49 little seedlings all in a row (well, a square), happy, growing and…nameless. Well, maybe not nameless, per se.

They started out with names. Oddball names like “Japanese Black Trifele” and “Cosmonaut Volkov”. Names that I had found amusing and, knowing my absolutely mind boggleing ability to forget everything, I had written each one down on a neat, line piece of note book paper torn from my son’s notebook.

And as I was writing down those names, I said to myself “Hanna” (and I said Hanna because sometimes in my head I am not so certain who will answer if I do not direct the comments) “Hanna, “ I said, “Get you lazy ass up and go get your laptop and type these seed names and which hole they are into a spreadsheet like you did last year. You won’t lose it.”

I was going to type it into my computer. I really was. Then my youngest son brought home a whole stack of artwork and after I had waxed on to him about his Picasso like ability to fingerpaint, I whisked the stack surreptitiously to the trash when he wasn’t looking. I am fairly certain that my seed list was at the bottom of that pile.

It just goes to show that my second grade teacher did not know what she was talking about. Being a pack rat does indeed pay off as you will never permanently lose anything if you never throw anything away. At least it was not a computer.

So now I have 49 cute but frustratingly similar seedlings glaring at me accusingly. They have no names, no identity and I fear that I will be footing the bill for 49 sessions with the tomato therapist. *sigh* Maybe they can work in group therapy in their Compact Trainer before I transplant them to their individual pots.

It is that time of year (Finally!). It is time to pull out the Tupperware container from the vegetable drawer in the refrigerator (I have two, one for seeds and one for actual vegetables) and plan what will be going into the garden this year.

Then this weekend, I am gonna get my seed starting on.

And I am going to start a whole bunch of seeds… because it is pretty much guaranteed that I will kill half of them. If I start a whole bunch, then sheer statistics say that at least a few will survive to see May.

Unfortunately, according to my handy-dandy Clyde’s Garden Planner Guide (given to me so I could take a little look-see at it) I shouldn’t be starting most of my seeds until mid-April. Eeeek! I don’t think I can wait that long. I didn’t wait that long last year. But, then again, perhaps this would explain my overwhelming ability to fail at seed starting. Maybe I am just too impatient and I am starting too early. Then my poor little seedlings, like children with helicopter parents, are just loved too long to a terrible end.

Nah, that’s bullshit. I just forget to water them or put them in bad soil. Though, if I started them later, there would be less opportunity for me to forget to water them and they might have a better chance.

Looking at the Clyde’s Garden Planner is making me just a bit depressed. It reminds me how far off Spring, Summer and garden grown tomatoes are. There is two feet of snow and I want to believe that it will all be gone by April and the world will once again be a bright and shining garden where rabbits frolic and butterflies flit happily from flower to flower singing a gay and happy song. Way too much time trapped in a house watching Disney movies. Do you see what winter is doing to me? I am turning into one of those scary people who shuffle around, talk gibberish and ask for money. Save me from a fate where I turn into a politician!

I need to start my seeds. I need gardening. I need to grow something!!!!!!!!

So I will start a few seeds this weekend. A handful. A distraction. A bit to keep me going until I can kill them and then start over right when the Garden Planner tells me too.

For the first time in my gardening life, I have managed t clean out the vegetable beds BEFORE the snow started to fall. Which leaves me with an interesting dilemma. What do I do with the beds since there are no dead plants and overly hardy weeds growing in them?

My neighbor says that I should do what she does and cover the beds with clear plastic. I am not so certain about this as I had one of my beds like this for the whole summer in an attempt to solarize the bed. I think all I managed to do was provide a decent greenhouse for super weeds like Canada Thistle and Creeping Charlie. The plastic grew brittle and broke in the sun/rain/cold/drought merry-go-round of a climate we have here.

I could just le it lay fallow. It is a time honored tradition after all. I watched for two decades as the farmers where I grew up followed a plant/fallow/till rotation year after year. But, since I went through the trouble of actually getting the beds clear, I feel like I should be doing something.

