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

Fall Energy

Recently, I read an article about overwintering the garden. To my way of thinking, all those dead sticks poking out from the exhausted plants and flowers were an eyesore that needed snipping. Lo and behold, apparently it's better to leave those things on there! Who knew? Well, apparently lots of people must know this, but this 40 year old former city-dweller had no earthly idea.

The best, most exciting part of this discovery is it now gives me a good reason to be a lazy gardener. I don't have to go out with the clippers and trim all that stuff, nor do I need to rake out the leaves from the garden. You'd think I'd be a little more with the "organic" program and realize that the leaves, for instance, will decompose and improve the soil. DUH!
But leaving the dead heads on the plants are good for the plants, too. The nutrients from the dying stems goes back into the roots for the next year. Almost everything I have in my garden is a perennial because I am, if nothing else, a lazy gardener. But another thing I learned about leaving the stems and dead flowers on is that some flowers provide winter food for birds, for instance Purple Coneflower. I have LOTS of that in my garden! It makes me happy to think that in addition to sparing my back an afternoon of cramped, bent clipping, it will also make for a yummy bird buffet.

In the meantime, I'm looking for more pots of bright red mums. I've read that placing them around your home's doorway brings good energy and I sure could use some of that!

Crap Fest!

I love my dog, but GODDAMMIT! She apparently smelled something yummy in the compost pile, you know the one I've spent two years cultivating and preparing and turning and cooking to make organic soil for my garden. The one I actually had the audacity to put in a moving van and bring from my old house to my new one when I moved. Yes, that compost pile.

It seems even after all that, the compost could not withstand the enthusiasm of a small dog. Granted, she's not THAT small, she's about 50 pounds of quivering Beagle. Something in that pile caught her attention so much so that she tore off the plastic fencing surrounding it and dove in head first. Needless to say, there is compost strewn across the yard, not to mention banana peels, egg shells and other fruits and vegetable pieces in random states of decay. I'm sure I could put it back into a pile if only I would get a rake and a bucket. Do you see this city girl reaching for the rake and bucket? I think not.

Okay, okay, I acknowledge that the aftermath is my responsibility. I could get out there and clean it up and really I probably should. But it's far enough away from the house that it doesn't matter at all and honestly, I don't want to see what's in there. I know there are LOTS of worms in it, and I shall lament their loss. I mean, I'm sure they survived, just went underground. I'm lamenting losing them from the compost because getting that many worms to show up for work takes a lot of time.

***SIGH***

Well, tomorrow is another day....

Bolts of Arugula Insight

The arugula has bolted. All of it. When a plant bolts, I discovered that it does not mean that it has grown legs and run out of the garden. It means that it has prematurely shot up flowers, and in the case of my arugula it's because it's been so damn hot outside.

On the upside, the arugula flowers have two things going for them: 1) they attract pollinators to the garden, and I'm a BIG fan of natural pollinators (especially since my neighbor has 5 hives of honeybees) 2) the arugula flowers are also edible and taste good in salads. They're also kind of pretty.

Admittedly, I planted WAY too much arugula at one time. There is no conceivable way I could eat all that I had grown so if the bees and other pollinators can benefit from what's bolted, I suppose that is just fine. Note to self: it doesn't all have to go in the ground at once. It can be staggered throughout the season. Hmmm.....another new concept for me.

The things which seem so self-evident to most gardeners are like giant flashes of insight to me!

That's IT???

Seriously. All the work that's gone into the potatoes and this it the yield so far...

Is it me? This is a picture of just one area of potato plants which apparently has turned into a vining-type of thing. I had no idea potatoes did that...

Country Boys

Here's to remembering why I love country boys....

That connection to the earth is so appealing. Their lives are so tied to the rhythm of growth, of seasonal change. A country boy has charm, has a sparkle in the eyes, a little devil in the soul, exuberance and passion.

Tell me, what's not to love?

The Glimpse Outside

There are several potato plants and onions ready to come out!!!

I feel so gratified by my garden. It really didn't take THAT much work and now I will have enough fresh food to last for most of the summer. Perhaps if I were smarter or more dedicated or something, I would be able to grow food all year round. I'll do that someday but for now I'm happy to have arugula salad with some onions. And baked potatoes for everyone!

Besides providing food for me and my family, the garden is the place I go when everything else in life seems too much. We get so caught up in our little lives, yet so much LIFE is teeming all around us at any given moment. Lift a rock and you'll see the depth of life occurring beyond your own mind. Just within the confines of my small garden is an entire universe of life; the plants, insects, microbes, everything working together in symbiosis, millions of lives all changing and growing, living and dying. How's that for getting a glimpse outside yourself?

Garden Sanctuary
You who walk
With troubled thoughts
Come, enter here and rest
And may the sweet serenity of growing things
And the heavenly peace
Be mirrored in your soul
-Doxis M. Palmer

Time to Get Serious

June is coming quickly to a close and I have been beyond CLUELESS this growing season. For a woman whose ultimate goal is to home-grow all my own food, I have been relentlessly lazy. Preoccupied is probably a better word, and not only can you tell by the garden, you can tell by my blog. It has been sadly neglected.

