Today is the last day of February, and we planted our first seeds of the season.

Our cold frame -- that's our composter in the background

It’s just an experiment. We don’t know if it will work. We planted two kinds of romaine lettuce in our cold frame. One was a standard-issue Burpee, and the other was a fancy-pants organic Thompson and Morgan.

Last year, we used the cold frame for seed-starting, and we failed miserably, The cucumbers suffered a 100% mortality rate, parsley was almost as bad, and the few sunflowers that survived were destroyed by pests almost the instant we transplanted them. If that weren’t enough, we didn’t realize that you have to start root vegetables in situ, so the carrots and beets were naturally a wash-out.

It’s not that we’re giving up on seed-starting (although I can hear you saying that might not be a bad idea). We’re going to try and build a hoop-house for that, so the cold frame is freed up for our lettuce experiment.

We were concerned about viability because the cold frame, a rectangle of treated lumber with a glass door for a roof, was filled with some really crappy compost we got last year from a local supplier who shall remain nameless. (It wasn’t the dump compost, which we’ve been very happy with.) But last weekend we stumbled on an excellent estate-sale find that solved all our problems. It was one of those composting barrels that you spin on a frame.

At retail, one of those barrels could run as much as $200., but we got ours for a song – a mere $25. And, get this – it came with compost inside!

I have no idea whose estate the composter came from but, whoever he was, he really liked peaches. And hazelnuts. Regardless, we figured a stranger’s household compost would be a better bet than the stuff we had, and we wanted to use it, so in it went.

We put a thermometer inside the frame to see how warm it got, and the results were encouraging. Although the nights have been slightly below freezing, the temperature in the frame in the morning was almost 40. During the day, when the sun is out, it gets up to 70 or 80. Even on a sunless day, it’s in the 50s.

Kevin doing the first watering

The seeds went in today. We planted five rows, about a foot apart. We thought we had one of those watering cans with a showering spout, but we couldn’t find it, so Kevin improvised by pouring the water through one of those little plastic planters with a few holes in the bottom. We made sure the soil was wet enough, closed the cold frame, and crossed our fingers.

At night, we’ll cover the lid with one of those reflective screens you put inside your car windshield to keep your car cool. It’s not quite big enough, but we’re hoping not quite big enough is sufficient.

Our seeds are supposed to sprout in 7-10 days. We’ll see if they do. We’re by no means certain, but we’re cautiously optimistic. Experienced gardeners will no doubt have a good sense of whether this whole lettuce-in-the-cold-frame experiment is a good idea or a bad idea. If you think it’s a bad idea, you’ll do me a big favor by not telling me just yet. God knows, I’ll figure it out soon enough but, in the meantime, I’ll have at least a week of hope.

I know, I know – hope springs eternal. If only lettuce did.

Back in 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper of Stanford published the results of an interesting study that shed light on how people make choices.

In their experiment, the choosers were customers of a grocery store in Menlo Park, California called Draeger’s. (They bill it as “upscale,” and I’ll vouch for that. When I lived in northern California, I’d drop by every now and then to see how the other half ate.) What was being chosen was jam.

Specifically, the researchers set up a tasting table offering samples of “exotic” varieties of jam from Wilkin & Sons (Purveyors to Her Majesty the Queen, no less). One day, they offered six varieties. Another day, they offered twenty-four. They tracked how many people stopped by, who those people were (by observation), and, ultimately, whether they bought jam.

Of the people who had six to choose from, thirty percent bought jam. Of the people with twenty-four choices, only three percent bought. Variety of choice, in some circumstances at least, inhibits purchase.

It’s a bloody miracle that anyone, ever, buys seeds.

Have you ever looked at a seed catalog? Take a gander at Fedco’s. There are forty-five – count ‘em, forty-five – varieties of tomato. Twenty-one of cucumber. Even the vegetables you thought were pretty straightforward, like eggplant, can flummox you. Do you want the Black King, the Swallow, or the Pingtung Long?

If you think reading the descriptions can help, think again. Catalog writers are supposed to make you want to buy whatever it is (trust me on this one – I’ve done some catalog writing), so each variety sounds tastier, more insect-resistant, and easier to grow than the next.

The bottom line: it’s a crap shoot. You just pick one and hope for the best. If it works out, get it again next year. If it doesn’t, try something else.

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn’t work so well with trees. The selection problem is the same, but it’ll be a good ten years before you find out whether you chose wisely.

And choosing is particularly hard for apples. There are 2500 varieties of apple grown in the United States, and estimates put the worldwide tally at 7500. That’s just a wild-ass guess, though. Because apples are heterozygous, the real number is probably closer to a zillion.

