Am I Really a Gardener?

Huh.   You know, I have been planting things since I was a pre-teen.  I can remember riding my bike up Alpha Road to Albanese's Florist in the summertime and spending some of my $1.00/hour babysitting money to buy pansies to plant along the side of our sidewalk in the house I shared with my parents and two brothers.   Seeing the bright purple and yellow faces of the pansies made me smile every time I walked by them.  I think that's when the garden bug first bit me.

And then when I was a young wife and mother I had a small plot in our backyard with onions and tomatoes.   How groovy of me.  Hey, it was the early 70's.    Somewhere in my belongings is a picture of Jarrad as a 9 month old sitting upright on a blanket in front of the garden while I did some weeding.   Even in the years that I was a single mother without a permanent place to call home, I would pick up an inexpensive plant here and there.   Something about nurturing and watering a living plant has always been satisfying to me.

The last couple of homes Joel and I owned in Florida became constant experiments (much to Joel's consternation) plotting our landscape using edible foods instead of ornamentals.    After one particularly frosty winter when we lost our palm trees I replaced them with edible plants.  Our backyard was filled with blueberry bushes, a huge lichee nut tree, a fig tree and I had raised beds with all our vegetables growing in them.  

Now that we live on a for-real live farm I can plow up some dirt just about anywhere I please and plant whatever my heart desires.    The first spring we were here I went crazy and had a huge garden.....can't remember exactly how big it was now but it was somewhere in the ballpark of 52'X72'.    Yup, that's a lot of square footage to weed.   And let me tell you it was overwhelming.  

I planted 35 tomato plants, 3-22' rows of potatoes, and a wide row of corn.  There were carrots, red beets, cabbage, broccoli, leeks, onions, melons, cantaloupe, acorn squash, and pumpkins.   And don't forget the zucchini and cucumbers that overtook several rows.   But I couldn't keep up with the weeding.   And I probably only harvested 60% of what actually grew because I was so overwhelmed. So much of that first garden spoiled before I ever got around to harvesting it.   There was just too much to do that first year.

That all took place before we had our kitchen in place, so I was canning and freezing veggies with folding tables as a work surface.   Our kitchen cabinets arrived later on in October that year after the garden went dormant.   But I sure did "put up" a lot of food that summer even with the limitations we faced that year.    Then we got the alpacas and their pasture went in where the garden used to be.

So now I have the much smaller potager garden up closer to the house.    Initially I divided it into 3 equal sections.   Blueberry bushes on the left third along with an asparagus bed.   This third of the garden is pretty much on auto pilot.    The berry bushes get weeded every few weeks and I continue to amend their soil with coffee grounds that I bury around their roots.   The asparagus simply come up every spring without fail and all I have to do is cut off the luscious spears to serve up for dinner.

The middle section of the potager(pronounced po/tah/zha) is loaded with strawberries.   I kinda overplanted that section without realizing how much they would spread.   Anybody want some strawberry plants?   When I bought the skinny root bundles 3 years ago I had no idea that there were so many plants in each bundle.   And since I am not one to waste anything I planted each and every one of them.   Yup, all 110 of them.   Giggle......let me tell you, we have strawberries every spring!

The right third of the potager has all my herbs and the flowers I grow to dehydrate for teas that I drink all winter.   There is also a huge rhubarb plant and some flowers just for fun.   The far right hand side of the garden is flanked by thornless blackberry bushes that are producing a bumper crop this season.

Many of the plants in this garden are perennials....meaning they come back year after year with little or no care.    I like that.    Makes sense to me to let Mother Nature do some of the work.   For example, the asparagus come back each spring without fail, and the strawberries, blueberries and blackberries produce no matter what I do.   Even some of the herbs return to their appointed spot without any help from me, as does the rhubarb and a few volunteer flowers.

