Pondered In My Heart

{pretty, happy, funny, real} - late summer garden

{pretty}

So many flowers are blooming so beautifully right now! I planted loads of zinnias this year as they are so easy to grow and give so much beauty for so little effort. The birds and bees and butterflies all love them, and so do I.  I haven't even been deadheading them to keep them blooming - the goldfinches have been taking care of that for me. So fun to watch them meticulously plucking and enjoying the seeds. And Kateri calls me outside on dewy mornings to see the sparkly jeweled webs dripping from the blooms. So many pretty colors in the Lilliput Mix from St. Clare's Seeds, and the butterflies love my Sparky Mix marigolds too. I put in lots of purple alyssum this year as well. I hope it reseeds as well as the white always does - endless mounds of little flowers years after year without any work. Lovely.

{happy}

Fruits and vegetables are doing fairly well. The cucumber vines have given up lately, but they did well for long time and I made five quarts of sweet refrigerator pickles. Blackberries are just about done but the fall bearing raspberries are just getting started. Beans and beets are old reliables. I grew garlic for the first time this year and got a good crop despite my not remembering that you're supposed to cut off the scapes on top before they bloom. Oh well. I'll remember and hopefully have bigger bulbs next year. Yesterday I finally got around to planting more seeds for a fall crop - peas, beans, beets, spinach, lettuce, radish and kohlrabi. And it even rained today - hooray!

{funny}

I really try to keep up with the zucchini during squash season, but alas I somehow missed this whopper hiding under the leaves for days on end. Kateri strung it up like a giant fish. It's really quite a versatile vegetable and can be used as a bookstand or doorstop or even a club in case of need...

{real}

So while I've been busy processing the prolific squash and making jam I've been ignoring the huge heaps of kale sprouting all over the garden. Lush leafy heads of kale were everywhere and I kept ignoring it, putting off harvesting it for the freezer as the other things seemed more urgent to gather fresh.

Until one day all the the kale looked like this -

Now we know from experience that kale is the groundhog's favorite meal, but I actually tried to explain to my husband how I didn't know what was devouring my kale as there aren't any holes in the fence and we haven't seen any groundhogs in the garden or even in our yard lately. Could it be grasshoppers? Something else? Ha. Silly me.

A few days later I noticed piles of dirt all over my tomato vines and then found the telltale hole...

Turns out it was a leetle groundhog, with a typical big appetite for kale. We don't know how it got in as we have double fencing all around the garden - unless maybe the gardener left the door open one day? In any case, it's gone now. Michael had his most entertaining catch of all time: he sprayed the hose in one end of the burrow to chase the thing out, and we got to watch it come tearing up out of the hole at the other end and straight into the trap! And we always come in and play Pete Seeger's Groundhog Song for Pa after he makes a catch. (Cause we're goofy like that.)

Visit Rosie at Like Mother, Like Daughter for more {p,h,f,r}!

A Tour of my Fairy Garden (a guest post by Kateri)

On my 9th birthday, to my delight, I received a Fairy Garden box. A fairy garden is a small flower garden for the fairies, and a fairy garden box is a wooden frame to plant it in. I was happy to get what I wanted! Here I am sitting on the edge of it after receiving it.

One day, I found it filled by 'the fairies'! They left a note telling me they filled the garden with dirt and couldn't wait to move into their new home! I immediately started putting in things. Dad had purchased four lovely flowers, so I planted them in the corners, and they looked bea-u-ti-ful! Here I'm trying to make a swing. It didn't work right, so I made a better one. But first I tried it out a bit longer.

Here I am making a stone house.

Here's a piggy-pig that Ma bought me at a sale. Poor fairies, piggy's eating up all the carrots! Naughty piggy-pig!

Here's a pear-juice stand. Maybe it's only a pear-bank, but in this case, it's a pear juice stand for fairies. They can put their little straws in at the slit and drink the juice.

Ma had built a little hill, and on it I built a small slate bench shaded by a rhubarb leaf. The 'trees' are old flower stalks of some kind, I don't know what.

Of course, fairies do not want people spraying pesticides on their flowers so they put up warning signs. They do not want pesticides because they ruin the flowers, and there will be no bugs for the birds to eat.

I enjoy making little signs for the fairy garden, using toothpicks and small bits of paper. The signs include: 'Butterflies Welcome Here', 'Ladybugs Welcome Here', and signs telling what some things are such as 'Wading Pool' and 'Pear Juice'.

Here is one of the aforementioned purchased flowers from the flower shop. You see, it really is a fairy garden to plant flowers in.

