First Plantings of Spring and More Gardening News

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!

Riot for Austerity – Month 29

It’s already 6 April but I know I doubt I’ll have  time at the end of the month, so here are our numbers for March + 5 days of April. It’ll all even out. Our first year’s averages were calculated here, our second year’s averages can be found here.

Gasoline. Same as usual. I’m doing a lot of driving around for Transition (paradoxically).

10.83 gallons per person pp. per month

25 % of the US National Average

Electricity. The calculator reckons per household, not per person. We are rolling on the solar PV, so in a few months this number will look very different. That number is up quite a bit this month, as in previous years, because I’ve got a heat mat and a whole battery of shop lights on 16 hours a day to keep my seedlings growing.

579 KWH (all wind) per month

15% of the US National Average

Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person.  We are planning on running a long line of PEX underneath the solar array for an outdoor shower in Summer. Busy busy…

32.3 24.7 gallons of oil per month

45% 40.1% of the US National Average

{UPDATE} 3 Jan 2012: The way I have been calculating our heating oil consumption is by reading off the furnace how many hours it ran, then multiplying it by .85 because that’s the amount of gallons of oil I *thought* it used. Now DH just told me that our furnace is more efficient than that and the correct number is .65. Hence the correction.

Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers.

10 lbs. pp per month

7% of the US National Average

Water. We brought  our usage down by yet another percent from last month. Don’t know really what it is that makes the difference. I guess we’ll just keep going the way we have been…

426.3 gallons of water pp.   per month

14 % of the US National Average

A Month of Contrasts

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!

We’re Going Solar

stack of PV panels

We’re doing it, we’re putting solar PV on our roof.

Though many went before it, taking delivery of the stack of panels felt like the first step. It was the first time something happened, not just talk and research and calculations. It was also irreversible: that’s $16,100 worth of panels, paid for and delivered, sitting in our carport!

This week the second big step follows: the taking down of about 10 big trees in order to get the shade off the roof. Next we enter the paperwork with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Then we wait. When we get the funding, the panels will be installed sometime during the Summer.

It’s a big project and I must admit I am nervous about it, for three reasons.

First of all, it involves a large amount of money up-front, and it has wiped out most of our other plans for the summer, like chickens and drip irrigation. But (on paper) the thing pays for itself in 7  years, and then we should get about 13-23 more years of use out of it.

Also, we use 390 KWH a month, on average, so this system should be able to take care of all our electricity needs (using the grid as the battery). And that doesn’t mean that we’re going to party it up now. On the contrary, we’ve already decided that we can become a little more frugal, so we can plug in an electrical on-demand water heater and take our hot water off oil. (That’s still being researched).

Moreover, this electricity will be renewable, non-polluting (as of installation), and decentralized. It will be an eye-catcher too, a statement, and an opening for a conversation.

My second reason for hesitation is the real costs of these panels. I am not ignorant of the manufacturing or “back side” of solar, which includes:

  1. toxic chemicals: arsenic, cadmium telluride, chromium, and lead.
  2. greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide from coal-driven plants, oil used for transporting the parts and the panels

I’m still trying to figure out what those are for our system. The amount of facts and especially opinions on the net is staggering. I’d like to talk with people like Richard Heinberg and Bill McKibben, who are aware of all the facts and who try to live a principled life, about their panels.

Last, but nor least, there’s the trees. It will take one day to take them down, and the whole summer to cut them up into firewood and to grind out the stumps. Their removal will drastically change the aspect of our property,  and for the better. It will:

  1. bring the sun to the garden.
  2. free up  land for more perennials and herbs.
  3. free up land for an orchard (every tree down will be replaced by one or two dwarf fruit trees),
  4. make possible the glass porch up front that could warm up our main family room in the winter – resulting in less oil again.

Sometimes changes and the resulting opportunities, though for the better, are overwhelming!

Golden Oatstraw

Infusing Oatstraw

I made my first oatstraw infusion, a quart of it, with 1 oz. of dried herb. It’s very mild, sweet and fresh, just lovely after steeping a good 14 hours. Not grassy at all. I added some raw honey to it and have been sipping it all day long.

Oatstraw is one of those toners, herbs that nourishes gently and deeply and that, though slow to take effect, acts for a long time in the body. You drink the infusions every day for a couple of weeks.

One cup of this infusion contains a whopping 300 mg of calcium (as much as a cup of milk). It also contains B-complex vitamins, silicia, flavones, saponins and Vitamin A. It can be used for both physical and nervous fatigue and is helpful for depression. The perfect herb to ferry me out the Winter floes into the tempests of Spring! And going by the taste alone, the kind of herb that will get me through the day, sip by sip.

Sip. Sip.

The First Robins

The plan for today was to plant out the first lettuces into the hotbox, but it is snowing!

But!

The first Robins have arrived. I wonder if they’ll take up residence in our carport again.

In honor of the first Robins and the first full day of Spring, and in the spirit of healing and peace, I pressed my first echinacea tincture and printed out my first Robin Hill Gardens label.

A Gift to Myself

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.

Doing vs. Undergoing

I must admit that I am down-hearted. I have managed for a couple of days now to avoid the news. A quick check in the morning and the evening and quickly look away again. Nuclear has always been my bugbear.

I was 15 in Belgium when Chernobyl happened and it impressed me tremendously. That was a very different situation in many respects, one of them being that we all found out about it many days after the event. Actually, I only found out how close we came to planetary-wide disaster a few months ago, when I saw the Battle of Chernobyl. Then I saw Countdown to Zero (and managed to keep my sanity)…

You see, I have to look away or it sucks me in. It sucks me in and prevents me from what I am doing – doing as against undergoing.

What I am doing is Transition, here in my hometown. The launch is in April but already so many good things have happened and I have met  so many good people. We’ve talked to two local  groups who have been bumping up against limits of expertise, energy and community support and we have invigorated them again, just by talking about Transition and offering some advice. We’ve become the volunteers in charge of a plan for an “edible park” at a very popular and visible place int he middle of town. We’re deeply involved with the Earth Day Celebration. We have a website up and are adding to it more and more every day. Now the local newspaper wants to do an interview…

I musn’t get used to writing about myself in the plural. Someone said “that’s a great group you have there.” So far it’s still just a group of one! I am kind of happy that it looks like a group to people, but am also very keen on making it a group very soon.

Why can’t we just be happy with what we need. Why do we gamble away our lives and the lives of many more who have no say in it, to our greed and our misplaced sense of rightfulness? Don’t tell me, “where will you draw the line between what we need and what we want?” Let’s look into it together and draw the line together. It’s not so hard to ask oneself,  “do I really need this? Is it worth it?” I know there is a large grey area, but up to a point – a point we have overshot by a mile – the difference between our needs and our wants are clear to all but the most unwilling of us.

Let’s start there.