Philosophic Gardener

So, I have always been a gardener. My dad and I planted our vegetable garden together every spring when I was a kid. Tomatoes and cucumbers were our specialties.

Then I went to college, and then to grad school, and lived in dorms and apartments and other rentals where I didn't have much of a place to plant anything. I did some potted plants, but it really isn't the same. So, instead I read about gardening. I found books, Gardenweb.com, I followed links on Pinterest, etc. And in this time I developed a gardening philosophy revolving around organic, chemical-free gardening and landscaping with edibles. A philosophy developed completely separately from the practical aspects of actually growing plants. This is probably not a good thing.

This new philosophy may die a quick and relatively painless death if I learn my green thumb turns brown when not artificially enhanced (by MiracleGrow), and that I am not a good enough designer to make a front yard that is simultaneously both pretty and edible. But for now I have my compost pile and my worms and I fully intend to dig up the lawn this spring. Maybe everything will work out fine and I will be in the market for some chickens next, the sure sign that I have gone off the deep end of this organic food business. Then I'd need a rooster so that my chickens would lay eggs...

I think I'll just stick to my worms. I don't care how good the fertilizer that chickens provide is for the garden, having a cockatiel as a kid was more than enough bird owning for me.

Garden Notes

I haven't posted on the blog lately because not much has been happening lately between my husband working on his big project (it's awesome. Take a look at his progress here: http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f8/36-pompeii-dc-18213.html) and a busy toddler and a hurricane and some seasonal colds. But here and there I've fit in some garden work. One variety of lettuce is doing very well: 

It's the Grand Rapids variety. I've had less luck with the Royal Oakleaf and Buttercrunch. But I'll have lettuce to serve up as a salad for Thanksgiving, which is something I had really hoped for. No peas to serve though. The growth of the peas has been less than stellar. I thought they would be both larger plants and more productive plants. I'll have to plant more of them (on a more petite trellis) next year, since the fruits are delicious.

I also planted some potatoes this weekend. It seems to be a bit debatable whether they should be planted in the fall or spring, so I decided to give it a try in the fall. If successful  they will develop a really good root system over the winter so that when springtime comes around, they will grow like crazy. If not successful, they will rot and I'll add them to my compost pile and start over in the spring. I have this funny bag that I grow potatoes in, and add soil as they grow. 

Other than watching my plants grow, my main garden task has been raking leaves. And raking more leaves. And raking even more leaves. It is amazing how many leaves my trees produce. And even though I have bags and bags of leaves, there are still lots of leaves still hanging on the trees. I like raking, but not to the exclusion of all else, which is what I fear these trees demand. I think I don't mind raking, in part, because I don't think of leaves as trash, but as organic matter. I decided my worms would never keep up, so I set up a compost pile in the back part of my yard where I'm throwing a portion of my leaf supply and excess kitchen scraps. The leaves I don't compost I will shred up and use as mulch. I'll still probably have more leaves than I have use for. 

Here's a picture of my compost heap.  Nothing pretty, for now. I'll give it walls as soon as my husband is finished with the pallets he has construction supplies stacked on. I saw a nice compost bin design using pallets a couple weeks ago. For now the heap works. It's only a week old, but I'll start turning it every couple of weeks to keep it from getting smelly. That seems to be the gist of it, as far as I can tell. I'm very new to this organic gardening thing. But I'll probably write a separate post about that later.

Blueberries and Kiwis

I received the plants I ordered on Wednesday and hurried to get them into the ground before dinner, since we were headed to dance after dinner. The blueberries look good, but I was surprised at how small and pathetic the kiwis were. They don't look intimidating at all. In fact, I kind of doubt they will last the winter. But everything is in the ground and mulched well. I covered the main bed with some decorative bark to make it look more complete. I'm planning on adding a retaining wall sometime soonish, but haven't done that yet. Here are some pictures:

The front planter bed. I swear there are plants in there.

Here's one. A lovely little blueberry plant with its fall colors

And here's one pathetic kiwi

And another pathetic kiwi (I didn't quite have the side bed ready, but ready enough)

Fall Planting

I ordered some plants yesterday evening. They will be here sometime this week while I scramble to finish up the garden beds for them. I have three different types of blueberry plants coming and some hardy kiwis. I think the blueberries will do very well. They thrive on the same type of soil that roses like, and I have some roses on this property that I think have lasted decades with little care.

But I'm suddenly afraid of the kiwis. I read this post as I was trying to figure out how to add additional support for the kiwis I'm planning on planting out front: http://www.sustainable-gardening.com/archives/450 Great, as if I didn't have enough problems with agressive vines, with the English ivy, Japanese honeysuckle, and the rest of the vines that seem to pop up everywhere around here. At least this one will grow tasty kiwi berries... I hope. And if it doesn't, I'll hack it back with the rest of the misbehaving vines.

