Tales from the garden

My garden has been neglected this spring. 

A very wise mentor of mine recently told me to leave myself room to fail—and I have! I have approximately 72 square feet of failure in the front yard (plus, you know, the rest of the yard)!

Sure, the annuals we planted have been pulling their weight. And little bits of zombified compost have popped up through the soil, reanimated tendrils lurching toward trellises—they're sure to offer us a surprise harvest of sorts. And friend who started too many tomatoes offered me her leggy cast-offs.

So it's all chaos out there, but that's okay because it's a beautiful, wild failure.

*****

The same friend who gave me the tomatoes gave me some clustered mountain mint last year.

When I say friend, you should know that this friend and I met on the Buy Nothing Group and our entire friendship is just...the exchange of plants and advice. And it's mostly me taking because—let's face it—my garden is pathetic and I need all the advice I can get.

She's been trying to increase the number of local plants in her garden—mountain mint being one of them. 

Like most mints, mountain mint is a prolific spreader, but it's less of a problem because the shoots it sends out tend to not root very deeply, so it's controllable. Also, it's native, not invasive. 

That mountain mint took to our hillside like it was coming home after a long day and has spread significantly since I planted it at the end of last summer. And that's fine by me. Bees love it—wasps and butterflies, too. It smells delicious.

"Is it edible?" Rachel wanted to know.

"I don't know," I told her. "Most varieties of mountain mint are, from what I've researched. But some aren't and..."

Long story short, Rachel picked a leaf and ate it. 

And she didn't die. And she didn't get sick. 

Watermelon, Sunflowers, and Pollinators

Watermelon is usually pretty good on its own, I think. 

Andrew, on the other hand, doesn't ever think watermelon is good.

Everyone else in our family enjoys watermelon, though, so in the summer Andrew will often pick up a watermelon when he does the grocery shopping (because he does the grocery shopping at our house). He won't typically cut it (though he has on occasion), but he will buy it for us. 

I have never succeeded in growing one, though we had some butternut squash volunteer in our yard this year (from the one time Andrew made butternut squash soup, I guess) and it is going wild. Well, the vines are, anyway. We've got a couple of lovely butternut squashes developing, but that's all. 

I can't imagine a more beautiful thing

We planted corn this year.

I don't think we've tried corn since we once tried it in North Carolina..and things didn't work out well for us. I think a big storm came through and flooded our garden and all our corn fell over and...that was the end of that.

Things went much better this year. Our stalks grew nice and tall...and then they got tassels...but I saw no silks anywhere. So I was a little worried we weren't going to get any ears of corn at all. But then my silks started appearing and I began instead to worry about pollination. We went out and did some hand pollinating, but I honestly think the tassels were simply too far spent to have that do much good. 

Still, we got a couple of lovely (little) ears of corn:

June is busting out all over!

Rachel just got home from babysitting (at 10 til midnight—and a good thing, too, because in Georgia 15 and 17 year olds can't drive between midnight and 5 am), so I suppose it's a good time to disclose how much of a secretary I feel like lately!

My phone has been off the hook with requests for my kids to puppy-sit, plant-sit, and babysit. Not to mention tutoring. And Benjamin's trying to start up a garbage can washing hustle.

"Can Zoë come over tomorrow at 2 to tutor?"

"Can y'all do puppy duty Monday and Thursday this week?"

"Any chance one of your girls is around on Saturday afternoon and wants to babysit?"

It can be a little chaotic to coordinate everything. Throw in daily swim practices and weekly swim meets (we just got home from the swim meet at 10:45 this evening), girls' camp (which Rachel and Miriam just got back from), music lessons, and the fact that Andrew has an actual job and I have some writing projects to finish up before the school year starts and...it's a real circus over here!

I thought I would share a few pictures of the more ordinary parts of our lives. The pictures are in reverse order (newest to oldest) because that's how they showed up when I imported them and I...don't want to take the time to switch everything.

My corn is flowering!

Disturbing the peas (and other tales)

I'm working on putting a little fence around our garden, with the goal of keeping various critters out of it—deer mostly...perhaps the occasional rabbit...oh, and Phoebe!

Here's Phoebe disturbing the peas:

Once freshly planted in straight, tidy rows, our peas are now destined to be a "chaos crop," and will truly have follow the adage of blooming where they were planted (wherever that may have ended up being).

Storms of the Past (a guest post by Alexander)

We tried to go to the pool today. According to the forecast we had a good hour before the impending storm hit us, and from looking at the sky that seemed to be the case! It had rained a little earlier in the day, but then cleared up a bit. So, we headed over to the pool, stopping on the way to pick up a couple of items from the Buy Nothing Group.

