This morning I started the day by picking salad greens, chives, mint, squash and a few cherry tomatoes in the greenhouse. Then I dug into my raised bed for the first potatoes of the season. It’s an almost-daily pleasure when I’m here at Little Horse, as I am most days in the summer. Here’s how the harvest looked today after I brought it inside, washed it off, and had it pose for a photo session. The lettuce and tomatoes are now history, having been part of a tasty lunch.
For the last few years, I’ve been helping Linda with her greenhouse, an 8 x 10 structure that she and her sister, Barbara, built. For Linda, who lives here year-round, the gardening year starts in the dead of January, when seed catalogs start to arrive. By early spring, in March, the focus is the weather: When will the time be right to prep the soil and plant the first cold-hardy crops. Timing varies dramatically year by year in this mountain climate. This year spring came late, with little sun and lots of cold,hail-peppered weather through May. After the watchful time came the buying of seeds and transplants and imagining the season to come.
By the time I arrived in June, the beginning of the gardening year for me, tomato starts had gone in along with peppers, onions, beets, peas, “toy choy” (a very cute mini bok choy), a few flowers (including sunflower, seeds) and those cool-weather standbys, lettuce and chard. I added beans, herbs (parsley, cilantro, mint and basil), more flowers, and made still another attempt to grow French breakfast radishes. Outdoors, Linda had planted potatoes next to the greenhouse and in my raised bed. These cold-tolerant plants were already 6 inches high.
If you judged the harvest economically, the folly of it all would be apparent. Neither Linda nor I keeps a tally of our costs. Who cares? For both of us, the goal is less to provide food than to provide delight: beauty, freshness, and the pleasure of seeing things grow. Here’s how one of the beds looked in early July. Greens did so well in this relatively cool, humid summer. So pretty.
If there’s one thing I can say about my garden, it can always surprise me. David Hobson, The Mad Gardener
Notice the plant on the lower left in the picture above, the one growing through the gravel path. One day I yanked it up, not sure if I was weeding or harvesting. Here was the result—a beautiful turnip that became part of a roasted veggie platter that evening. It was a reminder that sometimes nature does it all without any coddling on our part. Yes, very humbling.
Sometimes the surprises are disappointing, of course. This year, once again, I got lots of greens from my radish plants, but no radishes. The cilantro went to seed early. Aphids arrived to devour the spinach and bean plants—and developed colonies, which neither Linda or I noticed until it was too late to save a number of plants. The beautiful heirloom tomato plant I put in in June never did fruit. Something started nibbling on my potato leaves—unbelievably, as the leaves are toxic and even the numerous ground squirrels left them alone. No critter invasions in the greenhouse this year, luckily.
Fortunately, we can fill the gaps in our harvest thanks to the Woodland Park Farmers Market, held every Friday throughout the summer. One of my favorite stands is run by the Mauro family, who have a farm in Pueblo (warmer and much lower in elevation). They show up every week with buckets of seasonal produce—buckets of beans, zucchini, onions, beets, and tomatoes; cantaloupe and melons too. Many other vendors are there as well, with Palisade peaches and a variety of other produce and/or prepared foods. My absolute favorite booth usually sells nothing except information. The Harvest Center booth is there bi-monthly, with flyers about workshops and local food events.
Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are. Alfred Austin
I think Linda and I are a good team. She does the lion’s share of the work by getting everything organized and planted in the spring. After that, she proves her diligence and loyalty everyday. Even on work days when she leaves at the crack of dawn, she first opens the screen door and window to get air flow moving inside the greenhouse; she waters regularly, and monitors the weather so she’ll be ready to cover cold-sensitive plants overnight. She hates thinning plants, so I take over that job, showing my cool willingness to pluck out tiny shoots of life (great microgreens!) to let others grow. I also pull plants that are past their prime and take care of succession plantings. We have canine help as well. While Belle prefers to dig holes in the potato bed to forestall any burrowing rodents, Hop is ready to assist with watering, as she did in this 2014 photo.
Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. —Alice Morse Earle, 1897, Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden
Linda is fond of sunflowers—the tall ones—and plants them every year. Once grown, they seem to provide an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling in the greenhouse, which makes me feel, well, more imaginative. At the beginning of the season, the focus is on imagining how big things will grow and how they’ll look together. By the end of the season, we’re looking at the gap between hope and result, beginning to imagine next year. So far we’ve discussed planting fewer marigolds and less lettuce, and more peas and beans. Forget the zucchini. Maybe move the mint to my raised bed, where ground squirrels are constantly prowling in search of tasty shoots. Try protecting the summer squash that didn’t make it in our stacked-tire planters outside, most likely due to drying winds. OK, the melon plant was worth a try, but….Still, the sunflowers remind us to imagine all the possibilities.
Fates willing, there will be certainly be another garden, possibly more prolific, possibly not. It doesn’t matter, because we both know we'll enter the cycle again. as Karel Capek reminds us, “Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.”
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