Earthy Not Earth Day

Well, it wasn't technically Earth Day, but on Sunday we made a vegetable garden.

We didn't plant seeds. We didn't buy seedlings. We took a hole in the earth and filled it with compost and dirt, with a little help from the neighbor's Bobcat.

The project began about four years ago when we chose the sunniest section of the yard for a vegetable patch. We live in mid-Michigan, which has hard-packed clay, nearly pure sand, and occasionally beautifully rich soil located seemingly at random. Our sunny patch turned out to be the first variety.

You can make pottery out of this soil. All spring it's gooshy; by summer it's rock hard. My husband painstakingly dug out a rectangle about 40 by 60 feet and two feet deep. We began to line it with rocks for drainage and about the time we contemplated adding pipes, the whole project got out of hand.

So for the next few years it was the Clay Pit, which is much more fun than a sand box because the things you build are nearly permanent. The kids would get out there with pickaxes and shovels and a hose, creating rivers and mountains and dams and whole undulating landscapes. They'd be at it for hours, returning to the house in shoes caked with inches of clay. I'd warn their friends' parents that their kids would come home really dirty but tired and happy, and they did. I highly recommend a Clay Pit in your yard if you have children.

This year, to my kids' dismay, I insisted on creating a garden. (Luckily the Clay Pit is so big that I only commandeered half of it.) We had some rock-hard clay mountains left from the original excavation and two big old compost piles to work with. It really did take a Bobcat to break apart the clay mountains, which we layered with more-or-less rotted compost in a giant brown lasagne. My husband operated the Bobcat; I loaded and unloaded the compost from the tractor's trailer; my daughter learned to drive said tractor. My son helped spread the clay, which was the most difficult job, disappearing at odd intervals to work on his own project, digging a drainage ditch and lining it with clay. He always has marched to a different drummer.

I became closely acquainted with the compost pile. We are lazy composters, taking grass clippings and weeds and waste from the perennial beds and dead leaves and, well, piling them up. That's it. We don't mix it or water it or maintain a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. Unsurprisingly, the result is not a homogenous mixture of soft, crumbly, dark brown soil. It's more like flattened mats of leaves, pockets of dry-as-dust grass, curiously wet and slimy areas, and poofs of white powder (mildew?) that rise in clouds when I forked into the pile. Compost has many faces, all wildly intriguing but none very pretty. Crawling through the whole mottled mess were lots and lots of fat earth worms, so something must be going right inside our Compost Failure.

Next weekend we'll dig into our older compost pile that lives in the woods on the other side of the yard. The innards of this pile actually look like compost should, nice and soft and rich and loamy, kind of like a great big brownie. If the weather is good, we should be able to put a nice layer of this stuff on the new vegetable bed and rake it smooth. We may even get out the electric fence kit I got for my birthday back when we first dreamed up the garden. (The deer here are satanic.)

Oh. What will we plant? I know it sounds nutty, but a part of me doesn't want to plant anything at all. I am so pleased with the building of it, with the dirt and rotted this-and-that, the layers of earth, that I don't want to mess up its simplicity and purity. Maybe I'll just have a dirt garden.

A gratuitous flower photo. After all, it's spring. :-)

flowers for you and seven random things

These flowers are for you, whether you read my blog regularly or are here on a momentary visit. I welcome all three of you! (or maybe four if net traffic is heavy!) The flowers are especially for those who have no garden of their own.

Peonies are perfect garden plants. Their blooms are enormous and showy, implying arcane knowledge and diligent care on the part of their brilliant gardener. The truth is that they have few pests or diseases, are extraordinarily long-lived, and need no maintenance. What could be better?

My friend Lysne has tagged me with a meme, my first: seven random things about myself. Well,
1. My one true talent is spelling. I can spell virtually any word. This amazes my children, who are geniuses in many areas, but can't spell their way out of a paper bag.

