Posts from — May 2007

In the suburban world of my youth, all yards were clearly demarcated by fences. Not only were all backyards fenced in, they almost all had exactly the same style chainlinked fence. Oh, there were a few holdouts who still had wooden posts from an earlier era, but not very many of them. Even in that case, property lines were made very clear.

The lack of standardized fencing between properties in the little hippie enclave we call home has always been one of its charms for me. On one side, a drive way separates our land from the neighbor’s, more or less. On the other, the saddest of gappy little wire fences barely slows the squirrels down as they pass from our yard to theirs.

This year things went a step further when we talked with an elderly neighbor who still likes to garden despite the limitations of age. She moved into the house a few years ago and the backyard overflows with the mature flower garden put in by the man three owners back. No one since has succeeded in keeping up with it. Our neighbor has had a few vegetable beds cleared over the last couple years. She usually gets some help putting in a dozen or so plants in her yard.

This year we’ve come up with what I hope will be an ingenious exchange: we’ll help look after her vegetable garden in exchange for the use of some of her space. Seeing as we frequent the Farmers’ Market for seedlings, we’re going to pick up whatever else she needs. We said we’ll assist with the planting and the weeding. In July, when she goes away for her vacation, we’ll look after her garden.

I’m most excited about being able to grow some of the items my partner has in the past insisted take up too much room, like squash and melon, perhaps. One often wishes for just a little more space. This year, we have it. I’m looking forward to what we might do.

After a week of disappointingly cloudy and rainy and/or cold days, today was absolutely glorious. The sky was clear and blue; the sun shone brightly all day long.

It was an inspiring day for working in the garden and for solar cooking. Since my cupboard was bare of easy short-cut baking mixes, I had a look around a great site for solar cooking, specifically the recipe wiki part of the site. The desserts, as usual, caught my eye and I decided to try the recipe for solar baked brownies. The recipe called for ingredients I had in my kitchen– another sign. I adjusted the baking time from “one hour”, surely California standards, to my usual Michigan “as long as it’s sunny” period. Again, you can’t burn food when solar cooking so go for it.

These solar baked brownies were a hit. They were utterly delicious and close to my ideal of chewy brownies. The ease of preparation was another big plus. We’ll be making them again soon.

One of our running jokes about gardening has to do with our ability to save money through our production. When we have asparagus, I’ll say to Jim, “Wow, there’s $40 of asparagus in that there bed!” The same with our jalapeños, which I note are worth hundreds of dollars, at grocery store prices. And don’t get me started on rhubarb, which costs quite a lot in the store, but grows so profusely if you plant it.

Another thing that we’re rich in is leaf mulch. Like really rich. I saw a little bag of leaf mulch or leaf mold, as it’s sometimes called, in a gardening store for $6.00. We have about 100 times that! And we make it ourselves.

When we rake up our leaves in the fall, we store them in large paper yard bags, the kind other people put their yard waste in and leave at the curb to get picked up by the city collectors. We used to store those filled bags in the top story of our old barn, which, due to its leaky nature, did not result in dry leaves in the spring. Now that we have our new, water-proof barn, it’s a whole different story. Our bags of leaves emerged from the barn attic in prime crispy-dry state.

Only a year ago, we shredded our leaves by hand, using a large gauge screen to push them through. It was hard work, rubbing the leaves over the surface of the screen and filling the wheelbarrow with the extraordinarily useful leaf-bits.

We stepped up to modern times when we inherited a power shredder from a friend who’d gotten a better one herself. Now the whole shredding process can be completed in a scene of noisy industry lasting just about an hour.

This leaf mulch is one of our powerful gardening secrets. We will spread on a thick layer to keep down the weeds and, believe me, it really does. It’s a priceless technique.

Today we started the nasty task that has awaited us all along: we started excavating the part of our round bed that was crushed by construction. Over the winter, a pile of construction debris sat on top of this area. Over the soil now is a spill of sand probably 6 inches deep. The backhoe must have pushed the edging bricks into the ground as well. It’s not an impossibly large area, just 1/4 of our total round bed but it’ll be pretty close to “real” work, not the let’s-pretend-we’re-farmers kind of work we’ve done ’til now. That’s why we’re breaking the task up.

Today we just want to remember where the edges of the garden bed used to be. We measured other parts of the bed and a good estimate seems to be that the distance between the edge of the central sunflower bed and the edge of the exterior bed is about the length of my favorite hoe. Using this guideline, we used the spade to dig a few exploratory holes. Sure enough, we were able to find most of our “missing” bricks and edging material.

That’s about all we did today in our 20 minutes. We collected some of the bricks but other bricks we left sticking half out of the ground. Now we know where the bed is and we can start to dream and imagine what we’ll grow inside.

Addendum: I forgot something else that I did, something that I bet I’ll pay for tomorrow. I “rolled” a stone, roughly 1 foot in diameter, off the bed and I carried another oddly shaped puddle of concrete, both of which had been uncovered during the barn’s construction and both of which had come to rest in our round bed. We still don’t have a really firm idea what we’ll do with those stones but for now, they’re resting near the asparagus in the “orchard.”

Speaking of asparagus: two of our new asparagus plantings have sent up tentative, fragile stems. I am quite happy because frankly the crowns didn’t look TOO prosperous when we planted them.

Today’s 20 minutes largely involved seeds.

At the center of our round bed, we traditionally plant sunflowers. We like the strong “vertical interest” that sunflowers add to our largely flat yard. Not to mention the color. We keep the sunflowers from falling over with a length of chicken wire supported by a couple metal posts. The wire used to be the frame for our compost pile. Sometime soon I’ll write about the fancy copper gate / trellis I’m going to build for the sunflowers — I’ve been planning it and scavenging materials for it literally for years!) Sunflowers are also a sentimental favorite because my Grandma grew them.

We bought a package of sunflower seeds a few years back and every year since we’ve simply saved the seed heads and consolidated the volunteers that grow elsewhere in the yard. We always get enough to share a few with the wildlife. This year there were a large number of seedlings near the back of our yard, a good 25′ from where we plant the sunflowers. I figure a squirrel made off with a seed head and only ate through half of it. We made a few holes and transplanted our seedlings over to the area. Then I blanketed the area with the leftover seed from last year. We just collect the seed heads from the sunflower in an old bushel basket and set it aside in our basement. The heads become very dry and are easily crumbled. To minimize the number of squirrels at least who eat the seed, I spread a few generous handfuls of dried blood. This won’t keep away the birds but I hope they have better sources of nutrition by this time in the season.

I also spread a bit of the grass seed I bought. I had stored many items from the old barn (including much of the salvageable wood from the barn itself) under a tarp in the yard and this killed a nice broad swath of grass. I realize it’ll take several attempts to re-seed it but I wanted to get started. I realize now I didn’t do all the things one’s “supposed” to do when planting grass seed: I didn’t rake up the soil; I didn’t water the seed… I won’t be losing too much sleep over it though.

This doesn’t sound like much but I swear this took 20 minutes!