garden frustration

Ugh. I have not had enough time to properly tend to my garden plots. I haven't even finished planting it. But already my carrot, beet, lettuce, chard and cabbage seedlings have been totally defoliated. Given that I had lousy germination rates, there's basically nothing left. I think at this point I may just plant a cover crop in the one bed and just focus on celeriac and potatoes, which don't seem -- at this point anyways -- as tasty to the pests.

Then I'll switch my energy from ferrying back and forth to the community garden to building some raised beds on the only sunny bit of our yard so we can't plant some stuff at home next year. And maybe clearing a sunny spot for some asparagus or rhubarb or raspberries. I think I'll have a better chance of taking proper care of veggies if they're in my yard and I can tend to them without having to get the kids in the car.

This decision feels good. Much better than the frustration I was feeling before figuring that out.

seeds

This time last year I'd been poring over online seed catalogues of local vegetable seed vendors for at least a couple weeks, in time to buy seeds at the Guelph Organic Conference. This year, I didn't even set foot at the conference. And I hadn't given any thought to what seeds I might like to buy. I bought too many seeds to plant last year, so I'm hoping they're still viable and I'll give them a go this year.

But I'm not too sure just how big into gardening I'll go this year. I'm interested in building some raised beds in a sunny patch I noticed last fall here at home, but that's a lot of work, and I'm just not sure we're really up for it. I plan to continue the plots I have at the community garden, for sure, but I don't know if I want to start seeds myself again indoors, or just buy seedlings. I'm tempted to plant berrying shrubs along the only side of our house that gets afternoon sun, where there are just huge, ornamental grasses. But from where I am right now, that just seems like all too much work.

Maybe this will be my year of letting go and sinking in to what comes. We know the direction we want to forge, but we don't know how long it will take for things to shake down, and for the moment things are pretty peaceful as they are.

It could be five years before leave this house, in which case I'd like to make the raised beds and plant the shrubs to get as much learning in as we can. But it's possible it could be this year or next, in which case I'd rather not be leaving so much sweat equity. So I don't know. Maybe I'll put less effort into plans and more into actually doing whatever makes sense in the moment.

 

This was about an hour or so before I went out to lock up the chickens last night. When I went out in the full dark, the sky was bright with clouds and the snow muffled everything. It was balmy after so many -25C days and I found myself wishing I had more chores to do outside or perhaps in a place where I could see beyond the solid fences of my neighbours. As it was, I went out front and shovelled the driveway. Thankfully, the nearby neighbour with the snow blower didn't come out until this morning, so I got just the peace and bit of useful activity I was looking for.

Tudor Monastery Farm!

Hurrah! Ruth Goodman and Peter Ginn have made another historical farming show: Tudor Monastery Farm. It's just the thing to get us through the rest of January and into February. I just love discovering the ingenuity of how people did things without the so-called mod cons. And Eldest and Youngest both love it too.

I had no idea how many uses they had for urine in the Tudor time and how they smelted lead was fascinating. I also discovered that Tudor gardeners encouraged weeds in their beds, because they ate them too or used them medicinally.

We're only four episodes in, but I can already heartily recommend it. We found it on youtube but some problem with the sound made the background music sound horrendous so we switched to dailymotion.com.

First egg!

We've been waiting for our first egg for a while now. One of the Plymouth Barred Rocks, who we've started calling Scarlet, has had a bright red comb and been squatting when we pet her (she's the only one who lets us), both signs of sexual maturity, for more than a week. Eldest has been checking for eggs several times a day and I ask him every day when I see them at lunch.

Scarlet started acting a bit oddly today. It's been very cold this weekend (it went down to -13C last night and didn't get up past -7C this afternoon) and yesterday they refused to leave their run when we opened their gate for some free ranging. Today we again opened the gate and they weren't particularly keen to go out, but eventually they all got our and found a sun spot by the house to cuddle up in. But Scarlet was wandering off on her own. Usually they wander as a group or at least with a friend or too. She went into the coop and came out. Then she flew up on the roof!



She didn't stay up long but it was weird. She paced back and forth in front of the run, as if she couldn't remember to go around the corner and into the gate. She went into the coop and came out. I was doing a bit of work nearby during one of her entries to the coop, and I could hear her scratching in a nest box.

