We’ve got four overwintered collard plants that are ready for their Little Shop of Horrors audition. Every day, they send up seed heads in what I am trying to make a vain effort to reproduce. To that end, every day I go out there with my kitchen shears and cut off the seed heads. So far, the plants haven’t gotten bitter or woody, and I treat the seed head stalks like broccoli raab.

Feed me, Seymour!

But I know this is a battle I’m destined to lose, if not to the collards themselves then to the slugs who, unlike Kevin and me, seem more than happy to live on an all-collard diet. Before it’s too late, I have to harvest the leaves. Once I harvest them, they have to be washed, chopped, blanched, and frozen.

It is a job I dread, largely because washing greens is probably my single least favorite kitchen chore. I don’t know why I dislike it – there are a zillion jobs that are just as tedious or messy that I don’t mind at all. I’ll sit there all day taking crab meat out of crab bodies with a nutpick, but give me a lettuce to wash and I absolutely, positively, have a prior engagement.

That's a lot of collards

So you can understand that a bushel of collard greens is enough to chill my very soul.

Last night, over dinner, Kevin and I were talking about how to tackle them, and my first idea was to put them in the bathtub. Kevin thought that wasn’t much of a labor-savor, and might be a turn-off to anyone who’s ever seen our bathtub. And then he said, offhandedly, “Why don’t you just do them in the washing machine?”

The washing machine! Genius! Because what is a washing machine if not a salad spinner, writ large?

I went out with my kitchen shears. I cut a bushel of leaves. I ran the washing machine empty, once, to get rid of any residual soap, and then put in my load of collards.

And I checked the dial. There’s Permanent Press, there’s Regular, there’s Whites, but there’s no Leafy Greens cycle. Delicates seemed to come closest. Compared to, say, arugula, collards aren’t delicate at all, but compared to the frilly lacy things that I gave up long ago in favor of underwear that wears well and doesn’t show the dirt, collards are delicate indeed.

Delicates it would have to be, in cold water. I closed the door, turned the dial, and started her up.

Half an hour later, I had a bushel of clean collards!

I can’t say it worked perfectly. The greens got pretty bruised, but that doesn’t matter much for greens that you’re going to blanch and freeze anyway – don’t try this with that arugula. (At least there was no ring around the collards!)  The only other problem is that it left a lot of bits of green in the washer. I left the door open for a while so they would dry, and cleaning the washing machine wasn’t nearly as bad as cleaning the collards themselves.

Kevin thinks we can get it to work better if we just do a rinse and a spin, rather than an entire wash cycle. I think he’s probably right, but I have no idea how to make our washing machine do that. Even so, I will definitely use this method again, either for collards or kale.

Kevin and I may be walking around with little flecks of green, or maybe of slug, on our clothes for a while, but that seems a small price to pay for anything that gets me out of washing collards.

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In fact, I struggle with the whole philosophy of planting more seeds than you need just so you can snip the life out of two-thirds of them just as the little proto-plants stretch their legs. Is there a reason we can’t simply figure out how many plants we want, and plant that number of seeds plus a couple extra for insurance? That would undoubtedly be the best use of resources, and would get around the whole thinning problem.

As a rule, I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but it seems to me there’s no other explanation for the overseed-and-thin planting approach that permeates our gardening culture. Where do you find out that you’re supposed to plant three or four times the seeds you need, and thin them as seedlings? That’s right. On the seed packet.

Yeah, you see where this is going. Who is it who’s telling you to use three or four times the amount of their product than you would otherwise need? That’s right. It’s the seed companies.

So go ahead, plant four times the seeds you need.  And, while you’re at it, lather, rinse, repeat.

I suspect some of you are going to come to this strategy’s defense, and tell me that you plant WAY too many seeds because some won’t sprout, and some will be anaemic. But, if that’s the reason, where are all the protests about seed companies selling us crappy, non-sprouting, anaemic little seeds? If that were the case, we’d never have enough grass on that knoll to … Oh, never mind.

