They named the 20%, which were, of course, chosen at random. At the end of the year, though, the spurters showed significantly more improvement than their peers. Their teachers’ expectation of better performance seemed to result in actual better performance. Rosenthal and Jacobson called this phenomenon “the Pygmalion effect,” and published their results in their 1968 book, Pygmalion in the Classroom.

Well, if it works for third-graders, I figure it’ll work for tomatoes.

Kevin decided that, rather than using tomato cages, which are difficult to get into rocky soil and insufficient to the support requirements of large tomato plants, this year he would build a trellis for our 24 plants. Our friend Ed has a big bamboo patch in his back yard, and he generously donated a landscape trailer full for the trellising effort.

One day last week I was out running errands, and Kevin was putting the finishing touches on a tomato trellis a good ten feet high. Ten feet!

Kevin's tomato trellis

“That’s a big trellis,” I said.

“Last year, our biggest plants were easily this tall,” said Kevin.

And it’s true. Last year, our biggest tomato plants were ten feet tall. I think that’s why we got a decent tomato crop despite getting the blight, which starts and the bottom of a plant and works its way up. It takes a while from blight to climb ten feet.

So, this year, we’re quite literally setting the bar high. I’m thinking that the tomatoes, seeing that bar, will understand what’s expected of them and strive for achievement. Pygmalion in the Garden.

You may think that’s far-fetched, but I don’t think it’s less reasonable than some other gardening theories out there. Take companion planting, for example. Can you seriously believe that your corn will grow better if it has a pet parsley? And then there’s this crazy biodynamic theory that says – I kid you not – you should determine when to plant, cultivate, and harvest by the phase of the moon.

You laugh (or at least I do), but Fiona at Cottage Smallholder, one of my favorite bloggers and a better gardener than I’ll ever be, has started using the system and swears by it. Go figure.

Gardening lends itself to crackpot theories because it’s profoundly mysterious. Every year, some things thrive and some things fail, and they’re never the same things, and it’s never for the same reasons. Humans are hard-wired to look for causality, but it’s hard to find in nature because there are simply too many variables.

I like problems with well-defined parameters and one correct solution. A quadratic equation, say, or a crossword puzzle. Problems that involve nature aren’t like that.

I like problems with well-defined parameters and one correct solution.

And it’s not just gardening. Look at fishing. Fish behavior is a function of water temperature, salinity, the presence of food, the tide, the weather, the fish’s birthplace, the sea bottom terrain, and, for all I know, the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But, even if you know all those things, you can’t predict fish behavior with certainty because there are other factors that we don’t even know enough to consider. And that’s even if fish don’t have free will, or enjoy sightseeing.

Gardening, though, is even worse. Trying to figure out how to make a plant thrive is hopelessly complicated because everything from tiny insects to global warming seems to affect what grows and what doesn’t.

Sometimes, you can isolate a problem. Last year, like everyone else in New England, we got the late blight on our tomatoes. The slugs found the collards. The chickens dead-headed the fennel. I get that. But why did nothing grow in a whole strip on the left side? Why was the garlic so puny? And the potatoes – they didn’t even sprout.

The eggplant and squash, though, did well. And the basil we planted in every available space delivered all summer. Why, why, why?

It’s so hard to get at the truth of gardening that I understand why we grasp at causal straws like the phase of the moon. I’m almost ready to start praying to the ancient pagan god of gardening, assuming there is one.

Almost.

First, though, we’re trying soil amendments. We seemed to have a pattern of leggy plants with a sub-optimal foliage-to-fruit ratio, which, I’m given to understand, is a symptom of too much nitrogen. So we tilled in phosphate and greensand to beef up the P and the K of the N-P-K. We got three yards of compost from Watts Family Farm, which is said to have the most nutrient-rich compost on Cape Cod.

This year, the sugar snap peas I lovingly started from seed in the cold frame looked like jute twine with a couple of yellowish leaves glued on until they died altogether. The eggplant, usually insect-free, has depressingly lacy leaves. The fennel and beet seeds, which I planted directly in the garden, have produced anaemic little seedlings that hold little promise.

Is it the N? The P? The K? The Dow Jones Industrial Average? Damned if I know.

