all hands to the poopdeck!

It's again the time of year that tempts the body into hibernation. As the days get shorter and the temperature drops, so do tolerance and desire for the outdoors. The sun has retreated behind the grey skies and the early sunsets.

It's cold and wet out there this morning. The leaves in the yard can wait.

Evil cat and me have the house to ourselves. A warm blanket and the couch call a lot louder than do the garden and its tools. Screw the compost, I can't wait to curl up with my sweetheart. . .

So naturally, evil cat's supervillian godfather, Pappy, stops by. For coffee. And some lunch.

As is always the case when Pappy's around, the conversation covers a varied and diverse range of topics. At one point, he tries to convince evil cat and me that President-Elect Obama has chosen Michael Pollan to head the Department of Agriculture.

We both respond with as much excitement as incredulity. "You're kidding," I exclaim. . .

Pappy, a well known bullshitter, waves his hand next to his ear and replies "He offered himself up for the post, anyway." Evil cat and me exchange a quick, knowing glance and blow Pappy off.

"Whatever."

Later that afternoon, I ran across this open letter to President-Elect Obama written by Michael Pollan and printed in the New York Times.

It's nine pages of standard issue Pollan that I hope Mr. Obama, or someone near him, has read and understood. Food policy could change the course of the century ahead. Just try to to fry up a stock certificate for breakfast:

[W]hen we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

Humankind made a huge mistake when we stopped worshipping the elements and started worshipping stupid gods cast in our own image and imbued with our own desires.

I'm ready to cast my lot back in with the sun god.

All hail Sol! And Pappy, I suppose.

chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp

Sure is quiet around here. . .

Been meaning to keep this thing updated, but time constraints and my general laziness get in the way.

Evil cat spotted the first red strawberry in the garden yesterday. It was just barely on the right side of ripe, but I couldn't wait, so I plucked it and we shared it. It was tasty. Can't wait for more of them.

This past Sunday saw the first annual Sam Theoharris Memorial Celebrity Croquet Invitational at Liberty Garden. 'Twas a blast. Corneilius has some photos up at Flickr.

Photos of the garden soon.

long, cold winter

The weather was nicer before the equinox. Spring has not been kind. But the daffodils and tulips have bloomed, and the bluebells are budding.

We have a lot of good starts indoors, way more than last year, and have already put some sunflowers in the ground in the raised bed and along the fence. They were getting awfully spindly in their pots; I think I planted them too soon. Another lesson learned. The next wave will fare better.

The croquet course has turned out nicely, and seen limited action already. Should be ready for the Celebrity Invitational on Memorial Day weekend. Speaking of. . .I should probably get to inviting those celebrities. . .

In sad news, it appears that the Greengirls blog at the StarTribune is no more. Not so, not so. Turns out I'm just bad with code...

january

So...it's been awhile.

Since that last and now dusty post, Liberty Garden has gained a cold-frame of sorts. I hoped that it would help the peppers winter over, but nope...it was a complete and abject failure. I pulled the healthiest two plants into the house in November. All of the leaves fell off both of them. One never came back, and the other developed a stubborn aphid infestation as soon as the tender new buds turned into tender young leaves. I could have fought the aphids more, I suppose, but putting that sickly-looking, aphid-covered stick out of its misery seemed the best.

I built the cold frame out of 2x4s bolted together and attached to the eave on the east side of the garage. I stapled some visqueen to the 2x4s, leaving a flap on the south side for access. It was roomy! Big enough to hold all of my peppers and a few pots for greens, with tons of room to spare. I immediately jumped ahead in my mind to a cold-frame in May full of happy seedlings eager to be planted in the garden.

Unfortunately, slugs ate all the greens and some critter kept digging up the cilantro (I suspect a squirrel, though I always suspect a squirrel. Rotten little creatures are never up to anything good). Wind storms last month tore the visqueen off the frame, and that now sits in a bundle in the garage. This spring, I'll use lathe to reinforce it. Chalk it all up as lessons learned.