I want desperately to have the courage of this particular conviction, and plant only as many seeds as I need. Instead, I spend some time being suspicious and resentful and end up assuming, not unreasonably, that I really don’t know very much about gardening and I’m better off taking the advice of people who know a lot about it, even if they are selling me three to four times the number of seeds I need.

So what I end up doing is a namby-pamby, split-the-difference kind of sowing, in which I plant more than I need, but not as much as the seed packets say. Which probably gets me the worst of all possible worlds, because I set myself up for whatever those problems are that seed companies are guarding against by telling you to overplant, yet I still have a thinning problem.

My friend Christl has tried to teach me about thinning. Christl grew up in Germany’s Black Forest during and just after the Second World War, when food was not plentiful and nobody had the luxury of being sentimental about things like seedlings. “Tamar,” she says, with her slight Teutonic accent, “You must be ruthless!”

Christl is a very small person and, because I am large, she comes up to a little past my elbow. But, watching the two of us deal with a row of radish seedlings, you know who’s tougher. I am convinced that a good part of the reason the plants in Christl’s garden grow big and healthy is that they’re simply afraid not to.

When Christl’s not around, Kevin tries to do her job. “Tamar,” he says, and I will admit he says it in his best approximation of both Christl’s fierceness and her accent, “You must be ruthless!”

But he knows it’s hopeless. The collard greens in the hoophouse are way too close together, and I can’t bring myself to uproot them now that they’re so leafy and green. The radishes have needed thinning for a couple of days now, and I keep putting it off. Kevin is now threatening to do it for me, and he has no trouble being ruthless.

My friend Amanda has floated what I think is an excellent solution to what I suspect is a near-universal problem: Neighbors should thin each other’s gardens. If they’re not your seedlings, you can determine the optimal density and simply start snipping. Nobody’s judgment gets clouded by romantic notions of seedling survival, and everybody’s garden flourishes.

I think this is a genius idea. The only problem is that my neighbor, Mike, has the kind of gardening skills that make you suspect he sold his soul to the devil for a lifetime of perfect vegetables. He knows how I garden, and he wouldn’t let me within ten feet of his seedlings.

Amanda, besides being my friend, is also my web designer and all-purpose tech consultant. When she’s not having genius ideas about gardening, she’s trying desperately to drag me out of my old-school print journalism shell and into the brave new world of online media. (She told me, for example, that if I worked an Octomom reference into my thinning post, it would be great for my SEO, which she is trying to get me to A) understand and B) work on.)

So Amanda will be pleased to know that it has not escaped even my old-media notice that the pressing problems of the day are being solved by a technique called crowd-sourcing. According to Wikipedia, crowd-sourcing is “a distributed problem-solving and production process that involves outsourcing tasks to a network of people.”

This sounds suspiciously like “post your problem on the Internet and let other people solve it,” which I think is an outstanding use of online media. Projects that have been crowd-sourced include transcribing the hard-to-read handwritten documents of Jeremy Bentham, finding lost people after Hurricane Katrina, and designing a new armored vehicle for the Department of Defense. Oh, and Wikipedia.

And I think thinning is the natural choice for the next pressing social problem to be solved by crowd-sourcing. I clearly have too much invested in the radish seedlings in my hoophouse to make rational decisions about which should live and which should go into tonight’s salad, so I am turning to you for help. Below are three pictures, each of about one foot of a three-foot row of radish seedlings. All the seedlings are numbered.

What I ask of you is that you submit a comment with the numbers of the seedlings you would take out. These are ordinary red radishes, so space appropriately. Vote off any that are too close together or look suspiciously anaemic, and I will do the deed. Either that, or I’ll ask Kevin to.

May the best solution win.

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Yesterday, Kevin and I forgot it.

Because we’re thisclose to getting pigs this spring, we went to visit a local pig farmer, Bob from Ten of Us Farm. Bob has piglets that are very small, piglets that are medium-size, just-weaned piglets, and piglets due this week. He’s been breeding pigs for some thirty-five years on his small farm, and he gave us a tour of his place.

I was doing my best farmwife imitation, with my overalls and my muck boots, but when we went in the barn to see the sows with their litters, I gave myself away as a pathetic city slicker.

