Rather than giving you a list of excuses for why it’s been four months since I posted anything, I thought I’d give you a little taste of what I’ve been up to when I’m not typing away frantically at my computer.

For the last several months, what once was blocked off as “writing time” has been shamelessly converted to “gardening time.” For the most part, I’ve been happy with the results. I hope you will enjoy seeing a little of what’s going on in our gardens right now…I just wish you could taste some of it too!

A new addition this year is a pumpkin patch. I had planted this out as a three sisters garden, a Native American planting system in which corn, pole beans, and vining squash work together to grow stronger and healthier. There were a couple of hiccups–the sweet corn I planted first didn’t sprout, and the pole beans (which are doing great about ten feet away–scroll down to see!) didn’t do well either. A second attempt included Strawberry popcorn in place of the sweet corn, and it did quite well. Bonus: the popcorn seeds were saved by and gifted to us by a friend.

At this point, I’ve harvested the popcorn because the birdhouse gourds have pulled down all the corn stalks, except for the one I put a tomato cage around, and they were about to smother it as well. Turns out birdhouse gourds grow really well here. (Also, I feel like I’ve fallen into an episode of Veggie Tales…)

Along with the gourds, this patch has zucchini (which I planted at the edge of the garden for easy access, but have still been overwhelmed) and pumpkins.

The smaller, smooth green leaves in the pic above are the gourds. The larger, mottled leaves are either some seeds I saved from one of those cool green pumpkins that have been at all the grocery stores and farmer’s markets, or Seminole pumpkins. I’m not sure which it is, but there are a few of these little beauties hiding in under the leaves now.

Also, the bees LOVE their big yellow flowers. I couldn’t find one willing to pose for me this morning, unfortunately.

This is the bean tepee, one of my very favorite plantings. It has Rattlesnake beans on the south side (left in the photo) and Yard Long beans on the north side (right).

I learned something from this planting, which I would have known if I had paid attention to the Yard Longs last year: they don’t make all that much foliage, which means that side of the tepee wasn’t very shady in the morning. The Rattlesnakes, on the other hand, are lush as well as very productive. I did correct a mistake I made on my last tepee, and made the interior wider and left a door. It still didn’t get as much play time as I might have hoped, but there were a few instances of our kids and their friends sitting in the tepee munching beans straight off the plant. Success!

The kumquat tree bloomed a couple of months ago, and now is hard at work!

It has been a ridiculously generous producer for us every year, and it looks like this year will be no exception. Come visit us around Thanksgiving and we’ll send you home with a bag full! We had a great harvest off our our satsuma tree last year as well, but no flowers this year so no fruit. This seems to be its cycle–bounty, rest, a few fruit, then bounty again. I’ll be waiting impatiently.

A few years ago we were given an elderberry plant by a friend. We planted it, it seemed to have died, and we forgot about it. We built a chicken coop where we had planted it. And then it grew. We cut it back as far as we can two or three times a year, and it comes back and shades the chickens like it had never been touched. It’s in flower now, and well on its way to making berries.

I’m not going to attempt syrup again this year (too much work), but Sam and I are planning to attempt a tincture instead. (Recipe advice welcome!)

The tomato jungle is also back for another year.

And one of the many orb weavers which have taken up residence in our yard is helping keep them healthy.

The variety is Matt’s Wild Cherry, and I have never seen anything grow like these. They get enormous, make a ton of fruit, and reseed all over the place. I think I will plant ONE of these next year–we can barely give away all the fruit from three, and I’d like to try some other varieties. They have been a boon for our community fridge, though!

Speaking of other varieties, I do have one Carbon tomato plant (the fruit ripen to a purple-brown) struggling along. It’s getting a lot of shade from the Matt’s Wild Cherry, but it’s doing its best!

The butterflies love these zinnias. We don’t plant them anymore, they self-seed and we rejoice. I did see a beautiful orange ombre variety at the farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago, though, so maybe we will add a new color or two next year for interest.

In front of the zinnias is the basil pot.