I've heard that the first egg is a bit distressing for hens. They don't know what's happening, and I imagine it's a bit like being in labour and giving birth. Every day. I'm sure they get used to it after a while though. Anyways, her odd behaviour made me wonder if today might be the day. But I'd also heard that sometimes they act oddly for a couple of days, so I didn't want to dwell on it too much. A little later, I was sitting on the couch when suddenly I heard the egg song! (I admit to some considerable googling over the last few weeks on the subject.)

 

How exciting! We had just had eggs for lunch, so we haven't eaten it yet. But tomorrow!

it's the simple things

(not our hens' eggs - nobody's started laying yet)

I really miss being at home most of the time. I never get to all the things I want to. I didn't roast a pumpkin or make granola. I didn't finish clearing up the laundry room so we use it as a pseudo-mudroom, didn't clean up Eldest's room so he and Youngest can experiment with sleeping together. I could go on. But I won't. For all the domestic work I'm not doing, I am being pretty productive with my photography and my husband is managing the domestic realm pretty decently, so I can hardly complain.

But I am human, and I certainly do have negative, woe-is-me moments.

Today was miserable, weather-wise. The wind blew loud and fast, and the rain came cold and sharp. It was a day made for books and fires and soup. But my two-year-old is too loud for much book-reading during his waking hours and our fireplace is covered with boxes to prevent the same two-year-old from having another fall of the hearth like when he was 14 months old and went unconscious after what seemed like a seizure. (He was ok, although that spell caused me to see the dietician who diagnosed his severe anemia.)

And besides that, I hadn't finished tucking in my garden plots for the winter. I'd spread chicken compost from my friends who also provided our chickens and still provide us eggs. But I had read that I needed to mulch the beds to prevent the compost nutrients from just running off over the winter. So this afternoon, with much grumbling and self-pity and questioning of this dumb attempt to learn how to grow food and outsource less, I drove out of town and bought some straw bales. I had half-expected the farmer not to be there, so I hadn't thought as far ahead as to where I would put the straw. Really, the only logical place was to spread it on the garden and be done with the thing for this year.

All the way to the garden I grumbled and felt sorry for myself that I wasn't curled up reading in my warm house. But something great happened when we finally got there. It was still cold and windy as all get-out, but the rain stopped and my two-year-old actually heeded my request that he not step on the beds and he stayed in safe areas and did safe things. He even got into helping. So the three of us spread the straw over our three beds, and I found myself enjoying the work and the frosty nips on my cheeks.



I expected to feel satisfied with the task done, but I also just felt good, physically, too. Once again, I intrinsically enjoyed a task that felt like an obligation.

Increasingly, I'm finding my joy in simple moments. This morning, it was when my husband turned on some music while he did the dishes and I chipped away at Mount Foldmore, and the kids sort of helped me (by which I mean Eldest helped and Youngest didn't unfold). I'd put a stewing hen on (not one of ours) to make soup for tonight with some sage and peppercorns and bay leaves and already the house was smelling like the best chicken soup. It just felt really good.

The soup wasn't the best ever but it was pretty damn good.

coop tour

When we decided to build a chicken coop, we had to figure out a plan pretty quickly, with no previous knowledge of what chickens actually need. So we did a lot of research, fast. There's so much conflicting information out there, ultimately every decision came down to gut feel, personal preference or some other subjective method. For the person who comes looking for chicken coop design ideas, here is what we did.

So this is where we started. We chose the dimensions for simplicity, based on plywood sheets of 4 feet by 8 feet. We adjusted the design a bit. The low wall is four feet and the higher wall of the coop is 5 feet tall.

And here it is the day after Halloween. (How happy are we to have our jack o'lantern get eaten? SO happy!)
 

We would have liked to build nest boxes out from the main part of the building, but my dad was only here for two days, so it just seemed more complicated than it was worth. Plus we could always upgrade in the future. For now, the nest boxes are in the main part, just behind the bottom of the Baker St. sign, and we access them through the human door on the east wall.

This picture shows you our roost ladder. Mostly the ladies all crowd onto the top bar, but I think they still have a fair amount of growing to do, so eventually I imagine they won't be able to fit. I read that the roosts should allow 12 inches for each bird's width and we spaced the boards about 14 inches apart from each other I think, to prevent higher birds from pooping on lower birds.

