Bountiful Boxes

Our Vates collard greens have successfully overwintered for three years now. The branches seem more like trees, but the leaves are tender. Click on the photo to visit Seed Savers Exchange to order seeds.

Hello, and happy Spring! We are in full garden-bed mode at Bountiful Boxes – get your orders in so you can optimize the 2017 growing season. A note: Prices for our kits have increased. We are now being charged a premium for the long-lasting cedar planking (it’s a trade dispute between the US and Canada over softwood lumber; costs for American buyers were held down by the Softwood Lumber Agreement that expired in October 2015 and was held in place by a one-year moratorium until October 2016, but it’s possible this is temporary if terms of NAFTA are renegotiated; read more here).

French tarragon is a perennial! With it growing in abundance last summer, one of our favorite uses was as a base for roasting chicken (big chicken, generous kosher salt, plenty of fresh-ground Tellicherry peppercorns and into the roasting pan at 425 degrees for an hour, give or take). We find our Tellicherry peppercorns at Savory Spice Shop in Princeton, but they’re also available by mail order. Click on the photo to reach the website.

Chives are perennial, and so delicious when finely chopped and sprinkled over hot or cold soups. We bought this as a plant a few years ago, from Mazur Nursery, 265 Bakers Basin Road in Lawrenceville. Click on the photo to visit the website.

Our Red Russian kale overwintered quite nicely. We like to braise these leaves, cut into ribbons, in olive oil with sauteed garlic. Click on the photo to find seeds for this sweet and succulent dark green.

The new garden bed at the Whole Earth Center offers a fresh start of rich black soil.

The oak bed that had produced many beautiful vegetables at Whole Earth Center since 2012 was still in solid shape but I decided to spruce up the demonstration bed over there by installing a tall, capped version of our popular cedar bed.

The bed is one board higher than our standard bed and has a picture-frame cap around the top. This raises the bed to the height of a standard chair and creates a nice surface on which to sit.

What would you like us to plant in it? Or better yet, what would you plant, if you had your own blank slate of rich black soil like this?

Here’s a rule of thumb: First, grow your own. Then, if there’s something you still need, buy it at the Whole Earth Center.

As inspiration for the year ahead, here is a sampling of goodies harvested from our own boxes and the surrounding garden last year.

From time to time I’ve made garden beds with caps on them that give the bed a finished look and provide a place to sit. Many people have asked for them but I did not have a good way to offer the add-on as a kit that would be easy for anyone to install. I am excited to say that I have worked out a good system and am offering a cap for sale!

Here are photos of caps on a friend’s bed (a custom 3′ width):

Caps on a pair of 3-foot-wide beds.

Detail of cap. Secured with stainless steel finish-head screws.

Our western red cedar lasts a long time but nothing is forever. One of the nice things about our design is that individual pieces can be removed and replaced. Today I am introducing a partial warranty and replacement part policy. If you purchased a bed from Bountiful Boxes in the previous three years — this year, that’s 2012, 2013 or 2014 — and have found a part not holding up well, please let me know and I will give you a replacement part at no charge. If your bed is older than that, I am offering replacement pieces for the lifetime of your bed at a near-cost price.

For details, please see our replacement parts page.

Reader Brad Graham kindly send photos of the beds he made using Bountiful Boxes instructions.

On our DIY page, I offer instructions for how to make a Bountiful Boxes kit yourself instead of paying me to do it. The only payment I ask in return is photos of your garden to show off.

Reader Brad Graham took up the challenge in fall 2014, and from the looks of it did a terrific job. He wrote:

The instructions were clear and everything went swimmingly. 
I lived in Princeton for a year and would frequent the Whole 
Earth Center, which is how I was familiar with your site. We 
just moved to Ardmore, PA (just outside of Philadelphia) and 
one of my first goals was to put in some gardening space. 
I'm really excited for the spring time so I can get my hands 
dirty. Hopefully we don't have another winter like last 
year. The township I live in offers free leaf compost for 
residents, which I've used to fill the beds. It took around 
eight trash cans (8*32=256 gallons) per bed. 

I planted some fall garlic bulbs back in mid-October, but 
with this warm weather I'm starting to see a few sprouts, 
just have to plant them later next year. My next step is to 
gather some leaves, shred them up, and mulch the beds.

