But honey, think of the property value...

I've been thinking a lot about the recent "vegetable felon" cases.  I'd be surprised if anyone reading this blog hasn't heard about them, but the ones I'm familiar with are the "Julie Bass in Oak Park, MI" case, the "Compassion Farm" case, and the "Terrorized by CEDA" case.  The cases are all a bit different, and go to different extremes (i.e., threat of three months in jail, six months in jail, and the property being seized by the city and demolished, respectively).  But no matter how psycho the aims of each are (property demolition, srsly?), there is a common thread underlying all of them--no one wants to see your veggies.

From here on out, I'm basically only going to talk about the Julie Bass case, partially because it's the one I'm the most familiar with, and partially because the other two are so off the deep end crazy that it will only obscure my ultimate point (yes, this post has been brought to you today by an actual point).  So here's the basic scoop:  the city dug up her front lawn to do some needed sewer/drainage repairs--cool, thanks for that.  Then she needed to repair her front lawn because, well, it was big piles of dirt.  The family decided to put in a vegetable garden (after, they thought, obtaining permission from the city).  Ordinance violation citations followed, and now the City of Oak Park is the preferred internet pariah for their Stepford Neighborhood goals (apparently the Casey Anthony thing finally ran its course).

Basically up to speed now?  Good, because I'm going to say something very surprising, that I doubt you would expect to see from my fingertips--I sympathize with the surrounding homeowners.  Please note that I did not say I agree with them, but I do have sympathy for them.  How not?  They're a product of their generations, their society, their upbringing.  Look, I'm a trained philosopher.  One of the real downsides to this is that I am pretty good at seeing both sides of an argument.  It does a great deal of damage to otherwise wonderful rants of righteousness.  (But woe betide the world when, after careful consideration and seeing both sides, I still have enough venom for one side to launch into a rant.)  So unfortunately for me, I can understand the surrounding homeowner's positions.  They bought their houses with certain expectations about the nature of the neighborhood, its look, and the probable nature of their property value.  And they're concerned that the vegetable garden in the front yard will do harm to some or all of these.

Furthermore, they're right.  The vegetable garden probably will affect the character of the neighborhood, the look of the neighborhood, and will likely harm their property value.  [NB:  did you see what I did there?  I only claim that one of those three will actually do harm.  Sneaky am I.]  And this brings me, circuitously, to my point.  We now live in a society where being forced to see food growing nearby is considered harmful.  I don't think anyone seriously believes that if those garden beds had been filled with flowers, that Julie Bass would currently be in the media, or would be enduring harassment by anyone.  Besides, the citations specifically cite the vegetables as the problem.

I was mulling this fact over in my head while working in my own garden tonight.  And yes, it was hotter than Hades, let's just get that out of the way right now.  What is so offensive about vegetables?  I mean, there are many things that will lower a neighborhood's property value:  the presence of crack houses, the installation of a waste dump, the house collapsing or being obviously derelict and falling apart, etc.  I totally get why any reasonable neighborhood wouldn't want that sort of thing, and why there would be ordinances to assist in preventing or dealing with those situations.  Is "seeing food growing" on the same list as "waste dump"?

Yes, seeing food growing is indeed on the same list in a great number of neighborhoods in our country.  And honestly, I think that this fact all by itself goes a long way towards explaining the mess we're in as a nation right now.  What hope could a country have that can no longer endure the sight of food in its natural state?  What is the worth of a citizenry that thinks so highly of itself that not only does each individual feel that he/she does not have to stoop to the level of farmer, but that person can actually bring the law to bear on anyone who forces them to have contact with farming or gardening or food growing in any form.  You see, I might have some sympathy with those poor, benighted neighbors, but I've lost all sympathy for the culture that spawned them.

At root, I think this is a class issue--most things in America are anymore.  What is wrong with seeing food growing?  The same thing that's wrong with seeing laundry hanging to dry, or chickens in the backyard, or any other of the myriad potential offenses that HOAs across America decry.  It's not that it looks unseemly, it's that it looks poor.  We associate growing food with poverty, and thank god we don't have to grow our own food anymore because now we're RICH!  We can afford to make other people do it for us!  (And pay them poorly, and make sure we never see them, and often bring in slave labor to make sure our prices are acceptable.)  And we can afford machines to dry our clothes for us!  And chickens?!  O.M.G., those were from, like, the depression days or something.  No one in their right mind would want to do anything like that again!  Well, except for those folks who were too dumb to become investment bankers or interior designers. They can still do those things, but *ahem* Certainly Not Us.

So I guess my take-home message here, for what it's worth, is that this isn't about an insane property inspector in Oak Park (although that doesn't help), or about an abusive city government, or a freedom fighter woman defending her land (god bless her for it, though).  This is far more systemic than that.  It's about a society that is so deeply, fundamentally broken to its core that it can no longer endure sight of the most basic things that got us out of the trees and made us human beings in the first place.  We've become totally and utterly ungrounded as a nation and a society.

So just imagine how hard its going to go when our economy finally does bite it.

Have a happy weekend.

No flogging!

HA!

HAHAHAHAHAAAA!

I got my whole list done--DONE, I SAY!  And I was having a record-breaking crappy weekend.  Crappy enough that today at church, various kind people approached me quietly to make sure everything was okay.  Well, no, not a bit actually.  But nothing is wrong that I'm at liberty to discuss (and yes, that includes here as well, sorry).  And having that list of stuff to do hanging over my head did wonders for focusing the mind--sort of like the hangman's noose.  It actually provided some respite for the tormenting thoughts I was otherwise having.