We changed the placement of the windows. Originally I was planning for just one, but we decided to do the two we had in the shed, with one of the east side for morning light, and one that opens on the west side for summer breezes. (The prevailing winds come from the northwest. I was hoping the house would shelter the coop heavy winds, but it does not.)

We were very concerned about ventilation, as we read somewhere that you need one square foot of ventilation per hen, even in winter. We ended up not putting in a vent on the north side like in the drawing because we figured it would be too windy. So we left the spaces between the rafters open, and created a vent on the south wall. Since then we have filled the rafter spaces with styrofoam sheets of insulation, which we'll take out in the summer. We've also covered the vent, which is right over their roosts.

You can see the big vent here:

You can also see the other thing on the right-hand wall that I'm very proud of: the poop pit door. It wasn't my idea, but all the best artists are the best thieves. Apparently chickens poop most of their poop at night, when they're roosting. We chicken wired under the roost ladder so the birds can't walk around in their poop, and we made a sort of trap door, so we can just open the door and scrape out the poop. We can do it daily if we want. And the rest of the coop stays pretty clean, since they're mostly outside or sleeping.

Here it is open, with some shavings spread to absorb some of the moisture and odour:


And here are the nest boxes with the first curtains I've ever 'made':

We read somewhere that hens like their nest boxes dark and private, so I thought the curtains would help. I've been holding onto our old rice bags for ages, because they're so beautiful, but I haven't known what to do with them. This seemed a perfect use. We nailed a small board along the floor so that the eggs won't roll out.

The downside of the poop pit is that it significantly reduces the square footage available for the hens to hang out in during the day if they want. I had read to give hens 4 square feet of floor space each, and at 4 feet by 8 feet, ours was big enough for 8 hens. And I pretty much cut that in half with the poop pit. Given that our run is roofed, I'm not too worried as they really don't spend a lot of time in the coop (so far, anyways), but I'm very aware that we're really at max. capacity with our 9 hens. So we will be making some hard decisions for at least some of them when they stop laying eggs.

The last thing to show you is my husband's ingenious mechanism for opening and closing and locking the chicken's pop door. I will confess that at the time I thought he was overcomplicating things, but I let him go ahead because he was so clearly enjoying it. But I have to say, now, I'm pretty impressed.



We can open and close it without going into the run, which is nice because we usually do it in semi-darkness at either end of the day. Our run is predator-proof enough that we could just leave it open but I figure when it's cold it's nice to shut them cosy and even safer. Plus we have recently seen raccoon footprints around a few spots where they've tried digging under the fence. (Thank goodness my husband didn't listen to me when I suggested we take the 'easy' way out and just fence down to the ground to avoid all the digging required to bury the fence!)

Back to the door. So my husband rigged up a pulley system that takes the cord up to the roof and outside the run.


He rigged up a neat little thingie to hold the door open.

Here the little arrow/handle hanging when the door is closed.

He had to add a weight to the door so it would close most of the way on its own.

He also built the bits to hold the rod in place, and he made the end of the rod angled on one side so it would go over the door while closing it the rest of the way tight.

He even made his own handles for the rod from some pruned branches.

So I think that's just about it. We've also done tons of research and a few amendments for helping the hens manage the cold, but I'll save that for another post.

final harvest and some chicken pics

In some ways, my garden this year was a pretty big disappointment. I planted so many beets over the season but I've really only gotten a few pounds. The ones I planted in July keep getting eaten by something. The early ones were stunted by my idiocy (i.e. compacted soil). We didn't get many carrots considering how many seeds we sowed. And our pumpkins and squash plants were nearly killed.

But there were some successes. The best was the celeriac. Well, not the celeriac I tried starting way back in March. Those poor, stunted things have only survived and haven't produced so much as a hint of a bump. But the celeriac starts I bought did very well. Tonight I rushed to harvest the last 10, and the final tally is 18 roots for a total of 22.75 pounds, including the greens; I feed the leaves to the chickens and freeze the stalks for flavouring stocks. Celeriac seems pretty disease and pest resistant. While everything else wilted under the onslaught of powdery mildew and squash bugs, the celeriac kept going through it all. I think it was their kind of season: cool and wet. Even though we had lots of slugs, they never appeared to suffer at all.

