Archive
love spring
It was beautiful after work and great to get out and do some mucking around with the garden. I cleaned up the herb bed and can give my first detailed report. The tarragon is looking great, the oregano is spreading nicely, the thyme is back in two places, and the local white sage could almost be described as pernicious and is enlarging its footprint this year. Bergamont is looking good and the chives continue. The parsley is back as well. Inside the rosemary rocked through the winter and will move outside noticeably larger.
I raked off the leaves off the strawberries and was disappointed. I think i had them on too thick and wet and lost some plants. Nonetheless there’s a lot of them and most look great. With the early super cold snap I might have lost some anyway, who knows. I have a lot of leaves now and turned the compost before adding a bushel to the working pile. The working pile looks great, the one finishing is struggling and needs a lot of work.
Glad the weather is cooperating and glad to be home and on it. On the flower front crocuses are up and doing well, especially the violet ones. Everything else is coming along. less and less bare every day.
first foray
After a pretty harsh winter I got my first real chance to get my hands in the dirt since probably November. I went to Westlakes as I had some other shopping to do. I got 2 more 50 lb bags of sand for the horseshoe pits for the winter settling. I also picked up 2 cubic yards of composted cotton waste. I paid a little more than if i would have gotten compost and peat but i figured composted ag waste was better than supporting peat mining, a fairly bad thing from what i’ve read. I also got a can of brown spray paint for the rain barrels, the special kind for plastic. Plus i got a small bottle of black for the rims and ridges so i have a faux rustic thing going. The can only covered 1 1/2 barrels so i will need another one. I saw bulbs and was tempted but resisted to focus on clean up, or so i thought. At Aldis i ended up getting 15 gladiolas and a gardenia. Dad wasn’t feeling up to cutting down the rest of the ant infested red bud so i didn’t have to stack wood and haul brush. Instead I dug up a small bed up on the high side on the east, next to the neighbors privacy fence. I put the gardenia in the middle and the glads around it, fairly dense, putting in about 4 inches of the cotton compost. I did a couple of short dense rows of mescalin mix over the tree roots where i couldn’t get very deep. Didn’t realize glads need to go in 8 inches or i probably would have put them elsewhere. Too wet to go about anywhere else. Lots of spring bulbs popping up, but no flowers yet. Doesn’t look like i’ve got many crocuses coming back. I think the squirrels have been in them. There’s this stubby tailed bastard i’ve caught in my tulips twice. Dad says i shouldn’t begrudge them a little eats. I also cleaned up my herb garden, white sage, chives, and oregano coming back already. I considered raking the leaves out of the beds but decided to wait. Compost is going slow. With a march vacation coming probably won’t get as much of the really early stuff in. Nonetheless some time outside felt really good.
meteorological spring revisited
Seeing some interest in last years post I thought I would revisit the topic this year. Meteorological Spring is the idea that the equinox doesn’t really hit when the seasons really change. Its the idea that March, April & May are more springlike and June not so much. Astronomically spring rolls through to around June 20. Obviously mid June is Summer. Personally I celebrate both.
Last year I was a new nonsmoker. This year its been a year and I am in a great place with it. I feel as much more like a nonsmoker than a former smoker. This weekend I was even able to pick The Popster up a pack which would have been a no no a year ago.
Last year I was sick of winter. This year much more so. I am in a better place emotionally which i wouldn’t have realized without going back and reading my old post. This winter has been so much worse. We got hit with a long and very cold snap in December wiping out my winter crops and then snow and cold all winter long. No winter gardening. Only 2 of my 3 garlics i managed to get in survived. The third one washed away and froze. I don’t know when i’ll get my hands in the dirt. The compost hasn’t done anything all winter so it’ll probably be May before I have usable stuff. (Last year I had a batch in March and a batch in May).
Last year I had a Convening of the Cadre for Co-Occurring Excellence to attend. This year I do as well. This year I am on the steering committee and we are trying to do something. I’ll see if we really did on Meteorological Spring part 3.
Other changes, I am blogging more, playing more dungeons and dragons, and getting less projects done on the house. Getting along better with Dad in retrospect and am overall happier. I am getting a little more exercise, eating out a lot less and spending a lot less money. I am driving less and reading less books and more magazines. I facebook more and talk on the phone less. I gave up my personal cell phone months ago (great decision) and am days away from dropping my work cell phone. I am working a little less but still too much. All in all life improves. Easy to miss without some reflection on where we’ve come from. I am more and more seeing an “attitude of gratitude” as the most fundamental thing in my quality of life. Thanks for sharing the journey and please leave a comment.
swinging an axe
I spent a chunk of the day chopping down the bush honey locust out of the northwest corner of my backyard. My friend Trevor had pointed it out and mentioned it was a pernicious invader that had to go but then i heard that the cultivated ones weren’t pernicious. Last spring at the native plant show i talked to some experts and they said the white and yellow flowered kind were the aggressive ones and so i waited until it confirmed my memory that the flowers were white and decided to knock it out this winter. I see how it has a big edge over the natives because it didn’t drop its leaves until well into December.
