A(nother) New Year of Gardening

Happy New Year, all! We celebrated Humboldt-style by spending the day outside; in this case, in the Bad Garden:

Ladies a'gleaning, January 2013.

After all the clearing and prepping of 2011, it's a real shame that I spent almost no time gardening in 2012. By August or September—usually prime harvesting months—I threw my hands in the air and opened the garden up to the chickens, who immediately took it down to the dirt.

But in November my neighbors Steve and Sheba, knowing that they were moving soon, gave us their recycled glass-window greenhouse. Score! They even disassembled it and hauled it down the street to our driveway and I dragged it piece by piece into the back yard. Steve said I'd have no problem figuring out how it all went together...uh-huh.

I am not good with carpentry. I couldn't even tell what piece was the floor, though I did eventually figure out that the piece made from an old door was in fact the door. Point for me!

I also had to figure out where it was going to go. If I took the lazy way out and put it somewhere already flat, it would, at 10-feet-by-five-feet, seriously be in the way, and I would end up doing a lot more work rerouting paths around the greenhouse than I would ever spend by just leveling out a random patch of the Bad Garden.

Well, yesterday, New Year's Day, turned out to be one of those beautiful California winter days, with a clear, blue sky and no wind, just sunny and (for us, anyway) warm at 53 degrees. Shirt-sleeve weather! So once the frost had melted I went outside and surveyed my little farm and chose a spot.

Yes, we do collect a lot of scrap-crap in the Bad Garden.

It's not level. And, there's a berm of strawberry-covered dirt in the way. But otherwise it's perfect. So I started shoveling while the ladies milled around, gleaning.

And, as is typical of me, as I was piling up rescued strawberry plants I thought what a shame it was that I was shoveling all this dirt that I would only end up re-shoveling into a raised bed later...As if I have not done just that, shoveled and re- and re-re-shoveled dirt these last five years. But soon I had scrounged up bits of lumber from odd corners of the yard and started adding a raised bed off the one successful bed I have so far managed to build and plant. Needless to say, my site-leveling work stopped.

Assorted scrap-crap laid out.

Then I shoveled some dirt into it, which is I suppose working on site-leveling, too, but...then I looked at the Long Bed and decided to rearrange some of the plants in there.

Upper left corner are the hardier-than-I-would-have-guessed chives, lower left is a sage that never thrived in its original spot in the Long Bed, and in the center is a pile of dug-up strawberry plants waiting for a new spot.

And still having lumber left I decided to encapsulate the old straw bales marking the edge of the hopefully future patio, but I couldn't find an end-piece and the blade on my pull-saw finally gave up the ghost after 12 years or so.

So, progress on the green house was limited to site selection (and staking!) but I did get one bed and one partial bed in. And did I mention it was sunny?

My tiny farm

Now that I know how big our lot is (6100 sf!) I can estimate the size of my garden—or, as I'm now thinking of it, my tiny farm: a grand 1/10 of an acre!

So, what does 1/10 acre only haphazardly utilized get you?

-Blackberries
-Garlic
-Potatoes
-Strawberries
-Herbs (sages, oreganos, basil, parsley, chervil)
-Tomatoes
-Zucchini
-Huckleberries
-Eggs (chicken and duck)

Still to come:

-Shallots
-Pumpkins
-Winter squash
-more potatoes

Not too shabby!

Spring Flowers

Yeah, if the weather's crazy it must be spring-time in Humboldt Co. I think that hail one day and sunny blue skies the next counts as crazy, especially in April. Last Friday I took advantage of the sunny skies to photograph the flowers in the New Vitality Homeland's yard:

I don't know what these are, but I have a lot of them in the yard...a legacy of tenants past.

Some lovely weeds in the poo zone, looking north toward the tiny home behind us.

More of those white & yellow mystery flowers, plus some bonus mystery pink flowers.

Any clues as to what these are?

The sage in the herb box is going nuts. That was $3.99 well spent!

No yard in California is complete without some California poppies.

Ooh! Ruffles.

I am in love with California poppies. It's hard to beat a grass-Oak savannah covered with green spring-time grass and sprinkled with poppies, Blue Dicks, and Blue-eyed Grass, especially with a blue, blue sky background.

I love this yard!

