Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Snake Handling in the Park

One delightful thing about living in the city is the unusual characters you can meet in the park. One day last spring we walked to Overton Park for a most unusual day. One man was teaching another how to cast a fishing line- on land. It was fun to watch. The percussionist group showed up for background music, along with other musicians, including a Caucasian male guitarist with long dreadlocks. To top off the day of picnic and unusual sights, a couple brought their reptiles to enjoy the sun. My husband and I were graciously allowed to handle an albino python, pictured here. It was tame, and the snake-handling was quite fun.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Lovely Luffa

This is a view from inside the house of the luffa vines I grew this summer. I can't find the outdoor pictures, but they would show a tangle of vines growing over the fence, up the side of the house (hence this view from indoors and shelter for the praying mantis), and over the fence to crape myrtles down the way. They produced five-lobed, bright yellow, bee-attracting flowers, and about 30 gourds that look like large, lumpy cucumbers. When young, they can be eaten like zucchini, though my variety was rather tasteless. When the gourds are yellowish brown, it is time to process them. First, you peel off the skin. Hopefully the inside is white or pale tan and moist, smelling of cucumbers. You wash the inner skeleton with a hose or hot water to get rid of inner plant residue (squeeze and you get suds). Then bleach, especially the ones with dark or moldy spots. Allow to dry naturally, then shake out the seeds. Do not flatten the luffa before getting the seeds out! They'll get stuck. They are good for any kind of scrubbing, from pans (use as dry as possible for really stuck on stuff) to skin (let soak in water for a bit to soften the fibers). Compostable, degradable, scrubbable, expensive in the store, and practically free from the yard. Strange vegetable, but useful. This was a fun one to try.

Mexican Torch Sunflowers

These are beautiful flowers. The plants are short (4 ft tall) and branched, with many flowers per plant. I only had one plant survive transplanting out of 4 (one got accidentally weeded by someone else), but it proved attractive to people (until late in the season) and butterflies alike. If you like taking pictures of butterflies, they sit still on these flowers long enough to allow even a novice to get a good shot. It bloomed from mid-summer into the fall, but looked a bit straggly in the cooler weather, right up until hard freeze. Good plant.

Friday, November 12, 2010

Back Online

Sorry no posts in forever. A stressful life event erased my password from my memory and completely reset my priorities. I did grow a garden this year, but it survived among weeds and with much less care than usual. It was hot and dry, but with daily watering I still got 20 pounds of sweet potatoes this year! Otherwise the overall harvest was about the same as last year. And I tried growing luffa, or vegetable sponge. It grows a lot like kudzu if you let it, so I have a few fruit hanging from a telephone wire. Post forthcoming. I'm back.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Harvesting, Already

Today I harvested 2 small green onions, a little over an ounce of overwintered broccoli, and some lively and fabulous-smelling kale. Sauted in butter with some baby portobellos, these will make a fine baked-potato topping. Yay!

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Getting Ready to Run


My experiments at work are starting to produce data again, after a long, long dry spell. That is good, but it means long hours at work while I stare out at sunny days wishing I could be elbow-deep in dirt and baby plants rather than at work, all clean. I started these peas a week ago. Sunny days lead to remarkably fast growth for these guys! I have to try to get them conditioned and out soon. I'm starting more sugar snaps tonight, and the 4 or 5 varieties of tomatoes I'm putting in this year. The chard, spinach, radishes, carrots, and beets can go out whenever I get time. The buttercups are about to bloom, so I'm waiting for the last snowstorm/severe cold snap to pass, as it always comes when they are blooming. We'll see.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Dig! Dig! Dig!

I finished clearing the front bed Saturday. It is ready for fertilizer and liming ASAP. Since we are having a real winter this year (lows in the 20s forecast again next week, after a warm weekend), the baby plants will stay indoors for a bit longer. The broccoli and bok choi have moved to the porch, and the peas are going in tubes tonight on a radiator cover for faster germination, then to the windows, then the porch, then hardening, then outside. I also cleared some of the back beds of the rake-able leaves, hoping the cold night-time temps will foil my nemeses, the slugs. A broccoli plant that survived the winter is heading now. Wow! Maybe we'll get something out of those plants after all!

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Digging Up Roots With Snow on the Ground

Next week-end starts the beginning of the cool-weather planting season here in Memphis, if the weather cooperates, as next week-end will be one month before the average last frost date. This is my last week-end before the indoor and outdoor planting begins in earnest, with the sunporch turning into a greenhouse and the flats starting to appear outdoors on sunny days for cold-hardening. So I'm digging, and the longer cool snap than usual we had last week means that there is STILL snow in the shade on the bushes and the ground. Wow. Soon I'll be planting outdoors, and losing the winter flab! Woohoo! Ow.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Snow!


