08.03.09
Posted in Being Better, Home Life, The garden at 2:08 pm by Beau
My garden is dying. It is true, even in the first of what I assume will be the dog-days of August when the fruits of gardening labor should be apparent, mine are not. The garden suffers thusly:
The cucumbers have refused to grow and vine up the trellises I’ve so carefully built and strung for them. While we’ve gotten a few cukes off of them, the yield versus the number of plants I put out is a pittance. There will be no 2009 Aunt Kitty Pickles this year, I’m afraid.
The tomatoes are limp-wristed, pale, spindly, and wither at the slightest glance. Even if I walk past them and try to look from the corner of my eye, they droop and will drop a leaf as if to say, “ooooooooh” and throw the back of a hand up to their forehead in some pre-fainting theater. It should have been obvious that so few blooms equal even less fruit.
The only other vegetable of note are the peppers which I say using the word “stunted” would be aggressive. They are almost knee high when they should be at my waist and while they appear to be a robust verdant shade, I’m wondering if there is even enough juice coursing through their leaves to hold them up against gravity. No worries about needing support cages for these poor things.
My theories about what has happened to my sad, pale plot of dirt comes down to several plausible and probably somewhat connected reasons:
The cold, wet summer of our discontent. This year in upstate New York, zones 4A-5, has been one of the coolest and wettest won record. As a human being of a certain make up and constitution, I’ve found having no 90-degree days and a moderate and tolerable level of humidity to be a surprising delight. Am am not of a beach constitution, do not like to sweat, and cannot find it in my brain (nor my Ohio-born and raised genes) to entertain an afternoon siesta, languishing through the heat and humidity of the day. I find it perfectly hellish and it flattens me into a whiny, complainer that I hate to be around. Also, I’m driven inside and usually end up baking something which heats up the kitchen and provides food which I’m now paying a lot of money to a very nice trainer to tell me not to eat. All that being said, I believe the heat and humidity is exactly what a garden is used too. Sure it might like a good steady rain throughout the week and especially through July and August but there needs to be some sun and heat and this year, there hasn’t been a lot of it.
Have I expended the very limits of my soil’s nutrients? Every year, I enrich the soil of my raised plots with aged compost. I do have limited areas for rotation which I’ve worried somewhat about but there is little I can do with limited space. That being said, adding hundreds of pounds of rich compost to each individual bed should more than make up for heavy feeders…or so the though goes around in my head. But now I’m not sure and will spend most of August research soil refurbishing techniques to try and figure out what I need to do this fall and next spring to zap the beds back to life.
Bees. They’re dying…I send a little money to different places to find out why and hope to turn it around but I can’t say that a dearth of bees in my back yard isn’t distressing me. Even the Lamb’s Ear are typically covered like an undulating carpet of pollen-brushed little buggers but this year, it goes untended.
A Loss of Vision and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike previous years, my heart just wasn’t in the right place for the garden this year. There was no obsessing over seed catalogues and laying awake at night to dream of a dense, moist garden that kindly wound it’s vines around my ankles as I walked through whispering, “This is good, this is good.” There was only desperation as the early spring became late spring and I realized I was going to be working through all summer and fall and would only have short weekends to care and love my garden. Can anything grow without attention? I hurriedly put out a few things but nothing that really made my heart sing or want to spend afternoons weeding and turning over leaves to pick off bugs and whatnot. And now the cucumbers, pumpkins, zucchini, and tomatoes are all dying of powdery mildew and fungus that is rotting them from the inside out.
So I stand on the outside of the fence looking inwards to the neglected beds and think better thoughts for next year. Perhaps a planting of winter wheat to help the soil and the addition of some other natural concoctions that will amend and give back what things might need. And more importantly, I’m going to find the vision again I had for the garden and do a little more and better planning next go around to keep it fresh and alive.
Permalink
05.22.09
Posted in Fun, Home Life, Movies, The Blog, The days, The garden at 2:59 pm by Beau
I’m on a conference call this morning and Jeff rushes in and is pointing outside. I get up, head still connected to my douchy headset and see Jeff pointing out the window at the bear who has lumbered out of the woods and over to our tree that has a bird-feeder in it. I’m wildly throwing things at Jeff like: the CAMERA and the VIDEO CAMERA. I believe, however, that Jeff is actually wanting me to “take care of it”.
-
It doesn’t take long for the bear to realize it’s being gawked at so it kind of lumbers on around our workshop and then Jeff hollers that it’s going for our trash we keep in there. He runs back into the kitchen and comes out banging two pots together which is about all the bear-instruction we’ve ever gotten living out here (other than ‘don’t approach it…it won’t be a friendly bear’) and I’m running after him, screaming “NOT THE CALPHALON POTS!!! DON’T BANG THOSE TOGETHER, YOU’LL SCRATCH THEM”.