April in Humboldt

I was determined to get some garden work done today. We are moving soon and I have to put raised beds in at the new place so I can move my plants, and build a new coop for the poultry. ... Paycheck-earning work, the weather, and my own nagging, cold-riddled health kept me from doing anything on either project during March.

But today was a day off, and like I said, I was determined to git 'er done. The wind was already kicking up when I borrowed the van to get some lumber, and by the time the folks at Ace were cutting the boards to size it was coming down.

Still, I was out in the yard hammering together the beds and dumping in soil while my work pants soaked through and my shoes filled with water. Once I started to feel cold, though, I threw in the towel, picked up my tools and got in Charm. (The good thing about being a backpacker is I have plenty of good-quality outdoor gear so I mostly stayed dry—too bad my rain-pants are in my satchel at the Post Office!)


Driving home, that's when I noticed the big, puffy flakes falling from the sky:

Welcome to spring time in Humboldt County!

Late November garden

Last Saturday I got home from work before the sun set, and took the opportunity to grab some time in the garden. Sweet, sweet coastal California! This is what was blooming in my back yard:








I also got two more raised beds placed and filled with dirt!

Still Rainy

The backyard rain gauge is showing just about 4 inches of rain since this series of storms started, what, a week ago? But as I had the morning off, I wasn't about to let a little precipitation keep me out of the Bad Garden!

The straw mulch I put down kept the ground around the raised beds weed-free, but the blackberry...my on-going efforts at eradication lagged during the summer and fall, and it shows. So I geared up, grabbed my shovel and set to.

I like gardening, even in poor weather: I'm outside; doing something productive; and spending quality time with the cats. (Although Vivani sat out this session.) And poultry—they saw me heading to the boxes and came running.

The ducks are big piggies for worms, and they know now to watch me spade the earth. But they keep getting all up in my grill, making it hard to work. And I mean, way up there:

See, Carlin says, if I get my head in there while she's lifting a spadeful of dirt, I get the best choice of worms.

What's H.I. McDonough say about them babies? "They were all over me...it was kinda horrifyin'." I kept having to pick them up and move them bodily out of the way.

But they kept coming back. I switched to using a trowel.

After the blackberry, I moved over and started trimming back the one and only backyard shrub I bought and planted. It exploded in size and needed to be thinned and shaped to stop it from taking over the back corner of the yard. It was also harboring a secret stash of chicken eggs:

Eleven chicken eggs! Those girls have been holding out on me.

Soggy yardwork isn't the only thing we have to thank the rain for. A gutter over the back wall of the New Vitality Homeland stopped up and rainwater made its way into the closet in Greg's office. We pulled everything out and called the roof guy. And while we waited for him to fix the problem, the gatitas holas discovered the warm and soft blankets folded near the heater. First Orange Gina found them, then Vivani Catpants found Orange Gina.

Since Gina is half again as big as Vivani, Vivi's usual tactic when she wants something Gina has is to initiate a grooming session—which inevitably devolves into tussling and wrassling. And usually ends with Vivani getting what Gina had and gave up to get some peace. So when Vivi jumped up and started washing Gina's head, I grabbed the camera in anticipation of some cat-on-cat action:

They surprised me, though, and after Gina's head was nice and clean, they both laid down for a nap on the blankets. A first! Maybe in another couple of years they'll actually sleep together regularly.

Is not Kashmir one of the best rainy day songs?

Survivalist Mentality

And that's not all of them!

I told you I've been busy canning...my step-son came over yesterday and knocked together some shelves out of the free scrap-wood I scored from the alley near the post office, and Greg got most of the jars out of their dungeon-drawer and out where we can see what we have.

While this new display points out just how much blackberry jam I made this summer and fall—we're not running out this year—it probably guarantees that the fruit chutney won't make it past solstice.

Ah, well. Let's eat!

A Fine Morning

Now that the bad garden's winding down for the autumn, I've been letting the poultry have the run of the entire yard during the day. Today when I went out the back door mid-morning, the chickens and ducks came running. I felt like the Pope.

Hello, my flock!

Pretty soon I had a swirling cloud of animals following me, ducks, Wyandottes, Lakenvelders, cats, all in their species-specific valence. I sat down to watch and enjoy the morning. The ducks and chickens looked for pill-bugs and strawberries.