This has been a great way to grow basil for me for years now, though it does require daily watering in this heat. The crop is small this year, though, so I’m going to need to plant a fall crop if we want to have enough to freeze for winter pesto. (Hat tip to Fr. R.B. for teaching me that trick!)

Lest you think everything is unicorns and rainbows around here, this is the blueberry patch.

Only that light colored plant in the front should really be there. This spot is overgrown (again) and there were a few sad, small blueberries on them this year. I hope the birds who ate them enjoyed them. I need to do some soil sampling and serious research and see what is keeping these guys from thriving, because repeated layers of cardboard and pine needles aren’t doing the trick.

This isn’t much to look at yet either, but I’m hopeful:

I threw some moldy ginger root in the compost bin, and it sprouted, I did some damage trying to move it, so I’m not sure how many of these will take (I think most of the were broken off of the two main roots that were in there) but I think at least the main roots stand a chance. Moldy ginger is going in pots from now on, however!

There are a few things happening in the front yard as well. The dill I planted by the mailbox has been very happy there, but it’s been so hot the last two weeks that it’s just given up.

I managed to get some fresh cuttings into pickles, but now I will have to use the dried heads because that’s what’s left. We grew turmeric in this spot last year (below), and it really thrived, so we’re trying it again this year. It was a slow starter, but it’s up now, so I’m hopeful!

On our last visit to the farmer’s market in Baton Rouge (which just doesn’t happen as often as I’d like) Clare bought a milkweed plant. We put it on the corner of the house in this big raised bed, and it’s beautiful. No caterpillars yet (our neighbors have some!) but we’re planning to plant more now that we know this is a good spot for it.

The milkweed is picking up the slack for the mammoth sunflowers, which I sadly did not take a picture of, and which I had to pull out about a week ago. Someday I’ll get those seeds ready for eating or feeding the birds…

Speaking of birds, one result of bird feeders is…volunteer plants! We had a small forest of four foot tall sunflowers here a month ago, and now a bunch of what I think might be millet–the orange and yellow grain things in the front. (Someone correct me if you know what it is!)

On the side of the house, you can see what I’ve been spending my mornings doing:

moving a sprinkler around to all the gardens, but especially the mushroom plots. I put Wine Cap mushrooms, which grown in hardwood chips, in three places, so hopefully at least one of them will take and we’ll have our own mushrooms this fall!

Just next to the sprinkler is our asparagus patch, which has done so much better than I ever dreamed it would! Next spring we can start harvesting, and if these ferns are any indication, they should have good strong roots and be giving us tasty shoots for a long time.

And next to the asparagus, dwarf hawthorn bushes, which are making berries which (in theory) some birds will come eat. I think the bushes may be too short to be tempting, given our local cat population, but we’re trying.

And finally, on the front porch, this might be what I’m most proud of:

I grew this big, beautiful plant from the top of a grocery store pineapple. It’s right by the front door, welcoming guests to our house. The interwebs suggest that it should be nearly old enough to start fruiting. And at this point I feel inclined to wax eloquent on the amazing fruitfulness and resiliency of God’s green earth, and how generous it is if we’re willing to give it a little help…but I fear this post is more than long enough already. Here’s one more zinnia picture, with my wish that you enjoy the rest of your summer!

I had intentions of writing a grand four week Advent series…but Thanksgiving got the better of me last week, and this has been the week of the Stomach Bug. By the time the clothes, sheets, comforters, floors, and dog were all washed, there wasn’t much time left for writing. So that carefully planned, well-researched series will have to wait. Maybe until Lent.

My writing wasn’t the only one of our plans up-ended by this very annoying little virus. Our oldest turned fifteen this week, but festivities were muted, to say the least. Dance classes, violin lessons, school (home- and otherwise) all had to take a back seat to laundry and naps. I couldn’t even manage the little Jesse Tree ornaments and readings I had planned for this Advent. We’ll be playing catch-up with those for a while.

We all had many opportunities this week to practice patience. Practice being the key word – we failed again and again, and just had to keep trying. And the girls spent a good bit of time delirious (from exhaustion and empty stomachs) which they seemed to enjoy and will probably remember fondly for years to come.