 

What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good deal!

We picked up a dart board—because I thought Benjamin would love it. Andrew thought I'd lost my mind when I first told him that I had scored a dart board. But I assured him the darts were plastic...so not in any way lethal...and he felt much better.

Still, we put it up with the cement wall of our foundation behind it (rather than hanging it on any sort of drywalled area). I don't know how much we needed to worry about our walls, however, because Benjamin threw a bullseye!

What a good shot!

Who hit the 20 at the top of the board? Well...me. 

But I also threw the one that's really close to the bullseye (in the triangle part of the 12).

I'm nothing if not unpredictable. 

I knead this to be over!

The kids and I were sitting at the table having lunch and discussing Shakespeare (we're reading A Comedy of Errors at the moment) this afternoon when we heard Andrew say from the kitchen, "Alexa, how much time is left on the timer?"

We knew he had dough proofing in the oven; he'd planned to make pretzels for dinner. 

His pretzels are the best.

"You have two minutes remaining on your ten minute timer," Alexa told him.

"UGH!" he moaned. 

Everyone at the table exchanged looks. It's not usual for Andrew to be so emotional.

"Pretty sure you'll survive two minutes," I said, my voice dripping with fake sympathy.

"But I'm so tired!" he huffed. 

Everyone at the table exchanged looks again. Because literally what was his plan at...noon. Nap time?

Now, this is rich coming from a lady who treasures an afternoon nap with her toddler nearly every day. I see that. But, like, seriously, Andrew doesn't usually nap in the middle of the day. And would two minutes really throw off any napping plans that he evidently had? 

He can be so weird sometimes!

*****

Gonna make my garden grow

We finally got around to getting the garden ready. I suppose that's one upside to having moved to a colder climate—a few extra weeks of procrastination (if we had waited until now to plant our garden in Durham it would surely have been too late for peas, but I think we're still within the window for this hardiness zone).

Here's a cute picture of Alexander and Zoë in the "car cart" at the hardware store:

Gardening

Remember last year when I was so worried about the garden? I was seriously afraid nothing would grow or that I'd do it all wrong or...I don't even know what all I was worried about. But I was certainly worried about it.

Andrew can tell you about how worked up I get over stuff.

This year, though, I didn't spend a lot of time stressing about the garden. I planted stuff. I waited for it to grow. We've already harvested some radishes. It looks like we'll be able to try some lettuce soon.

V-Day, Paddy's Day, Snow Day

Today is St. Patrick's Day so what better day to talk about Valentine's Day, right? I'm only a month (and three days) off. To be fair, Andrew was a little late delivering but that was only because it snowed on Valentine's Day and we were "snowed in." As luck has it we're "snowed in" again today (there's a three hour delay for school tomorrow) so it's even more appropriate to reminisce about Valentine's Day.

Here's all the snow we had this afternoon:

They cancelled soccer practice for this

Hives and carrots

We're still battling hives today. They've moved off his tummy and are now on his sides, arms, legs, and back. And he's a little less happy about them. I'm trying to get up the courage to try an oatmeal bath, perhaps before bed to help soothe his skin (because he hasn't been sleeping well).

Gladioli

Shortly after Easter I planted 20 gladiolus corms in our garden and then waited anxious for them all to send shoots up through the ground. I nervously counted them every time I walked past the garden. Once all the leaves were out I nervously waited for each of them to blossom, inspecting the stalks each day for signs of flowers. They certainly staggered their entrances, probably trying to keep me antsy for as long as possible!

All of them bloomed, though, and they were beautiful while they lasted. Recently they've been doing much more withering than blooming so today while I was outside waiting for Rachel's bus to arrive I finally got around to digging them up.

In truth it took me quite a while longer than simply waiting for her bus. I was still digging when the sun went down (at 5:15 PM (thanks a lot, daylight saving time)). It was a lot of work, especially with Benjamin "helping" (by throwing clods of dirt and rocks, by upsetting my bucket of corms, by running off toward the street and making me dash after him, by stealing my trowel, etc.) but the sunset was beautiful!

I did a little research before I started digging because I'm still pretty new to this whole gardening thing. I knew that I was supposed to dig them up when they started to yellow but before they turned all the way brown and I knew that they'd grow a new corm on top of the old one and that I'd have to pull them apart so I could keep the new corm and discard the old one. Other than that I was clueless.

