Here it Comes

Finally. I think it might finally be spring here in the Heartland.  So many things to do suddenly.

Like mowing the lawn.  I need to find the charger for my mower and make sure the batteries still work.

The really good news is I can finally start planting the gardens for the year.  We're scaling back a bit this year in an effort to maintain sanity whilst the changes keep rolling in.  Gearing up for a move and the demolition of the old homestead this summer along with planning for festivals and farmers markets has left me with little time for anything else.  So we scale back a bit.

Next year we hit it hard, I hope.

Anyway...here's a gratuitous pic of my onions-to-be.  Every year I try to start seeds. They sprout then die.  So, I go out and buy sets because I can't find plants anywhere.  Then I find plants and buy those, too.  I'm hopeless.  But I will have tons of green onions for the farmer's market, so there is that.

The onion plants in the front are a mere fraction of the whole bunch of onions I got.  I pick out the biggest and the best for nurturing into larger bulbs.  The tiny ones go in the ground for spring salad onions.  I have Red Candy, Candy Hybrid, and Walla Walla this year.  The bulbs are the standard big box store variety.

My seedlings are getting way too big to be in the house.  I will remedy that over the next week or so:

These peppers want to flower!

The tomatoes are way too big.

Some of the plants will probably not make it outside.  For example, this basil is getting big enough to harvest fresh for a meal.  At this stage, it probably won't harden off well and will sun scald or be stunted by the transplant so I'll direct seed some more outside. I might try potting them up to a bigger container and see how long I can keep them going in the house.

 That's it from The Slice for this week!

Working the Night Shift

I have a night off from work unexpectedly.  Things change in the production world and I have to change with them.  So I'm off tonight and working Saturday night instead.  I guess it's okay.  I slept roughly 10 hours straight so I must have needed it, right?

Right!

So I'm up and at 'em and wide awake tonight.  It is just after 4:30 am.  I have managed to get caught up on most of the things I have been wanting to get done for the last week. 

• I up-potted my garden seedlings.
• I did some research on a couple of new things I want to add to my bath & body line-up.
• I made two more batches of soap.

Joyful Squid up top and Extra Stout below.

So far I've made a fresh batch of Ahimsa, Kismet, Swedeberry, Sowing the Wild, Lumberjack, Joyful Squid, Extra Stout, and a new offering--Grungy Gardener.  Grungy Gardener is an old/new soap flavor with added ground cardamom for a little bit of scrub power.  It works great to get the grime off your hands after a hard day's work in the garden.

Grungy Gardener.  Smells wonderful and gets your hands clean.

On top of everything else, it's officially spring! At least according to the calendar, anyway.  We got a dusting of snow for our first day of spring here in the Heartland.  It's okay though.  Just knowing that sunshine and warm temps are around the corner makes me pretty happy.

Okay...so this is an old picture.  The daffodils are not quite ready yet.

With the coming sunshine and warm temps comes a barrage of extra work.  Along with the soap gearing up there's the garden gearing up.

Pepper and eggplant seedlings.

Tomato seedlings.

We're moving to new digs at the end of the summer so there's that to work on.  It's a short move down the road to the next town over...just us adding to the Picofarm empire.  Along with that move comes more room for soaping and gardening and seed starting and what-have-you.  So we have plenty to do to keep us out of trouble so-to-speak.

Sheesh.  I'd better go put the camera away so Lucky will come in from the kennel.  I swear that dog is the most suspicious creature I've ever known!  He doesn't like his picture taken so he hides whenever I get the camera out and won't come back in until he's sure it's gone.  Nutty dog!  I can't even entice him back in with ham!

This is the last picture I took of Lucky that isn't blurry because he's running away. It was taken at least 5 years ago.  He is a Catahoula Cur and true to type is very suspicious of EVERYTHING.  Two seconds after I snapped this picture, he was gone.  He looks angry, doesn't he?

This is Dotti-Dog about 3 seconds after Lucky bailed for the kennel.  This dog is an English Pointer and wants to be a pony when she grows up.  She's actually posing here.  Not the slightest bit shy.

Sitting Zazen Among the Onions

Those are some weedy onions.

This is probably going to sound crazy.  But, I'm used to the stares and finger-pointing now so it's okay.

