Taking Advantage of the Loveliness

This weekend was one of those perfect clusters of days of warm sunshine and fresh breeze at the end of winter. You know it will get cold again, but you can revel in the loveliness while it lasts and get some prep work done in the meantime for actual Spring. (As I've been moping around about the bizarre weather, I wonder if Mother Nature is reading my blog!)

Saturday I puttered around the garden, cleaning up bits and pieces of miscellaneous trash that collects in a yard with children. I planted some lettuce and spinach and broccoli seedlings in late January and all are fine, having come through the bitter cold spell with ease. While I was picking some of the greens for a salad (with leftover salmon--yummy AND frugal AND green!), I noticed a yick smell--like a dead animal. But Frodo has occasionally ventured unwelcomed into the garden for a potty break, so I just sort of shrugged it off as puppy poo.

Here's a shot of the broccoli bed:


After a few more hours spent futzing around the garden and planning out the beds with the help of my trusty Vegetable Gardener's Bible, the whole family headed off to the park to do some exploring with Jeffrey's metal detector. This is the park we cleaned last year in preparation for the Earth Day that didn't quite get off the ground. They recently got the paths refurbished and it was so nice. This would be a great place to run. We only found one treasure--a rusted Pepsi can.


Alas. We had a great time anyway, running on the path and spotting Canada geese, a Great Egret, and one confused white duck.


I also thought I saw an alligator:


Sunday was spent much like Saturday was. We were outside almost the whole time. After a lot of messing around, Will brought his iPod outside and we listened to Jupiter Coyote and Jimmy Buffett as I started Winter Sowing Project 2009. Farmer Cathy gave me the idea, and I'm so excited to see if it works. I planted three kinds of tomatoes (Better Boys, Romas, and a grape variety--which I'm pretty sure will be a bust as River "helped" today by shaking the bottle up), some California Wonder peppers, eggplant, summer squash, Boston Pickling and Lemon cucumbers, some cantelope and some Swiss Chard. You will note that a lot of these names sound familiar--I'm using some seeds from last year. Ed Smith from VLB says that most seeds will last a few years, so I'm going to believe him. It seems as if I'm combining two unknowns and hoping for the best, but isn't all gardening like that? After filling up my WS containers, I set them in a nice sunny bed and pulled some of the leaves around the bases. The strip in between I planted with bunching onion seeds, yesterday being the last day the signs were right for planting above ground crops for a few weeks. I think it looked nice and tidy when I was finished, although I will say that I felt a lot like my daddy when I surveyed the reused bits. Daddy is a FAMOUS reuser.


While I was at it, I decided to put in a row of Sugar Snap peas in the broccoli bed. I have terrible luck with sweet peas. Last year, I managed to get the vines going for the first time, but it was too hot for any flowers by that time and so I was pea-less yet again. Starting earlier must be the key, I figured. While I was planting, I noticed, yet again, the dead animal smell. No poo was in sight. Hmmm...As I poked holes for the peas, I also discovered that some creature has been tunneling in my bed. And... as I bent forward to put in a pea, I realized that the dead animal smell was coming from the tunnel. Urk. I figure one of several things is happening. Either I've got a mole or mouse or something which died in there (barf) or I have a snake in there who took over a mouse or mole tunnel (not as barfy, but still not pleasant to consider.) I don't want moles or mice in my garden, although I wouldn't mind a king- or rat snake. They keep away mice and bad snakes, such as the copperheads I REALLY don't want to be tangling with. I'm not sure what to do about this...should I dig the bed up and risk running up on a snake or yicky dead things? This doesn't seem good for gardening...won't it pose a risk to our health? Blah. Maybe I should call the extension agency. Ideas?

Jeffrey got into the spirit of reusing while we were outside and went through the recycling bin until he found an old soda can. He got Will to help him cut out a piece of it and filled it with birdseed for a bird feeder. Will it work? No clue, but it was sweet that he came up with the idea all by himself!

Later that evening, Will and I were discussing the smell. Referring to my habit of tossing kitchen scraps directly into my beds in the wintertime, he said, "Yeah, all that rotting fruit and food seems like the ideal habitat for a snake."

My eyes didn't QUITE roll out of my head at this--um, YEAH, snakes are just MAD for some soggy carrot peelings--, but it was a near thing. I let it go, but I did go out this morning to take shots of our two respective areas of the yard.

Which looks more "snakey?"

My orderly, tidily-leafed garden


or his brush-cluttered, Christmas tree-piled, stacks o' wood-laden man camp?



That's what I thought.

A new kink has come into my plan to turn our yard into a semi-viable homestead--a piece of property at a crazy-low price. I'll be wigging out about it over at I'm Not Hannah later on.

Owls at Dusk

Late this afternoon, I spent some time winterizing my garden beds. I'm a bit late, I know, but better late than never, right? In any case, I gathered up the piles of fallen leaves, chopped up the pieces of fruit I chunk out whenever they go bad in my fruit bowl, crumbled the thrown egg shells, spread all of it out and then covered it up with the leaves. It looks all nice and tidy and I am proud of my little garden, but the best part of everything about today was this:

http://fsc.fernbank.edu/birding/bird_sounds/great_horned%20_owl.mp3

The entire time I was serenaded by Great Horned Owls searching for love. Being out in the warmish air, feeling the cool earth under my hands and knees, hearing the ethereal, plaintive calls was...magical.

Bad Biscuits and Fairy Houses

I have a problem making biscuits. As a Southern woman, this shames me. My potato salad is impeccable, I can whip up a cobbler in no time flat, I take pride in a perfectly seasoned pot of lima beans.

But...I cannot make biscuits.

My mother makes insanely good biscuits. Her recipe is simple: butter, flour, milk. And, like, magic fairy dust or something, because they are that good. But I can't make them. When I make them, they wind up sad little flat discs.