Benny, Marilyn, and Pearl hunting for bugs. Check out those pumpkins!

Meanwhile, the new cat on the block, Extra Red, had come into the yard trying to make a place. Vivani took her turn dissuading him of this notion. (He's called Extra Red because everyone on the block has a ginger cat. Really. There's one per house. So he's the extra red.)

Autumn

I know the equinox is this coming Monday, but some ineffable change has occurred and my body knows summer is over: along with the shortening day, the air feels different, the plants look different, the ocean smells different.

Out in the Bad Garden, I've ripped out the remaining corn stalks, emptied out the green bean bed, and stopped watering the squash. The pumpkin spiders are large and numerous. I should get another couple of jars of tomatoes off the cherry tomato plants; I'm hoping the fruits on the three large, later-planted tomatoes ripen before the season's chill kills them off.

For this year, I'm pegging the start of autumn as September 16. Dang, that was a short summer.

Tasty

It's summer—somewhere—but I've been spending very little time working on my bad garden. That's not to say that I'm ignoring it. After I feed the animals I usually read the paper and drink my tea out there, and I water 'n' weed after I get home from work, each time accompanied by very happy cats. (On the flip side, on very foggy mornings like this one where I stay inside I am harassed by very sad cats.)

Last night I looked in the strawberry box and saw a bunch of ripe berries, enough to need a bowl to hold them all. We could have eaten them for dessert if we weren't already full from dinner, so instead, I made jam!

Hmmm, county fair's coming up...

Happy Solstice

The day, which started out foggy, turned out to be quite lovely, with a bright blue sky filled with white fleecy sheep clouds. As soon as I got home I gathered the cats and husband and we went out into the bad garden.



During his lunch break, my step-son brought a treat home from the Co-op: a New York Times. I grabbed it and read it, sitting in my pooped-on blue chair while the cats tore around on the straw and the chickens picked through my meager afternoon offerings.

We ate a delicious dinner of fresh garden greens garnished with the world's best canned tuna and a surprise Sjaak's chocolate bar. Then my step-son came through with a bag full of fresh bananas and berries and spray-on whipped cream. Yes! I started cutting up stawberries when I heard...thunder? Yes! G-man and I went outside to scan the skies but we saw no rain or lightning.

Then our neighbors came home with Hank, their new (rescue) dog. And while we were petting Hank and fussing over Dinah (their huffy, 14-year-old dog), my neighbor handed me back the bowl I'd given her filled with fresh eggs—only now it was filled with homemade elote tamales and pico de gallo. Then big fat drops started falling out of the sky and I sat down to a second dinner of fresh tamales and fruit and listened to the thunder and watched the lightening in the darkening sky of summer.

Eatin' veggies

It rained the other night, and some critter took advantage and went snail-hunting in the beds covered with the pea-vetch cover crop. When we went out the next morning to let the Wyandotte sisters out of the chateau des poules, snails were all over the yard, fleeing the scene of carnage in the raised beds.

So I've been pulling out the broken and trampled cover crops and getting the beds ready to plant. Not like I feel we need more planted beds! We currently have a variety of squash, beans, peas, corn, strawberries, tomatoes, collard and mustard greens, and lettuce growing back there. If we skip a day eating salad with or for dinner, we get behind and have to give away a bag to family or the neighbors. The greens are reaching the same stage. So two more boxes? Maybe I'll plant herbs and dry them in the fall; I don't know.

Blackberry eradication continues, and the straw mulch is really keeping the areas I've already dug up weed free. It also makes it easy to spot and dig up blackberry sprouts that I missed in my first (or second) pass.

But I just got another four 4x4 raised beds with a promise of three more. If by some miracle I get them all installed in time to plant this year, that will be eleven 4x4 beds and another two 2x8 beds! My friends, that is a lot of vegetables. I wish I had a pantry to store all the stuff I'll be putting up this fall.

It's a good hobby, this gardening. Keeps me busy, fed, and the girls (cat and hen) enjoy the activity.

Seasons

This year summer started May 13: that's the first day we ate food from the garden.

When did spring start? Back in March, when I started planting my garden beds.

When will fall start? I'm not sure. Perhaps when the last of the blackberries are gone from the vine.

Winter? I know it's winter when I don't even try to go outside after work.

