Storms of Spring

It is springtime in the South, and that means big storm systems. In good years (for agriculture, not city life) we get two weeks of more or less solid rain in the spring, causing flooding of waterways. We may get the same in the fall, some years. This shortens an otherwise very long growing season.

The tree in this picture died last year. We left it as a convenient place to park the bird feeder, but it blew over in the most recent storms. It hit the fence and did nothing more than cosmetic damage. I cut it up with a hand saw today, to be hauled off later.

The storms are being especially destructive this year, probably because we have chosen to take up agricultural/forested land with concentrated population centers. The destruction is awful to contemplate. There are reasons why this continent was not as densely populated as Europe when the Europeans arrived. It simply has large sections that are not very hospitable to large groups of people- too wet, too dry, too hot, too swampy, too stormy or unstable geologically, etc.

Here in Memphis homes and businesses are being flooded as the Mississippi backs up into its tributaries. A lot of people decided that the older parts of the city (on higher ground) were not desirable anymore, so they wanted to move out. "Out" has a lot of low ground in the regions surrounding the city. We should either build enough levees to protect the whole thing or bring the population back to high ground. Selling people houses in"100-year flood plain" should be outlawed, plain and simple. More storms are coming in the next few days. I pray they don't bring more destruction. We've had enough to last a while.

Kale-White Bean Wraps and Tomato Soup

It is spring, and my basil, anise hyssop, lavender, black cumin, and other herbs are tiny seedlings in pots. But today it was cool and rainy, so soup was in order. I made tomato-basil soup (from canned tomatoes, vegetable juice, onion, celery, frozen corn, and my basil frozen last summer) and kale-white bean wraps. The kale was harvested from the back yard 10 minutes before it was wilted on top of the beans. The best way to grow kale without having to spray it or maintain constant vigilance for the cabbage worms is to over-winter it. Plant it in the fall so it has time to get 4-6 inches high before it freezes. It will go into suspended animation, wilting a bit in the bitter cold (as bitter as it gets here, in the teens Fahrenheit), but reviving in the sun and growing in the early spring. You can eat it gloriously before the worms can develop to do their thing and make you miserable watching your plants get swiss-cheesed. Wonderful, healthy stuff. Your eyes will thank you.

Daffodils Are Up

This is the time of year when it is extremely tempting on balmy week-ends to get out and plant. You could put in sets of crucifers or snow peas, but beware! That balmy week-end could turn into a snowstorm in a few days. We have roller-coaster weather. I'm going to dig and smooth tomorrow if weather allows, but no planting yet.

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.

My Favorite View of the Garden

I love a garden first thing in the morning, as the sun rises over the fence line and the plants glow with new light. The dew decorates the glowing plants with temporary diamond orbs, and the heat of the day has not wilted anything yet.

I hardly ever get to enjoy this state; I rejoice in the moment between feeding the birds and loading my backpack into the car for work. I wish I could linger, because the plants and bugs and birds would teach me things the science practiced at work will never discover, about the glory of God, His joy in creation, His love for detail in even the tiniest and most despised things (like green jeweled spiders), and His loving provision for us. It is amazing that He allows our work to matter in this process, but it does. If we do not plant, our harvest will be slim and wild-crafted, requiring many acres. If we tend our gardens well, that space will provide for an exploding diversity of nature and for many of us, bountifully. Those who say there are too many people in this world do not understand that God loves people, and would gladly show us how to accommodate ourselves and all the other creatures we value if we just asked, instead of ignoring Him and implying that others are not as worthy as we to exist. The "technology" is there already, if we just ask and look. It will be work (we were created to tend a Garden, remember?), but we can do it- without killing our offspring before they are born or forcing others into sterility. We can participate with Him in good stewardship. Just ask.

Blooms!

I'm no expert on flower gardening. I do alright with roses, but if you get the right varieties and keep them from drying out completely in really hot weather, they take care of themselves pretty well. The flower here is an amaryllis. They were in the backyard, where only one got good enough sun to bloom. There is still one back there, that I need to transplant after it dies back and goes dormant. It needs more sun to produce these glorious red blooms. I planted these in a bed with good sun, for a neighbor to enjoy. Whoever put in the confounded bushes seems to have randomly covered up a variety of flowers we are still discovering. Small, free, beautiful gifts from someone who once cared about making this house beautiful. 