More Work in the Garden

As I said in a previous post, I've been doing a lot of work in the garden. One of the first things I took care of was killing the ivy that was killing the tree by our back porch. I've killed the ivy (pictures of both the live and the dead ivy are below), but I'm not sure yet if I've saved the tree. The fact that fall has arrived doesn't make it any easier to tell. And I'm not sure how to get that ivy down. It is quite ugly now.

Tree smothered by ivy

Tree with Dead Ivy

I also have cleaned out several areas with overgrown planters. Most of them are just left as dirt right now, but I do have my little fall garden. I also cleaned out a couple of the planters in the back yard. 

Backyard planter before

Backyard planter now

Once again, that doesn't look like much of an improvement. I left the azaleas, but everything else was overgrown and ugly close up. I'll plant something new in it next spring, then it will hopefully look pretty both close up and from a distance. 

And I cleaned out the planter in front of our front patio. You can see the before in this shot of the house, the area to the right of the stairs. There wasn't much there to begin with, other than some weedy grass. I dug it up, along with some giant roots and pieces of cement that were hanging out there.

Front Planter now

It's all ready for the blueberry bushes I plan on planting there. I need a bit of a retaining wall to keep the dirt in as well. The sidewalk there has a slope, so the wall will be tall near the stairs and short over at the corner of the house.

My most recent task has been freeing the back fence from it's maze of ivy. I don't really have a great before picture. Here's my best one, but it had gotten much more overgrown. When I cleaned out the ivy, I found 3 overgrown rose bushes underneath. I'm going to try to bring them back to life by pruning them. I know very little about pruning, so we'll see if they are still alive next spring. I don't have a huge fondness for roses, but my grandfather loved them, so I hate to purposely kill them. I have two in the front yard too that I don't really want in the front yard. But if they can survive the transplantation to a different location, I welcome having them around as well. 

Back fence this spring

Back Fence now

Clearly one of my yard tasks will be repairing that fence. I'm hoping the fence posts are solid and I just have to replace the broken boards, but I haven't looked closely enough to know yet.

]All of this yardwork has resulted in a lot of yard waste. Too much for our weekly trash pick up. I had several piles going in the yard and it was starting to look messy, so I piled it up all in one place as if it is a compost pile. With pieces this large, it would probably take a decade for it actually to decompose, but at least it's all in one centralized location. Maybe I'll get a wood chipper some day and turn it into an actual compost pile.

The Joys of Homeownership: Appliances

We've lived in this house for 2 1/2 months and already had two broken appliances (plus the ice dispenser on the fridge, which was broken when we arrived, but since the fridge otherwise functioned, that hardly counted).

The disposal was a real bear. We were just finishing the bulk of our big home improvement projects and looking forward to an evening of relaxation when the darn thing just stopped working. It had gotten totally jammed up. My husband sat trying to unjam it for several hours the evening it jammed, but it just wouldn't turn freely. He ended up buying a new garbage disposal from Home Depot and installing the next day. I suspect that all the paint we washed down that sink wasn't good for the disposal. When we painted our bedroom, I wouldn't wash anything in the side of the sink with the disposal.

This weekend our washing machine stopped working. It wouldn't drain, it wouldn't spin. It just made a sad little humming sound then would trip the circuit breaker. I unloaded all of the clothes and wiggled thing to see if it would start working, but no luck. We pulled the box off so we could take a look at the inside. I successfully diagnosed the problem as something to do with the pump. We disconnected one side from the pump so we could try to turn it. Sure enough, it didn't turn. We were tired and still recovering from colds, so we decided to go to bed instead of dealing with it more. Water was still pouring out from it anyhow, so it was a bit hard to work with (my husband bailed the water out to the best of his ability, but there was still a lot left).

The next morning the water had completely drained and my husband took the pump off the rest of the way. He found one of my daughter's socks inside the pump, torn to shreds but still successfully jamming the wheel that is supposed to churn water through. Once reassembled, the machine works fine. Thank goodness for easy fixes. And for the internet with lots of how-to guides to help us discover the simple fixes ourselves instead of calling in the professionals.

Yardwork

While we did all the work inside the house, we were wanting to be outside, working in the yard. I'm a gardener and my husband has been dreaming of building an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven for months. So with the conclusion of the bedroom saga, we've been able to start focusing outside, where we have wanted to. I've done some more boring things (killing ivy, weeding, trimming roses), but also created a little garden bed for myself with some winter veggies growing, plus a large basil plant we bought a month or two ago from the farmer's market.

There are lettuce seedlings popping up here and there and the sugar peas are starting to climb the trellis I made for them from fallen tree limbs that I found around the yard.

My husband's project is much more impressive. Here's a picture of the current state of the pizza oven. 

That's just the stand. Firewood will be stored in that cubby-hole. A big igloo-like structure is planned for the top of that stand. He's keeping a record of his building progress here: http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f8/36-pompeii-dc-18213.html