2. I notice little things, while the big ones breeze right on by. A tiny little bloom, a shaft of sunlight, a clever turn of phrase -- these capture my full attention while the enormous weed, coming thunderstorm, or main thesis might escape me entirely.

3. My house exists in my imagination far more strongly than it does in reality. I see my living room with its blue walls, taupe-colored furniture, bamboo flooring, intriguing art and objets d'art, and enormous coffee table for books and tea and feet. Others see the builder's white walls, mashed-down carpeting, ratty mismatched furniture, garage-sale bull's horns as the only decoration, and tiny little apartment-sized coffee table that really can't support more than one book and a small foot. Someday vision and reality will match.

4. I'm pretty good with gardens, but any vegetal matter in my house is a dead plant walking. Usually several months without water do them in. The few plants I've watered have usually drowned as thanks for my efforts.

5. In grade school, middle and high school, and even college I was one of the smartest students, earning awards and accolades and a disgustingly high grade point average. In graduate school, I was suddenly the dumb one. Even my closest friends called me the dumb one. I didn't mind it from them, but my self-esteem took a real beating during those years.

6. I'm fascinated by vampire lore, and read any vampire novels I can get my paws on. (There's a lot of dreck out there.) I want more than almost anything to write my own.

7. Number One on my lifelong want list has always been and continues to be a horse. I'm an awful rider -- I really want a horse as a pet and a friend.

Hey Harriet, what are seven random things about you?

May's flowers

The day begins with walking through wet grass
In a slow progress, to visit the whole garden,
And all is undecided as I pass,
For here I must be thief and also warden:
What must I leave? What can I bear to plunder?
What fragile freshness, what amazing throat
Has opened in the night, what single wonder
That will be sounded like a single note,
When these light wandering thoughts deploy
Before the grave deeds of decisive joy?
"A Flower-Arranging Summer," May Sarton

I always hesitate to cut flowers in my garden, but I am always glad when I do. No matter how much time I spend outside, it seems I am indoors longer, so flowers on the kitchen counter are there to please my eye for far more time than they would have done outdoors.

Or perhaps, as the single live representative of nature in the house, the flowers seem larger, more important, more intense in every detail next to dishes rather than trees.

My Proustian madeleines are apple blossoms with their petals white-blushing-to-pink and their delicate sweet scent. Gnarled old apple trees, left uncut on an untended lot in the middle of the suburb, bent close to my bedroom window in my childhood house. We rarely opened windows in that house because of my brother's allergies, but on fine spring days after the long Michigan winters, my mother would open my bedroom windows to let in the fresh air, and I would stand on my bed and peer out at the apple trees.

The previous owners of my current house were wise gardeners, siting the most fragrant plants closest to the windows. Lilacs bloom outside my kitchen window; honeysuckle vines engulf the deck outside my bedroom door. And in the small space between the house and garage blooms a delicate ornamental crabapple buzzing loudly with fuzzy bumblebees, with my head stuck right among them. I inhale the precious scent and remember all that is fresh and young and innocent and simply happy.

I did cut daffodils this year, not because of their abundance but because of their scarcity. Oddly, many of mine did not come up or bloomed poorly. At their height, a late storm bent their heads to the ground. Rather than see the flowers sprawl, I cut them short and brought them indoors for small vases next to my sink, sewing machine, and bed (three of the four places I spend most of my time -- the laundry area seems too sterile for flowers).

When I am able to be outdoors, I work in the garden. Weeding in spring is always amazing. There are so many weeds, so healthy and big, bigger every minute. It is an odd joy to pull them, to feel their vigor, yet to have no guilt in ending their lives. (Well, not really ending them, for they always re-sprout.) Weeding in spring is indeed a "grave deed of decisive joy."

"Transplant dominoes" is my favorite gardening activity. This garden needs daisies. So I dig out a few clumps of daylilies to make room, then march across the yard to the daisies and shovel up good clumps of them. Back to the daylily holes I go, and pat the daisies in. Now, where to put the daylilies? A march round the yard is in order; there is a good place. But that place currently holds another plant, which has to move out. I must tramp a path as convoluted as the kids in "Family Circus," trailing their dotted lines behind them as they traverse their yard.