So what did I accomplish?  Let's review:

• temporary chook pen:  done and done.  It is the definition of the word "kludge," but that's where my DIY skills max out, so it's just as well.  I'll try to get pics soon.  The baby chicks are now happily installed in their new homes, protected from outside evils like raccoons, owls, and the adult hens eyeballing them through the chicken wire.  The interior of the pen is a bit difficult to access--I did mention that it's a total kludge, right?--but otherwise, it's all good.  And though it was designed to be temporary, I might keep it up as an isolation area, in case I have a sick chick, or a bully that needs to get taken down a peg or two.  Of course, if I do, then my next weekend list will have to include "paint roof of temporary chook pen."
• I made the new waterer with the chicken nipple, and gods alive, they figured it out!  I ended up using the "put jam on the nipple to encourage them" method, which was just the trick.  The babies now have fresh and clean water in an easy-to-refill setup.  And the hens have taken notice since they've been outside.  I think I'll make another one and hang it on the outside of the pen, near where the baby chick's one is, and see if the old hens can be taught any new tricks.  (Wondering what the hell I'm talking about?  Click here.)
• I made a wheel of Wensleydale.  I'm not sure how it will turn out, though.  I might've been too rough with the curd during several of the milling steps, and it's also really quite hot in our house.  I think the combination of these two factors might have created a "catastrophic butterfat loss" situation--it was leaking out everywhere.  Ah well, we won't know for another 3 weeks when it comes out of its cave.  My guess is that it'll be good, but very crumbly rather than smooth and creamy.  Live and learn, right?
• Garden paths:  weed-whacked.  And I totally deserved the flying object right in the eye, since I couldn't be bothered to take an additional 5-10 minutes tracking down my safety glasses.  No harm done, but it was a good warning shot.
• Blackberry brambles are as back under control as I'm likely to get them this year.  And some of the blackberries are neeeeaaarrrrllllyyyyy ripe.  Mmmm, blackberries...

So I'm digging this whole "public accountability" thing--I got more done this weekend than I have in a long time.  On the other hand, that's just about the maximum I can get done in one weekend, and I really didn't have any time to relax or enjoy myself.  True, I do enjoy doing much of what was on my list, but a bit of time to kick back, read, spin some yarn, whathaveyou?  Yeah, that didn't happen.  Maybe I'll get some spinning done tonight.  I've got some lovely suri alpaca roving gifted to me by my dear friend Dave, and I've been itching to get to it (and he's been needling me, too).  Pretty soon I'll be getting my niece's adopted llama's fleece to process, which he'll be helping with, so I'd better clear this other roving out of the way first, right?

Right??

This weekend

Okay, here's the deal.  I am going to very, very publicly proclaim Those Things What I Will Do This Weekend(tm).  You, in turn, will publicly shame me until I actually accomplish at least half of what I list.  No, you do not get to shame me until Monday.  Yes, flogging is approved (but only with wet noodles).  But I draw the line at being put in the stocks--how am I supposed to finish my list then?!

So, here's the list:

• Finish the temporary pen for the new chooks.  (No, I'm neither British nor Australian, I'm just a snob and I like that bit of slang.)
• Create a new water-feeder for the baby birds using the water nipples (damnit, one set of birds is gonna figure this thing out if it kills me).
• Make a new wheel of cheese--my husband has selected Wensleydale (Hi Wallace!!!).  I shall be following the method a la Monsieur Gavin, my new favorite cheese blog.  Okay, my only favorite cheese blog.  But if there were more than one cheese blog out there, and even if lots of them were my favorites, I think that Gavin's would still be my most favorite.
• Weed-whack the garden paths.  Again.  (Godsdamned crabgrass.)
• Get my blackberry canes back under control.

I pulled my first potato out of the ground today.  Lunch tomorrow!

And hey, did I tell you guys that I've made my first Cheddar?  It's true!  At least, I really hope it's my first Cheddar.  I guess we won't know until we actually try it.  It might be my first, "Dear, I'm not sure this is Cheddar."  (Sort of like "I can't believe it's not butter" but ... well ... not.)  Right now it's in a little cooler in front of a fan, sitting on top of a plastic thingy of ice, developing a rind.  I'm then going to vacuum seal it (unless my mom gets me cheese waxes for my birthday, in which case I'll wax it), and put it into *da da daDUM* The Cheese Cave.  What's with the cooler?  Well, it's like 85*F in our house right now, which is well and truly too warm to be letting a cheese sit out to develop a rind--it will start leaking oil everywhere.  So I've tried to put it somewhere that it will stay at least in the mid-70's.  And the cheese cave?  What, do you think I did major excavation on my house last week?  *snort* If you haven't figured out how much I suck at DIY yet, you haven't been around long.  I scored a sweet little dorm fridge off of Craigslist for $30.  I just plugged it in and set it at its warmest setting, and we'll see where that leaves us.  Cheddars should age at ideal temps of around 50*-60*F, which I sorely doubt the fridge will achieve.  I may put it on a timer and only run it for a few hours a day, see if that works.  If I get both desperate and dedicated to cheesemaking, I may spring for the $75 external thermostat.  And if I get dedicated to cheesemaking and my husband gets re-dedicated to beer & soda-making, we might spring for a full-sized fridge for our basement (which is also about 70*F).  

Hm.  There were a lot of "and"s running around that last paragraph.  In italics, even.

I'm having a great deal of fun at work these days.  We've got a great group of new interns who are all completely keen to learn whatever we have to teach them.  We'll be doing farm field trips, breadmaking and cooking workshops, environmental philosophy seminars, spiritual direction meetings, and oh so much more!  I'm completely psyched!

And, in my final story for the night, I'm reasonably sure I've been given approval from my boss to become our resident herbalist.  SCORE.

The Seasons of the Year

(This is a post I wrote for work and decided I liked enough to post here.  Yes, I'm double-dipping.)

We were all taught the seasons of the year when we were kids—winter, spring, summer, and fall.  And we were taught these seasons regardless of where we lived, or if we really experienced those seasons.  Whether you lived in Missouri, Alaska, Nevada, or Florida, everyone cut out tulips in May (even if there is still snow on the ground), and drew pictures of snowmen in December (even if your orange tree is still producing).

Most of the time, we don't think much about this, except as a joke.  When I lived in northeastern Ohio, we joked that we had four yearly seasons—"not yet winter, winter, still winter, and road repair."  Personally, I found that this captured the movement of the year far more accurately, while also reminding you that it didn't matter what time of year it was, you were still going to have problems on the roads.

Gardeners in particular operate on a very different set of seasons.  We understand that non-gardeners don't really get this—it's more like a secret gardener-language.  We invoke completely different seasons that the Standard Four, like "last frost date," "as soon as ground can be worked," "midsummer," and "mulching".  In the Midwest, at least, we have as many different gardening seasons as the Inuit have words for snow.  

