Promises, Promises

Although I feel as though I've simply fallen down on the garden this year, several bright spots rewarded close inspection this morning:

Whirled peas, for instance. The stocky, tendril-y plants are holding each other up nicely. Soon we'll be shelling these lovelies.


In just a few weeks it will be tomato sauce time! I can hardly believe that the plants are already thinking of fruiting, but a few warm afternoons have apparently done the trick!


We hope to get at least a few good apples this year. The Anna is setting at least two dozen small fruit, although I saw some wooly aphids on damaged places on the stems. My so far successful management technique for them has been a quick shot with aerosol cooking oil spray. Smothers them and with a small tree, it's easy to get every colony of them. Doesn't damage the tree at all, either, nor is it poisonous. Win-win.


A hard pruning didn't discourage the grape vine. I'm hoping that regular watering and compost amendment will yield at least a few large clusters.


Dutiful attention to the new strawberry beds has meant stoop work as I carefully pluck off all of April's flower buds. I want the plants to push all of their energy into establishing themselves and putting out healthy root systems. Last year's strawberries, though, well, we're letting them go crazy. At least a few early berries might be worth it.


The poor espaliered apple trees are still suffering the effects of last year's blight attack. Only a few beautiful blooms with promises of fruit:


Juicy new growth on the Meyer Lemon has proved irresistible to the green aphids. Oddly, these are a very different aphid from the gray winter aphids blanketing the sickly kale out back.


Yesterday's hard water spray didn't do much to discourage them, and today was pruning day anyhow, so I cut some of the new growth off. Soapy spray seemed like the only possible response besides pruning, but a close look showed that the calvary has arrived! Fingers crossed that this is only the first of many many hungry lady beetles and their larvae.


And I hope that these are lady bug eggs. They're pinker than I expected, but maybe they're near hatching. Any amateur entomologists out there want to hazard a guess?

April Already?

Well, let's see. Rainstorms? Check. Heat wave? Check. Bee swarm calls (none of which I've gotten as I'm waiting to refurb the chicken run before having resident bees again)? Check. Frisbee season heated up? Check!

Okay, then, it is April.

And downstairs, there are flats of kale I pricked out from their first flats, in order to give them a little more room to grow before getting transplanted. Lacinato:



Red Russian:


Various lettuce mixes -- not yet thinned. They might just not get much coddling, since they should have been 6" high and out in the garden a month ago, you know? I'm just feeling cranky.


Out in the garden, the nursery-bought basil has been chomped on by wee caterpillars, I assume by the damage. Too bad for it. It was hot, now it's cool, the basil is completely bummed anyhow. No easy pesto for me, apparently. And basil-from-seed remains for some reason a pipe dream. When I lived in warmer areas yes, but not here, land of sea breezes.


Pretend that your head is tilted. These are afilia-type peas (thank you, Mr. H for the recommendation). They are relatively happy, but alas, so are the grassy weeds in the bed. That's what happens when one year you plant sweet peas thick, so thick that you can't weed, and therefore the weeds are happy, so happy that they all set seed. Thus the gardener gets to weed well into the future.

The storebought bell peppers (orange and red only) are cheerfully peppering on. I don't know ow many of the old peppers are really going to resprout, but I haven't started any more Padrones, in anticipation of having the old ones bounce back. Perhaps I'm not being smart, but who knows yet?


Tristar strawberries are finally becoming happy in their recently-tilled clover bed:


But it's nothing like the Seascape strawberries, which are throwing a party (again, with the head tilt):


Looking down on a Roma tomato. Instead of the fence system, this year I am trying two stakes each, and pruning suckers out:


This is what the tomato sees:

Mikey romped through the asparagus, and now it has a "fence." I use the word loosely because it's really just a dog-discourager:


The hoops kept the birds away from the transplanted lettuce -- and really, that's nowhere near enough spinach. Argh.


All is not well out in GardenLand, alas. A chicken is eating eggs. Must figure out how to stop that bird. Drat it all.

One experiment which seems to be working okay is the sump pump irrigation system. If I only water a portion of the garden at a time, it moves enough water from the rain totes to keep the garden alive. It's not perfect, and it takes a startling amount of water. One tote is dry already, and unless it rains soon, the others will soon follow. We're back to draining bath tubs.


So in general, enough to keep me moving forward, garden-wise, and there's still lots of room out there.

Maybe this is why it makes me happy

Even when I was ten, gardening made me really happy. I may not have known why then, but maybe it was more than just a quirk of personality. Maybe it's science. That's right -- the only antidepressant that's hard to clean out from under your fingernails.

Instant garden

I broke today -- after a morning coffee with the eldest child, I headed for the local nursery to pick up an early birthday present for me. Seedlings! I got two six packs of leeks (with 2-8 leeks per pot), two six packs of lettuce mixes, two six packs of asparagus, and a single potted artichoke. The front yard artichoke was split but the transplanted half thrived and the original half dwindled to almost nothing, so I figured a jump start was in order.