Than we had a couple of weeks of ugly cold and now I’m cutting it down. I spent a couple of sessions warming up and got serious on it yesterday. I was stymied because all the branches were seriously entangled and large chunks of it hung over the neighbors rusty old chain link fence (which keeps out the pit-bull), wires, and my own fence. I had it better’n a third down and hadn’t been able to pull out anything out of the mass. Finally I just started chopping off branches and pulling them out one by one. The final pieces I roped and had Harry pull on the rope to keep the wires up. Success.
Now I am hand sawing some of the mid sized trunks to line a path through the new beds. I am hoping to rake out the plant material, pull up the handfuls of grass & mud I haven’t smushed all apart yet and plant my wildflower mix. I picked that up last spring at the Missouri Wildflower Nursery in Brazito last spring. I am going to use a packet of shade mix, one of shade mix thin soil, some bush clover, and one other one which is escaping me. Getting the seeds on the ground is the part of the project that is time sensitive. Its barely early winter yet.
Swinging the axe has got me nostalgic. I got into chopping wood in my early teens. It helped me get a handle on my anger which saved me a world of hurt. There’s something special about cutting stuff down by hand. If I had used a chainsaw i could have blasted through it but the noise and my general unease with machinery would have taken away from the experience. I wouldn’t have the satisfied delight from the tingle in my hands and the feeling that i did something in all those weird muscle groups around my body.
It reminds me of camping, and splitting wood for anyone whoever guested me and burned wood. I remember going home for christmas break with Claire and splitting her a winter’s worth of wood. I got into a rhythm and was nailing these big oak logs with one swing of the maul. It felt good, feels good now.
deer ate my broccoli
It has been great to get out and work in the yard. After endless rain, being sick, and working late it has been awhile since i got out and got my hands dirty. I started the day at the market getting yellow carrots, some of the last field tomatoes, and some odds and ends. Ran into Sarah and shopped with her there and at gerbees. Made plans to collect wreath stuff in the national forest tomorrow.
After the market i surveyed the demesne and found all of the broccoli neatly cropped off. It was looking like it was gonna make a crop too, sadness. That made a total loss for the fall seedling project. $3.75 for a snack for deer, although at that point i was suspecting Thumper and not Bambi.
My most pressing project was to get rid of the leaf pile by the compost bin before it killed the grass. It was going on like three weeks since they got piled up there after the bins got filled up. First i needed a place to put them so i pulled out the tomatoes out of the strawberry beds. I found three nice tomatoes with only some soft spots and Harry put them in the three bean salad for a side with our local farm trout.
The strawberries really came out good and i weeded the now expanded beds. Dad and i debated strawberry policy and I am ready to cede up as much square footage as they want. i’ll just move the path around them out to the lilacs at least. I did reposition those that got pulled out in the cleaning of the beds.
I then just raked the pile down the hill and covered them up in a 4″ pile. In the spring i’ll rake them off and compost them when i’ll need brown stuff. I debated knocking off for the day but had some energy left so i transplanted the daffodils growing in the southeast corner that i use as grill supply storage. I spread the clump out over a space about four times as big using up the last of my homemade compost. I’m a ways away from the next batch. Hopefully march.
I then raked the leaves on the top of the hill in the front yard onto the spring bulb beds. While checking out the tulip/crocus bed on the eastern side i saw two holes. I first thought it was squirrels harvesting out more tulips (they ate half of them last fall when i planted them) as i had seen sign they were pulling out tulips in the back yard. The holes weren’t ragged though and i saw an obvious hoof print. I think it was one going over the fence from the depth which made me think that’s who got the brocolli.
Gonna have to get Oni out earlier in the morning. She was chasing a squirrel while i was raking, a bulky one missing most of his tail. There was a littler one out front with me hanging out in the bushes. I told the furry tailed rat to stay out of my bulbs and made sure i got the leaves on.
Trouts on. i’ll let you know how the maters were.
fall gardening
I was raised gardening. We always had a huge garden when i was growing up. enough to feed our large family, give to friends, and preserve for the winter. My mom always put away 100 pints of corn and 100 quarts of tomatoes. she started with juice and then realized whole tomatoes were easier and just as useful. She also did pickles and freezer jams and green beans and often other things as well but we always had a lot of corn and tomatoes.
