Tata: Bob, would you mind if I blog your photo, crediting you, of course?

Bob: As long as you mention its unusual naughty bits.

Tata: Would you care to write your own description of these naughty bits?

Bob: Today’s flower is the “Mexican Sunflower” or “Torch” (Tithonia rotundifolia). It is a native of Mexico and is usually grown as an annual in North America; it will grow 6 feet tall and butterflies love this flower. Photographed at Solebury Orchards Cutting Garden, Solebury, PA. Enjoy and have a nice day!

Friends who’ve grown potatoes and know I have the attention span of a frazzled gnat assured me the little potato plants would grow, then grow more, then grow some, then go crazier than a liquored-up bridesmaid in a paid-up limo before dying back and needing fallow time for reflection and hardening – in fact, just like that bridesmaid. Her special day will come! Today, I dug my hand into the dirt around some of these plants and didn’t find fingerlings close to the surface. I am not sure what to think.

All along, the blue potatoes, planted on the same day at the same time, looked weeks behind. Today, they look healthy and strong in a way the Yukon Golds never really did. I have high hopes for the little darlings, but I worry. We’ve had a strange spring and summer of wildly uneven rain and heat, and I can’t see what’s really going on with them. What if they’ve got a crush on that greasy boy from French class?

Last week, we had a lightning-quick torrential downpour that turned this lettuce into soup.

Today, storms passed to the north and south of us, but not here, where temperatures in the nineties were complimented by nearly 100% humidity.

All day, I’ve looked skyward and hoped for gazpacho.

Meanwhile, in potato news: all plants topped their towers. The Yukon Golds grow like bossy show-offs, while the Blues hang back a bit. The experiment is still exciting every day.

The potatoes are growing like crazy. Pete says I dumped two full bags of soil into the potato towers in two weeks, but I’m not so sure. I think it might have been more. Today, we picked up another big bag of flower and vegetable soil and after he dumped it into the wheelbarrow Pete read the part of the bag that said it contained manure. “Wear gloves and wash your hands often,” he said. At the time, I was holding a bucket of goo I’d pulled out of the composter and wondering if those weren’t good instructions for me, you know, generally.

I tried a couple of different ways to take these pictures so the height of the leaves above the level of the soil might be more visible, but you might just have to believe me. Some garden store soils feel dense as you shovel them out of the bag but that’s often moisture. The soil often compacts overnight or after a good rain, so while the plants are growing the soil also shrinks back. This has been driving me bats.

This is the same potato tower after the addition of a metric assload of soil mixed with compost plus some shredded leaves. Into the four potato towers I ended up adding about half the bag of soil, raising the height of the soil about five inches.

The last brand of garden soil we used turned out to be a lot more water than it at first appeared. I was having a lot of trouble reaching down into the bag on the ground, grabbing about a cup of soil, dropping it carefully into a tower and repeating the process forty or fifty times; I started to dread remounding the potatoes. Today, I asked Pete to dump the garden soil into the wheelbarrow rather than leave it in the bag. The wheelbarrow offers the distinct advantage of being just below hip height on me, and the mobility didn’t hurt either.

The experiment with the potatoes has delivered a lesson daily. Yesterday’s was that potato-growing success might truly kick my ass. Today: we could use twice as much compost as we generate, perhaps more. The answer might be to get the tenant next door her own composter from which we draw more organic material. In the news: events too large, too terrible and too far away for me to act upon directly. Sometimes, the best I can do is shovel shit and banana peels.

The fiddlehead fern season is about 10 minutes long. Pete and I had chatted about them a few times. He’d cooked them in restaurants a zillion times. I’d never even seen them. In any case, on a more or less annual basis, I’d see an article about how the fiddlehead season was over. I’d twist my mustache, shake my tiny fist at the sky and mumble about next year. Monday, I was in the grocery store, staring at the greens and when I pushed aside a few things, there they were! No price posted. No one nearby. I grabbed a bag and started picking out the firmer ones, just sort of guessing what would be good or bad about the things. A young produce guy appeared next to me – WHOOOOOOSH! – asking if he could be of help. I looked around for a cloud of smoke. NEVER in the thirty years I’ve been shopping there has a produce guy asked if I needed anything. I said I’d like a price, holding up the bag. He said, “Sure.” He looked at the bag. “What are they?” He went to the computer and came back with, “They’re not in there, but they’re like $4.99/lb.” He totally made up a price! At the checkout, the cashier was really curious about them and made me promise to come back and tell her how they turned out. No price turned up in her lists, either, so she accepted the $4.99/lb. guess. Siobhan found them online yesterday for $10/lb., so it may be completely beside the point that parboiled, butter sauteed fiddleheads have a consistency between roasted asparagus and steamed broccoli, and a flavor in the same range. But seriously, now that I’ve tried them, I’m glad we’re growing our own spinach.

Last winter, I shivered and plotted verdant revenge on an unpleasant season; in particular, I dreamed of planting potatoes in differing containers and learning as much as I could about the ins and outs of it. I read up. I researched. I pestered people who grew potatoes at home. I bought seed potatoes and schemed madly. Perhaps I was sitting quietly much of that time, but if I were a Batman villain, we’d be up to the scene with the buzzsaw and color-coordinated flunkies warming up the getaway zeppelin.

For two weeks after we planted the potatoes nothing happened. I worried. I fretted. I wrote pitiful laments. When bold green shoots suddenly appeared, I rejoiced; the shoots soon turned to leaves. The idea was to wait four inches, then cover the stems with dirt and compost so the stems turned into roots. I mounded. I re-mounded. Suddenly, I could not re-mound the soil fast enough and some leaves were almost level with the top of the potato bags and planters. Pete and I realized we had to add some vertical distance for our tubers to travel.

So. We developed a plan. We have no experience growing potatoes, so we’re guessing. We stretched some chicken wire around the inside of the pots and the bags, securing the column with loose wire. Then we draped weed fabric around the sides so we can shovel dirt without it falling out everywhere. I set up the last column today and my arms are covered with wire scratches, but if it works, I’ll hardly miss my epidermis.

Today, Pete and I arrived at the garden center as the clouds burst and torrential rain sent huge carts of flowers sailing across the parking lot. Pete chased one down as I pushed a cart back onto a sidewalk. Hollow-eyed employees, hair dripping onto their faces, apologized to us. When I smiled, they did not smile back. We wondered what’d just happened as rain pounded the canvas roof. We stared around and stared at each other for a few minutes before remembering why we’d come: window boxes and containers. Our space is very limited. We make the most of it with containers we can move from place to place, plant and re-plant, and I’d run out of containers that fit into the window box frames. On a lark, we picked up two strawberry plants we hope won’t join the Choir Invisible like their predecessors, which we refer to as mulch. One of Pete’s clients gave him two odd urns. When the skies cleared this evening, I transplanted the strawberries into the urns and placed them on our front steps.

Later this week, it’ll be time to start the second set of seeds for lettuces, chard, spinach, sorrel and herbs for when the first set has been picked, bolted or suffered some disaster. You can’t rule out incursions by groundhogs or mysterious blight, so: containers, compost, potting soil, seeds. I growl at squirrels.