It was not exactly how I had hoped to start our Advent. I didn’t have big, outrageous plans to begin with…but I had hoped to be a little bit focused and intentional. The challenges of Week One have forced us to streamline – Advent wreath at supper, special night prayer. A pile of Advent and Christmas books available. Advent Calendar up and running. And that’s it.

Obviously there is still plenty of time to add decorations and get the Jesse Tree back on track. Still, our week doesn’t look terribly “successful” compared to many of the beautiful, complicated Advent decorations and homeschool schemes I like to read about online. But I know one thing: I probably prayed more and harder during the first week of Advent 2021 than any other I can remember. So despite the demise of my well-laid plans, I’ll call that one part a success, and be thankful for the chance to try again next week.

It’s long past time I wrote about Kim.

First, the background. Craig and I were married the weekend between exams and graduation. That summer, we moved a solid 1,000 miles away from our families. We knew no one; our closest contact was my graduate program director, with whom I had had a couple of phone conversations.

We met Kim through our church. She was a recent convert to Catholicism, and a single mother of five children, ranging in age from early twenties (roughly our own age) down to four.

Kim invited us to her house for dinner. Almost immediately, this became a standing date. Every Tuesday was Kim’s house, and Kim’s house meant board games with the nine year old, non-grad-student conversation, cloth napkins, and always a steaming pot of tea.

We often say that our family’s emphasis on hospitality stems from reading so much Dorothy Day, and her writings (and Peter Maurin’s, of course) do provide much of the philosophy behind our way of life. But the person in whom this ideal of hospitality took on flesh in our lives was Kim.

Every week for nearly a year she fed us, but her influence went much deeper than that. There were the little things: Would I have ever thought to use cloth napkins for everyday if I hadn’t known Kim? Is it any wonder that, when we decided we needed a teapot, the one I picked out is a close cousin to the round, earthy brown one from which she poured every time we visited? There were also some big things — like how to offer what you have and how to listen with all you are.

The joy and welcome we found at Kim’s house went a long way towards grounding us in the radically new situation we found ourselves in that year. That hospitality is something we’ve tried to replicate our whole marriage. She planted a seed, showed us a way of life open to seeing and caring for whoever crossed our paths. I’m sure we thanked her before we left, but we couldn’t have known then just how much we would have to thank her for. Fifteen years later, her little seed is still bearing fruit.

I wait all summer for this time of year, when the heat finally breaks. Towards the end of August there’s a little something in the air that’s different, a hint that someday it will be safe to wear sweaters again. It’s not actually any cooler, but the breeze seems to hold a promise for the future.

This week, it made good on that promise.

We’ve thrown the windows open, and pulled out the winter clothes for the kids. It’s still warm in the afternoons, of course, but the ten day forecast doesn’t show us reaching 90°. Fall weather arrived just in time for Fall.

A break from the heat changes life around here. It’s suddenly reasonable to take walks with the kids after breakfast, and to continue working in the garden after the sun climbs up over the pine trees. The cool air makes me itch to tidy the house. (Goodness knows it needs it!) The kids spend even more of the day outside, riding bikes, chasing each other with sticks, and laying in the grass, reading.

This weather always feels like a new beginning to me, as if now, at last, we can actually get something done. Maybe we can finally pull the weeds out from around the blueberry bushes, or clean up the back porch so it’s useable in this beautiful weather.

Of course, by the time I get through all the day-to-day duties, and school work, and a little time for writing, the blueberries tend to keep their weedy undergrowth. (We like to think of it as “living mulch.”) But part of the promise of Fall is time – months and months before the sweltering heat comes back in May. Of course I won’t finish my to-do list before then (I never do) but I’m ready to make a start.

I’ve been doing some stress gardening lately. It’s a lot like stress cleaning, but with more dirt and sunshine. (And sweat, of course. It’s August.) It’s a practice that has felt natural and necessary as we endure another massive wave of Covid here in Louisiana, driven primarily by our low vaccination rates and high proportion of unwavering anti-maskers. It’s been hard to hear every day of someone else we know who is quarantined or sick, some of them very sick. 