“Piggies! They’re so cute!”

Oops.  I tried to recover by turning to Bob and saying, “I guess you get over the cuteness factor, eh?”

He paused for a second. “Nope.”

What we noticed most about Bob’s pigs is that they’re very, very clean. It’s weird how clean they are, since a big part of the outdoor enclosure they were walking around in was very mucky, and I’ve been given to understand that pigs love muck. But upland from the muck was sawdust, and next to the sawdust was a big field of grass dotted with pig shelters. And all the pigs were clean. It’s as though Bob had just gotten them, fresh from central casting.

Pigs weren’t the only animals in evidence. There were also sheep, goats, guinea hens, and one lone peacock, who did us the honor of opening his tail for us. Wandering around the yard was a flock of chickens that seemed to consist mostly of roosters. (“People bring ‘em here, and I take ‘em in,” Bob said.) Several of the roosters approached us with menace in their eyes, crowing like they owned the place. Among them was one tiny bantam with a comically high voice and a villainous swagger who puffed his wings out like a comic-book tough guy. Although I was warned not to turn my back on him, I couldn’t take a two-pound bird seriously and I walked away to go visit the sheep. The bantam flew at my shins, kung-fu style, spurs out, with a viciousness that surprised me. He was way too small to do any damage, but I will be more careful around roosters from now on.

Although the piglets were pretty irresistible, we weren’t ready to go home with them yet. Since we want to slaughter in the fall, we need to wait until at least next month to bring them home – they’ll probably take five or six months to reach market weight. But farmers who sell pigs also sell pig manure, and since we’re expanding our garden, we thought we’d bring home a trailer load.

Bob had a huge pile of manure down behind the barn. By “huge” I mean a hundred feet long and fifteen feet high. Mount Pig Poop.

It had been sitting there for quite some time, and looked to be well on its way to being fertilizer. We lined the landscape trailer with a tarp, and Bob pulled up in his Bobcat with its bucket attached. Five or six scoops later, we had almost two yards of it. As he loaded it, we could certainly smell it, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

The overwhelming part didn’t happen until we got it home, and started shoveling it off the trailer on to the top tier of our garden, where we figured we’d keep it until we were ready to put a layer in the bottom of our raised beds and the rest out back somewhere to continue to break down.

Sorry, no piglet pictures yet

The more we shoveled, the more obvious it became that it still had a lot of breaking down to do. By the time we got half of it off, we should have realized it, changed the plan, and dumped it as far away from the house as possible – somewhere it could sit for a good year. But we weren’t thinking very clearly. Maybe the fumes got to us. And we now have two yards of hog manure decomposing about fifty feet from our front door.

There goes the neighborhood.

“This was a big mistake,” I said to Kevin as I shoved all our clothes into the washer and set the dial to “Manure Cycle.”

“Nah,” he said. “It was only a small miscalculation.”

Hah! Small miscalculations don’t affect your property value. I can only hope we can move the pile far enough away from our house that we don’t have to live with the smell morning, noon, and night until the composting process can work its magic.

And it will. The giant, smelly heap will at some point be crumbly, nutrition-rich fertilizer. Right now, though, it is pig shit.

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But the swap would shed some light on our vastly different approaches to problem solving. If there were one hundred ways to solve a problem, and Kevin and I were to each write down our top fifty, there would be no overlap. None.

I’ve written about this before (at greatest length, in what may be my all-time favorite Starving post, about building our chicken coop), but not with the kind of frequency that conveys how often this difference comes up in our life.

Where should we site the smokehouse? Which tree should we cut down? How should we cover the boat? How many chickens should we get? Where should we apply for doe permits? How should we paint the trim? Fine or coarse cracked corn? Regular or LED trailer lights? Stone patio or wood deck? Hot and fast or low and slow?

And, oh yeah, how the hell are we ever going to finish the godforsaken wood-fired oven?

You get the picture.

Today’s problem concerns gardening.

