Hold This Thought

Tomorrow's forecast calls for a wintry mix of snow and rain to start in the evening.  While NYC will get rain, the extended prediction is for "...mostly snow in the higher elevations north and west of NYC." 

That would be Waccabuc.  Home.



I realize that there's no point in bitching and whining about this.  Mother Nature has done much worse recently in many places around the globe.  So instead, I'm going to focus on the appearance of the first bloom of the season: my Chionodoxa Forbesii.  These are very tiny, very early spring bulbs that I've interplanted with a carpet of Creeping Jenny -- the groundcover that blankets the front garden under an oak tree.  Creeping Jenny is so thick and dense it's almost like a coat of mail.  Very little is compatible with it, and it smothers most competitors.  Chionodoxa outfoxes it by slipping a small tough, spearlike shoot unnoticed through the tangle, surfacing through the mat like a periscope breaching the ocean.  The plant isn't physically imposing.  It's only about two inches, but it populates the not-yet-green ground cover with pinpoints of lovely star-shaped periwinkle blooms, giving the garden its first real color of the season. 



Chionodoxa Forbesii



When I got home from work last night, I noticed the Chionodoxa had opened -- not fully yet, but it's clear that there's something other than gray or green about to burst.  So I ran right out to snap a picture before it gets covered up in the imminent precipitation.  I realized, however, that even if it does, it will be absolutely fine.  The common name is,after all, Glory of the Snow.

So there, Mother Nature.

Food Interlude

I mentioned in my last post that one reliable sign of spring is the appearance of shad roe at our local fish market.  What I didn't mention is that we are absolutely besotted with shad roe, and would eat it every single day as long as it's in season, but we're too embarrassed to display that level of obsession to the fish man.  


So we do try to restrain ourselves and succumb just once a week; twice at the most.  We have a standing order on Fridays for a single pair if they're large; two if they're small (and one if by land, two if by sea).  They've been running particularly large this year, and the first time we saw them we bought two pairs and even we two particularly piggy snarfers couldn't finish them.  


Now I realize that raw and wobbly sacs of fish eggs are not top of everyone's must-eat list.  But I'll also say that at least half of the people who hate them probably have never had them prepared well.  I grew up thinking they had to be poached til thoroughly gray, then wrapped in bacon and fried til crisp, at which point, their delicate taste was entirely masked by grease.  Then enlightenment struck, in the form of Ruth Reichl's simple recipe in her Gourmet cookbook.  It simply calls for dusting the roe in flour, then sauteeing in butter for about 8 minutes total, removing and making a lemon juice, butter and parsley sauce in the skillet to pour over the roe.  Simple, delicious, and at least at our house -- frequent!


So this weekend, when we went to our local locavore market, we were intrigued to see that the local fisherman who comes each Saturday, had something we had never seen before -- flounder roe!  It's true that all lady fish have roe, so I shouldn't have been so surprised, but I've never seen any available in the sac (as opposed to in my sushi) before.  It was about half the size of shad roe, a pale pink lobe, traced with very light red veins and truthfully, somewhat livery-looking.  But it had been swimming just the day before so who could resist?  Of course, we already had our weekend pair of roe in the fridge for dinner that night, but I had visions of "Two kinds of roe with parsley butter sauce" on the Hallberg nightly menu, figuring I could cook it exactly the same way.  

So that's what we had -- two kinds of roe, with kale risotto and shittakes in madeira.  It looked beautiful, and we sat down with great anticipation to take our first bites of flounder roe.


And it was like eating... sand.  Not even fancy pink sand from some exotic beach.  Just. Sand.  And it wasn't because I overcooked it, either.  The shad roe was perfect -- moist, delicate, and slightly crisp on the outside.  The flounder roe was tasteless and grainy.  Forgive me for being graphic, but the individual eggs in the Flounder roe sac were so tiny that they clearly couldn't stand up to any heat without losing all moisture, the very first bite disintegrating into a mouthful of tasteless itty bitty beads.   Flounder roe -- yech.  I've had better sand when I've eaten the blowback from a screwed up bunker shot.    


The rest of the meal was delicious, as was the lovely wine that Mr. Mulch had selected.  And we learned our lesson: there's a reason the only roe that's sold in early spring is Shad Roe.  


Anything else belongs in a sand trap.

The Return of Mr. Mulch

Calendars are poor indicators of the actual arrival of seasons -- precise though they may be about the timing of the equinoxes that signal an "official" change point.  There is no shortage of less sensitive, but more reliable indicators.  San Juan Capistrano has its swallows.  The NCAA has its March Madness.  Our local fish store has shad roe.