If that were not enough, my oldest is starting school for the first time (as a freshman in high school) and Craig’s workplace is not a safe place right now. Despite how closely this pandemic is hitting us, many people, including some I love dearly, are still choosing their preference not to mask over protecting those around them. 

And it is hitting extremely close to home – I got an email from our nearest hospital last night explaining that they are so overcrowded that they are going to be rescheduling appointments. One of the board members from Craig’s school needed to be admitted with Covid, and there simply wasn’t a bed for him. He waited two days before it was his turn.

There’s not a lot I can do about other people’s choices, so I’ve been pulling weeds. Gallons of them. The summer plants are mostly done, so I pulled out the sad-looking bush beans and the dried-up sunflowers. I’m still battling the blackberries that took over the back corner of the garden and threatened to overwhelm our yard and our neighbor’s. Slowly, something resembling order is rising out of the chaos.

Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, in their vision for the Catholic Worker, spoke often of the need for scholars to be workers and workers to be scholars. Right now would be a bad time for me to live entirely in my head. But being on my knees, hands in the dirt, working to make something beautiful has helped. If nothing else, any time I spend in the garden is time I’m not scrolling Twitter or reading the most recent nurse’s plea for people to get vaccinated.

Because most of the work has been in ripping out rather than planting, and because it’s been a blisteringly hot August, the gardens aren’t much to look at yet, mostly just bare dirt. Starting over is a slow process. Still, two weeks into my refocused gardening efforts, I’m starting to see a difference. The kale and mustard greens and cosmos by the front porch have sprouted. They are a very hopeful shade of green. The long vegetable bed that came with the house is now clear except for the tomato jungle and a couple of leeks, and the bare earth looks eager for new life.

We weather storms around here. It comes with the territory. Just how much this one costs us remains to be seen, but I’m sure we’ll get through it, too, eventually. But it may not be before I start harvesting all that kale.

We studied the Holocaust in our homeschool a little while back. It was hard in so many ways, (how do you explain so much evil to children?) but it was past time I came back to it myself, and definitely time my older girls started to learn about it.

One of the things I had missed (or forgotten) about the concentration camps was the sign that hung at the gate of Auschwitz: “Work makes one free.” Which, obviously, was a blatant lie in that context, but it struck me like a slap in the face, because a part of me believes that, at least under normal circumstances, it is a true statement.

I would never have listed it as a tenent of my philosophy. “Work is good,” maybe. Or “Work is healthy.” Or “Work is necessary.” But seeing “Work is freedom” in that context made me realize that even if I wouldn’t say it, I often act as if it were true.

If I can just get the house clean, then I can relax. If I fold all the laundry first, then I can play with the kids. Or I tell the kids, After you finish your chores you can play.

Clearly there is nothing wrong with being conscientious about work and chores. But what I realized was that when that work comes first, and when I let it rule my life and come ahead of my family, ahead of prayer, then it’s no longer the life-giving “tending the garden” which God asks of us, and instead makes an idol of productivity.

(I should say this seems to be extra tricky for those of whose work IS our families – when is folding laundry doing the good work of the Kingdom, and when are we making it an idol that separates us from God and the very families we’re trying to serve? I would be open to any advice on achieving a balance here!)

The point is not that work is bad (another heresy common in our culture), but that it is not the source of our freedom.

Jesus Christ is the source of our freedom.

If we are too old or too young or too broken to work, we still have our value and freedom in Christ. When we start there, with our dignity as sons and daughters of God, then our work is no longer a title which defines us, nor a representation of our worth, but a gift we are able to share with our families and our communities.

I’m not advocating for a messy house either, necessarily. I know I am more at peace when the floor isn’t hidden under a pile of Legos and stuffed animals. But I believe there is something my kids need more than a spotless house: a mom who remembers where her freedom, and theirs, comes from. That is, they need a mom who is free to toss a ball or read a book, even if it means the laundry has to wait till tomorrow.