Our sloped, wooded, sandy two acres could be the worst gardening property this side of permafrost. We have done yards and yards of amendment into the tiny area that gets more than a few hours of sun, but yards are not enough. We never seem to get a thick enough layer of nutritious earth, and what nutrients do we manage to introduce into our “soil” get washed away down the hill.

We do, however, have one little spot with potential. It’s flat. Since we took down the tree in the middle of it, it’s reasonably sunny. But it has no soil whatsoever. It’s Carver Coarse Sand, supplemented with rocks. If we expect to grow anything there, we’re going to have to bring compost and topsoil in by the trailerful – which we’re prepared to do.

The area in question, about 100 square feet

But the question is, do we dig down, or do we build up?

Well, depends who you ask. If you ask me, I’m thinking we should could rent a Bobcat, excavate a foot-deep hole the size of our planned garden, and fill it with those trailerfuls of compost and topsoil. Ask Kevin, and you’ll find he’s thinking we could build a couple of raised beds instead.

I understand the advantages of raised beds: the soil doesn’t compact, they warm up faster in the spring, your nutrients don’t leach out as readily. But do raised beds really lend themselves to creating the kind of soil that we’re working toward? The kind with structure, and beneficial organisms, and a life of its own?

It seems to me that a big hole that we fill with good stuff would be more likely to turn into that. But, because what’s underneath is so sandy, would our nutrients just drain away? If that happens, though, wouldn’t it be easier to amend? How do you get fresh compost or soil into a raised bed that’s already full?

Besides, the frame of a raised bed would block our view of the chickens from the house year-round, and I like to be able to see what’s going on in there.

Of course, digging a hole means the trouble and expense of heavy equipment, plus the little problem of getting rid of a large amount of Carver Coarse Sand, supplemented with rocks. But building raised beds requires getting lumber and assembling the frames. All told, the beds are less work up front, but that’s a small part of the equation since it’s a one-time job.

Neither Kevin nor I is sure enough of our position to push it very hard, so what we need here is a little more information, and perhaps a few opinions. Besides, if you all do the heavy thinking, that frees Kevin up to go do something dangerous, and I can get back to my Trollope.

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Those of you who follow this space know that he is the mastermind behind the chicken coop and the sabiki rod, the turkey pen and the chicken plucker. Also, the stump pulling, the less said about which, the better.

You also may remember that, last year at this time, he had a brilliant idea for making a cheap, portable cold frame. So brilliant that I did a video about it, in which I give him no credit whatsoever.

Spoiler alert: I’m going to tell you how to do it.

All you need are two window wells, the kind that go on the ground outside basement windows and cost about $18 a piece, and a handful of clips. Put the window wells together, back to back, and attach them with clips.

That’s all. You now have a cold frame that you put together in ten seconds, for forty dollars.

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Since we started growing food, the distinction has been a continual irritant. Why is it that the things you want to eat, like tomatoes and peppers, grow on persnickety plants that have to be handled just so and then die in October, while plants that yield nothing you want to eat, like tulips and switchgrass, reliably come up of their own accord, season after season?

I know, I know, there’s asparagus and there’s rhubarb, but asparagus and rhubarb will take you only so far, come dinner time. I want perennial tomatoes and peppers. And eggplant and squash. And collard greens.

Which brings me back to my favorite springtime game.

I’ve always thought that collards were an annual, but I’ve got a few specimens in the garden that say otherwise. Last year, they flourished, and we ate collards well into the winter. Eventually, the leaves that were left died back, and I’d thought they’d given up the ghost. But now, after an unseasonably warm winter, they are rising from the dead, and new leaves are sprouting.

The cheap Bordeaux is for scale. Until tonight.

A quick Googling is not definitive. Per Wikipedia: “The plant is a biennial where winter frost occurs, and perennial in even colder regions.”

Now what kind of botanical magic is that? Let’s start with the whole idea of a biennial. I know about biennials because of parsley, and I am here to tell you that biennials are the biggest tease in the botanical world. Once it gets past its first year, you know it’s not an annual. And, if it’s not an annual, it must be a perennial. Q.E.D.

