Gardeners Sharing Their Harvest With Food Pantries

Two years ago I was introduced to the group Ample Harvest, a non profit that helps connect gardeners with food pantries nationwide. The idea is simple: Donate your excess garden produce to a food kitchen in your community. Find them through the Ample Harvest program. It's a simple idea, but the simple ideas are usually the best, don't you think?

Click the link below to learn more:

Gardeners Sharing Their Harvest With Food Pantries using AmpleHarvest.org

With the economy still struggling and unemployment high, more families now than ever need food assistance. You can certainly donate money. But there's something special about donating actual home grown vegetables.

Vegetable Gardening Disasters

I always write about my successes, which may give the mistaken impression that everything I grow flourishes. Not so. Like most people reading this blog, I've had my share of failures too.

I started thinking about this when a friend emailed me to share that none of her melon seeds came up, her lettuce plants had been eaten by something, and she felt like a failure.I can say for sure that if this was the first year I grew a vegetable garden I'd feel like a failure too. The record-setting heat, drought, and voracious insects have reduced the vegetable garden to a rather pitiful state.

I like to accentuate the positive and share successes, but today - just for today - let me share what didn't work well this year.

• Corn: Our corn this year was awful. And I mean awful!  Last night we took down about half the stalks in the bed.  When we opened up the jackets on the ears of corn, they were either filled with some sort of nasty detritus or missing rows of kernels. It tasty woody and none too pleasant. I threw most of it in the woods for the animals.  

• Tomatoes: Blossom end rot, anyone?  I am getting a really good pitching arm from pitching rotten tomatoes into the woods. Now the tomatoes seem to have settled down and we are enjoying them, but early on I thought another year would go by without a tomato.

• Peppers: End rot again...I have one large one, the rest are all tiny.

• Cucumbers and Squash: Despite all my care and attention, the squash bugs have once again decimated the plants. Last night I saw hundreds of infant squash bugs wriggling over everything.  The only good thing I can say is that  the squash and zucchini acted like trap plants to keep the insects away from the cantaloupe.

• Strawberries: Tiny at best. Small crop. What I didn't pick right away was eaten by insects.

Now what is growing well?  The melons....harvested the first cantaloupe last night and had it this morning for breakfast. The watermelon look fine too.  The cherry tomatoes are quite good.  The spring carrots grew well, and I should get another harvest. From the foliage I'd also say the sweet potatoes are okay.  The beets only time will tell.

So as you can see, even someone like me who writes about gardening and considers herself a veteran gardener experiences failures too.  Gardening keeps me humble.  No matter what knowledge I've gained over the years, I'm still at the mercy of Mother Nature and her minions from the insect kingdom.

20% Off the Paperback Edition of My Gardening Book

Good news! My publisher is offering a 20% discount off of the paperback version of my book until July 31st.  My gardening book, Get Your Hands Dirty: A Beginner's Guide to Gardening, offers the very basic beginner steps to creating a garden.  My other books on business, marketing and model horse collecting are also 20% (paperbacks only - E books aren't on sale, but they're cheap enough if you want 'em).  Visit my publisher, Lulu.com, and use coupon code SANTA305 upon checkout for your discount.  Enjoy and happy gardening!

Link to all of my books on Lulu.com: Click Here

Discount effective until July 31, 2010 and it's offered by the publisher, Lulu.com - order from them directly, please.

Nabbed the Culprit

I have a small tray of potted seedlings on my front porch. These are the perennials I've been nurturing along since my wintertime splurge from Swallow Tail Garden's seed catalog: cherry Echinacea, Spanish lavender, yellow primrose. Something has been digging up the plants. Not every night; every once in a while, I'll find one seedling dug up and thrown out of the pot. I'm down to one lavender because something really seemed to enjoy digging in the lavender pots. John blamed Pierre, but I couldn't imagine that he'd have time on his daily outdoor jaunts to stop and dig in a pot. And besides, why would he? Okay, he's a cat, and cats can be weird and spiteful. But Pierre isn't a digger. Biting and pouncing yes, but digging - no.