(On a related note, despite putting up quarts and quarts of blackberry jam, we are going to run out before Blackberry Campaign 2008 commences: we opened our last jar yesterday. After that, it's two jars of cranberry sauce, then pfft.)

A Typical New Vitality Day

That's Miss Orange Gina Felina enjoying the northwest corner of our bad garden. It's deceiving, and makes it look like the emphasis should be on garden and not on bad. I might add that contributing to the badness is her and Vivani's habit of pooping in any patch of open dirt.

That's Condiment Man waiting for me to sluice off the grime before we eat dinner. You can tell we're from Berkeley by the twelve varieties of tea in our cupboard and the eighty-three jars and bottles of condiments on hand. Around-the-world dining!

Dang. Raining again.

Maybe Aristotle Was Right

"Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure."

I've spent my Daylight Savings Time hours well, and have a lot to show for it in my bad garden. (When I find the cable that magically gets pictures from my camera into my laptop I will show you what I mean.)

Except for a couple of small patches, I have the blackberry and ivy out all the way to the eastern fence. I have seven raised beds in, with more coming this week. (Thank you, FreeCycle!) Along with the two green-manure boxes, I planted a box of strawberries, a box of lettuce, tomatoes, squash, and beans 'n' peas. I got the large stump from the large, ugly bush dug out (thank you, Jason!). I leveled out and put down pavers in the back, northwest corner—the sunniest spot in the yard. I planted the borders and between the pavers with (mostly) plants rescued from other parts of the yard.

That's the good news. The bad news is, while digging out some turf to make a level spot for one of the FreeCycle raised beds, I noticed that while some of the blackberry is reemerging from buried roots (pretty easy to dig out in the still-soft soil), other buried blackberry roots are not sending up new growth and are instead concentrating on below-the-ground growth. So I don't know they're there.

Fuckers. That pretty much means that whenever I put something in, I must first dig out the top eight inches of soil in order to locate and remove all blackberry traces. That makes for some slow going. After I'd cleared, smoothed over, and leveled a 7-by-7-foot area for the last of the beds, I took a breather and sat down by my new little patio and hand-weeded for a bit. Orange Gina and Vivani sat with me, or chased sticks or bugs that caught their fancy. And I noticed, while I was weeding, something mixed in with the crab-grass and onions and pimpernel and assorted invaders. Huh; it looks a lot like tiny blackberry plants. But it pulls right up and isn't attached to any buried stems or roots...I finally examined one closely. Yep: baby blackberry plants. Hundreds of them! How? Why?

So discouraging.

Turning the Corner

We had friends up from Berkeley visiting this weekend, so I only managed to squeeze in an hour or two in my bad little garden. It was cloudy, but the rain was still just threatening. Where before I had found Old Lady Schneitter's trash-burning area along the middle of the fence-line, where the long raised bed went in, the college students who subsequently lived at the New Vitality Homeland apparently preferred the back corner. As I ripped out more blackberry canes and ivy, I found soda cans, beer bottles, candy wrappers, and one flip-flop buried in the duff.I was a little too far from my original pile of detritus to huck it, so I lined everything up on the fence. And hey! I turned the corner and am now working my way east! 1/8th of the way there!

Another Funday

The forecast was for rain today; thought I might end up with some inside time. But when I got up this morning, it was cloudy and windy, but dry. Oh, well. After a couple of hours dinking around I suited up for battle: dug out some blackberry stumps the size of my fists. I got about a 10-by-10-foot section cleared. Positioned another 4-by-6 box and got it partially filled with dirt. Realized I was tired and hungry and slightly soggy from the light rain and called it a day.

My Bad Garden

Wow, a surprise day off. Thought about doing, oh, a million other things, but the yard and the chorus of cats was demanding attention, so I suited up and started digging. Took out more blackberry roots, put in a second raised bed—this one 4x6—and started breaking up clods to fill it with dirt.

At some point I went out with the hubs to do some errands, including stopping by Miller Farms Nursery and picking up a small bag of green manure, a nitrogen-fixing, weed-surpressing cover-crop mix. My intent is to sow the green manure as I finish a box, 'cause I really don't think I'm going to have time to actually raise any winter vegetables this year. Not with all that stinking blackberry and ivy yet to go.