Ann-alog, a Pixel Remix, where Ann Torrence blogs about photographing for a book on U.S. Highway 89, the greatest road trip route in America. Photography tips, locations, trip reports, and real life.

Winter lettuce

Remember these? Now we call them dinner. The great winter gardening experiment continues to amuse and feed me. Before the first snow in mid-October, I covered the lettuce, tatsoi and pak choi bed with a low tunnel made from plastic and 9 gauge wire from the local big box hardware store. So far, the greens have laughed at the snow, wind and cold, although we haven't had all three at one time. The parsley seems sweeter now that it's been through a few frosts. And it felt great to put some of my own fresh food on the Thanksgiving table.

Besides the greens, we had our own mashers. We dug up 55 lbs of Kennebec potatoes on Tuesday from only 40 sq ft of raised beds, and I would guess we had already eaten or given 15-20 lbs before then. We don't have an ideal place to store them, so I kept them in the ground as long as possible. This week, the top three inches of soil were frozen, so out they came. They are sitting in the unheated garage next to the squash and last of the slowly ripening tomatoes. I am already impatiently checking the mailbox for seed catalogs. Next year I want to serve up our own celery, onions and broccoli, maybe even sweet potato pie.

First snow of the season

I gathered tomatoes, cucumbers, basil and dill before the impending storm this weekend. A freakishly early storm, too early to say good-bye to the summer crops. A marigold is peeking out from under a blue FEMA tarp, so maybe all is not lost. Not wishing to take the risk, I did harvest all the tomatoes, then sorted them by color into cardboard boxes in the garage. With any luck, we will be eating fresh tomatoes until Thanksgiving.

The schedule for the week: write, clean the kitchen, write, find my Gardner Village photos from 2003 to blog about, write, go to the Photowalk on Saturday, write. What is not on the schedule: checking the mail six times a day for a special document that is coming, waking the kittens up from their naps to play, or any other stuff that distracts me from the one thing it will take to finish this book, and that's write some sentences about Highway 89. There might be time for some kitten-tussling after I get a few hundred words onto paper, but not until then. It's hell working for me.

Seedlings for the winter garden

I blogged in mid-July about my plans to implement the winter garden ideas in Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest. In past years, by the middle of September, my tomatoes were sprawled on the ground, the snails getting more than their share, and I couldn't wait for first frost to mercy kill the whole affair. Here we are at the end of September, and the palace potager actually looks well-kept and the fall harvest is nearly ready.

I made the photo of these transplants on August 30, transplanted them on September 7, and now the lettuces are almost ready to harvest. The pak choi (blurred at top) will take a little longer. Once I got them in the ground, I still had time to start even more seedlings. I spent yesterday sacrificing ageing pepper and squash plants so I could tuck in just a few more transplants. I'm trying several of Coleman's suggestions for winter-hardy vegetables: staghorn, tatsoi, and winter scallions. Now I am looking forward to a frost so I can harvest my giant amaranth plant, not to put away the garden.

Since this is all new, I have no idea how much I need to plant. I may have created the autumnal equivalent of the ginormous zucchini harvest. I'd better start looking for some pak choi recipes.

Zucchini "pasta" with pesto

I heard this joke when I first moved to Utah: why do you have to lock your car when you go to church in the summertime? Because if you don't, your neighbors will fill it with their giant zucchini "gifts".

The management around here ought to fire the gardner. The weeds aren't so out of control, partly because the single ginormous zucchini plant is shading half a bed. We pulled out a monster zuke (3 lbs 10 oz) just last week. This is the first year I have planted Costata Romanesco. I got the seeds from Johnny's Selected Seeds. It was slow to take off, perhaps because of the cool spring rather than the variety. I will know more about its habits next year, because I definitely will grow it again. Costata Romanesco is the best tasting zuke we've ever grown, and it stays tender even at this unfortunate size. Yes, zuke neglect has happened before at the palace, plenty of experience here in that department. So what can be done with a supersized zucchini? (Recipe follows).

Sun Sugar Cherry Tomato

These are the tastiest cherry tomato I've grown. I believe they are the Sun Sugar variety, although I didn't write it down in my garden notes. Not too many of these tomato treats make it indoors. Both R & I find excuses to wander over to the furthest reaches of the potager to nibble them right off the vine. This is the first year we've used a trellising system instead of stakes or cages, and now I will accept no substitutes. My Early Girls are a record-for-me 7 ft tall, thick with side branches and full of fruit. The trellis has made it easier to keep the fruit off the ground, and much less is getting damaged by ruinous pests. More for me!