So it was with surprise when all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place last night.  I stayed up late to watch the season finale of Dr. Who (I have been a huge fan, or Whovian, since they first appeared on the old Channel 9 broadcast station in New York on Saturday mornings when I was a kid; my sister Ann, brother Steve and I used to sit and watch them all morning long together.)  I flipped on the porch light, hooked up Shadow and prepared to take her out for her last potty break. A sudden movement among the pots in the tray caught my eye and soil flew to the left while something leaped to the right with a squeak.

Guess what?

My toad friends.

They were digging down into the moist soil.  I found one small one in a little depression he'd dug in the one remaining healthy pot of lavender. The really large one, the toad the size of a deck of playing cards, had hopped out of the other lavender that I'd noticed dug up the other day. When they leaped out, their strong back legs kicked out huge chunks of soil and uprooted the plants.

After I walked Shadow, I got out my watering can and filled the tray up with water. I left it for the toads, who were now hopping like mad to get off the porch, perhaps fearing for their lives.

We puzzled over their behavior for a while, but I think I've found the answer. With daily temperatures soaring over 100 degrees, the soil in the garden is like concrete despite our morning and evening watering regimen. The pots on the deck, however, are nice and moist; I baby them.  The poor toads have been digging down into the moist soil to keep themselves comfortable.

John suggested last night that we put out a tray of mud or plain water for the toads in the evening to keep them away from the pots and so I'm going to hunt through the recycle bin and see what I can come up with for them.  In the meantime, I can take down my "Wanted" poster; we nabbed the culprit who's been digging up my seedlings!

Frugal Watering System

A friend went away for a week and asked me to water her newly planted trees and the Butterfly bush I gave her as a welcome to the neighborhood present. She's also got some adorable planters on her porch filled with purple and white petunias and zinnias, and they'd bake to death in this 100+ degree heat.  So John and I went to her house last night to water everything.  Before she left she told me she'd left containers of water near her plants but I didn't understand what she meant. After seeing them in action last night, I love this idea for a frugal watering system. I can't believe I haven't run across it yet but there you have it; old gardening gals can learn new tricks.

What she did was take milk and water jugs (about 1 gallon) and clean them thoroughly. She made tiny pinholes in the bottom of them, filled them with water, and placed them near the trees. Most were nearly empty when we got there, but when John picked one up we could see that the soil underneath was wet and moist. It was like a frugal drip irrigation system!  We refilled all the containers and I checked them this morning. Sure enough, they're slow watering the plants.

We are back to baking temperatures today with no rain in the forecast. I've asked the family to save containers for me. I'm going to put these near the shrubs Patty gave me so that I can keep the Rose of Sharon alive. The hose also doesn't reach the rose garden; one of my Sophia roses is, alas, dead I fear, but the other struggles valiantly to survive.  The Blaze roses are showing signs of heat distress and the minis aren't looking happy either.  This new frugal drip irrigation system might just work!

Anyone else use it? Tried it? Let us know!

I found this article on the Gardener's Rake which explains this and other tips for recycled milk containers.

Amphibious Landing

I seem to attract wildlife, and that's fine by me. I still get a thrill from random wildlife sightings and I hope that never goes away. I'm fascinated by everything in nature from the glittering stars to the vagaries of the weather. Insects, butterflies, birds, animals...even amphibians and reptiles.

And they seem strangely fascinated by me.

My last stop for the night before retiring is to take Shadow out for a quick potty break.  We usually walk no more than several hundred feet up the hill from the house to the edge of the woods. Keep in mind that I'm in the country, so there's no light whatsoever. We have lights on the front porch which illuminate the scene just enough to cast threatening, evil shadows off of the porch.

I leashed up Shadow, flipped on the porch lights, and stepped into the humid, moist night.  Suddenly both Shadow and I instinctively leaped straight up in the air. My heart was racing. A squirming, hopping mass writhed around my feet.