I like to sit in my garden.  Literally sit in my garden.  On the ground, next to the onions, on a small cushion I purchased just for this exact use.  I like to sit there and pull the weeds out of my garden one by one.  When I run out of weeds within easy reach, I scootch my cushion along the path and weed some more.

My husband finds this all quite ridiculous.  I find it relaxing.  Sitting amongst the onions and cabbages is calming.  They are endlessly patient as I tease the bindweed out from around stems and uproot the pigweed and black nightshade pretending to be a pepper plant.

More onions with fewer weeds.

I pull the weeds.  I listen to the wind and the birds.  Cars go by on the street.  Trains roll by on the tracks horns blaring at the crossing.  Children ride bicycles or skateboards or those crazy hoverboards down the hill chattering with each other and laughing. And yet, I calmly sit with dirty hands and extended posture as I stretch to reach a weed just barely at my fingertips trying hard not to lose my hat or get a muscle cramp.

Happy onions.  They really seem happier once I've pulled most of the weeds.

There is a smell in the garden.  The smell of the earth and of growing things and of things rotting back into the earth.  There is a complete cycle there.  A cycle of birth, life, maturity, death, and the waiting for rebirth.  All of these things I ponder as I pull the weeds and clear the way for my desired plants to flourish, and therefore, nourish me in body as well as spirit.

My very first cabbage.

I've grown a lot of different things in my gardens over my lifetime.  In good times and bad, my garden has been my sanctuary.  It is a portal of sorts for me.  A portal to a very special and spiritual place that I just can't find any other way.  It is like brushing my fingertips against some divine being...being in the presence of something bigger than myself.  Sitting in my garden, the world shrinks down to a tiny place where there is just soil and weeds and pulling and scootching and more weeds with a constant undercurrent of my thoughts.

Zen.  It is very zen.  It is all so temporary and yet it is all so constant.  The garden is my constant companion.  Even in the dead of winter, the garden is there waiting for me.

The first harvest of the season.

It calls me and I go.  I grow the things. I watch them sprout and grow.  I tend them and they bear fruit which I consume and preserve for later consumption.  I share the bounty with those around me.

But, if I'm honest with myself, even if there were no bounty I'd do it just the same.  For me, the act of gardening is more than the sum of its parts.  It's more than a means to an end.  It's a life-giving process.  It's a part of something bigger than me.  Something that accepts me as I am...even with all the scootching on cushions and weed pulling and funny hats and contortionist poses.  It fills more than just my cupboards and my stomach.  It feeds my soul and fills my life with meaning.  I belong there.

Me and some of the tomatoes.

Kinda swell picture of the okra in the early morning.

The absolutely enormous flower of a volunteer squash vine.  This flower was at least 8 inches across. I can't wait to see what kind of squash grows from it!

The first broccoli of the year.  It was tasty in stir fry.

A Few Little Bumps in the Road

Not my farm.  But, I can dream, can't I?

Sometimes life is smooth sailing.  Sometimes you can't do a thing wrong.  Other times it's like you're crossing an old cornfield on a 10-speed.

Things get a bit bumpy.

I hit a particularly hard bump at my paying job a few weeks ago when I twanged my back.  Almost a month later, I'm off work and on physical therapy with orders for activity as tolerated.  That is probably the most non-specific thing I've ever seen a doctor order.  The bad thing is, I don't know what is too much until I've done it.

But I digress.

The bumps in my road these days seem to happen one right after the other.  Bad tires on the truck lead to the discovery of a bad wheel bearing...oy.  But, fortunately the rattling noise from under the truck was not the exhaust system fixin' to fall off.  It was just a loose heat shield which the guy welded back on for nothing.  Thanks to my Dad all is done and dusted in the repair department.  Which is a good thing because that is my farm truck and I'm going to need it pretty soon to haul compost, peat moss, potting soil, and etc.

So, as you might imagine, I've bee a bit limited in what I can manage to get done in the garden.  I take my little cushion and my little hand spade out and sit by the raised beds whittling away at the grass that has been invading and simply won't DIE.  I got the old black raspberry canes mostly cut down and then tied up the year-old canes that will fruit this summer.  I discovered a new plant not too far away.  Did you know that if you let the ends of the canes of a black raspberry bush touch the ground for too long, they'll root in and start another plant?  Neither did I.  Criminy!  That thing could take over the whole place in a couple years!  I've also been whittling away at the mounds of rabbit droppings under the hutches.  Setting up winter quarters on top of the raised beds was a genius idea if I do say so myself.  All I have to do is re-distribute the rabbit poo to the other beds and get the rabbits back to their summer digs by the end of April. 

