Water, Water Everywhere

This afternoon it’s rainy and a little chilly outside, not unusual for March by any means. In fact, I’m glad to see the rain because we’ve had so little of it this season. Back in the mid-70’s we had a drought here in Northern California and learned how to ration our water use. Lawns died, cars got dirty, we were encouraged to shower with a friend, and to flush only when completely necessary. It’s shaping up to be a drought year again, starting now, even with all this rain.

A couple years ago, after much searching, we installed a gadget on our shower that allows a momentary water shut-off for soaping up without having to readjust the temperature every time. All winter I forget it’s there and, honestly, I’m not going to turn off that lovely warm water when it’s chilly in the house. But come summer, I’ll put that valve to use. It’s a gallon or two saved, a good start, but not enough.

What I’d really like to install is a grey water system. Watching the amount of water that runs down the drain makes me think there’s got to be a better way to use this expensive resource. We talk about it when the water bill comes in, or when we’re at the local farm supply store looking at giant water tanks, which makes me also wonder about capturing run-off from the roof during the rainy season.  I think about that every time I hear water pouring through the downspouts.

We live in a modern, suburban house with a concrete pad foundation; moving and rearranging pipes isn’t an option. And our neighbors probably wouldn’t be happy to see a storage tank of any size adorning our yard. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen someday. We’ll need to be creative about it, possibly setting up several small barrels to catch both grey and rain water and tucking them into the landscaping plan.

These days my incentive for turning off the tap and taking shorter showers is more complex than hearing my father yell about it. It’s my pocket the water bill gets paid out of, and a greater awareness of resource management propels creative and thoughtful use of household utilities. Drought or not, it’s worth considering alternatives.

Prepping the Garden Beds

It’s time to prepare the garden beds for spring planting. We’ve poured bags of compost into the beds, turned the soil and covered it with sheets of newspaper again. It’s not pretty, all that newspaper weighted down against the wind with rocks and tree limbs, but it works. The weeds don’t get a chance to take root and the neighborhood cats won’t do their business where they can’t dig. And it’s cheap. When it’s time to transplant our seedlings I’ll peel back enough paper to plant, letting the remaining newspaper stay in place to continue keeping weeds and cats out of the bed.

The tomato seeds went into seed trays yesterday and the basil this morning. Our green bean seedlings have grown startlingly fast. It’s the first time I’ve started seeds indoors and I’m surprised at how quickly they germinated and grew. There’s a forest of green beans in my kitchen and by the time the last frost is past and the soil warm enough to plant they’ll be sturdy beanstalks.

We dug up last season’s parsley (that wouldn’t grow then, but looks healthy now) as well as a large clump of sage and moved them from wine barrels to beds. Lemon balm that wanted to escape its box is now confined to a planter on the patio.

(Here's a potato we found in a barrel when we dug out the sage.)

By the middle of next month the garden will be in full swing and my hands will be full of dirt. I can barely wait.

Progress

I must be getting better at this gardening thing; today I picked up a snail with my bare fingers.

The Worms Crawl In ...

This post is about worms. You can skip it if you’d rather. My feelings won’t be hurt. Worms are gross. They make my skin crawl. Yeah, I know they’re useful, vital even, to soil and decomposition. Worm castings - poop - cost a fortune at better nurseries. At the local “beyond organic” farm where I buy the best tomatoes in the world (yeah, really) they sell small bags of worm castings for ten bucks a pop. I’m quite sure its worth that price, but … really? Worm poop?!?

So, here’s my dilemma. I compost in two bins in the backyard. One is kind of basic, a plastic box with a hinged lid. The other is pretty swizzle. It’s a giant plastic ball with twist on/off lids at both poles. We call it “The Death Star”. Looks just like the big evil thing in Star Wars that the good guys blew up. We roll it around the yard to mix the contents, helping yesterday’s veggie scraps break down a bit faster. I love composting. It makes all kinds of sense to me: from the earth and back to the earth.

