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All That Was Learned in a Season of Herb Gardening

Published on December 4, 2025December 5, 2025 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

Adelma did not let us down. In her 1964 book, Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, she assured readers that certain types of herbs would grow in sun-dappled shade gardens. And she was not wrong. Herbs did grow. Flowers did form. And I did clip and cook my way through the summer. Just not quite in the way that I had anticipated.

If you are joining us for the first time, this post is part of a series started back in January 2025, about building an herb garden from scratch inspired by the horticultural wisdom of New England herbalist, Adelma Grenier Simmons (1903-1997). Catch up here for a proper introduction to Adelma and the inspiring gardens that she built at her Connecticut home, Caprilands over the course of the 20th century.

In January, when planning and preparations were underway for the start of our first-ever herb garden at 1750 House, I had visions. As I sketched out the location map of what herbs would go where and which companion plants would best be suited side-by-side, in my mind, the herb garden of summer 2025 would be eye-high. Right in step with the 5-foot tall foxglove success story of past gardening endeavors.

Emboldened by those towering giants of the woodlands that had been grown in the greenhouse from the smallest of seeds, I had visions that the herbs would grow equally tall. I had visions of their delicate petals swaying in the breeze. Of their foliage tinted in all the greens. I had visions that they’d make a home in and around the foxglove and create an undulating palette of soft colors. A cottage collection. A fully filled out bed.

The snow-covered greenhouse in January 2025

While the ground was still frozen and snow-covered, I could see a full garden, busy with birds and bees and butterflies floating here and there. I could see the feathery chervil, the wave of parsley, the white petaled chamomile, the flax, the forget-me-nots, the dill, the lavender, the calendula. When the garden was covered under an ice-slick snow sheet, and I was starting seeds indoors, I had visions of deep summer in the herb garden. Hazy light, hot temperatures, the greenhouse surrounded by a vibrant and verdant utopia racing skyward to meet its peaks. I could see the bee balm on the right, the nasturtiums climbing a trellis on the left, and the foxgloves trying to out-stretch them both. I could see the savory, the sage, the oregano, the thyme creeping and heaping their way around the garden floor. As I collected seed packets in my garden tote in the weak light of winter, I imagined, months later, collecting herbs in a kitchen basket slated for summer meals made possible by the summer garden.

Back in January, bundled up in sweaters and scarves, I could anticipate the warm-weather blog posts. The recording of each new herb as it is unfurled week by week, month by month, all summer long. The sharing of what things looked like, smelled like, tasted like. The chamomile, the dill, the calendula. The mint, the basil, the cumin, the thyme. The unfolding of each new flower, each new leaf, day by day. They’d be blog posts that would practically write themselves, not because of AI (something I never use here on the blog) but because the herbs made it easy under Adelma’s experienced guidance and thoughtful instruction. I had visions.

Wrapping up eight months of gardening experience in one blog post is a lot to ask of a reader’s attention. So, in order not to make this post eighty miles long, I’m going to truncate a lot of what happened during the growing season. This is not an attempt to skirt over the challenges, of which there were many, and only to shine light on the successes. But building an herb garden, as I have learned this summer, is a bit like watching a tree grow minute by minute. Not a lot happens. And to be completely honest, not a lot happened for months.

When the seedlings grew strong and hearty indoors all through cold, snowy, rainy February and March and April, I knew they were off to a good start. The calendula was spilling over the sides of the seed tray on one end, while chamomile was mounding so full and lush on the other end, it was difficult to see the individual cell blocks from which they sprouted.

In May, everything headed out for planting. Optimism was high as all the seedlings were tucked into their pre-planned beds alongside their pre-planned companions. The summer garden visions were swirling with each dip of the spade into the soil. The cilantro next to the parsley, the flax next to the nasturtiums, the bergamot behind the feverfew, the oregano in front of the coleus, the echinacea before the fence. On and on, the digging and planting went all the way around the greenhouse. Three full sides layered in seedlings that would reach graduated heights of up to 5′ feet to match the foxglove. The shortest in front and the tallest in back.

Parsley seedlings adjusting to their new bed.

Once planted, every seedling got its own individually made wire cage for protection from rabbits, deer, squirrels, and other wild creatures that might find a newly planted herb garden especially enticing. For about a week, things were good. The herbs settled in and seemed to be happy in their new spots. The branches of the trees overhead were leafing out, and the sun was doing its dappled dance. The visions were coming to life.

Then the cold snap came. The weather turned wet and winter-like for weeks. Memorial Day weekend was rained out with a nor’easter, not bringing snow, but rain and high winds and 40 degree days. By Mid-June, I was still doing gardening chores wearing a wool turtleneck sweater and jeans.

Despite the unusually cool start to spring, the 22-foot tall Japanese maple unfolded in its normal fashion, but instead of last year’s canopy, it reached an extra 24″ inches in length this year. This sent branches half-way across the greenhouse on one side and further into the front yard on the other side.

This spring… the growth-spurt of the red japanese maple in the top left corner.

By July, a deep shade took over the whole left side of the greenhouse. The seedlings in that bed were the first to disappear. The nasturtiums, long and leggy already at just a month old, were eaten down to the ground in an afternoon’s timeframe. The cilantro, parsley, chives, and flax were next. All consumed by some mysterious creature, neither rabbit nor deer, but something smaller that could fit through the wire cages and snack away. My guess was that it was most likely the work of slugs, cut worms, and caterpillars who had made their presence known in other beds in years past, and who like to eat in the off hours when no one is watching. By the end of July, what was once a tender patch of steadily growing seedlings was now a framework of protective cages and bare dirt, with not an herb in sight.

Luckily though, as an experimental year, I planted herbs in several places around the garden, not just the greenhouse, so that we could see in which areas they grew best with varying lights of shade vs. sun. The reliable foxgloves in the front bed of the greenhouse grew to 5 feet and bloomed in shades of pink, purple, and white.

The foxglove seedlings in the back behind the greenhouse were squashed and trampled over by squirrels enroute to the birdfeeder and eventually were crushed to a papery pulp. The herbs on the right-hand side of the greenhouse (with lighter shade and much more sun-dappled conditions) fared far better but remained short and seedling size for months.

Although this photo above was taken in late June, the plants never really got much bigger than this over the next 60 days. Each formed their own little clump, but never branched out enough for one to meet the other, which was my initial idea in order to create a full garden. The mystery pest got the best of the herbs on the far edges of this bed too… the echinacea, the bergamot, the chives, and the chervil, but left the lemon balm, the oregano, and the feverfew alone. As an herb that symbolizes protection and new beginnings, I immediately loved the fortitude of the feverfew. Planted all around our pup Indie’s headstone, as a way to safeguard her spirit and to mark a new chapter, it was encouraging to see that it was now protecting the neighboring herbs too.

Every week, I kept waiting for something spectacular to happen: for something to catch a growth spurt and shoot up tall. But throughout the entire summer, all the seedlings that had been planted in early spring remained short and compact. Despite the organic compost laid in a thick blanket, despite the weekly waterings, and despite the regular fertilizer feedings, the herbs kept to a mercifully slow schedule. Meanwhile, the rest of the vegetable and flower gardens all around 1750 House flourished.

A small portion of the backyard vegetable garden in late July. This photo includes tomatoes, peppers, basil, corn, nasturtiums, winter squash, melons, beans, kale, artichokes, and collard greens.

In Adelma’s summer chapter of Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, she recommended two options in regard to feeding herbs: a commercially available (mid-20th century) fertilizer containing a 23-21-17 ratio and a homemade version of manure tea. While there are several horse and cow farms in our surrounding area, I have yet to see if any of these farms offer organic manure for sale, so I opted for the latter. The exact makeup of the commercial fertilizer that Adelma had recommended, is no longer available in that specific configuration anymore. I wound up making my own fertilizer combination comprised of organic seaweed, bone meal and banana peel water which was the closest I could get to mirroring her nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio.

Finally, when the end of August approached, a growth spurt occurred. The herbs in the greenhouse bed started spreading out wide, but not high. The tallest herb was the lemon balm, measuring in at 5 1/2 inches in height, about 19″ inches shorter than what it should typically be. So you can see that things were not exactly ideal in this area of the garden, but they were at least improving slightly.

At the end of summer, the feverfew filled out and a perennial foam flower plant was added to replace the forget-me-nots.

Just as the lemon balm and feverfew started fluffing out, the tiniest of forget-me-nots bloomed. It was one single flower of dainty proportions and the the prettiest shade of blue, a color not that common in the garden beds here. As a spreading perennial, it was a hopeful sign that they were establishing themselves. That the herb garden might be turning a corner towards long-lasting success. The photo is not so great, but the flowers really were lovely.

Later in the week, bunnies ate the anemone. The mystery pest came back too and ate the forget-me-nots, flower and all, and then ate the bergamot for dessert.

As a true experimental garden, I didn’t interfere with any of the plants, but just observed their progress, keeping notes, and taking photos on what survived and what didn’t and in what location with what amount of sun. When I sketched out the garden in January, I paired all the seedlings with their most ideal companion plantings based on compatibility, size, structural composition, and color so that everything harmonized and flowed together. When companion planting, there’s the added benefit that these specific pairings “help” one another, whether it’s underground adding additional nutrition via their roots or above ground adding protection or distraction from various pests. This step of the planning process is pretty intensive because many things can’t be planted next to each for lots of varied reasons. Add in additional factors like water, soil, and sun requirements, and this placement-of-the-herbs exercise turns into a puzzle on paper best executed with a pencil and a sizable eraser. It took many days to get the garden plan correctly mapped out over winter. What I didn’t plan for though was Santiago.

Santiago, the twenty-one-year-old wonder cat this summer.

In early September, on a beautiful sunny Sunday, Santiago, our 21-year-old cat, said a peaceful goodbye to life at 1750 House. Maybe nature worked in our favor over the summer leading up to the moment when we laid Santi to rest in the spot in the greenhouse garden where the anemone once stood. It was an ideal new home for Santi. Near his favorite rock with the hollowed out middle that became his outdoor water bowl, it was also close to his pal, Indie, with full view of the bird feeder and the woodlands and all the wild creatures that sparked his curiosity each and every day since he arrived a southern cat in a northern land.

Back in January, penciled in around the anemone were pink and white echinacea, foxglove, lemon balm, parsley, mint, chives, and oregano. Now in reality, in September, Santiago’s inclusion in the garden inspired something different. A new vision. One that transformed this side of the greenhouse into a brand-new kind of garden altogether. Instead of an entire bed filled with herbs with a foxglove end cap, a new celebration garden was coming into light. One that represented joyful memories in the form of plants. One that captured the engaging spirits of our long friendships with a ten pound cat and the most enthusiastic pup on the planet. The foxglove, feverfew, and lemon balm will stay, but in place of adding other herbs, next spring, I’ll be adding flowers and shrubs suited to shade that carry reminders of Indie and Santiago. Instead of a bed for scented herbs, it will become a bed of sentiment, which is not unlike how colonial gardens were built in America in the first place.

Faced with not much time left in the growing season to start something new, the winter offers the opportunity to think about the perfect plant to represent Santiago, this marvelous little friend we’ve known for two decades. I don’t know quite yet what companion will join him, but I do know that it will be a dramatic standout flower amongst the herbs, just like Santiago was a dramatic standout kitty amongst cats.

