Buzzing With Excitement

The garden is literally buzzing with excitement. GROAN! What a horrible pun! But it's true! The lamb's ears shoot up purple flowers this time of year that are undeniably appealing to the bees.
In addition, look what I found on my lavendar bush:

No, I have no idea what kind of butterfly it is because I'm the clueless gardener. However, that doesn't prevent me from looking it up and figuring it out later. In the meantime, I found lots of fun pollinators enjoying the garden today, the rest of which I can actually name:

Bumblebee

Another pretty butterfly picture

Butterfly Bush Madness!

First Look

Official harvest alert: I have harvested four green beans from the bush bean plant!!!

This might not seem very newsworthy, but for the clueless gardener, it's an incredible feat. Even though I've been engaged in the pursuit of growing organic vegetables for about four years now, I'm still stunned and thrilled when anything edible emerges from the dirt.

Organically speaking, I can certify that all the ingredients used to produce the plant are totally organic and workout additives, pesticides or any chemicals of any kind. They contain nothing but organic soil, homemade compost, organic seeds and purified, filtered water.
Oh, and sunshine!

Now. What the hell do I do with FOUR beans?

Perhaps I should have planted a few more plants. Live and learn.

Keeping Things Contained

The newest twist in my organic gardening is my move away from actually using my gardens.

Tomatoes

Wuuuhhhhtt?

My property is just a little bit shy of one quarter of an acre which is a lot of ground to care for. To be realistic, I've come to accept that I just can't care for all of it alone. Tending the huge gardens was becoming burdensome and I oftentimes I was forgetting to do it altogether. That means a lot of my crops withered and died or went to seed and I wasted time, money and all that energy. It was so incredibly disappointing.

Bush Beans

One area of my yard that gets lots of use is my deck. It's not a huge deck but it's big enough to put out some toys for my 2 year old son and for my older kids to sit and do homework (which they rarely do) or hang out with their little brother (which they often do). That being the case, I decided that putting pots of organic vegetables around the deck would be MUCH more user-friendly than planting large crops around the property. To fill the gardens on my property, I planted lots of pow-maintenance perennials like day lilies, hosta, snapdragons, coneflower, black-eyed Susans, peonies, wild roses, butterfly bush, hydrangea, forsythia, lambs ears, salvia, mint, sage, rosemary and lavendar. I know that sounds like a lot but it's taken place over about two years.

Lettuce

The container vegetable garden is very small. I scaled back from the intense fruit and veggie bonanza (which ended in a disappointing bevy of brown leaves) and kept it simple. I planted only what I knew we would eat instead of trying to plant enough to sell. I don't know what the hell I was thinking there, but alas, it didn't work out.
That said, this year's veggies are doing really well! In keeping it simple, I'm actually remembering to tend the garden and am already seeing the rewards for my work. The bush beans have beans on them and the tomatoes are already blooming.

Not bad for a few minutes of work a few times a week!


All my seeds were procured from Seeds of Change and all my organic soil and other gardening implements were purchased locally at Burke Nursery in Burke, Virginia.

And lest anyone think that I have some beautiful, expansive deck just made for gardening or something out of Home and Garden, have a look at where our summer food is coming from:

It's a tight squeeze, but there's room for all of us!

The Revenge of Rimsky-Korsakov

With all the time and care I have lavished on my garden, I am still often surprised at its beauty and abundance. There is such a variety of plants, flowers and food that bursts forth that I completely forgot to consider the side effect of all that garden life: BEES.

I am not a fan of bees. While I respect their important role as pollinators, I try to give them as wide a berth as possible. When a bee invades my personal bubble, I am quick to jump, run, scream and sometimes wave my arms around wildly in a vivid display of my human evolutionary defense tactics. Imagine my consternation on finding that EVERY SINGLE PLANT in my garden is a bee favorite! Now consider that the family across the street from me raises bees. Yes, that’s correct, they are beekeepers. No, I doubt that is a full-time job. But there are 14,000 honeybees that make their home a mere 300 yards from my front door and who have taken up employment in my garden. In addition, there are other flying, buzzing creatures who appear similarly smitten with the plant life therein, some of which are even more aggressive than the bees. All of this takes place literally inches from where I enter and exit my home.