Heterozygous means that they have dominant and recessive alleles for the same trait. An apple tree that produces large, red, sweet fruit may have offspring the produce small, green, sour fruit, depending on which alleles make it into the particular seed from which the offspring grew. It’s just like in humans – you start with my parents and you might get me but, if you’re really lucky, you get my brother.

This means that apples, left to their own devices, are almost as variable as humans. Which is why growers don’t leave them to their own devices. Instead, they take a cutting from the tree they wish to propagate and graft it on to a rootstock. When you’re choosing an apple variety from a catalog, that’s what you’re looking at. Which means that the number of choices is significantly lower than a zillion.

In my case, it’s sixty-one. We’re going to get our trees from Fedco, a garden-supplies place in Waterville, Maine. We chose Fedco because gardeners we know swear by them, and their location indicates that they know a thing or two about growing fruit in our climate. They sell apple varieties running the gamut from the familiar, like the Macoun, to the obscure, like the Esopus Spitzenburg (an apple of “unkown parentage,” made famous by Herman Melville in Bartleby the Scrivener, when Turkey and Nippers, the two coworkers, “were fain to moisten their mouths very often with Spitzenbergs”).

Picking from sixty-one wouldn’t be quite so daunting if we were only picking one. But we want four, each a different variety. That means we’re faced with over 12 million possible combinations. I wonder how that would go over at Draeger’s.

To help us narrow it down, we’ve asked every recreational apple grower we know for advice. Turns out, everyone’s got a favorite, and everyone’s favorite is different. In the end, we made our choices using a combination of research, nostalgia, and voodoo.

We’re getting a Baldwin, because it’s supposed to be both disease- and insect-resistant, although it has the disadvantage of being biennial (which means it tends to overproduce one year and underproduce the next). We’re getting a Cortland because Kevin likes them. We’re getting a Chestnut Crabapple because we really liked the description. (Yeah, I know I warned you about copywriters, but we couldn’t resist). Our fourth is going to be a green variety (we’ve been told that insects tend to pass them over), and we’re deciding between the GoldRush and the Grimes Golden.

If you want to know how we did, check back in ten years. But I’ll let you know about the eggplant in September.

Ah, the things couples fight about. Money. Kids. Sex. The number of pounds of winter rye seed required to cover a 500-square foot garden.

It wasn’t like we came to blows or anything, but it was a distinct disagreement.

We decided to put in a cover crop this year. A cover crop, for you non-gardeners out there, is something you plant while your garden isn’t busy growing things to eat. Its purpose is to improve your soil, a trick it manages by a number of means. Its roots help stem erosion. The cover helps suppress weeds. It becomes another layer of organic matter when you till it under in the spring. It prevents nitrogen, a key plant nutrient, from leaching out of the soil by taking it up and making it available for your spring crop as it decomposes.

Grasses, cereals, and legumes seem to be the most popular cover crops, and winter rye seems to be the cover of choice in our neck of the woods. We headed to Cape Feed and Supply for our seed.

They had two sizes. The 56-pound bag and the 2-pound bag. And there was only one 2-pound bag. We expected the coverage to be written on the bag, but the bag was absolutely blank. “Winter Rye Seed” was written on an index card and taped to it.

It seemed unlikely that we’d need fifty-six pounds of the stuff (that’s a bushel, in case you’re wondering why something would come in 56-pound increments), but we were pretty sure we needed more than two. Fifty-six it was.

When we got it home, Kevin said, “Why don’t we do a quick Internet search to see how much of the seed we should use?”

I obliged. An article on the University of Vermont Extension’s site, written by one Vern Grubinger, informed me that a fifty-six pound bag of seed should cover somewhere between a third of an acre and an acre, depending on how you’re planting it. Several other sites said the same. An acre is about 44,000 square feet, which means that, even using the densest recommended seed coverage, our bag of seed would cover our garden thirty-odd times.

I went back outside, where Kevin was about to open the bag. “Wait a moment,” I said. “I think we should bring that back and get the little bag.” I told him what I’d read.

He looked at the bag, he looked at the garden, he looked at me. He scratched his head. “That can’t be right,” he finally said.

My eyebrows went up. “Why can’t that be right?”

“If that’s all you need, why do they sell such big bags? Nobody around here has that much land.”

“Farmers do.”

“They don’t buy retail.”

I wasn’t sure whether farmers buy retail or not, but I was sure that the people at the University of Vermont Extension in general, and Vern Grubinger in particular, knew a thing or two about sowing winter rye. I pointed this out to my husband.

“It can’t be right,” he said. “It doesn’t look right. How could that little bag cover all this garden?”

“I don’t know that we’re entitled to a sense of how much that little bag could cover, never having done this before.” I tried not to, but I’m afraid I did put some emphasis on those last five words.

