Posts from — May 2007

I did something today I have never done before and I’m not 100% proud of it. I bought a gas-powered lawn mower. I don’t like them: they’re noisy; they’re smelly; they give off a crazy amount of emissions for the amount of work they’re performing… and they take up too much space in my precious barn.

The best solution, in my opinion would be to have no lawn at all. There are many parks around us within walking distance so if I really felt motivated to roll on some grass, I’d only need to walk a block or two. We’ve been guided by the motto: “More Hoe, Less Mow” but we haven’t entirely eliminated grass from our yard yet. Our front lawn is small and square. Our back yard has only a 3′ wide path of grass that snakes around the beds and one small snaking path of grass

For years, we tried to use –and tried to LOVE — a human-powered, rotary push mower. To be fair, it worked really quite well for our front yard. Our backyard, however, with its curved beds made the rotary push mower less effective (and made the other alternative, an electric mower almost entirely out of the question.)

And then of course there was the matter of the harvest.

The harvest? The only reason that we really tolerate much grass at all is so we can harvest the clippings and with the rotary mower, this meant raking the lawn after every cut. The clippings from an untreated lawn are a great addition to a compost. They provide nitrogen needed to break down the “brown” carbon components, like leaves. We also use some grass clippings as a mulch directly on the beds. I like them as a mulch because they are very fine textured and I can sprinkle them over seedlings in a way that I can’t with other, denser kinds of mulch. They also have a relatively attractive appearance, especially after they turn a little brown and let the green foliage stand out. A word of warning, though about adding too many grass clippings directly to your compost pile. They have a tendency to matt together and form a layer that is impenetrable to water and air. And without air, they’ll smell like cow manure. Yup. Cow manure.

So we bought that perfect suburban appliance, the lawnmower, today. If it matters, we first checked at the local repair shop to see if they had any used models in stock. Nope, it’s a busy time for them. As soon as a used one comes in, it goes out. Does it matter that we’re going to use it to cut the lawn of the 80 lady next door, because we are? Why do I still feel so darned guilty about this?

Maybe I just need to make sure that this is the LAST gas-powered lawn mower I buy, that by the time this one wears out, I’ll have a better solution.

One of the few mail order catalogs whose arrival causes a stir of excitement at our house comes from the Lee Valley company. Lee Valley also offers hardware, woodworking and gifts but our biggest thrill is their gardening catalog. Practical, innovative, and beautiful objects fill their pages. It’s not fancy stuff but simply fabulous. I challenge you to flip through the catalog and not find something you must have!

This is where we got our stainless steel kitchen compost bucket, our pound-in bed trim, our Victorian-style glass wasp trap, our disposable fruit fly traps, and lots more. More items wait on our wishlist for future orders.

The items I’ve purchased from the catalog and seen in their stores are of very good quality. When we visited the store in London, Ontario 2 summers ago, an employee told us that the company was founded by Mr Lee, who was disappointed with the quality of the tools he was able to procure. He decided to start his own company selling the best things for gardening and woodworking. I recommend them highly!

Here is another simple recipe that will delight you (with its ease) and your guests (with its flavor).

Ingredients you’ll need:

Jiffy Apple-Cinnamon Muffin mix

1.5 teaspoon cornstarch

1 egg

3/4 cup sour cream

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Combine the muffin mix and the cornstarch in a bowl. Add the egg, sour cream and oil and stir to dissolve most of the lumps. Spread the batter in the bottom of a pre-cooksprayed round lidded pan. Bake in the solar oven for 5 or 6 hours.

Our cake was brown and crisped on top. The bottom was more moist than a regular cake, although it was thoroughly cooked. It reminded me of an English pudding so I served it warm with a swirl of caramel on the plates.

Imagine it’s a Friday, the end of a long work week. Where’s the harm in coming home and putting up my feet instead of running right out to the garden?

From our perspective, taking a day off is definitely not against the “rules.”

In fact, we’ve decided that it’s a GOOD idea sometimes to bank up a few extra minutes during the week especially if the weather has been cold and rainy so we can spend a little extra time in the garden once weather turns nice. Our first rule of thumb is to work 20 minutes on average, computed more or less weekly. Feel free to work more but if you’re tired or have other obligations or it’s a nasty day outside, it’s just dumb to force yourself into work, especially through guilt.

Having said that, sometimes I can sometimes coax myself into the task by taking a garden walk. Although I don’t count a garden walk as “work” technically, an important part of spending 20 minutes a day in the garden is also that I get to enjoy and experience the garden on a daily basis. So much changes nearly every day and 20 minutes really isn’t very much time at all to take it in. I often can find a small clump of weeds to remove or mulch to adjust and before I know it, my 20 minutes are up.

Some days’ work are just less exciting than others like today’s which simply involved weeding. Weeds wake early and always seem to have a toehold long before I have much interest in pulling them out. One particularly weed prone area is the region of our perrenial bed where our Echinacea (coneflower) are.

At one point we had echinacea angustifolia, echinacea pallida and echinacea purpurea though I would need to peek at a garden book to tell which is which right now.

Echinacea are one of the few flowers we get to grow. By that I mean that the general plan of our garden is that everything, well, nearly every thing is “useful,” that is, a plant used by someone at some time for food or medicine or some other practical purpose. (Even the old lilac bush, I’m told had a purpose since it was supposedly located next to the outhouse.) Other folks make gardens with only one color like those grey-green “moon light” gardens while other folks specialize in different varieties of the same plant. Ours is a kitchen garden that we’ve tried to make as pleasant to look at as possible. One way is to somewhat stretch our concept a bit to get a few flowers. So though the Romans used the roots of Valerian as a sedative, we don’t intend to. I know that Echinacea tea is supposed to be a popular herbal remedy… but I don’t even know which portion is supposed to be used. And according to the wikipedia article, it doesn’t sound llike I’m alone.

The Plan: We had let this little area go, not just this year but last year too, so long that it almost felt like a psychological block. We decided to see how much 20 minutes of focused weeding could accomplish.

The major enemy that we fought was something I thought was called was “witchgrass” but now that I settle down to investigate, it doesn’t resemble any of the descriptions of that plant. Suffice to say the our adversary here was some kind of grass that sent long spear-sharp “roots” sometimes out a foot or two under the mulch or soil before they erupted into another plant. It was delicate kind of destruction to pull these long strands out.

But it was worth the effort. In addition to rescuing several tiny echinacea plants, we found a little patch of garlic chives and a little stand of valerian.