Sculpin

I was going to move the birdhouse away from the clothesline for fear of disturbing any inhabitants. But now that bees have apparently taken up residence in the birdhouse, the intimidation is going quite the other way. For once I wish I could find my camera.

The chickens have turned one year old, which means that they’re officially hens rather than chicks or pullets.

One thing I’m often asked is whether we’re going to eat them when they’re done with the bulk of their laying. A year ago I would have said yes. Now, though, I know that we’re going to be running a home for geriatric chickens. I’ve gone soft. The chickens function the same way cats do in that one xkcd comic. “Who’s a chicken? Who’s a good little chicken? You are! Yes you are!”

This would have been a fine year to actually get around to putting the plastic on the hoop house frames. Oh well. A few plants do seem to have coped very well with being stuck under a foot of snow, and when the snow melts enough that I can get a better look at things, I’ll probably write about them at greater length at House of Cranks. Any day now.

Well, it’s been a month and my knees never really did get all that much better. I guess that means it’s time for me to haul my carcass in to physical therapy. Just as soon as I get dug out around here. Hmph.

It’s almost certainly my own fault for not letting my knees rest. They’ve been just good enough for me to stump around on them; it’s only bike riding that really obviously aggravates them. But I probably did them no good when I was building the latest incarnation of the compost bin.

The new compost bin is designed to insulate the compost somewhat over the winter, and it’s basically a three-sided structure made out of sod, reinforced (barely) with cheap plastic-covered steel rods, with inside dimensions of roughly 3′ x 3′ x 5′. Properly speaking, I should probably drive some pipes through the sod walls to increase air circulation, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m enjoying how ancient and Celtic it looks now.

MikeK asked me a while ago how my garden was doing. “Shit. Crap. Ugh,” is about what I said. I’d gambled on a moderate-to-good year this year in my garden planning, and did I ever lose.

And don’t get me started on the wacked-out C-to-N ratio of that compost I had delivered from Cedar Grove. It might not matter so much if our native dirt weren’t basically sand with rocks in. Josh and I have started collecting grounds from a coffee shop up the hill, the Blue Saucer, to help fix the situation. (We’ll be testing the soil acidity next spring, if you’re wondering.) You should have seen the look the owner gave Josh the first time she saw him packing the bags of grounds onto his Xtracycle. Super extra bonus hippie points!

But even the best soil would have done only so much for us this year. Brrr. I knew it was bad, all right, but this shocking news brings it home to me: the Tilth Harvest Fair is tomorrow, and the Tilth Tomato Tasting is canceled this year. Not even the black-belt vegetable gardeners at Tilth could produce enough tomatoes in this weather.

Even with this lousy year and that lousy soil, though, I’m still getting some good tomatoes from the Beaverlodge plant. That one’s a keeper.

I do occasionally wonder what the neighbors think. As when, for instance, I open the back door and rush out shouting, “Grawrr!! I kill you with my mind!”

Stupid squirrels, digging where they ought not be digging. Grawrr.

Josh just went outside to work on the bikes. His ensemble includes a wool hat, wool socks, and a thick wool overshirt. This is not my idea of June. We didn’t move into the southern hemisphere while I wasn’t looking, right?

It’s a lucky Seattle gardener who’s doing well this spring, and I’m not one of them. I’ve yet to catch much of a break in the seed-planting department. Planted cilantro and it snowed; planted basil and we got unusually cold, wet June weather. I’m rethinking this whole business of direct seeding. At least the chard seedlings have come through like champs. My new favorite plant, right there.

The chickens are almost three weeks old now. In theory, they should be ready to go investigate their new home very soon, and I’m becoming very ready to see them leave their corner of my office. Chicks do create a lot of dust and sometimes a lot of racket. But unless this weather straightens out, they’re going to be in the brooder a good long while.

This year I ordered tomato plants from Territorial Seed. Uh-oh! They arrive tomorrow. And is that bed ready for them? Will I be home much of tomorrow? Will I have enough time and energy to get that area prepared? Are they going to go in promptly? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Gahhhh.

I’ve been gardening like a fiend, though. I’m putting in a path to and around the chicken coop and basically regrading a significant part of the backyard, which involves moving a big hill of dirt that’s full of vile buttercups. (The buttercup is my nemesis. Or maybe I should reserve that title for the morning glory.) Can’t just drop ‘em on the compost heap, because they’re acting like noxious weeds. Can’t just drop ‘em in the yard waste, because the yard waste is close to its weight limit already. It’s a pain. I’m hoping the hot weather lightens the yard-waste load.

Alternate names for Ranunculus repens: devil’s guts, granny threads, ram’s claws, meg-many-feet, setsicker, sitfast, tether-toad. And then there are other buttercup names, some of which R. repens is likely to share: crazy, guilty-cup, blister-flower, blister-weed, hell-weed, pissabed, cursed crowfoot. (Thank you, Albert Brown Lyons!) Apparently I’m not the only person who’s ever disliked this stuff.

Week by week, more and more of the basic garden structure becomes a reality. And there’s actual soil! When I come inside from shovelling, I’m actually filthy! This is great news, because the dirt out there used to be a mixture of fine clay dust and sand with hardly any humus. It couldn’t even really get you dirty, just very dusty. I’ve been dumping organic matter into this place for years. At first you could hardly tell; I’d dump a load of compost and dig it in, and what I’d get is slightly darker, heavier dust. Now things are starting to hum along at last. The soil’s physical structure is finally getting to the point at which I’d consider it worth testing the nutrient balance and monkeying with it.

Sometimes when I garden, it strikes me that I’ve been making something that may well live on after me. Not the rocks or the vegetable beds, but the soil itself. It’s like I’m constructing and feeding an enormous quiet creature. Sometimes I take a moment and try to imagine/sense it as something like a living tissue.

Speaking of the P-Patch, last year we planted two artichokes there; then we dug them up in fall and brought them home in a tub, intending to transplant them. Instead, we forgot about them, and the tub sat on the patio for six months, cold and dry and completely ignored. I was shocked a few days ago to discover that the artichokes were still alive and putting up leaves. So I transplanted one today. What do you want to bet I kill it now? [ETA: Yeah, that thing's looking like death warmed over, if not worse. Weird.]

Late last fall I put the worm bin in the shed, gave it a fair amount of food scraps, and more or less forgot about it. Josh put a stack of very heavy chipboard sheets in front of it so we couldn’t really get to it. (Those sheets were supposed to be moved and used in October. That’s another story.) It wasn’t until the other day that I got a look at what was inside.

A whole lot of very fat and healthy-looking worms, that’s what was inside. That worm colony came through with flying colors.

So, if any of you Seattle folks want to start your own worm bin this spring, I have a few handfuls of worms to give away.