And so now I am contemplating cover crops. This fine bit of alliteration is causing more trouble than it needs to. The problem is, what exactly do I plant for a cover crop? The choices are surprisingly dizzying. Rye, winter wheat, clover, hairy vetch and dozens more are available.

The first place I need to start is nitrogen fixing vs. nitrogen using.

Legume cover crops pull nitrogen out of the air and put it into the ground. This is called nitrogen fixing. The cover crops in this group include clovers, hairy vetch, winter peas and alfalfa. These cover crops can help enrich the soil by adding nitrogen to the soil, which is a vital nutrient that plants need to grow.

Non-nitrogen fixing plants include rye, oats, winter wheat, and buck wheat. These don’t add much to the soil while they are growing but they do help to encourage good soil by preventing erosion and keeping the soil from compacting itself.

I am most interested in the nitrogen fixing kind, so I will stick with those.

Cover crops as a whole was a practice that fell out of favor with the invention of fertilizer. I don’t know if you know this, but fertilizer was literally invented because scientists feared that the planet would be unable to feed themselves based on the then current levels of nitrogen fixed in the soil. Fertilizer does put nitrogen back in the soil more quickly and less expensively than cover crops, but as I am a hobby gardener, the economic and time gains are insignificant. Not to mention that cover crops are just nicer for the environment.

Visiting one of my favorite seed purveyors, I see that in the nitrogen fixing side of cover crops they have Austrian Winter Peas, Crimson Clover, Hairy Vetch, Ladino Clover, Lespedeza and Red Clover. The more I think of it, the clover is probably a bad idea. After all, the rest of the year I consider this plant a weed in my beds and lawn. I imagine that it works like vampires. Once you invite them in, they cause all sorts of harm and won’t leave until you put a stake through their heart. And as I do not know where the heart of a clover is, best not to invite them in.

That leaves me with Austrian Winter Peas, Hairy Vetch and Lespedeza. I am intrigued by the sellers promise that Lespedeza will turn poor soil good, like some kind of cover crop evangelical minister but closer inspection shows that this cover crop does not do well in drought. Since I never know when Cleveland will decide that it is a good time to drought, I will avoid it. Hairy Vetch just sounds like something my kids will be putting on as part of a Halloween costume. So, that leaves me with Austrian Winter Peas.

So we will see how it goes. I will see if I will be contemplating cover crops again next year or not.

The fortuitous beauty of last weekend allowed me to clear out half of my vegetable garden. Part of me really wanted to keep the tomato still planted, but the other side of me said “What the hell are you thinking, woman? The weather is good and those tomatoes are now half dead anyway. Do you really want to be doing this is the cold?!?” I really hate cold.

While the tomatoes are still green and alive, for the most part, they will not be producing anymore red tomatoes. I pulled a handful of cherry green tomatoes and thought that was the end. Then I got to the back of the tomato beds…

I am sure you all have areas like this in your garden (or maybe I am alone in this and I am a freak.). Little nooks and crannies where, when the season gets going and the plants get huge, you simply can’t get to. Once the tomatoes were out of the way, I weeded with a fury and found dozens of volunteer tomato plants snaking in and out of the weeds. Nary a red tomato to be found but there were dozens and dozens of green cherry tomatoes.

And being a good Scottish lass, I cannot simply throw those little green tomatoes. I must keep them… for something. I love fried green tomatoes, but the thought of breading and pan frying a few dozen cherry tomatoes is less than appealing. So I am turning to the public at large. Do you have some good recipes for cherry tomatoes? If you do, please post the recipe in the comments. Surely these tomatoes do not need to go to waste!

This year I grew about half of my tomatoes up strings and now that the season is just about over, I have had several people ask me how the system worked for me.

Does it say enough that I will be building the stringing frames over all of m beds next year?