So, I pulled my first gladiolus corm out of the ground and was rather perplexed to find two corms beside each other. The new corm, you see, is supposed to grown on top of the old one. I was like, "How am I ever going to figure out which is the old one and which is the new one?"

Gladiolus

Last night Andrew and I made pickles because if there's one thing in my garden that's growing well, it's cucumbers. Andrew got me a canning set...for my birthday, I guess...because we've been wanting to learn how to can things like peaches and applesauce and baby boys and such.

Gardening

After nine days vacationing following a week or two of deck reconstruction (during which we ignored our lawn and garden), we were greeted by a veritable jungle when we arrived home. We ignored it all day again yesterday, due to its being the sabbath, but took a machete to it with vigor and vim this morning (after a luxurious post-vacation sleep in, of course). And, actually, we don't own a machete so what we actually took to it was a lawn mower and a garden hoe.

Andrew spent nearly three hours mowing the lawn because we have a rinky-dink (but easy on our wallet and the environment) reel lawn mower. Grass spiders, large and small, were fleeing before the blades. And then a ginormous, muscular, hulking spider ambled out from the wild weeds and sought refuse on a pile of neglected deck stuff.

One man's trash

My friend Kim is moving in just a couple of weeks. We've been borrowing her baby bouncer (for bigger babies) for several months and she's been borrowing our baby bouncer (for littler babies). We're going to have to trade back sometime next week (technically I just have to get hers to her; she's keeping mine until the day they fly out). I'm kind of sad about this because it's been so, so useful!

Today Benjamin joined me outside to do some work in the garden. He wasn't supposed to. He was supposed to be napping but he got woken up (by Miriam who decided to play drums using a metal mixing bowl and butter knives) so I hung some towels up to dry to make a little shade tent for him and he bounced in his bouncer while I worked.

Sustainability

I've been diligently working away at planning that garden of ours. Mostly I've decided not to be very adventurous and have been researching easy-going plants that are almost guaranteed to thrive in our area. Growing anything at all is ambitious, right? I mean, I haven't done this before. I don't want to overdo it.

On the other hand, if I set up something super easy and still fail...how's that going to make me feel?

On the other, other hand, the poinsettia I adopted at the ward Christmas party is still alive (and thriving) two months later so I don't kill everything* I try to grow (see, Andrew?).

On the other, other, other hand, it's possible it's fake. I mean...it's still alive so obviously something fishy's going on here.

While I was researching difficult-to-kill plants the other day I came across a bulleted list of plants. I can't find the list I was looking at before (I'll have to re-research it...nuts) but it went something like this:

• beans
• zucchini
• cilantro/coriander
• sunflowers

My eye was immediately drawn to the cilantro/coriander bullet because that's two things, not one. Duh. Someone obviously missed hitting the 'enter' key. 

Besides, we'd already ordered a "Culinary Herb Set" that included cilantro in it. Andrew forbade me to plant it. He hates cilantro. But, I reasoned, we have the seeds...and they grow (the internet said so). We don't have to eat it. We can leave it to flower, further justifying my claim that it's a legitimate flower garden, not a flower garden disguised as a vegetable garden (or a vegetable garden disguised as a flower garden).

Andrew just bought coriander so that he could make falafel, so I looked that up and...

Coriander is cilantro!?

I told Andrew this and he had a major "Luke, I am your father"** moment.

Yep, it turns out "coriander" and "cilantro" come from the very same plant—Coriandrum sativum. But coriander is a spice (because it's the seed of the plant) and cilantro is an herb (because it's the leaves). I learned that this past fall, actually, at an herb garden class that I attended (which ignited enough ambition to order packets of seeds...which have yet to be planted). I didn't learn that coriander and cilantro were the same thing, necessarily, just that spices and herbs aren't interchangeable terms.

"Ugh! Why do people even plant the seeds then? I mean...you already have the seeds. Why not just use them and avoid cilantro altogether?" Andrew asked, repulsed at the very idea of cultivating such a vile plant.

"That's an idea," I said sympathetically. "But if everyone did that, then we'd run out of coriander pretty fast, wouldn't we?"

"Oh, yeah," Andrew conceded, lowering his emotional 'Down with Cilantro!' picket sign.

"It would be The Lorax all over again," I soothed. 

We need th-ilantro. 

We need its th-eeds, for cilantro seeds are a fine thing that all people need.

*I can't find a record of this...but I managed to kill that sago palm before Rachel was even born. That's...less than three months from the time we got the plant.

*Misquoted. Because Star Wars isn't my favourite (it's too pew-pew-pew).