My dad drove truck so it varied on when the garden got put in. We always put it in in a couple of days and everyone pitched in. I remember putting in the corn, because those seeds were big for the grasping of little hands. I remember being told not to touch my face and wash my hands and for gods sake don’t eat the little corn, the pink stuff on them is poison. Then dad would leave for the road and all the maintenance fell on us kids. Usually we would ignore it until word came that he was coming back and then we would desultorily do some weeding but we would never get through the endless rows of corn and tomatoes and would get hollered at for being the lazy goodfornothings we were. i swore when i had my own garden i would never grow corn and tomatoes.
the big thing i got out of it was the rhythm of the conventional garden. Till in the spring, anytime after May 15 and plant it all in a couple of days at most. weed all summer, harvest in the fall. Maybe if loads permit put in another batch of corn 2 weeks after the first.
Now its different. i plant pretty much year around. i love the idea of fall crops. the little lettuces and arugula are coming along nicely. I hope to get in some spinach yet. two of the three garlic i planted have already come up and i plan on putting in another head or two yet. I still hope to turn over a full 120 square foot bed and build a little stone wall (out of all the rocks and stones i’ve turned up) around it. saturday i hope to pick up a 1/4 scoop of sand (about 800 #s). I want to add about 300 in the horseshoe pits and the other 5 in the rest of the garden bed.
After the leaves fall on the bush honey locust i am going to cut that down and haul it to the mulch pile. i am going to pull some of the ivies and other crap plants and put in some native wildflower mixes, showy goldenrod and a native clover. I am also going to add a row of paw paw trees across the back of my little wildflower bed. I may lay out a path through the new beds with the trunks of the honey locust. While i’m cutting i’m going to cut back on the mimosa branches from the neighbor’s tree that hang over and hopefully bring a little more light.
And of course spring bulbs, perhaps another mum, and maybe some other fall plants will go in. Fall is as jam packed with planting as spring and they are coming together in my mind, even as i put my carrot bed to sleep. i harvested them last week, piss poor i must say, but i’ll let you know how they taste. i covered that bed with leaves, raked just for that purpose, and will cover that with coffee grounds as soon as my grounds container gets filled up. theres a pot of a delicious triple certified blend from kaldis getting ready to go in the mix right now. closing loops and completing the circle. things are still pretty messed up but some things at least are heading back again in the right direction.
the fall bed is in
John has been visiting and so i took a four day weekend and we have been doing just a lot of hanging out. Since i’m not smoking i haven’t just wanted to sit around so i’ve gotten a fair amount of gardening done. I turned over about 10 square feet in the start of a third bed north of my other two. Dad thinks the light will be better than the other two beds this time of year or i would have pieced in the stuff i wanted to plant in the other two beds.
I double dug them and only shoveled in about an inch of hummus and an inch and a half of compost. Smokey, John’s Aussie Cattle Dog, was pretty into rooting into and eating of the compost so i guess its not quite finished but looked pretty good to me (earthy smell and except for 1/2 a cob and some egg shell fragments can’t tell what it is). I put all the stuff in the bottom foot and would’ve put in another inch or two of compost in the top as well but with the dog taking an interest i didn’t want to give it any more reason to dig in the bed.
I planted my broccoli and cabbage starts. They’re pretty little but its getting late in the year. I also planted 3 garlics from my second best head and 4 one foot rows of lettuce, arugula, and mescalin. this morning i looked out the back bedroom window and the little broccolis were looking very brave standing in their two little rows backed by giant squash blossoms and a marigold explosion. this late summer has been incredible.
I’m glad i’ve gotten everything in. Time and weather permitting i would like to get in some day lilies or another mum or any discounted perennial i come across. I’m also planning on trimming out the fence row since a big branch came down in the front yard and i need to make a trip to the mulch site anyways.
Summer seems to be winding down and it never even really got going. We got a nice soaking rain which we needed but I also need to turn over a new bed and get some fall stuff in. I’m most eager to get in some garlic before I eat it all. I didn’t get a whole lot out of what I planted and ate the nicest head but the second nicest I still have and want to plant that. I got more than I thought I was going to from the way almost all the surviving plants struggled, but still not that much. I’m going to add a lot more to the soil this time, maybe 3 inches of hummus and 6 inches of compost. See what that does. I also have 6 surviving cabbage plants to put in but I decided to give them another week at least to get bigger and hardier even though it’s getting late. I saw day lilies at the market and wanted one, but I didn’t drive and they wouldn’t fit in the trunk. My dollar mum from last year being huge and beautiful is keeping me from paying $7 for one that don’t even have hardy in the name. I want to put in a red one though for the song. I’ll have to check through the poetry and see if its there.
The Garden in August
The garden is not what I expected but lovely nonetheless. The only seeds that came up were the carrots. The rabbits mowed them down once but they look like they might do ok. The plants I put in struggled early because of all the rain. My tomatoes have only produced a small amount and my peppers struggled as well. I did get a couple of black bell peppers and the hot banana peppers have done OK. It looks like I’ll get some habaneras as well but they’re not ready yet.
