salad! salad!

This is why.  This is why I garden:

Oh!  There's nothing like it.

jd grew it (drafts)

This: from 5/31/11

So many rhubarb crisps.  Zelda is crazy for them.  Also Jeff.  Also me, because they let me have the best part of baking (transformation) without the worst part of baking (careful measurement).  A smitten one, and one I like better with pecans and oats.  I am officially setting down all my prejudices against EarthBalance, because it works wonders here.  

Also, of course, I made some strawberry-rhubarb jam, which burned and stuck like crazy and is silly sweet (although still totally saved by the zingy rhubarb).  Zelda will accept it stirred into vanilla coconut bliss if no crisp is available.  I have never seen her so hip to the meaning of does-uurt.  We gave JD a jar and got the empty half-pint back the same day.  So I'm feeling ok about making yet another crisp - and delivering another jar.

return of the yard salad

God bless the yard salad.  I am whole again.

Flowers

You think it never will, and then it does.  And when it does, it makes you forget you ever doubted.  Oh, the hope held in these plants through the long winter, waiting for the right time!

ooof, or, get over it already

I wrote a complainy post about being bad at posting, and this is just not going to help me if I don't get better at it, etc.  What you put in, you get out, etc.  And the internet threw it to the wind, like so many dandelion seeds.

So, no more complaining.  It is spring, after all.

Here is what is working right now:

Being patient with the weather and growing cool season crops while it is cool.

Not having the basement full of scrawny pepper plants.

Planting starts out into the hoop house.

Keeping the big picture in mind.

Vigilance with the slugs.

I think I'm going to harvest the first yard salad of the season tonight!

Crap.  Lots of stuff has happened; or, not so much has happened, depending on your perspective.

The slugs were winning.  Then I went to Dusty's and had a deep moment in which I realized that I have been acting like dealing with the slugs is a burden, not part of gardening, and I shouldn't have to do it; then subsequently realized that dealing with the slugs is part of gardening, a part of the day-to-day maintenance that is such good medicine, and teaches us that our lives are made of the things we do regularly, and not the big occasional gestures.  And then I began to win.

Zelda and I planted peas all along the whole third bed and contrary to all my best hopes and resolutions, I did not note which kind went where, and I did not note one what day they planted.  Maybe one day I will have a deep moment about keeping garden records, and then this blog will stop being such a drag to write, and start really helping me.  I do keep taking pictures, though.

Along with the peas in #3 we put negretta favas and some radishes.

In the middle row under cover we planted wild arugula (which I bought even though I still have a ton of the other arugula seeds which I don't like as much and must find another use for), mustardy things, radishes, lettuce mix, and I don't know what else.
We have been harvesting kale like mad but now it is bolted and about over.

This winter is dragging all over this spring.  Please spring, come.

The ants are already on the cherry and I am on them with my tanglefoot.  But not so on them that I strangle the trees.  Ooops.

The favas in the North beds look great.  I am curious to see what they will make.

I keep buying random plants at the farmer's market for my fantasy permaculture perimeter.  I need to get a plan and a budget, fast.

I have some big questions about mulch.  Both artichokes look to be toast.  The asparagus was coming up white in all its nasty, mushy mulch. Delicacy, I know, but with rotty tips?  Jeff emptied the worm bin back when we had to decommission it, and put all the good stuff all around the fruit trees and then mulched them.  It was the middle of winter.  My feeling is that that was a heavy thing to do when things are breaking down so slowly, but what do I know?  maybe the artichokes were never going to come back...  If anyone read this blog, I would say: what's up with mulching?

Anyway, sign-off and publish, before another month goes by.

spring slug report 2010

Last Tuesday, March 8th, I put a few things into the ground.

It was an exciting time when I saw these starts at the Hillsdale farmers' market.  I was like some people are about dogs, or human babies.  More excited than is maybe appropriate.

I gently yanked them apart as I was instructed (even though I have never done such a thing before) and they looked nice.  Purple peacock (kale+sprouting broccoli), mixed lettuces, beets in the middle bed with the cover over; peas in #1, fennel around the trees in the back, for beneficial bugs.  All of them were sturdy little guys, not root-bound but well developed

Meanwhile, Gay Riley did her thing taming our white-trash tendencies in the driveway. 

 Suffice to say, it is not necessary for me to photograph the bare dirt where these lovely little plants once were.