They know what's expected of them

One bright spot, though, is the potatoes. Kevin planted two kinds – Kennebec that we ordered from a fancy-pants organic catalog, and fingerlings we bought from Costco and left too long in the bin. Both kinds seem to be thriving and the Kennebec, in particular, have sent up big thick stems that Kevin mounded soil and mulch around.

The leaves are, so far, almost free of insect damage. The flowers are just beginning to bloom. We don’t know what the crop looks like, of course, and it could be that we have all leaf and no tuber, but it’s reassuring just to see the nice big patch of healthy green.

Is it the weather? The sunlight? The compost? The companion garlic?

My theory is that it’s my husband, who’s full-blooded Irish. Centuries of subsistence farming have encoded an indigenous understanding of the variables of potato growing into the Irish genome, and so it’s quite reasonable for him to expect much of them.

So, what explains last year’s crop failure, you may ask.

Damned if I know.

But if you need help with the crossword puzzle, I’m your man.

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I had high hopes, going in. After last year, which was so wet and cold that nothing grew until well into July, I saw our warm May and weeks of sun as harbingers of lush tomatoes and big, firm cucumbers, succulent eggplants and full, ferny fennel.

Hah!

I am being thwarted by bugs and weeds, and I’m convinced they’re in it together. “Gardening” is just a hoax.

Decapitated cucumber seedlings

Here’s how it works. Humans are lulled into the idea that they can grow things by the fact that things are just growing, of their own accord, all around us. If trees, and grass, and flowers, and even edibles like wild grapes and beach plums manage to grow themselves, just imagine what we humans, with our free will and opposable thumbs, can grow, if we put in a little effort!

So, what do we do? The first step is to till a nice patch of soil, and amend it with compost and fertilizers to make it as plant-friendly as possible. This is the part where the weeds rub their little roots together and say, “Heh heh, we got ‘em now! Just look at that nice patch of ground – it’s way better than what we have now!” And they promptly move in.

But not before they make a deal with the bugs. “Hey, bugs,” they say. “If you leave us alone, we’ll leave just enough room in the garden for some nice young kale, and a few tender beet greens.” The bugs know a good deal when they see one. They’re extremely fond of kale.

This is why, a mere three weeks or so into the gardening season, the garden is a bed of absolutely unblemished weed seedlings interspersed with devastated cucumber sprouts, beet shoots, and fennel frondlets. I can barely tell the beets from the weeds – I have to look closely for the purple stems – but the bugs seem to be able to find them with both antennae tied behind their backs.

I can’t blame all our problems on bugs and weeds, though. Some of them stem from sheer ineptitude. Our problems with the sugar snap peas, for example, seem to be our fault.

I started them back at the very end of February, and transplanted them to the garden some time in April. They were a little weedy-looking, with long skinny stems and sparse leaves, when I transplanted them, but I figured they’d thrive once they were no longer pot-bound.

No such luck. They got longer and weedier. Too much nitrogen? Could be. We tried to amend the soil with greensand (for potassium) and phosphorus, but then the leaves started to turn yellow, from the bottom up.

Almost ready for toe shoes

I had a moment of hope when I visited our friends Al and Christl. I’ve talked about them here before; they’re the best gardeners we know. Their house is surrounded by healthy, vibrant, growing things. They have a beautiful asparagus patch, a big raised bed of strawberries, a forest of raspberries, and a well-ordered vegetable plot. Somehow, they’ve managed to outwit the bug-weed cabal. Personally, I think Christl made a deal with the devil.

My moment of hope came when Christl told me her sugar snap peas were also suffering. “They just won’t grow,” she said. “I only have one flower.” So I guess it’s just a bad year for them, I thought. If Christl’s having trouble, I certainly can’t expect to succeed. There’s hope for me yet!

And then she showed me her plants, and the hope died within me. They were full and green and thick-stemmed. Okay, so there was only one flower, but the plants themselves looked like they could produce them any time they wanted, and were just holding them in reserve. Compared to mine, her sugar snaps were a veritable jungle.

Blight?

It’s not just our sugar snaps that are tall and skinny – our garlic, kale, and collards have met the same fate. They’re also, I suspect, victims of nitrogen. The kale, particularly, is downright willowy, like a Bolshoi ballerina. Good kale should be short and squat, more like an East German gymnast.