So, what's the big deal?  How hard is it to maintain this little plot?   I have one area in the "tea" garden that is becoming overrun with weeds and I have procrastinated on cleaning it up for weeks now.   You know why?   I hate the heat and humidity.   Yup, there I said it.   I don't mind the work, but I can't stand the heat.    Is it wrong of me to be dreaming of fall already?    Sigh......But seriously, what kind of gardener hates the heat???  Me!

Don't "real" gardeners love standing for hours out in the sun, baking their backs while they toil bent over the plants they have nurtured from little seedlings?   Don't "real" gardeners take pride in presenting a well manicured garden to anyone who happens to wander over to view it?  I like the part where the garden looks pristine, I'm just not so thrilled about the part where I have to do all the weeding to keep it that way.

And to think Joel and I placed 3 huge sheets of black plastic (we're killing the grass before planting this fall)  over another large area beside the potager in preparation for adding onto the garden.    I know!  How crazy is that if I don't want to weed what I already have to take care of?    But I love the plants.   I love harvesting our own food.   It thrills me to see a watermelon developing on the vine and to know that the broccoli I grew will stock our freezer.

 So I guess I'll just have to weed when I can and maybe not be such a perfectionist about the weedy part of my life.    Yup.   That sounds good to me.   Because I sure do love opening up a home canned jar of my tomatoes as I prepare our dinner on a cold winter January evening.  And the addition of three raised beds this year (like the one above) have made it a bit easier to work with the plants without having to do so much bending over....which is tough when you have a bulging disc as I do in my lower back.

I do love going out to the garden to pick our lettuce for our salad paired with our evening meal.  This year I have been experimenting with planting different lettuces every 2 weeks so we have a continuous supply of lettuce all summer long.   And we purposely placed one of the new raised beds closer to the maple tree so it gets afternoon shade which allows cool loving lettuce to thrive, even in the heat we've had lately.

Alright, maybe I am a gardener after all.   It's unthinkable for me to envision a time when I don't have dirt underneath my fingernails.    The thought of not having fresh produce every summer is almost impossible to bear.   And who could possibly resist those beautifully photographed seed catalogues?

I guess most days I can see myself as a gardener.....just please could we have some temps in the 70's again?

The Reluctant Weeder-in-Chief,
Debbie

More of What's New?

Yes, there is so much more going on here these days.  One of the first food items we harvest early each summer is strawberries.   And, oh, my!    The plants have been producing like crazy this year.   That's me way out there on the left, down on my knees, picking quarts and quarts of berries in the early morning mist.   Who could ask for a better place to work?    And how about that view from my "office window"?   Pretty awesome, if you ask me.

See what I mean?   That's a lot of strawberries.  And every 3 days there is a whole new batch of berries to pick.    This morning I ate my breakfast in the strawberry patch.....eating berries with morning dew on them, still chilled from the evening air.  I'm telling you there is nothing like eating food grown from your own land....it just tastes better.

One of the chores I dread every spring is the annual "cleaning of the back porch".   It seems that no matter what good intentions we have, all winter long the porch becomes a dumping ground for everything from dirty boots to farm implements.    By spring I am ready to put everything away in its proper place and give the porch a good scrubbing. 

Joel helped me scrub the walls, ceiling and furniture before Joyce and Dick arrived which gave us a clean place to sit and take in the views.    I love sitting out here now that the spider webs and pollen is all gone.  I even bought a third rocking chair from Cracker Barrel to add to my collection.

Joel got motivated by the scrubbing and finally replaced the old lights on both sides of the back door to the house.   Now these galvanized cuties are more in keeping with a farmhouse, don't you think?

And remember this old washtub from a couple of years ago?    It's so pretty now that it has been sandblasted and painted with powder coating.    That should help it last another 75 years or so.

The opposite end of the porch holds my old farm house table from Florida.   To give us plenty of seating I cleaned up, sanded and painted an old church pew.  It's super sturdy and I was able to keep the painting on the end of the pew of a dove holding an olive branch.

I would love to know what little country church once held this pew and others like it.   