I’m not the only one who has encountered this difficulty with the front door of my house. At a family party on Saturday afternoon, several partygoers commented on the garden only to be attacked in the face by hundreds of bees moments later. That was not popular. To top things off, it seems to be grasshopper season here in Northern Virginia, so once the head is sufficiently clouded by bees, one can run screaming onto the grass to be blanketed by grasshoppers. It’s definitely biblical.

It’s difficult to know what to do to solve this problem. Killing bees and grasshoppers is not an option at ALL. This is an organic garden, peeps! For those that aren’t aware, honeybees are in short supply and are almost on the brink of endangered due to hive collapse. I’m sure grasshoppers serve some useful purpose in the environment, although I don’t really know what it is. As a clueless gardener, I suppose I’ll have to research that a little. I will say that the grasshoppers are a nuisance; one afternoon on the way to a job interview, I opened the front door to a cascade of grasshoppers. What appeared to be about 100 of the explosively bouncy insects saw the opportunity to come inside and seemed to think that would be neat. It felt like someone threw a bucket of water at me, except the water was grasshoppers. Also, it would have been easier to get rid of a bucket of water by drying it up. The grasshoppers had to be chased out the door bit by bit, which made me late for my job interview. THAT was embarrassing.

I’m in the process of devising a way to get in and out of the house without being attacked by stinging, flinging insects. My children have been traumatized by this process. But unfortunately, it’s the most direct route to the car which is where we’re usually headed when we go out the front door.

Next year, I will have to devise some bee-free options for the garden. Bees are incredibly important for pollination and my garden is full of flowers, fruits and vegetables, however they are a little intimidating. Fortunately none of us is allergic to bees so it’s really  more of a nuisance. But for someone with a bee allergy, this situation could be potentially dangerous. I have to find some way to curb this so we can all benefit from one another - the plants, the bees and the people. Can’t we all just get along?

Psychoactively Clueless

I admit it: my garden looks like hell. I've only started seeds for carrots, radishes and scallions (and I think the scallions are dead). Everything needs weeding badly. The lawn needs mowing. I cannot seem to keep up with the work with everything else I have to do, and yet I can't relinquish the dream of this garden.

One thing that seems to be growing with no problem at all is the kitchen sage. It's also known as salvia officinalis if you're interested in that kind of thing. The reason the Latin name for the plant is somewhat relevant, I discovered, is that there are about 1000 different species of sage. After watching Champ chomp down on an entire dried bundle of sage (that I use to smudge my home - more on that later), I became concerned. I seem to remember a factoid from long ago, that sage has hallucinogenic properties. Champ is pretty strange to being with, so the thought of dealing with him in the midst of a psychoactive sage trip was just a little more than I was willing to deal with. Oh, and of course I don't want it to harm him; the reason I haven't been more concerned with that is because he seems to be able to eat all manner of things without effect. This is the same dog who ate an entire straw clothes hamper, a tennis ball (ate it), a pad of post-it-notes, several books, a slurpee cup, and a wood fence, and with no ill effects. His stomach is made of iron.

Salvia plants in general have a long history as medicinal herbs. Sage itself has scientifically documented healing properties to treat everything from diarrhea to alzheimer's disease. One of the active chemicals in sage, including salvia officinalis, are a class of ketones known as thujones. Thujones are part of the psychoactive ingredients in absinthe that make it so potent, and potentially toxic. However, I have a feeling that common kitchen sage has a very low amount of thujones within, otherwise people would be lined up at my front door (or sneaking around in my garden at night) just to get a few precious leaves. On a side note, I do find it amusing that a common plant (and sage has other wild variations that are intensely potent) such as sage is totally and completely legal, unlike marijuana, which really isn't all that harmful. However, I don't want to open a political hornet's nest by examining the reasons behind the stupidity of the war on pot, so let's just leave that alone.

The interesting part of this is that it took me two years to realize that the common sage I have growing in my garden is also a psychoactive drug. Granted, it's not the most potent one out there, but I'm still somewhat amused by this. I'd love to try an experiment where I stick a marijuana plant in the ground right next to the sage and let them sort of intertwine together and see if anyone notices. My bet is no one would notice. Any takers on that bet?

Chef Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

From Jamie Oliver's Website -

"This food revolution is about saving America's health by changing the way you eat. It's not just a TV show, it's a movement for you, your family and your community. If you care about your kids and their future take this revolution and make it your own. Educate yourself about food and cooking. Find out what your child is eating at school. Make only a few small changes and magical things will happen. Switching from processed to fresh food will not only make you feel better but it will add years to your life."

