yawn . . . stretch . . . groan . . .

This is the earliest photograph I can find of the back yard at Liberty Garden. It's from the late winter or early spring of 2007. You can see the treacherous bramble of blackberry and morning glory vines on the left. In the center is the poor climbing rose and its trellis, which had been continually menaced by that terrible beast of a holly tree. On the right is the yellow and thin bamboo which had been slowly rotting itself out from the center. The raised bed in the right foreground has already been turned numerous times and, with the trellises leaning against it, ready to be overwhelmed by peas.

In this photo from winter 2008, Evil Cat has already planted some of her flowers in the rock bed, and I have already fought back the bramble of blackberry and morning glory vines that dominated that corner of the yard. And, yes, in the process of clearing the trellis, I managed to decimate the poor climbing rose.

We had some success starting tomatoes and peppers in the cold frame, and volunteer tomatoes popped up all over in our compost, but again we did not manage to get any fruit until the end of August. Despite the success with peas the year before, barely four vines sprouted. They made only enough peas for a few salads.

The Year of the Rat taught me that simply putting seeds in dirt and adding water doesn't guarantee gardening success.

In The Year of the Ox, I drew a plan, and started taking notes. I wandered the yard from the front of the house to the back, making note of where the sun is at any given time of day during the given time of year. In this photograph from February 2009, I knocked out the rotted parts of the wall for the raised bed, and planted garlic where the black plastic planters are in the photograph. Hundreds of volunteer poppies took over that spot, but the garlic doesn't seem the worse for wear, and I hope to dig up some bulbs this year. You can also see the holly is cut from the trellis, and the bamboo is bushy and green. I won't garden again without some access to a healthy bamboo bush. It is simply the best garden tool in my arsenal.

By this time of year, I had decided I did not want to mess with the cold frame and scaled back my plans for growing tomatoes and peppers. The Maritime Northwest is not a good place to grow tropical plants, and I realized that my success while gardening in Minneapolis was in spite of my efforts, not because of them. I started a few hybrids in pots, spared a few volunteers, and bought a couple of Oregon Spring and Early Girl starts at the nursery, and planned to put them in pots along the south side of the house, where the oak trees on the boulevard provide afternoon shade and the brick from the foundation holds heat overnight. Corneilius and Snowball added to the tomato plans, and despite my plan to scale back that year, tomatoes were planted in every available plot in the garden.

And of course, we had a spectacularly mid-Western summer. Hot and humid with plenty of sun, the Spring and Summer of the Ox brought along early crops of turnips, poppies, tomatoes, salad greens, and just about everything we planted. Except peas.

A couple of road trips left both beds overgrown with weeds, and we never caught up. The tomatoes also crowded each other from lack of pruning, and almost as much fruit rotted as ripened on many vines. May and June is a wicked-bad time of year to be out of your garden for weeks at a time.

In this photograph, taken this morning from the kitchen window (most of the photographs in this post were taken from that vantage), you can see that the lilac has nearly taken over right foreground. The bamboo is in need of thinning, and if you look really close, the climbing rose has bloomed in the shadow of that accursed holly. A few of the tomato starts I planted in trays back in April are visible in the ground and in pots directly below the bamboo.

In The Year of the Tiger, I decided to stop fucking around, drew up a real plan, and buried my nose in Seattle Tilth's guide to growing in the Maritime Northwest. I also picked up Steve Solomon's Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, and have tried to absorb every bit of wisdom I can from the hillbillies of the coastal Northwest. I have planted roots and greens in waves, and I have run around like a clown carrying pots of tomatoes and peppers out of the rain and back into the sun. I have convinced Evil Cat that ruthless weeding is not a heartless act, and we have been on top of it this year. Mostly. You're never done weeding. Ever.

In fact, you're never done gardening. There's always something to be done. But I don't mind. I can't think of anything more pleasant than spending an afternoon in the garden with a friend. Truly.



Hopefully more photographs to come as the growing season progresses.