Soooon...

The enforced downtime has allowed me to plan and plot and plan my plots to the point where I think I know where every dang plant will land when I get it all...erm...planted.  I started a "let's grow onions from seed" project that didn't really go as hoped.  The bunching onions are doing great!  The Spanish onions have pretty much bit the dust.  The other onions, the name of which escapes me, never germinated at all.  So, I ordered onion plants online.  They should be arriving soon.  Oh, and the sweet potato project never really got off the ground.  I got a few roots.  Then one of the potatoes started to rot so I threw the whole shebang into the trash and ordered slips online as well.

There comes a time when you have to throw in the towel.

Once again, my kitchen shelf space is brimming with seedlings.  I have 6 kinds of tomatoes (I think), several kinds of peppers, a few cabbages, some broccoli (hopefully the second round does better than the first), some brussels sprouts, a whole bunch of basil, and a few sage plants.  Yesterday, I was gifted a bunch of cilantro seeds.  I'll grow them.  But, it will have to be outside.  I can't stand the smell of the stuff and I won't have it in the house.  Bleh.*

*cue the outcry from cilantro lovers.

Another exciting thing has happened.  I know you're not going to believe this, but two out of three mint plants survived the winter!  For most people this is nothing to write home about.  For me it's a dang miracle.  I've tried for years to establish a variety of mints in my garden.  Every year it's the same thing.  They winter kill.  Not this year, though.  I discovered this when I was working on the herb garden trying to get the damn grass out of it and I kept digging up much fleshier roots.  Finally, I pulled on one of those long suckers and it ran right up to the dead-looking mint plant.

Gobsmacked, I was. 

All along that root were tiny, green shoots.  I promptly dug it all up and replanted it in some buried containers to hopefully, well, contain mint's apparently well-deserved enthusiasm.  Just in case I managed to kill the momma plants anyway, I took a few root cuttings that are growing like weeds in amongst my other seedlings.  The two that lived are spearmint varieties.  The chocolate mint didn't make it.  No matter.  I'm going to get a new plant and move it to the magic mint bed with the other mints.  I hope to find some other kinds.  I have four more containers set into the ground already.

So excited.  Simple pleasures for simple minds.

I could blather on all night, but I probably shouldn't.  I'm getting the hairy eyeball from the spouse about it being suppertime.  But I don't mind.  I kinda like having the bum around. He kinda smoothes out the bumps sometimes.

Toodles!

Spring is Here!

Although, it doesn't really look like it today, spring is here.  I woke up this morning to snow falling with the kind of intensity usually reserved for frigid January nights.  When it finally stopped, we had been blessed with about two inches of the wet stuff.

I've had about enough of that.

So instead of spending my day clearing the garage and puttering in the garden, I spent my day potting up some of this year's crop of bedding plants.  Seedlings, that is.  Green gold...

I've been in the house for TOO LONG.

Anyway, here are the highlights:

I went a little crazy with the cole crops this year.  I have two kind of brussels sprouts (Brawny and Purple), a Romanesco broccoli, broccoli raab, and baby choy.  I can't get a good pic of the choy, though.  Try as I might.

Romanesco broccoli

Brawny Sprouts

Another broccoli

Purple brussles sprouts

Then there are the peppers.  Thirteen kinds of peppers.  Here are a couple pepperocini types. 

Next come the tomatoes.  Only seven kinds, I think.  They're pretty small yet, but soon I'll be potting them up like the rest.

I haven't forgotten the herbs.  I planted two types of chives, some sage, thyme, basil, and corn mache.  It's my first try at corn mache. I don't even know what corn mache is, really.  But it was recommended to me by a very knowledgeable gardener.  So what the heck?

That's the basil with some leggy corn mache draped over it.  Swiss chard in the background.

So far, I think I'm off to a good start.  But none of this would be possible without the assistance of my able-bodied husband, his drill, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of zip ties.  Yesterday, he built the annex to the original seedling station.

It's just plastic, snap-together shelving, clip lights, and roughly a metric ton of zip ties.  A little bit of heaven in the living room.  Yep.  You read that right.

Yes, it seems like a lot of plants to me, too.  Perhaps come May 7 I'll see you down at the farmer's market and you can take a couple of peppers and tomatoes off my hands for a reasonable fee.