The writing for the current chapter of the Highway 89 text is up to 2678 words, a sweet spot that lets me add some quirky facts without having to restructure the paragraphs. The history and present day southern Utah abounds with quirky facts, some of which I have recorded in my capacious 3x5 card system. I shall go dig some out. But first I think I'll go weed the tomato bed have a snack.

Amaranth plant in full flower

You know you are falling behind when your mom asks, "Are you o.k.? You haven't been blogging." Yes, I'm fine, just writing. As in the fifth chapter for the Highway 89 project. Writing is fully engaging. It takes all my energy to sit until either words come out of the pen or my fingers bleed. I set a daily goal of 3 hours (seems like not so much, so go ahead and try it, report back, I won't laugh. Three hours with a pen in hand is a lifetime.) Afterwards, or while procrastinating, I go out into the Palace Potager and walk about looking for little things to accomplish, and to admire the Amaranth.

The potager, all 300 sq ft of it, has a number of experiments in train, including Florence fennel, Brussels sprouts, parsnips and the great amaranth trials. I grew amaranth only because I read that it could yield one pound per plant, and I didn't believe it. Getting to this point was a real commitment to knowledge because we had such a late spring that even the reliable crops like zucchini didn't sprout; getting a short row of amaranth to transplant size took two plantings and lots of TLC. Once the first plant reached 2', however, it took off with a mind of its own.

Now I'm scared, and partially convinced that I have discovered a carbon sink that will solve climate change. To put a scale on the photo, the top leaves are about 9" long, and the camera is looking up to about 10'. If the birds don't get to it, and if R's re-staking assistance after the thunderstorm this weekend works, we will have more amaranth than I know what to do with. Actually, any amaranth harvest will tax my knowledge. I read you can pop it like popcorn. Luckily, only three plants survived, two of them from the second planting. It's sufficient for this experiment and for blog fodder. Blog fodder is good, because the AT writing process is pretty boring to watch, as in molasses pouring or government legislative sessions. The final product won't be boring--I'm really excited about where the book is going--but I've stockpiled a bunch of potager photos to feed the blog just in case. Zucchini anyone?

P.S. Send amaranth recipes

Nasturium flowers, leaves and pods are tasty in salads

Maybe I read too many Little House on the Prairie books as a girl, but I have discovered that I have surprising affinity toward the agrarian self-sufficiency virtues of Jeffersonian democracy, however impractical they might be on my 1/6 acre urban lot. I do not come from farming stock--whenever my people left the land, they didn't look back and tell fond stories about the past. I was raised in suburban California in new subdivisions where the builders scraped off the topsoil, then sold it to people who bagged it up who sold it back to the new home-owners. We bought fresh vegetables from the Japanese-owned market stands, and I can remember the scent of orange blossoms in the evening air before the remaining groves were bulldozed for yet another cul-de-sac. But my people didn't grow anything except grass.

Three macro shots of a tulip in my backyard

I have been thinking of digging up all of my spring flowers and replacing them with edibles, even though they are such fun to photograph in the "wild" of my yard. I want to replace them with asparagus and strawberries and even jerusalem artichokes. But the tulips are pretty.

I've got about 200 sq feet of vegetable beds, planted out in potatoes, tomatoes, beans, salads. The main experiment this year is to try Eliot Coleman's strategy for extending the garden into fall and winter, if I can keep it going through the weedy, discouraging period of July.

Tonight we ate weeds, in that I have a few "walking onions" that dropped bulbs last year. I let them go until they grew to be somewhere in between leeks and scallions. I wanted fresh green onions for dinner-we had a fine mess of these alliums, otherwise known as Egyptian or tree onions that needed thinning. We also have random seedings of arugula, borage, and other things I couldn't be bothered to weed last summer after Montana. One year, I actually let everything flower, from lettuce to radishes, just to see what would happen (note to self: do not repeat). Radishes form edible pods that last on the plant much longer than the roots do in the garden. Lettuce will blow like dandelion heads, and come up for years.

This year, I let the tomato seedlings get sunburnt and bought fresh from the garden store; the amaranth experiment may be a total failure; and R is looking at the rhubarb division with great suspicion (quick, send rhubarb salsa recipes, please!). On the other hand, over the years I have counted 20 kinds of native bees in my tiny little plot. And not much comes up before the flower bulbs. So I am undecided on the tulips. But if you are in SLC and want some walking onions, come by with a vessel to carry some away, before I eat them all.