No sooner had I written that did the new crop suffer the same fate. Except: the potato gods gave us a reprieve, and what essentially looked like yellowing, rotting stems took a long time to spread. We waited until we were sufficiently worried (we’re good at that), and then dove into the dirt. This is what we came up with:

That’s the entire surprise harvest, and they were unbelievable. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a potato that I pulled out of the dirt myself, but oh man were these phenomenal! We rinsed them, cubed them, and roasted them—they were buttery and soft, with a crisp thin skin. So worth it that we planted two 10-gallon tubs full about 6-8 weeks ago.

Simple Roasted Potatoes
Serves two hungry gardeners

1-1 1/2 lbs. new potatoes, cubed into 1″ chunks
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbs. olive oil
1 Tbs. fresh thyme, minced (or other fresh herbs to your liking)
Salt and pepper to taste

• Preheat the oven to 425°.
• Place an ungreased baking sheet in the oven for about 5 minutes to preheat.
• Toss all ingredients in a bowl until evenly coated.
• Spread in a single layer on hot baking sheet, leaving plenty of room between taters (helps them crisp up).
• Roast for about 15-20 minutes (or until browned and just tender), flipping taters once or twice to help them brown on all sides.

What to do? Well, we’re kinda busy and the cat seems to be making his away around the garden without totally destroying the plants (yet). So for now, we took the poor man’s route: an old bean trellis (aka chicken wire strapped to two broom handles) dropped over the starters.

Hopefully, this will make our plot sufficiently annoying enough that he’ll move onto the next garden. The more permanent plan (I mean, we’re going to grow beans at some point and we’re going to need that trellis!) is to place some plastic collars (aka old milk jugs) around the starters high enough that the cat won’t bother them. Plus, the broccoli can still grow up and not into the chicken wire.

The cat doesn’t seem to be eating the mature broccoli growing in some of the other plots in our little community garden, so perhaps these guys just need to grow big enough that their leaves no longer taste as delicious to Meow Mix.

Last weekend, we amended the soil in plot #2 and chopped it into a grid for some square foot gardening action. We also planted a few starters and dumped a whole lotta seed into the thick, black dirt. In the photo below, you’ll see the three broccoli plants along the right side toward the back, with two white onions, then two beet plants, then two more onion plants along the inside.

The large empty swaths of soil you see are already planted. We seeded up two squares of spinach and two squares of arugula along the left side there. The leafy greens will hopefully yield a good nine plants per square foot, and we’ll plant another square of each every month or so to keep us in the leafy greens. Since both spinach and arugula require a lot of leaves to really do anything in the kitchen (if you’re going to cook them down), we need to be able to pull a few plants at a time (hence the two squares each, which will hopefully yield 18 plants per crop).

The raddish and carrots you see noted on there were planted across two full squares. I’ll be amazed if our technique works, but everyone recommends it, so who am I to argue? It’s quite clever really: radishes germinate and grow to maturity in about the same time it takes carrots to germinate at all. So, you plant your carrot seeds at about 1/2″ down, and then sprinkle a little dirt to cover, and plant your radish seeds. As the radishes grow, they loosen up the soil for the carrots to move into. Once the radishes are mature, you pull ‘em out and the carrots take over.

Because of this quick cycle of the radish, people who do this sort of thing recommend using them as filler crops all over the place; their leafy greens help keep weeds down and their root systems keep the soil loose and aerated.

Above, you can see the very first sprouts of arugula popping through! The following day we returned to find the first handful of radish breaking through. Days to germination:

• Arugula: 5 days
• Radish: 6 days

Ah, the fun begins.

So we amended the soil by working in a generous helping of compost. For our 3′x9′ plot, we gave her two wheelbarrow’s worth of the stuff we’d “grown” in the on-site bins last year, plus another two large bags (maybe 25 lbs each). It required a lot of shoveling.

We used a pretty straightforward method for turning in the soil:

• Dig up about 6″-12″ of soil from one half of the garden plot, and pile it up on the other half.
• Spread half the compost over the side you just dug up.
• Shovel the dug-up pile of dirt back over the half from whence it came.
• Using the shovel, turn the dirt over itself in deep scoops, mixing the layers of soil and compost together.
• Rake out and smooth, and repeat for the other half.

It went well, as evidenced by the slight stiffening in our backs by the time we were done. Then came the fun, if totally meaningless, part. Square footing it.

Now, I suppose it might be blasphemous to talk smack about anybody’s gardening technique. Gardeners seem to be, by definition, a pretty laid back bunch. And the square foot method sounds really clever in theory. The theory being that if you plant your crops in individual square feet, you can fit more plants in per square foot and yield a larger crop. But as far as I can tell, it’s really just a simple matter of plant your plants closer together. I mean, doesn’t it boil down to spacing, whether you plant them in squares or in rows? Nevertheless, we’re going through the motions to give it a shot.

Once we sectioned off our squares (which in fact were more like rectangles, but who’s measuring), we went ahead and transplanted the last of the starters we’d bought a couple of weeks ago. Now here comes a perfect example of why we’re called amateur gardeners: it was at this stage that we realized we’d forgotten to test the damn soil to begin with.

Because remember: soil is everything. More importantly: never deny your boyfriend a chance to geek out with a soil testing kit…

Luckily for us, the dirt was good. Weighing in at about 6.0 - 6.5 on the pH scale, our soil was going to be great for veggies. See, pH affects how plants grow—some like the soil very acidic (below 7.0), while others prefer it alkaline (above 7.0). Veggies tend to dig on soil coming in at about 5.5-6.5. The pH of your soil will also impact whether certain important nutrients become accessible to the plant as it grows. For example:

• Nitrogen (N) shows up in soil above 5.5 pH.
• Phosphorous (P) shows up in 6.0-7.0 pH soil.