But then you suffer a crushing disappointment when it dies in the second year and you find out it’s not an annual, it’s not a perennial, and you’re an idiot because you never even heard of a biennial. I can understand plants that die when the weather gets cold, even if I never develop a real fondness for them. But how does a plant know to die the second time it gets cold?

And then there’s the part about collards being a perennial in “even colder” regions. Cape Cod is “even colder” than lots of places, including places like Manhattan in which a winter frost definitely occurs but you don’t care because your building has central heating and from which only people who are “even stupider” leave to go to places where you have to cut down trees to stay warm.

Wait, weren’t we talking about collard greens?

Last year, the ones in the hoophouse, which we planted the previous November, bolted in about June, presumably because the hoophouse simulates a frost-free climate. The ones in the garden, started in the hoophouse in the spring and planted outside in May, didn’t bolt. They grew very thick stems and big, healthy leaves.

Since they’re still there, still alive, and growing a new crop of leaves, I’m assuming I should leave them there, but I know there’s always a chance that there’s a good reason not to. Do second-year collards taste bitter? Do they house some obscure kind of over-wintering insect?

And, most importantly, is Cape Cod “even colder” enough to turn collards perennial, or will I, come November, be faced with the biennial heartbreak? If I know now it’ll cushion the blow.

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We’ll start with the good news. The good news is that our hoophouse has successfully extended our growing season. Granted, it’s gotten an assist from the warmest winter in human memory, but it still felt good to be out there in January, harvesting the parsnips and beets I planted in the early summer.

Or at least it did, until I got the bad news.

Root vegetables allow gardeners to remain in denial up until the very last moment. When you’re growing tomatoes, or eggplant, or lettuce, the fruits of your inadequacy stare you full in the face, from seedling to harvest. You watch as, right before your eyes, they stubbornly refuse to turn into the picture-perfect vegetables of your imagination. You never have the chance to develop unreasonable expectations.

Roots, though, allow you to dream. Surely that forest of beet greens is collecting sunlight to feed big, sweet, deep red beets just beneath the surface.

Surely.

Parsnips, with an egg for scale

Last week, I pulled up the parsnips. Despite having been in the ground for some eight months, most of them were about the size of my pinky. A couple of them reached a diameter of over an inch, but none was more than about three inches long. A more pathetic root harvest I have never seen.

Or hadn’t, until I pulled up the beets. The best of them looked like miniature stunted carrots. There was not a rounded one in the lot. The dozen or so largest – the only ones that merited keeping – came in at about a half-pound. Total. Not for the first time, I was grateful that beets are two vegetables in one, because the greens were lovely.

Beets, with an egg for eating because the beets won't fill you up

I suspect our soil is long on N, and short on P and K. We have a history of growing plants that are long on leaves and short on fruit, and our root harvests have almost always been terrible. Each year, I think I should give it up and only grow things that are supposed to have lots of leaves but beets are one of my favorite vegetables, and I’m of the hope-springs-eternal school of gardening.

So, come spring, Kevin and I will be loading up on organic matter, supplementing P and K, and slipping back into denial.

Consolation greens

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Surprising, eh?

We planted a lot of winter squash. We picked two varieties: Delicata, and a giant kind I don’t know the name of but what we call Sasquash. We chose Delicata because it is supposed to taste very good. We chose Sasquash because it is supposed to be absolutely enormous.

Too bad you can't eat the leaves

Our friend Christl gave us the Sasquash seeds from the ones she grew last year. Christl is not one to be seduced by the novelty of a thirty-pound squash; she thought last year’s were watery and bland, and opted not to replant this year.

We tasted her squash last year, and it was watery and bland. But a thirty-pound squash? You gotta have one. We planted four plants. Or maybe five. I left plenty of room between them, and planned to corral them toward the back of the garden, where there was lots of space, as they grew.

Words like “plenty” and “lots” are tellingly unspecific. What looked like oceans of space when the plants were three inches tall proved woefully insufficient for the real estate needs of the Sasquash. When I marveled at the sheer biomass of the plants, Kevin pointed out to me that, If you’re going to turn sunlight into thirty pounds of bland, watery squash, you need serious solar panels. Each squash plant put out tentacles as long as twenty feet, the length of which are studded with leaves that can measure two feet across. Serious, indeed.