I've been working on cataloging (as best I can) the various seasons we experience here at WVC, and I thought I'd share my observations with you.  I think, when I started this list, I really meant for it to be helpful; I'm no longer sure that's the case, but I do hope it's still entertaining.  Enjoy!

The Seasons (starting in calendar month January)

• "Seed catalog" season:  technically this season opens in mid-December, for the particularly astute seed purveyors who realize that gardeners are now seriously garden-deprived and increasingly irrational, making the Christmas gift-giving season a potential goldmine for them 
• "What do you mean you haven't gotten your first shipment of potting mix in yet?" season:  roughly late-January to mid-February in our area.  Later in the year we realize that, in general, this is really saving us from ourselves since it is still way to early to start those tomatoes 
• "No, really, it's still frozen" season:  what the gardener's spouse/significant other says to us when they see us out there, jumping up and down on the spading fork in some desperate attempt to turn the soil.  Or, February. 
• "Favorite nursery reopens for the season!" season:  better than Christmas.  The smarter of the gardeners open savings accounts in October to offset the damage done this weekend.  Mid-March.
• "*Gasp* It's so beautiful!" season:  when you finally do manage to turn that first spading fork of soil.  5-seconds in late March. 
• "*Sigh* It's so wet" season:  immediately follows "It's beautiful!" 
• "Planting" season:  runs roughly from late-March until June, and depends on a couple of variables, like rain, dryness, late frosts, rain, swampiness, work interference, rain, slow seedlings, rain, and rain. 
• "Weeding" season:  from mid-June until the day you die. 
• "Canning & preserving" season:  runs concurrently with "weeding" 
• Midsummer, or "Fall seedling starts" 
• "You threw away those old windows?!  Those were for the coldframes I was finally going to build!" season:  self-explanatory 
• "No, I don't rake leaves, they're mulch for the garden" season:  October 
• "Next year I'll do everything right" season:  November.   
• "Early seed catalog" season:  December.    

And then we begin the cycle again....

The SOTG

And now, folks, it's time for the annual State Of The Garden (SOTG) Report.

The State Of The Garden is: "good"

Actually, so far the garden is going well this year. Last year was, as you may know, a pretty unqualified disaster. Actually, wait, you probably don't know. Why don't you know? Because at some point (I'd call it late July) I just stopped talking about it altogether. But it was bad. I got completely overwhelmed by my new full-time job and a garden that was really conceived of and planned like a full-time garden. I did do some things to try and mitigate the problems, like using plastic mulch, but eventually, it just got entirely out of control.

Now, here's the interesting thing--thanks to the plastic mulch I used, the beds themselves were pretty okay.  Those mainly suffered from poor planning, not planting on time, etc.  No, the disaster areas were the paths in between the beds.  Chocked full of crabgrass--absolutely awful.  And I had no practical way to get rid of it.  Our mower doesn't fit between the beds (yes, maybe that's bad planning, but nothing for it now), and you can't weed it out, since it's completely packed down by walking.  Finally, at the end of the season, I found a used electric weed-wacker for $10 at a garage sale and I completely went to town on those suckers.  And in fact, I think I obliterated a lot of them--cool stuff.  They don't seem to be coming back this year, I think in part because the whacked weeds formed a pretty solid mat, partially because I whacked them right down to the ground, and partially because the chickens ate everything that was making an attempt.

Here's my garden in some detail, with design layout.

Here's what's gone on so far:

• We freecycled our kid's old swingset (they hadn't used it for at least two years), and reclaimed that area for two new 2'x10' strawberry beds.
• I interplanted the remaining strawberry crowns into the asparagus bed.  Now we have two 15' rows of asparagus that are 5' apart, with maybe 15 strawberry plants running down the center.  No, I haven't figured out how I'm going to harvest the strawberries, why do you ask?
• Several of my new grape vines got kacked by hail recently, so my vines are now lopsided.  I'll have grapes growing on canes on one side, and a new vine growing on the other.  Ah well, c'est la vie, n'est-ce pas?
• Asparagus beds and strawberry beds have all been thoroughly strawed.
• Potatoes (white and yukon) are up in two 4'x4' beds.  I've mulched in one of the beds, and I'll be putting down straw in the other, to see which works better.  I've also aggressively covered the plants with netting, in case the chickens try to get at them.  Potato plants are toxic, you know.
• Just planted my sweet potato slips, which have all taken nicely.  Sweet potato greens are not toxic, but I still don't want my chickens eating them (they're mine, damnit).
• Pole beans are planted around, well, poles (duh.), and I've got wire mesh 1.5' high surrounding each pole, with branches stuck inside, as chicken defense, making the whole thing look like some kind of twisted Guantanamo for beans.
• MY ONIONS ARE DOING WELL!  Yes, that does deserve to be in yellcaps, cause I'm freaked out.  I've been trying to grow onions for five years now, and this is the first time it looks like I might actually have some success.  I started them from seed on Feb. 15 (which was later than I'd wanted), got them into the ground at the end of March, and have been fertilizing pretty aggressively.  So far I've got a lot of nice, fat greens coming up.  We'll see if they bulb properly now.  Garlic is doing well, too.
• Lettuces have all recovered from a hideous chicken attack (look back a few posts for more on that one).  
• Broccoli is doing well, but no sprouts yet; cabbages are limping along; carrots & beets similarly.
• Pepper plants are in self-watering containers on our back patio.
• Many new herbs in the ground--we'll see if I can keep them alive.

A lot of my gardening methodology has changed this year.  First, I've really changed my goals--I have a lot of potatoes & onions in the garden, which are comparatively low maintenance.  My family just doesn't eat many tomatoes or peppers, and they're PITAs to grow, so why bother?  That's what the market is for.  The other main thing I've been learning is Extreme Chicken Defense.  So far, the chickens have managed to get into and somehow harass nearly every plant I have, but in almost all cases it was because I'd not properly secured some covering or other.  A lot of the garden I've just blocked from the chickens entirely, but some of it they still have access to, so we'll see how it goes.

