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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One of the plants that seems to thrive in our hydroponic system is peppers. Although they’re a little tall and weedy, they’re nice and green, with lots of flowers. Until about a week ago, I thought we were going to have a bumper crop of those long, skinny Portuguese hot peppers.

Then I noticed that something nasty was happening to the skinny ends of the peppers. They were turning brown and shriveling.

I looked more closely, and I could see how it developed. It started as a small brown spot, just where the pepper bends, about an inch from the bottom. Always just there – nowhere else. Then the end of the pepper turns brown, then black, then shrivelly. The pestilence then creeps up the body of the pepper.

I took one pepper to the farmer who’s been helping us with our hydroponics, and he was stumped. There were some mites on the pepper I brought him, and he thought it was possible an insect was laying eggs, and the eggs were hatching and the little insects muching on the pepper flesh. When I checked other peppers, though, I didn’t find insects, so it may have been a coincidence.

I then trotted my diseased peppers over to the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension in Barnstable, where they mystified everyone. “Never seen that,” said one master gardener with twenty-five years experience growing peppers under his belt. That is to say, the experience was under his belt. The peppers were in his garden. He thought it was possible our peppers were overwatered. “They like it a little drier,” he said.

Another Cooperative Extension staffer speculated that it could be a nutrient deficiency. Lack of calcium?

I thought this sounded entirely reasonable. Our fertilizer is Peters Professional Hydro-Sol 5-11-26. It contains magnesium, sulfur, boron, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, and zinc. A close look at the label indicates that you’re supposed to add calcium nitrate to your mix. Oops.

Further investigation reveals that calcium deficiency can lead to blossom end rot, which starts as little shrivelly areas near the skinny end of the pepper. Hmmm. It’s also supposed to make the leaves crinkly and bunched up, and we don’t have that problem, but I suspect nutrient deficiencies don’t always manifest themselves in exactly the same way.

So that’s my working hypothesis: calcium deficiency leading to blossom end rot. But here’s the weird thing – it always starts in the bend of the pepper. There are a couple of peppers that don’t have a bend, they’re straight all the way to the end, and they seem to be fine. What’s up with that? Can peppers have joint diseases? Rheumatoid arthritis, perhaps?

I’ll be fortifying our hydroponic mix with calcium post haste, but if you’ve seen this kind of thing before and can tell me definitely what it is and what to do about it, you’ll win my undying gratitude and maybe even a jar of my home-made Cape Cod sea salt.

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The squash plants have blossoms. The pepper plants have tiny little proto-peppers. The tomato plants have green fruits beginning to ripen.

A first fig

The onion tops have stopped growing which means, I’m told, that all the onion energy is being directed to making bulbs. The mache and Chinese cabbage seeds I started in our hydroponic system are sprouting. The fig tree has a handful of pea-size figs. Even the beets are showing hints of actually generating beets.

We won’t discuss the eggplant.

“I know I shouldn’t say this,” I told Kevin as we surveyed the garden, “But I’m cautiously optimistic.”

“That’s as good as gardening ever gets,” he said.

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Kevin's workplace

Nature is deeply invested in anything that can derail our efforts at growing our own food. Why else would the fecundity of rabbits be the stuff of proverb? Got a better explanation for mid-summer hail storms? And there’s nothing nature loves so much as a cutworm.

It is only now, well into summer, that some of the edibles in our garden seem to be thriving. The weeds, though, have thrived from the moment the ground unfroze. Grass, purslane, the ubiquitous chickweed, and a host of other UWTs (unidentified weedy things) spring up everywhere, relentlessly. I go out with the cultivator and hack at them, only to have them reappear two days later, unharmed. If whatever doesn’t kill them makes them stronger, we are host to some Herculean weeds.

After the fifth or sixth iteration of this, I was getting tired of it.

“I’m getting tired of this,” I told Kevin, after I’d spent a sweaty hour turning over the soil. Again.

Kevin called my attention to the fact that the area under our hydroponic system had no weeds at all. We’d covered the row with weedblock before we put in the poles for the pots and, true to its name, it blocked the weeds.

“We could cover the whole garden with it,” he suggested.

We could. And we were tempted. But there was something about the aesthetic of a garden covered with black plastic that made us balk. Besides, a roll of fifty feet goes for something like ten bucks. Surely there was an alternative.

It was a stroke of good fortune that Kevin’s kids, Fallon and Eamon, were visiting. I’m surprised they ever come see us, because all we do is put them to work, but there they were. So we put them to work.

Sea grass!

While I took the cultivator to the weeds one last (!?) time, Kevin grabbed the pitchforks, hooked up the landscape trailer, and took the kids (they’re not really kids – Fallon’s 25 and Eamon’s 15) down to Barnstable Harbor.

