Garden update
The beans have come! It’s garden time, and my first order from Seed Savers has come in, and is already in the ground. Well, not all of them, but nine Flor de Junio, and nine Tejano beans (I only ordered the Flors, apparently the others were lagniappe) are in their appointed squares. Prior to their arrival, we already had onions (some green ones we rescued from the compost pile and some seeds which are just coming up), orange, green, and “chocolate” bell peppers, jalapeño and Anaheim peppers, basil, oregano (which over-wintered) lemon balm, dill, chives, parsley, orange mint, salad greens (some of which have already bolted and been removed, including the bacon-flavored one, whatever it was), and several types of tomatoes. The daffodils and tulips are bloomed out, and the iris are in full bloom now (some yellow and some white, with some white and purple on their way). I put in some morning glory seeds in pots in hopes of getting them to climb the play ground the porch posts. The orange tree is blooming (I wish I could send you a smell of it – it is amazing!) and the jasmine is almost there. All the berry bushes (ok, they’re not bushes yet, they’re sticks) have new growth, so in two years, if nothing goes wrong, we will have berries, too!
And there is a dove nest in the tree-bush near the garden. She’s sitting, so I’m looking forward to hearing the babies chirping soon. Apparently the eggs take about two weeks to hatch, then another two to leave the nest, and then they might even reuse the nest. I’m pretty excited about all that.
We’ve also had one big, black snake behind the shed, and more cats than we can keep track of coming through. I found one tabby tom-cat sitting in the stroller we had left out a couple of weeks ago. It looked ready to go for a ride.
Lucy wants to plant potatoes and other food, so her square will be turned up from the tulips and daffodils, now that they’re bloomed out, but we’re not quite sure how that is going to work yet. And Craig built a worm farm, so now all we need is manure and, well, worms. The garden shop nearest us doesn’t sell them, so I have some searching to do. Which means I should probably get busy before the girls wake up. Happy Spring, everybody!
Ask any sporting goods store that caters to fishermen. They’ll tell you where to find worms in abundance. I admit I’m relieved to hear that something is sprouting from those blackberry sticks I saw. They looked pretty forlorn on March 12! The difference a month makes!
April 9th, 2010 at 3:29 pmYou can just do a kitchen compost without finding worms. We’ve had one for a few years, we just toss kitchen scraps, sometimes leaves or grass, and keep it wet, hot and stir often in the summer. We get a great compost. When its hot outside the turn over is really fast.
April 21st, 2010 at 12:40 pmWe already have the compost pile, too, but we find that the amount of kitchen waste relative to “green matter” like grass is way too high, and we’re lazy about turning and watering it, so there are lots of bugs and not so much good compost. Worms, on the other hand, like kitchen waste, and it would be really cool to have a box of them in the back yard. Craig has done some research that says there are special red worms for composting, not your usual tackle shop night-crawlers, but we haven’t gotten much farther on that front.
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:30 pmBut we have, since this post, put in a potato bucket and laid out a pumpkin/squash/cantaloupe patch. And the garden actually looks like a garden. I made dill bread today just because the dill is trying to overtake the tomato plant next to it. It’s all pretty exciting.