So, the cold frame was an abject failure for fall, but I'm still looking forward to it overflowing with seedlings to be planted this spring (in addition to seedlings that will no doubt fill every windowsill of Liberty House). I'll have to get Evil Cat back on the slug hunting. I'll take care of the damned squirrels. Somehow.

I've also been tending to the Sam Theo-Harris Memorial Croquet Course at Liberty Garden*, which will play host to the first annual Liberty Garden Celebrity Croquet Invitational sometime this summer. I think I have a pretty solid course laid out, and the greens I seeded are taking, so it should look nice, too. That round stone in the photo is where you put your drink when you have to swing. We're inviting Ichiro and Eddie Spaghetti, among others. If you're famous, look for your invitation sometime this Spring.

*Sam passed away this past fall. She loved croquet, and playing against her on my fancy course this summer was a big reason I decided to put the course in. It seems fitting that it be named after her.

hiding out in the garden

This large, ugly rat skulks in the west end of the raised bed and reminds me not to step on the asparagus. If only the cilantro was so lucky.













This jerk hangs out in the pea trellis. If I catch him, I'm throwing him out on Market Street with hope that a hipster on a motor-scooter runs him over. If morning glories are garden variety zombies, squirrels are garden variety pirates.











I found this little mouse while digging up morning glories. She lives in the rock garden now, and keeps an eye on the catnip for me. It seems to work.

Lesson #1

We always had a garden when I was growing up. Evenings, my Dad would issue orders from his kitchen kingdom, and I would take the bent metal colander and go foraging, gathering whatever he commanded - lettuce, carrots, broccoli and tomatoes from the garden, or sprigs of mint, basil, oregano, and parsley from the pots perched on our rickety wooden front steps. Everyone around where we lived grew vegetable gardens, and I took this small chore and others, like weeding, as a matter of course. I didn't particularly like gardening, and I didn't particularly pay any attention to it. It was something everyone did, along with washing dishes, hauling and splitting firewood, canning preserves, maintaining ailing infested Datsun pick-ups, and raising various scraggily goats and chickens.

Now, of course, I wish I would have paid more attention. I wish I would have paid more attention to a lot of things that were taken for granted in my community...if I had, I might have learned how to work on a car, or cook decent Indian food, or make wine, or garden.

With Liberty Garden I am realizing exactly how much I did not pay attention to the basic building blocks of gardening. The main thing I have learned by process of trial-and-error is this: gardening is all about soil.

Now, you'd think I would have realized this when my parents forced me, at age eight, to spend at least one day every summer shoveling chicken shit. You'd think I would have realized this when I was forced to haul immense buckets of compost on a daily basis. You'd think I would have realized this when I earned almost 40 credits in the history of agriculture in Mexico, Russian, and the American south.

Ah, no.

In observing Liberty Garden I have noted that all of the plants that were planted in proper garden beds are flourishing and beautiful, while the seedlings I stuck in crude holes I cleared in the lawn are languishing sadly.

On the advice of woof's mother, I have been watering these pathetic specimens> with water from woof's fish tanks, and have also added fish emulsion to the surrounding soil, but it may be too little too late.

Next year.

evil cat in a burqa

Evil Cat's godfather, Pappy, paid one of his extemporaneous visits to Liberty House yesterday, and spent a good bit of time marvelling at the progress we've made in the garden, and identifying many of the random plants growing here and there. Turns out we have some opium poppies that we've been pulling up as weeds. Since my dream since childhood has been to be an Afghan Warlord, we will stop that practice. Now, where did I put that Kalashnikov. . .

Since Pappy is apparently old hat at this gardening business, I take his marvelling as a huge compliment, especially since Evil Cat and myself didn't put any special amount of forethought into any of this (the carrot patch being a prime example), and sort of picked up the tools and started digging. Now we have a garden.