present weeds… the gardener’s life.