This is a photo from last week. I have lettuce plants from last fall that have survived some pretty severe temperature extremes, and being frozen solid, with no protection. Amazing. Today I woke up to a total surprise: snow on the ground! It was a wet, snow-ballable snow, too. Work is closed, so I get the day at home. Woohoo! Play and shovel time this morning, followed by Internet time and oatmeal bars and things I did not finish over the week-end. Shovel dirt in a garden bed one day, shovel snow the next! I love Tennessee.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

A Sound of Rushing Waters


This is a picture of a dogwood bud, taken yesterday before the thaw started. Today was the first day of melting after the freezing rain/sleet/snow mix Friday. We got about half an inch of ice with less on the tree branches, enough to look pretty without breaking the trees. Things melted off nicely, and I'm starting broccoli and lettuce (and some cookies) this afternoon. Great day, blue skies, water and ice everywhere, and ice bits raining down under every mature tree.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Halfway There

And adjust it has! I dug twice as much today as Monday, in two sessions split by lunch and a rest break, with much less soreness than last time. We went to the Cafe for a sundae, and that always helps, too ;).
A quote about why I'm hacking out bushes by W. Robinson (editor) from The Vegetable Garden by MM. Vilmorin-Andrieux (containing a detailed list of heirloom varieties going back to 1920):
" We cannot grow vegetables well under trees, and in attempting to do so we destroy the roots of the trees... The vegetables, too, would be more wholesome for good light and air, for shade from ragged and profitless trees and bushes and hedges is one of the evils of this hopeless kind of garden. The broken crops, too, (for the most part sickly patches) are not such as one can be proud of."
I'm taking out as many "profitless" plants as I can!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Beaten

It was a beautiful MLK Day today. Sunny, warm, breezy with just a hint of January in the gusts, it was a day to be outdoors. I spent part of it this afternoon at the park, and part of it digging. I got out a huge bush, with corresponding roots, by digging all the way around it and prying it out with pick and shovel as levers. The end was an old-fashioned " 'rasslin' " match. Now I do not want to move anything larger than my fingers. My body doth protest the unaccustomed effort. It will adjust.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

One Bush at A Time

An altered version of a Dottie Rambo song from my childhood ("One day at a time, sweet Jesus, that's all I'm asking from you...") was sneaking through my thoughts as I started digging the front bed in earnest today, trying to beat out the rain. The bushes and grasses in the front bed have much healthier (larger, deeper, harder to dig) root structures than the ones in the back beds did. It will take me a long time to get this bed dug properly, but just getting the roots out will plow it up pretty well. And don't get me started on decorative grasses. I hope the numerous root nodules I saw on overgrown, exuberantly healthy looking plants ( the roots were packed several inches deep) indicate a healthy soil bacterial population. You know it is going to be a long dig when you raise the pick above your head, swing down with all your might, and THE PICK BOUNCES. This is not rocky soil. It is full of roots. No pictures of the work out front this year, but I'll talk about it. Must rest a bit and continue the indoor work now that the rain has started.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Winter is Here!

We had our first dusting of snow this week. We were hoping for more, but it did not happen. It is also unusually cold! We've been below freezing, even for HIGHS, for a few days now, though we're supposed to warm up next week. The cat's water freezes inside the garage. The 3-gallon bucket outside is frozen solid. No gardening here, though the lettuces and broccoli ARE NOT DEAD! Unbelievable!
I've been reading a lot, collecting herbal tea recipes, and working on the spring planting schedule. The broccoli seeds go in for germination week-end after next. Hope we get a break in the weather to clear beds soon.

Friday, January 1, 2010

My hope for 2010

"You shouldn't have to work that hard." That seems to be a refrain I hear often from people in my parents' generation (the Boomers). Their parents, growing up during the Great Depression and World War II, came through those crises grimly determined to get only the best for their children. They succeeded, and for a lot of people who came to maturity in the 60s and 70s, life was expected to come easy. Get a degree, work in an office, come home to lounge in front of the TV. Big salary, big house in the suburbs. Retire to travel, get a place in Florida in a retirement community, and relax. That was how it was supposed to be.
Things are changing. Even the white-collar jobs are being outsourced overseas. Unemployment is becoming a long-term issue. My generation (born in 1971) will have to shoulder a lot of burdens in the future, with increased taxation to pay incredible debts, care of elders not provided under a decreased Medicare, and care of our childless selves as we age.
We really will have to work hard, probably harder than many Americans in recent generations have worked. We'll have to relearn the skills of frugality (rice and beans and backyard vegetables, hand washing and line drying clothes to make them last longer, sewing and repair, etc.) and extend them. We'll have to reject the label of "consumer" and produce something good for other people. We'll have to turn from our culture's idolization of self and back to God for any long-term good to be done. Let's start in 2010.