Here's a tiny Trader Joe's coffee cup that has in it boating and fishing equipment. Inside are boats made of different kinds of leaves and bark, and poles made out of sticks, and fishing rods made out of sticks with bits of twine.

This shows a side view of the whole garden. Spiders continually crawl over the sides and weave webs between trees (that aren't really trees).
This de-light-ful structure is made out of the old recycled trunk of a hibiscus tree, shaded with a large rhubarb leaf, and supporting the long swing where the fairies love to slide back and forth. It also has a platform made out of more slate. Here on this slateful platform the fairies may enjoy the view of the countryside. They may go up and down by the braided hibiscus trunk.

This here, seeming to be a coconut dish supported by sticks, is actually a slide, where the fairies enjoy to bounce up and down. It has a small ladder to climb up, and is supported by a triangular block.

The fairies' teacup, full of water, is where the fairies love to go fishing and sail their boats. This teacup is surrounded by two small stone benches where the fairies may sit in the hot summer afternoons and chat.

The fairies here live, cheerfully surrounded by delightful flowers and lovely play things. Here is where they sleep and cook their meals.

Attached to the house is an upraised deck shaded by a rhubarb leaf and decorated with a pot, in which is contained a violet. Leading up to it are slate steps, and there is a small round piece of slate on the deck. This was supposed to contain birdseed, but the birdseed all blew away.

Close beside the small hill is a light, which sticks up from the earth and gives out a blue light when it grows dark. This light was given to me by Dad, who brought it home as a surprise for my fairy garden. It shows exactly where the fairy garden is when it is dark. This glowing light is sometimes used as a lookout pole. The fairies fly up and then stand on the top and survey the landscape. In the background, you see a pinecone. This is a climbing pole, and the sign near it says that it has a fine view. This is true, but other tall things give a much better view of the scenery.
  Closing remarks: This wonderful garden box wood was  purchased by Daddy, and the box was made by my dear brother Josiah. The writer of this post hopes that her fairy garden will flourish and grow flowers, but not weeds. I think that it was very kind of Ma to ask Josiah to make me this lovely garden box, which is now in my backyard.

Each day, I proceed to go outside and change the canopies of rhubarb leaf and change the water (which is probably being drunk by birds). I also make sure that the swing is not falling down. And always, always, I give the fairy garden a delightful rain of the hose. And so we must end.  The end.

P.S. I took most of these pictures myself, but not the ones with me in them.

Editor's Note: The square garden box was made with one ten foot long 2x10 board, cut into four equal pieces. The corners are held together with weather resistant screws. Fairy gardens seem to be quite popular at present, but I was careful not to let Kateri see any of the numerous websites or pinterest boards as I didn't want to fill her head with other folks' ideas. I provided her with a few boughten trinkets and let her do it all herself with her own imagination as her guide. I think she's done a wonderful job, and she takes joy in playing around in it every day. :-)

Currantly

Continuing our efforts to add more edibles to our landscape we planted two small black currant bushes last year.  They have done well and produced a sufficient amount of fruit for making our first currant jam. In fact they looked so good that I went ahead and planted two kinds of red currants this year, and red and green gooseberries too for good measure. (Not that any of us have ever tasted a gooseberry before, but game for fool we are!)  These small fruits are very easy to grow and are relatively pest free - very unusual properties for fruit. The bushes are also rather inexpensive and there are now currant varieties resistant to the white pine blister rust that got them outlawed by a federal ban in 1911. This once common fruit has become virtually unknown here in the US because of that ban, though currants remain popular in Europe. It's quite an interesting story to think about, how this ban could wipe out currant production for a whole century rendering the tasty, nutritious (loads of Vitamin C!) fruits virtually unknown to American palates. They do taste a bit odd right off the bush, but cooked up they are quite delicious.

It was a happy coincidence that our currants were ready to harvest right after we finished our school work for the year. I love making simple jams that don't require anything but the fruit, sugar and water. I used this black currant jam recipe and it was very easy to make! That one colander of currants yielded six pints of jam for us, paying for the currant bushes with the very first batch. This stuff is really good on fresh hot biscuits! Or rolls. Or a spoon. And there's still a few later-ripening fruits left out on the bushes that we'll perhaps make into currant buns so we can be like Mrs. Rabbit (just for the good little bunnies, of course).

Wordless Wednesday: Second Breakfast, Spring Style

Garden Update: Late May

So much growing since my last garden post way back at the beginning of March! I'm joining Ginny for her Saturday Garden Journal.