Two ideas I’m considering at the moment… black peppermint and the black aeonium called Zwartkop, pictured above.

In the other experimental herb garden beds, challenges and triumphs ebbed and flowed with the swell of the season. The second location was a full-sun bed in the front yard that surrounds a 100-year-old maple tree.

The bed was vacant when we moved in, except for three clumps of rusty-red daylilies planted years ago by a previous owner.

The daylilies – a gardener’s joy at 1750 House from year’s past.

To celebrate the full sun location and to compliment the color palette of the daylilies, I planted the whole bed in shades of yellow and orange with a touch of pale pink. Calendula, yarrow, and blackberry lily seedlings were planted between coral bells, sweet potato vines, cosmos, and zinnias.

The calendula were the winners in this bed since they made it to full flower and kept flowering along with the cosmos and zinnia from June to November. The calendula formed little bushes of sticky leaves and multiple flower shoots. Had I planted about twice as many, they would have filled out all the bare spots in the bed completely. The yarrow and blackberry lily took the whole summer to establish themselves, but by September they both sported long leaves, so I’m hoping they’ll over winter with healthy vigor and really take off next year.

The third bed was also planted in full sun, but because of this year’s extending tree canopy, it turned out to be covered by partial shade once all the leaves unfurled in early summer. Since this bed, tends to dry out more quickly, it was the ideal spot for the Mediterranean herbs (lavender, rosemary, thyme, oregano, cumin, and sage) along with winter savory, dill, garlic, chamomile and one brussels sprout added for encouragement and nitrogen sharing. Most everything did well in this bed, except for the garlic which grew lovely, long green leaves but never formed actual bulbs, and the cumin which flopped over in the cold weather of spring and never really rallied after that. Like the greenhouse beds, everything planted here remained small and compact but looked healthy and happy. In August, the chamomile flowered for the first time, sending up two fragile little blossoms. Days later, in the early morning when I came out to water, all eight of the chamomile mounds and the dill were eaten down to nubs.

The last of the herb beds, located on the other end of the backyard from the greenhouse, contained basil and and another batch of nasturtiums. These beds were in partial shade last year, but turned out to be in full sun this year, due to a large tree that fell far back in the woods last autumn. That opened up a bit of a sun spot in the tree canopy overhead that was fortuitously in the direct path of our vegetable beds. Planting seedlings in spring when the trees were still bare, I had no idea this sun spot was going to be available, but it made it a banner year for everything growing in that section of the yard, basil included. Racing right alongside the pepper plants, the basil grew over two feet tall and produced leaves as big as my hand.

The nasturtiums, a reliable favorite for the past four years, thrived in the same way. Grown from seeds I collected from last year’s nasturtium harvest, this was the first time I had tried growing new flowers from the previous year’s stock, a recommendation from my fellow New England Instagram gardening friend, Karen. The vigor of the nasturtiums in this sunny bed, which bloomed and crawled for a full seven months, more than made up for the nasturtiums that were eaten by the mystery pest on the left side of the greenhouse in early spring.

This photo was taken early on in the season, but by October the nasturtiums were climbing all over the squash trellis, our lemon tree, the floxglove, the bush beans and the pea trellis

Their enthusiasm inspired more seed saving adventures. Not only from the nasturtiums again, but also from vegetables we grew this summer and from two native herbs, Joe Pye and Queen Anne’s Lace, collected from a neighborhood park. It’s going to be fun to see how (and if) these will grow here at 1750 House next spring.

Queen Anne’s Lace at our neighborhood park

A field of dreams… hundreds of Joe Pye not far from the Q.A. Lace

The final gardening trial in my experimental year involved starting four different types of herbs again in early September. This time, seeds were started in individual pots and in a raised bed, both placed in full sun locations in the back yard. I chose chervil, parsley, dill, and cilantro to experiment with since these are all cool weather lovers and since all four never made it to maturity in other in-ground areas of the garden. The chervil and parsley were planted separately in small pots, one plastic and one terracotta. The cilantro, dill, and a second batch of chervil were planted side by side in a raised bed that had previously been home to lettuce and mini melons, both of which thrived over the course of the summer.

I was interested to see if these containers and bins made a difference in the overall vigor of the plants and also interested to see what challenges might affect the herbs in this new arrangement. Within a week, all the herbs had sprouted from seed. The chervil in the garden pot made it to flowering stage, but still remained much shorter than its traditionally intended size. The parsley filled out its pot. The trio in the raised bed grew quickly too. All three spread out and up but the chervil and dill remained short and low. The cilantro grew taller and fanned out beautifully, like a bouquet. None of the herbs in the pots or the raised bed were affected by pests.

Raised bed with dill (left), chervil (center), and cilantro (right).

As of this first week in December… there are still green herbs in the garden: in every bed from the greenhouse to the front yard to the backyard. Already tucked in to their winter blankets (aka mounds of leaf mulch surrounding them but not covering them) they made it through their first snow/sleet/ice storm on Tuesday and look just as happy as they did on the days when the temperatures were 50 degrees and sunny. This makes me so hopeful that in starting an herb garden in 2025 with Adelma’s guidance, enough healthy groundwork has been laid for many of these herbs to overwinter and start anew again in 2026.

This experimental year proved to be so valuable in so many ways. Not only did I learn first-hand about the growing conditions for herbs at 1750 House, but I learned about how our landscape changes year by year. I learned that shade is good but sun is better. That parts of the garden need more protection from wildlife. That a sizable list of herbs will have a permanent home in the gardens here going forward. And I was reminded that gardening is a journey. That it takes not just one year, but many years and lots of patience and practice to establish a full, lush and vibrant herb garden.

This project also extended itself way beyond the landscape at 1750 House too. Throughout the course of the year, I connected with several new blog readers from around the globe who are also interested in herb gardening. I visited a very inspiring large-scale herb garden that’s about to celebrate its 30th birthday, and I received a lovely invitation to visit the Coventry Historical Society in Coventry, Connecticut, which houses a small collection of herbs from Adelma’s gardens along with some of her personal artifacts.

So while my winter time visions of early 2025 did not come to life in the exact way I thought they might, the herb garden bloomed in many other ways. Because this was just the starting point of what I hope will become a long-standing garden feature here at 1750 House, stories about Adelma and the herb garden adventures will be continuing on the blog throughout 2026 too. There’s so much more to discuss, including notes on caring for a batch of herbs that were brought indoors to overwinter, recipes from Adelma’s kitchen, a recipe for a homemade salve made from the calendula flowers that grew in the front bed, the neighborhood seed saving experiments, and features on both a trip to the Coventry Historical Society and the 30 year old herb garden. All these stories and more will be coming to the blog over the course of 2026.

In the meantime, our herbal education continues.

Cheers to Adelma for making this garden experience feel like a real experiment. Cheers to all the herbs for teaching us everything we needed to know when it comes to growing new life at 1750 House. And most importantly, cheers to Santiago, who gave us far more than just a mere 21 years together. Long live the garden you’ve inspired.

The Greenhouse Diaries 2025 : Meet Herbalist Adelma Grenier Simmons – Our Inspiration for the Year

Published on January 31, 2025 by In The Vintage Kitchen2 Comments

Snow is on the ground, freezing rain is in the forecast, and our first seedlings have just sprouted. It is officially time. The Greenhouse Diaries are back for a whole new year of growing adventures, experimental gardening, and wit and wisdom from some of the most interesting gardeners of the past three centuries.

If you are new to the blog, this series started in December 2022 as a way to chronicle our horticultural endeavors as we build up the heirloom gardens surrounding 1750 House with the help of our 4’x6′ polycarb greenhouse.

With two full growing years behind us and lots of trial and error, we are now at the stage where we pretty much understand the general garden design and layout we want to achieve, the capabilities we are working within, the location of beds, the soil, the sun, the shadows cast by the tree canopies, and the wildlife that both helps and hinders some of our ultimate goals.

Each year, we establish a theme in January based on inspiration from a vintage garden book that helps set the direction for the next twelve months and organizes the project list. While the overall garden plan has changed quite dramatically since we first moved in in the spring of 2022, the Diaries have helped define and redefine expectations, capabilities and desires.

First bouquet from the greenhouse – winter 2023.

In Year One, hot off the trail of sixteen years of city and country gardening in the hot and humid South, we were keen on testing the greenhouse’s ability to grow an array of vegetables, herbs, and flowers during our first New England winter, all inspired by the writings of Katharine Sergeant Angell White and her 1977 book Onward and Upward in the Garden.

In Year Two, we embraced perennials native to the East Coast that would provide a pleasant aromatic scent to the garden across all four seasons, thanks to the 1977 book The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell.

While we gleaned valuable information in both years and grew the garden successfully in many exciting directions, last year’s theme presented so many challenges that it made us rethink the perfumed garden altogether. In place of twelve new additions to the garden, we only added five… three bare-root witch hazel trees, a patch of perennial viola flowers, and a pot of Nemessia on the porch that slugs eventually enjoyed all the way down to tiny little nubs. The idea of planting an aromatic garden, while fun in theory taught us a lot about the realities of working within the confines of a Northeastern landscape. As we have come to learn, gardening successfully in New England means recognizing and embracing the seasonality of the landscape. And that means in winter, the natural world rests.

While it is not a problem to acquire twelve aromatic plants in a year, it was difficult to acquire them on a month-by-month basis in keeping with the Diaries’ month-by-month writing/gardening schedule. We discovered last year that most growers with aromatic inventory won’t ship to our neck of the woods until late spring or after early fall to ensure a successful growing experience. Our own favorite local nursery closes down completely from the end of December to mid-March and larger garden retailers in our area start to remove outdoor plant inventory by the end of July.

This left a limited window of opportunity to plant a dozen new varieties which didn’t match up well with a month-by-month writing schedule. That being said, The Fragrant Year was set aside a third of the way through 2024 and the greenhouse became a holder for a hodge podge of succulents, herbs and experimental seedlings for the rest of the year. Too fun of an idea to let it go, we haven’t seen the last of the Fragrant Year project though. It will come back with a more appropriate planting schedule at some point in the next few years. In the meantime, the now-established witch hazels and violas planted last spring will represent the scented garden for now as we turn our attention to our new, much more accessible garden project for 2025.

January 2025 flower buds on the witch hazel

This year, our gardening endeavors involve building a perennial herb garden with the help of Adelma Grenier Simmons (1903-1997) and her book Herb Gardening in Five Seasons published in 1964.

Adelma was considered a definitive authority on herb gardening in the United States during the mid-to-late 20th century. A Vermonter by birth, in 1929 at the age of 26, Adelma purchased a rundown 18th-century farmhouse on fifty acres in Coventry, Connecticut with the idea that she and her parents would start a dairy farm selling cheese and butter made from their own herds of cowsa and goats. She called the farm Caprilands, which literally means goatlands in Latin.

Adelma Grenier Simmons in 1935. Photo courtesy of the Hartford Courant August 01, 1935. Photo by John Haley

Soon discovering that running a dairy while also maintaining a full-time job as an international buyer for a Massachusetts department store left little time to do both jobs well. Adelma began to rethink her farming dreams. Inspired one day by a walk up to a rocky hill on her land, feeling the sun’s warmth on her face and watching it move across a patch of scrubby terrain, Adelma’s thoughts turned to recollections of earlier travels to Europe and the beautiful herb gardens that decorated a similar landscape. An idea struck.