“I think I can settle this,” Kevin said. “Let’s go back to Cape Feed and Supply.”

Luckily, Cape Feed and Supply is only a couple of miles down the street. We went back.

Next to the parking lot was their pig enclosure, now pigless, with lush green grass growing in it. “I think that’s winter rye,” Kevin said. “And that yard is about 350 square feet. Let’s ask him how much he used.”

“Him” was a man we’ve dealt with on many occasions, but whose name we don’t know. He owns the store (we think), and he seems to know a lot about animals, crops, feeds, and fencing. He also seems to be in a good mood all the time. We like him.

We caught him just as he was going out the door. “Can I ask you a question about your grass?” Kevin asked, gesturing to the pig yard.

“Sure,” he said. He seemed to be in a good mood.

“Is that winter rye?”

“Yup.”

“How much seed did you put in there?”

He looked bemused for a moment, and then pointed at the enclosure. “About that much.”

We thought this was very funny, and it was probably the kind of answer we deserved.

“Would you remember how much that much was?” Kevin asked.

“I would,” he said, and thought for a moment. “I remember because I didn’t want to break another big bag, and there were three of the small bags, and I used all of them.”

Avian interest in our cover crop seeds

Now we were getting somewhere. Kevin explained that we were trying to figure out our coverage for our garden, and we were wondering not just how much to use, but whether using a particular amount was critical.

“If you use more, you just get more grass,” he told us with a shrug. “It doesn’t really matter.”

Because I write about food, and am the author of an actual cookbook, friends ask me cooking questions all the time. “How much ginger should I use?” As much as you like. “Can I substitute beef for pork?” If you prefer, but it’ll taste different. “How long should I cook it?” Until it seems done to you.

Experience, and probably only experience, gives you the confidence to decide for yourself what matters and what doesn’t.

Our best guess at how to wrap a fig tree

We’re doing all kinds of things at which we have no experience whatsoever. Just this weekend, we wrapped our fig tree so it will survive the winter. (Do we put plastic all around, or just on top? Do we have to completely enclose all the branches, or just protect the roots?) We stowed and covered our boat. (Does it matter that it’s on a slant? Is the tarp too heavy to rest on the center console?) We decommissioned our lobster traps. (Should we rinse them? Will covering them prevent rust or encourage mold?) Our wood-fired oven will put our novice stonemasonry to the test. And I’ll tell you about my radical new oyster mushroom experiment very soon.

This morning I read a Gluten-Free Girl post about dinner rolls in which Shauna, the titular Girl and a very accomplished cook, talks about how discovering that she couldn’t eat gluten widened her horizons by forcing her to look beyond white flour. “Have you ever noticed how your brain sort of sleeps when you do something you know really well? … Learn something new and you’ll see the world new too.” It would be easy to sniff at the mind-expanding power of quinoa flakes and almond flour, but I know just what she’s talking about.

I began this project thinking it would be an interesting thing to do, and would give me something to write about. It was more than a lark, but less than a lifestyle. Now, nigh-on a year into it, it has taken hold of me with surprising strength. I find the work we do here to be absorbing and compelling, and it has changed the way I look at food, at land, and at animals.

And just last week someone asked me – me! – which kitchen scraps you could feed chickens. And I knew! And I told her! “If they don’t like it, they won’t eat it, so it doesn’t really matter.”

A friend of mine knew a woman with very definite ideas about child-rearing. I don’t’ know exactly what those ideas were but, for our purposes, it doesn’t matter. She had a baby, a boy, and reared him according to those principles.

Little Nigel was a paragon of childhood virtue. He slept through the night almost immediately. He ate everything he was supposed to, and nothing he wasn’t. He was never ill, and seldom cried. He talked and walked ahead of schedule. When he got a little older, he did what he was told, was helpful around the house, and always said ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’

Nigel’s mother, her child-rearing philosophy borne out, couldn’t help herself. She told all her friends that she’d discovered just how it was a child was supposed to be raised.

Then she had another baby. A girl, this time.

Little Ernestine was a holy terror, right out of the gate. She cried all day and fussed all night. She wouldn’t eat anything except mashed sweet potatoes and chocolate frosting. The only word she mastered before the age of three was ‘no.’ She was big for her age, and beat up on her big brother (but really, with a brother like that, who wouldn’t?).

Her mother, who’d had so much invested in nurture, had been humbled by nature. To her very great credit, she took her medicine. She visited her friends one by one and explicitly apologized for telling them how to raise their kids.

As we decommission our garden, I feel her pain.