I have searched high and low for a good recipe. I've gone to the back of flour packages, baking powder tins, Allrecipes, craft forums, the list goes on and STILL I haven't found anything that comes close to Mama's biscuits. It drives me batty.

On Christmas day, I was in charge of the bread and I found this recipe. I followed it dutifully, although I was dubious about the insane wetness of the dough. I'm talking CRAZY wetness. The one diversion I made from the recipe was that I cut the biscuits a bit smaller than it called for. I wound up with these:I mean, seriously. Ar to the gh. They were peaked AND split in the middle. And while they tasted good, still...I don't think this is the recipe. Sigh.

The day after Christmas we went up to Cowtown and spent a lot of time out on the farm. I went out several times with my little digital camera and pretended to be a real photographer. (It's a pity that all of my favorite hobbies require pricey equipment.) I got a few shots that I really liked, including lots of fairy houses, as Will and I spent a great deal of time convincing Jeffrey that fairies were real. His pragmatism can be exhausting, but it inspires groovy pictures!

Green Thumb Sunday 3

Join

Things have been slow in the garden this week; the moon has been waning and the weather has been rainy and/or cold. But we're waxing next week and I'm going to start getting my cool weather veggies in. I'm a bit behind, but wanted to wait on the moon (plus, we had a hard freeze this week.)

In the meantime, here's a pic from last week's visit to Cowtown. This is a field thistle that found its home nestled in the lea of a hay bale. Not to sound like a photo nerd, but I really like the contrast of textures in this photo.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Green Thumb Sunday Two

Join

The first picture owes absolutely nothing to my personal green thumb, unless you count "not hacking the bush into bits" as gardening. It's a blossom from one of the gajillion azaleas in our yard. We figure they must be as old as our house--which was built in the early 1970s. The bushes themselves are around ten feet tall and they form veritable thickets of pink and fushia and white blossoms in the spring. It's all very lovely and every spring, I think to say "thank you" to the folks who had the good sense to plant so many of them.

The second picture owes even less to my intervention. These daffodils were planted well before my birth by the wife of the caretaker of the farm where my father (and I) grew up. Big Jim and his wife (whose name I'm not sure I ever knew) are long gone from the farm and might, for all I know, be gone from the earth, as well. But their daffodils still bloom in a rectangular drift along the fence line and have the sweetest scent of any daffodil I've ever sniffed. They bloom earlier, too: these have been blooming since Valentine's Day. If you look close, you might see the brown stippling caused by a frost that caught them unaware.

I'm labeling this post "Spring," even though the weatherman says the temperature will dip back below freezing by the end of the week and the solstice is still days away. I'm doing it honor of those folks from the past who seemed to know that I needed a bit of hopeful color after the past week.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Reworking the Garden, Day One

This is how my garden looked a couple of weeks ago as the year dragged itself toward spring.

In other words, like crap. The old compost heap container was a rotten, fireant-infested spider's paradise. The new compost bin was fine, but also ant-infested. The gardenia bush, which I adore, was overgrown and disease- and bug-ridden. The blueberry bush which I had rescued from the shady dog pen (former owners of this house? C-R-A-Z-Y.) was spindly and sad. I had yet to pull up the old tomato, pepper, or eggplant vines. The ground was littered with various oranges, banana peels, and other bits of stuff I had thrown out because I was too lazy or cold to go to the compost bin. And...there was lots of various trash abounding. Only the herb patch looked as an herb patch should.

Here's a shot of the gardenia bush. It is patentedly unfair for me to post this picture of my husband on the internet, because it might be the most unflattering picture of him ever taken in the history of pictures. But I wanted to show how big the bush was and he's 5'9" or so and there was NO way I was getting in front of the camera so...yeah.

About a month ago, I stumbled on The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith. I ordered it online and realized upon reading it that it could CHANGE MY LIFE. Or at least my gardening habits.

Basically, the idea is that raised beds and organic techniques equal higher yields for your garden. And given that I want to actually, you know, eat stuff from my garden this year, I was all about his method. The soil in my garden is wonderful in a small section and horrible in the rest of it with a few smatterings of good throughout. Not optimal for gardening, so we decided to build some frames and bring in topsoil to add to the beds we made. It would be an investment (around $300 so far), but it would also be a permanent solution to the unsightly and poorly yielding garden that made Will want to kill me every summer. With Imbolc showing us all kinds of possibilities, we got started.

After fetching the lumber (and, come to find out, vastly miscalculating the amount we would need, basically because we vastly mismeasured the garden--math is hard!), we set to work.

Will built the frames in his "workshop" while Jeffrey helped.

Meanwhile, I hacked at the gardenia bush. I felt a bit like an axe murderer (clipper murderer?) as I did so, but the truth is that without any intervention, my beautiful shrub is going to die. I was literally stuck in a whitefly carcass snowfall as I pruned. So gross. I hope that I haven't killed it and that in the spring it will come forth beautifully again. When I say hacked at, I mean it:

I also took down the old compost container and a rickety chicken wire fence that at no point in time supported the peas or cucumbers like I wanted it to. It did, however, serve as an excellent way for me to worry about my children poking their eyes out.

I also found the time to take this picture of a bird's nest I removed from the gardenia bush. The birds had long since departed--the thing was starting to fall apart. What smooshes me is the care with which Mama Bird built it...how she tenderly wound the soft thready things around the center to make a cozy spot for her babies. Nature has so much to teach us.

At the end of Day One, the garden looked like this:

I was well-satisfied and felt like we had done a lot of good work. It was a lovely way to spend a day with the family: we all got a bunch of exercise and fresh air. Day Two would have to wait out a cold front...