By the numbers, zucchini was the real success, which I harvested at least 27 pounds of (I'm pretty sure I forgot to weigh and record a few too). I planted two plants of the variety Costata Romanesco, at the recommendation of Carol Deppe. When I bought the seeds last January, I thought I would try my hand at dehydrating foods, including squash slices like Ms. Deppe, but life went in other directions. My main desire for the zucchinis were to eat them grilled, which I discovered last year. But the first zucchinis I cut off the plant tasted absolutely terrible grilled. I still don't know why: if it's soil (truth be told, none of our vegetables taste as good as local farmer-grown vegetables) or the variety or what. But after that I stuck to grating them for baking, freezing them for future baking, and using them in chutney. Even so, I'm ashamed to say I couldn't keep up. At least a couple of them rotted before I could get to them. The plants did pretty well, especially compared to the delicata squash and sugar pumpkin plants. I did see a few squash bugs hanging about the zucchini and thought they'd be goners, but they didn't seem to struggle too much.

I'm still declaring the pumpkins a success. We only harvested four out of the seven fruits that formed (one withered and two got eaten by pests so I fed the remnants to the chickens) but that made for nearly 12 pounds of food. I will definitely try squash and pumpkin again, but I'll give them more room.

Some volunteer potatoes sprung up and we got 7.5 pounds of potatoes from them - just tonight we found two more big Norlands when we dug up the celeriac. Let it be known: volunteer foods are welcome to turn up in my garden any time and I will let them live until I can eat them at the first opportunity.

My husband spent most of today insulating our chicken coop and buying a heat lamp in preparation for tonight's forecasted -5C. We had a chicken mentor assess our coop the other day, and it needs some work to keep the birds warm. We're not really ready for -30C nights, but we'll chip away at it and hopefully have a long while before we need to be ready for it. We turned the light on tonight but they were all still awake at 9 o'clock, so I think it weirded them out. We turned it off, hoping they would be able to relax and the new insulation would keep them warm overnight.



We still have a lot to learn. But they are really lovely to have around. I love having creatures who eat our vegetable scraps with gusto and will eventually turn it into eggs and compost. And they're lively and adorable and sing some pleasing songs. Tonight a bunch of them gave themselves dust baths for the first time (that we'd seen anyways), which was fascinating. But the best is when they jump up to get the wee berries from our burning bush (at least I think that's what it is). A couple of experienced chicken keepers I know were surprised to hear that chickens would do this, so maybe it's just ours, but they are adorable. It's my new mission to try to photograph them jumping for berries, but with the days getting shorter and me at work for most of the daylight hours, I don't know if it will happen. In the meantime, I offer some of these.



Now that I've seen what fun they have when we let them loose in our backyard, I am struck by what cruelty it must be to contain hens four to a cage for their entire lives. I'm so glad we're having this chance to get to know the pleasures of chicken keeping beyond fresh eggs.

 

Thanksgiving goings-on

Canadian Thanksgiving is coming to a close. We spent a couple of days at my parents' farm, where we had a most delicious turkey dinner, mostly made by me.

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision that I bring a local, pastured turkey instead of my mom buying the usual Butterball. And then, of course, I had to learn how to cook it, because pastured birds are a breed apart for cooking, apparently. And then I had to manage the timing of everything. My mom made a few things and my husband made one, but the rest was mostly me.

I brined the turkey at sunrise. My parents' covered porch is a beautiful thing.
Mostly I was worried that it wasn't anywhere near thawed, and I figured the brining would help a lot with that. I added sage and garlic and peppercorns to the brine and it smelled delicious right away.

Then it only took a little over two hours to cook the 15-pound monster. Apparently pastured turkey cooks much faster than stuffed, all grain-fed birds. My husband told me privately that he thinks it might have been the best turkey he's ever had. It was so moist! It wasn't perfect -- the legs weren't quite done when the breast was, so we carved off the breast and put the rest back in, where it got dried out. But it will be fine in soup.

Before we went to my parents' we went to the garden plot to pull a celeriac for coleslaw and to see how everything was doing. And we discovered the most wonderful wee surprise: that stalwart Delicata squash plant that somehow managed to grow three tiny squash after being nearly destroyed by squash bugs had actually managed to grow FOUR squash. One was hiding under the zucchini plant.