It’s time I add becoming that mom to my (long) list of works-in-progress.

There is a chick living under my husband’s desk.

How it got there is a long story.

Two things happened a few of months ago: my brother-in-law asked if we wanted his friend’s silkie chickens (which turned out not to be the COVID pets she had been hoping for) and Samantha started collecting abandoned duck eggs from the pond, hoping she could get some of them to hatch. (Yes, they were truly abandoned. No nest raiding involved, I promise!)

We took the cute-in-a-scraggly-way teen-age silkies and added them to our flock. Urban homesteading at its best! Samantha started trying to engineer an incubator for the duck eggs.

When our neighbor heard about Samantha’s interest in ducks, she sent her husband up into the attic and then over to our house to deliver their old incubator. Weeks of anticipation followed.

We didn’t quite have the incubator figured out, so the duck experiment, sadly, ended up being nothing but a smelly mess and a lesson in partially-developed duckling anatomy. Samantha took it well and was very good about cleaning it all up. We considered where to store the incubator.

Meanwhile, we began to realize that two of the three silkie chickens were a little different. Bigger combs. A tendency to jump (like goombas, I kid you not) and fight. And finally, they crowed.

Our lovely hens were roosters.

This is an age-old tale, and we probably should have been more savvy. But just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait. It gets better.

I started looking for someone who would actually want silkie roosters, and was shocked to have quick success…but my friend wasn’t ready to take them just yet. So we waited, and hoped the neighbors didn’t mind the crowing too much.

Meanwhile, the roosters and hens did what roosters and hens will do: provided live Life Cycle lessons for anyone wandering through our backyard. So Samantha did some more research, and started absconding with our would-be breakfasts and starting them in the incubator.

The incubator is under my husband’s desk because, well, we have a small house. The footspace under the desk was (usually) unoccupied.

We ordered a new thermometer so the eggs would have a fighting chance. More weeks of anticipation. And Wednesday night, we started hearing peeping. Which, I now know, is what chicks do before they hatch.

Then we watched one of the eggs wiggle around for a while (it is really strange to watch). And right before breakfast today, while no one was looking, out the soggy little darling popped, to be rhapsodized by one and all. A black-and-gold Ameraucana/Silkie mix. I suggested naming him (Joseph) Pieper. I had to explain the joke to Samantha. (Given his coloring, maybe Drew Brees would be better…)

Samantha and her dad made a quick run for chick food and bedding, and she has spent the last two days fashioning a brooder out of detritus from the shed.

City dwellers that we are, we’re already at our legal limit for chickens, so the next project is finding someone interested in silkies, or Ameraucana/silkies, or Black Australorpe/silkies…you get the idea. This was not an organized breeding experiment. We’re holding out hope that the Ameraucana mix will lay tiny green eggs, but who knows!

(At this point in the writing, I had to take a break to watch chick #2 hatch.)

But as I was saying, none of this was planned. One little serendipity followed another, until we had a peeping, wriggling bunch of mutt chickens under my husband’s desk. I thought I had avoided this fate when we chose to live within the city limits…but Samantha has farming in her blood and she had other plans. We sat back and watched as she nurtured her little brood to life.

I’m sure Pieper and his new friend are grateful.

Update: In the time it took me to finish this post, two more chicks hatched. Craig’s desk is getting to be quite noisy.

The blackberries have come into their own.

We planted a few unassuming cuttings given to us by a friend roughly a year ago, right at the beginning of quarantine, if I remember correctly. Our friend’s gardens are lush with life, so I had high hopes for any gift from her.

We put too many plants in too small a space in a bare corner of the garden, where the weeds had been kept at bay by a layer of crunchy red pumice stone. (I’m still wondering what I’ll do with the box full of stone we took out.) We settled the plants in, and we waited.

The pile of vines grew. (Pile is really the best word for it – a pile with tentacles.) As the weather warmed this spring, cheeky white blossoms started to cover the plants. We started to get excited.

The white petals fell, leaving tiny green clusters. We watched and drooled, and started planning parfaits, pies, cobbler.