Frogs. Toads. About a dozen of them ranging in size from Pierre's toy mouse to a pack of playing cards. Hopping up and down, startled by the light perhaps or the giant sneaker bearing down on them.

I watched while they hopped into the garden, quickly taking refuge behind the azaleas and Ann's bloomerang lilac. But what in the world were they doing standing in a group right in front of my door?

Are they just as fascinated with me as I am with them?

Or....does my glowing front doorbell attract insects, and make for a nice snack bar for the toads?

Butterflies and Thunderstorms

Apologies for the missing photos from the last post. As I was writing, a perfect summer thunderstorm rushed in from the west. My desk sits under three large windows facing directly west, and I watched piles of angry, bruised-looking clouds burst over the horizon. Thunder growled over the Blue Ridge and sprang upon us suddenly, pouring rain and lightning upon the earth. Time to shut down the computer. I lost one computer with all of my writing and data on it back on Long Island and guess what? Never again. Any time I even smell rain approaching with the risk of electrical storm, I unplug everything in the house.

Not two minutes after I shut down the office beast and unplugged it, I sat on the porch and watched the storm. A gigantic bolt of lightning crashed down into the woods, zigzagging, the sound so loud my ears rang. Electricity crackled in the air and the hairs on my arm stood on end. Time to go inside. Time to be thankful I'd unplugged the computer!

We were blessed with over an inch of rain this week, giving the plants some much needed rain. My neighbor Joan caught up with me after mass on Sunday and said that she got four inches of rain to our two. She lives just a few miles down the road, proving the point one of the old timers around here made, tersely saying, "Yup; this town's got its own weather." Indeed it does.

One creature completely undeterred by the heat and rain is the butterfly. My butterfly bushes are massed with fragrant blooms right now and at times during the day I'll stop, rest a bit, and look out the window at them. It's like a moving cloud of white, yellow and black wings. Puffs of butterflies rise and wing their way to the pines. I watch them land softly on pine branches, rest, and flutter back to the Buddleia for a drink. I don't know their names yet, but I will learn them. In the meantime, between the thunderstorms and butterflies, I am well entertained.

And a gentle plug for my gardening book...and a thank you to my readers who have already bought the book!

Beginner's Guide to the Model Horse Hobby

Saturday fun - since I spent the morning weeding the driveway, which is about as interesting as watching grass grow, I thought I'd briefly share with you one of my latest articles for About.com. I'm the Contributing Writer on the Miniatures channel, writing about model horses. I've collected models since 1974, and basically been a model horse nut my whole life. The photo I'm sharing with you today is the china cabinet in my office here at Seven Oaks; my models were one of the first things I unpacked when we finally bought a house. I love this hobby and it has given me such joy and pleasure, especially now that I can't really own a horse. I can "own" an entire herd, albeit one made of plastic, china, glass and resin.

So if you're curious...if your daughter (and it's almost always a daughter!) is horse crazy and wants Breyer horses every Christmas and holiday....learn more about the hobby here.

Beginner's Guide to the Model Horse Hobby

Breyerfest, the World's Largest Collector Event

Of Tomato Plants and Old Bedsheets

After nearly 10 days straight of staring longingly at my garden as it basked in the hot, humid July weather while I waited in air conditioned comfort, I couldn't stand it anymore. Heat wave or no heat wave, I needed to get out and do something. I needed to get my hands dirty, to feel the earth gritty under my fingernails and smell the pungent scent of tomato vines, cut grass, and marigolds. With the shed key in hand, I unlocked the shed, scaring a gigantic skink that had somehow evaded Pierre's expert hunting skills.  I rolled out the old-fashioned push mower and mowed the grass among the raised vegetable beds. I could barely get the lawn mower around the tomato beds. Large stalks flopped out of the beds, tomatoes dangling precipitously near the mower blades. I headed back to the house and without thinking much of it, grabbed an old sheet from a pile we have folded in a box in the basement to use as rags and drop cloths.  I settled onto a chair on the front porch with Shadow and Pierre by my feet, a little breeze tinkling the wind chimes, and an old sheet to cut up to use as ties for the tomato plants.