Our do-it-yourself instructions even include a printout to lay over the end of the board to show where to drill the holes! Here’s Brad Graham’s setup as he used our instructions.

Chives are a beautiful perennial to have in a raised garden bed. Ours were blooming gloriously the other day.

At the bottom of the picture, you can see a rascally sprig of mint photobombing the picture. Really, that’s mint’s approach to the whole garden – once it’s in there it pops up everywhere. Beware of putting mint in your raised bed!

The peas have sprouted, the lettuce is up and apple trees are blooming — all so welcome.

The peas should be ready to pick by early June.

These apples – Arkansas Black – are late season, producing beautiful dark-skinned fruit that’s ready to pick in October.

So these early spring harbingers actually book-end the season.

I am pining for peas. Only two weeks on the calendar until the traditional pea planting day of March 17. But as I look out over the graying expanse of snow and ice that blocks the few modestly warm days from loosening winter’s grip on the hard-frozen ground, the feel of a pea seed sliding into dirt under gentle pressure from my thumb seems remote. Harder still to conjure that snap as the first snow pea of the season breaks free of the vine, still dewy wet in the early morning sun, and the sweet grassy juicy crunch of the first bite…

I ought to be planning my season of working in the garden and building raised beds but I need extra inspiration. What did it look like when snow did not blanket the beds? Let’s walk through some pictures from 2013.

Just to remind myself of inevitable transitions, I’ll go back more than a full year, to January 1, 2013, when we harvested collard greens that were overwintering nicely – a bowl chiffonaded and ready to turn into our traditional New Year’s Day supper of black-eyed peas and collard greens.

Collards seem to sweeten after a frost. Even without a protective cover, such as a cold frame, they seem to bounce right back and are ready for harvest any time the temperature exceeds freezing.

Collards keep on going past the winter into the new season, but don’t forget to plan new ones. Here are some tiny collards on their way in — I took this photo at the Whole Earth Center demonstration bed on March 30, 2013:

But what about the peas? The trellis is all set there in the back, but nothing’s coming up yet….

Let’s skip ahead another two weeks (oh what a long time that is when I’m waiting for seeds to sprout) to April 12, 2013, when — there they were! — the first pea sprouts of the season:

Ok, now we’re moving. Two days later, April 14, 2013, we had the first harvest of lettuce.

It’s hard to describe what happens when it’s time to pick lettuce: the sense of it being too early, really, for anything but a taste and the discovery that I’ve filled an entire salad bowl and hardly changed how the lettuce patch looks… the soft aroma of the leaves as I proudly carry the bowl inside… the profound realization of just how much more vibrant, precise and deep the flavors are compared to anything that can be bought in the store… the simple pleasure of welcoming a new season’s worth of flavor to the table.

Meanwhile, back with the peas: Here’s one to harvest on May 30, 2013.

From that point on for the next several weeks they came like gangbusters. Snow peas and sugar snaps. Racing up the trellis, they formed a great green wall. Only this wall is specked by white flowers, each one signalling the arrival of a pea pod.

Don’t forget, the early shoots are delicious too. When we harvest lettuce, we often stop by the wall-of-peas and clip some tendrils to sprinkle on top of the salad bowl. Of course some chopped up peas go in the salad too.

Let’s change colors. Also on May 30, here’s what was coming from the raised bed four feet behind the peas. This is a case where red and green don’t signal Christmas whatsoever:

Again, the flavor of a strawberry from your own carefully tended soil can’t be bought.

Oh, and did I mention the peas kept coming? June 4:

The green beans arrived by June 25 (joining the lettuce, which was still going strong).

I like to come home for lunch and pick a few green beans to eat raw with a sandwich. They are sweet and crunchy like candy.

More colors – we had a bumper crop of pink-eyed purple-hulled peas. Fun to shell, delicious to eat. These photos from August 21 courtesy of Karla Cook:

But what about tomatoes? Apparently I was too busy eating them to take pictures. Ah, well they were still coming on strong into October. Here are a couple charmers on October 5. By October 12, the vines were looking a bit spent.

There’s no reason why the season should stop here. On this season’s ambitious list: Building an easy-to-use cold frame. Previous attempts have gone well enough to prove that lettuce can last pretty much all winter.

Well, what are you looking forward to this year? What were your triumphs from last year?