Mulch it good

When I first got into veggie gardening we talked about buying a tiller and working the land that way. Since permie school/hippie camp, I've come to know, love, and totally rely on building mulch beds. Remember how I do it? Start by suppressing grass and weed growth with cardboard.

Pile on layers of mulch in a variety of forms. We have a hill of decaying shredded woody material so I use that, grass clippings, leaves, chicken litter....whatever is free and handy.

Water well, add soil/finished compost in pockets throughout the deep mulch and plant directly into the soil.The next season that whole mound you made will be beautiful, dark, rich compost, full of worms and ready for growing.

Keyhole Bed: A recap

April 2011

May 2011

June 2011

2012

Then in 2013 I didn't do much gardening...

I was pregnant with Fox. I did

get some onions in the ground in the fall.

Late 2012 the plum tree had bad blight so we chopped it down.

Sometime in early 2014 I put bricks we had on hand

for another project around the bed. This is April 2014.

Here it is now, taken over mostly with perennials, a few annual veggies

tucked here and there, and some flower seeds yet to sprout.

The Pond, a recap

2008 - the plan in place

2008, just after we finished building the pond

2009 - 8 months later

2010 - 2 years later

2014 - 6 years later

Using the Harvest

This past Saturday, these greens (a combination of sorrel, sweet potato leaves, and Malabar spinach), with the addition of some frozen chopped spinach, became a spinach and cheese pie.

Did you know you can eat sweet potato leaves? They're a great spinach substitute. I collect the young leaves that still have a bit of shininess to them. When I'm using them in a recipe like this pie I quickly blanch them prior to making the pie filling. 

The crust is a basic Pâte Brisée but I skipped the sugar because I don't like the slightest hint of sweetness with a savory filling.  The filling is very similar to this one, but I added some mozzarella since I had it on hand. 

Pretty powders

Of the gardening (spin-off) activities I can do with Mabel is get her to help me grind dried goods up in the small coffee grinder. To keep her entertained, she needs to see what's happening and to know she's not just doing busy work. Powdering things up is an activity with immediate results, and she gets to do most of the actual work. So far we've done this twice: first pulverizing tomato peels into a seasoning something like tomato-bent paprika, the second was to turn homegrown (and dried) stevia into a powder. All-in-all it's a time consuming tasks and requires an extra bit of patience with the toddler since the powder ends up everywhere, but our time together making things and the pride on M's face when we're done make it that much better. Plus, look how pretty they are together!

Monday Musings

A plaque I commissioned from Melissa Bridgman. As soon as the porch is finished it will find its permanent home. In the meantime, I love seeing it in our kitchen window.

Long Tom paste tomatoes (pencil for scale): Delicious, giant, and virtually seedless. I'm in love with these tomatoes, the plants are dripping with tomatoes. The harvest (below) is one day's harvest from 3 plants. I have to pick them just slightly earlier than ripe or the rabbits will taste every single one.

Preservation Proclamation

Friday evening I made a big pot of sorrel and potato soup from MizTrail's Easy Growing. It was excellent! Part of the issue with growing non-traditional honky foods is that I have to figure out a way to cook them and use them. Especially when they start coming in by the truck load. Note to self: having 3 sorrel plants for a family of 3 is more than plenty. Thanks in part to the potatoes, the soup was filling enough that it provided dinner for 2 (Mabel wasn't feeling experimental that night), Saturday's lunch for me, and a big enough batch for the freezer that we'll have dinner another night.

I spent a couple hours in the community garden on Saturday morning, first teaching a class (of 2!), then attacking the weeds* that had taken over. Currently the garden consists of 20 mounded rows, each 8' wide and 25' long. We've consistently had 3 people there working on Saturdays and 2 stalwarts who make it out a couple times during the week. Suffice to say, the uprooting of weeds has been much slower than the growth of new ones.


I brought some clear plastic to the garden to begin solarizing a couple of the beds. In return, I came home with a plastic grocery bag full of lamb's quarters, a giant cilantro plant that went to seed, and a bin of red wrigglers. Later in the afternoon I gave my own herb garden some TLC by giving one of the rosemary bushes a trim, uprooting and drying catnip (for our own use as tea), and dividing a few of my plants-gone -wild in preparation of unloading (errr...) giving them away.

This is actually a different batch of pesto than the cilantro pesto I made, 

but what can I say, it's Monday and I'm lazy.