SIGN THE PETITION!

Click on the link above to take you right to Jamie's petition!!!

April Showers

April showers bring May flowers
But what do Mayflowers bring?
Pilgrims.

This is my kids' joke that they giggle out over and over on their way out the door to school this morning. My daughter dons her rain boots which have ladybugs on them. My son thinks that high top Converse All-Stars double for boots, which they don't, but he's an adolescent so I'll let it slide. There is something sweet and slightly adventurous when you're a child in preparing to head out into a light spring rain. It's different from preparing to go out into a fall storm. The chill is light and there is a warm embrace of newly green leaves.

For myself, I am enjoying a warm cup of coffee and the view of my perennial garden outside the window where I write. The colors are vibrant especially against the backdrop of the rain. Something about the gray sky and the water makes all the colors stand out.

The sage bush is ready to explode into flowers. The scent of the sage when the sun is warm is intoxicating. Interestingly enough, sage, if ingested in large quantity, is a powerful hallucinogen. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!

I don't have to work today and I was feeling eager to get outside and put my vegetable seedlings in the ground. The rain will keep me from doing that, but it will make my job easier tomorrow. The ground will still hopefully be damp and make the planting faster and better in general for the seedlings. So far, I have cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, carrots, lima beans and pole beans. As always, an experiment.

For now, I'm happy to sit and listen to the rain fall.

Clueless As Always

So I was mulching the perennial garden today. What I love so much about perennials is the way they come back year after year and all you have to do is welcome them. A little mulch, some organic compost and VOILA! Beautiful plants all season long.

The vegetable garden is another story. It takes a lot of work for me to produce really ANYTHING worth eating, although last year I had an abundance of arugula and just not enough uses for it. The result is that it bolted (or grew flowers) which makes the leaves taste really bitter and basically unusable. I didn't collect the seeds from the plants and didn't purchase new ones because I had an overabundance of the stuff from just one packet of seeds! The surprise happened when I started weeding the overgrown patch of garden that I use for vegetables; the arugula has grown back and is EVERYWHERE! Almost the entire vegetable garden is covered in arugula, which by the way has bolted and is flowering everywhere. All this time I thought there were just a lot of weeds encircling the enormous butterfly bush in the center of the garden. And don't get me wrong, there are a TON of weeds, too. But the most prolific plant in the garden by far is the arugula, which, mind you, I dind't plant.

I am impressed with Mother Nature's ability to recharge herself. I had no idea that arugula was a perennial or that it was so hardy. Although I can't really eat it now, I'm wondering if I can collect the seeds to save for next year. It's possible I've discovered a really amazing spot to grow arugula and that I could use it as a cash crop. I have several crops that have become so abundant that I'm actually thinking about opening a stand at the Farmer's Market this summer. I can't believe I'm saying that, either, but between the sage, lavendar, lamb's ears, arugula and the black-eyed Susan...all of them have taken off and become so abundant that I can't fit them in the garden and I can't use all of it either. It certainly wasn't a position I expected to find myself in, but if I can do it, I will be THRILLED!

If this works out, I might actually consider purchasing the bee hive.

Yep, that's the next threshold for me...bees. I want this suburban home to be a little organic farm. Seems like I'm on the right track....

Rescue A Pet

Four years ago I adopted my beagle/mutt Chloe from the Homeless Animal Rescue Team - or HART - here in Northern Virginia. But my dog family always felt incomplete to me. Being married put a cramp in that style since the only reason Chloe was even in our home because of me. If it had been up to HIM there would be nary a furry creature in our home. However, without all that baggage to weigh me down, I now have the freedom to complete my family the way I see fit.

So recently I adopted another dog, Champ, from HART. Champ is an 8 year old beagle/mutt that had been abused for years. Turns out he's as sweet as can be and doesn't hold any grudges for his foul treatment. I discovered that the rescue's shorthand for "likes to chew everything in sight" is "enjoys his chew toys." Champ has torn apart many slippers, magazines, bags, a box of cereal and numerous other things. But he is loving and just adorable. And to be honest, at the end of the day even after he's made a huge mess, I feel lucky to have him. The fate of dogs like this is not happy but I think Champ, and my family, got pretty lucky.

Now my family feels complete to me. Two kids, two dogs, one me!

Let's Say Thanks

Say Thanks to our Troops