I've got it curing in the kitchen window now.

Before we left and after we came home, we put the finishing touches on the chicken coop and the birds arrived tonight. I plan to write a whole post about the coop and the decisions we made, but in the meantime, here is the view from my living room window:

lessons from the garden

Our community garden plots have not done that well this year. It may be that last year's success was all down to beginner's luck. But there have been compounding factors. The spring was cold and late. By the time planting conditions arrive, I had just started working full-time and had barely any time to do any work there. Then it rained and rained and rained, and I didn't want to do any work there. The weeds took over. I managed to fight them back, and we've harvested a few zucchinis and some potatoes that just showed up, missed in last year's harvest I guess.

I've learned some new things. The seeds I planted in early April did germinate, but that's pretty much it. I thought it was better not to till the soil, but apparently that's only if you have adequate organic matter. The poor beets and chard are so stunted, even four months later, I'll just put them back into the earth. So that's a good lesson: keep the soil from compacting. 

For the second year in a row, the peas died as soon as they started producing a few pods. I don't know why, but a fellow gardener suggested it might be a lack of the bacteria in the soil that helps the plant fix nitrogen. I remember in an episode of Gourmet Farmer, they worked with a soil biologist who cultivates microorganisms to boost food production. They grew two side-by-side patches of the same vegetables: one with specific amendments of compost, nutrients and microorganisms and one just with compost. At the end of the season they did a taste test, and not only did the first patch produce more and better looking vegetables, but the vegetables all had much better flavour from that patch. I wonder if there's someone in my area who cultures microorganisms for hire. At the very least, I plan to prep my beds properly this fall: more compost, hopefully from my friend with the backyard chickens, plus a cover crop to turn in next spring. I haven't done a lot of research but I'm thinking buckwheat or maybe some kind of vetch. 

This year, I've been trying my hand at squash instead of potatoes. I planted zucchinis, delicata squash and a pie pumpkin. The pumpkin is rampant, overtaking its neighbouring zucchini and already setting 7 fruit with more female flowers on the way. The zucchinis are not as prolific as I was expecting, but they're producing. And the poor delicata appears to be living up to its name. It was nearly destroyed by squash bugs before I discovered what they were and how to fight them: hand-to-exoskeleton mortal combat. I use duct tape wound sticky side out around my hand to catch them, because they're wiley and hide quickly when they see you coming. It's trying to make a comeback, so we'll see what happens. It had set fruit, and I was very excited, but those parts have all died, so I may not get any. I've caught a bunch of squash bugs on the pumpkin too, but my watching and killing appears to be keeping them at bay so far. The zucchini seem utterly unaffected, touch wood. 

I also have a big patch of celeriac. Convinced there was no way I'd find anyone selling celeriac seedlings, I tried starting my own from seed. Celeriac needs a long, frost-free season to mature, so there is no direct seed option here in Ontario. A number of the seeds I planted germinated but they've done very poorly. They were only really big enough for transplanting in July. Luckily, the Guelph Urban Organic Farm was selling celeriac seedlings, so I bought a bunch and those ones are thriving, with large bulges already swelling from the ground. I couldn't bring myself to actually kill the celeriac I started, but I highly doubt they will produce any food. They are still struggling and small. Next time, I need to start them a month earlier, and feed them lots of nutrients. I'm pretty sure the planting medium I started them in just didn't cut it.

* * *
I started this post several days ago, but didn't know how to wrap it up. Tonight when I went to the garden, I discovered my pumpkin, with all its five glorious, perfect pumpkins (one died and one got eaten since I wrote about it above), is all but dead. It's had powdery mildew and for days I've been meaning to spray it with milk and water a la Dr. Google, but you're supposed to do it during the day, and I can't get out there easily during the day. And, to be honest, I didn't think it was THAT urgent of a situation. The plant does look a lot like the delicata that was destroyed by squash bugs, and I have killed a bunch of the suckers on the pumpkin, but I didn't see them overrunning the plant the way I did the other squash. And I killed bugs every other night for a week.

Anyways, tomorrow I'll try to detach myself from the ever-voracious nursing toddler so I can spray the plant in the morning and get into work on time for my 9:30 meetings with senior executives. I am very, very bummed out about the state of my pumpkin plan. I was so looking forward to all the pumpkins.

