MamaStories

The garden is about 90% planted.

peas and poles for the pole beans. compost in background

Today I sowed all the dry beans, green beans and pole beans – first year I’m growing these – and the squashes, zukes and cukes. Also watermelon, carrots and basil, and calendula, anise and chamomile (German), all from seed.

I have faith in a seed.

new bed in foreground (calendula, anise and chamomile), then parsley and basil, then broccoli and Brussels sprouts, lastly monster rhubarb.

Once my hoop house is moved, I’ll transplant  the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants and sow the lima and garbanzo beans (which like it hot).

seedlings

All the trees, bushes and live plants I put in at the beginning of April are doing fine, except for the Wild Ginger. The currants, gooseberries and strawberries that were planted last year are thriving. Not so the hazels, which got stripped in one day by the nasty caterpillars. I hope they come back (the hazels, not the caterpillars). And none of the asparagus ever came back: it seems like some critter ate the roots (which animal would eat those?).

new bed with medicinals

I harvested mint and it’s steeping. The kitchen smells divine. Also rhubarb. Those plants are monsters!

potatoes!

The hoop house is moving on Saturday. “Moving” is not the right word — being moved. Though the hoop house is movable because it’s modular, some of its pieces are darn heavy. DH and I moved it once, just the two of us, and we nearly broke our backs and our (t)rusty Radio Flyer.

celery, carrots, green beans, garlic, rhubarb

So I’m going to invite everyone I can think of who’s near and will call it a  barn raising!

In return for their help, I promise that “you’ll learn about hoop house construction, what to do and what not to do (yup, that too), what you can grow in it, and how these hoop benders work – and if you want one for yourself, use ours (it’s part of the tool pool). You’ll see what is growing in the garden, I can introduce you to the bees, and I hope you will take home a lettuce or two because we’re swimming in them. And when the time comes for you to do a barn raising, I’ll be there!”

It’s about time we started doing it like that!

Want to come? There will be lettuce and rhubarb…

{UPDATE} What happened?

Click for larger

A lot has happened in the garden. The trees are gone and there is more sunlight all around. I’ve planted 2 blackberries, 3 elderberries, 50 strawberries, 4 rosas, 2 hazels, 2 serviceberries, 1 jostaberry, 2 peashrubs, 4 muntead lavender, 8 grapes, 4 wormwoods and 1 witchhazel. I’ve put in 90% of my veggie transplants, now it’s just the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. I’ve filled three beds with potatoes. I’m also filling up the herb bed up front with interesting medicinal herbs. I’m fixing the fence around the veg garden and making trellises. I’m predicting a hot and dry summer, so I’ve also been mulching, mulching, mulching.

A lot of the new activity happens down the hill, near the street. Neighbors drive by and slow down, as they usually do (sometimes to wave, sometimes to ponder me doing my bee hive dance), but now they stop and roll down the window and chat. Many are asking why we took down the trees, and I’m sure we’ll have more enthusiasts coming by once the solar PV comes up. They ask what bushes I am planting (down here? Elderberry, jostaberry, serviceberry,witch hazel, all of which like it moist) and what mulch I’m using (first, a top dressing of compost, then a thick band of shredded leaf mulch. I like it, chatting with the neighbors about the garden, the food. I sincerely hope we can get that bottom area done this Summer.

That brings us to the still to do’s, some big, some bigger:

1. receive and plant sweet potatoes and sunchokes, for which latter I need to dig and make a raised bed. The former go into containers, which I plan to put up so the vines can trail down.
2. move and fix hoophouse, plant peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants in it.
3. dig trench for roof-runoff into pond, dig and plant pond.
4. terrace the slope path up front (too much erosion, grass seed washes away.
5. tackle front garden: raised beds with flowers, perennials, more bushes, paths with grass, central area for meeting.
6. install drip irrigation in veg garden.
7. as soon as the pile of wood is sawed up, split and stacked, the whole area called “woods” next to the driveway opens up for more bushes and dwarf fruit trees. First up: work on soil there.
8. saw up, split and stack that pile of wood.
9. solar PV installation (still waiting for the go-ahead from the state).
10. and, if there is money and energy left, get those chickens!

Today I found a study in contrasts in the boot of my station wagon: a cello, a chain saw.

Once home, we hooked a rope to the car, tied the other end around a log in the big pile, then I reversed to pull the trunk out so DH could cut it up.

DH and I work together really well. Neither one of us had ever done anything of this kind. In preparation, DH watched YouTube videos and read the manual.  Then we went out and laughed a lot because we couldn’t get the darn thing started. Then it did start and we got serious. Not having any experience or any other tools  we ran into some difficulties, and we took some time figuring out the solutions and ways to prevent it from happening again. We got better at anticipating other problems, got more creative. Did you know that chalk comes in really handy when cutting logs greater in diameter than the bar of your saw? Also pieces of already chopped firewood, as wedges and stops… We worked together, wedging and pulling, gauging.

Three hours later we got one log done. Twenty-five to go.