I am still planning on having a 10' pool for the kids (and me) this year.  We don't use our A/C, and you really would not believe how nice a pool is to jump into.  It cools you right off, and really it keeps you cool even once you're out.  This does take a big chunk of space out of the middle of the garden, but I think it's worth it, and we just don't have a better place for it.

I have lots of other things to update, but I'll go ahead and post this for now, otherwise even I wouldn't make it all the way to the end of the post, and I wrote it.

MWF seeking advice from Blogger population

I have a reasonably well-established garden in the back of our little lot.  (This is not to say that I will not utterly upend that at some point, but for now, this is what I'm working with.)  I've got the beds pretty well under control, vis-a-vis weeds, but the paths.  Oh my lord the paths.  Nothing I do seems to get rid of the crabgrass in the paths, which leads to, well, a messy-looking garden (and it does re-seed the beds, of course).  I keep seeing all of these gorgeous pictures of weed-free organic garden paths, and I'm dumbstruck. 

Some prior attempts:

• Just walking all over it (TOTAL fail)
• mulch (partial fail)
• newspaper and mulch (pretty good, but weeds grew back)
• landscaping fabric (worked, but only did a small portion)

My thinking this year will be to let the chickens at it, keeping the beds themselves covered in bird netting to protect the plants.  I tend to not get ginormic projects like landscape-fabric-ing then mulching the entire garden, but maybe that's the direction I should go in. 

At any rate, I am actively seeking advice from y'all.  What do you do/have you done that works?  Or doesn't work (so that I don't waste my time)?  If you have suggestions for my herb garden, that would be nice, too.  There, I'm actually thinking about doing two layers of cardboard, landscape fabric over that, then pea gravel (I tried one layer of cardboard and mulch, and the *@$#^$ star of bethlehem grew STRAIGHT THROUGH IT).

The Spinning Life

This is my spinning wheel. Er, well, actually, it's a friend of mine's spinning wheel, but I'm thinking I need to make some kind of offer to her to change this fact.

Truth is, yesterday was the first time that my wheel had seen any use in well over 6 months, possibly a full year. It might seem that spinning yarn would be a calming, meditative exercise, perfect for those stressful days of unemployment. Yeah, funny how things like that never work out. You see, first, spinning is only calming and meditative if you're any good at it. Since I have only barely crossed that magical line between a non-spinner and "hey look, I think this is actually yarn!" I don't think anyone could fairly call me good at it. As such, spinning can be an exercise in frustration rather than zen if things don't go well.

However, that's not the main reason, or the one most relevant for my purposes, as to why my spinning wheel has been resting alone in a corner for so long. The real reason is that spinning your own yarn is an incredibly useless thing to do. Of course, that's wrong--it's a very valuable thing, a great skill, an enjoyable pasttime, a craft, and more. But not when you're unemployed. When you're unemployed, it's pretty hard to justify sitting around pushing on a peddle for hours to make something that you could've bought for $6 (or in the case of my yarn, could have gotten for free due to quality issues). Shouldn't I be out looking for a job? That's not guilt from others, that's guilt from right inside my little ole head. So it could be frustrating, and I felt guilty doing it.

And unlike other useless things that I persisted in doing to get me through the stress of unemployment, it just doesn't offer the same diversions. You can watch TV and just ignore everything else--there's a lot to recommend this. When I knit, I can either do something else at the same time (e.g., read, watch TV, etc.) or if the pattern is complex enough, I would be focusing on that instead. Great diversion! But spinning? There's not much else you can do and spin at the same time. It takes both hands and a foot, so reading is straight out unless you've got some kind of truly wacky setup. You can't really watch TV since you need to watch the fiber you're drafting out. But it's not a very intellectually engaging activity; it doesn't "keep your mind off of things". Nope, spinning consumes both all of your attention and none of your attention at the same time. Once you get the hang of it (i.e., you get past that whole "frustration" point), it really is quite meditative. It focuses your attention brilliantly inside your own head, where you can think. A lot. About stuff you don't want to think about. Like unemployment. Yay.

But you no doubt notice, dear reader, that the wheel is back! What does this signify? It's a sign that my mind is returning to being a safe place to be left alone in. I spun yarn last night for a few hours, perfectly happy. My thoughts were calm, not stressful. I reveled in the incongruity of listening to an iTunes Genius mix of the Urge, Dada, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, and the Catherine Wheel, while spinning yarn (and if you know who any of those bands are, then you were just as much of a geek as I was in high school!). I thought about my job, my family life, my house, my town, and all without hyperventilating. My life finally seems to be settling itself down.

So I'm going to enjoy this all while it lasts. Does this mean that I'm no longer preparing for the zombies? Au contraire! I feel like that's a project I can finally look in the face again, since it no longer feels like the zombies are already at my door. Also, while I am confident that my current job isn't going to disappear tomorrow, I don't really know what the long-term prospects are for a well-paying administration job in the field of eco-justice. I don't hold out much hope for the lasting viability of our current economy; the growth capitalism model of doing things just isn't sustainable. Will the economic crash (which I believe is still to come) spell doom for my job? Honestly, it seems likely. On the other hand, working in an eco-justice center is a pretty good job for doing preparation, learning and teaching everything I can now, to help everyone through it. So there's always that. But will these days of bliss last forever? Nope. Buddhism got that one right.

So I will embrace impermanence and enjoy this while I can. I will use the calm to reapply myself to things I was just too depressed to work on before. My garden is getting a MAJOR upgrade this year. When I'm done with the construction, I'll post pics (my regular State of the Garden reports). Seedlings are growing in my dining room and on my sun porch (which, despite the name, has almost no access to said celestial being). I'll finally build the vent box for our root cellar to help regulate the temps down there. Maybe I'll even finally build or buy a sun oven! Crazier things have happened. Depending on where we are in a few months, or by next year, maybe we'll finally invest in a wood-burning cookstove. Many possibilities are open.

But what this all really means? It means I need to overhaul the "To Do" list on here. But not right now, I've got yarn to spin! =)

Smell the air....

It's getting closer, isn't it?



It really is....



You can smell it, even if you're not trying....



It's just under that vague scent of barbeque on the air....



Close your eyes.....



Inhale......


*sigh*



*grin*



Spring.

Thank the heavens for a new Gardening year!