On the upside, I harvested some yummy arugula already and I'm thrilled that it seems I'll be up to my eyeballs in it all season long. The carrots I planted seem to have magically disappeard from the garden....I choose to attribute that to the family of rabbits that have moved in nearby. The phlox in my perennial garden has already been munched to near-extinction by Mama Rabbit, so I'm guessing the carrots have been expertly removed from the ground. What amazes me is that they left no evidence behind...hmmm.....

I planted what survived of my corn seedlings, which was about 15 plants. For a small, home garden such as mine, in an uptight neighborhood of Northern Virginia, that is probably just as well. I'm sure if I dug up my front lawn and replanted it with nothing but corn, the neighbors would have something to say, nevermind what the HOA would do to me. Probably death by firing squad. Anyway, of those 15 corn plants, only THREE have survived. This is a huge disappointment to me. There really need to be more than that because in order for corn to grow (this is something I learned this winter so hang on for enlightenment) there needs to be multiple plants and they need to be planted in a grid. Corn is wind-pollenated so if there is only one plant, it cannot pollenate itself. If they are planted in one straight row, the wind will blow the pollen away and it cuts the chance that any corn will develop. But if they are planted in grids, they stand a much better chance of pollenating one another so that corn will grow. Otherwise, you just end up with tall, gangly green stalks and no corn.
In any event, with only three corn plants, it'll just be a gamble as to what happens. I don't have room in the existing garden for much corn and I fear I put the plants in a bad location. Live and learn! That's what clueless gardening is all about!

Something amazing did happen in my perennial garden. Last summer, I planted marigolds in all my gardens, mainly to help with pest control but also because I just like the way they look. In any case, this year the marigolds GREW BACK! From my understanding marigolds are annuals, but clearly I need to look into this more. I was so surprised to see them, almost like old friends. I guess what happened was they reseeded themselves, not "grew back" per se, but still....it amazed me. That's one thing I love about being in the garden....it never fails to provoke my sense of awe and wonder.

Off We GO!

The seeds from Seeds of Change organic arrived over the weekend, two hundred dollars worth of them! This is going to be one gigantic garden this year. Either because I was giddy off a quiet, inactive winter, or oblivious to the failings of last year's garden, I ordered about four times as many seeds as I did last year. The kids have been fighting over who gets to plant what, which is basically a moot point since once they actually got into the garden, they were distracted by other things. So who do you think actually planted the seeds?

Winter Gardening?

Apparently there are people who put stuff in the ground in the winter. I've noticed that some of my more industrious neighbors have all manner of random cabbages growing, as if we might mistake these for colorful flowers. I just don't have the wherewithall to do such a thing. My garden is such an intense amount of work that I cannot imagine doing it all year round. Just like the garden in a temperate climate needs to sleep in the winter, so do I!

It's interesting to me that, in spite of how we seem to forget this in our modern lives, we are intricately tied to the rhythm of the seasons. The holidays we celebrate at this time of year point to the need we have for the sun, how we miss the light and warmth in winter, ergo we rely on holidays full of candles and lights to brighten us. In addition, we pad ourselves for winter by eating much, much more than usual. Note the abundant commercials in January for joining health clubs to rid yourself of those unwanted pounds put on between Halloween and Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa. Well of course we are padding ourselves with fat! Regardless of our modern lives, we cannot fight our evolutionary programming. We are programmed at the deepest, cellular level to seek out extra fat to keep us warm through the cold winter months. This is not to say that everyone blows up like a buffalo over the holidays, it just explains why the urge to overeat is so damn strong!

But now that those holidays are past, I find myself longing for warmth and sun, for green leaves and animals. The months from January to March are especially bleak, which is why we humans have come up with more random celebrations to help spice things up and keep us from committing suicide before spring!

This year, the biggest attention getter in my area is, of course, the inauguration of Barack Obama as President. However the inauguration itself is only the beginning of a new chapter in our American life and hopefully an opening to an era of peace and justice.

But we also rely on more regular occurrences to occupy us: Mardi Gras, Super Bowl Sunday, Valentine's Day, St. Paddy's Day and other strangely invented holidays which occur during this time to keep us from acknowledging the gloom of the season.

I wonder, however, if these distractions are necessary. Do we as humans perhaps require a period of each year during which we slow down and reflect on our lives? It is a perfect time to curl up in a warm blanket and read, read something to challenge you, to make you think, to make you care, to change your world view or introduce you to another's perspective. This is not to say these things can't happen any time of year, but winter seems perfectly poised to offer the potential for us to focus inward, to think, to dwell.

Just a thought.

Where Did My Garden Go?

Poor, poor garden. It has now become mostly fodder for the compost heap. I discovered a strangely deformed cantaloupe plant that had mysteriously migrated to the front garden. The cantaloupes themselves never grew bigger than my fist and my son ended up smashing them open for the birds to eat. Yesterday, I saw a hardy squirrel take off with half of one in its mouth. That's an industrious squirrel!

At this point, all that's left for the garden is to become either part of the compost pile or to become food for the garden critters for the winter. I'm happy with that and hoping that the abundance of good, organic material will provide a great compost for next year's garden. Now I'm just waiting for that mulch delivery so that I can close out the garden for the winter. Hope it gets in soon. It's fresh from a tree that was just cut down so hopefully it will be friendlier than chemically altered, purchased mulch.

Unfortunately, I can hear the rain starting so today will not be a good day to clean out the garden. I've been doing it gradually but I was hoping to get in a good chunk of time today. Still, we haven't had rain in awhile so I won't complain!