I guess this too is an important lesson: never count your pumpkins before they ripen. Also, don't try to grow them vertically or plant them too close to each other or other squashes.

fool

Last year, we didn't really get any peas in our garden. By the time the pods were plumping up, it was too hot and the poor plant turned yellow and died. But the fresh peas we bought from local farmers were so amazing, I am determined to try again. Last Monday it was mild and the sun came out for about an hour when the kids and I were free. So we headed over to the garden plots to see how they came through the winter, and I thought, in a fit of foolish optimism and dark vegetable cravings, why not throw in some beet, chard and pea seeds if it's not too wet? After all, the packets say to plant them as soon as the ground can be worked. The soil was moist but not mushy or mucky (the other big mistake learning opportunity I made last summer when I tried to plant beet seeds in too-wet soil), and we'd even beaten the weeds, so I threw in a row of each. I knew there was pretty good chance it wouldn't work out, so I still have seeds left, but maybe we'd get lucky and have the first chard and beets and peas of the season.

Well... I haven't actually checked on them, because it just feels too ridiculously hopeful, after days of heavy rain and a big two-day ice storm. Surely the poor things have rotted in the ground? Or have they? If anyone with knowledge of these things reads this, please share your thoughts.

what was I thinking?!?

This sourdough is feeling like just another mouth to feed. It's hungry! And not only that, but I have to keep finding ways to use it that people will eat. It's exhausting.

Also, on the day I finally got around to planting celeriac seeds, I calculated how much space they take up verses the size of the plots in the community garden, and decided what I really need is 32 celeriac seeds waiting to germinate. The seeds are tiny and need light and warmth to germinate, apparently, so I just sprinkled them on the surface of the grow mix. But you have to keep these suckers moist, which is difficult when there's no soil on top of them to hold the moisture. I try to mist them with a spray bottle a few times a day, but today I forgot and they totally dried out. I will be so sad if not even one germinates. And it could take anywhere from 10 days to three weeks before that happens, so I have a lot of misting ahead of me.

I thought I was making things that will serve me, but it seems I just created more lives that need my daily care and attention. 

lessons from the land

This weekend I went to a seed starting workshop at Little City Farm. I wasn't sure how much I would get out of it. I mean, how complicated can it be, right? You put some seeds in some dirt and water them. It turns out that it isn't complicated, but hearing from someone with a ton of real experience can save time on those painful learning experiences.

I had some of them in my garden last year, which I didn't report on here. I tried some success planting. In the middle of July I direct seeded cabbage, Brussels sprouts, beets and carrots hoping for a late fall harvest. I really wanted some storage vegetables for the winter. But I didn't get any. Only one cabbage plant germinated and no Brussels sprouts. The beets and carrots germinated fine, but they just didn't seem to grow. Neither did the cabbage. I figured the colder temperatures just slowed everything down.

On Saturday, the instructor said that it was the decreased daylight hours that make everything slow down. Plants will happily just hang out, so there's way less rush to harvest when they're ready in the fall, but growth? Not so much.

I actually planted two different sets of beets a couple weeks apart, and the first set was really stunted. Later, I learned that if you work soil when it's too wet, the structure collapses and it totally compacts. So that's what happened with the first set.

But hearing from the instructor this weekend made me realize just how valuable these learning experiences are. They're disappointing, sure. But the information really sticks.

Having said that, I'm hopeful that after this workshop I'll be able to get some hardy wee seedlings in the ground without any painful learning experiences. I've discovered celeriac through our winter CSA this year and I ADORE it. I cannot get enough. So I'm going to try my hand at growing it but apparently it needs a very long season. So there's no choice but to start it indoors myself. Wish me luck!

starting seeds

It's possible I went a little overboard buying seeds at the Guelph Organic Conference. It's more than possible I will not have enough garden space or food storage space but whatever. Let's call it optimism.

Last year, the decision to grow food was kind of last-minute and it felt like too much to try starting my own seeds. But this year it feels do-able. So I've signed up for the seed starting workshop at Little City Farm, a place I've been keen to visit for a long time now.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

That is the long, mournful wail I heard from Eldest when he got to our garden plot yesterday. The last remaining baby watermelon, now baseball-sized, was savaged by some kind of animal, I'm guessing raccoon or skunk. Two of the others were eaten by something and one of them just mysteriously stopped growing and shriveled.