First Harvest Report

A fraction over one ounce (including the sugar snap pea day before yesterday) is the total so far. I never realized that sugar snap peas were so light! 4= 1/4 ounce. Yes, I pick them young, but you want to avoid unpleasant stringiness. It is small, but it is a beginning.

Growing Gardens in The City

It is very possible. A friend in an apartment has several pots, taking advantage of every bit of sunlight entering her little abode. We have a tiny backyard with formal bricked flower beds, but those beds can grow food, too. Why do it, when there are several grocery stores, including ethnic ones, within easy driving distance, and the food is cheap in season? Why continue to battle the slugs (I have picked 4,798 as of last night), and the cold, and the heat, and rain storms and drought?

It is fun. It is a way to get out in the sunshine and get a little dirty after a long day in front of a computer or an experimental bench at work. The exercise does not require a gym or expensive equipment. You don't have to endure MTV or ESPN while exercising- the birds overhead in the flowering trees are far better entertainment. The quietness and stillness seep into your mind to calm the fretting of a difficult day. Gardening can be an inexpensive hobby (without the "eco-friendly"gear and endless gadgets) that actually results in short-term gratification, after a few months: food. Good stuff.

Dogwood Winter and Spring Returning

Tomorrow we're supposed to be back to 70 again for a daytime high. THE BEANS WILL GO IN THE GROUND! On days like tomorrow, my little nose is pressed against the glass at work (mentally, anyway), longing for the first moment I can get away to freedom and dogwood petals and birds rejoicing overhead while a silent cat sneaks up behind me through the clover and blooming violets. I will rejoice, as all creation does in the springtime of the year, looking forward to that Spring to come.

Dogwood Winter and Cloches

Covering plants is an important thing to do when the freeze warnings go out, but how? If you throw a sheet over the plants, your cat or another animal might lie down on the soft surface, crushing the tender plants below. Cloches are a solution to the problem. You can buy elegant, expensive, bell-shaped jars, or you can recycle available materials. We use cut half-gallon milk jugs and juice cartons to make inexpensive, temporary cloches. Cut 2- or 3-liter soda bottles work really well in climates where you leave the cloche on during the day, and a transparent bottle lets light through. You can even unscrew the top for air circulation. Here we'll only need protection tonight (and maybe tomorrow night), with a high of 54 tomorrow, so I'll remove the cloches tomorrow morning before work, and keep a close eye on the weather through the day. Hopefully I can plant Wednesday, because the beans and tomatoes need to go into the ground. We will see.

Dogwood Winter and Climate Change

I got up early due to an alarm-clock malfunction, so here is a pre-church post. We are due for a possible freeze Monday night. Yes it is April. Yes, our last average frost date is in March. Yes, that date is fairly meaningless around here. Our grandparents had knowledge of the weather that had to be carefully discounted by our educators for us to be re-educated in matters of "scientific" ecology, so that money can be extracted from us out of guilt for our existence, a.k.a. "excessive use of carbon". We are carbon-based life forms, after all. They knew that there would be many close calls and a few freezes between the blooming of the daffodils and safe planting time for sensitive plants. My grandfather finally got so frustrated with early spring warming causing his peach trees to bloom, then late frosts destroying the crop, that he bulldozed the orchard when I was a very young child. That's the risk of perennials. I remember peaches from a good year that seemed almost as big as my head. And I remember a grassy field at the back of the hill afterward.

They knew about blackberry winter, and dogwood winter, and other cold snaps when other things were blooming, that put crops at risk but could not be stopped. Farming terms and rainfall totals stopped being reported in local weather broadcasts when I was in my teens or early 20s. Now every drought, every flood, every snowstorm or heat wave or  "unseasonable" frost is "evidence" of "climate change". Perception of chaos in the weather is drilled into people who never go outside, except to get in a vehicle. Flooding in areas where people have traditionally grown 18-foot-tall varieties of rice is portrayed as unusual. Drought on a continent where many of the Caucasian explorers and initial settlers died of hunger and thirst if not assisted by the Aborigines according to the old stories (Australia- it was a penal colony for a reason) is seen as dreadful evidence that we are tipping the world into chaos. Umm, yeah. We had to be taught to disrespect old stories and people and ignore old books (after all, we're not taught good enough English to read pre-television sentence structures anymore) in order to believe what we are now told is "scientific fact-the debate is settled-DON'T LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW!- DON'T ask the retired farmer in the nursing home down the street what's going on! just give us money for carbon trading and all will be forgiven!"

