So — the greenhouse room has pretty much become my office, which means I’m starting seeds on my desk. This wasn’t the plan when we built this room, but it’s so nice out here that well, I colonized it. I think some of the geraniums might have to migrate back into the house because this year, I think the garden is going to be more necessary than ever before. It’s very scary out there. The President is rapidly rolling back norms we’re accustomed to, from the assault on the ACA, Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security, to the tacit approval of bomb threats…
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After calling in for the Orwellian “Tele Town Hall” my GOP Senator, Steve Daines held last night, and after this morning’s news that the GOP Congress has approved Scott Pruitt for EPA, I’m filled with despair and heartbreak. And anger at every single upper middle class person I know, which is pretty much every one I know, who continues to blithely fly around on airplanes and drive SUVs and buy new stuff just because they feel like it. We, the generation of selfish overconsumers, who have ruined the world for everyone else. To all “my” kids — to the whole…
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The backside of the garden has gone a bit feral on me this summer. Actually, the whole veggie garden is pretty feral — there’s way too much grass, and weeds, and because I’ve been experimenting with broadcast sowing, things are just coming up where they will, or not. Domenica Marchetti, of the new book Preserving Italy (blog posts to come), has been using the hashtag #gardenofneglect, and that’s kind of how I feel about mine this summer. If you need help building or maintaining your garden, you may hire a landscaping company Jacksonville like AJAX Landscaping. Or do I? Is…
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I’ve decided that the time has come — as much as I like the decorative aspects of my current garden design, it has several crucial drawbacks. This design is based on 6-foot lengths of lumber, so the big square boxes are six feet square, while the triangular beds are all based on six-foot right angles. Here’s the diagram: (Sorry about the photo quality.) While I love the decorative aspects of this design, it has several practical drawbacks. The biggest of which is that I can’t reach across the beds. Once I got chickens, I wound up fencing the outside perimeter with…
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My first post-deadline, post-travel weekend and although I was woefully short on new fiction pages produced, I did get some long-neglected house-and-garden tasks done. First of all, I’m feeling sanguine about winter because, at long last, we got our whole pig! It took a long time this year because, well, the small packer/butcher operation we buy from sold more post-fair pig specials than they had pigs. So we had to wait for them to get more local pigs (they promised me it wasn’t a CAFO pig), and then for them to make the delicious hams and bacon. There’s nothing like…
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A couple of years ago I blogged about how great straw mulch was in my veggie beds, but I stopped using it because I got so much wheat and grass seeded into my beds that it became unmanageable. This spring though, I was having trouble with weeds in the long tomato beds along the back fence, so I turned over the soil, put down a layer of paper weed cloth, and mulched with a couple of inches of grass clippings I begged off the nice older man who cuts the lawn at the Baptist church on my corner (he told…
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Here’s my first real harvest — I’ve been eating a little bit out of the hoop houses, some spinach here, a couple of scallions there, some komatsuna as it came in, but this is the first real harvest of the season. Today I picked a big bag of scallions, probably the equivalent of two big supermarket bunches, a huge bag of spinach, a big bag of arugula, two re-purposed tortilla bags full of broccoli rabe thinnings, and a big bag of mixed Chinese greens. Enough for the week at least. Here’s to give you an idea of the difference the…
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Look what came in today’s mail — new seeds! This order is from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (I also have some herbs coming from my beloved Seeds of Italy). Of course, its snowing again today, but I did eat the first overwintered scallions out of the hoop house for breakfast, and the spinach, komatsuna, arugula and bok choi are sprouting out there so in a couple of weeks, greens for breakfast. Sigh. Can’t wait. In the meantime, I ordered a few new things — a couple of new tomatoes: Cherokee Purple, Stupice, Koralik, and Reisentraube — all short season, all…
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Here’s the overwintered hoop house. The spring greens I planted a month ago are only now starting to sprout — there are teeny tiny seedlings of spinach, bok choi, and arugula in there among the overwintered scallions. I planted seeds a month ago, but I hadn’t expected another bout of subzero weather. So today I pulled the plastic off, watered, planted a row of Gai Lan (where I pulled out the kale that finally gave up the ghost) and replaced the plastic. The key to hoop houses, I’ve discovered, is 2-inch binder clips — they’ve held the plastic during even…
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The famous Livingston winds hit last night — up at Choteau, near Glacier, the gauge clocked 114 before it broke into pieces — I don’t know what it was here, but it was the kind of morning where stuff is all over the yard. Among the things that blew askew was the cover that’s been on the hoop house all winter. Here’s how it looked inside — the scallions are pretty battered, but they look like they’ll come back strong. The chard, hard to tell? I pulled the deadest leaves off the surviving chard plants, and pulled a couple of…