Weed Pullers

Under the concrete benches,
Hacking at black hairy roots,--
Those lewd monkey-tails hanging from drainholes,--
Digging into the soft rubble underneath,
Webs and weeds,
Grubs and snails and sharp sticks,
Or yanking tough fern-shapes,
Coiled green and thick, like dripping smilax,
Tugging all day at preverse life:
The indignity of it!--
With everything blooming above me,
Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,
Whole fields lovely and inviolate,--
Me down in that fetor of weeds,
Crawling on all fours,
Alive, in a slippery grave.
-- "Weed Puller" by Theodore Roethke

Last week I got out the push mower and attached the bag to it, determined to capture every last dandelion seed and commit it to the compost bin before it propagated to the remainder of the lawn and gardens--carbon footprint be damned! With teeth gritted and eyes stinging with sweat, I raced across the lawn decapitating thousands of the white fluffy horde. After several minutes I was surprised to find that the mower bag remained empty. I stopped the mower, removed the bag, and peered into its darkness. Nothing. Only then did I recall that I had not put in place the other attachment required to block the normal output for the clippings on the side of the mower. After a cursory search for said attachment in the garage, I resigned myself to the fact that the dandelions had won again. I had, in the end, merely assisted them in their evil plot to take over the ChemLawn-free lawns and gardens of the world. [Insert comically insane Dr. Evil laugh here].


In the annals of gardening and horticulture (and literature and religion), there is much discourse concerning the nature, relevance, and extermination of weeds. A search for weed quotes resulted in a cursory education on child-rearing, personal cleanliness, the nature of the Tao, mental health, morality, politics, Hallmark moments, Roundup, edible plants, and Theodore Roethke's poetry. The literature of Western culture is indeed thicker with weeds than my yard is with dandelions, yet I have to wonder whether that is any sort of consolation. How are we affected by being immersed in a culture obsessed with the elimination of potentially beneficial plants whose presence in certain locations we humans deem inappropriate, unsightly or downright evil?

I have known for sometime that dandelions are quite edible and that the young greens are a piquant complement to a salad. Moreover, I learned last week that one of my most prevalent garden "weeds," Plantago Major, is valued in many parts of the world for it's medicinal properties, as it has been proven to be a powerful coagulant and aids in abating infection and healing wounds. Perhaps there is a reason the weeds keep winning. I guess I'll withhold judgment at least until the dandelions show up again next spring.

Meanwhile, the Yugoslavian Red lettuce and Siberian Kale seem to have made amends. I think that's a young Lamb's Quarters hiding beneath the lettuce. Some quick research indicates that it too is edible and is in fact more nutritious than spinach, though it contains much more sodium.


We've eaten our first head of broccoli, and here's another one just beginning to form.


It looks to be a good year for strawberries if we keep them in water. This is a June-bearing variety, but if I were to do it over again, I'd definitely switch to ever-bearing just to give the chidren a few more weeks of grazing.


Maybe I'll come back to the "weed" question in the future, but I've run out of intellectual steam and need to get back to crawling on all fours in the fetor of work. Til next time...

A Weekend at Home, A Day at the Farm

What do I know of man's destiny?
I could tell you more about radishes.
--Samuel Beckett

A wonderful, long weekend with family, friends, and, of course, gardening. It was great to start things off Friday with an appetizer of asparagus and Cherry Belle radishes from the garden (below). Unfortunately, the accompanying caprese was made from bland grocery store tomatoes, which motivated me more than ever to get the real tomatoes in the ground.


I planted about 10 heirloom tomato plants in one of my gardens and got a number of peppers and some eggplants in as well. The real work took place at the family garden on Monday though. There, we've had the seed in for sometime, but we've had very little rain. Time for irrigation. Here's a shot of my brother-in-law running the sprinkler lines. We're pumping the water from a nearby pond rather than a well, so the plants benefit from the warmer temperature and added nutrients. The stakes in the foreground are for the beets, beans, carrots and onions. The beets and beans are up, the onion sets are doing well. (By clicking to enlarge the photo, you can get a better view of the plants.)


While the others worked on the sprinkler system, I put down the soaker hoses and transplanted 20 tomatoes and 25 peppers. We have a heavy, semi-permeable landscape fabric below the tomatoes which will be covered with a straw mulch, but still have to get in the support for the plants. We spent quite a bit of time hauling the rocks we had removed from the garden back in to hold down the fabric until the stakes are in place.