I've been so behind with the seedlings downstairs that I wonder if I'll ever see seed-started lettuce! It's just been a bad winter, garden-wise.

So the jump start seemed to be all I needed. In a break in the rain, I raked smooth the bed infested with potato scab, and put in, with many incantations to the spring goddesses, a dozen feathery asparagus babies.


It strikes me that planting asparagus is a really optimistic gardening move. It says that you're going to be around for at least the next few years, just to coax the plants along. Since these were seedlings, not large crowns, it may be up to four years before I get to eat anything. Oh well, it keeps me busy!

The leeks filled a small bed and half a large bed. Before the lettuce could be sited, the rain opened up again and I headed inside. There a flat waited, so I seeded two kinds of kale and about eight different kinds of lettuce. My version of succession planting -- nursery seedlings AND home-seeded ones! Whatever gets you eating, I suppose.

In distressing news, the garden kale is going to seed, and I didn't succession seed well enough to have more at the right point. So I may end up (gasp) buying kale to eat. Now I wish I'd frozen some!

The Garden Goes On

Without a lot of work on my part, but with a lot of help from child and friends, the garden might actually amount to something this year. Of course, my recordkeeping has already gone to pot. I've harvested and cheerfully eaten pounds of kale (and perhaps ounces of aphids) without writing a single amount down. We're still listing eggs, pretty much, on the calendar, but that's about it.

Oh, and the garden plan/drawing thing. I'm sketching things in there as they go in. At least I have some record. Mostly what I want is food -- much much more food. Kale is great, but we eat a lot more than kale usually.

And finally, finally, and with the help of the current Junior Farmer, some crops under lights. Tomatoes, a pepper or two (because not all of the overwintered ones are going to make it), some more kale (yay, kale!), and many flowers because families do not thrive on food alone. Well, okay, some of the flowers are things like breadseed poppies, because baked goods are pretty wonderful, but many are just pretty. For instance, we like zinnias a lot.

And both of my hives, it ended up, dwindled until the lives of the queens were at stake. Disease? I don't think so. Pests? Maybe. I think it was probably a combination of bad keeping and harsh weather -- but both queens were rehomed in more congenial hives and then a friend came over and dropped an entire hive on the fancy stand in my yard.

And fifty strawberries, it turns out, is a lot. Fortunately they all went into the ground ahead of torrential rains. I hope they like it. The winter-planted garlic is growing well, thank goodness. I wish I'd planted more, of course. . . And the peas, the peas that were protected by bird netting, they're still doing really well. So even though there's a ton more work to do, I don't feel anymore as though I'm lying when I tell people I have a large garden. It's just that not all of it (rather than none) is in production right this minute. At least there's hope now.

Can't knit? Spin!

Knitting seems a bit stall-ish here. The mittens are slogging along, and I'm surprised every time I pick them up how little I'm enjoying them. I think part of it might be the steel needles -- they're slippery, and so I spend some energy just keeping the alpaca on them -- and part of it is that I'm contemplating learning the two-at-a-time-on-two-circs methods, so the stop/start of dpns is a bit of a drag. And some of it is that I knit woefully slowly when I remember to knit.

Then there's that sweater. A sweater I would actually happily wear most mornings in this house. It's a bit chilly. Got to the bottom, did the second round of color work, ribbed, bound off. . . tried it on.

And. That second round of color work doesn't do much for my shape or my mental image of myself in the sweater. Out it came. Now I'm back to round and round and round we go with stockinette. In brown. On metal tips. Feels perhaps slower than it really is, and I hesitate to believe that it's going to look any better on me. Sigh.

Tonight, I spun instead. Fun, fast, almost instant gratification (or else it feels that way; it's clearly not) and I finally finished the first half of the lovely Grafton Fibers orange:


Such a small-looking bobbin in front of a blanket of top. I'll cross the ply/single bridge in the months to come, since it will probably take that long for me to finish. I do know a couple of babies who deserve hats, though. . . Do the moms want hand-wash only hats? I do not know.

I also don't know what goes through my children's heads. As I noted, the house is, indeed, chilly. And homeschooling gives one some flexibility in education that isn't available in other settings, but still. . .

Happy Birthday

Yesterday somebody turned 16 at my house.

She's a treasure -- always something interesting to say, funny, sharp as a tack, and doing that lovely "growing up in front of you" thing so I get to enjoy it. Considerate, no?

Right now she's asleep nearby. I know there aren't many more years I'll be able to say that, so I'm enjoying it (even though I kind of wish I, too, was asleep). And tomorrow I'll watch her run and leap on the Frisbee field and think of how fortunate we all are to have her in our lives.