Yeah, they have some correct talking points. We may run out of easily accessible oil. We do use ridiculous amounts of energy for a lot of things. We have indiscriminately used horrible chemicals to do bad things to ourselves for the sake of convenience. Our grandparents were not stupid, and we have not "evolved" to be better and smarter than they, but rather have been culturally impoverished and rendered ignorant, cut off from their knowledge by a sense of technological superiority. I like to check some of the "doomer" sites sometimes, because they are collecting information about canning and homesteading that is quite informative. But their carte blanche acceptance of "global warming-oops, it is colder-climate change" gets really old. Sorry for the rant. Just amazed when otherwise seemingly sensible people accept political extortion as gospel.

More Spring Planting Preparation

Today was very rainy, with some severe storms mid-day. Half an inch of rain fell, with a bit more due tonight. If tomorrow is sunny, that will mean the soil will be wet for Saturday's planting, but that's OK. In the pre-dug beds, when the ground is wet, I can shove the stakes in the ground to support tomato cages and bean fencing without a mallet. I usually tamp them in a bit anyway for safety (2 stakes per tomato cage, several inches down, and bamboo stakes spaced as needed on the bean fencing, which is there to guide the plants up to the wooden fence). I'll have pictures when it is all set up. 

These are my okra and sunflower plants. They may not be ready for Saturday, but the beans definitely will. The cucumbers are questionable-we shall see.

Planting Time is Here

These green bean plants will have to go in the ground by Saturday. They are growing very, very fast. The tubes make planting them convenient, and provide a bit of protection from cutworms, or so I have read. I actually have not had any cutworm problems. Wow! Maybe soon we can eat our own green beans again! Maybe I'll have enough to freeze as well. Lord willing. We will see.

Broccoli is Alive

This picture was taken March 29. So much for "40 days to Maturity!" on the cauliflower (it is supposed to be an early-maturing hybrid). It sounded too good to be true. The bed seems no worse for wear for the near drowning last week. More fertilizer spreading this afternoon. We got more rain today, and I got home too late to dig, so I spread it out, at least. Must dig next few evenings. Planting season is very, very busy. Some days I really do not like working away from home and at home. I just cannot do it all as well as I would like. But I can try, and I'll sleep well when I finally crawl into bed tonight.

Spreading Fertilizer and Planting Borage

I'm trying to pre-empt the cabbage worm invasion by planting borage in the broccoli/cauliflower plot and inspecting the leaves for eggs periodically. We'll see how it works.

I'm also preparing the bed for the Big Corn Planting, April 11. Lots of "organic" fertilizer and some Miracle-Gro Garden Soil going in (needs some improvement, being a thin layer of topsoil over solid clay, with rocks and debris from 80 years of continuous habitation). I even found several child's marbles in the bed when I dug it last year and the year before. Found another marble this year. I'm going to dig it soft, dig in the amendments, and hope the corn grows high. Incorporating the stalks and the bean vines I hope to interplant with them should go a long way toward alleviating the thin-soil problem- just in time to revert it to lawn so we can sell the house when I graduate. C'est la vie.

Tomato Seedlings

Look at these! These are Arkansas Traveler seedlings from saved seeds, from a tomato I grew last year. This is cool! I always thought seeds were something you just had to buy every year, that you could not save them for reasons I never considered deeply. Now I know that the cycle can be repeated.

These are Japanese Black Trifele seedlings. They're supposed to be Russian purple-brick colored pear-shaped tomatoes. I bought the seeds this year from Baker Seed company. they're supposed to be heavy producers. We'll see how they do in my yard.

Gardening is an adventure. These plants will acclimate outdoors for a week (unless we get a cold snap or another deluge), then go in the ground next week-end. We are blessed.