Wow, didn't last year's gardening just suck? Well, ours did anyway. If yours didn't, you can just keep that to yourself....

So anyway, onward and upward, right? We learn from our successes and our mistakes, and remember that Mother Nature can be a right bitch, and that we will only only only purchase Certified Disease-free seed potatoes, we will not use saved seed potatoes from last year, and we will destroy any potato volunteers from last year, now won't we? Yes we will!

So anyway, I'm knee-deep in my Fedco catalog (what, you don't know what Fedco is? Oh good heavens, get thee to the website!) picking plants, daydreaming about how gorgeous my garden will be this year, and reading Thomas Keller's new "Ad Hoc at Home" cookbook, which is its own form of cruelty in these desolate, vegetable-less days. Sipping my husband's latest home-roasted Brazilian coffee. Small joys are key.

Part of my plan for this year is to finally embrace that a large chunk of my garden is almost unusable due to the nearby trees. It's not that they shade too much, since my garden is to their south (though at the height of summer there's a bit of cover, but this is probably a good thing). But a tree can out-compete my little seedlings for water & nutrients any day. Pair this with the fact that at least one of these trees is a black walnut, which will actually poison surrounding plants, and I've been fighting a Sisyphean battle here. So I am going to embark in a multi-prong strategy to deal with the situation.

1. The 6-ish wooden-sided raised beds I built last year? Yeah, those are awesome. I'm building more of those. Oh yes.
2. Tomatoes (the most susceptible to juglone poisoning from black walnuts) simply will not be in my ground-based garden. I can't fight that anymore, I concede. Instead, my tomato plants will all be in homemade Self-watering Containers, protected from poisoning and the vagaries of my own watering habits....
3. I am going to install some kind of barrier between the bottom of the northeast corner boxes and the sub-soil. Now, I must admit, this makes my earth-mother/permaculture/holistic cycles/soil-system side go batshit, but the simple fact is, the trees are taking all of my plant's food & water--these two entities are not playing nicely, and they need to be separated (I'd put the trees in a time-out if I could, but that hasn't proved possible.... yet). So, I will till up that section, move all the soil off to one side, and put down a barrier, then the boxes (which will, of necessity now, be about 12" high), then refill with soil.
   

And so, I come to the question and answer portion of this blog post. For all you gardeners out there, especially if you've done something like this in the past, what barrier method did you use? I know there are several existing systems that follow a plan like this--the latest edition of Square Foot Gardening does it, for example--but I don't have access to those books right now. In my ideal world, this would be a permanent (or at least mostly-permanent) thing--I wouldn't have to dig it all up and start over every year or two. And it will have to have some kind of drainage, so just a solid layer of plastic may not work (then again, maybe it will--I'm open to suggestions). My two best ideas right now are to either use some sort of permeated gardening cloth, but I worry that this will still allow too much passing back & forth between the boxes & the trees. My other thought is a good 2-3" barrier of large gravel. So what do y'all suggest?

Our edible landscape

Well, now that the whole "teaching thing" is done and over, I can get back to my life as a blogger--er, I mean, gardener and urban adaptionist (I just coined that term--it works, doesn't it?). I've noticed of late that my outdoor life is sliding steadily toward the "edible landscape" end of the spectrum. My basic criteria for planting something has always been that it must either (1) be edible; (2) be advantageous to those things which are edible; or (3) be in a place essentially impossible to plant anything edible in (e.g., the 3" deep built-in flower boxes on the north side of our house). But now this has taken something of a turn; I've begun to actively remove things that are already in place which do not meet these requirements, replacing them with things that do.

For example, let's look at the new blueberry bushes I just got (along with some landscape fabric, custom organic fertilizer and detailed planting instructions, all for $10 each bush--did I mention that I was completely taken for a ride on my first $30 blueberry bush purchase?!). These will be replacing the five boxwood shrubs currently sitting happily in front of our house. The boxwoods look nice, they are nearly no maintenance, and they fill the space and block the view of our concrete foundation. And I'm replacing them with a plant that is about as finicky as they come, with stringent pH requirements and watering & drainage needs, pruning requirements, and which will probably never block the view of the foundation. And I'm paying for it. And yet, this all seems perfectly logical, because at the end of the day, I will have blueberries. Well, at least, I will probably have blueberries, if I can keep up with the pH, water, drainage, and pruning requirements. Hmmm.

Blueberry bushes are nice looking, don't get me wrong. Or at least, they probably will be in a couple of years. Probably. The only reason I'm reasonably sure my neighbors won't hate me for destroying their property values are (1) at least half of them are currently racing me for getting chickens first; and (2) forces other than me have already done far more damage to property values than my wee little bushes could ever dream of doing.

I've also now planted three grape vines, and am struggling to learn The Art of the Grape Pruning. Why does every plant on the planet that needs to be pruned need to be pruned in an entirely different manner, with different tools, aiming at different goals? Is this some kind of subtle perverse joke on the part of the divine that we just haven't seen yet? Cut back only new growth; cut back only old growth; only allow two canes at a time; never cut back to fewer than five canes; cut mid-branch for shape; cut at the node for healing; prune in fall before dormancy; prune in spring before leafing out; prune in spring but not before leafing out. WTF, people? And don't even get me started on the apricot tree on our property. Whoever owned the house before us had the poor thing topped. It's now a hopeless mass of scraggly branches that cannot possibly support the amount of fruit it sets. Pruning of the most aggressive order might be able to bring it back into useful production, but I'm still over here struggling with my one-year-old grapes & blueberries, okay?

We are also approaching the Season of the Assessments. (And, judging by this post, we've also entered the Season of the Over-Used Capitalized Made-Up Proper Names.) Pretty soon things like berries and early greens will become available in mass quantities, which means canning, freezing and dehydrating, oh my! And that means figuring out how much to can, freeze and/or dehydrate. And that means figuring out how much I canned or froze last year (I hardly dehydrated anything), and if it was enough, not enough, or too much. Why buy a bushel of peaches when I still have half a bushel of peaches from last year's bushel purchase in the freezer? That's a clue that a bushel is too much, ya know.