A representative sample of this year's cucumbers

Last year, almost everything we planted came up roses. Our tomatoes were abundant and sweet. Our kale was sturdy and bug-free. Eggplants were firm and smooth, cucumbers were crunchy and dense. We had basil, parsley, and chives in abundance.

We had exactly three flame-outs. Our beans failed to thrive because we planted them in the shadiest part of the garden. Our watermelons were a total bust because you can’t grow watermelons here. Our cabbages were completely devoured by insects, but they seemed to act as a kind of lure, keeping the bugs off the other crops.

I may be new to gardening, but I wasn’t stupid enough to attribute our success to our high-class fertilizer (we got our compost from the dump), or our careful planning (we just picked the sunniest spot) or even the classical music we played our germinating seeds. I know that soil, weather, and blind luck play big parts in the gardening equation. Still, I’ll admit to a smug sense that we had this vegetable thing down.

This year has disabused me of any smugness. Most of our crops – carrots, beets, fennel, potatoes, cucumbers, kale, peppers – were a total bust. We did get a few butternut squash and a few eggplants, and our collards did pretty well.

It wasn't all bad news

The high point, surprisingly, was the tomato crop. Surprising because we, like just about everyone else in the northeast, got the blight. We fought it, though. I trimmed off all the blighted stems, leaves, and fruit, and we sprayed a fungicide. Then, a week later, we did it again.

The weather cooperated, and our eradication effort coincided with a (brief) warm, sunny period. We didn’t exactly win the fight, but we bought ourselves enough time for our vines to produce a reasonable crop. Our cherry varieties were delicious, and we’re still harvesting a few. Our slicing varieties weren’t nearly as good as last year, but at least we got some.

Some of our failures were certainly our fault. We put up the fencing too late, and the cat and the chickens wreaked some havoc. We planted some short things behind some tall things, and they didn’t get enough sun. We may have over-watered the tomatoes.

Partly, though, it was just an Ernestine of a year. It was cold and cloudy and damp until August. Then it was hot and muggy for two weeks before it went back to being cold and cloudy and damp. This kind of weather is a double whammy, being both bad for crops and good for insects that are bad for crops.

It’s not that nurture doesn’t count; skilled gardeners do better than unskilled gardeners, whatever the weather. It’s just that you can’t expect Nigel results in an Ernestine year.

I’d sure appreciate a couple of Nigel years, while I get my skills up to speed.

You know how the Golden Raspberry Awards honor the worst movies of the year? We need something like that to recognize the year’s most egregious gardening blunders. The Fungies, maybe? The Cutworm Awards?

Whatever they are, I’m in the running, having displayed, over the past month or so, bubonic horticultural stupidity.

What's at stake

You probably know – I mean, everybody knows – that the Northeast tomato crop has been hit with one of the worst infestations of late blight ever seen. It started in tomato seedlings sold at Wal-Mart and Lowe’s and other big-box retailers, but buying locally or raising tomatoes from seed offers no protection. Spores from Phytophthora infestans (which isn’t a genuine fungus but an oomycete) travel easily on wind currents, and once there’s an infected plant anywhere in your state, you’re screwed.

My state is that of bitter remorse. I knew the blight was here. I heard stories of people – many stories, many people – losing their entire tomato crop. But did I monitor our plants carefully? No. Did I look at pictures to make sure I could identify the first symptoms? No.

Kevin was paying more attention than I was, but he wasn’t on top of it, either. He’d seen a few yellow leaves, but a few yellow leaves is normal on tomato plants. And then, suddenly, there it was. We were blindsided.

“I was out there for a full half hour, just tying up plants and admiring the tomatoes,” he told me later. “It was relaxing. Just a man and his plants. And then I saw it.”

Unmistakable

He compared it to those 3-D pictures that you have to stare at in a certain way in order to see the images. “It was just like when you hold one of those in front of your nose and then, all of a sudden, you see the camel in the desert. And once you see the camel, you can never not see the camel again.”

The blight was on the bottom sections of all the plants, leaving tell-tale gray spots on leaves and little black specks on stems.

We ran out and got the only fungicide (Daconil) that has any chance against P. infestans, but I don’t have high hopes. This is the blight that caused the Irish potato famine. It’s man vs. oomycete and, so far, oomycete is undefeated.

I suspect we are going to lose our entire crop, all twenty-six plants, some of which are ten feet tall. It’s the makings of hundreds of pounds of tomatoes. There’s a knot in my gut just thinking about it.

Daconil has a chance if you use it prophylactically, or if you apply it at the very first signs of infestation. Had we been smarter and more vigilant, we would have sprayed weeks ago. But we weren’t, and we didn’t. And so, the Silver Slug Award for worst disease management goes to …

I thought that living off the land was a kind of makeshift, make-do enterprise, but I was wrong. If you expect to come up with your own food in any significant quantity, you need infrastructure. If you want eggs, you have to build a chicken coop. For tomatoes, you have to till and fertilize a garden. Fish? Buy a boat.