By the early 1950s, the Caprilands Herb Farm was well established and Adelma was on her way to becoming the foremost authority on herb gardening in America. Welcoming visitors from around the world, Adelma gave tours of the grounds and the gardens. She also taught classes, organized workshops, and hosted teas and luncheons at Caprilands for anyone interested in learning more about growing, cultivating, cooking, and collecting these multi-faceted plants.

1970s postcard of Adelma’s 18th century Connecticut home – Caprilands

Eventually, Adelma became known as America’s “First Lady of Herbs” and was credited with igniting the country’s interest in herb gardens. In addition to educating the public at home, Adelma also lectured extensively around the country, into her late 80s, inspiring generations of gardeners with her knowledge of herbal horticulture, history, and symbolism. The gardens at Caprilands contained between 200-300 different varieties of herbs at any given time and from them, Adelma preserved stems and stalks in dried bouquets and living wreaths, saved seeds, seasoned food, and wrote extensively on their presence in horticulture, history, cooking and decorating. Her farm became both a learning center and a bustling business spreading the joy of herb gardening around the world.

Adelma Grenier Simmons photographed in October 1984 by Don Heiny. Photo courtesy of Find A Grave.

When she passed away in 1997 at the age of 93, Adelma’s estate went into probate and got tangled up in legal matters preventing her ultimate wishes of turning the property into an educational resource center permanently open to the public. The legal battles, which lasted over two decades, eventually resulted in Adelma’s house being sold, dismantled, and relocated to upstate New York where it was rebuilt for a private buyer.

1970s postcard of one of the 30 different herb gardens at Caprilands

While Caprilands and the incredible herb gardens that surrounded it are now a thing of the past, thankfully Adelma was a prolific writer who shared much of her knowledge and enthusiasm for herbs in over four dozen books and innumerable pamphlets. In the 1960s, Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, kicked off her writing career. Covering spring, summer, fall, winter, and Christmas (the fifth season), Adelma’s book tackles just about every bit of information you would need to start, maintain, and build upon an herb garden of your own.

Garden layouts, botanical drawings, black and white photographs, recipes, and poetry fill the pages of Herb Gardening in Five Seasons while also providing detailed information on seventy-seven different plants, an herbal dictionary, and a pronunciation guide. One of the things I love most about Adelma’s book are the lists in the back that organize groupings of herbs by name according to specific situations… Herbs for Bees, Herbs for Dry Soil, Herbs for a Meditation Garden, Herbs to Grow as Hedges, Herbs for Tall Accent, Herbs for Sun-Filtered Shade, etc. It’s that latter list that interests me most since the majority of the garden spaces at 1750 House are bathed in partial shade throughout most of the peak growing months.

When I first discovered Herb Gardening in Five Seasons at a local book sale, a woman next to me asked if I had heard of Adelma. When I said that I had not, she proceeded to tell me a story about the time she went to a luncheon at Caprilands and about how Adelma had served the biggest salad bowl she had ever seen stuffed to overflowing with nasturtium flowers freshly picked just hours earlier. The woman said it was the prettiest salad she had ever seen, let alone eaten. Right then, I knew the book was bound for life and library at 1750 House. Thinking about how well the nasturtiums have grown each summer in the gardens here and the fact that her book includes not only gardening advice but also recipes too, it seemed like Adelma was the perfect teacher to assist us this year in our efforts to create a permanent herb garden.

It wasn’t until after I was home that I noticed that Adelma had inscribed the book to a previous owner. To Carol, it reads… May herbs enrich your life and bring you joy for all seasons. Adelma Grenier Simmons.

Here it was. The final nudge from Adelma to get the garden growing. Over the next twelve months, I cannot wait to share her insight, wisdom, and instruction through our herb gardening adventure. In the next Greenhouse Diaries post, I’ll share the layout and location of the herb garden and the list of herbs that will get us started, courtesy of Adelma’s helpful garden guide and companion planting lists.

In addition to Adelma’s final wishes to turn Caprilands into a teaching facility and an educational resource, she also fancied the idea of creating a network of other herb farms around the country that shared a like-minded enthusiasm for herbal outreach and education. Since Adelma’s wishes for her beloved gardens at Caprilands never came to fruition, it is nice to be able to honor her here in our herb garden adventure at 1750 House. Perhaps in our own small way, it’s part of the start of the cross-country garden network that she envisioned so long ago.

Cheers to a whole new year of gardening, to Adelma for sharing her knowledge of herbs, and to the greenhouse who is proving to be a wonderful teacher herself.

Welcome To A Fragrant Year: The Greenhouse Diaries Return for New Growing Adventures

Published on January 27, 2024January 30, 2025 by In The Vintage Kitchen10 Comments

The Greenhouse Diaries are back with new inspirations and a whole new year of growing adventures to explore and discover. Like last year, these new diary entries center around what can be grown in a petite 4×6 greenhouse in our four-season New England climate, but starting this month there is a brand new theme, different from last year, that is guiding our gardening goals in 2024.

Last year, our first year as greenhouse owners and New England residents, we focused on winter gardening from December through May and all the possibilities that a warm greenhouse could offer in a cold landscape. We drew inspiration from Katharine Sergeant Angell White, a lifelong lover of the natural world who also happened to be a marvelous writer, a founding editor of the New Yorker magazine, and the beloved wife of E.B White.

Katharine Sergeant Angell White (1892-1977)

Her 1977 book Onward & Upward in the Garden, featured a collection of horticultural essays that highlighted her ability to embrace challenges by finding joy and solace in the certain uncertainties. Something that all gardeners must face when it comes to designing a pleasing landscape, in Katharine’s case, it was the long Maine winters that were a struggle for her spirit which yearned to be out in the garden digging and clipping, pruning, and propagating. She also had much to say about the confusing advice of garden experts and her own thoughtful attempts of trying to create the garden of her dreams. Her writing was full of spirit, humor and opinion when it came to detailing plans, recommending books and seed catalogs, and offering advice on growing plants and flowers both indoors and out. She was inspiration enough for us to start experimenting with our first winter growing season. Cold weather aside, we had Katharine on our side, lending a unique empathy and encouragement that fueled our desire to get out and grow things regardless of the weather, our experience level or the unseasonability of what we most wanted to achieve.

Our plan last year was to get a head start on establishing garden beds for 1750 House, so we focused mainly on forcing seeds and plants to sprout, bud and bloom early. Using 33 different plants, flowers and herbs as trial-run guinea pigs, we accomplished our goals with a fair amount of success and a few setbacks as we tested the physical capabilities of the greenhouse and grew our garden knowledge.

A greenhouse success – the joy of growing collard greens in 2023

This time, a year wiser, we are reducing the number of overall plants in the greenhouse to just focus on the proven winners that grew well both in the greenhouse and in the garden beds last spring, summer and fall. And to keep things interesting, we are launching a new experiment. This year, we are leaving extra room in the greenhouse to try our hand at growing a new type of perennial garden for year-round enjoyment… a landscape full of plants, flowers and trees that carry a scent.

Marvelously scented magnolia blossoms dotted our landscape down South.

When we lived in the South, we were surrounded by a wide variety of aromatic flowers that made our time there all the more memorable because of the beautiful perfume that continuously lingered in the air. The scent of night-blooming gardenias and fragrant magnolias swirled around our dinner parties. The heat of summer brought heavy humidity but also the delicate, sweet aromas of climbing Carolina jessamine. Roses in every scent and shade toppled and tumbled over hedgerows and brick walls. It was a lovely layer of landscape design that I had never really thought about until we had experienced it firsthand. Of course, we won’t be able to recreate an exact aromatic Southern garden here in New England since it’s a very different climate from there to here, but there are plenty of other options in the Northeast to explore for similar effect thanks to our new inspiration.

Here to guide the 2024 Greenhouse Diaries in our aromatic endeavors is the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. Month by month, in words and drawings this book details how to grow specific types of plants and flowers that will continuously unfold new scents in the garden season by season, even in the winter months.

Praised for being the first of its modern kind, The Fragrant Year was lauded both for its scope and its practical application, as well as its healthful benefits. In the opening chapter Helen writes… “if our gardens today were more often planned as fragrant retreats and our rooms were frequently perfumed with bowls of spicy pinks, bunches of aromatic herbs, vases of fragrant roses, and jars of potpourri, perhaps we would not have to depend so much on tranquilizers to hold us together in this frantic, fast-paced world.”

Helen wrote that in 1967 but it is still so applicable today. The world is still frantic and fast-paced. People still look to medicine to calm their nerves. But we think Helen’s theory is pretty wise – there is something much more natural, more gentle, more joyful in tackling frantic nerves and fast paces with this sort of approach instead. It is lovely to think that by selecting a few handfuls of scented botanicals and thoughtfully adding them to the landscape we might not only help create a more calm environment for ourselves but also for the community around us. Who knows what sort of impact that small gesture could have on a greater world.

A prolific writer of gardening books throughout the 20th century, Helen was no stranger to the power of plants. Along with penning a newspaper column titled Our Gardens Within and Without during the 1920s and 1930s, she also wrote for all the well-known women’s magazines including House & Garden, Cosmopolitan, Better Homes & Gardens, and House Beautiful. In between all that she wrote/edited over fifty books on various gardening topics throughout her long and lengthy career.

Born in New Jersey, Helen spent the majority of her life in Philadelphia, PA and Westport, CT where she experimented with gardening projects of all sorts both indoors and out. Her most well-known book was one on caring for African violets published in the 1940s but she was a beloved and trusted authority on a variety of horticultural topics throughout her life. Working with Leonie on several different projects, it was in the 1950s that they learned they shared a mutual love of aromatic botanicals. Upon discovering this, the idea for The Fragrant Year was quick to spark but it took Helen and Leonie ten years of dedicated research and trial-and-error gardening experiments before their book was finally published.

Leonie Bell in the garden. Photograph courtesy of monticello.org by way of Rev. Douglas T. Seidel

Like Helen, Leonie Bell (1924-1996) lived and gardened in suburban Philadelphia. In addition to being a well-respected botanical illustrator, she was also known as a rose expert. Contributing her expertise to several rose garden books published during the 20th century, Leonie was often referred to as a rose genealogist since she had a knack for discovering/uncovering heirloom roses from the past that had been misnamed or believed to be no longer in existence. At one point, her own personal garden contained over 200 different types of roses, most of them old-fashioned heirloom varieties.

If you are ever in Virginia, you can see the impact Leonie made at the Leonie Bell Rose Garden at Thomas Jeffferson’s Tufton Farm, which features a tribute to both Leonie’s legacy and the history of North American rose breeding.

Much sought after in the world of botanical illustration, what’s interesting about Leonie’s art is that she was self-taught. Her intrinsic knowledge of the anatomy of plants combined with her studies at the School of Horticulture in Ambler, PA led her to closely look at botanical subjects from all angles. That well-rounded vantage point carried through to her drawings which shine with scientific detail but also personality.

Excited to share a year full of fragrance here on the blog, each month we’ll feature a new scented flower or plant recommended by Helen and Leonie and detail our gardening experiences as we incorporate twelve new aromatic additions into the landscape at 1750 House. Hopefully, you’ll find this information equally inspiring and insightful too. It would be lovely if we could all experience the calming nature of a scented garden together.