When you come to visit us, this is where we will sit to enjoy a cool glass of iced tea while we listen to the birds in the oak trees and watch the alpaca roam their pasture.   Makes you wanna hop on a plane right now, doesn't it?

Here's the newest flower bed I finished up a few weeks ago.  It's hard to tell from this picture, but at the far end of the petunias is a barrel dug halfway into the ground.    I'll have to take another pic from the side so you can see it better.   Anyway, the crepe myrtle on the left used to have huge trunks.   But the ice storm a year ago killed all the growth on the big trunks.   Last summer the only growth that came back were little twigs.   This spring I thinned out all but 7 or 8 of the thickest twigs to start new trunks and it worked!   I am not sure if it will bloom this year or if it will need another year of recovery.

Ha!   Looks as though we've been partying it up, doesn't it?   Actually, I put out a request at my quilt guild for the gals there to save me their wine bottles.   Well, they sure came thru for me!   I haven't counted how many they gave me last Friday, but the boxes and bags of empty wine bottles filled the back of the Suburban.   And, what am I doing with all those bottles, you ask?   This is what I'm doing...

I've been digging a trench in the herb garden and "planting" the wine bottles upside down as a fun border.   I have estimated it will take 100 or more bottles to complete the circle.   So far I am 30% around the perimeter so I have quite a ways to go.  I know, I know.....like I had nothing else to do with my time this summer!

I've got wine bottles laying around everywhere in the garden.    Each day I try and spend a little time out there either picking berries or burying wine bottles.  Eventually I hope to be finished with both.   Whew!   Especially since there will be 80 women from my quilt guild coming here for a picnic on June 17th and I would like these little projects completed by then.   Huh....no pressure there.

Remember when I trimmed the blackberry bushes in the garden late this winter?   Well, they have gone crazy and blooms are popping out all over the bushes.    These are a thornless variety which makes picking the berries a treat.   Yum, I can almost taste them now.

Well, as if taking care of all the animals and the gardens and flower beds wasn't enough, now we're putting up more fence.  Yes, you read that right.  I can't believe we are doing it again.  Only this year, it's high tension fencing.    These posts are monsters and are 6" or more across and 8' tall.   Joel is determined to have perimeter fencing around our property.....could take us a while to do all that.    So, yup, we're putting up fence.   And that's what's new here on the farm.

Oh, my aching back,

Debbie

What's New?

Oh, my.    Where to begin?   Our weather has been nothing short of spectacular the past couple of weeks.   The last few mornings have begun sunny with a cool mountain breeze and temps in the low 60's.   Yup, darned near perfect if you ask me.  

The only problem with perfect weather is: what should I work on first?   I have no excuse to stay indoors and quilt as I do when it's raining.   But seriously, there's so much I could be working on that some days I simply don't know where to start.   Kinda makes a farm chick feel a little schizophrenic.  The list of "to-do's" seems to get longer instead of shorter....even though a check mark usually gets placed beside an item or two on the list by the end of the day.  

Here's a sample of what's going on right now on the farm....

 Lots and lots of lettuce, romaine lettuce and kale is growing in one of our new raised beds.   Unfortunately, the downside of having barn cats....is having cats that think any patch of dirt is their's to play in.   So, I now have very unsightly, but effective chicken wire loosely strung around the 3 new raised beds.   And, I am happy to report, because the wire is so wobbly, the cats can't climb it and the beds have been undefiled by the furry critters.

Yes, I told you we were harvesting a lot of lettuce!    But it's wonderful to go out to the garden and pick your salad for the evening meal.

 Next up is the newest flower bed I put in this Spring.   This one is in front of the tall blank side wall of the barn.  

And here are the old fashioned flowers in the same bed.   I planted perennials so they will come back year after year without having to be replanted.  I'm all about "plant efficiency".   Ha!   My hope is that eventually I will have less and less that needs to be planted every year and I can sit back(well, sort of sit back) and enjoy the fruits of these early years establishing the farm.