At low tide, it’s easy to see the high tide line along the south side of the harbor – it’s where big piles of dried sea grass accumulate. We got the idea of using it as mulch from our friend Jess, who wrote about her mulching technique on her blog, Dame de Fleur. We figured she and her dad couldn’t have taken it all, and there was probable enough left for us.

The family that mulches together ...

Two trailers full was enough to mulch the entire garden. We even put some over the weedblock, decoratively.

Literally as I was admiring our collective handiwork, the phone rang. It was Christl, gardener extraordinaire and excellent friend. I told her, with some satisfaction, that we had just finished mulching the garden with sea grass.

“What kind did you use?” she asked. “Is it green or brown?”

I told her it was the brown kind at the high tide line. “Is that the wrong kind?” I asked, with fear in my heart.

“No … “ she said, but there was a ‘but’ in her voice.

“But?” I prompted.

“It might have seeds in it.”

Miracle of miracles, I’d actually thought of that.

“That did cross my mind,” I told her. “But I thought those would be seaweed seeds and they wouldn’t grow in …”

“Sand?” she interjected.

Oh yeah. Sand. That is where seaweed grows, isn’t it? And sand is what our garden is built on. Carver Coarse Sand, to be specific.

This year, chickweed. Next year, seaweed. If it’s got ‘weed’ in the name, I can grow a bumper crop of it. So go ahead, bring on the rabbits and hailstorms.

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You can do this with a system of hoses and pipes, in which case your effort stops being watering and starts being irrigation.  Or you can stand next to the garden with a hose, which is what we end up doing most of the time. The bigger your garden, the longer it takes. Last year, when it took a good half hour to water the plants, I started to see the appeal of self-watering containers.

The finished products

Yesterday, I made two of them, and I’m going to tell you how in this, one of my occasional series of bona fide how-to posts. But now that I have you on the edge of your seat, I’m going to deliver the death-blow to your nascent enthusiasm.

Here it is: my self-watering containers are another in my series of experiments in hydroponics.

Last week, I told you about the gravity-feed system we set up for our kale, and it went over like a lead balloon. Instead of appreciative comments about how creative and interesting our system was, my post was met with stony silence. A couple of you left remarks along the line of, “well, if you really must …” The rest of you must have been operating on the maxim that, if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all. That, or you were all washing your hair that day.

So now I’m asking – what’s wrong with hydroponics? Is it that it’s not organic? Is it that it’s more science than nature? I think it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread, but I’ve always been more scientist than naturalist.

Talk to me.

And now, my self-watering containers.

“Self-watering” isn’t really accurate. You still have to do the watering. But you can give your plant several days’ worth of water at one go, and the container enables the plant to soak it up in its own good time.

There are as many ways to assemble self-watering containers as there are discarded containers, but the basic elements are the same. You need a reservoir of water, a way for the plant to access the reservoir, and way to refill the reservoir.

I read a number of methods, and then pretty much followed an excellent set of instructions from Mother Earth News. Here’s my version.

You’ll need two 5-gallon compound buckets that nest (the outer will be the reservoir, the inner will hold the soil and plant), a one-quart deli or yogurt container, and a pipe about an inch in diameter (I used PVC) long enough to reach from the bottom of the reservoir to the top of the soil. Two feet does nicely.

That’s it: two buckets, a yogurt container, and a pipe. The rest is tools.

Mainly, you need a drill. Everything’s going to need holes. You’ll also need a knife or hacksaw for the holes that are too big to drill. Got those? Here goes.

1. Figure out how deep your reservoir is by placing one bucket inside the other.  (So the pictures make sense, I’m using the orange bucket as the interior, and the white as the exterior.)  Cut down your yogurt container so it’s about a half-inch deeper than the reservoir depth. This is going to be your wicking chamber. It’s going to stick out the bottom of your interior bucket, and will contain the soil that’s in contact with the water.

2. Trace a circle the size of the cut-down yogurt container in the center of the bottom of the interior bucket, and cut the circle out. It doesn’t have to be a perfect fit.

The interior bucket, with all its holes

3. Trace a second circle on the bottom of your interior bucket (near the edge), this one the size of the pipe you’ll be using to fill the reservoir, and cut that out. If you have one of those drill bits they use for cutting doorknob holes, that works well. Again, it doesn’t have to be a perfect fit.

4. You now have two big holes in the bottom of your interior bucket. Using a ¼-inch drill bit (or anything remotely resembling it – size isn’t crucial), drill about a dozen other holes in the bottom of the bucket. These are for ventilation.