Someone had already hacked off a corner of the old sheet, probably to use as a rag. I smoothed it out on my lap. It felt cool and a scent from long ago wafted up. With a start, I recognized the scent, the linen closet from my childhood home, detergent and soap.  I looked more closely at the green and pink plaid sheet. It was from my parent's linen closet.

I remembered that sheet.  I remember peering down at my sleeping mother, the sheet pulled up to her chin, whispering, "Mommy, I don't feel good. I want to stay home from school."

I remember that sheet flapping on the back laundry line. My mother had a peculiar habit of whistling through her teeth, the sound even more strange when she had a bunch of clothespins in her mouth while she pinned sheets to the line.

I remember countless times folding that pink and green plaid sheet with my dad, helping him neaten up the linen closet after my mom died. He was actually better at folding sheets than I was, but somehow when he pushed them onto the narrow shelf in the linen closet they'd all bunch up and some would fall off and on top of the vacuum cleaner and we'd have to start again.

How old is this sheet? I wondered as I held it out to judge how long a strip of cloth I could get out of it. Cloth strips are the best for tying up tomato plants. My grandma taught me that.

The pink and plaid had spots so worn I could see through it, the cotton polished like velvet.  If I was whispering to my mother that I didn't feel well and didn't want to go to school, and the sheet looked new...I was probably 9, 10 years old? Which would make the sheet at least 20, 30 years old.

It is on its last bit of life, that pink and plaid sheet.  I tied up the tomato plants last night with parts of the old sheet.  Strips flutter from the recycled tobacco sticks my neighbors gave me to use as tomato stakes. The long, sturdy, solid cloth connects me to my past, my present garden to the past that nurtured me. Like the tomato plants setting down deep roots, it reminds me of the place that helped me set down my deep roots, roots strong, straight and true. 

*    *    *

This blog is a labor of love and a way for me to share my personal essays and garden writing in a different way from the paid work that I do for websites and magazine. I am honored by the recent fan mail that I have received. As a writer, I always thought I'd publish the Great American Novel and receive sacks of fan mail from my adoring public. With the advent of the internet and the realization that my novels are tangled skeins of words that need to be unraveled before I can knit them back into shape, I now blog my stories or write articles for my clients and share them through social networking. I am honored that friends - both people I know and people who have found me online - have thought it worth their time to read these little essays and drop me notes about them.  Thank you.

One parting thought, however - if you feel inclined to share my writing, that's fine, but please share just a link which points back into the post or this blog. Please do not reprint the entire blog post verbatim. I love links.  Reprinting my stuff is no-no unless you have my specific permission.  Thank you and drop me an email if you have any questions or would like permission to reprint anything I have written.  For my professional writing services, please visit my website, Seven Oaks Consulting.com 

The Truth About Allergies in Dogs: Symptoms and Treatment

The Truth About Allergies in Dogs: Symptoms and Treatment


Having dealt with Shadow's many allergies - and kept them fairly well under control through diet modifications alone - I thought I'd share what I learned in this new article on Suite 101. Enjoy!

Love of the Land

One thing that always strikes me as a key difference between rural folks and city folks is the love of the land. I've never met a New York City friend, for example, who was so in love with his patch of sidewalk that he wouldn't budge from East 78th and York or whatever his address is at the moment. No, to the contrary; most of the people I worked with in Manhattan are on the never-ending quest for a bigger apartment. When space is at a premium and most people have one or more roommates, any time there's a whiff of an apartment for rent with (gasp!) an actual closet, a bit of a view, or a balcony and within the budget - it's a mad scramble to be the first to snag it.

When I lived on Long Island, people loved their houses, but I think that if they could put their house up on stilts and get it to walk to a new place far from the maddening crowd and away from neighbors so close you can peek into their dining room windows they'd do it in a heartbeat. Of the places I lived on Long Island, I loved Floral Park because I grew up there; I do know every patch of sidewalk, and because my grandparents were one of the first families to move into the town in 1917, and then my parents grew up there and lived there, I felt a very special kinship with the town. But love the land my house sat upon? No, I didn't love it.  It was my childhood home but I do not yearn to move back into it. 