Still the brambles grew. Tentacles came up in my daughter’s garden nearby, in the vegetable bed on the other side, in the neighbor’s yard on the other side of the fence. I played yank-a-shoot, whack-a-mole style, in long sleeves and heavy garden gloves.

(Summer project: Operation Contain Blackberry…if such a thing is even possible. I have a feeling we’ll be fighting blackberry shoots and lemon balm for the rest of our lives.)

In the last week or so the berries have started to ripen. Ten, even twenty fat, dark berries a day from our little 3×3 square of land, plus the area the plants took for themselves. We are at the point of growing our own cobbler.

A friend of mine has a theory that blackberry plants are actually carnivorous. One of her sheep was killed (not by blackberries), and where she buried it now grow the fattest, sweetest blackberries she’s ever had on her property. As further evidence she sights the fact that the thorns on the blackberry plant curve inward, back towards the base of the plant, like it wants to hook you and pull you in for its dinner.

Having painstakingly extracted these little delights during the last week, I think I agree. This bramble pile would eat me if given the chance. Which is how life works, of course, but I didn’t realize I was bringing anything quite so menacing into my backyard. 

So we’re keeping two eyes on the toddler these days. And the cats. And the dog. Warning them, Don’t get too close to the blackberry bushes! 

We’re also preheating the oven for the cobbler.

And when we’re not tied up with graduations, recitals, and final exams, we’re researching trellises for next year, in case there is any hope of our taming this (delicious) beast of an urban homesteading experiment.

So…we painted a piano green.

In our defense, the sound board is warped, and it won’t hold a tune anymore. But we didn’t want to put it on the curb…so we’re turning it into a planter. (Can’t you just imagine some purple basil in there?)

I thought I was painting it a nice deep sage green, but something comes over me when I look at paint chips. This color is listed as “Mossy Bench,” but the members of our family agree it’s closer to “Day-Old Mate Latte.”

So we are dedicating this piano-planter to Pope Francis, as he is well known to love mate, the traditional Argentinian beverage. (Though I expect he likes his fresh, not day-old.)

Now it just needs a catchy name…something like Habemus Piano or Papa Piano or The Mate of Music. I’m open, as usual, to suggestions.

No deep thoughts this week, so here’s the garden update:

The scraggly bush-tree that was a stump when we moved in 2 1/2 years ago has shown its true colors.

It is most definitely a Japanese magnolia, which I have wanted in my yard since I first met one almost 20 years ago at Tulane. Score one for the house, and one for being too lazy to dig out the stump before we knew what it was.

It’s time to bring in the cabbages, but I’ve lost the cabbage soup recipe I used last winter that the kids loved. If you have suggestions, please send them my way.

I harvested about a gallon of curly kale yesterday, all from a roughly six-inch by two-foot space. Bunches of cilantro are next.

I wouldn’t have harvested it all now, except that it’s time to start planting, and I need to sheet mulch this bed before we put tomatoes in it. Craig is determined to have a repeat of last summer’s Wall of Tomatoes.

I invested in a grow-light this year, and the first seedlings are ready to harden off, so that we can plant them in…

THE SPACESHIP BED! We have grand plans to turn the whole back yard into garden beds, and this one is the first. Three walls complete (thanks to a diligent and creative husband) and it will be a while before the fourth, so it’s been double dug and will soon be planted with the zucchini, anise hyssop, and oregano from under the grow-light, as well as lots of other goodies. It just happens that, with the keyhole walkway, it looks a little like a spaceship. Hopefully it will be less noticeable once the plants are in.

I also pruned the climbing rose WAAAAAY back, which is a little terrifying. But the guy on YouTube said it would make it happy…I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Turns out I have one Deep Thought after all – it’s been a good two days (or week…who’s counting?) digging and lugging and planting a little. Even when it seems like I’m just piddling, not really accomplishing much, it’s still been refreshing, and at least felt like I was doing something worthwhile. Which maybe says something about the importance of the worker part of Peter Maruin’s worker-scholar ideal.

And, God willing, there will be vegetables from some of this work on our table three months from now.