The row of pepper plants at the front of the garden was the first casualty, as the tentacle I ran in front of them swallowed them up. Then came the collard greens next door (although one behemoth is holding its own in the large-leaf department). The eggplants are still holding their heads above water, but it’s touch and go.

A few weeks back, looking at my overgrown squash patch, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea.

Amazing, isn’t it, how every idea seems brilliant when you have it. It occurs to you, and you are blinded by the brightness that the light bulb over your head is putting out. You’re a genius! Only when you follow the idea down the garden path do you find its flaws, which, if your ideas are anything like mine, are many and varied.

Here was my idea: pole beans.

Pole beans! If I planted pole beans in the squash patch, the plants would quickly grow over the level of the squash leaves. The squash, meanwhile, would act as a mulch and prevent weeds from growing up around the beans.

No sooner said than done. Kevin set up two little teepees of eight-food poles, and I planted beans at the base. It was the beginning of August, a little late for beans, but I wanted to give it a try.

Note sprout in foreground (ignore camera data, which is wrong)

It was only a few days later that I had sprouts. Beautiful, sturdy little bean sprouts, growing right in the teepee. Everything was going according to plan.

A few days after that, I had little stumps of sprouts, with all the leaves bitten off.

I had my suspicions, but I broke out the Varmintcam to catch the culprit red-pawed.

Note absence of sprout in foreground

Over the course of our procure-your-own project, we have considered raising rabbits for meat. They’re easy to raise, I’ve been told, and they’re one of the most inexpensive and least labor-intensive ways to grow your own protein. I understand all the ideas in favor, but there’s something about the idea of killing cute furry bunnies on a regular basis that doesn’t appeal to me. But it’s looking a lot better since one of those self-same cute furry bunnies got into my garden and ate my pole bean sprouts. That kind of thing has a way of hardening you to the species.

It didn’t help that the same rabbit, or one of his close relations, got into the hoophouse and ate my beet sprouts.

Cute furry bunnies, my ass. Mangy, lop-eared varmints.

It was only after my neighbor Mike mentioned that beans and squash were two of the traditional Three Sisters (corn being the third) did I realize I wasn’t the first to have the idea of pairing them. Planting the vertical with the horizontal is an idea that goes back to the dawn of agriculture. Beans and squash are a time-honored partnership.

And they both go very well with rabbit.

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There’s also this idea that chickens and gardens have a symbiotic relationship. The garden waste helps feed the chickens, and the chicken waste helps feed the garden. Plus, the birds can help till the soil and keep the insect population in check. Together, they form a functioning backyard ecosystem that will keep you and yours in eggs and produce.

This is all stuff and nonsense.

Not that it’s actually false. It’s just very selectively edited. The whole truth is much more disagreeable.

Argh!

The whole truth is that, when you have chickens and you have a garden, the chickens will expend all their time and energy, as well as whatever intellectual horsepower they can coax from their seven brain cells, trying to get into the garden.

And, no, they’re not going to eat the waste. Or the bugs. They’re going to eat the tomato that’s one day short of perfect. When that’s been pecked to a seedy red pulp, they’ll start on the tomato that’s two days short of perfect. And so on.

There are some things they don’t like to eat, but the only way they learn that is by taking a bite. And then, because their gastronomic memory has a half-life measured in seconds, they’ll come back for another bite the moment they can’t find a tomato that has even a hint of blush. Only after they’ve done irreparable damage will they figure out that they didn’t want to eat the thing in the first place.

Not that I’m angry or anything. I tell you this in the spirit of sharing, so that you new chicken owners will know what to expect.

Specifically, expect to lose tomatoes as a matter of course. But also expect that your first winter squash, a beautiful specimen of a variety whose name I can’t remember but whose fruit can approach thirty pounds, will have a big hole pecked out of it when it is still weeks away from being ripe.

