Adventures with the Tiniest Gardener

Please excuse my orange clay-covered knees if you saw me out and about yesterday - I was (finally!) able to get in a good bit of gardening. Virginia's Tiniest Gardener and I planted about fifty square feet of our backyard garden with spring vegetables and some strawberry starts. He had a blast out there raking, digging, and poking around. My hope is that the garden will teach my kiddos some of the more admirable character traits, like patience ("Whaddaya mean, these don't turn into fully-formed carrots overnight?") and humility (because as all gardeners know, we may be bigger than cutworms, Japanese beetles, stinkbugs, and tomato hornworms, but they will still defeat us handily).

I also hope that the experience of growing his own fruits and veggies will give my son, who currently subsists on noodles, buttered toast, and yogurt, an appreciation for foods with colors outside the continuum between white and ecru. To that end, he ate, with a little prompting, a lettuce leaf straight from the garden, which is a minor miracle. He did tell me almost immediately afterwards that "lettuce is green, and green is icky, like sausage that has skin on it," but I'll take what I can get. Today lettuce leaf, tomorrow broccoli rabe? A girl can dream.

The Prudent Homemaker's Garden Tour

Two bouts of "Don't you know it's March?!" snow have kept me out of the garden for fear I'll compact all that heavy, wet clay soil I have with my giant clodhoppers. I'm having to get all my garden thrills vicariously (though hopefully next week's forecast of temperatures in the sixties will hold true and I'll be out there before you know it). One of my favorite sites to check out is the Prudent Homemaker's, and she just put up a virtual tour of her garden.

I'm amazed at what she has been able to accomplish in a backyard in gardening-unfriendly Nevada, with its hard, rocky soil and its punishingly low rainfall amounts.

Even more pictures, plus her gardening story (which includes fitting 34 fruit trees on a .24-acre lot!) can be found on her "Edible Landscaping" page. Enjoy, especially if, like me, Mother Nature is giving you fits and keeping you out of the dirt for longer than you'd like.

Gardening with Devil Dogs

I've been growing nasturtiums from seed for about two weeks now. I love nasturtiums, and so by extension, I loved my nasturtium seedlings. The seedlings looked healthy, green, and strong when I left the house this morning. Here is how they looked when I returned home:

LEAFLESS LITTLE NASTURTIUM SKELETONS.
What? How? Why? Because furry demons had converted them into dog upchuck on my deck.

 (demons not shown to scale)

Hungry for Spring

Virginia's Tiniest Farmer and I toured the Back Forty (cough *square feet* cough) this morning and found a few signs that spring is truly on its way.

The crocus have bloomed, and the chickweed has sprung up. The crocus will be a distant memory within an month, but the chickweed will continue to vex me throughout the growing season.

The fuzzy green leaves of "Paprika" yarrow have begun to push through the soil. In the summer, these plants will be covered in beautiful red flowers, and in the fall, its seedheads will be a tasty snack for birds. You're welcome, little dudes.

The azalea buds are beginning to fatten up. I'm not a big azalea fan - I think they look lovely, of course, but I can't deal with how much those spider mites love them - so these two are guests in one of my raised beds until they are ready to head over to my next-door neighbor's front yard.

Hellebores! Or Lenten roses. Tomayto, Tomahto. They are also budding, and should bloom soon. Did you know that Lenten roses are in the same family as clematis and columbines? The More You Know (tm)...

More winter rye has sprouted in one of the raised beds. I used rye as a cover crop in the beds this winter, and the plants never grew more than a few inches high but stayed pleasantly green throughout the colder months. I turned this bed over a few weeks ago so that the rye would decompose into the soil and enrich it; some of the seeds must have come closer to the surface when I did this. They'll be turned into the soil, too, to amend it with plenty 'o' good stuff.

Virginia's Tiniest Farmer and I did a little recreational digging, just to get our wiggles out, but we're looking forward to really getting our shovels (some more plastic than others) dirty in just a few weeks. 

Check out "Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA"

"Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus, you get strawberries."

Snowquestration 2013

Well thank goodness I had the discipline to not plant my peas this weekend.

Those suckers would have been buried under a foot of snow or so right when they were thinking it might be nice to poke up out of the ground.

Barn cam, Hen cam, and Goat cam, or, Additional Ways for Me to Procastinate

Everybody, stop what you are doing rightthissecond (unless it's something important, like open heart surgery or purchasing pizza rolls) and check out HenCam.com. I'll wait.

Hello again, and welcome back! I assume that it's been at least a half-hour and that you have experienced the phenomenon of missing time, because seriously, multiple hen cams? Plus a goat cam with inside AND great outdoors views? You had me at "Here's something Katie can do besides grading these last few freshman comp papers." Or "Hello," if you're Jerry Maguire, aka Tom Cruise before we all knew about the Scientology stuff and saw the couch-jumping and got kind of weird taste in our mouths and made That Face, like a collective "Are you sure this is 'regular' and not 'diet'?" pucker.

Mavis from OneHundredDollarsaMonth.com first alerted me to this ideal procrastination device. The first time I looked at the goat cam, the goat looked like s/he was trying to eat the cam, which struck me as very, well, goat-like behavior.

"What a delicious piece of technology!"

 

I can't decide what I dig more: this, or the hens struttin' their stuff.
 

 "What are you lookin' at, punk?"

Yours in not getting a substantive amount of work done this fine Thursday afternoon,
Katie