This is where the part about worms comes in. Composting with worms is faster. Those little critters are dirt factories. Garbage in one end, soil out the other. It’s a fascinatingly basic process. Except for one little bitty thing. (See first paragraph.) They gross me out. I want a worm bed. I want to feed worms as many of my kitchen scraps as they’ll eat. I just don’t want to see or (dear god) touch them.

Last week, while emptying the kitchen bucket (which is really an old, plain cookie jar) into the composter, I found a lone earthworm crawling along the rim of the bin, just where the lid needed to be fitted back on. I gathered up my gut and, with the edge of a paper towel, encouraged him to wiggle back into the bin. I even spoke to him in a kind and gentle voice, which brought my husband out of the garage to remind me that worms have no comprehension of human language. No matter. I hadn’t retched; it was a milestone moment.

Two nights ago, while doing a last sweep through the kitchen and family room before heading off to bed, I spotted a twig on the floor. We’d both been in the backyard earlier in the day and sometimes track things into the house. I bent over to pick it up … and it moved. There was an earthworm in my house. Inside. My. House.

I’m sure I’d have dealt with the situation if I’d been home alone. At my last house I’d had to remove potato bugs from the living room a couple times, and I’m telling you, you could die from ugly with a potato bug. But, thankfully, my husband was home and he’s not bothered by worms. He carried it outside to the front yard where it is, I’m sure, contentedly doing whatever it is that makes worms happy.

Which brings me back to the fact that though I really like the idea of worm beds, I’m just not quite there yet. Maybe someday, but my skin with have to stop crawling first. It’s going to take a while longer.

Rocks, Roots and Clods

Gardening isn’t for sissies. We’re learning that with our backs. We've pulled lots of rocks, a network of old roots, and solid dirt clods out of the yard. The rocks and dirt go into the backyard to raise low spots. Then we dig, dig some more, mix good, new soil with old in the wheelbarrow, shovel it back in around the new plant, pat it down, repeat. So far we’ve repeated this process 26 times, not counting the two flats of ground cover that we cut into more than twenty little squares each and followed the same steps.

The dirt (I hesitate to call it soil) in our yard is adobe, a dense clay that just dares a plant to grow. It has to be amended in order to break it down into something that will drain properly and have the right mix of nutrients for our new plants. Of course, everything we’ve chosen for the front yard requires good drainage.

If When the plants take root they’ll be low maintenance, colorful, and fragrant. Our front yard will be the best smelling in the neighborhood. We’ve put in a variety of salvias, rosemary, a couple kinds of lavender, lambs ear, and lemon verbena. They’ll grow tall and lush and we’ll be glad to have worked so hard to help them along.

One Of These Things Doesn't Belong

Last night we learned an important gardening lesson: do not cook and eat a vegetable you can’t positively identify. An adventurous attitude is a good thing to have – it can lead to all kinds of wonderful experiences. At least, that's what we hope.

So, when several plants started coming up in the garden beds we decided to let them grow and be surprised at harvest time. It made sense. We knew what we’d planted in the past, and had a pretty good idea of what we’d put into the compost bin. The first surprise was that so many seeds survived the composting process and began growing when we spread compost into the beds. We stood over those little seedlings many mornings guessing what they might be. Cantaloupe, zucchini, pumpkin?

Yesterday we delightedly harvested potatoes, green beans - which we'd actually planted, and some strange squash we hadn't. We were pretty stoked to get so much of our meal from our very own garden. Weren’t we clever and headed for great gardening success.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

The wine was poured, our meal plated, we toasted our bounty, and took a first bite. I don’t know which of us made it back to the kitchen to spit it out first. Holy god, what did we just eat? I’ve never tasted anything so bitter. Swigs of wine, chunks of bread, and a dip into the sugar bowl were required to get rid of the taste.

Turns out I’d forgotten about the gourds I’d tossed into the composter a couple years ago. Gourds are vile tasting. You should never cook and try to eat a gourd. Lesson learned. We ripped out the plants this morning.