Our next Greenhouse Diaries post will introduce our first fragrant botanical, but in the meantime, here’s a quick update on improvements we made to the greenhouse over the summer and a current list of what’s growing in the greenhouse now…

Current Occupants

As of mid-January, the greenhouse is halfway full with overwintering geraniums, vinca vine, and dracaena spikes from the summer garden. Six different types of succulents, a coffee plant, a pineapple sage cutting from our summer plantings, and Liz Lemon (our six-year-old lemon tree) fill out the rest of the space alongside a batch of newly started seeds… collards, broccoli, beets and four different types of salad greens.

Winter Plastic Wrap

This isn’t a new improvement, but we are on Year No. 2 of dressing the greenhouse in a winter coat – aka wrapping it entirely in a layer of thick plastic – to keep the heat in and protect the plants from drafts during rain, sleet, and snowstorms. The plastic, a temporary solution for the coldest months gets removed in early spring, folded up, and stored in the basement. Once the temperatures drop below 45 in the fall, we put the plastic back on for the season. Aesthetically, it’s not the prettiest site but it gets the job done and keeps our overwintering plants and new seedlings happy and warm. We weren’t sure how the plastic was going to hold up from year to year, but so far it’s nice to see that it is still working just as well. To learn more about this winterization system, see last year’s post here.

Thanks to the plastic wrap, everything stayed warm and dry inside during our most recent January 2024 snowstorm.

New Electrical

Over the summer we added an electrical outlet inside the greenhouse and buried the wiring underground. This was a big (and much safer) improvement from running an extension cord across the yard between the greenhouse and the workshop, which is how we handled things last winter. This new addition is an outdoor-rated 110V 15 amp circuit box which is just what we need to power the heater and lights.

A New Heater

A new mini space heater replaced the tall radiator-style heater used last winter. This smaller size opens up more room to move around the greenhouse and fits nicely on a bottom shelf tucked out of the way when not in use. It has a safety feature that turns the heater off automatically if it tipples over or if any excess moisture drips inside. When the greenhouse reaches a certain temperature, it also automatically turns off to save energy and to keep the plants from overheating.

Normally the heater sits on the pea gravel floor of the greenhouse so that it efficiently heats all areas from bottom to top, but to photo it for this post I put it on one of the higher shelves for a better view. Please note: your greenhouse heater should never be this close to any plants as the proximity to the heat will cause the leaves to shrivel and could become a fire hazard. Any greenhouse heater should have a wide radius that is completely free and clear of other objects.

By using this smaller unit, we don’t have to run out and adjust the heat as the temperature changes over the course of the day, like we had to do last year. Also, we readjusted our required heat temperature in the greenhouse. Instead of keeping it in the mid-70s like last year, we lowered it to 55 degrees, in hopes that the cooler temp will keep spider mites at bay. We learned first-hand last winter how much they just adore a hot greenhouse. The new heater also blows warm air around the space instead of radiating it, so we have continual air movement swirling around inside this year, which I also hope will help with any pests. The final great benefit of this small little worker is that it has an additional fan option too, so in summer we’ll be able to grow our herbs inside the greenhouse without the temperature getting too hot or the air too stagnant.

New Lights

My most favorite new enhancement to the greenhouse came this fall when we added bulb lights to the interior roofline. The lights make it so much easier to work at night, especially in the winter when it can get dark as early as 3:30pm if we have an especially cloudy or rainy weather day.

These bulb lights are a tad too big for the space, so they’ll be swapped out for something a bit more petite this spring, but we had these already on hand and wanted to make sure we liked the light idea before we committed to several sets. At night it looks especially festive. Once all the landscaping is in place around the greenhouse, it will provide a nice light source for outdoor dining during the warm weather days. By then we’ll be at least five months into the fragrant year and the garden will hopefully be on its way to becoming a perfumed paradise. Just dreaming about it now, I can see and smell the summer already.

If you’d like to catch up on the trials and tribulations of our first year of greenhouse gardening start at entry #1 here. Otherwise, it’s on to 2024 and all the delightful aromas that await each new season.

Cheers to ever-evolving garden adventures, to a scent-sational year ahead and to Helen and Leonie for inspiring this new set of diary entries centered around the life and times of one mighty but mini New England greenhouse.

Highlights from the Summer Garden & A Big-Time Surprise Visitor

Published on September 11, 2023September 11, 2023 by In The Vintage Kitchen2 Comments

A visit from the deer we call Juna in June.

Before summer ends officially on September 23rd, I didn’t want the season to go by without a garden update on how the seedlings fared once they left the greenhouse in spring. Given the late date, this is sort of like a summer wrap-up post told mostly in images – a view of our New England garden from June to mid-September. Don’t miss the real garden surprise (visitor) all the way at the end!

Heirloom Flower: The Watchman Hollyhock grown from seed started last year.

The Watchman Hollyhock starts out with a bloom as black as night but slowly turns a deep purple the longer it says on the stalk.

From black to eggplant to deep plums and bright purples – the hollyhock came to symbolize the enture garden as it grew and changed over the summer months.

Brussels Sprouts with a companion planting of dill and volunteer tomatoes – stowaways from last year’s crop.

OUR 2023 BEST GROWERS

This year, we were most successful in growing the following list from seed. Everything here but the pole beans, zucchini, and peas were started in the greenhouse in winter or early spring. The rest were started from seeds sown directly in the raised beds. Further down in the post, you’ll find the list of flowers and vegetables that we struggled with along with the various reasons. Hopefully, other New England gardeners will be able to share their insights as to why or what may have caused the challenges. But for now, here is our list of winners this year…

Tomatoes (Brandywine, Sungold Cherry, Sweetie Pole Cherry and Pineapple)
Cucumbers (Marketmore)
Collard Greens (Georgia Southern)
Hot Peppers: Lemon Jalapenos, Santaka Chile, and Padron Peppers
Rapini
Pole Beans (Blue Lake)
Flowers: Foxglove, Snapdragons, Hollyhocks, Mexican Sunflowers, French Marigolds, Zinnia, Geraniums
Mint
Lettuce (Rouge D’Hiver, Farmers Market Blend, Arugula, Salad Bowl Blend)
Cascadia Peas
Mexican Sunflowers
Jarrahdale Pumpkins
Black Beauty Zucchini (partially successful, more on that further on in the post).
Cucamelons

The cucamelons were one of our most enthusiastic growers this year. If you are unfamiliar with these little charmers, they are native to Mexico and look like miniature watermelons but taste like lemony cucumbers.

Our cucamelon plant literally vined its way to double in size in less than a month. At mid-September, it’s now over 9′ feet tall and still climbing. Its current destination is the upper echelons of the crab apple tree above it.

Cucamelon on the vine. They dangle like plump pearl earrings when they are ready to be picked.

Cucamelons are tiny (about 1 inch in length) but full of fresh summer flavor.

We loved the cucamelons so much that they inspired a new 1750 House summer cocktail – the Cucamelon Gin and Tonic.

So much new information has been learned about how to proceed this fall. What worked, what didn’t, what we can improve on and what we can forget, what we can nurture now and what we can save for another day or another year. A lot of surprises ensued. What worked great last year didn’t necessarily work as well this year. One thing that drastically improved though was the soil (thanks to a year of composting and leaf mold, and we didn’t overwater thanks to the miracle moisture meter reader. The garden was definitely much more lush and vibrant and full this year.

One of the surprises of the season were the Black-Eyed Susan vines. We almost gave up on these guys completely since they grew so slowly for so long. We figured they weren’t happy in the bed or the inground mound where we planted them. It took five months from seed to first flower (and our forgetting about them), but once they got to the bloom stage they really took off and haven’t stopped since. Now they are happily climbing all over the sides of the rock-walled raised beds and are producing lots of pretty little flowers. I learned from our local nursery, that they have the best luck propagating these flowers from clippings, so we are going to try that method this fall.

Tomatoes and pole beans climbing their way to the sky. This top rung of the trellis is 9″feet tall. We have to get on a ladder to pick the top tier!

The moonflower vines were a placeholder and an experiment to see if we liked a living wall on one part of the back of 1750 House. As it turns out we do! Next year, that wall will be covered in English ivy, which has already been planted at the base of the moonflowers. The moonflower seedlings were purchased from our local nursery, but we will definitely grow them again somewhere else in the garden next spring, this time from seed. They are fast growers and produce big beautiful white flowers, the size of your hand.

Our Biggest 2023 Garden Challenge: SLUGS

Oh the slugs. They slithered, they slimed, they feasted their way through the broccoli patch, the herb garden, the marigolds, the nasturtiums, the lettuce, the pepper plants (leaves only), the colleus and the cosmos. We tried all sorts of ways to deter them – sand barriers, chili powder sprinklings, tin foil, beer traps, nightly hand-picking.

We were most successful with the beer traps – sinking a small container in the garden soil filled with about 1/4 cup of beer. The beer attracts them to take a swim and then they depart this life in one big vat of boozy revelry. The other thing that worked well was handpicking (we relocated all the slugs to the woods each evening to carry on life there), but this was a never-ending task – every single one we picked was replaced with a new slug the next night. Plus, this hand-picking was a pretty unappealing and slimy exercise. Our buckets each night were filled with at least 30-40 slugs. Interestingly, they left all other plants in the garden alone, which is why we had such great success with everything else. Next year, we are going to try growing all of these feast-worthy plants in the greenhouse over the summer to hopefully keep them slug-proof.

Impromptu bouquet – snapdragons and phlox

First summer gathering basket: nasturtiums, zucchini, cucamelons, mint, Mandeville flowers, cherry tomatoes, pineapple tomatoes, Santaka chile peppers

Things That Didn’t Grow Well in the Garden This Year…

Zucchini (Black Beauty) – while they did grow big and lovely and flowered every day pretty much throughout the summer, two plants only produced three zucchini. Three was a definite improvement from last year’s crop which was zero, so we are moving in the right direction but this was also the second year they eventually became overcome by powdery mildew, even though we tried two different treatments: baking soda and neem oil
French Melons (powdery mildew victim #2)
All the herbs – parsley, basil, chives, sage, and thyme (The work of the mighty slugs! The only herb they left alone was the rosemary).
Cosmos – our second year in a row trying to grow these. (They produce a few flowers but then the plants dry up and die off)
Bush Beans – we rotated them to a different bed this year underneath the tomato plants and they did not like it. Maybe it was not enough sun for them once the tomatoes really started growing.
Broccoli (DiCiceo) – we harvested one broccoli head harvest before the slugs arrived for the season
Straw mulch – The intention was to use this as mulch to help with the slug situation but, as you can see from the list above, it had no effect and turned out to look really messy in the garden. Aesthetically it wasn’t our favorite.
Sunflowers – also our second year trying to grow these. Starting them in the greenhouse this year helped but they were weak and spindly and mostly fell over before July started.

Back to happier stories…

Our first big pineapple tomato weighing in at 1.7lbs

The big goal for 2023 was to create a pollinator-friendly garden. Success!

Pole beans and cucumbers joined the weekly gathering basket in August.

This year, the tomato’s best friend was the pole bean. Both still growing strong, they’ve become their own support system at the top tier keeping everything nice and tidy all on their own.

Impromptu bouquet: mint, Mandevilla, marigolds, Mexican sunflowers, snapdragons

The first time the gathering basket weighed over 4 lbs with all its produce was the first of September.