Our garlic harvest. About a week's worth, in our house.

Well, we built the coop, we tilled the garden, we bought the boat. It has taken time, effort, and money, and so far we haven’t had much to show for it besides what few herbs our chickens haven’t shredded. This week, though, we finally began to see results. First, we harvested our overwinter garlic. It wasn’t all it could have been – a damp, sunless spring prevented it from reaching its full potential – but it was a respectable haul.

More exciting was our inaugural saltwater fish. Inaugural, at lest, in the sense that it was the first we caught in our boat. Last summer, we caught a few in Charlie’s boat.

Charlie lives right on the beach, and he called us one morning and asked if we wanted to go fishing. We met at his house, not knowing quite what to expect. Charlie has a certain personal dignity that led us to imagine him, in yachting whites, at the helm of something substantial. When we got there, all we saw was the smallest possible fiberglass dinghy.

It was just a little shell of a thing – no hold, no motor, no gear. It did have its own hand trailer, a custom-made dolly with big fat wheels designed to carry a boat over sand. I looked at the boat skeptically. Kevin looked at the boat, and looked out to the water, hand shading his eyes, to see if he could spot the boat this boat would take us to.

“Where’s the boat?” he asked me, sotto voce.

“I think this is the boat.” I said.

“This can’t be the boat,” he said.

“I’m pretty sure this is the boat.” I said.

The boat had one of those little occupancy stickers inside it: “Maximum capacity, 349 pounds.” I did the math. Let’s see, there’s me, there’s Kevin, there’s fishing gear … Whew! We’re OK, as long as Charlie, who resembles Ernest Borgnine, comes in under 27 pounds.

“Come on,” said Charlie to Kevin, “let’s go get the motor.”

I wasn’t sure whether this was good news or bad news. On the one hand, at least there was a motor. I hadn’t relished the idea of rowing to wherever the fish were. On the other hand, the motor, a 3-horsepower Mercury four-stroke, probably used up all of Charlie’s 27-pound weight allowance.

Luckily, the water was warm and calm, and since the worst-case scenario was a long swim, I figured I’d rather have a severely overloaded boat with a motor than a less severely overloaded boat without.

Charlie and Kevin retrieved the motor, attached it to the boat, and we headed across the sand to launch. We all climbed in, and Charlie pulled the starter. Nothing happened. He fiddled with the motor and pulled again, and again. Still nothing.

I will admit here that I was half hoping the motor wouldn’t start. I was apprehensive about the boat, and I wasn’t at all convinced that there were fish off Charlie’s beach. I wasn’t even sure what we were fishing for – Charlie was new at this and couldn’t tell us what kinds he’d caught before – but it sure wasn’t striped bass.

But the motor started, and we set out. Charlie pointed to a buoy about a quarter-mile offshore. “That’s where we’re going.”

That’s where we went, and dropped lines baited with squid. To my surprise, the fish started biting immediately, and we pulled up fish after fish after fish. Most were very small, and some were unidentifiable, but there were a few grillable porgies that made a fine, if bony, dinner.

When we took our own boat out, we weren’t looking for porgies. We were looking for fluke, and we went out through Cotuit Bay into Nantucket Sound, hoping to find the shoals where the fluke reputedly hang out. Since we didn’t quite know where the shoals were – we’d only heard rumors – we didn’t have high expectations. We got to the general vicinity and dropped lines, baited with squid. It wasn’t long before I got a bite.

Porgy and me (take that, Bess!)

I started reeling it in, having no idea what was on the other end. If it was a fluke, it was really a fluke – it would have been blind luck that we hit the spot on the first try.

It wasn’t a fluke. It was a porgy, but it was big enough to keep.

Porgies (also called scup) feed en masse, and we hit a mass of them. They’re very good at nibbling your bait away without ever impaling themselves on your hook, and we watched our rod tips dip over and over but our upward yanks yielded nothing. We were using fluke rigs, which have fairly big hooks; they wouldn’t hook the smallest fish.

After about twenty minutes, I got something promising on the line. It fought, it swam, it pulled the rod almost double. It took a good couple of minutes to land it.

It was Moby Dick! I mean, for a porgy. It was two-and-a-half pounds, the size of a platter, dinner for two.

The garlic and the porgies should be only the beginning. With our infrastructure in place, the next few months will, with luck and decent weather, yield us tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, and assorted greens from the garden. It’s possible we’ll have shiitakes, and almost certain that we’ll have eggs, in late fall. We’re going to try for lobsters in September, and Kevin hopes to bag a deer in November.