So you know…it’s about priorities and safety at our place. Eventually the bear dropped the bag of trash it was going to start mauling and lumbered off into the woods. And now I have to order new Calphalon pots.
Permalink
05.03.09
Posted in Being Better, Fun, Home Life, The garden at 9:07 pm by Beau
I’ve been gardening just about every year since Jeff and I bought the house upstate eight years ago. When we first bought the house, the garden was actually already established by the previous owners and was some huge thing full of rows and rows as well as just about every cast-off piece of everything on God’s green earth. Additionally, there was a barrel of something that was foul and evil which I later came to find out was monkey poo which he had been getting from some research lab in New Jersey and using as manure. I’m pretty sure simian dookie isn’t supposed to be used as compost. I got rid of it right away.
When we enlarged our property footprint and, serendipitously, the above ground pool in the back yard collapsed, we moved the garden to the back yard, fencing in a nice plot that was a perfectly manageable size for me. It was at that time I discovered the Square Foot Gardening method which I’ve embraced whole-heartedly and had great success with.
I was out composting and mulching everything around the house this weekend, including the garden and really have it set up to start taking the plants next weekend. Cucumbers and tomatoes seem to be my two main priorities though I’m throwing in some beans, peppers, peas, lettuces, and try a few root veggies like beets, onions, and carrots.
But then again, I never really know. I’ve been known to stick in various extra flowers and just a bit of whatever I have laying around left over. There is some kind of vine with berries that has sprung up in the corner which I’ve let go these last few years and it adds a nice touch. Also, the 14-foot anaconda garter snake living somewhere in the rock pile in one of the corners let me know it was around while I was cleaning up debris left over from the winter on Saturday. Jeff and I are still debating whether I screamed like a girl or yelled like a startled, terrified man.
But it’s coming along and I’m all excited to have the season start.
Permalink
08.11.08
Posted in Home Life, Mom, The garden at 7:20 pm by Beau
Jeff and I have a spot in our backyard that has a particular circular pattern. This was the result of an above ground pool that came with the house when we bought it back in 2001. Two brutal winters in a row finished the pool off and we opted for a year-round hot-tub with deck rather than put a pool back in. The spot remained bare for several years, then we put the garden in but there was still a faint circular foot print that I’ve always wanted to do something with.
Two years ago, I planted some bee balm (mondara didyma Aquarius) along the hill which has spread nicely and filled in a crescent-shape, giving us the first hint of something else, something bigger that might make use of the existing pattern. We’ve also been focused on making the beds in the back yard friendly for butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds while trying to keep deer uninterested. So this weekend the ideas for the spot came together and we came up with the idea of a memory garden, filled with flowering plants to draw in my mother’s favorite butterflies and hummingbirds but also to give us some focus against the garden. So we put in a circular path of stones around a central stone and then continued the crescent of bee balm around the parameter. We have a bronze bird-bath/sundial combo coming for the center and lots more salvia, milk weed, bee balm, and butterfly bushes to fill in. I’ve also got creeping thyme seeds coming to sow between the stones because frankly, the idea of buying a ton of 3″ pots of established plants, cutting and dividing them up to stuff between the stones sounds perfectly horrific.
But the little thing that will only be significant to Jeff and I, and the reason we’re calling it our Memory Garden, is because we’re totally going there: we’re having a few stones engraved with significant dates in our life together: when we first met, when we first boffed one another (eerrr…see “when we first met”), our domestic partnership, the day we bought our home, and now in late September, our wedding date. We’re not typically schmaltzy boys but when we apply ourselves, we do it whole-heartedly which I sorta love.
Permalink
07.06.08
Posted in Cooking, Home Life, The garden at 2:39 pm by Beau
Permalink
06.07.08
Posted in Home Life, The garden at 3:15 pm by Beau
Jesus but it’s humid. It makes yard work hot and sweaty. Good for the health, I guess.
Permalink
05.27.08
Posted in Being Better, Home Life, The days, The garden, Word for the day, art, traveling for work at 8:12 am by Beau
I spent the weekend on my knees getting dirty. That can be taken anyway anyone sees fit and it would be true…or true enough, as it were.
Mark my words that come mid-August, it is best believed there will be some exhausted rantings about how fucking stupid it was to put out 20 Kirby cucumber plants, all for the love of pickles. I’ve warned Jeff already that him crying and whining about spending most of the weekends in August and part of September in the kitchen, over a hot stove sterilizing jars and boiling pickling brine will fall on very deaf ears. I just grow ‘em and do what I’m told. Seriously, mark it on your calendars.