One nasturtium plant managed to outsmart the slugs. How? We aren’t exactly sure, but for some reason, they left this one alone.

All things considered, this year’s garden was definitely an improvement upon last year’s just as far as soil health, pollination count and bird and frog activity. Last year we had more voles and chipmunks but this year we had more slugs. Last year we had more heat but this year more humidity. Last year we had barely any flowers, and this year, we enjoyed ample bouquets all summer long. That’s the joy of gardening though I think. It’s always changing. Always engaging us.

Although the temperatures are still in the 80s, and there are still a couple weeks of summer left to go, Autumn is definitely beginning to cast her spell over the garden. Our first pumpkin just formed, the paradise apples are falling and our first sighting of a Spotted Orbweaver joined us overhead on the patio chandelier one night at dinner. Fall is coming.

The pumpkin vines are making “S” curves all over the sideyard.

Spiders, slugs, birds, bees, and Juna aren’t the only things that came to visit the garden this summer. Recently, we installed an outdoor trail camera to see what sort of wildlife came to visit in the night. Our most frequent sightings so far have been the wild rabbits (hop over to Instagram to see our favorite little bunnies zooming around the yard), along with the occasional raccoon, and opossum, two coyotes and a pine marten not to mention a bevy of early morning birds and squirrels. But our most dramatic guest so far is this guy…

A bobcat! He passed right through the yard with no incidents and thank goodness no bunnies. It’s pretty magical that such an extensive amount of wildlife lives while we sleep, carries on while we dream, travels about while we stay put for hours on end. We can’t wait to see what shows up this winter.

Last, but not least in this highlight of summer pos , we have two exciting sneak peeks of two very big 1750 House outdoor projects about to be unveiled soon…

We can’t wait to share them with you! Stay tuned!

In the meantime, cheers to summer 2023, to all we learned and all we reveled in, and to Lady Nature for continuing to be our biggest mentor and our guide. We’d love to hear how your gardening adventures fared this year. Please tell us all about it in the comments section. It’s so important to share the highs and lows, regardless of what part of the world we live in so that we can all learn together. The more gardening joy the better.

The Greenhouse Diaries Entry #4: Lessons in Highs and Lows, Triumphs and Tragedies

Published on January 6, 2023January 7, 2023 by In The Vintage Kitchen1 Comment

You might not suspect that a lot could occur in a greenhouse over a two-week period, but this time off for the Christmas break equaled quite a bit of unexpected change in our little house of wonder.

We had some pretty dramatic outdoor weather over the holiday with the lowest of lows being 6 degrees one night and the highest of highs being 58 during the day just this past Wednesday. It was a wide swing of weather for certain, but it provided a good fourteen days of observation to draw some enlightening information.

Frozen ground, ice streams and patchy snow covered our landscape during Christmas week.

First off, the few nights of single-digit weather created a bit of havoc. It also shed some new light on an ongoing topic. Do you remember the haybale conversation from The Greenhouse Diaries Entry #3?

Well as it turns out, first-hand experience is an excellent advisor. I can see now how the haybales would have been helpful through the cold snap. Like everybody across the country during Christmas week, we experienced the freezing polar vortex temperatures with daily highs between 9-19 degrees and nightly lows between 6-12 degrees. The indoor temperatures in the greenhouse on these coldest nights, with the heater going full blast, hovered in the high 30s and low 40s, which was pretty good considering the chilly weather. The coldest area of the greenhouse was the pea gravel floor which is where the broccoli, marigolds, aloe, mint, thyme, tarragon, basil, rosemary and geranium pots sit.

Although the sun came out on most of these single-digit days, one night in particular the wind picked up and grabbed hold of a small section of the plastic covering the door frame. It was a strong enough wind to open up a small gap between the plastic and the poly carb door, so that cold air could seep in through the greenhouses’s most vulnerable area. That night the windchill forced the outdoor temperature to sway between 0 and 1 degree. Inside, the greenhouse the temperature fell to 34 degrees – the danger zone. Some problems arose.

While there was never actually any frost inside the greenhouse, there were signs of distress on the leaves of the zinnias, broccoli, mint, thyme, geraniums, aloe, basil, marigolds and tarragon. Withered plants one shelf up from the pea gravel included the tomato, the Santaka pepper seedlings, the rabbit ear cactus, the pincushion flowers, and most unfortunate of all, Liz Lemon, who had made such great strides just the week before. Everything else located the next shelf up (about 2 1/2 feet off the ground) and higher was completely unaffected. Thankfully, heat rises.

Had the haybales been placed around the outside of the greenhouse, they might have added just enough insulation to protect the plants sitting at ground level. The other thing we could have done was just to put all the ground plants up higher in the air so they would be protected by the rising warmth from the heater. So two lessons were learned…

Add haybales around the exterior during extreme weather dips or…
Move the plants up higher in the greenhouse to capture the rising warmth.

Luckily, the extreme weather only lasted for a few days.

The trickiest part of greenhouse management so far, is that there is so much conflicting information online and so much variation between agricultural zones and particular weather situations each year that there seems to be no definitive right or wrong way to care for your own greenhouse. Except by watching and waiting and recording how your greenhouse acts in your particular environment. What is expert advice on one site is a disaster on another and vice versa. It’s never my intention to “sacrifice ” a plant but this time spent learning is proving to be really valuable in understanding not only how things grow, but also what things grow in a New England greenhouse in the middle of the winter.

In continuation of our year of waiting and watching, the withered plants were left alone to see if they might perk back up again as the weather warmed throughout the week. The severely affected plants on the floor level received a trim, removing all damaged leaves in hopes that they might heal themselves.

On the good news front, most of the plants bounced right back including the withery, weepy, unhappy tomato branch clipping who is now getting ready to offer up more cherry sized tomatoes…

But on the bad news side, three never recovered. We lost the basil, the zinnias and the marigolds, all plants that really crave that warm summer sun. As discouraging as it was to see these carefully tended plants go, not all was completely lost on them. Their stems and stalks were added to the leaf mold piles (another garden experiment started last fall) and will contribute to the joy and beauty of the garden come spring, just in a slightly different, more composted way now.

Layered leaf mold stacks – our soil amendment plan for the spring garden beds.

It was a good reminder that nothing lasts forever and that there is an ideal season for everything. Sometimes one just isn’t meant to meet the other. The great thing about nature though in times like this, is that it wastes no time moping. With the lost plants now removed from the greenhouse, there was more room for what was growing well to spread out in their vacant spots. As if to add some cheer to the atmosphere, everything that could send out a bloom between Christmas and New Year’s Day did…

Clockwise top to bottom: geranium, broccoli, nasturtium, lemon.

The broccoli infact was so quick to flower, it burst into bloom before I had a chance to harvest it for dinner one night. Exploding into a pom-pom of butter yellow flowers, it became a feast for the eyes instead of the belly. That’s fine by me. Broccoli produces one of the most beautiful, delicate flowers of all the garden vegetables, so it is a joy either way. The nice thing about broccoli also, is that its leaves are edible. We might not have enjoyed the spears but the leaves are next on the menu if the broccoli doesn’t send out any new shoots.

Also on the harvest list is the bell pepper. Currently, it’s measuring in at just under 4″ inches in length – close to mature size that makes it ready for picking soon. This pepper comes with an added dose of mystery included too. Last summer, we grew two varieties of bell peppers in the garden. Adored by slugs, bunnies and maybe a vole or two, the pepper beds were constantly being reseeded and defended all summer.

Out of time, but not yet fully grown, just before the fall frost I transplanted three of the strongest plants to see if they would continue growing in the greenhouse. Two of the three were hot pepper plants of the jalapeno and chile variety and then the third plant was a bell pepper. I thought I had transplanted an heirloom variety called California Wonder, which if not picked when green will ripen to a deep red shade. But based on its shape right now, it could be the other pepper plant we experimented with – Orange Sun – which will as its name suggests, turn a vibrant orange when ready for harvest. In both cases, the longer the pepper sits on the vine the sweeter it gets. So a surprise is in store as we wait to see what color it turns out to be…

The other green delight that really took off on a growing adventure these past two weeks was the parsley. With no extra help or amendments, it’s doubled in height since the last diary entry. The only way I can really rationalize this growth spurt is to say that we had a little help from the gods. The ancient Greeks believed that parsley was a sign of death and rebirth.

In mythology, it gets caught up in stories surrounding the baby, Archemorus, and the parsley that grew from his blood after he was killed. Later, the Romans believed that Persophone ( the Goddess of Spring, the Underworld, and of Vegetation) was in charge of guiding souls to their final resting place in the underworld. Parsley throughout Roman times adorned gravesites and funerary objects as a gift to Persephone so that she would take good care of those that perished.

Between the demise of the marigolds, zinnias, and basil and the growth of the parsley, the flowers, the bell pepper, and the broccoli, I can’t help but think that Archemorus and Persephone were at work, guiding the greenhouse through these past two weeks of dramatic winter weather. From death springs life. And parsley too.

Cheers to weather and what it teaches us, to plants that persevere in the face of difficulty, to Persophene and Archemorus, and to this brand new year full of possibilities. Hope your 2023 is off to a beautiful start!

{The Greenhouse Diaries is an ongoing series. if you are new to the blog, catch up here with Week #1, Week #2, and Week #3 here}

The Greenhouse Diaries Entry #2: Surprise and Circulation

Published on December 11, 2022December 18, 2022 by In The Vintage Kitchen4 Comments

The chronicling of the greenhouse is underway. If you are new to the blog this week, catch up with our new gardening series in Entry #1 here. For everyone else who is all caught up let’s carry on to week two of news from the growing greenhouse.

It’s only been seven days since our last post but already there is much to discuss on both the good and bad fronts. First off, we’ll start with the food portion since that was a big reason to build a greenhouse to begin with.

We harvested our first bowl of arugula last Sunday and ever since, it and the nasturtiums have been adorning our plates all week long. Here, they were a part of last Sunday’s brunch of eggs cooked in foccacia bread pockets…

The tomatoes ripened! In just one week they went from a zesty shade of green apple to sunny golden orange. We were curious to see if these indoor growers would taste the same as the ones we enjoyed in the garden all summer, and much to our delight I’m happy to say they tasted equivalent. Which means they tasted fantastic. Sweet, soft yet slightly firm, and just as juicy as their summer counterparts, these two beauties ended the week on a sweet note.

Grown from seed purchased from our favorite seed company (A true review! They are not a blog sponsor.) these tomatoes were determined to grow regardless. Producing fruit the size of large marbles, we grew eight plants of the Sun Gold Cherry varietal this summer. Some reached monster heights of over 10′ feet tall and they produced a couple of big handfuls every other day from August-October. The branch grown in the greenhouse was from a stem cutting. It was our first experiment to see if the cutting would root in water, which it did, and then immediately it went to flower. A little bit of hand-pollinating with a paintbrush, and two weeks later these two tomatoes started forming. They grew so quickly, we never even had a chance to plant the cutting in actual soil. These are just growing and flowering in a jar of water. Isn’t nature amazing?

Next in the ripening department is the Numex Lemon Jalapeno pepper. Because of the timing last spring of when we moved to 1750 House, we started our seeds and our garden beds pretty late in the season. The pepper plants didn’t have a full chance to grow, bloom and then produce mature peppers before the cold autumn weather settled in, so we pulled the three strongest from the ground and potted them for the greenhouse.