I really can not say enough about them. The method worked great and I can see all sorts of possibilities that start with the tomatoes and run right through peas and beans and right smack dab into squash and cucumbers. I have never had such large plants. One of the tomato plants grew to the top of the line (close to 8′) and then kept growing . I believe the tomato vine reached close to height of 13′ tall if it could stand at attention. While it looked as though it was in need of viagra after it hit the top of the line, there is no denying that the tomatoes liked this kind of support.

One thing that I do need to add is that a single string per tomato is not enough. I ended up adding at least two more strings per tomato once the tomatoes got growing.

The other thing I am really looking forward to is the easy fall cleanup. Snip, pull, done. Quick and easy as a vasectomy.

It makes for a great addition to my small vegetable garden. Give me a little more room for planting, less trouble for storing which means I can be just a little lazier than usual this fall.

Whew… The past two weeks have been just amazingly overwhelming. Children off to school, crazy schedules, weddings, anniversaries, cars breaking down and of course Cleveland weather threatening to destroy the garden in preparation for yet another winter. All in all, this schedule has made me lax in how often I have posted (and I must apologize). And there is so much to post… A few more tomato tasting need to go up, a review of how string up tomatoes worked out for me, bitching about the weather (frost warnings tonight ) and new how to video that is sitting half done on my computer. So much to do and never enough time to do it.

We are in the final stretch here, folks. Mother Nature is evicting Summer and Fall is sitting on the porch with his bags ready to unpack. Yesterday I watch a rain of leave from the black walnuts in our back yard flutter past my back door. The dogwood is tinged with red. And today I was forced to use my 4 year old’s tummy to warm my chilled hands. These are all sure signs that the garden will be dead in two weeks time, maybe less.

How unfair is that? I suppose not at all, really. I do live in Cleveland after all. It is not like cold is not expected. But every year I feel it come earlier and stays later, but this is not the case. The seasons march on as they always have. We march on with them, retreating to seed catalogs and gardening magazines to satisfy the yearning for sun and dirt when the weather takes from us what we love to do most.

Ugh.

Ugh.

Double Ugh.

Damn tomatoes. Damn Green Tomatoes.

I was certain when little baby tomatoes started popping up all over the place (weeks and weeks ago) that I would be in the tomatoes in no time. Obviously the Midwestern Gods of “Thou Shalt Not Be Proud (or Bragging or Say Naner-naner-boo-boo)” read my post on having baby tomatoes and have seen fit to punish me by providing me with hundreds of little green tomatoes and nary a one to eat. I am beginning to feel like I should go get an albatross and throw myself on my vegetable beds and whine alot. It wouldn’t help me much, but melodrama is always a good way to pass the time.

Apparently, I am not the only one who is wanting to eat some tasty tomatoes. SK8 over at Wolfie & The Sneak has created a truly awesome template for tracking your own tomato tastings. She emailed me to let me know she had posted it and I was simply blown away. She is really talented, that one. Anyhoo, if you have tomatoes and you want to keep track of your thoughts about them and look super cool doing so, hop on over and get yourself a copy of the template.

I kind of wish that there was some sort of device I could buy that would make my tomatoes turn red faster. Apparently, there is no such green tomato gadget. So much for modern science, I say. I mean, if you can put a pig heart in a human but you can’t get a tomato to turn green faster, what is it good for?

I know, I know… I am not the only one waiting for red tomatoes, but a fair lot it does me to know that.

*sigh*

Come on tomatoes. As Kermit says, “it’s not easy being green”! I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not easy seeing green either.

I have a tomato. Naner-naner-boo-boo. (And I don’t want to hear it from all you warm weather people who had tomatoes like in March or some other M month. You don’t count. You have freakish weather as far as I am concerned.)

Want to be really jealous? I don’t just have one tomato, I have baby tomatoes on EVERY plant I bought from my eBay connection, TomatoGirl (that’s 12 plants, by the way). I will have tomatoes by July 4th. Mark my words. Here in Cleveland that is a mirical on the level of growing an actual orange.