In happier garden news, we harvested all the early variety potatoes (Norland) and we got 30 pounds despite the blight. And almost 10 pounds of carrots from the first four rows I planted.

on watermelon babies and other round things

I've dabbled with gardening here and there in various ways over the years. It's the kind of thing that I love the idea of but often not so much the actual work. I loved envisioning a garden and choosing and planting the plants. But after that my interest waned. (I believe this is typical ENFP behaviour.) Rather, my interest remained, in a passing kind of abstract way; I loved watching the plants grow and bloom and make seeds. I just didn't much care for the work of maintaining a garden: mostly, weeding. Such tedium!

I have a friend who is a brilliant flower gardener. I am a little in awe at how he never seems to mind the weeding. And he spends so much time just standing there, watching and looking. I liked looking at the garden while I walked by on the way somewhere else. But I was never a fan of watching a garden, like, just watching. I mean, there were no people!

In the vegetable garden this year, I was hoping that the promise of food would keep me motivated to get through the tedious work. Now, I have to say I don't spend a lot of time just watching, like while standing still. But I am loving the practice of observation it is instilling me. I manage to take an awful lot of information in about the weeds and the bugs and the plants and the soil. And whatever I miss is pointed out with great excitement by Eldest. His voice goes up several octaves when he exclaims about something new that I hadn't noticed. I don't weed as much as it needs it, but I am surprised by how much I actually enjoy weeding. It's very satisfying. I wish I could get more time there by myself but there are creatures I need to attend to at home as well. (Well, one creature, mainly, who would crash through everyone's garden plots and wreak havoc if a grown-up weren't policing his every move.)

I didn't spend much time planning, and I had no real context for envisioning what my vegetable garden might look like. I based all my decisions on what I enjoyed eating through the winter. I figured local organic produce is easy to get in the summer and was probably better purchased from people more knowledgeable than me. But winter vegetables were harder to find from local sources. I planted some Swiss chard, beets, lots of potatoes and a decent amount of carrots. I plan to grow cabbage and more beets in the fall to store. If I could find Brussels sprouts seeds I would try some of those, but I'll have to wait for next year. I stuck in some cilantro, basil, rosemary, cayenne peppers and sweet peppers because why not? And some peas because people said they were just too good not to. (Having eaten my weight in bought fresh peas recently, I must concur, but it looks like we won't be harvesting any from our own garden. Barely any seeds germinated and several of those that did died. Two plants were left and just as the pods were fattening up, they suddenly turned yellow and flaccid. I think it was just too hot for the poor peas. Next year, we'll plant them much sooner.) Eventually I want to grow my own beans for drying but I figured I'd start with bush beans to eat green this year. And some lettuce, because salads are good. Most I've planted from seeds, except for the herbs and peppers, which I bought as seedlings.

Just before I bought the seedlings, when I was still trying to figure out what to grow, Eldest mentioned that his favourite vegetable is cucumber and his very favourite fruit is watermelon. So when I saw cucumber and watermelon seedlings at the market, I made an impulse purchase. The cucumber shrivelled within days of transplanting (I've since learned that cucumbers do not like transplanting. And I think I added insult to injury with I fiddled with its roots in the process. Next year I'll direct seed.) The watermelon definitely suffered, and I thought it was going to go the way of the cucumber, but it made a comeback. Today it is healthy and happy and spreading like mad, so we put it up on a support so it doesn't crowd out my entire plot. Last week, or maybe it was the week before, it got the most beautiful small yellow blossoms on it, and we watched ants pollinate them. So far we've counted four tiny baby melons on it and there are more blossoms too.

When I was pregnant with Youngest, we told Eldest quite early on. Earlier than I really felt comfortable with, but my parents were coming for Thanksgiving and I was so horrendously nauseous I knew there was no way I could hide it from them. And it seemed so very wrong to tell anyone else in the family before telling Eldest. So we told him and hoped for the best. I remember each week telling him about how the baby was growing, and more than once the three of laughed about how the updates described the baby's size. It was always food related: "Your baby is the size of a kidney bean," a grape, a stuffed green olive... later, it was a cantaloupe and, eventually (it seemed to me anyways), a watermelon. Maybe I'm imagining the watermelon. Today, Eldest and I were shocked and delighted to discover that the biggest baby melon has already grown from pea-sized (and a small pea at that) to grape-sized. Actually, plump cherry-sized. In just a day or two! It's amazing!