I will also take this opportunity to look at our eating habits, and how they can be adjusted to eat more completely out of our stores, rather than out of the store. I might have some fairly impressive food storage going on here, but I still go to the store weekly. Why is that? What can I adjust to pare that down? So in my food storage assessment will be thinking about why I didn't use a full bushel of peaches. Could I have? Should I have? Did I make various desserts or jams out of things I bought from the store, when there were perfectly usable peaches right downstairs?

And, of course, I will be assessing the quality of my food storage. For example, the potatoes went beautifully. They're only now starting to give up the ghost. The apples, OTOH, were an unmitigated disaster. What happened? I need to figure that out. And where were my other root crops? Or winter squash? Gotta look into these things. Where were my gaps? What could I have done better? What methods of storage worked particularly well--or particularly poorly--with which veg or fruit? Yes, all this in more will be in store in upcoming posts.

I am becoming increasingly paranoid about the state of our economy. The behavior of the stock market seems to have taken leave of any reference to on-the-street economic conditions, or indeed with reality itself. As discussed in The Automatic Earth, there was an interview with a major stock analyst who said that he sees a recovery for our economy in late 2009-early 2010. Then, in the same paragraph, he said that he didn't have any particular ideas for what the engine of recovery would be. So what, exactly, is this belief in recovery based on? Pure faith? Tarot cards? What? I love me some tarot cards, but I try not to gauge the movement of world economies with them, ya know. And the useful economic data (i.e., not the stock market) is bleaker than hell. We're now well embedded in the deflationary cycle, which is the sort of thing that wakes up most economists in the middle of the night in cold sweats. So while I would love to have more time to prepare my family and my methods, I'm genuinely concerned that we're about out, and this is our last go. So let's hop to it, shall we?

New List Item--Blueberries!

I just got in contact with a local farmer (who I know tangentally, and with whom I had once traded some extra strawberry crowns for some thornless blackberry canes). He has lots of blueberry bushes left, and at a killer price! I bought one bush at a local nursery for $30 (eesh, I cannot believe I paid that much for a plant). Aaron will sell me one bush for $12, or two for $20. Woot! So now, all five bushes in front of my house are going to be yanked, and replaced with lovely, nice-looking, food-giving bushes. Furthermore, by getting five bushes, I'm getting one of each of his varieties--early, early-mid season, mid, mid-late, and late. So probably 10, maybe even 12, weeks of blueberries. YEAH! So I guess I'll be putting those bushes in, what, after the cookies but before the new hot water system?

I'm really getting into this whole edible-landscaping thing. Can you tell? In other news, I've erected several... er... trellises? Trelliseas? Trellisae? Can I get a plural on that? ;-) Okay, back to grading!

The List

Well, for those of you who know me, you know that I am currently adjuncting at one of our local Universities. I've got two classes worth of finals sitting on my couch right now, which is probably why I'm sitting here typing. I've noticed, over the past few days of grading, that I have an ever-growing list of "things that I'm gonna do once I'm done with my grading." It's worth mentioning that this list starts almost immediately after grades are due at noon on Tuesday. So far, it looks something like this:

• Tues, 2:30: pick up Alex from school, make chocolate-oatmeal cookies (at the request of Alex & Ian--I'll just have to figure out what "chocolate oatmeal cookies" actually are)
• Mulch in the entire side-garden for more medicinal herbs
• Mulch the current herbs
• Plant my new herbs from the local herb fair in pots (the ones that go in the ground are already there--I had to de-stress from grading, after all)
• Sweep up the ghastly mess of little branches & rotting leaves that are all that remain of The Evil Gumball Tree. Put leaves in leaf mold pile (which I built a couple of days ago). Sticks will go... um... well, we'll figure that out later, now won't we?
• Clean the ever-lovin' bejezus out of my house. It has been Far. Too. Long.
• Finish up the rain barrels, which I've got mostly installed now.
• Probably take some pictures of all of this for the blog.
• Get some vegetable glycerin to make kid-friendly herbal tinctures. It's not that the kids would ingest so much alcohol if I just used vodka-based tinctures (probably no more than half a teaspoon for an entire formula dose). But something about sending my 7-year-old to school smelling of Smirnoff seems like a bad idea.
• Bar-b-que. Yeah.
• Look into making a really awesome solar water heater predicated on long loops of black hose slung up on my roof.
• Finally write that "bug-out bag/bucket" post I've been swearing I'll write for so long now.
  

So that should get me through till Friday, right? *smirk*

Hey all you Urban Gardeners!

Get yer butts over to The Urban Garden Project and JOIN UP! Stand up and be counted! The only requirements are that you are gardening (and yes, containers on your balcony count) within the city limits, so get to it!

And, in other Adapting news, my neighbor and I are getting dangerously close to getting chickens. "Close" meaning that we've been emailing each other design plans for various coops.

What, you don't stick your seeds to toilet paper, too?

Allow me to introduce you to a most delightful invention, the seed tape:


Okay, in all honesty, this is more of a seed "sheet" than seed tape, but the principle is the same. There is a real seed tape near the top of the photo, which is simply seeds in one row, rather than in lots of rows. Depends on how you want to plant, I s'pose.

Anyway, here's the idea: you take some kind of paperish product--something that will degrade very quickly--and you stick seeds to it. Then you put that in your garden, cover it with soil to an appropriate depth, water, and be done with it. As you see above, I've chosen to use toilet paper (unbleached recycled stuff), which will obviously degrade very quickly indeed. You probably can use regular paper, but I'd worry about if it's been bleached (which in all likelihood it has). Newspaper would probably work a treat, too. I stuck the seeds down using a thick mixture of flour & water. I've heard tell that cornstarch works well, too, and I even saw recommendations for Elmer's glue. Now, I doubt there'd be any problems with using actual glue, but something about putting that stuff in my garden put me off. So I went with flour.

Anyway, I stole one of my kid's watercolor paintbrushes and dabbed the flour-water mixture at appropriate intervals for the seeds I was planting. In this case, 1" intervals, as I was seeding carrots. I then dropped 1-2 seeds per splotch, continued till the whole sheet was covered, and set it aside to dry. If you want tapes instead of sheets, just cut them apart once dry. Anyway, when completely dry (and I do me completely--just imagine what would happen if the sheets stuck to each other! Disaster!), I rolled them up and set them aside until ready to plant.