In the spirit of fairness, I will point out that it might be, at least in part, your own fault. Particularly if you, like me, are something short of vigilant in the fence maintenance department.

Argh!

Our garden is fenced in with – ha! – chicken wire. At some spots, that chicken wire is only eighteen inches tall. Generally, this is sufficient. We learned early on that chickens weren’t watching Sesame Street the day Grover explained the prepositions. “Up,” they understand. “On,” they understand. “Over” is beyond their ken.

If the fence were eighteen inches high with a bar at the top, they’d fly up to the bar, and then into the garden. But if the top of the fence isn’t something they can roost on, they can’t wrap their minds around the idea that they can simply go over it.

On!

Now, if natural selection were left to take its course, I would think that any creature that can fly would have a very well-developed sense of “over.” One of the wonders of domestication is that we can breed birds that simply have no idea that they have all the necessary equipment to breach a fence.

So, although an eighteen-inch-high fence will keep them out in theory, it will only do so in practice if all the fence posts are secure and straight. If one of them gets loose and leans in, the chickens will simply start walking up the fence until their weight flattens it and they can stroll right in.

Since our fence posts are just bamboo sticks hammered into the ground, this does sometimes happen.

That’s when we lose our tomatoes. And that’s when we got the hole pecked in our squash.

I was pissed about the tomatoes, but I was really pissed about the squash. It was the first obviously set fruit, and I wasn’t expecting too many over the course of the season. When a plant yields a squash that weighs thirty pounds, you can’t expect it to yield a dozen of them.

So I’d been watching this squash carefully. I mounded the marsh hay under it so it wouldn’t touch the ground, and I tracked its progress as it went from just a bud to a promising sixteen-inch adolescent.

Its adulthood was still a long way off, and I worried that the crater our chicken had pecked out of it would let in rot, or insects, or both. Should I just keep it dry and expect it to heal? Should I cover it with packing tape? Should I try to cauterize it somehow?

I would like to say that I came up with the solution myself. That I thought the problem through, considered all the factors, took inventory of the materials at hand, and voila!

Plan A

But I didn’t. Kevin did.

I was obsessing over the problem, combing the Internet for ideas, worrying that I’d lose my giant squash, and Kevin looked up from his online chess game just long enough to say, “Drip wax on it.”

Drip wax on it! Now why didn’t I think of that? We took a tea light out to the garden, and the job was done inside five minutes.

It might not work. Moisture might seep in and get trapped there. Some bug might decide a nice wax burrow was just the thing. If the wound shows any signs of decay, we’ll have to move on to Plan B, whatever that is. Meantime, though, I’m much happier knowing that my squash has a nice wax seal on it.

While we were out dripping wax on the squash, we also secured all the fence posts and added taller chicken wire at particularly enticing spots, just in case. That chickens and gardens can’t coexist harmoniously is irritating, but we’re not planning to give up either one any time soon. Instead, we’ll have to learn to live by Rural Maxim #732: Good fences make good chickens.

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Frieda was over ninety, and came from a prominent Eastern European Jewish family – I want to say she was Hungarian, but that’s probably because I automatically assume all mathematicians are Hungarian. She was well-educated and well-read, and spoke enough languages to statistically compensate for a whole roomful of pathetic monoglots like me. She had somehow escaped the Nazis, and made a career in the United States.

The one thing Frieda couldn’t do – and, as far as I could ascertain, there really was only one – was cook. It was a mystery to me. She was so accomplished, so intelligent, I was sure she was capable of it. But, whether or no, she obviously preferred not to cook, so I would sometimes make a big pot of something, something she could make several meals out of, and bring it to her house.

One day I brought over a big batch of pasta sauce and a couple pounds of pasta. As I made dinner, she watched. “All you have to do is heat the sauce and boil water for the pasta,” I told her, feeling stupid giving such simple directions to one of the smartest people I knew.

Frieda was tiny, probably a foot shorter than I am, and I remember having the impression that she had to stand on tiptoe to look over the side of the pot as I put the pasta in. She watched as I stirred it to make sure it wouldn’t clump.

“How long do you boil it?” she asked me.