TomatoGirl hails fromTennessee, so I have no idea why her plants were so much more mature than mine (proper upbringing, I suppose). Her plants are even out-fruiting my neighbor’s, who bought her plants at the local nursery.

I suspect that TomatoGirl grows her plants hydroponically, but maybe she is really just a tomato growing goddess to to be bowed down to. I really don’t know. When you can get tomatoes to fruit and be ripe before July 4th in Cleveland, there is no one who can top you. Either way, I am think that my short lived tomato seed starting days are over. I know greatness when I see it, so why should I try to compete with it?

I think that Hanna’s Tomato Tastings 2007 will be hitting the web sooner than expected. Stay tuned for more details as the develop.

Officially, summer does not start for another two weeks, but if you are a kid or you happen to have one or two (or a few) of the little buggers, chances are summer started for you this week.

School’s out, school’s out. Teacher let the monkeys out. One went East. One went West. One went up the teacher’s… well, you get the picture. All hell’s broke loose and it is called summer.

Lucky me, my monkeys are spending the next several weeks at Grandma’s house. It’s just me, the spousal unit and my garden. Can you say “projects”? I knew you could.

This week marks a big milestone for most gardeners. Chances are, if you haven’t planted the vegetables, annuals, perennials and trees you had planned to (and meant to over the Memorial Day weekend), you had better get them in the ground RIGHT NOW. That ringing sound you hear is not tinnitus, it is just the sounds of frantic gardeners everywhere purchasing the last “must haves” for the season.

Heat is coming and will be coming fast. While we may enjoy the heat for the lovely tomatoes it brings, newly planted plants don’t like it so much.

That being said, this week also marks the start of the ever popular “It might live but if it doesn’t, eh, it was just a buck” season. Mal-Wart’s smiley face is moonlighting and prices at your local nursery or plant shop will be hitting rock bottom starting this weekend. That lovely perennial you just paid $20 for two weeks ago now has a sister sitting on half dead row for $5.

School’s out, sale’s on… Summer is here, ladies and gentlemen. What are you waiting for? Get out there and get gardening.

I think the stars were thinking when they decided the day I would be born. They took one look at my genetic code and said “That there is a human who will need lots of extra gardening related gifts right in the middle of spring. Make sure you schedule her for an April birth. Oh, and make sure she is slated to marry a guy who know that flowers and not diamonds are her best friend.”

And so, some thirty plus years ago I was brought into the world smack in the middle of April. It is a win-win situation. I get plants and gerndening stuff and everybody always knows what to get me.

This year, the hubby got me a fine looking weeping cherry tree, which is something I have wanted for a few years. Up until this year, they were far too expensive for my wallet. Thanks to the late spring frost, all the flowering trees were marked down 50%. Gosh dear, I know we will be growing that tree in our yard for the next decade or two, but its not in bloom now so let’s not buy it. Got to love garden marketing.

In Japan, cherry tree blossoms are called Sakura and are considered to be one of the jewels of the nation. Millions of people have traveled to Japan during the cherry blossom season (which happens to fall right around my birthday) to participate in hanami or cherry blossom viewing. A weeping cherry tree is called shidarezakura.

I am hoping my shidarezakura gets some sakura so I can do some hanami next year. I am going to be darn okorimasu if I don’t get to do some hanami.

While Japan loves all kinds of cherry trees, it has a soft spot in its heart for weeping cherries. They have some weeping cherries that have literally lived for centuries and are now revered landmarks.

Unfortunatly, my little cherry tree won’t live past 20 years. Like many ornamental flowering fruit trees, they are not long lived.

But I don’t care. You make hay while the sun shines and hanami sakura while you have shidarezakura. I’ll enjoy my new little weeping cherry tree for as long as it enjoys being in my garden.