And I have... Mr. Mulch! 

Mr. Mulch in action

There's no surer sign of Spring than when my normally sane husband resumes his BFF status with the guys down at Bedford Gravel, making several trips there each weekend to have them fill his pickup truck with dark, moist, sweetpeat mulch.
Admittedly, it's much more efficient than hauling back hundreds of those always split and spilling bags of cedar chips from one or another home center which are always too awkward and heavy to lug to the right spot.  This way, he gets to spend hours standing in his truck, shoveling the mulch out into the wheelbarrow and ferrying it to the next naked spot, painting the hills and flowerbeds with a uniform layer of weed-smothering chips.

Mulched Daffodil beds

I have to confess, it's a very satisfying outcome -- one which appeals totally to my compulsion (largely unsuccessful) towards neatness.  It is possible at the beginning of a gardening season, to delude myself that this year -- finally, THIS year -- we will keep the garden tidy and perfectly groomed all summer long.  And the mulch is the gardening equivalent of a good haircut, manicure and pedicure to get it started.  The lines are clean, all flaws -- a few rocks, the last stray leaves from the fall -- are buried, and there are no weeds.  Just the first spring shoots of daffodils,  tucked into their neatly defined beds.


Mulch is a process, not an event.  It takes a good 4-6 weeks to get everything covered.  After 5 years of doing this, there are spots that now have more mulch than soil on them -- so the new layer gets thinner each year.  There are also some spots where weeds have figured out that they don't actually need to root themselves in the soil, but that they can grow just as happily in the mulch itself.  And then there are always a few good rainstorms that redistribute what Mr. Mulch has so carefully spread -- either covering up the very plants we were trying to protect, or washing down onto the path, to be swiftly carried off to burrows by an army of Martha Stewart-inspired chipmunks.

Daylily beds at the top of the hill

But today, all that is yet to come.  For now, I can admire Mr. Mulch's handiwork, as order creeps over the garden, and the canvas is primed for another bountiful year.

Hydrangea Anxiety

Is it possible that hydrangea are related to wire coathangers?  You know how wire coathangers multiply as soon as the closet door is closed.  Well, it seems as though the hydrangea multiplied while they were hidden by snow all winter.  I honestly didn't recall having THAT many of them -- it's taken me the better part of the weekend to prune them all.  


I have a checkered past when it comes to hydrangea.  For five years I ignored them altogether and they seemed to do just fine.  Then it became clear that a) we would have to relocate several because they had gotten so large they were being scouted by the New York Giants, and; b) I would have to do something to tame the wild bushes they were about to become regardless of where they were planted.  Fortunately, my dear friend Joanne came to the rescue, with a copy of "The Pruner's Bible" -- an almost idiot proof volume that explains how proper trimming contributes to healthy plants and clearly illustrates how to prune just about anything that needs pruning.  "Almost" being the operative word in that sentence.


It wasn't that I couldn't follow the instructions.  Really, I can do what I'm told.  The problem was that there are five different kinds of Hydrangea (arborescens, paniculata, quercifolia, macrophylla, and serrata) and while I could eliminate a couple, I couldn't say definitively which ones were what kind -- having long ago lost the little tags from the nursery that I meant to put in a safe place.  And it's actually kind of important -- because three of those varieties need to be pruned in spring, and the other two need to be pruned after they bloom in the summer.  So I guessed.   And cut them all back rather severely in the spring.  And, as it turns out, that was wrong. Very. Wrong.  They got even with me by producing lots of foliage, but not a single bloom.  


So last spring I didn't touch them.  And we were rewarded with both riotous growth and a wall of blooms.  It was truly impressive.  But I was so caught up in how great they looked that I forgot all about pruning them once the blooms faded.  And then it snowed, and now it's Spring, and they look like this.  A petrified snowball doily forest.  I can't leave them in this state of total neglect.  


As Willy Loman's wife says in Death of a Salesman, 
     "Attention must be paid."  


So, I went back to the Pruner's Bible and re-read it ve-ry-slow-ly, hoping I hadn't totally screwed up another season.  I found a glimmer of hope in this sentence:  "If spring pruning, remove only dead wood, as the majority of its flower buds form on shoots that develop after the plant blooms."  So I tried that, and also removed the petrified doilies, so now the hydrangeas look like this.  As do another 20 hydrangeas scattered throughout different parts of the garden -- including some I swear were not there last year.