 I can't remember if I have showed you this project yet.    I know, what the heck?    Thank Pinterest for this one.    I am taking wine bottles and planting then upside down in a circle in the herb portion of my little potager garden.   Hence the string you see in the bottom of the pic.   That's how I am establishing the arc of the circle.   Only 80 more bottles to go!

 This project is a huge one.    I got tired of taking forever to mow around each and every fruit tree in the orchard....and getting smacked in the face with low lying branches.   Ta-da!!    Now we have nice wide mulched beds which makes it ever so easy to mow straight lines on either side of the beds.   Now mowing the orchard is a breeze for me!  And I don't get hit in the face with any branches.

 Near the orchard is my rosa rugosa bed with an edging of purple irises......all in bloom!  

 And the grapevines are going crazy, too, with little bunches of grapes already forming on each branch.

 Maybe we need to look into making wine this year?   In our spare time....ha!

 And check out these itty bitty peaches.   We're so excited because this is the first year we have peaches on our trees.

 And the granddaddy pear tree is simply loaded with fruit.

 And our two year old cherry tree is even getting into the act.  I believe there will be a lot of canning in my future.

 Next up, our sweet friends, Dick and Joyce were here last weekend for a quick visit.   Over the last year I worked on a quilt for Dick in red, white and blue.   You see, Dick is a Vietnam vet with over 10 years service to our country.   I am a member of Quilts of Valor, an organization dedicated to making quilts for service members who have been touched by war.   And this quilt was made especially for Dick.

 He had no idea he was getting a quilt when Joel brought him to our local War Museum.   Several of the members of Quilts of Valor were waiting for Joel and Dick to arrive on a rainy Saturday morning.    We surprised him and explained why we were all there.   My dear friend, Barb, did the presenting and we all honored Dick for his service.

 Here's a full shot of the quilt.   The stars in the four corners are from the flag making company in our nation's capitol that manufactures the flags for around Washington, D.C.   Quilts of Valor is the happy recipient of these embroidered originals and we are allowed to place them on our quilts for the vets.

Our strawberry patch is in overdrive these days and I was more than happy to give Joyce all the berries she wanted.    We picked these beauties in just half an hour.    Yikes!    You wouldn't believe how many more are out there waiting to be picked.

Look at these two buddies yukking it up.   Joel and Dick always have so much to chat about when they get together.

And then, sadly, it's time to say goodbye until next time.   So, working in the garden, putting in flower beds, and having company.....yes, that's what I've been up to this last month.  

But wait!   There's more....
Deb

A Schizophrenic Spring

Yes, I do believe it's official that spring is finally here.  I mean, winter was officially declared "done" last weekend.   And we have had temps in the 70's....but they were followed by a few mornings of frost.   Yikes!  And then we had 45+mph winds the other night accompanied by rain.   And now today it's gorgeous out again.....the sun is shining, the winds have finally died down.   But it's 45 degrees!   Oh, well.   That's spring for 'ya.

 Our granddaddy pear tree is happily blooming away.    I just hope the frost warnings we have for tomorrow morning don't drop all the blooms or we won't have any pears this year.   But the tree sure looks pretty against all the bare tree limbs of our hardwood trees.

 Our bees have come alive once again and are actively buzzing around the blossoms on the pear tree.    Joel is especially grateful that the bees survived their first winter here on the farm.   Hopefully we will be getting our first harvest from them late this summer.

 This is the tangled mess of grape vines that need pruning late every winter.    I really enjoy getting outside working on the trees and bushes, preparing them for buds that will hopefully bring us a good harvest later on this summer.

 See, all cleaned up!    Now the buds can develop on the second years' branches, producing at least 2 bunches of grapes on each branch.

 Buds like these.......they are so ready to "pop" out.

And here's my trusty green trailer that I use to haul all the cut off portions of the branches from the grape vines and blackberry bushes.   The burn pile always seems to have an ever growing assortment of branches and twigs from somewhere on the farm. 

