food

I have achieved both of my New Year’s resolutions for 2025.

The first resolution was to get “some sort of garden” started. I’d been procrastinating on that, because I have big plans for my backyard garden and it all feels complicated and intimidating.

So I started small. I ordered four bare-root Triple Crown blackberry plants and built a wire trellis for them along one side of the house. While I was digging around over there, I also installed a tall gate I’d been wanting.

I spent so much time on the trellis and gate that by the time I got the blackberries into the ground, three of them succumbed to summer heat and grasshoppers before they could get established.

The fourth survived and is doing fine. I’ll use that one to propagate replacements for the other three.

I also planted lemon balm. I’ve never grown lemon balm before, but I love it in tea.

I chose lemon balm in particular because it’s listed as a good companion plant for blackberries, it’s shade-tolerant and I’m told it spreads as aggressively as mint. Its job is to outcompete the musk thistle and other invasive weeds that want to grow in that strip of ground.

I miss cooking with fresh herbs, so in early September I built a raised bed next to the back porch for next year’s herb garden.

I planted some cool-weather greens as placeholders, and made a little mesh tent to keep the birds from eating the seedlings.

Thanks to an abnormally mild fall this year, my little garden has really thrived. Starting with the three-week-old thinnings, it has provided delicious salads every week.

Unfortunately, as the sun moved into the south it started throwing the shadow of the house over the edge of the garden bed. By the end of September, plant growth had slowed wherever the shadow crept over the bed.

But it all kept growing, just slowly.

The salads were still delicious.

By the end of October, the entire bed was in permanent shade, except for maybe an hour in the late afternoons.

By early November, the Swiss chard had developed white leaf spot from not getting enough light…

and the broccoli and kale were showing faint signs of some kind of powdery mildew.

None of this makes them inedible, I just soak them in vinegar water for a while before making salads with them.

But this inconvenient shadow means I can’t use that bed for my culinary herb garden after all. I have to plant something there that can tolerate full sun for half the year and full shade the other half. All I can think of is parsley. Maybe thyme and sage? I’ll have to experiment and see what works.

In mid-September I ordered some garlic, with the vague intention of planting it in the enriched soil that the deceased blackberry plants had vacated. Once it arrived, I realized that spot doesn’t get nearly enough light for garlic, so I ordered a cheap 4-foot round galvanized garden ring for a temporary raised bed until I figure something else out. For $20 I was expecting the metal ring to be flimsy and basically single-use, but I was pleasantly surprised when it arrived. It seems as sturdy and durable as the expensive ones you see in garden nurseries. I planted softneck garlic in one half…

…and hardneck garlic on the other side, but the hardneck garlic only took up a quarter of the bed, so I ordered some shallots and filled out the bed with those.

Most of the green sprouts in those pics are wheatgrass from the straw, but some of the softneck garlic did sprout in the warm fall weather. We have yet to get our first snow, which is highly unusual here for late November.

Of course once I got started, the gardening bug took over my entire brain. My plans for the backyard garden are getting more ambitious by the day, but that’s a topic for another post.

My second New Year’s resolution is…still a secret. Some accomplishments are fragile.