Rainy Season

This is my broccoli bed on March 7. I'll take more pics of it next week, after I see if the plants can survive the deluge.
I looked at my garden journal for last year, and in the 9 days leading up to April 6, we got over a foot of rain. This year, we've had about 4 inches of rain so far in the last 4 days, according to the National Weather Service. I looked out my window yesterday to a scary sight- it looked like I was trying to grow broccoli in a rice paddy! The clay subsoil was turning our backyard into a pond. The flower beds are slightly raised and the brick walls have drainage holes, so they were OK, but the middle bed was not. I remembered a tiny trench I dug last year leading away from the bed, choked with leaves. I re-dug the parts filled in by the fall bed-dig and dug the leaves out of the other part. The yard has a gentle southerly slope toward a small sidewalk that funnels water to a neighbor's driveway. By later in the day the soil was sodden, but water was no longer pooled around the plants. The driveways in our neighborhood are all shaped to catch runoff from the yards and funnel it to the city drains. It is a neat system, as long as we do not get many inches of rain in a short period. Then it backfires and we get street flooding from the excess runoff. I'm thinking some household cisterns and catchment ponds might help. If each of us had a cistern holding a few thousand gallons of runoff water (maybe where a septic system would be if we did not have city sewer) for watering grass or gardens in the dry season, and if there were catchment ponds on the public lands and in common areas of residential developments (many here do have these, because the outlying areas of Memphis, where the growth is, are often on low-lying ground), maybe the flash flooding (it is here and gone in a few hours) wouldn't be so bad. 

I need to get out there and work. My borage and nasturtium plants really need to go in the ground. I may just transplant them to individual containers, and try for next weekend (planned to be the Big Planting Week-end), because the ground is just too wet. We got more rain last night, and even more is forecast for Monday night, Tuesday, and Thursday. Spring!

Spring Planting Approacheth

Rosalind Creasy wrote a book in the 80s called Cooking from the Garden. I highly recommend it. I got it from the library. It does not appear to be in print now. She wrote in the chapter about Native American gardens that they traditionally planted their corn when "the dogwood blossoms changed from beige to white or the wild plums were in bloom". A plum tree in the neighborhood bloomed before our last snowfall, so I'm not depending on it, but I have read that a dogwood tree can be a pretty reliable gauge of soil temperature. Here is the current bloom stage of our backyard tree. It will be planting time soon!

I Love Spring!

The windows are open. The trees are blushing lavender and pink and yellow-green. The mockingbirds are singing and fighting full-throttle. The tomato seedlings are looking strong. Even my saved banana pepper seeds have decided to germinate. I don't like working in an environment where you can NEVER open the windows. Even when I worked in a school with no windows, the janitors would open the hall end doors, and teachers left their fire doors open, to allow the breezes to blow the stale air of an overcrowded school out and fresh spring in. Then the fire marshall and middle school shooting aftermath stopped the air flow. 

Here at home, despite the barred windows, we can enjoy the day by letting the breezes blow through the house. And blow they do- I read a paper about Southern house design before the days of air conditioning. The author stated that Southern homes were often built with a "dogtrot", or 2 small structures connected by a bit of roofing, in which the hot kitchen with its huge fireplace was separated from the rest of the house. In our house, the "dogtrot" evolved into a main hall that runs the length of the rear of the house, with the kitchen on one side and bedrooms on the other. The authors of the paper stated that wind velocities in dogtrots (and later in houses with interior halls oriented with windows to take advantage of prevailing winds) were 2-3 times those outdoors. Ventilation was a necessity for good health then, and it is now, too. Thank God for open-window days! Sorry to quote something I cannot cite, but I can't find the paper now. 

Time to Help a Neighbor

As I was out hunting slugs this evening (I had caught 40 to that point- eventually caught 145!), I heard my neighbor arrive home, and comment over her phone about the difficulty she was having unloading her trunk. We talked, and I helped her unload some sale bags of mulch from the "local" big box store. She did not help me hunt slugs, but I don't blame anyone for not wanting to join that fun, crouching in the dirt with a flashlight picking up slimy gastropods.

It's that time of year, when the trees bloom, the grass greens, the birds nest, and everyone mulches and plants and waters in the new growth. Lend a hand, and the whole neighborhood will be better for it. Helpfulness and tidiness of yard tend to be contagious. Even if "property values" have declined in your area, keeping things neat, clean, and attractive-looking will help you continue to value your property for what it is- a shelter from the storm, a warm nook in the cold, a shady spot in the heat, and a place to call home for a while.