Now if the snow will just melt and let spring get underway, I'd be much obliged.

The Price of Love is Grief

Late summer is often a whirlwind of activity here on The Slice.  This year is no different in that regard.  However, it is very different in a couple of ways.

The new job is going okay.  I am slowly adjusting to the change in schedule although it is troublesome.  I enjoy the contact with the patients and being a comfort to them within the scope of my practice.  However, I find myself losing interest in school.  I'm no longer certain I will continue my nursing studies in January.  Things have changed around me and within me.  While I do enjoy my work at the hospital, I find I miss my work at the lab more and more every day.  I often wonder if I shouldn't move on to something I've never done before.  A true fresh start.

My Mom died a month ago.  August 19 to be exact.  I was sitting at my computer reading my email and I thought I heard her say my name right next to my ear.  About 30 minutes later, I got the call that she was gone.  She was very, very sick and her passing is a blessing for her and all of us who knew and loved her.  I feel her absence every day.  She was my first best friend and my lifelong confidant and supporter.  She taught me to take care of myself.  She taught me how to survive no matter what.  Those lessons have been well used these last weeks.

A month later I can still hardly believe she's gone.  Sometimes I am able to fool myself into thinking she's still living there in her little house in the mountains...just a phone call away.

Many folks have tried to give me comfort by sharing that she isn't really gone and that one day we'll be together again.  I know they mean well and I appreciate it.  I think it unlikely for a couple of reasons.  First, I'm not convinced that the afterlife they tout even exists.  Second, if I'm wrong and there is an afterlife like they say there is, I most certainly will not be going to the good place.  My Mom was a good Baptist woman.  Her faith was strong and it served her well throughout her life.  Sometimes I wish I had that faith to lean on.

The only thing that can be said to be worse than losing a loved one like my Mom is dealing with the aftermath of her existence.  I spent a week alone in her home packing and sorting and cleaning in an attempt to prepare it for sale.  It was probably the worst week of my life and probably just as well I was on my own.

If you have children and you love them, do everything you can to make this process as easy as possible for them.  My Mom did and I have been frequently surprised by the things she thought of and did for me and my brother before she died.  I can only imagine how much more difficult it would have been had she been as lackadaisical about housework as I am.

I hear that time heals all wounds.  It makes me wonder if I have enough time left to heal the wounds this summer has left on me.

In between the new job and the trip to Colorado and the dealing with banks and Realtors and whatnot, my life has been percolating along.  I have been canning like a woman possessed and basically just trying to keep all my plates spinning.  I've been zapped with the most unholy seasonal allergies this year and yet I still keep going.

The Energizer Bunny has NOTHING on me.

May Update--In Pictures

It's hard for me to comprehend that it is May already.  The winter seems to move so slowly for me.  Once spring has sprung, it's like Mother Nature puts her foot to the floor and time starts to speed by quickly.  Fortunately, spring makes me want to take pictures of the gardens.

So here's what's going on at The Slice:

Cayuga viburnum--I wish you could smell this!

Volunteer cilantro coming up around my onion set...and what looks to be a small grass seedling of some kind.

Some lovely daffodils

The Korean Lilac is in full bloom!

My favorite tulip came back yet again.

Wild violets in my perennial bed coming up through the rug juniper.

My hubby's fancy schmancy tree propping rig that helps my State Fair apple tree stand straight and tall.

The rig also comes in galvanized steel.  This one is holding the Kieffer pear up and allowing it to straighten up and flower right.

Jalapeno peppers peeking out of their white plastic cloche.

The peppers inside their cozy cloche. This protects my plants down to 30 degrees F.  It also works really well for tomato plants.

Growing the potatoes and onions together worked really well last year so I'm doing it again.  With fewer potatoes.

Radish crop circles.

Sugar snap peas coming up with a few extra radishes.

Volunteer fern leaf dill.  This stuff is everywhere but I'm not complaining.

That's it for now!  A lot of new things are happening at The Slice this year.  More to come.

April Garden Update

It's garden time.  Can you dig it?

Yep, I'm giddy with anticipation.  At last I have dirt under my carefully manicured fingernails.  It happens every year.  Just about the time I get my fingernails to the perfect length and shape to look really nice and elegant with nail polish, garden season arrives and screws the whole works up.  But, I don't really care much.  The season has begun.

