"Barn Raising"

I've said it before and I'll say it again, community is important. We've had a rough year this year and this last two weeks have been especially difficult. One of the things that have seen me through this time are the relationships we have with friends, family and neighbors. My sister's constant encouragement in the form of texts, my sister-in-law and auntie-in law and their sheer presence, and friends who have met me at boxing class or spent the night. Then last weekend, I put the call out for help with our little house and yard. We had a ton of great friends show up and do all sorts of work around the house. One of our friends referred to it as a "barn raising like the Amish do." She said, "We should do this more often for each other." I couldn't agree more and am so grateful for all the work they did! Just call and if we can be there, we will gladly return the favor.

Some things thrive in the rain...

Although there are mole mounds melting down the slope of my front yard, standing water in our back path, and it's so wet I don't think I'll ever get to plant green beans now, some things are loving this weather. In fact, lots of stuff is doing quite well right now. I just might need to rethink my plantings this year and stick with the cooler, greener crops. I'll let a few tomatoes struggle on since they are my favorite, but we might as well write off the bigger peppers this year. This is a year to stick with onions, lettuce, broccoli, chard, cabbage, spinach, herbs, zucchini and peas. (Don't ask me why the zucchini seems to be liking this OK for now.)

Of course this also creates the perfect environment for slugs to flourish and I need to get out there more to keep on top of them. The chard has sensed that that brief dry sunny spell in March was actually summer and now we're into fall so it's time to go to seed... I've had to cut it back drastically to get some light to the struggling tomatoes and basil. We'll see if it comes back with a third crop of leaves for me.

Actually, I think I need to give up on basil for now. Here's a sad view of the basil.

 Much of the garden is really happy though and I just have to remember that, even though my favorites may not make it this year (the tomatoes, basil and yellow squash) some great stuff will! The lettuce couldn't be happier and the onions are about to burst forth flowers. The garlic seems to be holding up without any rot and this weekend promises good weather.

I have even started a batch of compost tea to encourage more growth. This is the easiest and cheapest way to fertilize. Just grab a shovel full of your rough compost (doesn't need to be the potting soil consistency yet) and toss it in a bucket. Fill the bucket with water and let it sit a day or two. Once it starts to get a nice foam at the top, scoop off the coffee-colored "tea". You just pour this directly at the base of each of your plants. I use an old plastic container and a Home Depot bucket for the job. I do this about once a week. When you've used all the liquid, you can dump the leftover compost back into the pile or around the base of your acid loving shrubs (like camellia or rhododendrons).


Keep in mind that the "tea" is very nitrogen rich, especially if you add rabbit droppings to it like we do. The best part of doing this now is that the green plants that love this weather love the nitrogen from my bunny poo rich fertilizing brew. Before your "fruit" producing plants start to flower, you'll also want to work in something such as fish bone meal to encourage flower production and to balance the nitrogen. Last year I used a ton of tea and didn't realize until too late that I needed the bone meal. My plants were HUGE and a nice dark green, but they didn't produce as much as I wanted...

Lastly, we use beer traps to curb the army of slugs that love this wet cool mess of a garden. So, we need to double my little beer traps and frequently refill them. I don't actually drink beer so I have to buy it just for the garden, but you can use whatever you have. I don't want to use Jovi's expensive local brews so I run to the store for the biggest, cheapest cans of beer I can get. I like to imagine that the store clerks think I'm a closet alcoholic as I stand in line with my magnums and snack food. Cheers to your garden!

Tea Trees and Hawthorne Remedies

The combination of too much rain and a day off has led me to some web research. I've been wondering for a few days if there is anything I should be doing for my camellias in general. I don't know much about them and so I Googled them and came to the realization that they are in the same plant family as the plant that tea is commonly made from. Actually tea is made from camellia sinesis and the plants in our NW yards are more likely to be camellia japonica. This got me thinking, well, could you make tea safely from my variety? I did a little surfing and found some great pruning tips from the American Camellia Society and then, surprise, another blogger's experiment with making tea from camellia japonica! I also found out that the leaves, berries and flowers from our hawthorne tree can be used for medicinal purposes.

I absolutely LOVE that, even after living here for almost 6 and a half years, I am still discovering things about this little piece of property! Several years ago we discovered that the bush/tree near our garden is a hazelnut tree too - although the squirrels and bugs get to the hazelnuts every year before we do. I like to imagine that the Copeland Family, who built this house and for whom the street is named after, actually planted all of these trees and bushes. I imagine that they knew a bit more about what plants were good for and specifically chose the plants they did for these reasons. For instance, they must have planted the catalpas they are so big! They surely thought about the summer shade these trees would provide and the light they would allow in in the winter. I'd be willing to bet they intended on harvesting hazelnuts for their own use and that they could provide a little morning shade when they planted that tree/bush. Did they know about the medicinal properties of the Hawthorne or did they just want to add more summer shade? I like how this connects me to the history of my house and to sustainable urban lawnscaping today. It's a full circle kinda thing. A thing to remind us that some not so new knowledge is better knowledge.

Here are two of the links I found regarding camellia's:
Tea making from camellia japonica http://pandragonathome.blogspot.com/2009/11/making-black-tea-from-your-camellia.html
General good info regarding care for camellias: http://www.camellias-acs.com/

The "Uses" section of this link provides interesting information regarding hawthorne trees:
http://www.gardenguides.com/462-hawthorne-tree.html

Meh!