To recap: we're now well stocked on rosemary infused oil, rosemary balsamic vinegar, cilantro oil, cilantro pesto, and coriander. I'm still deciding what to do with the lamb's quarters, we have a ton of lettuce to go through before I get to them.

All of this jabber is to get to the point of what my Mother's Day consisted of: preserving. Whether keeping herbs in oil, vinegar, or finding a way to freeze them, I've already got a nice stockpile and the summer growing season hasn't really started!

*Most of these weeds are edible, but we want more mainstream crops producing food for Friendship Trays.

Running the natural course

Plants are waking up, stretching their leaves and saying hello.  Those tuckered out from a long fall and winter of growing are setting seed, ensuring their place in the gardens next year.

Most projects only get a few minutes of attention here and there. Just like building soil, everything requires time, so time gets split between chores. Painting the playhouse would be a prime example. The tee pee won't be finished until the peas grow and climb. 

{Click on the images to see them larger}

Sunday Projects

When we've got projects we try to find a way to engage the kiddo. She's eager to learn and do what we do, so with a little guidance (and sometimes extra personal reminders to have patience) we give her tasks and she gets involved. Sunday morning she helped make pancakes, then later in the afternoon she helped us inoculate several oak logs with shiitake mushroom spawn.

How many 2 year-olds do you know that can already pad their resume with construction experience, chef's assistant, and mushroom grower?

A stark reminder

This (though this view is from a different angle) was the view from our kitchen window on Saturday.   We need some work done on the house foundation, which meant a little bit of cutting, and pruning was needed.
Instead of just clearing out just what was needed, we also cleared out the volunteer privet, a source of tension between us and the neighbor. We've had an ongoing battle of the wits with our neighbor about the area, the trees and the "messy" hedge. They prefer topped trees and open lawn, we prefer figs to eat and oxygen to breathe.

By 2 PM Sunday, the street was lined with privet and fig debris. The pine branches are from a 3-day, 3 40 year old tree-toppling spree performed by professionals. I won't go into why those trees came down, except to say they were too tall for a certain person's taste.

The view from the kitchen window now looks out into Blandsville, a stark reminder of our suburban lifestyle.

Are you noting the tinge of sadness (and depth of bitterness) as I write this? It's kind of a shock to me, the difference. I take comfort in the privacy the trees offered and the bareness of the space has left me feeling quite bare. Soon enough we'll fill the space with more appropriate plants, but in the meantime it feels quite like an open wound.

Murky mucky mud

We hadn't cleaned the pond in 3+ years, since before Mabel. Yesterday it was time. It was actually way past time, but so it goes with little ones--time speeds up and to-do lists quadruple.

Last summer the fish population peaked at 15, now we're back down to 2. Predators get them and a few times I've found a dead one floating. The floaters get buried with a little ceremony akin to Garden State.

A couple hours of later, the plants around the pond are mulched with nitrogen rich muck and the pond was refilled with rain barrel water. We've tried barley powder to keep the algae down, but I'm not great at remembering to add it weekly.  I know we need more shade to keep the bloom down, but I'm also thinking of trying bokashi ceramics like these folks did. Do you have a pond? How do you keep it biologically balanced?

New Plots and Plants

Remember when I was braggin' on my bro's amazing gardening project? I don't know if it's the early emergence of spring that got him going, or the profusion of food-based documentaries available for instant streaming, but his front yard is quickly becoming a beautiful little farm.   Todd's been sitting down after work each night disassembling pallets to re-use as raised beds. The details give them a beautiful sort of craftsman style. These beds are his newest garden addition and equal about 1/2 of their total vegetable production space. The middle rear square bed has been planted with potatoes.

{In full disclosure, I stole this pic from his facebook account; I've been meaning to take some pictures. I was afraid if I waited til that happened I'd never get to share his handiwork, and I'm so impressed with what he's done.}

As far as my handiwork? I've been great at buying plants, but that's about it for pretty stuff. I've started 2 new compost bins and cleaned up a few areas that were knee deep in leaves so we can hang swings and make play areas for the little one. The changes, so far, are very unexciting visually.

I have gotten a few new food plants as you can see above, including kiwi, pomegranate and mushrooms. I've also gotten my first kiss of sun on my nose, ant bites on my arms and neck, and a few ouchy little blisters. Although I'm reluctant to say, it seems spring is really here. 