Okay, so why did I do this? Well, partially because I have a perverse desire to have the only perfectly spaced carrots in the city. But mostly because, well, if you've ever seeded carrots yourself, you'll probably understand the appeal of the tape method. No hunching over a garden bed, achingly spacing eensy-teensy seeds 1" apart from each other for row after row after row after row after.... No one really makes it that far, either. Most folks get, like, maybe two rows into this hellish process before they just say F*CK IT and start sprinkling seeds down the rows. This leads to the obvious problems of overseeding in some patches, underseeding in others, lots and lots of thinning, stunted carrots, wasted space, broken back, dogs & cats living together... anarchy. Nope, anarchy must be averted--order will be imposed. I sat at my kitchen table, listening to a movie playing in the other room, no hunched back, and worked for a few hours on and off finishing my sheets. Planting them took like two minutes. Tops.

I don't think this process is worthwhile if you have larger seeds--like beet or bean seeds--or if you're planting small squares, a la Square Foot Gardening. But if you're planting lots and lots of fiddling teeny seeds in 1" spacing over 16 square feet? Well, f*ck that. I'll make a tape, thanks.

EDIT: Oh yeah, do notice that 1" spacing really is too close for fully-grown carrots. That's why you wait for them to start growing well, and then you thin out all the baby carrots, which are a yummy, yummy delight! So, no major veggicide (read: thinning; although if you seed two seeds per splotch you will have to do a little bit of veggicide), you get baby carrots, and the baby carrots you pull help loosen up the soil to let the remaining carrots penetrate more easily, preventing stunted carrots. Man, there is just no downside here...

Multi-media SOTG Report

Yay! I'm finally at home, at the computer with the relevant pictures, and possessing at least a little bit of spare time. Or, to put it another way, there are lots of other things happening in my house right now, but they can be getting on without my help for the time being. Mostly anyway. So, on to the garden!

Here are the babies in their nursery. Fresh, new florescent lights go a long way towards having healthy, stocky little seedlings (rather than the spindly, pathetic-looking, falling-over hopeless seedlings I've grown in the past). The top pic are my spring broccolis; the second are all of my brassicas--broccoli, cabbage, kale and, um, celery. (Okay, celery isn't a brassica. Fine.)

Here's the beginning--my 4'x4' square garden boxes. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm trying this out for the first time this year, so I went el-cheapo on materials. I didn't want to sink $100 on a project I didn't end up liking very much, ya know? So these are all untreated 1"x8" pine boards which I banged together with some drywall nails I had laying around. Now that they are in fact being used, and have begun to warp slightly with the damp, I see that using a couple of screws would've been beneficial for a more secure joining, but I don't think it'll be a big deal this year.

Step two! The boxes are in, and the remaining beds have been made. The circular garden you see is my children's "pizza garden". They decided they wanted to plant carrots, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and some flowers. Now, the weird paper & dirt things. That's my pathway lining. I put down layers of newspaper, and covered it with mulch. What you see in the above picture are just handfulls of mulch to hold the paper down while I was laying everything out (it was verra verra windy that day).

And here we see the garden in it's mostly finished state. Of course, not nearly all my plants are in yet--we've got another two weeks till the frost free date here. But there's a good number. The white sheets are floating row cover, or frost blankets depending on whom you ask. I have them covering my brassicas to protect them from The Evil Cabbage Worm. Broc & cabbage don't require fertilization, and the cover lets in nearly all the sunlight and rain, so I can pretty much leave the plants covered until it's time to harvest (except for weeding & mulching, of course). Oh, that big mass of branches? My neighbor next door had a tree cut down, and she is struggling to gain the upper hand on the remnants. =)

Here we see the latest additions to our garden: the patch at the bottom of the photo is Brian's potato patch, which is a 4'x8' spot with 8 potato plants in. Behind that are, for as much as you can see in the photo, 5 mounds of mulch. Growing out of those mounds are various bushes & vines: the three in the middle are grapes, and they are flanked by the blueberry bush at the far end, and the "mystery bush" on the near side.

And here we have the nursery again, this time populated by summer veggies & herbs like tomatoes (middle, right), basil, chamomile, borage, echinacea, blessed thistle, horehound, chervil, cillantro, and ... er... who really knows what else? I know there's some lavender and chives in there somewhere. I expect I'll be able to figure out which plant is which once they're bigger, right? And smiling down beneficently over all is the AeroGarden, currently housing lettuce.

The State of the Garden Report

Okay, so I don't have pictures yet (they're on my home computer, and I'm currently at work), but they're coming soon. However, I thought before the Easter Break takes us into its grip that I would report on the current state of our garden.

I am pleased to report that our garden has enjoyed a steady growth rate in the first planting quarter, with the garden-share of our lawn increasing by approximately 5% over last year's end. This figure was carefully calculated by eyeballing the size of the garden, and then adding in the new additions, and then going "Yeah, that looks like maybe another 5% or so." But in more strict terms, we have reclaimed at least another 50 square feet from our lawn for the purposes of food and beauty.

Joining me in my gardening endeavors this year will be my husband Brian, who has finally let guilt drive him away from Civ IV and out into the fresh air and sunshine, which we have now conclusively established does not either set him on fire nor cause him to melt. Brian is not a natural gardener, but he is giving it a go this year by putting in a lovely potato bed. The bed itself is 8' x 4', and was dug out and planted by him yesterday. He'll be trying two different methods of potato propagation to see which one works better, since neither of us really know what we're doing with potatoes. Four of the potato plants are planted in standard 6" deep trenches, and will be hilled maybe halfway through the summer. Another four potato plants were also planted about 6" down, but after sprouting will be caged in chicken wire columns about 3' high and 1.5' in diameter, and then continuously filled throughout the growing season. This does mean that somewhere we're gonna hafta find a lot more dirt. Hmm....

Also, yesterday I put in two elderberry bushes, three grape vines, one blueberry bush, and one "mystery berry bush". I got the elderberry bushes from a friend's farm who was getting ready to pull them all anyway, and he said I could take whatever I wanted except the currents (curses!). I asked "What are those?" and he said "We don't know." "And those?" "Nope, don't know what those are, either." "These?" "I think these had something like a raspberry, except they didn't taste like raspberries." Okay, so I just chose one at random and dug it out. They're all edible, whatever they are. I'll try to post pics of the leaves for identification purposes later.