Perhaps I am over generalizing, but all of the people I've met here in Prospect love their land and their farms - love it so deeply that they are willing to sacrifice vacations, jobs that pay more but would necessitate a move, and many other comforts and convenience to maintain their farms. They rise before dawn to rake and bale hay, water their stock, tend their gardens. Then they jump into the car and drive to a job somewhere - at a factory, construction, as pipe welders, plumbers and electricians, teachers and accountants - and then they come home around 5 to work around the farm even more. Vacations are spent tinkering with a tractor bought at auction, or perhaps putting in new fence posts or gates. They brave the 100+ degree heat because they must; the cattle need hay, the goats need water, or something needs tending to. Period.

Last night we had the rare pleasure of a night off. We went to our friend's farm, Shady Acres.  Our husbands went down to the farm pond and fished (they didn't catch anything except leaves snagged with the fishing lines!) while Patty and I hopped in her golf cart and she showed me all the wonders of her farm.  I saw a guinea hen brooding a nest of eggs in the flower garden, and got nuzzled by the best herd of Boer goats in the south.  Do you remember how I bottle fed one of her goat babies this past fall?  She kept one of the four bottle fed babies. I didn't know that, but I felt a tug on my jeans and turned around to see a young goat with a mischievous glint in her eye nuzzling my jeans. I was surprised when Patty said it was one of her bottle fed babies. I wonder if that little goat remembered me?  Patty has guinea hen chicks under the brooder in the shed and she picked one downy days-old chick up for me to stroke. He looked like a little duckling and was so soft he was like velvet.

We sat by the pond drinking icy cold Coca Cola, watching the guys fish ("That's why it's not called catching, but fishing," someone joked as the evening drew to a close without one single fish) and listening to the bull frogs call to one another. Bats swooped in an aerial display over the secluded pond and the stars came out.

Our friends have not had a vacation in years. But as Patty drove me around the farm, pointing to this and that, she knew every rock, tree stump, and animal by name. She loves her farm in a way I've seen among our neighbors but I am just learning.  I watched her call each goat by name.  I saw her shoo an injured rooster into a cage to protect him overnight and put up with his angry clucks while she did her best to protect him.  She fussed over her cats, collected eggs hidden everywhere from the free range chickens, and made sure her dog had her medicine.  We made the rounds and checked fence lines and made sure every animal was in his place and everything on the 80 acres was secure.  The love for her farm and her land just shone in her face. 

I like my land, but I do not love it yet.  I think the more I kneel in the garden soil, digging and planting, finding turtles in the compost pile (like I did yesterday - surprise!) and getting to know the wildlife, I will learn to love Seven Oaks too.

Photos today: Manhattan skyline, Morguefile.com.   Farm and tractor by Mary R. Vogt, Morguefile.

Flower Garden Ideas for Containers and Windowboxes

My gardening activities during the heat wave consist of watering, watering, and watering, followed by more watering. This would make for some of the most boring blog posts in the history of garden blogging. Therefore, to spare you the boredom, I'm posting my "best of gardening articles" written for various websites. Please enjoy these tips. Click the link below to read the article.

Happy gardening and stay cool wherever you are!

ARTICLE

Flower Garden Ideas for Containers and Windowboxes

Butterfly Garden Update

Alas, yet another heat wave! We spent over an hour watering the orchard trees and any plants that were struggling or in full sun.  I pray daily for some nice, gentle rain....as our priest reminded us on Sunday, carry an umbrella to show your faith that God will hear your prayers for rain! (I often joke that when I DO carry an umbrella it NEVER rains! Wear suede boots or shoes, I say; then it is sure to rain.)