I Spoke Too Soon

It seems this was leaking for a long time. Explains why our water bill is so high. It's fixed now. (I hope.) Did I mention that we're on vacation? Working in the yard, hauling ass let me tell you, and calling it vacation. It's a good thing we love working around the house.

A Work in Progress

This is how our front yard looked at the end of the first day of work. The lawn was torn out and later hauled away.

A couple days later the messy trees were gone, the walls built, and extra soil was ready to spread.

And then this happened.

And this.

This morning my husband repaired the last (we hope) of the broken pipes and found all the buried (!!!) sprinkler heads. Then we planted chamomile, creeping thyme, lavender, and Russian sage. There's lots still to do; more plants to plant, tons of bark to spread, trellises to build. It's good.

In & Out of the Garden

Once again, I have no pictures to post today. What I do have is fourteen jars of plum jam cooling on the kitchen counter. It’s the last of our plums supplemented with store bought and gift plums from a friend. It’s a little tarter (is that a word?) than usual, but I like it. A lot. It’s going to be delicious with peanut butter.

In landscaping news, our front yard is ready for planting. Now we get to do the fun part – picking out plants, laying out the garden, digging in the dirt. I’m thinking lavender, salvia, butterfly bush, yarrow. That should get us started.

There will be pictures this weekend. Stay tuned.

Bzzzzz...

It’s been a hive of activity here at Wild Plum Cottage during the past few weeks. We’ve been painting, watching the garden grow (although the only thing I’ve harvested so far is six green beans – yeah, six), and working on the front yard.

We realized, after three back-breaking weekends, that there’s no way we can re-landscape the front yard by ourselves. So we hired someone to do it for us. What luxury. We’ve had a crew of three guys tearing out lawns, shrubbery, and small trees for two days. Tomorrow they’ll start working on terracing and laying bricks. After that they’ll lay out the drip system. Then we’ll pay them and do the planting ourselves. It’s going to be beautiful. There’ll be before, during, and after pictures when we’re done.

In the midst of all this busy-ness I’ve been canning like a fiend. The chocolate cherry wine sauce turned out amazingly delicious, but I’m not sure it’s safe to can. I put three jars through the water bath, admired them for about a day, got the willies, popped the seals, and refrigerated them. Botulism is a bad thing, and I don’t know enough about acidity to trust my own made-up canning recipe. But if I find out it’s a canning-safe recipe I’ll be slamming it into jars as fast as possible, because, honestly, it’s the best damn thing I’ve ever cooked. (And you, Miss Amber, will be first on my list of recipients.)

In The Garden

The duck that came to visit for a week.

A Sunday morning worth of yard cleaning.

Soaking Up The Sun

The weather was astoundingly beautiful this past weekend, sunny in a way that warms you all the way through. I can’t complain about the weather, because, really, it’s California after all. Not that we don’t have our share of rain. And then it rains some more. And then the news people start talking about flooding and landslides. Our winters can be pretty soggy. But it’s Spring now and Sunday was perfect. It was worth waiting for all Winter.

We were at the garden supply store before they even opened and sat for a while in the parking lot with our mugs of tea, planning our garden. We bought soil to amend the raised beds and enough vegetables and herbs to get a good start. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty easy to over-buy, and then you’ve got 27 tomato plants and enough parsley to supply half the town. We restrained ourselves and bought just two Roma tomatoes, but still more parsley than we’ll ever need, along with a couple tomatillo plants, green beans, and basil. You can probably see where this is going – I’ll be freezing and canning what we don’t eat straight out of the garden. (I might get another tomato plant or two, just because.)

By noon we’d weeded all the raised beds, turned and moved the compost bin, replanted a struggling rosemary, and my husband made good use of the tiller he bought a couple months ago. The veggies are sitting in the kitchen in front of a big window – the weather turned yesterday with rain and a chance of hail. We’ll plant them later in the week.

Tending a garden calms me; it reminds me to stay in the moment while looking hopefully to the future. Besides, there’s nothing that tastes as good as a homegrown tomato.

What have you planted this year? How does your garden grow?