All of the other trees in the orchard are blooming as well as the pear tree.   Even though we lost quite a few fruit trees last winter due to the ice storm of the century, the trees that remain seem to be doing pretty well.    This is our sour cherry tree.   The crabapple, peach and other varieties of apple trees are all in bloom, too.  I have to tell you, it's a welcome sight to see pretty flowers again on the farm.

One area of the farm I've been working on lately is the wooded area next to the roadside of our land.   It just seemed to cry out to me to be "pretty".   Um, yea, Joel just rolls his eyes when I talk about it.   But seriously, in my mind's eye I picture a smattering of early blooming flowers dotting the slope under the trees going up the hill.

I have finally depleted the stack of stone that was delivered almost 2 years ago.   By creating a low lying wall, I've eliminated an eyesore area of the farm where grass wouldn't grow and weeds took over.   Not very pretty.    Now, we can mow up to the wall and I get to play with some flowers in a bed where we can enjoy the view every time we drive up to and leave the farm.   

Our first fall living here, I planted a few daffodil bulbs so they would start to multiply year by year.   Last summer I planted some more perennials, plants that come back all by themselves each growing season.    Pink astilbe was planted in a mass planting, reminding me of the frothy pink astilbe that my grandmother used to grow along her house's foundation.   

Today I plan on thinning out the hostas that have been in a flower bed at the front of the farmhouse for over 25 years.    There are so many of them that I could start a nursery of hostas!  Hostas love shade and will also come back each year without any coaxing, so they are perfect for the woodland planting as it is way too far from the house to get water out there.   Anything I plant in this bed has to make it on it's own!    No fussy plants that require constant care or watering.  Nope.  It's survival of the fittest.    I still need to get out there and clear out about 15 feet of the woods behind the flower bed so I can bring in understory trees like redbud.   Yeah, there's always another project in the works.

Speaking of projects in the works......this bare wall of the barn that faces the back of the farmhouse has been crying out to me for 2 years.    Last year I planted 2 pussy willow bushes as foundation plants.    A couple of weeks ago I brought the stones from the never-ending-pile-of-stones to make a low wall and create a bed for greater impact.    

Then it was time to make a little vignette.   Oh, come on, you knew that was coming now, right?   Out came the old red chair with the blown out cane seat, perfect for plopping a round planter into it's middle.   The birdie sculpture was next....rocking and spinning with every breeze.   Then, I brought out the old washtub.    For now it only has creeping Jenny dripping over the sides.   Um, yea, I had to lay some chicken wire over the tub until it is full of flowers (after the frosts are done).  Otherwise, the cats think it's a great place to use for a bathroom.   I never had to contend with that before......this barn cat thing is a whole new experience when it comes to gardening.    Those furry suckers go everywhere!   Anyway, as summer advances this side of the barn will become a riot of blooming flowers.    Stay tuned.

So what is this monster, you ask?    Ha!    It's Joel's newest toy....er, um, machine.   It's an Agri-Fab.   And it's basically a leaf sucker-upper-mulcher machine.    It tows behind my mower and has it's own motor to run the mulcher blade inside it.   This thing is fabulous!   We have needed one ever since we moved here, but the cost of one prevented us from taking the plunge.   Until last week.   

Joel found one for sale second hand......in perfect condition.    Woo-hoo!    Now the piles of leaves we accumulate from the thousands of trees on our land will become mulch for our compost piles.    Just mix the ground up leaves into the piles of poop from the alpaca, wait, turn occasionally with the tractor, and in a few months we'll have fabulous compost for our gardens.   Win-win.

And so, today I plan on working outside since it's sunny out once again, even if it is a bit chilly.    But I'll have to cover all the plants by days end because we are supposed to have frost tomorrow morning.  Seriously?    Enough already with the freezing temps.   OH, and we will also need to disconnect the hoses for the alpaca waterers.    Um, yea, not gonna make that mistake again!   And that, folks, is how we deal with a schizophrenic spring.    

Dreaming of flowers,

Debbie