A New Way to Spring

It's amazing how different my thinking is as I walk through the yard this year compared to last year. I see plants differently because of my time at Hobbit Gardens. I see the space differently because of my time at Growing Power. I am walking the yard with new eyes and bigger plans! Want to see what I see? Okay!

This is the new peppermint emerging from last year's start. It's in a cinder block so that it doesn't take over the whole world!

This is that same peppermint in a little sexier pose.

Lemon Balm! One of my all-time favorite medicinal and culinary herbs.

It's not like I didn't know this was a medicinal before my apprenticeship, but I'm WAY more prepared to use it this year than last. Sweet, wonderful dandelions.

I had no idea the wonders of violets before last year. A lovely tisane with expectorant properties and its antiseptic constituents make it great for skin eruptions. It is VERY tasty, too!

 

This is the garden bed we built. We put the great soil right on top of the yard. It made for shallow roots. Today I dug down another foot into the soil underneath and mixed it all together. It reminded my lower back that I did deadlifts yesterday at QuantumFit.

Plantain is a great herb for a lot of things.

Yarrow. So lovely and wonderful!

Wormwood. It barely stopped growing all winter!

Valerian. It is not used to make Valium. Sorry. 

Bloodroot! The most exciting thing about this is that it died off early last year. I didn't expect it to come back!

Deliciousness

With the coming of fall and the purchase of a new camera, I can show you what's happening in the garden.

Some gorgeous red amaranth.

Broccoli being allowed to go to seed.

Delish corno di toro peppers

An unlabeled heirloom tomato

Eggplant!

Another heirloom... possibly Mexican... Label fail.

A rogue, volunteer flower.

Suddenly there were two petunias in the garden... is this a petunia?

Yarrow grown for medicinal purposes in the front plot.

Straight Lines

The house that I moved from into our current home was a fixer-upper in Fountain Square that had yet to be fixed up when I lived there. When I was planning my move-in, I was looking at all kinds of plans for painting the walls because I had never painted walls before. I wanted color. I wanted awesome.

Shortly after taking a closer look at the house, I realized that all my hopes were dashed. The walls were anything but square and each and every room had a unique texture applied to the walls and sometimes ceilings. I say unique in the most literal of ways. The walls in one room were differently textured from the next. So, I chose paints but knew that I wouldn't be able to enjoy the crisp lines of meeting colors that I had favored in my magazine perusing.

Fast forward about 5 years to the new house and the garden. I look at magazine pictures all the time of these amazing gardens. I see the gardens at Hobbit Garden. I dream of the same kind of planned space that I wanted when I was preparing to paint those walls. Then I have morning after morning of randomly planting seeds and seedlings. There are things growing everywhere and only some of them show a semblance of order or rows.

Today, for example, I decided to plant this sickly looking pepper seedling that should have been in the ground in May. It was a leftover, really, but I have some space that isn't being used so I was just going to put it there. Then I tried to dig in that space, which is in the garden left by the last residents, and it was so hard my trowel wouldn't break it. That left only one option. Dig an oddly shaped, 2-feet deep canyon in the middle of the garden. Dump the compost, that has gone anaerobic, from the large container in the garage into the bottom of it. Cover it back up. Tada. Fixed.

I had absolutely no idea just how nasty the goop in that container had become. It was not a very good idea, perhaps. The smell wasn't in full effect until the dumping was done and all the ick from the bottom was now the top. I added a little lime because I think that makes stuff decompose faster. I added some peat because I felt it needed some brown in its overly green mix. Then I buried it as quickly as possible.

In a year, or less, that will be the most fertile part of the garden. It will also still be a very oddly shaped patch right in the middle. It currently has a pepper and a tomato plant freshly planted right over it. The volunteer cucumber plant is right next to it.

Perhaps next year my garden will have some straight lines. Perhaps Dreamy will come through with his purported 'plannerness' and help me actually draw things out before we get too deeply entrenched. For this year, though, the madness is much like those old walls. It isn't what I imagined but it is home. I am very excited to have fresh produce to share with neighbors and friends. I am very excited to plant my next round of seeds for this year, whatever those turn out to be.

Life is seldom about straight lines. I'm getting better at being okay with that. Visiting my curvy garden every morning is one of my deepest joys. What can I say? I love it!

