Garden 13 Jun 2006 02:24 am
garden update
I’ve almost done it. I’ve gotten all the pebbles out of the path between the two original raised beds, as I’d hoped; there are just a few left scattered around the outside of them. I’ve almost finished levelling that path and another one, and I’ve roughed out an additional bed. It’s all starting to come together. And did I mention that I’ve moved 2500 pounds of large rocks, dung-beetle fashion? Yowch. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the bathtub soaking in an Epsom salt solution.
With the new bed in place, I’m starting to get a sense of how the whole yard will look when I’m done. I’m still not sure where I can put a large compost bin; there’s one reasonably good spot, but I suspect we’ll be putting a bicycle shed there instead. I really do want to snag the fabulous compostables from Espresso Ulysses, but where they’ll go, I couldn’t yet tell you.
About half a decade ago, my friend Jim in San Francisco introduced me to the exboyfriend I like the very least. That guy had some sort of roaring Angel/She-Devil complex, and after we (fairly swiftly) broke up, he yowled to everybody he knew, not excepting Jim, that I was evil incarnate. My villainy has become a running joke between Jim and me. Gardening is not exempt from my wicked tendencies. The new garden bed, built on the corpses of innocent plants, will grow winter vegetables, the vegetables of evil: kale, chard, maybe some kohlrabi. (I am just about desperate enough in mid-winter to eat kale.) Maybe some walking onions. Or perhaps I’ll relent a bit and just plant four kinds of garlic. That could be its own kind of evil, I am sure.
Though it’s not exactly a half-flooded underground lair with an army of giant robotic amphibious badgers doing my vicious bidding; oh, well, a girl can dream. Start small, work my way up. Maybe next year I’ll plant Bloody Butcher corn and La Ratte potatoes.
In flower: Alderman peas, peonies, roses, mock orange, pansies, volunteer sweet peas. Forming buds: eggplant, All Blue potatoes. Ready for harvest: Tom Thumb and freckled lettuces, arugula, Cherry Belle radishes. Growing slowly: all the carrots. (Grow, damn you!) Unhappy: dill. Taking over everything it can reach: wisteria, horehound.
on 13 Jun 2006 at 5:14 am 1.Joy said …
Wow – good on you! It sounds magnificent.
Watch out for the wisteria – I keep hearing it’s particularly fierce this year.
on 14 Nov 2006 at 10:37 am 2.Sculpin » Floods and the farmers market said …
[...] I wound up buying some greens I’d never heard of before. “Perpetual spinach” is a sort of spinach-like chard. It tastes to me like a mature spinach crossed with a little sorrel. The market was fairly picked over when we got there, but there were still lots of beautiful bunches of this mysterious stuff that nobody was buying, presumably because they’d never heard of it either. I also got some kale from Whistling Train which is notable mostly in being so delicious that I’d eat it raw. Seriously fantastic. And it’s kale, as in “I am just about desperate enough in mid-winter to eat kale.” [...]