As I mentioned last week, the strawberries are doing very well at the moment. Strawberries can be tricky to grow and you are really at the mercy of the weather, about which you can do nothing. Too much rain, particularly with cool temps, and they succumb to molds and rot and your berry patch turns into a disappointing mess. But given plenty of sunshine and moderate water and you have a lovely crop. This has been a good year: we are picking a goodly amount every few days, and we are adept at polishing off several quarts at at time as they are so good when just picked.

I am also hoping to grow alpine strawberries, which I actually read about in my favorite vegetable gardening book. Alpine strawberries bear all summer long and do not form runners so they are easier to tend. I started two varieties from seed a few months ago and they are almost ready to set out in a new bed prepared for them.

The blackberries are  just beginning to fruit, and we should have a very good crop from our three bushes we put in a few years ago. I know you southern growers are already enjoying your big black tasty fruits but we have to be content with our little green berries for now. Patience!

And our blueberries are still green berries too-

We also grow two varieties of raspberries in a long row across the back of our yard, for a total of about eighty feet of raspberries. These berries produce on second year canes, so that there are always a row of bushes-

And these are the ones that get cut back all the way every year. In spring they grow new canes and will eventually bear fruit on them later in the summer. As you can see, we are still working on getting these mulched with compost.

New this year are a couple of black currants We just planted these a month ago and I was surprised to find a few clusters of flowers on them already.

We also put in more fruit trees, adding cherries, peaches, and Asian pears to our collection. We have a cluster of fruit trees over on one side of the house and we fondly refer to it as The Orchard. Our lot is about 3/4 of an acre here in suburbia, and as you can see we try to make the most of it garden wise.

Onward to the vegetable garden! It's almost beet time. We do love our beets. (and taffy)

Bush beans are just sprouting (along with weeds) -

Our first planting of peas is doing well-

and I just picked the first two pods the other day for these two sweeties.

Greens are thriving in the spring weather. Spinach-

lettuce and kale;  I kind of have a rotation going for our dinner salads with the three. So tasty and nutritious, and every night my husband says 'I love not having to buy greens!'

Here you can see how I have the greens all growing under my cucumber frames. Later in the summer when the vines are climbing the frames they will give a little cover shade for the greens who like it cool. I also have little baby leeks mixed in with the greens to maximize the space. If you have keen eyes you might also spot a few 'volunteer' nasturtiums popping up in there. I leave them be as they are pretty, the flowers are edible, and they are also said to repel the dreaded squash bugs. Besides utilizing space well, this type of interplanting can also be helpful for minimizing pests as I learned in that same garden book. I also follow the author's recommendations for deep, wide, raised beds to maximize productivity.

Here's a view of the whole vegetable garden. We have five wide raised rows with paths in between. Raised beds are very popular today with most people thinking of them as some type of frame placed on the ground to hold your soil. But as you can see you can have a raised by simply mounding up the soil and the benefits are the same - maximized space and loose rich soil because you aren't walking on it. Loose soils allows for better root system development which makes for stronger plants and better yields. And that allows the soil to support more plants in less square foot space, further maximizing yields.

I also have a couple of boxes of lettuces on the deck and this is turning out to be very convenient. If we just need a few leaves to put on a sandwich or if we are making a salad after dark for a late supper (ahem) we can get our green fix right out the door.

I've also been working hard on the flower beds, but not too much to show as yet. That loooong bed we put in a few years ago was overtaken in parts with vetch and I've been laboring to really turn over the soil (by hand) and get all the roots out. I'm also pulling out lots of primroses which are lovely now while blooming but tend to take over the garden universe.

There are also roses for consolation.

Thanks for visiting our May gardens!

Wordless Wednesday: Because it's 3/21 Day

(And because she's the cutest, sweetest, prettiest gardener in the whole wide world.)

Garden Beginnings

Like the door in Narnia, our garden entryway looks a bit out of place standing alone and leading nowhere in the bleak grey landscape of not-quite-spring.

Ginny is hosting a link up of garden journal posts to visually chronicle the progression of the growing season. She's already inspired me to plant some garlic and put the beds to use over next winter. At present, the vegetable garden is empty and nothing remains but the dregs of last year's vines.

And this tangled mess is a view of the herb garden. You can see that I am one to skip what is commonly called 'fall cleanup', preferring to leave the dying vegetation of the previous season in place as a sort of natural mulch and to provide cover for foraging wildlife. I also just like the wild natural look.

 If you look closely there is life to be seen,

 (lemon balm)

and it's those bits of very much alive greenery that bring hope and joy to the gardener's soul.

(parsley)

But most of the action is going on here inside the house.

 For several weeks now this has been an almost daily sight-

as my little garden helpers assists with the sowing

carefully planting the tiny brown packages of new life.

