moxiegardener.com

Despite my energy level, I can be a lazy gardener.  In the case of green onions, also known as scallions, this turned out to lead to a great discovery.

Freshly picked green onions are sweeter and crisper than those that have sat in the fridge for a few days.  I generally only pick one or two at  time—whatever I need for dinner that night.

Because green onions like cool weather, I leave them in the ground until just before it freezes.  One fall I left them in the garden just a little too long. (Translation: I was too lazy to pick, wash, and properly store them.)  The ground froze solid overnight and I couldn’t pick them.  I wrote them off.

The following spring I noticed green shoots emerging in the green onion patch.  I’m glad I left them to see what would happen.

From those shoots I picked good sized green onions weeks before I normally would have from spring-planted seeds here in Minnesota.  Since I was experimenting with them anyway, I decided to leave some growing and see what would happen.  I’m glad I did.  Soon they grew flowers and seeds ripened.  They re-seeded themselves and not long afterward I noticed baby green onions growing.

For the rest of the summer I left the small onions and picked the largest first, starting with the two-year-old ones.  They were delicious even though their diameter was much larger than store-bought green onions.

That fall I dutifully covered the un-picked green onions.  Not only did they survive and come up the following spring, but many self-sown seeds survived the winter and germinated in the cool, wet spring weather.

I kept my green onion patch going for four years, until I moved.  In my garden right now I have green onions which I planted from seed last year.  They’ve already flowered and I manually scattered their seeds before snipping off the dried flower heads.  Hopefully some seeds will germinate this summer and some next spring.  Just in case, I saved some seeds and plan to scatter them in the green onion patch in late fall.

The moral of the story?  Sometimes it’s best to do nothing in the garden, because it could magically turn in to something.  Like a perennial green onion patch.

Every garden should have at least one hot and one sweet pepper.  Peppers are easy to grow and aren’t really bothered by pests or diseases.

The worst thing that ever happened to my peppers was the blossoms dropped off without forming fruit.  No problem.  Just use a small paintbrush to manually pollinate the flowers.  It jumpstarts the pepper plant and it begins to grow lots of peppers!

Sometimes peppers won’t keep their blossoms and make fruit if they’re watered too much.  If this happens to your peppers, hold back on watering, except for what Mother Nature provides, and watch the fruits form.

Peppers should receive a weak solution of liquid fertilizer every other week.  Too much fertilizer causes the leaves to grow lush at the expense of setting fruit.

Don’t forget to pick regularly.  If you leave the first few peppers on the plant to turn red it may stop producing.  Pick the first three or four peppers while they’re still green and leave the later ones to ripen to red, yellow, orange or whatever color they will eventually turn.  Pepper plants make a lot of fruit so they’ll be plenty.

I’ve found peppers to be one of the most forgiving vegetables in the garden.  They’re perfect for the beginner and also do very well in pots.  As long as you give peppers a super rich soil they’ll even give you a few fruits in partial shade.  But peppers love hot weather so they’ll do much better in full sun.

Here’s to the mouth-tingling delight of hot peppers!

It’s high summer and wow is it hot!  Time to sit and wait, watch the garden grow, and pick, pick, pick.

In my garden, summer is my laziest time.  After a hectic spring, I can relax and enjoy the beauty.

Everything is mulched so I don’t have to weed.  Water, fertilize, and pick.  That’s what I do in summer.

Ok.  I do other things.  I usually get around to organizing my seeds.  I make sure all the envelopes are sealed and file them by planting season.  Salad and other greens, tomatoes and peppers get their own categories because I grow so many varieties of each.

I try to start some salad greens and cole crops in flats for planting out in mid to late August.  If I’m super busy with other things I’ll keep them inside under lights.  If I grow them on outside, even in the shade, they need water daily, sometimes twice.  Made that mistake before.

One of my favorite garden tools is a sharp pair of scissors.  I use them to dead head flowers, pick beans, and cut the roots off salad greens as I pick them—less dirt makes the greens easier to wash.  While you’re dead heading, don’t forget to use the scissors to cut bouquets of flowers for every room.

Cut your herbs back before they flower and dry for winter use.  They’ll have more flavor because they contain more essential oil before they flower.  Tie in bunches and hang upside down until crunchy.  Strip the leaves from the stems but don’t crush them until you use them in your recipes.  I couldn’t bear to throw away any part of my herbs and I’ve found that the stems add subtle flavor to soups and stews.  Just make sure to fish them out before serving.

Now is the time to dig out the tomato and zucchini recipes collected since last summer.  What better time to experiment with these vegetables than when there are so many of them?

I love, Love, LOVE my garden.  I could talk about it endlessly and gaze upon it for hours.  Every morning I inspect the plants, mentally comparing their size to the night before.  In spring I even use a ruler to measure their overnight growth.  (By midsummer their growth is self-evident.)

I am starting this blog to share my enthusiasm for gardening and to learn from my visitors.

Why “moxie?”  Webster’s Dictionary defines moxie as “energy, pep, knowledge, enthusiasm, courage, and determination.”  These six words encompass my gardening philosophy.

I’ll get back to energy and pep in a moment.

Knowledge refers to the ability to understand your plant’s needs.  Meeting those needs gives you a return on your investment a thousandfold, be it in bloom or in produce.

Enthusiasm is what we all have for gardening or we wouldn’t be here on this blog.

Courage means we aren’t afraid to take a risk.  We’ll plant that untried specimen, try out that just-discovered pest deterrent, or eat that unfamiliar vegetable we grew because we couldn’t resist planting it.

Determination is what makes us, for example, cover up the pole beans with buckets every night and uncover them every morning for a month until they grew enough to climb the poles, out of reach of the rabbit that insisted on eating them.  Sure, I could have put up a fence or covered them with fancy row covers, but that just wasn’t in the budget this year.  My beans will come later than usual, but my determination rescued them from not bearing at all.

Energy and pep are part of the dictionary’s definition of moxie and truly belong in my philosophy of gardening.  If we are to succeed in bringing forth a crop we must expend energy to achieve that.  However, my energy is expended primarily in spring preparing and improving the soil and applying an effective mulch.  This gives the plants a rich fertile soil in which to grow, retains moisture and checks the growth of weeds.  Expend energy in spring and indulge in laziness all summer!

As for pep, it is defined, among other things, as initiative.  What gardener lacks that?