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.

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 I 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.