The tomatoes haven’t had time yet to get leggy, since we just put them in last week, but I’m sure they will. Unless, of course, the blight gets them first. I’ve seen a couple of spotty leaves that make me very uneasy.

The one bright spot is Kevin’s potatoes. They’re bushy and green, and seem to grow several inches a day. We have two rows of Kennebec, which we bought as seed potatoes, and one row of fingerlings, which we bought to eat but languished, forgotten, at the back of the potato bin until they sprouted.

The potato crop

There’s only minimal insect damage, from what we suspect are thrips, but I think it’s only becaue the potato beetles strong-armed the rest of the insects to stay off the potatoes until they’re big and tasty, so they can move in and devastate the crop at the very last minute. Once they’ve eaten their fill, I’m sure they’ll band together and lift the fence so the rabbits can come in and finish everything off.

If the devil’s still available, I’m ready to deal.

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But here’s the thing. Fruits are better than vegetables. Way better. Fruits, at their best, are pretty much the finest thing the earth has to offer. A rich, buttery mango. A dark cherry that almost crunches. The first crisp Macoun from the fall apple crop. I like vegetables as much as the next guy, but no carrot will ever measure up.

Raspberries by the truckload

I had always taken it as an article of faith that stone fruits (botanically, drupes) are the best fruits going. The mango and cherry, as well as peaches, plums, and nectarines. When I met my husband, I was shocked – shocked! – to find out that his favorite fruit is ….

Drumroll please.

Blackberries!

As first, I was afraid this bizarre preference was a leading indicator of all-around questionable judgment, but I learned fast that Kevin’s soundness of mind is, in all other ways, to be absolutely relied upon. It’s just this one weird quirk.

It’s not that I have anything against blackberries. A good blackberry is a fine thing, but so many blackberries are not good blackberries, and even the good blackberries have those nasty little seeds. If the contest is between the very best blackberry and even a run-of-the mill mango, it’s the mango, hands down.

It has turned out, though, that Kevin is having the last laugh in the fruit preference department. If you’re trying to grow your own food in New England, the blackberry lover (whose second-favorite fruit just happens to be raspberries) has it all over the mango lover.

Our climate is not fruit-friendly. (And I do know that some of the crops we pass off as vegetables, like tomatoes, cucumbers, and eggplants are actually fruits, so don’t go all pedantic on me.)  Apples and peaches can, theoretically, be grown here, but people who’ve tried it roll their eyes and tell me it’s not worth the trouble. It seems people aren’t the only organisms who think fruits are better than vegetables. Insects, fungi, and disease-causing bacteria all agree.

Our garden's dead zone, reclaimed

The biggest clue to what can be cultivated successfully is what grows wild. All over the Cape, there are raspberries, blueberries, and grapes. If the wild berry varieties (grapes are berries, too) can grow by the side of the road, without fertilizer, irrigation, or annual pruning, surely their cultivated cousins can survive in my garden.

Our berry-growing attempt started last year, when our friends Al and Christl gave us some blackberry bushes. We put them on the upper corner of the garden, and they had a modest fruiting last summer. Then we learned the hard way that chickens are among the organisms that prefer fruits to vegetables. They ate every last one before we realized what they were doing. (“Marauding little bastards,” Kevin called them.)

We’re ramping up berries in earnest this season. From Miller Nurseries, we got strawberries (two varieties – one June-bearing and one everbearing) and blueberries (also two varieties, both lowbush). From our friends Geri and Emory, we got the cast-offs from their raspberry patch, which they’re thinning ruthlessly this spring. Al and Christl gave us another blackberry, to join the other two.

Up until now, our fruit-growing attempts have been limited to the brown turkey fig we planted last year, which seems to have survived the winter quite well and from which we expect a bumper crop of some seven figs this year, and a blueberry that puts the “high” in “highbush” – we couldn’t reach a good third of the harvest last year.

The strawberry beds, planted and netted

We had big plans for some apple and peach trees, but after a survey of our sun-challenged land, a cost estimate from a tree-feller, and a chat with the nice people at Miller Nurseries, we scaled our ambition back to one Fingerlakes Super Hardy peach tree.

The strawberries seem to be taking to the raised beds we built them in front of the house, and the raspberries went in what was a dead zone next to our garden that Kevin dug up and mixed with about a half-yard of compost. We hope to have a berry fruitful summer.