Rain, rain, go away. You could, of course, come again some other day. I don't want a drought either. The tomatoes are withering away. The basil simply won't stay alive. Plant #3 & 4 have almost bit the dust. I will say the broccoli and cabbage are looking fantastic. The onions, garlic, and chard are happy enough too. The chard is actually already going to seed. I'm afraid the onions and garlic may rot soon though if we don't get some dry weather. The slugs are having a heyday too with everything. Can't keep the beer strong enough to draw them away. Need some little beer tents! The potato bugs seem happy enough too.

Porter is on restricted movement too. Poor thing has been so housebound this spring with Jovi and I working extra hours both of us and the rain. Now he has a slight disc problem - that's the vet's guess anyway. Yesterday morning he just started whining randomly. We fed him breakfast and he just looked at it and then started pawing at it. This dog LOVES food and he's on a diet so he devours anything that looks remotely tasty including food soiled paper towels. So, dog-food flavored anti-inflamatories for now and not a lot of activity. Good news is that we found out he has lost 4 pounds! AND, they make dog-food flavored chewable anti-inflamatories. Bad news, they are $5 bucks per pill.

While we were at the vets yesterday, we saw a poster with two adult kitties needing a new home. They are brothers, they are six and they need a new home because the toddler in the house is allergic. They look very sweet and spunky. I was very tempted. I haven't been this long without a kitty since I was maybe 12? Then again, it's nice to have one less litter box. I'm also worried everyone would think we were nuts if we added two cats to our menagerie. Feel free to give your opinion below.

Some reading for these raining days?

I stole this link from my friend Hannah. Interesting review of books - interesting looking list of books for folks interested in modern and sustainable food production movements. Full article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/food-movement-rising/

Here's an excerpt:
It’s [the food movement] a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations have recently run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the current revival of small-farm agriculture. Joel Salatin, the Virginia meat producer and writer who has become a hero to the food movement, fulminates against food safety regulation on libertarian grounds in his Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front. Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, criticize supporters of “sustainable” agriculture—i.e., producing food in ways that do not harm the environment—for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor. Animal rights advocates occasionally pick fights with sustainable meat producers (such as Joel Salatin), as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his recent vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals.

My Bliss

I realized my bliss Sunday. People say to follow your bliss. One of my favorite quotes is "Let yourself be silently drawn by the greater pull of what you really love." Life is about becoming aware of those moments when you realize you're being drawn by what you really love.

I was sitting in my garden on Sunday when I had a bliss moment and I let myself be acutely aware of it. I hadn't showered that day. To me a hot shower is like most people's morning coffee yet I relish a weekend day of dirtiness. My hair was in prime Bob Dylan disarray and curl. I was wearing comfy cotton pants that had, over the course of a morning of yard work and then gardening, had become covered in dirt. I was breaking up clumps of dirt with my bare hands so my nails were filled with the stuff. Every wrinkle of skin on my hands were brown.

The sun was setting and the air still warm. The temperature was at that just right point of warm enough for short sleeves, but not so warm you were sweating. Half the garden was completed and I was at the level on the ground where some plants were taller than me.

A worm crawled across the ground where I had just laid down a layer of fresh compost. I looked at the scoop I was just about to spread. Dirt I made. I made that dirt! The worm stretched out across the warm soil. I thought, "That would make a good fishing worm. If I were 12 again I'd pick it up and hold it." So, I picked up the worm and let it crawl across my hand. I watched him, looked up around me. I thought about the perfect weather, the perfect amount of dirt worked into my toes and hands and I just felt right. I felt whole and content. In that moment, the work I had done to grow the plants that were around me, the dirt I was holding, came together with the potential of the plants I had just put in and the life in the soil the worm meant. I was right in the middle of it all.

That's my bliss.

The "Real" Farm

Spring in Missouri is dangerous for me. A visit to the creek when it is running full and everything around is buzzing with life. Little baby corn popping up in chocolate fields. Leaves on deciduous trees turning with the rain that you can't see is coming. Birds chasing each other through a carpet of close cut grass that bleeds right into a very full pond. Fish jumping. Clouds cruising by. The smell of dirt, grass, trees, wind that has blown half-way across a country to reach you.

It's intoxicating. It lures me in and makes me day-dream of a little house beyond the field. A little house tucked into the woods, just by the third pond, close to the fourth pond that was always my favorite. Laying in the grass, looking up at a perfectly clear, cornflower blue sky. Building fairy houses by the "waterfall" that isn't really a waterfall anymore. The unplanted fields make me hungry, remind me of chunky cookie dough. Part of me finally feels at peace, part of me feels planted on the bank above the water in this pregnant landscape.

But then there's farm business and I'm ready to throw in the towel, ready to run toward the sea, ready to say, "I know I'm not the first born son." I am just a girl. A girl with a garden of her own. A garden I now ache to return to, to shelter in. I have memories of tractors I picked out that my brother opened for Christmas as I walk my nephew to the garage on his motorized toy tractor. Cycles of life, cycles of farm management. I have a garden that I have bought with my wife. I have a garden that is mine. I will plant myself there.