Last weekend I was hunting through what is left of our potato harvest from last year in the bitter hopes of finding a couple of unsprouted spuds.  No luck there.  But, I decided to make lemonade out of those lemons and I planted a dozen or so pre-sprouted red taters in a nicely prepared bed out back.  I can hardly wait to see if they will actually grow or not.  Someone told me once that they won't if they're already sprouted when you plant them.  That sounds sort of foolish to me, so we'll see.

Tonight, after a week of on and off again rain and a smattering of snow yesterday, I planted my peas, some radishes, a row of carrots, a row of beets, and 100 yellow onion sets.  I got lucky and found the onion sets on sale for 99 cents a bag of 100.  Less than a penny apiece!

So, naturally, I bought three varieties.  As usual, I will plant way too many onions and I will have to tuck them in where ever I can find a little space.  We somehow manage to use them anyway.

Now that it's getting dark outside, I realize that I need to take some new pictures of the garden.  We modified one of the beds and made it deeper.  All of the beds are practically overflowing with composted goodness.

I also found some dill seedlings when I was planting the carrots.  It really is true.  Once you've had dill, you will always have dill.  My mother-in-law was right about that much.

Well Underway

We got frost last night at The Slice.  May 16, 2014 and we got FROST.  I had to scrape my windshield this morning before we could head out to the market. Just what sort of nonsense is that anyway?

Hmmm?

In spite of the overnight low approaching freezing, the gardening season is well underway.  All the plants seem to be doing quite well.  Except the ones I tried to grow in the greenhouse.  Not so much grow, I guess, as start.  I have purchased replacement plants for all the seeds that haven't really grown and they are doing pretty well.  The ones I've tried to start are also planted in the garden, but they are tiny and refusing to grow so much as a single new leaf.  I hope with warmer weather, they'll change their outlook and join us for the summer.

Yes, the greenhouse is pretty much a disaster.  But it's okay.  We've just started out with this greenhouse business and we pretty much immediately ran headlong into the learning curve.  All is well.  We just can't regulate the temperature well enough yet to get things to roll along as I expected them to.  Silly me.  Jump in with both feet?  Why not?

But I do have some really nice things happening in the gardens right now.  We are the proud parents of a bouncing baby Golden Curls Willow tree.

It's much more impressive in person.

Along the driveway, we've added two  more fruit trees:

Blurry!  For some reason I just can't get a good picture on this side of the drive.

The two trees in the back are a plum and another apple.  The front apple tree has these:

Spent apple blossoms.  I am fervently hoping for apples!

Out in front along the street side of the walk, we put in a couple of pear trees.  I took pictures, but you can't really tell what they are exactly. 

Not all of the new additions are plants.  We also added this cool gecko.

Here leezard, leezard, leezard...

Around back in the vegetable garden, the new tomato bed is planted and mulched in.

Those plastic bags around the tomato cages are a lifesaver!

Of course, I just realized that I promised a blog about how I use those all too numerous plastic shopping bags to protect my tiny tomato seedlings.  And of course I have no pictures of my process.  I guess I'll have to bust out a spare tomato cage and a plastic bag.  Sheesh.

The asparagus is doing splendidly.  In fact, of the 30 crowns I planted last year 27 have returned.  I expected half to die so I planted heavily.  We had to put some bracing in to keep the ferns from falling over.  I need to come up with a more permanent solution to this problem.

In the garden proper, the beds are filling in nicely.

And, try as I might, I can't get all of the potato and onion bed in one shot.

Looking good!

The flowers are blossoming all over the place in spite of the unseasonably cool weather.

Grandma Vi's fern-leafed peonies.

 I love those peonies!  I can't find them anywhere anymore and I'm so glad I have Grandma's to plant here.  They took a bit of a beating in a recent storm.  Still, this is nothing compared to the tornado ravaged countryside a mere 30 miles from here in the small towns of Beaver Crossing, Cordova, and Sutton Nebraska.  Scary stuff, huh?

What I love about my garden is its resilliance.  These chives were grown by my mother-in-law in a different part of the state and have been in a pot, in a bed, in a raised bed, in a pot again, dug up and transplanted numerous times.  Yet here it is, flowering like nothing ever happened.  So pretty.

Well, I guess that's it for now.  I leave you today with this picture of some creepy phlox.  Have a good one.