I’m happy we bought the chainsaw and that we are doing this job ourselves instead of paying five times the amount to let someone else do it. Granted, the professionals would  take two or three days and we’ll probably take a couple of months to get it finished. And honestly I’ll never feel entirely relaxed while DH is wielding that machine. But we’re working together, outside with our hands, using what tools and ingenuity we have. We might both have PhDs and drive Volvos, but we aren’t afraid of getting our hands dirty and getting the job done.

I read somewhere in an article on Transition a saying that I could take as my mantra:

We are the people we’ve been waiting for!

Such honest accomplishment, along with accountability, and hope. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone could say this of themselves? Don’t sit around and wait for someone else to do it. Just do it!

These carrots were seeded in our garden in September 2010 and harvested and eaten in April 2011. Extra sweet.

Our insane wood pile after tree removal

I received a large box in the mail on Friday, the kind of box that could only house… plants! Fedco. Of course they had to arrive on the busiest weekend since last Summer. Of course I wasn’t ready…

So after our Earth Day Celebration I stuck almost all of ‘em in pots. Tere were some herb plants like Good King Henry, Asclepias tuberosa, Butterfly Weed, Lavender, Marshmallow, Arnica,  Black Cohosh (or Black Snakeroot), and Valerian. There were also 2 pieces (?) of Canadian Wild Ginger and I couldn’t even tell what was the top and what the bottom, or where vis-a-vis the soil line it had to go. And 1 Purple Coneflower – of the 12 seeds I put in downstairs, only 1 germinated, so I have high hopes for this plant. Last but not least there was the Elecampane. What an interesting, fat, huge root. It reminded me of the mandrake in Pan’s Labyrinth. This one I put in the herb bed up front, which gets a lot more sun now that the trees are gone.

Then there were some bushes. I put the Red Pearl and  the Regal Lingonberry in pots. But I planted the Belle Poitevine Rose in the East bed, next to our “official” (not our mudroom) front door. What a robust plant. Prickly too! And the two Bluebell Grapes I planted next to the kiwi vine that went in last Spring and that is, to my great relief, budding. (So are all the other bushes I planted last year.)

The 50 strawberries crowns are still in my fridge. They’ll go in tomorrow, along with lots of vegetable seedlings.  We have many more bushes and vines coming, I really need to start prepping the place. I’m afraid I filled  up all my large pots today!

In other gardening news, we received our hoop bender from Lost Creek and we’ll be moving and rebuilding the hoop house next weekend if we can persuade some friends to help. It’ll be good to be able to get all the seedlings out of the living room. And out of the basement too: the mice are going wild down there! They went through my lobelia like a grass mower, and they’ve ruined all the wormwood seedlings (luckily the wormwood I grew and transplanted out last ear survived the winter and is growing again) . They’ve dug up lots of other seeds. And I’ve caught  not a one. The glue traps are obviously not working either.

There is lots of mycelium growing in the mushroom bed (didn’t have many mushrooms last year but might this year) and… a few days ago we ate our first lettuce from the garden (the hotbox). Yum!

April Fools!

- contrast with -

3 April

Those seedlings are still sitting on my window sills (inside) – and of course the spinach has bolted. I might be able to plant them out tomorrow, if the rain lets up and if it doesn’t snow!

Downstairs in the basement the lights and heat mat are working on the newly seeded tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. And I have mice, again, of course. I bought the cheap wooden traps and the mice have been getting fat on peanut butter. Today I switched to glue traps. Yep, sorry, no more live trapping.  They ate all my Good King Henry, Sea Kale and Echinacea seeds!

When you’re down, there’s nothing better than to give yourself a gift. Mine is this:

to start writing in my journal again, every day.

My present self will go to a trusted place every day, my future self will be happy we got the habit back, and all the good things that are happening will be recorded. I’ve already cleaned my fountain pen and located the ink.

In the picture: microgreens from the basement.

I opened my last bottle of ginger soda yesterday.  It had been in the fridge for two weeks – I had sort of forgotten about it till now. I did open it over the sink…

Yeah, blew the top right off! My bottle! And then, when I poured it…

DH and I finished the whole bottle at once, of course because we couldn’t close it anymore. No one got hurt. But now we know how dangerous this soda making can be. Always open the bottle outside or on the porch, and make sure no one’s in range.

3/4 of the carrot bed is still frozen, but the rest yielded this

And they’re yummy.

Some days ago I had a chance to run out and pull one side of the hoop house plastic out from under the leftover snow (it thawed some, finally!). It involved breaking up the huge slabs of ice that had formed inside the “hoop sloop” and pulling them out, then draining the melt water. You can see the pile of plastic – still intact, that woven stuff is strong! – behind the structure. It is still stuck in the ice and snow on that side.

This took about an hour, at the end of which I was cold and sopping wet. And it started the rain. Still, I had just enough stamina left to cover the three beds with row cover (Agribon) and plastic. I am happy to report that these beds still have –  miracle of nature! – living plants in them. They’re not exactly thriving, but they’re still there and will hopefully take off soon.

I came in and washed my freezing hands in a bowl of warmed up ginger tea – the tea I brewed from the ginger peels. Aaaaah!