Enough bitching about the lack of rain. How about some pretty flower pictures? This is the butterfly garden with the gorgeous pathway! I am so thankful to my hubby every time I step onto the pretty pathway. I weeded the butterfly garden this weekend. Sadly, none of my cherry Echinacea survived, although I have four I kept in pots on the deck to nurture along until the fall, when the cooler, rainier weather comes and I can safely plant them in the garden.  But look at the Buddleia! They are huge. They tower over me and I am a very tall person!  The sweet, gentle fragrance fills the air, too.  In the afternoon if you sit on my front porch, it is like the whole garden is alive with butterflies playing.  I counted seven different colors of butterflies the other day and I could only identify the Swallowtail, the Monarch and the painted lady. One looks like it has zebra stripes but I did not get a picture of it.

So enjoy these photos from the butterfly garden....pray for rain for us in Virginia where we battle 100+ degrees for another few days. Carry an umbrella to show God you believe he'll deliver, or if you're like me, don a pair of suede boots you absolutely cannot get wet!

Kindness

Yesterday at church my friend Andrea and I led the music.  I would say that I played piano, but that's too grand a word for what I did. I mostly sat at the bench behind an instrument that feels way too elegant for me and plunked out the first bars of whatever hymn we were supposed to sing, and then I stood up with Andrea and we led the singing.  I don't know what it is about Catholic congregations, but no matter what the tempo of the song, they'll always managed to back it into 4/4 time!

I've written before about how I loved to play piano, but I was never very good at it. I began taking lessons when I was 13, I studied a lot of music history, theory, sang with church and school choirs and basically enjoyed music all throughout high school. My original plan was to minor in music in college and major in writing/English, but I listened to all the grownups in my life who were already panicking because I was going to be a writer....now I wanted to give piano lessons on the side to little kids and play piano at church? What kind of money could I make? Could I support myself? So I gave it up.  I really haven't played in about 20 years or so.

But they need someone to hit a few keys at the start of the music at church and I'm it when the music leader (a professional musician and professor of keyboard studies) is on vacation and the other good pianist cannot make it.  Tag, you're it!

I'd vowed a long time ago not to play in church. When I was 16 and learning how to play the organ with Mrs. Cook at Our Lady of Victory church, a very mean priest who shall remain nameless stormed up into the choir loft and forbade me from playing. Mrs. Cook tried to explain that I was a student and learning and how could I learn if she couldn't sit with me up there and teach me? Especially on a day when she had apparently cleared it with everyone to use the afternoon as practice time. But he was mean and his words stung, and that plus my general anxiety issues kept me from ever playing in church again.

Now here we are in 2010 and I have played (okay, still a grand word for playing a few notes with the right hand, but one step at a time, and there are no words for the little bit I can do) three times since Christmas.

And here's the difference: kindness.

I have never experienced such kindness as I have at St. Theresa's.

First in June.  Father Joseph came up to me after my little bit of piano plunking and beamed at me.  "Thank you for the effort!" he said, clapping me on the back like I'd just won a rugby match.  I loved it.

A lady on the other side of church smiled at me and gave me two thumbs up when I slid behind the piano bench.

And yesterday, before Mass started as I sat reading the music and reviewing it in my mind, Joan slid onto the bench next to me. "I just want to say how much I enjoyed your solo a few weeks ago," she said. "You were the only alto singing, and I could hear your voice...it is so lovely...."  I was flabbergasted.  She was so kind.

Another lady slid into the pew behind me and put her hand gently on my shoulder, smiling and wishing me
good luck.

You know, you can't turn back the clock. I can't go back to that day when I was 16 and got so frightened that I thought I'd never play in church again.  But honestly, God only gives us today (that's why they call it "the present". It's a gift, see?).  And today, I am so very grateful for the people at St. Theresa's church, who somehow sense all the anxiety and issues I overcome every time I slide behind the piano bench.

I don't have much of a gift for playing the piano. Even when I took lessons regularly, I wasn't very good.  It takes me weeks and weeks to learn a simple song.  But I think God appreciates the efforts. In fact, I know he does.

Thank you St. Theresa's congregation for being kind, generous and loving.