The first summer naps of which I’m so fond was had on Sunday. Jeff’s mom spent the weekend with us and while we’d planned to do some shoping on Sunday and catch the new Indiana Jones flick, but by our 2pm departure, all three of us were cast in what probably looked like a fine funeral repose. All of us stretched out on the big new Pottery Barn couch/sectional thing we bought for the new screened in deck, snoozing away. I love the fact that I roused myself in the middle of it to find I’d stuffed my hand down Jeff’s pants right next to his mom. That’s how we roll with Charlotte. I would say this was a vast improvement over my normal routine where I’ve stuffed my hands so far into my armpits and clamped down with such force as to render both hands numb from a lack of circulation. At least in Jeff’s pants, I still had sensations…both in my hands and my pants.
So things grow. I put in a ton of periennials that I’d been meaning to do, trying to make the back flower bed off our porch into a butterfly and humming bird garden. Lots of cone flowers and black-eyed susans with a smattering of some different daisy varieties and a returning bed of bright red pom-pom’ed Mondara. I’m fearful that there is no good design in how I planted things but I think as long as they grow I’m content. I’m trying to slowly but surely kill my constant need for good design in everything because it renders me completely incapable of moving forward on any project.
I spent some time this weekend staring at the pig mural I painted on the side of our workshop. I’d link to the picture but it has once again escaped me to actually put the picture on some accessible media I could actually use. The closest I have is the pre-picture so imaginations will have to be used. I have visions and have actually researched on how to silk screen using a home-grown system. I think the mural would make a fine and spiffy t-shirt. Fine and Spiffy being my current direction in personal growth and flair.
Now I’m on that Tuesday-Feels-Like-Monday-After-A-Holiday schedule, riding the train back down to Philadelphia for work. All of which is still Fine and Spiffy with me, dirty or not.
Permalink
05.18.08
Posted in The days, The garden at 9:52 am by Beau
Everything must be mulched.
UPDATE: Everything has been composted AND mulched. Now things must be planted.
Permalink
08.27.06
Posted in The garden at 4:20 pm by Beau
I’m not taking about these bears (which I could use more of in my garden if I knew what brought them in), but instead I’m taking about these bears. I would say, and have said as I’m furiously knocking on wood, that I could have spent the summer dealing with a Noah’s Ark full of pesky, garden-munching, soul-crushing critters that foiled my green-thumb attempts at every turn but I haven’t really needed to. As it is, I’ve come to grips with the waves of deer and their fawns who had, up until last week, let the impatients planted around the house blossom and fill out to give it a quaint, cottage feel. Then those fuckers mowed them down entirely. But I’m not bitter, mostly. And that’s about it. The big fence around the garden has done its job but I actually also believe I just don’t have a critter problem. That fence wouldn’t keep out woodchucks, rabbits, or porcupines but I haven’t seen any evidence of them anyway. The chipmuncks and squirrels, while pervasive, simply eat the birdseed but they’re cute and we do have birds so it’s fine. But then there are bears.
We don’t see the bears usually come through our place, but this year, like clock work, they’ve come meandering through and just made a mess of things. Early May had them up-end a trashcan we’d left outside. No harm, no foul…that was our error and so we moved the trashcan in and that was then. Then about six weeks ago, a weekly sweep of our property by the bears took down and smashed every fucking bird-feeder we had. So far, we’ve gone through 7 gold-finch feeders and 5 regular bird-feeders. In an act of defiance, we suspended a regular feeder way up in a tree with a rope so that only the birds could get to it…until the bear climbed up and swipped the rope with its paw and dropped the thing to get at the seed. All that is fine, sorta, but our last remaining feeder, bolted to the corner of the garden was hit hard sometime last night and left for ruin. And the thing is, I’m all about nature. I wouldn’t even mind so much if they’d just do it while we were around so I could get it on film and post it on the blog. Is that too much to ask?
Permalink
Posted in The garden at 2:51 pm by Beau
I walked out into the garden this weekend to this. My GOD. The faithful, dutiful attention I’ve provided Le Jardin Beau all summer and now I have a garden plot so choked with overgrown aggression that I’m stymied. And for anyone who has read “The Ruins” this summer, you all will know exactly the creepy feeling I got when I was crawling on my hands and knees behind the tomato beds and a tendril of something ever so gently caressed the back of my neck. I practically SHIT myself. It says something when I’m sort of afraid to go into my own garden, I think.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be my mother’s son if I didn’t want my garden to be something for and about nature so I’m proud that I have a garden and flowerbeds attracting hummingbirds (even though the thick, heavy humming of the damn thing almost made me shit myself again because I couldn’t see what it was and thought I’d mucked around in a hornet’s nest). Here’s the close up if you can’t find Waldo.
My one and only strategy out of everything I’d planted this year, was to create a lush, flower-filled environment around our little fountain up on the deck. This is where I started and this is where we are today.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