The wicking chamber

5. Punch many holes in your yogurt container. These are the holes through which water will wick into the soil. They should be in the ¼-inch range. I used an awl, and then made the holes a little bigger with the drill.

6. Cut the end of the pipe at an angle, so it doesn’t sit flush on the bottom of the reservoir (which would make filling it difficult).

7. Assemble! Put the interior bucket in the exterior bucket, put the yogurt container through the hole in the center, and the pipe through the appropriate hole.

Ready for planting

8. The last step is to drill a small hole in the exterior bucket, just below the bottom of the interior bucket (if you hold the assembly up to the light, you can see where that is). This is so that you can see when the reservoir is full – the water will start dribbling out the hole.

That’s all there is to it. I built two of these in about 45 minutes.

Materials for both containers cost me about five dollars – two Home Depot buckets, at $2.50 each. My friend Rick gave me the other two buckets, and we have lots of spare PVC lying around because we use it in our oystering. I go through lots of Trader Joe’s goat yogurt, and have a collection of the containers. (I had to empty some fermented beans out of one of them; it’s a measure of my housekeeping that I don’t clean out the refrigerator until I need the yogurt containers for gardening.)

If you have to buy the buckets and the PVC, it’ll cost about $5.50 per container – two buckets and a short length of pipe.

Once your containers are assembled, all the remains is to put plants in them. We used our standard-issue hydroponic mix (two parts perlite, two parts peat moss, one part vermiculite), and we filled the reservoir with Peter’s Professional 5-11-26 fertilizer, a teaspoon dissolved in a little over two gallons of water.

You’re probably going to use potting soil, and ordinary water, because you think hydroponic gardening is the work of the devil. But you’re going to tell me why, aren’t you?

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Unfortunately, when it comes to growing things, the more control you have and the more foolproof the enterprise, the less satisfying the results are likely to be. The Chia Pet sprouts every time, but then all you’ve is got a sprouted Chia Pet. My friend Beth is partial to those experiments where you put the avocado pit or the pineapple crown in water, but now she’s got a windowsill full of tropical foliage and no exit strategy.

But then there’s hydroponics.

Hydroponics is as close to a Chia Pet as gardening gets. The idea is that you take soil out of the equation. Instead of expecting your plants to fend for themselves, eking nutrients out of the earth, you take it upon yourself to provide for their every need. You do that simply by adding fertilizer to their water.

My introduction to the appeal of hydroponics came a few months back, when Kevin and I stopped by Sprout Farm, in Mashpee. Jay Sprout is growing kale, strawberries, lettuces, and tomatoes hydroponically, and I found his system fascinating. He uses a system of stacked pots, four plants per pot, so a five-pot stack has twenty plants. The irrigation hose goes across the tops of the stacks, and the fertilized water drips into the top pot and filters through the stack. (It’s a system marketed by a company called Verti-Gro, in Florida.)

Kevin and I decided we wanted to try it, and went back to see Jay this past weekend. He had some extra supplies, and was willing to sell us just about everything we needed to get up and running.

The base of the pole, ready for the pots

I’ll spare you the play-by-play of our installation, but the gist of it is that we laid down weed block and put five poles in the ground, three feet apart. A short piece of PVC goes over each pole, and keeps the bottom pot off the ground. We put four pots on each post, each at a 45-degree angle to the one underneath, so the corners stick out. A plant will go in each corner.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is making sure the right amount of water/fertilizer mix gets to each stack. As we’re doing a gravity-fed system, this is a non-trivial exercise in fluid dynamics.

Our stacks run up the slope of our garden, and we’ll put the barrel with the plant food on a platform that we’ll attach to the oak tree at the top. We have a hose that runs from the barrel across the tops of the poles, and there’s a little hose tributary for each stack.

We’re working on restricting the tributaries so all the fertilizer doesn’t just flow into the first stack. That wouldn’t work so well. Once we get it worked out, all we have to do is attach a battery-power timer that opens the spigot for the right period of time, at the right time of day, and we’re sixty days from hydroponic lettuce.

All set

This year, we’re experimenting with one row. If it works out, we’ll expand next year. Which will mean that, instead of rows of crops interspersed with aisles of soil, our garden will be black fabric with metal poles of white Styrofoam pots. It’s not as picturesque, I know, but the whole at-one-with-nature, dirt-under-the-fingernails romance of working the earth has paled for me.

To get plants to grow in dirt, you have to first figure out A) what plants need, B) what of those things your dirt doesn’t have, and C) how to get those things into your dirt. And it’s not like you just have to do it once. It’s an everlasting struggle, creating and maintaining earth that plants will grow in.

It’s also hard work. It’s digging and weeding and hauling and tilling. The inputs required by a garden of any size are many, varied, and heavy.