Next year, maybe we’ll tackle the highway system.

Most people, given the choice of beer or collard greens, take the beer. Miraculously, so do slugs. It’s miraculous because, although beer only kills people if it’s drunk in truly heroic quantities or combined with the operation of heavy machinery, it kills slugs almost on contact.

Or that’s what I’d heard. I’d been told that, if you put a dish of beer in your garden, the slugs will climb in, drink, and die, but I didn’t believe it. I thought it advice along the lines of warding off vampires with garlic, or using tiger spray on city buses.

Bad choice

Then we got slugs. Bazillions of slugs, turning our collards into lace. I was ready to try anything.

We had Sam Adams and Smithwick’s in the fridge, and I figured that, since I like Smithwick’s, the slugs might, too. I was about to open one and pour it into my four little dishes when Kevin, who also likes Smithwick’s, asked me what I was doing. “I’m baiting my slug traps,” I told him.

“Don’t we have some Sam Adams?” he asked. I told him we did, but I was afraid the slugs might not go for Sam lager. After all, Kevin doesn’t care for it. Kevin, though, was pretty sure slugs, if they drank at all, would drink anything. “Let’s keep the Smithwick’s for the vertibrates.”

So yesterday evening, I poured a bottle of Sam Adams into my dishes and distributed them through the collard patch. This morning, I went out to check them, and I was floored. Not only do slugs drink beer, they text all their slug friends when they discover it. “Party! Free beer in the collard patch!” I counted 34 beer-soaked dead slugs in the dishes.

When the slugs had the upper hand in my garden, I thought of them as wily garden pests I was matching wits with. Now that I know they willingly crawl into dishes of stuff that kills them, my opinion of them has gone down several notches, and I’m figuring they’ll drink anything. Next time, it’s Coors Light.

I’m all for pesticide-free gardening. It’s friendlier to the planet, it doesn’t leave residue on your food, and it’s less harmful to the things you’re not trying to kill, like ladybugs and dogs. There’s only one downside: pests.

Our experience with organic insecticide

I’m beginning to think that the whole idea of organic gardening is a vast, six-leg conspiracy, hatched by the pests themselves. They got together to solve the life-threatening problem of pesticides and, in a remarkable show of pan-pest cooperation, launched the organic movement. The leafrollers wrote the literature, the cutworms did the PR, and the slugs – well, the slugs were supposed to set up the web site, but they never got around to it.

Before you could say “insecticide,” they had world-wide buy-in, and right-thinking, ecologically conscious humans started to do their work for them. The rest is history.

Don’t get me wrong. I try to be a responsible steward of land and water. I know the earth’s tolerance for chemical pesticides isn’t infinite, but neither is it zero. I can’t think that taking the time and using the energy to plant a vegetable garden, and then watching the crops succumb to pests that chemicals could kill, is anybody’s idea of good resource management.

I’m sure that, were I a more skilled gardener, I would have an arsenal of organic pest-fighting tools and wouldn’t be so quick to resort to Liquid Sevin, a toxic soup that kills every garden pest known to man. As it is, my primary organic pest-fighting tool is Monterey Garden Insect Spray, a commercial organic pesticide whose active ingredient is spinosad.

In the unlikely event that you’re unfamiliar with spinosad, let me fill you in. It’s a compound that was first produced by fermenting a soil sample populated by the bacterium Saccharopolyspora spinosa. The soil sample was collected when a vacationing scientist with the Natural Products division of Eli Lily stumbled on the remains of a defunct Caribbean rum distillery. He scooped up the sample, brought it back to the lab, and left it to ferment for three years.

What possessed him to let it ferment for three years? Dow Chemical (which now owns that Eli Lily division) doesn’t say, but I’m betting he forgot about it. He put the thing in a test tube, and then went about his Natural Products business. Three years later, when he was cleaning out his cubicle, he found it. “Oh yeah!” he said. “Here’s that soil sample from the Caribbean rum distillery. I wonder if it’s produced any natural insecticides.”

The remains of a cabbage

Actually, first he probably tested to see if it produced any cancer cures, non-caloric sweeteners, or wrinkle creams. Once he ruled out the big money, he tested for insecticides – and hit the jackpot. Sure enough, S. spinosa generated metabolites that were deadly to caterpillars, borers, leaf beetles and the like, while not harming beneficial bugs like lacewings and ladybugs.

Because it’s made from metabolites produced by fermentation involving a bacterium found in nature, it’s organic. (It’s worth noting that this bacterium has never been found in nature again, leaving open the possibility that someone accidentally spilled Liquid Sevin on the original soil sample.) Because it’s organic, we gave it a shot. We sprayed our garden with Monterey, and the pests just laughed – in between bites of our collard greens.