Here are some hostas that I took from the side of the driveway: the Deer Buffet, for the antlered rats munch nearly every plant there to the ground. They please me nestled against the rock. Theirs was an unusual case: I did not need to move any plants out to fit them in, and I didn't put anything in the holes they left along the drive. The deer have food enough.

Ambrosia

In ancient mythology, Ambrosia (Greek αμβροσία) is sometimes the food, sometimes the drink, of the gods. The word has generally been derived from Greek a- ("not") and mbrotos ("mortal"); hence the food or drink of the immortals . . . . The classical scholar Arthur Woollgar Verrall, however, denied that there is any clear example in which the word ambrosios necessarily means immortal, and preferred to explain it as "fragrant," a sense which is always suitable. If so, the word may be derived from the Semitic MBR ("amber", which when burned is resinously fragrant; compare "ambergris") to which Eastern nations attribute miraculous properties. In Europe, honey-colored amber, sometimes far from its natural source, was already a grave gift in Neolithic times and was still worn in the 7th century CE as a talisman by druidic Frisians, though St. Eligius warned "No woman should presume to hang amber from her neck." [I think I'm going to make a practice of wearing amber from now on -- Anne.] W. H. Roscher thinks that both nectar and ambrosia were kinds of honey, in which case their power of conferring immortality would be due to the supposed healing and cleansing power of honey, which is in fact aseptic, and because fermented honey (mead) preceded wine as an entheogen in the Aegean world: the Great Goddess of Crete on some Minoan seals had a bee face: compare Merope and Melissa. See also Ichor. . . .

Derivatively, the word Ambrosia (neuter plural) was given to certain festivals in honour of Dionysus, probably because of the predominance of feasting in connection with them.

from wikipedia

In summer, we feast on pesto. Basil is our fragrant food, so potent that I suppose it must have aseptic properties (and the garlic certainly does). Although we don't yet have a vegetable plot in our yard, we planted lots and lots of basil in pots on the deck. There is more than enough to make pesto on Saturdays and Sundays simply by pruning the plants. Pesto has the taste of summer to me. What could be more summery than masses of green leaves? And what better binder than Greek olive oil? Food of the gods, I dub thee pesto.

What puts me in mind of things Greek is the most marvelous book, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. This is his first book for young adults. Part American Gods and part Harry Potter, The Lightning Thief follows the uneasy growth of a teen troubled with ADHD, dyslexia, and social problems, which stem from his mixed parentage: part human, part god. My 10-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son both devoured it as voraciously as I did, and it is somewhat rare for our tastes to agree to such an extent. This book is (groan with me here) pure ambrosia.

Dividing the Daylilies

I've been invited to a friend's house to share our perennials. Instead of waiting till the last minute like I usually do, I've begun to dig the perennials several days in advance. This is so unlike me that I don't recognize myself in the mirror.

My gardens seem to specialize in red daylilies. I've got enormous clumps of them, all subtle variations on the theme of Red with a Yellow Throat. Out they go! Last spring I got rid of the dreaded Stella D'Oros (far too reminiscent of school-bus yellow), and with the reds gone, I can indulge my taste for clear yellows, peaches, and pastels.

It's not that I don't like red flowers. I do. Red cannas are glorious. I've got lots of crocosmia 'Lucifer' scattered about, and they're staying. Red tulips? The ultimate. But my red daylilies are trying a bit too hard to be red; it doesn't sit well on them. I remember a quote from somewhere: "There are a million different colors of daylilies, and all of them are orange." Underneath the red of these ones is a strong orange gene pushing hard to get out. It makes for an edgy plant, and I don't need edgy in my garden.