My saving grace was putting in the flat of strawberries by the house. Not only have they done well but I got some great volunteer tomatoes and squash out of my compost. Those tomatoes have produced way more than the ones I planted. I got a couple of really nice pink ones that seem like an heirloom variety but the big producer has been a beefsteak looking tomato. The squash vines have been huge and spilled across large chunks of yard. They’ve produced some small butternuts and one good looking pumpkin. More are developing and I think I should do all right on the butternut front. In the heart of summer the vines were growing a foot a day and they were putting up all these great looking huge yellow flowers. I think with all the rain there were a lot that didn’t get fertilized and I had some kind of cutworm thing going that cut off a lot of blooms. They would have been worth it had they not produced anything though the flowers are so pretty in the morning.
Yesterday I made compost tea and fed my struggling starts. My compost continues to do well. I’ve got my 2nd batch ready to go and it looks really good. I also started cultivating the swiss chard. It is pretty heat tolerant so I put it in in July and it is doing well. Well lo and behold I came across this really great looking praying mantis. I had seen a little one in the spring down the bed on a volunteer tomato and I like to think this one had grown up in my garden. I took some pictures, don’t know if they came out.
So the beds by the house did great. I also tried a bed up by the privacy fence on the high part. Instead of too much water like the low beds I have too little water. I may get a sun flower or two to bloom, but no summer squash, and even the native plants are struggling up there. The soil is weird very light and airy but dries like cement. I tried mulching which I think helped but was too little too late.
I planted a lot of native stuff with decidedly mixed results. Deer came and ate my Paw Paw trees. I put in two on the shady side of the house in front of the fence. They came back post-deer until I had a brain fart and mowed them down. One came back and Harry mowed it down the first time he mowed. So no paw paws. On the plus side my persimmon that got bug eaten down to stems and then mauled down to a stump by dogs shot a branch that is growing straight up and might survive after all. So who knows maybe the paw paw is of the lazarus variety as well.
I planted black berries and one black raspberry along the back fence. One plant got buggy, bad aphids maybe. I squirted it off real hard with the hose and that took care of it. I also spruced up the shady garden bed but a lot of that stuff just got overrun or lost. The brown eyed suzans did great this year, plus some lilies that were here before me, and some other stuff bloomed. From the stuff I planted the spiderworts did ok for awhile but just kind of got tangly and droopy.
I planted some coreopsis by my mail box which did just great. Very pretty much of the summer. I have some asters there, I thought they weren’t doing anything but a crossword puzzle clue said asters bloom late so maybe they’ll do something.
The sickly dilapidated mums I got at the hardware store came back in two places. One is huge with pretty yellow flowers. My pink rose bush from last year has done nice this year and the hostas boomed, until the deer ate ‘em. I fertilized, with chemicals (I dumpstered them years ago, what are you gonna do?). I added 2 discount rose bushes late, one put out a pretty rose, I should have clipped it and forced it to grow plant but couldn’t make myself until the bloom started to fade. One rose bush died, I delayed planting them a week because I got busy and weather got spotty. Plant murderer. I also planted a native rose, its itty bitty. Just below the roses I transplanted the lilies an old client in Michigan gave me. She told me to move them every year and they struggle when they’re in the same spot for years. I figure I’ll move them somewhere else and then add more rose bushes where the lilies were.
Henry, my neighbor gave me some forsythia. I put some under the overhang up front and on the shady side. Some I put in the back as part of a row of bushes kind of mirroring my clothesline. I anchored that with a witch hazel, which seems to be doing pretty good. So writing all this makes me feel like I’ve done something. I also pulled a couple of rose of Sharon out of the lilacs I planted below my bedroom window (where they get way to much sun). I planted those by my hidden back gate in the shade of the bush honeysuckle. I confirmed that one is a dangerous nuisance and am going to cut it out this winter. I hope the Rose of Sharon is not the same, but my mom liked them and they hold some nostalgia for me.
Gardening continues in earnest. have planted a lot of native wild flowers, some row crops (arugula, onions, leaf lettuce, carrots, radishes, a little spinach), i have a cold frame with leaf lettuce (almost ready) and spinache (couple more weeks), i have garlic, chives, oregano, & sage coming back from last year. also added white sage, echincacea, and wild bergamont (all native) this year. Planted paw paws yesterday, i put in 2 should have gotten 3. i might go to the native plant sale (i drove to a little hippy place an hour away for my other natives) and get another one on saturday. the weekend after i am camping on the grounds of a B&B (hot tub access) and pulling invasive garlic mustard out of a river bottom area where i have been planting native trees with missouri river relief. We have been planting nut trees (oaks, hickory, pecan) with the thought once they mature the nuts will float down stream to re-seed the rest of the banks. i love being involved in a 300 year plan. glad your still coming, time frame not really that important. happy easter. eric says ‘a late easter means an early spring.’
Multiconstruct 
Recent Comments