We’re going over to the dark side and breaking out the Sevin.

Planting seeds is the easy part of gardening. You poke a hole in the ground, you drop in the seed, you cover it up again. Then all you need is a little water to set the process in motion.

The hard parts of gardening are all peripheral to the actual planting of the seed. You need to know when to plant it, where to plant it, what to feed it, how much to water it, how ruthlessly to thin it (invariably more ruthlessly than you think), what to plant next to it, how to protect it from pests, and what steps to take when it stubbornly refuses to live up to your expectations.

The actual planting of the seed, though, is easy.

Foolproof!

But when you plant a lot of them, and they’re supposed to be evenly spaced in a straight line, you can run into trouble. At least I did, last year, with the radishes. Not only did I plant them too close together, I managed to spill a whole bunch of them, so we grew a cluster of radishes just to the left of the row.

This year, I discovered a simple, elegant solution: seeds on tape. Seed companies simply attach the seeds, evenly spaced, to biodegradable tape. It’s genius! You dig a furrow and lay the tape in it, cover, and water. No spacing problems, no spills, no crooked rows. We planted carrots, beets, and radishes in under ten minutes.

Who thought of that? If there were a Nobel prize for gardening, I’d nominate him.

We almost didn’t go to the seed-starting workshop put on by the Cape Cod Organic Gardeners. I mean, really, you put the seed in the little pot, and give it some water and sunlight. It’s the stuff kindergarten projects are made of.

But we were willing to acknowledge that there might have been agricultural innovations since our kindergarten days, so on a recent Sunday we headed out to the Kelly Farm, where its owner, the venerable Jean Iverson, was going to teach us how to start seeds.

As long as you don't look too closely ...

We learned a lot. We learned that it’s important to use a soil mix designed to start seeds. We learned to keep seeds moist but not wet. We learned to keep them warm and dark until they sprouted, and warm and light thereafter. We learned to be ruthless in our culling. We learned that a cold frame could extend our growing system, and how to build one.

We went home empowered, and started our seeds. Kevin built our cold frame. Everything sprouted just fine. When it looked like freezing nights were behind us, we moved our seedlings into the cold frame. And that’s when the trouble started.

At least I thought that’s where the trouble started. I learned later that the trouble started when I decided to start cucumbers so early in the spring.

“Oh, no! You can’t start delicate plants like cucumbers this early,” said my friend Christl, whose gardening skills border on the mystical.

The middle row is -- well, was -- the cucumbers

As tragedies go, the Great Cucumber Die-Off doesn’t hold a candle to, say, the Spanish Flu of 1918, but it’s notable for its 100% success rate. Every seedling succumbed.

Not all is well in other parts of the cold frame. The fennel looks like it’s going to go the way of the cucumbers, and the beets are barely hanging on. In fact, many of the plants in our cold frame seem to be afflicted by Failure to Thrive. They’re not dropping dead, but there are way too many yellowish leaves and leggy stems for me to be optimistic. There’s also a general air of dispiritedness, which I’m convinced is contagious.

Last year, we didn’t bother with seeds. We simply waited for June and bought plants from local farm stands and garden stores. We put the plants in the ground, made sure they got water and sunlight, and they rewarded us amply. Remind me – what’s wrong with that?

I love the dump.

I know, I know, “dump” went out with “negro” and “retarded.” It’s “transfer station,” thank you very much. But “transfer station” isn’t catching on, for obvious reasons. Only the people who work behind the scenes (we call them refuseniks) think of the dump as a place where stuff gets transferred. The rest of us think of it as a place where stuff gets … well, you know.

The dump's compost pile

But here’s the thing – it turns out that you don’t just dump stuff at the dump. You can get stuff, too. There’s the swap shop, of course, where people bring any dumpables that somebody else might conceivably use. But there’s also the metal pile (where we got the lid for our cold frame), the construction material pile (where we found a pair of brand new French doors), and, best of all, the compost pile.

All year long, Barnstable residents bring their yard waste (leaves and grass clippings, no brush) to the dump. Horse owners enrich the mixture with stable leavings, and the refuseniks do the rest. Then, in April, a giant pile of rich, black compost shows up in the parking lot. And get this – you can take as much as you want.

Our compost pile

It’s not quite like the compost you buy in bags at the garden center. It’s got some good-sized sticks in it, along with the occasional piece of rubber or plastic. (This year, we found a functioning Bic pen.) It also probably has chemicals, although I understand that the heat generated by composting breaks down almost everything. I’m sure Smith and Hawken wouldn’t touch the stuff with a six-foot hoe, but it serves our purpose admirably. We also compost at home, but it would take us about seven hundred years to generate the amount we need from onion skins and apple cores.