The Un-harvest

While many friends seem to be going on and on about the food they are bringing in from their gardens, ours is just a lot of green leaves with a ton of flowers and only a few little, tiny peppers, tomatoes, broccoli, and a cucumber. It makes me sad.

This reality is why I was so excited to harvest my turnips yesterday to use raw in a salad with granny smith apples. I looked past the leaves to the tops of those beautiful white orbs and my excitement swelled. I pulled up the first one, removing it easily from the soil that had nurtured it and was so stoked to pull the next one. Inspection of that first turnip, though, revealed that there were more than root vegetables being nurtured in that soil.

Little.

White.

Worms.

It seems that there are any number of larvae that feed on root veggies in the ground. Of the 35-40 turnips that I pulled up, exactly one was edible. Well, edible to humans. The little usurpers of garden goodness found the others to be quite delicious, it seems. They are all safely tucked away in the garbage can now.

This was a major blow to my new role as urban homesteader. Thank goodness we aren't actually trying to survive off this little plot of land. We'd be in sad shape. Oh well, now we just need to figure out what to put in that soil that won't be susceptible to the squirmy bits so that we can utilize all of the precious little space we have. We'll see what's next!

Just an update

I've been in the garden doing something everyday for a while and it's been great. Even the days that are just watering days make for good times. I am more and more like my parents all the time and I am not even feeling the need for therapy as I realize this! I love walking around and seeing what's growing and what needs some loving and where new seeds have sprouted. I get sad when things aren't doing so well and I get excited when something is going better than expected.

Today I planted a majority of the balance of broccoli, pepper, and eggplant seedlings that were left. I am still looking for more places to put tomato plants. I only have 4 in the ground and would like 3 or 4 more in the yard somewhere. The yarrow and valerian finally found homes this morning as well. Based on their roots when I pulled them out of the packages, they will be very excited with more space and fertile soil.

What is really excited is that some newly germinated seeds are finally poking through the herb garden. I think I wasn't keeping it wet enough for the plants to germinate. I've corrected that problem and some new growth is the awesome result! What is sad is that the tobacco seeds have not been as easy to germinate as the youtube video made it seem. I've put fresh seeds in my little pots in hopes that they will go. I might not have had them warm enough to start so we'll see.

Fingers crossed that everything continues growing. We've put strategies in place to defend against seedling stealing birds, leaf eating slugs, and a few other threats to our food supply.

How's your garden growing? We want to know!

Murder...

Snails have entered the garden. If a bug is in the house, I tend to take a capture & release approach save for ants. You can never catch them, so we are just trying to make it less attractive to come in. (I may have secretly place a food source just outside the door so they don't have to work so hard and can stay outside.)

Snails, though, are ravaging the leaves of the plants in the garden. They seem to love the turnip greens and I simply can't have it. So, the interwebs has made it quite clear that there are lots of ways to battle the little heshes (they are hermaphroditic and I want them to feel respected.) Today I put a bottle of beer in a small bowl buried to the rim near the plants they are eating. I've a feeling that it's a precarious line between drawing them off the plants and into the garden. So, I'm hoping the current residents will all go the way of idiots with booze and that the ones who have yet to be in the garden won't notice the party that's happening, for their own sakes.

For the new raised bed, I am looking at preventative measures. Copper wire, salt, coffee... these are things we have come to love but that snails can't abide. I shall employ them as best I can. Sorry, snails, you'll have to eat from food I don't want.

In other news, read this article. It will let you know what kind of impact we can make if we continue spreading the word. What we're doing here in Little Flower isn't just for fun, it's for the future. This is how we grow.

Bedtime

Well, we finally constructed our beds and filled them with our super-fantastic-growing-medium. The free pavers that we got from the lovely lady on Craigslist made the garden bed just fine. The tiles I got from the other lovely lady on Craigslist seem to be holding in the soil for what will become the herb garden just fine as well. I am very excited about this whole endeavor. It is hard for me, though, because I like instant gratification and, well, after all that work there wasn't a tomato or pepper to be picked.

Below are the pics of the first two beds. These will hold most of the veggies, minus tomatoes, and the herbs. Tomatoes will go in food-safe buckets along the fence. There will be other little areas as well, no doubt, where we squeeze in more.

One of the most interesting things about this project is how nervous I get that we are doing something wrong and how anxious I get about talking to people who are experienced because they all have advice and it never matches but they really seem to want me to do what they say. Frank keeps reminding me that it is our first time and it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm trusting him on that one.