Some of you may recall a post back in May or June when Jake and I planted approximately 3,500 purple potato plants. Ours was to be Peasant Garden 2010. We were going to have enough spuds to feed an army of Proletariats!

Planting potatoes is a fairly straightforward business. A potato is cut into sections, each section must bear an eye, or sprout.  Only non hybrid spuds can be used (in other words, planting potatoes from the grocery store won’t work). Plant the spud in the dirt, sprout side up–or is it down? Does it matter?   And prepare for a season of purple mashed potatoes.

Unfortunately, between the pregnancy, delivery and the lockdown that is mommyhood, Peasant Garden 2010 turned into an unruly mass of weeds devoid of anything resembling care.

But we’re not a couple of yokels that lets work go to waste. Oh no!  A few days ago, Jake and  I tore up the weeds and tilled the parched soil, on the hunt for our precious spuds.  And we found a motherload.

These will go in our root cellar.

The only problem with digging up purple spuds in a woefully neglected garden?  The potatoes tended to be smaller than the cut segments we planted!!!

So we’re calling these miniature purple potatoes.  Does their puny size justify the planting?  At first, I thought not.  But after tossing them with olive oil, salt and pepper and roasting them at 400 degrees, I am inclined to say MMMMmmmm.

This was the first nice weekend we’ve had since forever so I blew off work and spent all day Saturday preparing my nine raised beds for a spring planting.  To prep the soil, I headed down to the chicken coop and scooped up 3 bucketfuls of nitrogen-rich chicken droppings.

This is where the chickens have called home since January (the mobile Hen Hut turned out to be way too cold to properly house them over the winter so we moved them to the coop/barn.)  I like to keep a clean, sparse coop. Here, you’ll notice the stacked laying boxes, a hanging feeder and their makeshift wooden roost. The white bucket is full of poop. The floor is covered with fresh cedar chips.

If you’ve ever spent any time in a chicken coop, you’ll notice that some coops have a very strong ammonia smell. This is not healthy for the birds. It could even be toxic. It means that their poop is off-gassing; there’s nothing to absorb the noxious fumes of the turd build-up, which could make the birds sick.  This is why it’s essential to layer wood chips or some other source of carbon to facilitate the breakdown of the poop, which also absorbs the chemical smell. And wood chips mixed with droppings are really, really good for a garden.

A 2-for-1 chore: Cleaning the coop AND collecting compost for the garden

Chicken droppings are among the best forms of compost there is; vegetables need nitrogen to grow, and chicken scat is positively loaded with it. In fact, chicken poop is SO nitrogen-heavy, it can actually burn the plants if the poop isn’t given a chance to thoroughly dry out first.  To be honest, I’m not sure the chicken scat I collected was thoroughly dried, but I took my chances anyway. (That’s the one thing I’ve learned about gardening: You can read all the books you want, and listen to all the advice in the world, but at the end of the day, you gotta go with your instincts and work with what you have when you have it!)

Next, I turned my gardeners loose on the raised beds. Chickens love, LOVE, LOVE to kick and scratch in dirt looking for all sorts of yummy larvae that have bedded down for the winter. Not only does this action aerate the soil — nature’s way of tilling — but the chickens rid the beds of beetle eggs and other nasties that might otherwise invade vegetable plants.

(FYI, the protein from bugs are what makes farm-fresh eggs taste so good and give the yolks that deep golden hue. Factory farm birds, on the other hand, don’t get to eat their natural diet, which is why their eggs taste so bland and watery and the yolks are the color of margarine.)

While the birds went to town on the beds, I dug up in another bed 6 fat parsnips and 3 huge turnips I planted LAST FALL, which we roasted for dinner last night. Mmmmm.

Each bird claims her own bed.

After the chickens had their fill, I then tilled in a few shovelfuls of my scat compost to each raised bed.  I tried not to add too much just in case some of the poop was still too fresh.

I’m going to give the soil a few days to rest, then I’ll plant my spring garden:  Sugar snap peas, snow peas, kale, spinach, leeks, turnips, radishes and onions.