And so we get our compost from the dump, from the dump, from the dump dump dump.

A heat lamp keeps things hot. An ice box keeps things frozen. So, imagine my surprise when I found out that a cold frame keeps things warm.

For those of you who, like me until last week, have no idea what a cold frame is, let me fill you in. It’s a box with a glass top that you put in a sunny spot in your yard. You put your seedlings in the box, and it effectively extends your growing season because the sun sees to it that the box stays much warmer than ambient temperature.

Repurposing

Except when it doesn’t. If the sun refuses to shine, or the temperature becomes unseasonably cold, you either have to cover your box with a special insulating blanket or take your seedlings to bed with you.

This is an effort we’re willing to make in the service of earlier vegetables. Until we have produce, it’s all shellfish, all the time, so we’re very motivated.

Step one of building a cold frame is going to the dump. Don’t ever buy a frame with glass in it; windows and doors are the kind of thing people throw away all the time. We headed for the scrap heap and, In a matter of moments, found a perfect sliding glass door.

Step two is going to the lumber yard, a more expensive proposition. Our first choice of building material was cedar, since it is bug- and rot-resistant. It is also five dollars per board foot, which would have run our costs up to the $150. range.

Repurposed

Our second choice was treated lumber. Conventional wisdom has it that you’re not supposed to use treated lumber in gardens because one of the things it’s treated with is arsenic, which leaches into your soil and, from there, into your vegetables. I read up on this and discovered that A) there is plenty of arsenic-free treated lumber and B) although arsenic does leach out, it doesn’t travel well, and won’t affect plants that aren’t right next to it.

That research – which led to the decision to go with treated lumber – was the last contribution I made to our cold frame. Once we got everything home, I left Kevin in the garage with material and power tools. Three hours later, out came the cold frame.

If I leave him in there long enough, maybe that bigger boat will come out.

The Cape Cod Organic Gardeners are going to vote me off the island.

As the name implies, the CCOG is an organization of Cape Codders who garden organically. Kevin and I are Cape Codders who garden organically when it’s convenient and effective, but aren’t above resorting to non-organic products and methods when it’s easier or cheaper and doesn’t seem to put our planet in immediate peril.

In this case, the product in question is seeds. CCOG members carefully consider their garden many months in advance, and place orders with companies that specialize in organic seeds – companies like Fedco and Seeds of Change.

Our method stands in stark contrast. We didn’t even think of starting plants from seed until about February. Last year we grew everything from seedlings (necessarily, since we only bought the house in April), and we figured we’d do the same this year. But then we walked into Ocean State Job Lot, which is one of those stores that sells pajama overstocks and off-brand aluminum foil, and we saw a big display of Burpee seeds, all at 40% off.  Burpee is reputable, if not organic, and 40% off seemed like a good buy to us.  We bought beets, carrots, radishes, and a few herbs.

Then, at the last CCOG meeting – a workshop on seed starting – the conversation naturally turned to where everyone had gotten their seeds. Kevin and I suddenly managed to look very busy.

Then came the discussion of onions and garlic. Last fall, we decided to overwinter those two crops. Generally, that means you buy seed garlic and onion sets from Fedco or Seeds of Change, and you plant them in October. But Kevin had a better idea. He’d seen an episode of “No Reservations,” Anthony Bourdain’s television show, in which Bourdain participates in a Catalan festival centered around the calçot, a kind of onion that looks like a scallion on steroids. Calçots are grown by cutting the root end off a full-grown specimen, and putting it in the ground, root side down.

If it works for calçots, it should work for onions, Kevin reasoned. As for the garlic, how different can seed garlic be from, say, Costco garlic?

Our overwintered garlic -- it just might work!

Yes, that’s what we did. Last October, we bought two ten-pound bags of onions and one five-pound bag of garlic from Costco. We planted the bottoms off the onions and the fattest cloves from the garlic with a little bone meal for fertilizer. (We ate the tops of the onions and the rest of the garlic.) We covered the garden with straw, and hunkered down to wait out the winter.

When, at the CCOG meeting, talk turned to overwintered crops, Kevin came clean. First, he confessed that we’d used ordinary, store-bought garlic (without saying ‘Costco’ out loud), but that it seemed to be coming up just fine. Then, he explained about Bourdain and how we’d tried the Catalonian method. The CCOG members were too astounded by the sheer folly of sticking onion bottoms in the ground to notice that the onions in question weren’t organic. They shook their heads in pity and disbelief.

“I’m not sure that’s going to work,” one of them said, diplomatically.

We’re not sure either, but there’s only one way to find out.