Otherwise, almost everything that can go into the garden now has gone into the garden:

• cabbage
• broccoli
• carrots
• beets
• rutabegas
• parsnips
• spinach
• onions
• lettuces
• chard

Other plants have been started, such as tomatoes, and lots & lots of herbs. Some of the herbs I bought, like evening primrose and echinacea, are direct seeded once the frost date has passed, but otherwise they're getting going in my house right now.

Also, if you look back at the old post that has my herb garden laid out, you will see a large tree on the right side labeled "Big Stupid Gumball Tree". Well, joy of joys!, that thing is coming down. Apparently tree service costs vary wildly from one to the next, but I found one who will take the whole tree down for $250 (including cutting it into pieces, but not hauling it away). That price is so low that I wouldn't trust it normally, except that this person just did extensive work for my neighbor and was perfectly good at what he did. So OKAY! Tree GONE! This will really open up my herb garden for planting, as well as help my main garden get far more late-afternoon sun. This is good.

Okay, kids, here it is!

"A garden is never as good
as it will be next year."
--Thomas Cooper

(I am just positive that you'll need to click on the picture to get a larger version so that you can possibly tell what's going on in there--well, if you want to anyway.)

So here we have it--the Spring Garden Plan 2009(tm). The first thing to notice about it is that it's probably time for me to lay off the caffeine. ;-) I should give credit for the software I use, too, which can be found at www.growveg.com. I really love this service--it's got lots of great utilities, and it's just plain old fun to use. For US$25/year, maybe it's a bit frivolous, but I suck at keeping paper records, so this will do.

Okay, seriously now, this is my fourth year gardening. I've had mixed luck with it, but I think I'm finally starting to get my brain wrapped around the project (or, at least, other people seem to think I am, because they keep asking me questions about gardening as if I know what I'm talking about). The garden this year is about the same size as the gardens I've done for the past three years, with a couple of additions (the potato and garlic squares), but there are several notable changes I'm making:

1. I will be adopting the "square foot gardening" method for several parts of my garden
2. There will be a "kid's pizza garden"
3. My husband wants his own square
4. Some hardcore new fertilization
   

Let's look at each of these in turn, shall we?

Square Foot Gardening

As you can probably see, in the SE corner of the main garden I have a number of 4'x4' square plots, rather than the more traditional long beds or rows (and the remainder of my garden is regular, 12'x3' raised beds, and has been for the past few years). I am trying this method to see what I think of it. Certainly I've heard rave reviews, and it does make a lot of intuitive sense to me as well, so what the heck? I will be trying two basic styles. First, the four squares at the bottom-most corner you will see are labeled "Kitchen Garden". These are the squares from which we can harvest for daily eating throughout the growing season. It's where I will (and I will, damnit) build coldframes and such for season extension. I am hoping that this will create a useful divide between what to eat and what to store. I often found myself not harvesting things to eat last year, because I was worried that it would put too much of a dent in our food storage. Well, let's just put them in separate sections, then! The other two square beds (which contain onions, carrots, and beets) are meant for storage--I'm testing the SFG methodology with respect to mass crops for putting up. I am actually rather optimistic about all this. The remainder of my garden will be regular raised beds.

Incidentally, the garden-planning utility isn't great for actually plotting out what I'll put in the SFG section--so that stuff's not really set in stone. It's more just reminders of what in general I want in there, and in what rough proportions, as well as planning out where the frames will go for vertical crops.

The Pizza Garden

I want my kids to garden, but I don't want to overwhelm them. So I've planned in a 4' diameter "pizza garden" (got the idea from Sharon Astyk), and I let the kids decide what to put in. They picked tomatoes, beans (bush or pole? probably pole), some leaf lettuce, carrots, and two kinds of flowers--blue nasturtiums and marigolds. Cute, eh?

My Husband's Patch

Those who know my husband are probably still busy picking themselves up off of the floor after having read that he wants a section of the garden for himself, so I'll assume that you don't know the backstory here. My husband and green things do not traditionally get along. Gardening has pretty much been my domain for, well, the entirety of our relationship. But I think this has been making him feel guilty, as he is very much on board with everything I'm trying to do, and he wants to help. So this year he's asked to have a plot of his own. Switching some of the garden to a SFG method, I think, made the project of helping out in the garden become more manageable to him, rather than attempting to wade out into my sprawling, wilderness-like layout. Also, he could choose what he wanted to plant, which will hopefully make the project more interesting to him (I suspect he would have to restrain himself from actively sabotaging my tomatoes otherwise--he hates tomatoes [and yes, I still married him voluntarily]). He has chosen to do a bed of potatoes, which I think will be a great choice for him and a good starting place. He really likes potatoes, so he'll have a vested interest in trying to take care of the plants. Potatoes are also pretty forgiving, as far as I know. They do require a different sort of care than other plants, but not so much that it's really more difficult, just different.

The New Fertilizer

Yes, the new fertilizer. I'm taking a leaf out of an old Mother Earth News article found here (http://tinyurl.com/2rgxmy), and mixing a homemade fertilizer to add in, along with the copious amounts of compost I put in. The fertilizer is a ratio'ed mixture of lime, gypsum, bone meal, alfalfa meal, and kelp meal. All of it (except the kelp meal, which I need to order online) rang in at just over $20 (and that's for almost 150# of agricultural products), so it's a pretty durned good deal, if it works. I'll be sure to report on its success or failure later. But, of course, this will be used in conjunction with compost--always always always have compost! Love my compost! Don't take good care of my compost, but that doesn't mean I don't love it!


And so... there you have it! That's the plan. For future reference, our lawn is actually twice the size, width-wise (i.e., east to west) as what we're using now, which is probably even better land since it gets better sun. I will be steadily encroaching on it as I get better. I am planning on putting in a short grape arbor and/or blueberry bushes along the North side of our lawn, between mine and my neighbor's yard (who won't mind one little bit having grapes or blueberries coming onto her side, and might just help me pay for them). Who knows what else? We'll see.... =D