I can’t believe it’s garden time already. Hooray!

It’s hard to believe but planting season is right around the corner.  I’m already looking forward to plots of bountiful leeks, peppers, sugar snap peas, and hot, hot, hot chilies of all persuasions.

As I’m sure it was for a lot of Americans, 2009 was a grim year for me financially. So I’m having to cut back on my seed buying this year. Which isn’t such a terrible thing because last year, my gardening collective and I — the Violet Femmes — ended up buying way, way, WAY too many seeds. I still have leftover leeks, sugar snaps, beets, radishes, fennel, celery root, parsnips, okra….you name it, I have it save for the basics like tomatoes, cucumbers and melons.

Plus I’m pregnant. And 50 additional baby chicks are due to arrive June 1. As ambitious as I am, how much gardening am I really going to have time for once all 51 babies arrive early summer?  So I’m thinking a small garden is the name of the game this year, supplemented by a CSA.

Have you started thinking about your 2010 garden?

Mmmm, a steaming bowl of fiber.

The other day, I was lamenting my dismal heirloom tomato crop and generally bemoaning the fact that gardening, for all its rewards, can be a big waste of time when things don’t work out.  But me being me, I didn’t think to say a word about all the veggies in my garden that are doing very well. For one, broccoli.

I plant broccoli every year, and every year it’s a big let down. Either the catepillars get to them before I do, or the weather becomes too hot too quickly (broccoli is a cool weather plant), or the broccoli gods simply do not wish to shine on me. But I went ahead and put in 12 broccoli plants anyway, figuring, maybe this year I’ll get lucky.  Sure enough, for the first time in four years, I hit the broccoli jackpot.  My broccoli crop has exploded. Every morning for the past two weeks I’ve been picking  a head a day.

Which means that I’ve been eating a lot of broccoli.  More than I can handle. Last night, I chopped three pounds of it and made an easy cream of broccoli soup, courtesy of The Joy of Cooking.

The directions:  Melt a tablespoon of butter with 1/4 cup chicken stock. Add an onion and cook for 5-10 minutes. Add some white wine, 5 cups of chicken stock, and a bunch of chopped broccoli, including the stalks (which is where the bulk of the nutrients are). Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for 20 minutes.  Puree in batches in a food processor, and return to the pot. Stir in 1/4 cup whipping cream, and season with white pepper and salt.  Garnish each bowl with freshly chopped dill and scallions.  If you want an extra shot of creaminess, stir in a spoonful of sour cream.

It was fantastically fibrous. And delicious.

That’s the thing about gardening: It’s a numbers game.  Just when you think you know a plant, such as tomatoes and eggplant (another crop that’s sucking bigtime for me this year), you realize you don’t know much about them at all. This is why I recommend planting way more vegetables than you think you need and a large variety because invariably something will not work out, while others will defy expectations.

I call this strategy “maintaining the gardener’s mental equilibrium,” because otherwise a feeble-minded gardener like yours truly would go nutters.

I planted 30 gorgeous heirloom tomato plants this spring, and exactly half are dying. I don’t understand it! Are they thirsty? Are they drowning? (It’s almost impossible to tell the difference at first.) I’m inclined to go with the latter given all the rain we had this spring. The roots never had a chance to dig down and thrive.

And to think of all the hard work I put into those plants. Working in the hot sun, digging holes, pruning them, watering them (that was what probably killed them!), suffering dirty finger nails and soil-covered knees….and for what??? To have my tomato dreams ripped away from me, that’s what.  I was so looking forward to canning truckloads of heirlooms, all varieties, and eating ratatouille until it came out my ears, I was even going to preserve homemade pizza sauce. Yes, I am that domestic, people! If you come too close to me, I may try to bedazzle you a sweatshirt. A bedazzled tomato sweatshirt.  And lets not forget the annual tomato toss across my front lawn.

Is it any wonder people buy their tomatoes in cellophane at the grocery store?  Allow me to be clear:  Gardening is a big pain in the butt full of disappointment and sorrow.