Below is a view of the length of the garden with the sweet corn coming up in the foreground. We've broken the plot up into approximately 60-by-60 foot sections. Beyond the sweet corn are the tomatoes, peppers, carrots, onions, beans and beets, then another plot of sweet corn followed by squash, cucumbers and zucchini. Beyond that is one more sweet corn plot and a pumpkin patch. Not quite an acre, but definitely enough to keep us busy and, one can hope, well fed.

On Axe Handles and Planting Peas with My Son

There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with--"
And he sees...

-- from "Axe Handles", by Gary Snyder

Ahhhhsparagus

Pray how does your asparagus perform?
-- John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail

Yes, the first asparagus spears showed up this week. Always cause for celebration in these parts. Typically the first bounty of the spring garden and there's no comparing it to the supermarket variety that is usually so stringy after its extended travels that it might double as dental floss. This bed is about four years old and seems to be doing quite well so long as I keep the neighboring strawberries at bay.


As promised, here's a shot of one of the two fledgling potato towers. Following the link will take you to the details, but essentially one adds boards and soil or mulch as the potatoes grow, compelling the plant to continue to produce potatoes along its height. I've heard it can be done with old tires as well, but I prefer to keep the petroleum products on the road and out of our food.


A pepper update. The peppers, egg plants and tomatoes are still inside under the lights. Peppers are doing very well. I had some curling of the top leaves and what I would describe as a red rash (still visible on some of the leaves in the photo) before they were transplanted, which was probably due to a trace mineral deficiency, but once they were transplanted to the larger pots, they rebounded and seem to be flourishing. Depending on nighttime temperatures, I'll probably start transitioning them to the coldframe outside in the next week or so.


And here's a shot of one of the four gardens. This was the first and is a brick terrace with two levels. In the front from left to right are onions, garlic, the asparagus bed, and the strawberries. In the background there is a mixture of early spring plants such as radishes, spinach, lettuces, swiss chard, broccoli, parsley, and kohlrabi (which I seem to have a hard time growing successfully).


We spent six hours today putting in a victory/family garden at my in-laws. That is where all the things go that require more space than I have here. The highlight, if successful, will be the half acre of sweet corn (Bantam and a peaches and cream variety). We also put in beets, peas, beans, onion sets, carrots, squash and zucchini. Pumpkins will go in soon, as will the tomatoes and peppers. The battle there will be keeping the rabbits, deer and raccoons away from the salad bar.

Happy Mother's Day.

A Good Day's Work

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-- Wendell Berry

Sunday was a good day on the suburban farmstead. A beautiful spring day offering sun burns all around and a steady wind up here on the hill that helps one better understand the sometimes fatal bouts of ancraophobia suffered by the early prairie pioneers. As much as I wanted to get some carrots in the ground, there was simply no way to do it without planting them in the rest of the county. So I resigned myself to moving heavier things like soil for the kids' gardens. I built two of these side by side with just enough room to mow between them (I won't be truly happy until there's no grass left to mow at all). I assembled them using recycled plastic TuffTimbers^TM from Landscape Structures. Oddly, without plants in them they end up resembling fishing junks more than raised gardens.




So, the boy wants to grow melons in his, but I'm getting concerned about the odds of that happening. The other day he said, "Dad, is that all you think about is gardening, gardening, gardening?" There's hope for my daughter's peas and carrots I think, but I'll be happy to utilize any space they are unwilling or unable to fill. Still looking for room for more tomatoes.

In the meantime, the Sugar Ann Snap Peas are popping up at the base of the trellis. (Sorry about that shot--I start to feel dizzy looking at it too.)

The broccoli continues to flourish in the cooler weather and do its part advertising for Food Club Sour Cream.

Rhubarb, the old faithful of bread and muffin perennials, seems to be enjoying the weather just fine.


And, finally, I'm looking forward to savoring the first French Breakfast Radishes with my Café au lait and croissant here in a few weeks.

I spent this evening putting in two potato towers for the Desiree and Purple Viking potatoes I ordered from Seed Savers Exchange. Rumors of rain over the next couple days (and the fact that potatoes should have been in a couple of weeks ago) motivated me to get that done. So scavenging some old redwood decking, building the first tier of the boxes, and getting the potatoes in took me right up to sundown and left barely enough time for this post and a shower. Picture of the towers will have to wait until the next installment.