{The images are from the links included below. Angel Red pomegranate (though I got mine locally), Anna and Meader hardy kiwi vines from Willis Orchards; reishi, shiitake and wine cap mushrooms from Field and Forest.}

Pretty Green

The Mr. knows the way to my heart better than any other--for mother's day he gave me a greenhouse, and for our 6th anniversary he gave me shelves for the greenhouse!

The greenhouse is much prettier when surrounded by green trees.

We took a romantic anniversary trip to Ikea for 4 Molger benches. I thought they'd work stacked 2 high and be an absolutely beautiful substitute for the more widely available metal storage shelves. In my mind 4 benches, 2 sets of 2 stacked high, would be ample work space for the greenhouse, but when I saw them in person the benches were smaller than I'd imagined. It would take 8 to fill the space rather than 4. Instead I decided Gorm would be a much better solution and that's what Sugar Daddy bought me.

Ikea had a 30" tall unit on display, but when we got to the aisle to load them up they were sold out of that size. In it's place we bought the 68" tall unit and Charlie cut the legs in half and it actually turned out to be a better working height.

After a few seasons, some design adjustments were made, including the addition of

actual greenhouse poly-tape and poly to wood tape.

The shelves need an oil finish to get them ready to stand up to the humidity of a greenhouse, but I'm ready to do a little bit of rubbing on them.  Mr Sugar Daddy also bought me a metal pail with lid so I can put my dirt in it and keep the greenhouse all matchy matchy pretty and Martha'd out. I'm thinking some baking sheets with low lips will polish up the look even more, but maybe enameled ones so they don't scorch  the tender seedling roots. 

I've got my soil blocker ready, will pick up a few bags of seed starting medium (peat free, please) and will have my act together just in time to start my summer loving plants.

The $3 (plus the odd scrap or two of building materials) trellis

My oldest brother, Todd, has the gardening itch this year (actually it might be garden pox judging by his scratching) and is converting his front yard to a small farm. I promise to get more pictures of his projects, but first wanted to show off his $3 (plus some bits of building materials he had lying around) trellis.

The basics? taking a 2 x 4 and using a table saw to cut it down into lattice strips, while leaving about 6 - 12 inches at the base uncut. Cut some scrap wood  to create 2 spreaders to fan the boards apart. Todd used screws with scrap pex pipe (cut to about 1-inch lengths) instead of spacers to attach the trellis with wall anchors into the brick facade of his house, but any sort of strong, rigid pipe-like material would work.

We're moving our hops to a sunnier location this year, and a couple of these trellises will help 'em reach for the sky.

Are you planning a garden this year?  Check out this great post that spells it out for the beginner gardener.

Reading Material

Apparently when I decide to learn about something I take it on through full immersion.  I started out  asking for book recommendations about medicinal herbs and bought 2: Homegrown Herbs and The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook. Then I found out about a sale in the brand new Farthing Collective store and bought 2 Raleigh Briggs titles (Make Your Place and Herbal First Aid). All the while I'd forgotten I'd pre-ordered Easy Growing. Fortunately each of these books fills in where others leave gaps. And for anyone wondering? Rodale's Encyclopedia, while the thickest book in my herbal library and brimming with information, is the last one I pick up when looking for information.

Since I'm finally starting to keep an actual garden journal (outside this here blog), I've also found it handy to rip out pages of seed catalogs, since those descriptions are what enticed me to try out those particular plants.

Maybe this will be the year I remember exactly why I was so excited about starting anise hyssop, shiso and knit bone.

What have you got sprouting in your garden plans?

Seed Bug

The bug bit and I'm ready to start planting. I bought a couple pounds of Kennebec potatoes (not from Johnny's, from a local source) to put in the ground and I've placed a seed order from Sow True seed. We had several weeks of spring like weather to tease us all into wintry restlessness, and with the return of cold now I have to sit back and wait.

Each year I go back to the Lazy Gardener's Seed Starting Chart on You Grow Girl, though some of the seeds I've ordered that aren't on the list. To fill in the blanks on the missing data, Weekend Gardener is a great resource!

Obsessiveness is borne of restlessness, and if you don't believe me you can check out my Google Doc worksheet. There are some math errors on there, I'm sure, and some dates that are off, but the good thing about planning well in advance is that I have wiggle room!