My vegetable seeds this year are from St. Clare Heirloom Seeds, a family owned company that specializes in non-hybrid, non-GMO, open pollinated seeds. I have been very pleased with the seeds, and they are packaged in handy little bags inside the paper envelopes for safe storing of the seeds (no more accidentally dumping the entire envelope of seeds out all over the ground because you dropped the packet out of your garden basket, if you know what I mean). Using open pollinated seeds also means you can save seeds at the end of the growing season for use next year, as well as letting plants reseed themselves in the garden, knowing that the new plants will be true to type (unlike hybrids).

Kateri is writing down everything she plants in Alice's sweet little Garden Notes book while I keep a more detailed list in my now fifteen year old garden notebook. In February we started peppers, tomatoes, rhubarb, spinach, kale, leeks, and several annual herbs. We also have a couple dozen types of flowers we've planted as well.

 Kateri is so excited to check and see what's 'up' every morning. Mother, we have tomatoes now!

For me, the joy never of having new plants sprouting never gets old. I love to watch things grow, little by little, day by day, greener and greener. It's always amazing to think of the big plants and so much food that will delight and nourish us, all coming from those tiny brown seeds.

 

(sweet peppers - California Wonder and Hungarian  bananas)

So this is what my 'garden' looks like for now as we plant and tend and wait for spring.

Edited to add: A commenter asked if it's too late to start seeds. It's still early in the season (at least where I live) and a couple of weeks delay isn't a problem - your harvests will just be a little later. You can go to the almanac site, type in your zip code, and it will give you the best planting dates for various seeds based on your location. Alternatively, this site has a planting guide worksheet that you can print out. I have another post on starting seeds here. The book I use for reference on vegetable gardening is The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.

Happy Spring Weekend

 

It rained all last week making the warmth and sunshine of the weekend that much more delightful. We happily devoured the season's first bowl of red, ripe strawberries from our backyard beds. Serving suggestion: Place strawberries on table alongside bowl of freshly whipped cream. The big (and little) hungry bears will know what to do.

Another harbinger of spring is Mrs. Robin sitting snugly on her nest-

Her three babies are getting so big they hardly fit in the nest anymore. Today we saw Mother Robin bring dessert to her babies - she delivered a beakful of grape jam to her good little birds to wash down all those worms they eat all day.

The lovely tree swallow eggs remain snug in their feather lined nest waiting to hatch-

 

And Lydia caught sight of three of the baby blues being fed by their mama across the street in the woods. It was the first we've seen of them since they fledged, so that was nice. 
 

On Saturday I planted out all of my vegetable seedlings I've been coddling for months. I was tempted to do it two weeks ago, but thoughts of  the stern Francesco De Baggio kept me in restraint. Though I've never met him nor even laid eyes on him, I kept hearing his admonition to 'not let my peppers see nights below 55' running through my head and I held off until this weekend. So now my tomatoes and peppers and cucurbits are finally in.

I have to show you my new cucumber frames Michael made for me. (I did oooh and aaah properly.) Behold-

  
Aren't they fabulous? By going vertical I can grow many more cucumbers, and they won't have to rest on the ground and get buggy. Cucumbers are one of the girls' favorite walk-out-to-the-garden-and-grab-something-to-munch crops, so I am very happy and thankful to have these. Michael says they were quite simple and inexpensive to make. The many little cucumber plants look so cute next to them, all lined up in a row-

  
I am also trying some companion planting this year to try to repel some pests. My favorite gardening book suggests marigolds to keep away cucumber beetles and nasturtiums to combat the dread squash bugs, so I added in some of those as well. But the weekend was not all work - there was plenty of time to sit and make clover chains in the sunshine. The girls made me a lovely clover circlet to wear so I was surrounded by the delicious sweet scent of clover as I worked.

 
 We were also delighted by the spotting of several red admirals-
 
 Fresh air and sunshine and hard work and new life every where - I do so love these simple pleasures of spring.

Of Weeds and Sin

I spent the day Saturday working in the flower beds cleaning up debris and pulling weeds. I have a lot of beds and there are lots of weeds thriving out there. Whenever I spend any length of time pulling and digging and wrestling and cultivating to get rid of weeds I can't help thinking of how they are so like sin. As I pull and dig and wrestle and cultivate I ruminate on how all the different types of weeds are like so many different ways sin penetrates our lives.

The first comparison is obvious - pulling weeds is like rooting out sin; we must get to the very bottom of things in order to triumph. As I always tell my garden helpers, it does no good to just pull off the top of the weed -we must use our 'poker' and dig down deep to get all the root out in order to be able to hope the offender is gone, never to return.