I’m still on the lookout for a mango variety that’s hardy to zone 6, but Kevin is happy as a clam.

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Strawberry bed, before

Strawberries, though, are much more particular about beds than I am, and today Kevin and I spent a couple of hours making theirs.

We’re short on sunlit spaces, and we’re trying to use every square foot of what we’ve got. There’s a small patch of ground cover, about four feet by five, in front of our shed that we decided to appropriate for our strawberries, due later this month from Miller Nurseries.

I’m afraid it may not be sunny enough. It gets excellent sun in the morning and early afternoon – about six hours’ worth. As soon as the sun passes behind the shed, though, it’s all over. Unfortunately, our only other option was to put them in something moveable, and wheel it around to follow the little patches of sunlight as they appear. That seemed like a lot of work, even if strawberries are the payoff, so we went with the shed.

I went out there with the spade to uproot the ground cover, but I hadn’t taken two digs at it before Kevin came in with the heavy equipment – the DR mower with the rototiller attachment.

Last year, we borrowed a heavy-duty Craftsman rototiller from a friend. After we’d had it for a couple of months and tilled up everything we thought we’d be planting, he understandably wanted it back, so we had to go to Plan B on the strawberries. We’d bought the DR mower – a seriously overwrought string trimmer, really – at a yard sale, but we’d never tried the rototiller attachment it came with.

Somewhat to my surprise (you never know what you’re going to get at a yard sale), it worked beautifully. On this, its inaugural till, it ploughed up with ground cover in just a couple of minutes.

Strawberry bed, after -- with the fertilizer brigade

That was the only hard part, and a machine did it. The rest of the work consisted of nailing four pieces of wood into a rectangle (Kevin did that), digging a trench around the bed for the wood to rest in (I did that), and putting the frame in the ground. Voila! Strawberry bed.

We’ll put a few inches of compost in it when the compost pile at the dump opens in a couple of weeks, add a little 10-10-10 fertilizer, and it’ll be ready for the plants, due at the end of the month.

As a gardening project, it was pretty easy, but four man-hours is more time than I devote to bed-making in an entire year, so these berries better make it worth my while.

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This particular manifestation of his genius came about because I didn’t think ahead. I had the brilliant (!) idea of planting romaine lettuce in the cold frame. We could start it very early, I figured, and have our first crop in May, before some of our other plants are even in the ground.

So far, the lettuce experiment is going well. The seedlings are coming up, and some are almost an inch high. All is as planned. The problem is what wasn’t planned. It never occurred to me that, if I filled the cold frame with romaine, I’d have no place to start our other seeds.

Enter my husband, the genius.

We were in Home Depot looking at grinders. Once we determined that the only grinder powerful enough to do what we needed it to do (cut off large pieces of boat trailer) cost more than we were prepared to spend, Kevin brought me over to the other side of the store, to the aisle with vents and insulation.

Instant cold frame

I didn’t know where he was going with this, since we didn’t need any vents or insulation. But he went to the little section where they have window wells – heavy-duty pieces of semi-circular plastic that cover ground-level windows and the holes beneath them. Kevin took two of them off the shelf and then led me two aisles over, to the clamp section.

He put the two window wells on the floor, facing each other wall-side in, and put clamps along the top and sides where they met. Voila! A circular cold frame.

We bought the pieces for a grand total of some sixteen dollars and assembled them in the sunny spot right in front of the garage. It took about seven seconds, and another half hour or so to plant seeds for kale, arugula, fennel, and sugar snap peas.

One seed tray in, two more over the next few weeks

Our new cold frame is big enough to hold three standard trays of 72 plants each. It’s mobile, so you can put it somewhere that you wouldn’t use for a greenhouse or a stationary cold frame (like right in front of the garage). It’s easily stored because the two wells nestle together and can fit on a shelf. On warm days, you can prop it open with a piece of wood.

The only problem we foresee is wind, and so we tied it down with a piece of rope anchored to a brick on one side and a rock on the other (we didn’t have two of either within arm’s reach). There may be problems we don’t foresee, but it’s hard to plan for those.

Technically, the jury’s out on the jury-rigged cold frame. We can’t declare success until our seeds come up, but I’m voting now anyway. It’s genius.

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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.

No related posts. Yet.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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 …

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