Food Forest Example

A while back I posted a worksheet to plan a food forest garden. I've used it a couple times, but thought I'd share this one since it's time to start thinking about spring gardening.

This particular food forest/guild will be planted in a Charlotte, NC community garden and will be about 20-feet in diameter. The plum tree will be the center, the outer circumference will be planted with daffodils, garlic, chives, and crocus and act as a deterrent to deer and squirrels.*** The other layers of plants that will benefit the tree and each other mutually, including gathering nutrients and attracting/deterring insects.  The idea is to have a garden that provides it's own nutrition, mulch and soil building, while providing an assortment of food to those that tend the area. It's a commonly used permaculture technique to provide larger yields and require less work; just the way I like it.

Filled with herbs and fruit, this could be quite a tasty garden!

***Though I don't think there's actually true squirrel or deer deterrent!

Early spring flowers are already peeking up through the soil. I read an old bit of farm lore yesterday: When you see daffodils starting to bloom, it's time to sow your peas. I'm still wary of the 2 months of frost we have, but maybe I'll try it out.
{And yes, I'm aware there isn't a daffodil to be seen in this drawing, but I thought it was spring-y.}

Follow Up Politics

Good news! The NWF and Scotts have called it splitsville, which is especially good because all the facebook and twitter urging/activism I was doing was making me feel a bit obsessive. I was just *so* disappointed in them. 

The thing is, though, Scotts MiracleGro will continue to try "owning" the profitable realm of organics. While their corporate friend Monsanto will continue to "buy" rights to plants.

Even if you aren't wary of GMOs, we risk losing the resulting joy of simply pushing a seed into the ground to watch it flourish.


Farmers should be able to sue Monsanto, not just vice versa.
Monsanto is more than represented in the FDA. And another, similar petition here.

down wind of chemical stench

My lengthy dislike for Scotts MiracleGro products started when I was just getting interested in gardening. Scotts was suing TerraCycle for using green and yellow on their packaging, though I never really believed that was all it was about. Perhaps a small start up company with a great idea for reused packaging and simple organic ingredients was putting a hurting on a major corporation's profits. Whatever it was, Scotts image seemed like the popular football star stuffing a nerdy kid in a locker.

Companies like Scotts promote chemical use in the garden, persistent chemicals that perpetuate reliance for gigantic yields and "weed-free" gardens. They promote the idea that a singular plant (grass) is the only acceptable basis of a beautiful, lush yard. A single variety plant space, such as a weed free lawn, is known as a monocrop, and a monocrop's lack of diversity can create all sorts of issues that need other synthetic products to resolve.

I won't get into the many uses of weeds...well maybe for just a second--some of those weeds might replace your prescription medicine, others could be pulled up and used to make an organic plant food, yet others simply feed the wildlife in your yard. Perhaps if the critters had natural forage they wouldn't go after your tomatoes and you wouldn't need that Scotts brand pesticide after all.

The more I learn about gardening, the more I learn that popular kid in the green and gold uniform had a few unsavory secrets. Enter stage left: Monsanto, wealthy, smooth-talking hip best friend to Scotts. Monsanto's own GMO-tainted politics does nothing to endear me to Scotts. 


To put my feelings into perspective, let's talk about something most people have some level of concern about: the honeybees. We've all heard about the rapid decline of bee populations and what will happen if they keep mysteriously dying. Bees an accessible environmental issue: less bees, less pollination, less productive crops, less food, higher food prices, food shortages...you get the idea. Scotts sells all sorts of weed killer monocrop the hell out of your yard. Make it all grass, get rid of that nasty clover...that nasty clover that bees find so useful as a source of food. Yeah, food, that little thing that keeps us all alive. Of course, Scotts' BFF Monsanto, the company that sues farmers whose crops have accidentally cross-pollinated with Monsanto GMO crops. The GMO crops that may or may not contribute to the decline of bee populations, certainly contributing to the loss of monarch butterfly populations (another handy insect that pollinates plants).

And then the National Wildlife Federation announced its partnership with Scotts. Frankly I took the news personally. I felt like an old friend went and made out with the dude that used to tease me every day about being flat-chested. Betrayal.


How do you feel about the partnership? Care, don't care, wish I'd saved my breath for some pretty furniture and lovely pictures?

* * *


You Grow Girl and Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens discuss the new partnership on their blogs.