In the early pages of The Resilient Gardener is the "Plant Gardener Covenant: 33 Gardening Golden Rules." Now, I'm going from sieve-like memory here, so I may not get it exactly right and anyways you should read it yourself because it's so eloquently written, but the covenant's premise is that domesticated plants are not so good at surviving the perils of life so they need our protection and care. They can't compete with weeds because their resources are spent making bigger fruits or roots or leaves for us to eat instead of competing. Even though I can't recite the details of the golden rules, I do feel deep affection for my plants. I mourned when I discovered my Norland potatoes have early blight (they're still producing potatoes but perhaps not as much as they would otherwise, and I believe they won't store for long, so we'll be eating them all up sooner than I might otherwise and eating them faster). I got angry with the unknown rabbit who ate our lettuce (although thankfully they all came back just fine from the trimming and we enjoyed them) and again with the unknown animal who messed with my cabbage seeds the other day. I felt genuine remorse when my poor peas succumbed, and not only because we probably wouldn't get to eat them. I felt I failed them.

Tonight, as Eldest and I crowed over the baby melons and how very cute they are and imagined enjoying them when they get big and ripe (even though I cautioned myself and him that I'd heard watermelons are very hard to grow so we mustn't get our hopes up too high. But surely getting pollinated and forming baby melons is a very important milestone?!?), it struck me as a bit odd to feel such tenderness for something I'm later going to around and EAT. But I guess livestock farmers do that all the time. And now that I think about it, maybe it isn't so odd. Maybe what's really odd is that I think it's odd.

Here are the very adorable babies:

the smallest one

the biggest one

(And now that I'm looking at the biggest one I'm fretting that the wire will cut off circulation to the melon. I hope it will be ok until morning when I can change it. Soon we will need to support the melons with slings made from old t-shirts.)

magic

So get this. If you stick some seeds, or potatoes, in some dirt, and water them and keep away the weeds that want to steal their water and sunshine, eventually you will get some food.

The other night we ate our first beets from the garden and tonight it was potatoes. It's really quite magic. Most of the pea plants have died so I dug up the poor struggling things and put some cabbage seeds down for a fall harvest. This could get addictive.

Here is our first, very large beet.

Beltaine and first times

So apparently it's Beltaine today. I'd forgotten, although I'd like to make more of an effort to celebrate these seasonal days. I keep getting swept up in life and not realizing the day is coming until it's here. Oh well.

Yesterday, Eldest and I planted our first vegetable seeds in our new community garden plot. A row each of radishes, beets and Swiss chard. I was kind of freaking out about it before we went, to be honest. I don't know anything about anything and I felt like I needed to have it all planned out in advance. When I told my husband about my panic, he said, "That seems like a funny thing to panic about. I mean, the worst that can happen is nothing grows, and then you're out - what? - 20 bucks for the seeds? How can you go wrong?"

Well, when you put it like that...

I did develop a bit of a plan for the seeds we were going to plant first, but when we got there I changed it anyways and looking at the actual dirt, suddenly it wasn't so complicated. It wasn't exactly easy, because I don't think it's ever easy to feel that awful discomfort of not having an f-ing clue about what you're doing and doing it anyways. But simple. You drop little dried bits of pure potential life into dirt. And then you try to keep the dirt moist and without weeds.

We loosened the soil a bit with a couple of rakes, drew a line in it with my finger, dropped seeds in according to the instructions for each plant, then swept a bit of dirt over top and patted ever it ever so gently. After we planted the three rows, we watered it with a gentle mist from the hose. The most complicated tasks were unlocking the tool shed and untangling the hose.

It was a revelation to hang out with just me and Eldest. A treat. The garden was completely empty, so I would have felt lonely if I was there by myself, doing this thing I'd never done before (I've only grown from transplants before). He was great company and seriously helpful too. It was great to have another set of hands. We didn't get as much planted as I'd wanted to - we still need to plant the peas. I think we'll try that tomorrow, although we'll have the baby with us, so I'm not sure exactly how that will work.