This summer, we had a big struggle with slugs in the garden beds so you can see the leaves are quite chewed through, but the plants continued to flower and persevere regardless. In the greenhouse, they look a little raggedy, but they are still growing so we are encouraged. Unintentionally, we may have stunted them a bit when we moved them to the greenhouse during their early post-flower days as they are now producing smaller fruit. But nevertheless, one pepper so far has turned yellow, which means in theory, it is ready for picking even though it’s just a little pip of a pepper. I’m going to leave it on the plant for a few more days to see if it grows any bigger – otherwise, we’ll pull it and see how it tastes.

Our last vegetable of the week that’s really taken off is the broccoli. It sits closest to the door, which is the coldest part of the greenhouse and since broccoli prefers cooler weather, this seems like an ideal location. From last week to this week, the floret has grown taller and wider by about an inch in both directions and has a new companion shoot growing up next to it. Like the peppers, the broccoli also suffered through slug season, but for every leaf that the slugs ate, a new leaf grew in its place. All summer I loved the broccoli’s optimism. In the face of slug defeats, it was the ever-present cheerleader that kept encouraging us to keep going.

On the flower front, the highlight of the week was Liz Lemon. For long-time readers of the blog, you’ll remember Liz from her indoor orchard stories. The last time we checked in with her on the blog was in November of 2020, when she was a Southerner living in the city and looked like this…

A little while after that photo was taken, she showered us in lemons (three!)…

But things took a bleak turn when we moved north. The indoor orchard, cultivated over six years of Southern city living, had many casualties. Avi the Avocado (age 6), Grace the Grapefruit (age 4). Jools the Date Palm (age 2). By the time, we loaded up the truck and moved a thousand miles away from the southern sun, we were down to two plants – Liz Lemon and Pappy the Papaya. Neither were thrilled at leaving the heat and humidity of the South. To put it lightly, Liz especially was NOT a fan of the new 20-degree weather, or the weekly snowfalls or the five months spent in a cottage on a lake in wintertime Pennsylvania. She lost every single leaf but three and was down to two twigs – just a skeleton of a body.

When we finally found the 1750 House in spring and became official New Englanders, I thought a summer spent in the warm air and sunny backyard garden would be Liz’s cureall. But nothing happened there either. All around her pots of daisies bloomed, the okra headed skyward, the tomatoes blushed rosy red and gold. Even Pappy flourished and became so content with New England life that he sported his first flower in August…

But Liz was not following suit. Out of ideas as to how to fix her, a repot and a move to the greenhouse seemed like the final attempt at revival. There, for more than two months, she just sat there on the shelf with nothing changing. And then this week, magic happened. At long last, Liz has come around. She sprouted five new leaves and two sets of flower buds. Just like that. Practically overnight.

Like an early Christmas gift, I was so excited, I took her inside for a portrait. Holiday magic comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes around here. And it is never what I think it might be. Two years ago, we had holiday magic in the form of a lost cookie recipe found thanks to Ken and Cindy. Last year, it was a bevy of snowstorms one right after the other. This year, our holiday magic comes with lemons.

The other happy campers these days are the geraniums, which are growing more and more leaves each day. Here’s the growth spurt from last week to this week…

But for all this growth and joy and magic of this second week in December, there has been a challenge to contend with in the greenhouse too. The sage came down with it first. And then the tarragon. Powdery mildew.

This can happen when there is not enough air circulation in the greenhouse. Along with winterizing the greenhouse, I also should be adding a small fan just to move the air around. When the daytime temperatures are warm enough (above 60 degrees) of which we, surprisingly, have had a few recently, the heater can be shut off and the greenhouse window vent opened, and that usually allows for adequate air circulation.

But now it’s too chilly to open the vent. Ideally, I’m trying to keep the daytime temps in the greenhouse between 70-75 degrees and the nightime temperature between 55-65. There are only three settings on the heater 1, 2 & 3 with 3 being the warmest. Depending on the daytime temperatures outside and the amount of sun on each particular day, there is usually a bit of fiddling around with the heat settings once or twice a day to keep things balanced. The warmer it gets in the greenhouse, the higher the humidity gets which then welcomes pesky problems like powdery mildew, scale bugs and funguses. Just like life in the outside world, life in the greenhouse is a continuous adjustment of care and considerations. I treated the sage and tarragon with an organic garden-friendly fungicide, so hopefully, that will clear things up. More on that next week.

Today there is a possibility of 2-4 inches of snow. Although we have had two nights of flurries already this month, the storm tonight will be our first accumulation of the season. Like sending a baby out into the world for the first time, I’m anxious and excited to see how the greenhouse will manage when enshrouded in a snow blanket. Will it remain warm and cozy and fragrant with the scent of honeyed perfume all season long or will it be too delicate of a creature to stand up to a strong New England winter?

Katharine with her husband E.B White and one of their furry friends.

I looked to the garden writer, Katharine White who inspired this series, for advice. She lived in Maine and was used to snow and winter and caring for flowers and plants in the off-season. “Outdoors, nature is apt to take over and save you from many a stupidity, but indoors you are strictly on your own,” wrote Katharine. It was not exactly the reassurance I was looking for.

When you move into a new (old) house in a new state with a new agriculture zone, there’s a lot of waiting and seeing and observing and guessing all buoyed by optimism. Next year at this time, we’ll know a lot more about the capabilities of the greenhouse in cold weather. But for now, here’s to hoping that the wild and willful nature present inside the greenhouse at the moment will suffice enough to save us from any serious stupidities of our own doing, at least in this first snowstorm. More on that, next week.

In the meantime, cheers to the Christmas magic of Liz Lemon, to the nasturtiums who look like little kids lined up at the window waiting on the first flurries, and to our first impending snowstorm. Hope your week brings some unexpected joys this week too.

The Life & Times of Avi the Avocado and the Annual Indoor Orchard Update!

Published on October 29, 2020November 3, 2020 by In The Vintage Kitchen5 Comments

Last week we got our first taste of the 2020 jungle. The first frost warning of the season arrived early in the week with a chilly 37-degree night. Since that is too cold for all the orchard plants that have been happily sunning themselves outdoors on the balcony all summer long, this change in temperature meant a mass migration of all potted plants from the outside in. It was time for the annual interior decision of where to set up wintertime living arrangements and how best to fit everyone in.

I love this yearly transition ritual with the plants. It not only signals a new season but also it’s close to Avi the Avocado’s birthday (he’ll be 4 in November!) which means Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Also, it’s a great time to check the growth process of the fruit trees. The last time I posted a garden update was November 18th, 2019. It was a different world back then. Not only for us humans but for these city plants too. Last year our orchard round-up consisted of potted avocado, lemon, grapefruit and date palm trees, each grown from seed (except the lemon which was a grafted gift several years ago).

Fitting for the times, just like our traumatic 2020 pandemic year, the orchard plants have also experienced their own turbulent events over the past 344 days. I’d like to say that everyone flourished and that the garden bloomed and blossomed under the extra care from all the stay-at-home attention that quarantining invited. But nature is never that predictable. With every success I celebrated in the potted orchard experiment this year, there was an equal amount of setbacks.

The 20th-century British writer, Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) once said, “every gardening failure must be used as a stepping stone to something better.” And so we step. The life and times of the indoor orchard continue, for plants and human, as we learn and grow together into year 4. Failures and setbacks aside, there is much to report. Let’s look…

Avi The Avocado

We’ll start with Avi first since he’s the one celebrating his fourth birthday three weeks from now. Last year Avi looked like this…

He had made real strides in the growth department and was busily filling out his canopy of leaves – especially up top. As of last posting in November 2019, he was 4′ 7″ inches tall and destined for a bigger container that would allow him plenty of room to continue his sky-high stretch.

This is what Avi looks like today…

The good news is that he’s almost too tall to fit in the whole photograph. Cheers for growth! The bad news is that’s he’s stooped over, weary and a little bedraggled-looking. Unlike the other plants, Avi has remained indoors all year long, preferring this environment much more than the heat, humidity, and direct sunlight on the balcony. This is odd for an avocado tree. Normally they revel in such tropical conditions. But from the very beginning, when he was just a small sprouting pit…

Avi has lived indoors and decidedly said he preferred that much more (see previous posts about this behavior here). As of late, he’s been looking so unfortunate I’ve deemed him the family H.S.P. (highly sensitive plant) and can’t help but think he’s feeling everyone’s emotions in the world these days.

Despite this woebegone appearance, there have been several successes for Avi this year. He now measures 5′ feet tall (a growth spurt of 5″ inches since last November!), he lives in a new larger container to accommodate his larger size, and he’s completely 100% rid of the pesky scale bugs that plagued him for over two years. I suspect that his current beleaguered state might be due to a nutrient deficiency. Even though he receives a regular sprinkle of organic avocado fertilizer, he hasn’t made any new leaves in months – an unusual circumstance for the once gusto grower. His latest troubles are an issue affecting some of the tips…

This weekend, I’m going to take him to our local garden center for some advice from the experts on how to get those leaves back up in the air instead of drooping down around his trunk. In the meantime, if any avocado enthusiasts out there have some helpful advice, both I and Avi would greatly appreciate it!

Grace the Grapefruit

As if she was trying to make up for Avi’s struggle or at least encourage him to keep growing, Grace, the grapefruit tree, has done nothing but flourish this year. When I last documented her height a year ago, she was 3′ 2″ inches tall.

how-to-grow-a-grapefruit-tree-2019 — Grace in November 2019

Like Avi, she is another one insisting on growing outside the frame. This is Grace now …

At first you might say, she doesn’t look that different. But she’s not done showing off her portrait yet. This is her too, still going…

And then this is her again – still going and growing some more…

All the way up to the ceiling in fact! To give you some perspective… that’s the tip of a ceiling fan paddle in the top left corner. Grace, I am happy and amazed to say, now stands 6′ 2″ inches! In just two and a half years she has grown to the size of a very tall person!

Initially, I attributed this doubling in size to an energetic offshoot that citrus plants sometimes get. It’s where they grow a random branch in a quick minute, one that gets much longer than the others and gives the whole tree a wonky, wild look. But upon closer inspection, that’s not the case with Grace. This long stem waving above her rounder section of leafy greens is the central trunk growing taller. It’s her way of saying she’s ready for a bigger container (her fifth one so far since she first sprouted in March 2018!) As it turns out, Grace is well on her way to fulfilling her ultimate goal of being a few dozen feet tall. Oh my. Bigger pots await!

The mighty evolution of Grace the Grapefruit from seed to tree!

Liz Lemon- The Lemon Tree

While Grace and Avi were determined to grow higher, Liz in 2020 was determined to grow wider. As of last November, Liz looked like this…

Liz showing off a bright yellow lemon in November 2019.

Despite the traumatic storm and the unfortunate haircut, Liz managed to grow an extra inch in height, making her 29″ inches tall now. What she lacks vertically she more than makes up for horizontally. She is twice as wide as last year. I wish I had measured her width back then – but you can see in the photos from last year to this year, in relation to the tabletop, that there is a definite dramatic increase. Her width as of yesterday was 3′ feet across branch tip to branch tip. She is also sporting three almost ripe lemons…

and a brand new cluster of flowers…

It will be fun to see if these flowers make it all the way to the adult lemon stage over the winter. Typically that is her dormant time, where she hibernates her way through the cold months, so we’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed!