Some weeds have one main tap root, strong and slender and steep, but when you've dug far enough and pulled hard enough you get it all out, and it shouldn't come back.

Other weeds have myriad clusters of branching roots; the leafy green growth above ground is nothing compared to the far reaching labyrinth of roots underneath. How can one weed have such far reaching intricate root systems branching out in so many directions? Even after pulling out the weed, and a fair bit of the main root system, you still find root clumps here and there. Broken off bits of leftovers from the main, still mixed in the good earth.

Some weeds are menacing just to look at, and their prickly spikes leave no doubt they are nasty weeds and must go.

 

And then there are other weeds that do a wonderful job of looking like something else, pretending to be something benign or even desirable. 

  
 
We can be tricked by their likeness to good things, but looking very closely we can see they are only fakes. Sometimes it takes a while to spot the difference. We can spend a long time trying to figure it out, waiting for the good fruit or flower that never comes.

But when we do, and the true nature of the imposters is known, then they too must go.
 

Then there are the plants that started out as something nice. We may have even planted them on purpose, charmed by their sweet flowers or pleasing scents. But then they take over and become invasive, reaching and penetrating and reproducing where they don't belong, choking out all else, and what started as a good thing has become despised by its very tenacity. And now it's a weed, and it's got to go. And we start to dig and we are astounded at how pervasive it has become, spreading further and further where it was never intended to be.

Some plants send out impossibly long underground runners and then new shoots form all along the hidden invaders. Innumerable little bitty replicas of the original, everywhere. It's so hard to dig out every last one, and it can seem hopeless we'll ever get them all. Some sin can seem to 'travel underground', reaching far and surfacing now and again when and where we least expect it.

  
 
Then there are the weeds that are so much more difficult to remove after they've been ignored. They grow and blossom and then bear seeds that are dispersed into so many areas far and wide. It would have been much easier and wiser to 'nip it in the bud', but laziness and procrastination and even denial work together to let them flourish and multiply. 
 

And when those weed seeds sprout, they may seem so tiny and insignificant, but there are oh so many of them and they seem to spring up everywhere. It's quite a job to grasp at all their little offspring that came forth from the one parent weed. If we let but one sin go unattended, we can be left dealing with its repercussions for a long, long time.

When gardening, I think of how I work and work removing all the weeds in one area and then I sit back at look at what I thought was all clear. But having removed the big weeds, I can now see clearer and all the little weeds I missed are visible, just as Confession clears the soul so we can more clearly see the faults within.

It's hard work weeding. Unused muscles ache, arms get prickled and scratched and dirt gets under the fingernails. It can tire a person out. We can get excited by our progress and the next minute get discouraged by how very much more work there is to do.

And weeding is of course only part of tending the garden. Establishing lovely flowers and useful fruits and vegetables crowd out the weeds and keep them from taking over. The more the garden is filled with the good and the beautiful, the less of a chance the undesirables have to ever take hold.

 

These are the things I ponder as I work in my garden beds.
 

Saturday Snippets

 
My children never cease to amuse and entertain me with their clever and creative ideas. This time they've decided to bury a treasure box and plant a treasure map as bait. 

 

The box is naturally filled with various assorted sundry treasures, all home made of course. There are pearls and gold nuggets and coins and a ruby ring, with a bit of cram for sustenance and an 'atmospheric' crab claw for good measure.

 
And there's a well-aged and adequately mysterious missive for whoever finds the loot-

 
The purpose of this adventure is to 'test' the sensibilities and skills of the group of nine little kids on bikes who frequent the vacant lots on the edge of our development. These are of course referred to as the Nine Riders (though no malice is implied), and my gang is anxiously waiting to see if their adventuresome spirits and cartographical skills are sufficient for them to find the booty.  Do 'modern children' still care about searching for buried treasure? Inquiring minds want to know.

In other new, the killdeer have started to 'nest!' We've been hearing them for a few weeks, and last night the children finally found their homestead-

 
They created their customary protective 'notice' to try and keep people from stomping on the nest, though they kept it rather low key so as to not attract the attention of The Nine Riders. The treasure is buried far from the killdeer site.

And finally, if you are interested in frugal gardening note that Park Seed has free shipping on seeds until midnight on Sunday April 11 (EST). Use coupon code SHOWERS. This is a great way to try a few seed packets without having to pay for postage as well. If you sign up for their emails you get notified of these occasional offers, as well as helpful gardening info.

Now I must get to my Saturday chores. Happy weekend!