I won't know for another month or two whether I've screwed it up again.  But either way, I've now realized that if you want a short wall of hydrangea, plant a variety that stays small -- you can't prune the big guys back into little guys without ugly consequences.  And just as a precaution, I've saved a bunch of those snowball doilies.  Worst case, I'll spray paint them blue and hang them all over my bloom-less hydrangea.

Not Spring Yet...

The last stubborn snow pile on the
Andromeda in the shadiest spot at the rear of the house.

Technically, it's not Spring until Sunday.  That means that since the snow has retreated -- well, in most parts of the garden -- we have two days to finish the Fall cleanup that was interrupted by an early snowfall.  As a result, the anticipation of a new gardening season is tinged with shame upon discovering what slackers we were last October.





Nasty piles of sodden leaves test the vigor of the first spring shoots, forcing them to strain and contort themselves to poke through the wet blanket that January left behind.  

The hellebores seem to be working particularly hard.  Perhaps I shouldn't have cut the old leaves off last week; it was just such a lovely weekend, and my pruning sheers took on a life of their own.  But the result was that the new bracts emerging look as wet and vulnerable as little baby birds.  I know that these are really tough, almost arrogant plants -- toxic to deer and most other critters, arriving early and staying even through the worst summer heat -- and once established, they're pretty indestructible.  But right now, they look like they need to be diapered and swaddled.

Perky little garlic sprouts this
year from fall planting

It's a time for impatience in the garden.  Not impatiens -- they come much later, once it warms up for good -- but for being antsy at what feels like the glacial pace of growing things.  In truth, things are sprouting quickly, but all that does is whet my appetite for full scale blooming and getting the vegetable garden in.  

Sad looking brussel sprouts
 from last year

In our early years of growing veggies, it seemed easier to follow the unofficial rule that "the peas should be in on St. Patrick's Day."  This winter, and several of the recent ones have been so wet for so long, that the only thing we can remotely hope to see in the raised beds by March 17 are the first tentative signs that the garlic we planted in the fall is still alive.  That, and the sad looking brussel sprouts we never got around to harvesting.

Desolate though it may look at this time of year, there's also a clean-slate sense of excitement as we plan the jigsaw puzzle of what gets planted where... and when.  A glimmer of hope that if we move the tomatoes a few beds, maybe the tomato hornworms won't find them this year, though I swear there's a bug newsletter that goes out announcing that "This year, for a limited time only, Hallberg heirlooms are available in beds 3 and 4; broccoli in bed 6."  But more about them next August when I go worm hunting.  For now, it's back to impatience.  As soon as the seeds arrive, we'll start some of them indoors to get a jump on the planting.  For now, we'll clean up the empty beds and plan...

The raised beds, in their pre-season emptiness

Starting at the beginning -- Garden 2011

It's been a very. long. winter.  It started early, burying the garden before I had a chance to do my fall pruning, leaving skeletal rose bushes and still un-harvested brussel sprouts to weather the heavy winter snowfall on their own.  I'm sorry.   I would have tended to you, but Fall ended early and abruptly.


Our back garden is terraced all the way up a steep hill behind the house.  This winter, we had so much snow that it obliterated all contours, steps, and -- to the squirrels' dismay -- any trace of buried stashes of acorns.


By the end of February, my yearning for spring creates a visceral need to see colors.  The snow is gray, the sky is gray, the smell of the earth is gray, and I'm reminded of "The Color Wizard," a book I used to read to my oldest daughter when she was little. It's about a Wizard named Gray who, tired of the dull colors he saw, caught a rainbow and painted everything around him vivid colors, until the only gray, was "The (name) Gray on his door."  I can feel the same need for color -- especially green.

In lieu of the real thing, I obsess over seed and garden catalogs.  Plant porn.  And wait for the snow to melt.  We order herbs, flat Italian beans, bush peas, sugar snaps, broccoli romanescu, and three kinds of eggplant.  And wait. 


Early March rains submerge many of the roads in our area, but clear the garden of much of the snow.  The contours emerge slowly.  Another heavy rain on March 10 and we're down to the last couple of gravely piles of crystalized slush. The temperature edges upwards and then, on an almost - warmish March 12th morning, we are finally able to walk up the terraced steps, survey the damage, look for the slight swelling of buds on hydrangeas and viburnum, and note that we have many buds this year on the rhododendron -- a testament to our persistence in warding off this season's famished and marauding deer.  




And then, I spot the green.  While making the rounds of the various garden beds, there, peeking up between last year's mulch and a few stray decaying leaves: the optimistic tips of crocuses, hyacinths, and tulips.  We will have Spring after all!