This is one reason why it makes sense to plan your veggie garden carefully, deciding which crops to plant together. Crops liking the same pH make sense together—and make it easier on you once you start getting hungry, since they’ll give more successful yields.

So, moral of the story: test your soil before amending it, then add the necessary nutrients based on the results.

Turns out, there’s a cat in the garden, and he’s feasting on almost everyone’s plants. We’re currently trying to figure out the best way to keep this guy out safely. Supposedly, there are tablets you can scatter that essentially put off coyote piss smell. No cat wants any part of a coyote.

Another option I’ve read about it spraying the leaves with pepper-water or soapy water so he loses the taste for them. Not sure yet what the best solution is.

So, commercially-grown veggies are getting scarcer (to a small degree) and simultaneously, they’re getting more expensive. Go figure. I’d be interested to see what the statistics are for the production of home-grown vegetables. Are urban farms, backyard gardens, etc. making any real difference? These numbers are impossible to track of course.

Just a few weeks ago we made our first 2009 visit to the plots, only to discover that #2 had been mysteriously taken over. After a bit of back-and-forth, it was discovered that the garden manager had accidentally given away our plot to a newcomer! They were understanding enough to move their plantings over to some empty plots and give us back our baby. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t have been so picky but once we started grappling with this once-abandoned plot last year, we got…attached.

Which may be a little odd, because you never know what you’re going to hit when you sink your shovel into this sucker. It’s lined with concrete, you see. Concrete that’s grown jagged and worn over the years, breaking off into the soil and every now and then jutting out in huge plates not more than a foot down. You can be methodically working along the edge, turning the soil and turning the soil and turning the—CLUNK. My shoulder has cursed plot #2 more than once. And yet, that’s one of the reasons I was so reluctant to just give it up. We’d put just enough labor into it that it really became a labor of love. We’d respected its stone-cold orneriness, and it had respected ours—by giving us more beans than two human adults could possibly consume.

So it was with utter disappointment that we discovered plot #2 yanked from our clutches that unseasonably warm (70+ degrees!) second Saturday in January. And it was with utter gratitude that we turned up this Saturday to a freshly emptied plot—the newcomer had laboriously transplanted all of her misplanted starters into the plots she was originally intended to have. And thus the weekend began.

Our first move was to address the ailing first plot. Number one had been left unattended over the holidays while we headed back East, but it still had a bushy (though now dreary) sage plant, Italian parsely and some slow-growing rosemary. More importantly than those few survivors, though, was the shock of seeing a good two square feet of lush, green, fast-growing potato plants.

When we first laid eyes on them, our jaws dropped: we’d planted potatoes last spring, and they had shown real promise. But within weeks of unfolding leaf after leaf, they caught blight (does a plant catch blight? Does it contract it? Come down with it?), and had to be pulled. We dug up quite a few ultra-tiny tubers that would never get the chance to grow to maturity and I felt a twinge, thinking maybe this is what my Irish forbears felt so long ago…until I remembered that they were starving to death, and I had frigging Whole Foods down the street. Out came the potatoes, off shook the twinge.

But now, now here are plants larger and lusher than those failed starts. Springing forth from untended soil, unintended and very nearly abandoned. Who woulda thunk? And all it took was leaving the damn things alone for a while. Figures.

So on Saturday, we dropped a few starters into plot #1 (saving some for plot #2):

• Half a dozen spinach plants
• Half a dozen lettuce plants
• Four beet plants
• Three broccoli plants

I also moved the ailing sage plant, unsure if this thing was even supposed to still be around (was sage a perennial or an annual? Turns out, it’s a perennial). And today, Sunday, we spent several hours ammending the soil in plot #2, and sowing what we hope to be a ridiculously successful crop. Details on that to come…

Sorry, no recipe this time around as I didn’t measure anything! But essentially, I used equal parts ricotta and mozzarella (maybe 1/2 c. each), about 1/4 c. Parmesan, a heavy handful of spinach sautéed with minced garlic, and s&p to taste. It was topped with a simple bechamél and baked till bubbly.

If not, let me know how they should be rearranged, and what should be added or taken away.

(Also, please note: Many of the categories are placeholders, with no actual posts. So if you get a 404 Not Found, don’t freak out. After all, we’ve only just begun.)

• Spinach (one row)
• Lettuce (one row)
• Arugula (one row, with a single lettuce plant on the left)
• Tomatoes (two plants, with marigolds on either end)
• Onions and leeks (one row of each, next to that big empty patch)
• Strawberries (on the other side of the empty patch)
• Parsley (two plants, with more marigolds)

After eight weeks, it’s really blown up. We’ve already harvested most of the arugula, and have been picking off spinach and lettuce leaves as we need them for salad. The parsley’s the only other plant that’s big enough to pull from, and it gives us more than we could possibly use. The photo below is from today (eight weeks in). Unfortunately, I took it from the other side, so the layout is reversed.

All in all, we’ve had incredible luck: no nasty bugs (save for the random aphid) or disease, and the ladybugs seem to love the plot. Our strawberries haven’t done too well, sadly. I think we let them dry out too much between watering for the first couple of weeks, and they never came back. We transplanted one to a container, and that guy just sprouted some green little berries in the last few days. The other problem we ran into was that the spinach kept burning. We solved that by propping a couple of screens over the plants to cut the sun, and now they seem to be thriving. Finally, we’ve pulled all but one arugula plant, which has bolted. We’ll try to collect the seeds, and maybe even resew them right back in the ground.