Posts from — March 2009

In southern Michigan, it’s still too wet and cold to start cultivating, that is to start disturbing the soil on any more than a very surface level. But I wasn’t going to stay inside on such a lovely day as this. Full sun. Warm enough that I could even stand in the breeze without a jacket. And plenty to do.

But if I couldn’t work IN the garden, I could still work AROUND the garden. Literally. Our beds are ringed by grass pathways and today’s task was to rake and straighten them up, sort of like making a nice frame for a painting. I know that later on in the year, I’ll ask myself why I bother to keep ANY lawn. The arguments against lawns are many: gas lawn mowers are noisy and are horrible polluters since they have no catalytic converters, lawns take too much water and more importantly, too much my precious time for upkeep. Plus, unless you’re a goat, you can’t eat it. (You can tell my biases right there!) Sometimes I’m tempted to dig it all up and plant a maze of asparagus. Or a path of low growing, fragrant herbs like mother of thyme so I’d be surrounded with scent when I strolled. Or any one of a number of even more whimsical ideas. The most practical reason I keep a lawn is to harvest the clippings which I find are a great source of nitrogen for the compost (and the “sheet compost” style of all over mulch that we practice.) And there is also the excuse, this early in the spring, that I can play around in the garden without ruining anything.

I collected three big bags of “material.” If I was a bird, it’s probably prime house building supplies: leaves, wind fallen sticks, the dried bits of last year’s weeds, the odd candy wrapper… Everything was decomposable apart from the candy wrappers, so I put it back behind the barn where we’re fighting an infestation of non-native bamboo. It’s a good natured feud we have with the bamboo that we’ve continued for… let’s see, over a decade. It’s retreated largely to our neighbor’s yard but every now and again, a sprout pops up in our yard so we remain ever vigilant with a thick coat of mulch.

Raking up the lawn makes the place look like a garden again. The edges of the beds are more defined. The lawn is a more neutral color and texture, like a good picture frame, which allows attention to be focused on the beds. I discovered several new arrivals. The daffodils (or are they “paper whites?”) that we’ve naturalized in our front yard have made a determined showing with their spear like foliage. The clumps of tiny snow drops that I mentioned before are now all in bloom. Also in bloom are the purple cups of the croci, tucked in and around the stones. Still no word from the asparagus, that slumbers in the cool soil but there were two profuse eruptions of rhubarb. My mouth waters at the thought of the season’s first rhubarb pie, especially when I consider it’s just a couple weeks away. There’s also a good stand of garlic chives.

So I spent my 20 minutes today with a rake in my hand. Then I spent a good 20 more poking around under the mulch. Soon, very soon, I’ll be getting my hands dirty again.

We keep advocating the 20 minute idea because we think that anyone can find 20 minutes to work in the garden and that meaningful work can actually be accomplished in 20 minutes segments. And over time, those minutes add up to a wonderful kitchen garden.

How do you motivate yourself on down days, or lazy days, or days too early in the season to have anything interesting growing in the garden?

One way to keep motivated is taking “before” and “after” pictures.

Here is the semicircle bed in “before” mode.

Here is the same bed after 20 minutes of moving, raking, carrying yard waste to the compost and general tidying. Good work that results in us being a little closer to ready for summer.

It’s still too cold. And what’s worse, if the sun shines long enough one day to warm up the ground, then the beds are too wet. If you step on wet soil you’ll compact its structure, make a mess of your shoes… and possibly cause the sky to fall. The best thing you can do for your garden right now is to stay out of it. At least that’s what all the expert advice says. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with that advice. On a merely and purely botanical level, there is no refutation. But gardening, especially amateur gardening, also depends upon the psychology of the gardener. And even after a back-breaking day at work, there was nothing that could have kept me from “gardening” a little this afternoon before the sun fell behind the trees.

I needed to remember my place in the world today, to measure out my yard with the length of a few good strides, to see if anything was already busy beneath the mulch. There are a couple clusters of horseradish that have green tips, though given the hardiness of that whole stand of horseradish, I suspect they never really went dormant despite our brutal winter. The buds on the apple are starting to swell, which reminds me that another January has passed without a proper pruning. Under the lilac — the one area of the yard where we permit purely ornamental plants — several tiny clumps of snowdrops are blooming. The garden has started without me.

I couldn’t restrain myself. I started to “garden” as well. I decided to see how much I could accomplish in the bed behind the house. It had been “under utilized” if not outright neglected last year. We never got around to harvesting any horseradish and the second year kale that grew there wasn’t exactly delicious. I had stored the frame for our nursery bed in the bed, and then I stacked the logs from an old wooden swing set on top. I had every intention of using those logs for a hops trellis last summer (and now intend a hops trellis for the coming summer). Some variety of pernicious grass sent its long spear like runners under the mulch and established a strong foothold as well.


In 20 minutes, I was able to: remove the logs and lean them against the barn where they’re more conspicuous; move the nursery bed frame (even though I’ll likely put it back there once I’m done cleaning the bed;) rake out the dead horseradish leaves; rake up the two year old leaf mulch. I raked mostly because I didn’t want to step on the beds — I obeyed at least that part of botanical wisdom — but I did step in long enough to snip off a box elder that had grown to a sapling since the last time I worked in that bed. Even if I left a couple foot prints behind, I got to work in my garden today!


To those wise sages who prohibit gardening at this time of the year, I counter with the equally wise proverb “Make hay while the sun shines.”

Few clean-up activities will make you feel like a genuine pioneer woman or man than cleaning a cast-iron skillet without water. You might ask yourself is that even possible? The answer is yes, the process is simple, and here is what you need to do to get this dirty cast iron pan clean.

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Last fall, we gathered up all the leaves we could easily get our hands on, and then we laid down a thick layer over our garden beds. We raked our yard a couple times as well as helping ourselves to the leaves raked into the street by unsuspecting neighbors (see Confessions of a Leaf Thief for more details).

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