My favorite daylily (well, right now it's my favorite, because it's about the only one blooming) is 'August Orange.' I got it from Bob Stewart's Arrowhead Alpines in Fowlerville. You have got to read this guy's catalog. Here are just two entries:

Heuchera 'Plum Pudding'
Purple foliage, my muse hates plum pudding, altogether too cute, I just want to gag, how can I write a description about plum pudding; no, we will have no Dickens–Christmas Carol sickly sweet prose here.

Heuchera 'Yeti'
The Abominable Heuchera, this nearly ate Sir Edmund Hillary in the western Himalaya in 1958, no wait I’m confused that was a crappy Heuchera we bought out of tissue culture that looked nothing like the photo. Hmm, that’s not quite right either this yeti is a good looking white flowered plant with nicely marbled leaves, it will enchant your garden causing fox tracks in the snow to magically sublime into yeti tracks and creating no end of panic when the local tv station runs the tape.

He is some kind of whacko, and I wish we could be best friends. Arrowhead carries rock garden and difficult-to-find plants as well as (against his will, I think) more marketable varieties. Many of them are very tricky to grow, which he freely admits. To use his parlance, I've croaked a bunch of them.


But 'August Orange' is sublime: a bright orange-yellow like a candle flame. It blooms profusely throughout August and September, continuing through October and with a few scattered blooms (sans foliage) right into late November. The plant looks like hell by then, to be sure, but I won't argue against anything that blooms so late in arctic Michigan.

I also dug up a big mass of irises. Their corms (I think they're corms, not rhizomes or tubers) were so layered and tangled amongst themselves that I had to work at them with a garden fork and hose for quite some time before I could tease them apart. This is such satisfying work to me. I can't wait to go back out and replant some of them back into their refreshed bed.

Truthiness

The great thing about taking pictures of individual flowers is that doing so edits out the weeds. I have weeds. Lots of weeds. I also have lots of excuses: biting ants live here, making weeding painful. It's too hot to weed. I have too many things to do, too many other weeds to pull. This area is awaiting a double-digging and re-edging by DH, so why weed it now?

The truth is that my yard and garden is filled with weeds, and is likely to remain so. Someday I hope to have a handle on everything that needs doing, but until then, I think I'll develop a partiality towards weeds.

How About a Craft?

The urge to create is strong, almost as strong as the urge to eat. I don't have a lot of self-knowledge, but know that I am happiest when creating something with my hands. It started with quilting, then expanded to knitting and recently to crocheting.

There's just something about fiber that appeals to me. It is tactile. While one can touch a painting, that's not what the painting is all about. (Surely there are painters who are all about the touch, but I don't know them.)

Quilting has an obvious visual element, yet remains very tactile in the making. I love running chains of fabric patches through the sewing machine, then blocks, then rows, then sections of the quilt. Maneuvering a large quilt through the sewing machine is nothing if not tactile .

Yet the visual element is huge, much more central to quilting than to knitting or crocheting. I love that about quilts. It reminds me of my favorite part of gardening: taking pictures of the plants that have bloomed for me. The picture makes the garden permanent, taking away the sorrow of time passing and flowers dying.

(My mom has a rather fatalistic attitude about the garden: when the daylilies bloom, summer is basically shot, and goldenrods are the nails in summer's coffin. I try not to view the succession of bloom this way, but don't you think it's scary that my very favorite time of year is just before the crocuses bloom? Then all the flowers are yet ahead of me. Pathetic, I know.)

Oh. The quilt. This is my favorite of the quilts I've made. I designed it for a sunny baby named Molly, whose mother loves brightly colored flowers. To me, this quilt sparkles with the little triangles of flower fabrics splintering off the main blocks. It matches the sparkle of little Molly's spirit and intellect.

The Girl picked a bouquet of tulips to take to the Montessori spaghetti dinner. I had no idea that there were so many kinds of tulips in our gardens. The Shirleys (white with purple edges) are scattered and mostly petering out, but the plain red and yellow ones are going strong. The deep wine-red bloom is amazing in person but didn't reproduce well here.