Beyond the Garden Bed

I spent the morning in the garden watching a mother even busier than I:

Over the last month or so, we watched mama and papa bushtit make trip after trip, bringing dried vegetation and fluff and crafting it into the fuzzy, pendulous sock of a nest that grips the bamboo.

Then a few days ago the sock started hopping and squeaking, and now when mama peeps her approach the little ones tweet-tweet their tiny hearts out. Given the size of the nest---less than a foot from top to bottom and just a few inches across---they can’t be much bigger than walnuts, but they’re apparently quite hungry.

I’m out here doing the same thing: working to feed my family. It can be daunting to think about. How much food can we really coax out of this yard? Hopefully a lot, especially as we’ve just amended and planted the back of the yard in the space around the fruit trees.

This soil was so hard that I firmly remember a clang the first time I stuck a shovel in it, solid clay with poor drainage. Before the winter’s rains this year, we made a lasagna of cardboard, horse manure, and straw. This is what it looked like in February, just before the straw:

Then in the spring we turned it---hard, time-consuming work---added some of the great free topsoil we picked up, and topped it off with just two bags of fertilizer and a bit of blood meal.

This is the space for Big Plants: corn and squash (and beans to round out the Three Sisters), and I’m hoping they’ll run all over the yard. When the chicken coop is ready it’s going to be a tight fit back here. I can’t wait.

And with the hose attached to the rain totes back here, watering is a breeze.

It's evening now, and that mama bird is still at it. Though I’m a busy mama, too, working in the garden gives me the chance to observe those moments in nature that I’d miss if I were rushing through, and learning the rhythms of my yard’s other inhabitants reminds me that I’m just one part of a larger system.

Sharing that with my boys is a gift, one they appreciate in their own way. When I pointed out that the baby birds cheep and bounce when mama approaches, my oldest tracked her arrival with his make-believe rifle: “Blam! Got her.” Sigh. They’re still growing, too.