Jools – The Medjool Date Palm

Jools was a real grower all winter, but sadly, we lost her in the spring. I don’t know what happened to her. One week she was doing fine outdoors in the sun, fanning out her leaves, growing tall, and long, and then mysteriously, the next week she just shriveled up and dried out. Poor thing. I tried to revive her with all sorts of attention, but nothing brought her back. In a final last-ditch effort, I cut off all her palm shoots above the soil line hoping that would refresh her roots and encourage new growth, but that didn’t work either. So it’s back to the drawing board on the date palm front. This winter I’ll try seed starting again and hopefully, I’ll have a new Jools in the orchard to write about next year.

And introducing our newest arrival…

Even though it was disappointing to lose Jools, I am excited to announce that there is a new plant in the orchard to fill her spot. Meet Pappy…

the papaya who was grown from the seeds of a grocery store specimen.

Pappy was in there somewhere just waiting to grow!

In April 2020, Pappy poked his head above the ground along with a couple of his brothers and sisters…

In May, Pappy proudly declared that he was embarking on this journey of life accompanied by not two, not four, but eight siblings…

And by June, the family portrait looked like this…

Four months later, here’s Pappy now…

Too big to be grown together, at the end of June each of the papayas were separated and transplanted into bigger containers. As you can see Pappy didn’t mind the move at all. Some papayas can be temperamental about transplant, but I’m happy to say that the whole gang – all nine of them did great with the move.

There are three more members of Pappy’s family tucked inside this photo. Can you spot each one?

As of this weekend, Pappy has leaves as big as my hand, a trunk as thick as a sausage and a stature of impressive height. Measuring exactly 3′ feet tall, he’s already about 1/5 of his natural height. I’m not anticipating that Pappy will get over 15′ feet tall due to container restraints, but I am hoping for at least 10 feet. That multiplied by his eight brothers and sisters and the inclusion of Liz, Grace and Avi will make a full jungle out of the indoor orchard this winter if everyone keeps growing like they have been.

The pencil is here to illustrate how thick Pappy’s trunk is already! He’s such a hearty grower:)

Even though it will be tricky trying to figure out where everyone will fit, I have my eye on one more little project to complete the green dream team. Over the summer, I discovered a very inspiring book…

that is fueling my next experiment this winter. Indoor tomatoes! The volunteer tomato seed planted by the birds (or maybe the breeze) on the balcony this summer…

continues to grow and bloom even though the typical tomato season is over now. I’m excited to see if I can keep some re-rooted sprouts going indoors for the next five months. It requires no special equipment except for a sunny windowsill and a little extra love and attention. It’s an attempt that Elizabeth, in her book, said was a bit difficult but was definitely do-able, so the challenge is officially on. We’ll see what happens!

In the meantime, while we wait and watch the orchard and see what sort of tomato tales will spring from this latest garden experiment, if you’d like to read more about the past growing adventures of Avi, Liz, Grace, and Jools visit this post, this post and this post. If you’d like to grow your own Pappy, all you need to do is scoop out the seeds from a grocery store papaya, rinse them in cold water and let them dry on a paper towel for up to a week until they resemble whole dried peppercorns. Then plant them in some potting soil, keep them evenly moist with warm water and watch them sprout sometime between a week to a month later. Keep them in the warmest sunniest place you can find and watch them grow grow grow. And then send me a photo so we can marvel at Pappy’s relatives too.

Last year, blog reader Gloria, shared a photo of her avocado tree that she planted in her Florida garden about the same time that Avi sprouted. As of November 2019, her avocado was 7′ feet tall…

Now it’s up to 8′ feet and just got a recent trim…

It is not bearing avocados yet, but maybe there will be some for her in 2021!

That’s the lovely thing about gardening, isn’t it? You just never know what might happen exactly or even when, but you always have your fingers crossed that it’s all going to work out for the best. Audrey Hepburn said it most eloquently… “to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” I love that. These plants don’t always make life look easy or foolproof but they do always make it look rewarding and hopeful.

Cheers to gardens big and small, indoors and out. And cheers to Audrey and Elizabeth and the indoor orchard gang for the continual motivation and inspiration.

Now… onto those tomatoes;)

The Indoor Urban Orchard: What’s Growing Now?

Published on November 18, 2019November 23, 2019 by In The Vintage Kitchen4 Comments

This time of year recipe ideas start floating around the kitchen and vegetables start piling up on the counters. Pie pumpkins and sweet potatoes, herb bouquets and onions, lemons, limes, mushrooms, pomegranates, garlic, apples, cranberries, carrots, celery and what seems like all the nuts in all the world spill out from bowls and plates and baskets as we get ready for Thanksgiving Day. Nestled among all that Autumn bounty is an avocado. Not exactly the first food you think of when talking turkey day fare, but around here the avocado is king of the Kitchen, especially in November, when it comes to a certain someone’s birthday. I’m not talking about the kind of avocado that is small, round and rumply skinned though. Here in the kitchen, the king I’m referring to looks like this…

It’s Avi the Avocado! On November 22nd, he’ll celebrate his third birthday. If you have been reading the blog for a few years, you’ll remember that Avi started out as a seed experiment in November 2016. The kind of experiment where you pierce a regular avocado seed with toothpicks and set it in a glass of water and then wait and watch for it to grow into something green like this…

…which he did with aplomb! Months into the experiment Avi sprouted, gained a name and grew taller as each day passed. Three years into life now, he’s survived a move, a very fretful, almost fatal batch of scale, a fall off the kitchen counter and numerous jockeys around the house as he grew, and then subsequently outgrew, each and every perch. In that time, he’s also developed quite the personality – clearly communicating his loathing for the city patio, the wet blanket heat that is a Southern summer, and the blustery winds off the river that perpetually zip and zoom around the city skyline. Instead, in a very unusual flight of fancy for his kind, Avi decided that he preferred the air conditioning, the bright yet indirect light of the indoors and the resting spots that always seem to be in closest proximity to the hustle and bustle of the kitchen. Perhaps he’s a gourmand at heart:) Long story short, Avi began and became the inspiration for an indoor orchard of fruit plants all started from seed.

In today’s post we are checking up on the state of the garden and the four inhabitants that now comprise the indoor orchard. It’s been 15 months, since I last posted about their progress and because Avi turns 3 on November 22nd, this seemed like a perfect time to check-in and check up to see how this indoor garden experiment is faring. Let’s take a peek…

Avi the Avocado:

The last time we checked up on Avi’s growth here on the blog it was mid-summer 2018. Outside the temperatures were hot and humid, but indoors everything was as cool as a cucumber. At that point, Avi measured 3′ 5″ inches tall and had just turned a hopeful corner of recovery from the terrible scale outbreak. When this photo was taken, Avi was just returning to his more handsome, happy, healthy state…

Today, I’m happy to share that Avi is still at it. Growing by leaps and bounds, he now measures 4′ 7″ inches tall and his leaves are widening out into a broad canopy…

In just 15 months he grew 1′ 3″ inches. That’s an impressive inch a month! You can see the dramatic difference in this side by side picture if you use the black framed wall art on the left as a reference point…

If he keeps growing at this rate, by next Thanksgiving Avi will be as tall as me:) Most thankfully, the scale is almost all gone. Soon he’ll transfer to a bigger pot where he’ll stay for a couple of years while he fills out leaf -wise. One thing I learned recently about transplanting flowers and plants is that you should only go to a slightly bigger pot than what you are already using – otherwise the plant spends all its energy below expanding its roots instead of growing taller above the soil line. The next pot size for Avi will be 12″ inches in diameter which should give him enough room to grow up and out for at least the next year and a half. Like a little kid graduating from crib to bed, Avi will be a true floor plant at that point, not longer able to be carried from perch to perch, an exciting milestone!

Grace the Grapefruit:

Not be outdone by Avi, a little friendly competition ensued between fruit trees. In this past year, Grace also also hit a spectacular growth spurt. She went from this in March 2018…

to this in July 2018…

to this in November 2019…

Just over 3′ 2″ inches tall now, Grace grew so fast that she’s been re-potted four times already. I’d like to say that all this robust enthusiasm caused her to literally break out of her planter, but her current abode was a cracked-then-repaired pot meant as a temporary holder for her. But she’s so happy in her blue space, there she’ll stay until she outgrows it. Meanwhile she’s very busy growing extra everything – skyscraper limbs, big green leaves and sharp thorns, especially on her trunk…

This is lovely to see, because just like Avi, Grace also succumbed to scale when I was away for a month taking care of my sick dad last January. When I got home, she had lost 70% of her leaves and had so much scale that the local garden center (where I took her for emergency help) declared it the worst case of scale outbreak that they’d ever seen. They also gave her a doomed prognosis, saying she probably wouldn’t make it. If you’ve never experienced scale before, this is what it looks like…(on overdrive as in Grace’s case)…

A series of flesh or clear sticky, jelly-like insects, scale wind up sucking the life out of plants. They are pretty gross looking and can be difficult to both see and eradicate but determined, I loaded up on Neem oil and bottles of rubbing alcohol (a trick I learned at the garden center) and then got to work every few days wiping down each of the leaves and the trunk. The rubbing alcohol kills the scale, and the Neem oil protects the plant from re-infestation. As it turns out, that was exactly what she needed and thankfully, Grace made a full recovery in just a few weeks. Now she’s racing to catch up with Avi!

Liz Lemon – The Lemon Tree

If we were giving out awards for the least amount of drama this year, the award would definitely go to Liz Lemon. By far the most low maintenance plant of the bunch, she just carried on over the past year the way all good lemon trees should – growing flowers, making lemons, filling out. Here she was in July 2018, a sprig of sharp angles…

Now she’s a more stately, shapely tree thanks to some careful pruning and lots of sunshine…

Not as fast a grower as Grace or Avi in the height department, Liz spent her past 15 months growing out instead of up. Coming in at 2′ 4″ inches tall she is the smallest of the household orchard trees but she supplied the most color of the bunch with her bright yellow lemons and her pretty perfume-scented flowers.

Just the other day, she started growing a new batch of tiny little lemons so I’m hoping our yield this year will be greater than last year’s, which produced a total of two lemons. Fingers crossed:)

Jools – The Medjool Date Palm

Finally, the baby of the group, born from seed in July 2018, was the Medjool date palm, who was so tiny it didn’t even have a name yet…

Four hundred and fifty six days later, the date palm looks like this. Meet Jools…

Standing at just over 16″ inches tall, Jools put forth a new leaf every few months last year. She lost a couple of green shoots to wind damage over the summer, but apparently that’s not really fazing her, as she just grows another one in its place. Low maintenance like Liz, Jools just requires a sunny window sill and a good dose of water every few days. When I look at her I can’t help but imagine those grand date palms that grow in India and Egypt – the ones that are big and lush and beautiful and radiate notions of exotic locales and foreign flavors. It will be exciting to see how big she grows over the winter now that she has taken up residence indoors and is out of the wind tunnel on the patio altogether.

Of all the orchard plants, Jools is the one I’ve researched least. There is an air of spontaneity in just watching her grow and imagining what might happen next. The container of dates that she came from was purchased at a fantastic international shop in the farmers market that unfortunately is no longer there. So not only is this date palm named Jools a fun growing experiment, but she’s also a good little memory of a place I loved, but can no longer visit. That’s the cool thing about plants isn’t it? How active they are in our lives… as decoration, as curious living creatures, and as memory holders. Each one is like a quirky little (or in some cases big!) character sharing our space, making it feel natural and welcoming, just like home.