“Just until it’s cooked through,” I said. “Test it when it starts to look flexible. You’ll be able to tell.”

“No,” she said, taking my elbow and looking up at me sternly. “You will be able to tell, but I will not.” She pointed to the pasta in the pot. “It speaks to you,” she told me. “It does not speak to me.”

And she was right. Food has always spoken to me. Loudly. And a good thing, too, because it drowns out the deafening silence of music, fashion, and contemporary art.

Those of us who are either lucky or prescient start careers in fields that speak to us, and stay there, happily playing to our strengths, for the duration. I was neither, and came to food writing only after more than a decade of bumbling around in the corporate world (can you imagine?) irritating bosses and subordinates alike.

Part of what makes this enterprise that Kevin and I have taken up both interesting and frustrating is that I’m engaging in all sorts of activities for which I have no particular aptitude. The only way I can tell if a chicken is sick is by taking out the Sick Chicken Check-List and running down it. Tail down? Listless? Poopy bum? I have no intuitive sense of it; Kevin is always the first to notice a problem in the poultry pen.

When I took a hunting workshop last fall, the leader took us into the woods to teach us to identify deer habitat. We stopped by a small clearing in the trees, and he pointed. “See that? Deer slept there last night.”

I looked, I saw nothing. I made sure I was looking where he was pointing, and I looked again. It was only when he pointed out the flattened grass did I see the nest. It spoke to him, but it didn’t speak to me.

This week, I set about trying to solve the calcium problem in our hydroponic system. There is a very specific prescribed solution, and it involves water-soluble calcium nitrate. My first impulse was simply to order it, but because it was both A) expensive and B) at least a week away at standard shipping rates, I decided I would try to find a local solution.

Craving calcium

I made the rounds of the local garden centers and talked to the staff. I found that the spirit was willing but the inventory was weak. They understood my problem, but didn’t have anything they thought could help. Kelp was about as close as they could come.

Finally, I ended up calling a hydroponic shop a good sixty miles away. I talked to the owner, and I was mystified when he didn’t seem to have any idea what blossom end rot was. Kevin had to explain to me that the only hydroponic crop grown in quantity to support an entire store in an otherwise depressed area of southeast Massachusetts was pot. Pot growers aren’t interested in blossoms, so blossom end rot just isn’t on their radar.

Still, marijuana needs calcium too, and the store carried a product called Cal-Mag, designed to make up the calcium deficiency in hydroponic fertilizers. (Why hydroponic fertilizers have a chronic lack of calcium is a mystery to me, although I’m sure there’s a straightforward chemical explanation.)

The amount of gas I burned getting there, and the money I spent buying a quart of Cal-Mag, are unconscionable. It was only after I got home and Kevin and I added the supplement to both our gravity-feed and our self-watering containers that it occurred to me that calcium was an ordinary substance, present in all kinds of cheap, readily available products.

“I should just add milk powder to the mix,” I told Kevin, facetiously. And then, on a whim, I Googled it. Seems people water their tomatoes with milk all the time. They also crumble eggshells into the soil. Or they use calcium gluconate supplements meant for human consumption.

The reason I’m trying to solve the problem with an expensive, custom-tailored, mail-order product is the same reason Frieda wanted to know how many minutes to cook the pasta. It’s a problem I have no feel for, and so I’m looking for specific directions from someone who does have a feel for it. Following directions, I can do.

But gardening isn’t so different from cooking. You try things until you find what works for you. The more you try, the better you get at it. The biggest difference is the lag time between the attempt and the result. Cooking, you add and then you taste. Gardening, you have to wait. By the time the tomatoes are ripe, you can barely remember how you amended the soil. But that’s what notebooks are for.

So I’m thinking we grind up oyster shells and add them to our hydroponic substrate. Or maybe even try adding non-fat milk powder directly to the fertilizer. I can’t believe that expensive additives are the only way to solve this problem. It may take several iterations to figure out just how to make our hydroponics work, but I think if we pay attention, read up, and experiment, we’ll get there.

All my life, my plants haven’t spoken to me, but maybe it’s just because they couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

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