If you skip the dirt, things get a lot simpler. You put your plants in a nutrition-free medium whose only requirement is that it hold the right amount of moisture (ours is two parts perlite, two parts peat moss, one part vermiculite). You let people who understand the needs of plants send you everything your plants need in a 25-pound bag of fertilizer. You put a tablespoon of it in a gallon of water, and you’re good to grow.

The pots, the equipment, and the growing medium can be used for years. Once you’re set up, the only inputs are fertilizer and water. There’s almost no waste. There’s virtually no run-off. And you can grow many times the number of plants in the same area.

Or you can fail utterly, of course. This could be a bust. Our system could malfunction. Our kale could die. And, because our pots are outside, the plants are still subject to weather, insects, and fence-breaking marauding varmints (or chickens). But we’ve struggled mightily with our soil to very little effect, and I can’t help but be optimistic about an alternative.

If this doesn’t work, I’ll just have to ask Beth if I can take some of those pineapples off her hands

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Then, in spring, it comes on strong, and we now have a nice carpet of sturdy green grass.

Since we have trouble getting a lot of things to grow in what passes for soil on our property, I can’t help but marvel at our winter rye. It comes up without making the slightest fuss, just days after you sow it. It survives in the face of cold, snow, and various chicken-related indignities. And, unlike so many other things we try to grow, it has the sturdy, fleshed-out look of a plant that is all it should be, not the weedy, dyspeptic look of a plant that’s hanging on by a thread.

So, why, I have wondered, is it just a cover crop? Here’s the one thing we’ve found that we can grow successfully. Why let it set nitrogen and control erosion only to till it under? Let’s be rye farmers! Kevin likes the bread and I like the whiskey, so it would be a big win.

My long-suffering husband pointed out that the labor saved on the front end by not tilling the rye under or planting other crops would be more than made up for on the back end, when we would have to painstakingly separate the tiny grains of rye from their seed heads (is that the technical term?) and do whatever it is that gets done to them to turn them into something edible without benefit of any of the appropriate equipment

So we’re back to Plan A., which is to till the grass under.

Last year, when I did this for the first time, I didn’t think it was such a big job. You just go out there with the rototiller and run it back and forth across the garden, and the grass gets chopped up and rolled under the soil. I think it took me a couple of hours.

When I finished, I put the rototiller away and showed off the newly tilled garden to Kevin. I was feeling triumphant and salt-of-the-earthy, the way you feel after you do a vaguely agricultural job that gets you dirty and sweaty. I admired the fresh-tilled look of a garden ready to receive.

It looked that way for a day or two, and then I started to notice tufts of grass starting poke through the clumps of dirt. I went out to investigate and, sure enough, the rye grass was growing all over again.

While tenacity is a quality to be valued in plants you are trying to grow, it is a serious liability in plants you are trying to kill. And winter rye is about as tenacious as any green thing this side of mint.

“It’s like those joke birthday candles you blow out, and then after you’ve made your wish they light again,” I complained to Kevin as I hacked at the grass with the wicked-looking five-tined hoeing thing whose name I don’t know. (Cultivator?)

The battle went on for a couple of weeks, and I decided the rye wasn’t like those birthday candles at all. Those candles do eventually go out. The rye could not be killed, and the only thing I could figure was that it was already dead when I started.

It’s zombie rye, the undead grain.

This year, knowing what to expect, I wasn’t looking forward to tackling the rye.

As I stood in the garage, eyeing the rototiller, Kevin pointed out that there was labor we could conscript to get the job done.

The rye grass at 9am

Slaves?

No, chickens. Although we keep them here by force, make them work for us, and give them nothing but food and shelter in return, I don’t think of them as slaves. They’re more like prisoners, and when we set up the makeshift fence around a third of the rye grass, it seemed like something out of Cool Hand Luke. All I needed was a uniform and a shotgun.

Almost immediately, Blondie made a break for it. She found the spot where the chicken wire was droopy, and stepped on it to flatten it. She made her escape, and two other birds followed.

The rye grass at 4pm

I put in another stake and captured the escapees. Blondie set about casing the fence line, looking for another droopy spot. When she found a likely place, she put her foot on it to see if she could push it down. It took her about three minutes to get out again.

“What we have here, I told her as I scooped her up to bring her back, “Is a failure to communicate.”

But then I thought better of it. If she’s bent on getting out, she will, and she’ll probably teach her little trick to the rest of the flock. I let her go.

That left six chickens in the garden, although one was broody and one was sick (she seems to be holding on, so we’re watching and waiting). We’ll see if zombie grass is any match for a six chickenpower engine.

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