Not every experiment I try turns out to be a successful one. This year I attempted apples (success up to month 5!) and papayas but neither lasted long enough to see the sprouts that start the story. Gardening is a game of chance after all. Somehow that makes the ones that do grow into a Grace or an Avi or a Jools all the more significant. While you are peeling and chopping and cutting stuff up this holiday season in your kitchen, keep your eye out for the seeds, and all the potential and possibility that is contained in those small packages tucked inside your favorite fruits and vegetables. Worlds of adventure stir inside our kitchens everyday, none more dramatic or miraculous than the lives that feed our lives.

If anyone has started their indoor gardens from seed, please comment on this post and share with us what you are growing and how it is going. One of our blog readers, Gloria, recently shared photos of her avocado tree in Florida, which she started from seed around the same time as Avi began. She planted hers outside, a smart decision thanks to Florida’s ideal growing climate. Three years in, her avocado seed now looks like this…

Wow! An absolute beauty towering over the garden at a majestic 7″ feet tall! Well on its way to being a proper shade tree in her yard, Gloria is hoping that by next year, she’ll be able to eliminate avocados from her market shopping list and instead just pick them right off her own tree. What an exciting thought! Our fingers are crossed that she is flush with avocado by this time next year:)

If you need a little more inspiration when it comes to building your own plant paradise, consider these colorful and beautifully illustrated mid-century books in the shop. They are packed full of helpful advice regarding citrus trees, orchards, edible plantings and indoor gardening…

They make fun gifts for yourself or your fellow garden lover, and unlike the internet, lay everything out before you all at once, instead of hunting and pecking your way through endless garden sites plant by plant.

If you missed the previous posts about the start of the indoor orchard, catch up here.

In the meantime, cheers and happy birthday to Avi, to all the seedlings out there who grow big with just a little extra dose of love and attention, and to Gloria for sharing her own personal gardening adventure with us:)

Turning Servers into Succulents: A Vintage Re-Invention

Published on September 15, 2019September 15, 2019 by In The Vintage Kitchen6 Comments

Eight. That’s how many days there are to go. It’s almost here! Then one thing turns into another. We end and we begin. We change and we grow. This year, the day falls on a Monday. The exact date – September 23rd. Then it’s official. The first day of Autumn arrives. How exciting! To celebrate the season, I have a fun new gardening project for all you do-it-yourself-ers out there who like to keep your hands busy in the dirt in the off-season when summer turns to fall and fall turns to winter and the outdoor garden is at rest. It doesn’t require much effort, time or expense but it does call for a little imagination. It will last forever if you want it to and it will make you look at things in your cupboards in a whole new way. Most importantly, it gives new purpose to old items that sometimes get left behind on a shelf or forgotten about in storage.

I’m so excited to introduce the succulent set…

…real plants growing out of old china serving pieces. If you’ve inherited pieces of your family’s china and are not quite sure what to do with them or how to incorporate them into your daily life, or if you just want a planter with a little bit of one-of a-kind personality then designating a vintage sugar bowl or a creamer or a serving dish as your new garden vessel is a fun way to go. Let’s look…

This Japanese Majolica creamer is from the 1940’s. Due to some cracks on the bottom it no longer holds water (or cream!) so it makes an ideal container for varieties of succulents that prefer well draining soil. All it needs is a little water once a week and it’s ready to grow. Keep it in the sink for a few minutes and the water drips out through the cracks, then it is good to go until its next watering seven days later.

Vintage sugar bowls like this one above, made in England, fit perfectly into shelves or small spaces. Your very own unexpected mini garden greenspace place!

This vintage coffeepot from the 1940s lost its lid somewhere along its 75 years of travels. That makes it no longer the most suitable vessel for hot coffee but it certainly makes a pretty container for eye-catching flower power in the form of a petal shaped succulent.

With their long shape and roomy width, gravy boats make great table centerpieces. They can usually accommodate more than a couple of mini plants depending on size. For wedding reception decorations, they offer the symbolism and sentimentality of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

Ideal plants for this type of pairing project, many succulents don’t require a lot of watering and come in a variety of sizes, colors and shapes. As they grow, the plants can be transferred to larger and larger containers like this one – a two-handled vegetable dish from Salem Pottery’s Commodore pattern which debuted in the 1940’s. Because of its larger size it can accommodate up to seven 2.5″ inch succulents or just a few bigger individuals that have outgrown their smaller holders…

Authentic crazing, staining and chippy details add interesting, quirky personality to your space that you can’t find in modern day planters. They also easily fit on window sills, ledges, mantles and counter top nooks. Choose one that matches your interior aesthetic, or the colors of your kitchen, or reminds you of a good memory and you’ll instantly add a bit of happy energy to your space. Old dishes love to remain useful helpers. Matching the old with the new creates balance and harmony and reminds us that imperfections are the stuff of life. Beautiful! This antique gravy boat below is over 100 years old but still looks as fresh and pretty as ever thanks to its classic shape.

The trio below have no cracks to worry about so they are ideal holders for succulents and cactus that prefer to be spritzed with water, rather than doused, every now and again. Add some some pea gravel to the bottom of each vessel before adding dirt and certain succulents will be happy with just a tiny bit of water every now and again.

Another possibility is to gather them all up and make a hanging wall display with the help of a crate…

That makes an instant collection and an engaging garden that you can cultivate and tend to all year round. Usually all that is required for succulents is bright natural light, a sunny alcove or close proximity to a window.

With all their color choices which range from light gray to soft pink, bright green to dusty blue there is great fun in matching plant to planter and then watching them grow and sprout new additions.

If you need a vintage serving piece to start your garden you can find the ones above in the garden section of the shop. Succulents are available at most garden centers, nurseries, farmers markets or sometimes even the floral section of the grocery store. I recommend getting your planter first, then your succulent second, so that you can determine the appropriate drainage condition, color and shape for plant and planter.

Hope this brings a little fun your way on our second to last Sunday of summer. Cheers to new gardens, old dishes and the joy they both provide:)

A Year and 91 Days: The Life and Times of Avi the Avocado

Published on February 23, 2018April 23, 2018 by In The Vintage Kitchen19 Comments

Two days before Thanksgiving, not last year, but the year before, a sandwich was made and a seed was started. The sandwich was a smashed collaboration of avocado and sauteed kale, ricotta cheese and caramelized onions which turned out great and became a repeat recipe for awhile, but the real star of the show was the seed. On that day, November 22nd, 2016 a little life began.

Reminiscent of elementary school science classes, the avocado pit (actually called a berry) from the sandwich-making endeavor got cleaned up and pierced with toothpicks. Resting on the rim of a glass while partially submerged in water, it sat there half-hovering for days and then weeks and then months. Absolutely nothing happened. The holiday season came and went. We celebrated New Year’s and middle month birthdays and our first snow in the ending week of January. But in the land of the avocado, nothing was changing except regular refills of water in the glass. It was such uneventful gardening I didn’t even take photographs.

Heading into the first week of February (week 9), I thought perhaps my avocado seed was a dud and was ready to abandon the project altogether. But magically, almost as if the little seed had read my thoughts, a crack in the pit opened up one morning. Something was happening, at long last! Days later a tap root started reaching out like a diver heading towards the bottom of the sea. And then things really escalated. Every day, it grew longer and longer until little root tentacles started filling the bottom of the glass. Satisfied with itself, it turned its attention skyward and from the center of the pit, a long slender green shoot started reaching for the stars.

Drinking about a 1/4 cup of water a day, it grew almost a 1/2″ inch every morning. When it passed 12 inches” in height and grew its first set of leaves, I named this little guy growing with such gusto, Avi, and welcomed him into the family. For most of the Spring, Avi enjoyed his glass of water while taking in the river view from his perch in the window.

As the days grew longer and the temperatures warmed, I introduced to him to the outdoors for a little bit each day. When the hot, humid temperatures of summer in the South took over, he was transferred to a new garden pot filled with potting soil and joined the summer flowers on the balcony. You might remember seeing him from last summer’s post about how to make a mini-compost bin.

There’s Avi on the bottom right corner behind the nasturtiums!

In the lazy summer sun, Avi grew and grew and grew. Towering over the other plants, he looked like a king ruling over his court.

All summer he played a long-standing game with the nasturtiums to see who could climb the furthest.

Avi was the winner! When the seasons changed and the cool rains of Autumn scattered leaves on the balcony garden, Avi welcomed the wet weather.

But when we moved in mid-Fall trouble began. His first few nights went okay. He and Indie liked to watch the city lights come on from his new spot on the new balcony…

but during the day, when the sun was warm and bright, and the birds were floating overhead, Avi started doing peculiar things. Instead of carrying on with his growth spurt, he got limpy and lethargic. A week into his new surroundings, he developed brown spots and then white spots and then crinkly skin. Thinking he was not getting enough water, I doubled up. But soon after, he looked more like a loose umbrella than a young tree. His leaves turned from a colorful shade of lime to a dull blackish green. Tragedy was looming, we both knew it. A week before his first birthday I feared Avi might be on his last legs.

Signals from a troubling time of growing pains.

I brought him inside for a few days, consulted the internet and determined that he either had too much salt built up in his roots, ( a common side-effect of using regular tap water for daily watering) or he was getting too much sun on the new patio. I rinsed his roots in distilled water and gave him a new home in a bigger pot with fresh potting soil. Then he got a new vantage point – a sunny windowsill on top of a low bookshelf.

Avi’s second perch nestled in with pig and pineapple and Hedy Hatstand.

But for two weeks he still looked terrible. So he moved again, this time to a bright corner between two big windows – a spot that gets no direct sunlight but reflects light because of the white wall paint. It also happens to be right next to the kitchen, where I could keep a close eye on him. To my happiness, Avi flourished once again! Day by day, his leaves moved higher and higher until they went from vertical back to horizontal. And he started growing again.

Now he’s taller than dear Hudson and happy as a clam. As it turns out, all Avi ever wanted was to be close to the kitchen and out of the sun. Who can blame him?

Back to pretty green leaves and a happy disposition once again!

Today he measures 3′ feet 2″ inches tall and he’s just achieved his longest set of leaves at 12.5″ inches in length. Some gardening experts say that Avi will never produce avocados to eat, but that doesn’t matter, I like him just for the handsome plant that he is. And it’s fun to watch him grow. I hope to see him reach a height of 8-9 feet (maybe taller!), a little indoor arboretum in the making.

If you’d like to grow your own Avi, it’s really simple. Find step by step instructions here. You just need an extra dose of patience in the beginning until the berry cracks open and growing gets underway. Other than regular watering every couple days and eventual transplanting as it grows, avocado plants are easy to care for. Many garden sites say that avocados LOVE sun, but as we learned with Avi’s growing pains, too much sun is indeed, too much, so watch closely as your plant’s personality develops and see what he or she likes best.

On November 22nd, when Avi celebrates his second birthday, we’ll check back in to see how much he has grown in the nine months between now and then. Maybe he’ll be up to the ceiling!

In the meantime, cheers to Avi and his ability to weather the rigors of adolescence. And cheers to indoor gardening – an activity that’s in-season all year round!