Plants in the most Unlikely Places

Are those plants growing under your bookshelves in your kitchen?  Well, yes, actually.  

We bought a grow light from a local hydroponics store and attached it to the bottom of our kitchen counter.  We put up aluminum foil reflectors that got in place around the counter for when the light comes on at night (it's on a timer).  It's been great and we've had some excellent salads plucked right from our kitchen.  Those are self-watering containers from the balcony moving in for the winter.

One of the reasons we chose to use a grow light is because our windows become prime real estate for already existing plants.   I'm even beginning some tomato starts in here in the very middle.  Romaine, kale, spinach, chard, and a variety of microgreens are growing happily in this little environment.

Outsmarting Jack Frost

"Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden.... It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart."

  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks


We are about to have a hard frost -- a very hard frost for a garden that had so many 80 degrees days to waken it up just a week earlier!  Check out the weather forecast through NOAA's weather.gov for Boston:

But, being a small gardener on a balcony, I have ways of combatting that sneaky Jack Frost, such as:

Bring all the plants into the warm kitchen for the night!!  
An incredibly patient husband is also recommended to accomplish this feat...  

"Yep, Allison," you might say, "You really fill that balcony full of plants."  To which I will say, "Well, um, there's actually a few more around the corner.... We kind of have a lot of plants.


Don't worry!  I'm married to an engineer who double and triple checked the weight our balcony can handle for me.  I have a good one!  (I'll let you decide whether I mean the balcony or James)

In an outside, larger, and in-ground garden it's much harder to combat a frost like this if you have plants already growing outside.  Putting down mulch or hay is a good way to protect your garden.  Even a cloth barrier might help such as burlap or reemay (a light-permeable, mesh fabric).  Lucky us, we have a big enough kitchen.    

Early Spring Harvest

We've had such a warm winter!  With temperatures in the 80's all last week (in March!), it's been quite something and almost impossible to keep the plants from looking amazing.   The magnolias and cherry blossoms are out.  The following is a nice balcony harvest of kale, chard, and some sprouts collected earlier this week.  We made a stir fry with these tasty greens.

 "The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies." -- Gertrude Jekyll 

Just Beginning to Bloom

"Earth laughs in flower."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here's our peach tree blooming in March!  Such a treat to see these flowers so early in the season.  I'm looking forward to those mouthwateringly fragrant peaches come summer!

First Day of Spring on the Balcony

The balcony garden, I will admit, is a little crowded.  There are watering cans and containers of soil and  and some old plants that somehow survived our impressively mild winter.  Here's some of the highlights:

You can see the watering can next to the door all primed and ready to go for the season!  Most of these containers are self-watering ones we made a few years ago.  They are still holding up pretty well.  We just added some compost (from our worms) and some all-purpose organic fertilizer.  They are seeded in with some radishes, peas, greens, lettuces, and scallions that have not yet come up.

Here we've got some lovely chard and ... potatoes?  already?!  Yes.  Potatoes.  I am trying them again.  I think that perhaps being in a self-watering container might help give them the water they need when they need it without over-saturating the soil.  So far so good.

Finally, here's my garlic!  So exciting.  It just started coming up a few weeks ago.  I planted it a bit late this year (beginning of January... instead of end of November).  Let's see how it does. 

Happy First Day of Spring!

Is That Made Out Of... Gingerbread?

"It's a bird.... it's a plane... it's a car containing an exact-size model of Christ Church in Andover out of gingerbread!  Huh." 

    I know, I know.  Exactly what you would have said, too, if you had seen this being loaded into a zipcar one lovely Sunday morning back in the fall of 2010.  

Those are replica stained glass windows out of handmade lollipop...  yes, I know, we're nerds.  But you have to admit it looks really cool?!

James and I have a thing for building churches out of gingerbread.  We've done five to date for different fundraisers that happen from time to time.  Believe it or not, gingerbread is how we first met.  At least, close to how we first met... right up there with making ice lenses and patching holes in a rooftop skylight while listening to Phantom of the Opera.  But that story is for another blog post...

A Bee's First Look at the World

Here's a picture we took last year at one of our hives.  It's a drone (a male bee) emerging into the world.   Isn't he just so fuzzy!?  How fuzzy a bee is helps the beekeeper know how old he/she is.  The fuzzier, the younger he/she is.

A worker bee (female with smaller body, head and eyes) is helping the drone out of his comb cell.  If you look close you can see her actually chewing the wax off and the drone's head just beginning to poke out.  One way you can tell drones apart is that they have bigger squarish bodies and big eyes that almost meet at the top of their heads.  All the bees in the background are workers.  The bumps of wax above and to the left of the young drone whose emerging are other drones who have not yet "hatched".

Pretty cool, eh?  AND SO FUZZY!