Category Archive for ‘gardening’ at Beside the Stream

Archive for the 'gardening' Category

A dead squirrel

Published on July 2, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

The squirrel came back and started tunneling the potatoes, and that was the end of that. If something eats my lettuces, I can say shoo. It messed around with Bob’s potatoes, though, and he called Department of Wildlife that morning to see if he could shoot it. He was told, sure. So he set the trap out for show, and the squirrel walked into it by early afternoon.

Bob told me he said very nice things to the squirrel when he drowned it.

When he said the squirrel had to go last week, I wrote that he was ruthless. It made me wonder, what is ruth? Is anyone ever ruthful? It turns out that the root of the word is rue, or regret. My husband is a man who rueth less.

ruthless

c.1327, from reuthe “pity, compassion” (c.1175), formed from reuwen “to rue” (see rue (v.)) on the model of true/truth, etc. Ruthful (c.1225) has fallen from use since late 17c. except as a deliberate archaism.

rue (v.)

“feel regret,” O.E. hreowan “make sorry, grieve” …

Living next to wilderness with no deer fence, no cat and a dog that’s trained not to chase wildlife, there has to be someone willing to take a stand. Glad it’s not me. And since I live in a world where I get to rue because he rueth less, I’m making a nice shrimp and snow pea Thai curry in thanks. Wanna keep that man strong.

Walking Onions

Published on June 30, 2008 in gardening. 0 Comments

My walking onions are about to take a hike.

These are also called tree onions, top-setting onions, or Egyptian onions. They’re originally from Canada, and became popular in kitchen gardens in the 1790s. Instead of making seeds, the flowers turn into little bulbils that drop off and form a new plant.

It’s kind of a standard-looking onion flower

but instead of making seeds, each little floret turns into a tiny bulb (this flower top has two more florets and the rest are already little bulbils.

These are mature bulbils, and if you look closely you can see new flowers forming at the top of some of the bulbils. When those top flowers form bulbils, the stalk is so overloaded that it bends to the ground and new onions will form where the little bulbs touch the earth. That’s the ‘walking’.

I saw this in a friend’s garden last year, and he gave me a few clusters of bulbils that I planted 15 miles away. In plant speed, that would be running really, really fast.

[bul·bil (bul′bil′) noun

a small bulb or fleshy bud on a flower stalk, as in some onions, or in the axil of a leaf, as in a tiger lily.]

Garden Peace

Published on June 25, 2008 in gardening. 1 Comment

Bob thought it’d be no problem to catch that squirrel. He went to grad school at Harvard, for Pete’s sake. He was sure that he could outwit a rodent. But he was wrong.

So he declared Peace. No chickenwire, no mesh, no traps

and of course the squirrel suddenly disappeared. Funny thing how declaring peace changes the atmosphere.

I sprinkled the lettuce bed with dried blood (thanks wkf) and the plants with cayenne, and if that doesn’t do the trick I’ll put it under strawberries for next year.

I integrated some vegetables into the flower beds this year. I put onions grown from seed amongst the daffodils. They were threads in May,

but not anymore. The daffodils are dying back and the onions, with the same kind of spiky foliage, are taking over. I have fifty onions tucked into the daffodils, and you can see they’re kind of cute–the crashed-over leaves are the daffodils, and the perky blue-green spears are the onions.

Here I have a half-dozen fennel tucked in amongst the coreopsis. Doesn’t look like much right now, but in August they’ll be four feet tall.

And my favorite plant of the moment is

patchouli. They’re annuals at this altitude, and I put in three. They’re getting racked by the sun but are setting their roots down nonetheless, and will be fine in a month. Sam said, Patchouli? I said, You know: Hippy perfume. According to Wikipedia, patchouli is in the mint family.

Mark Twain called brussels sprouts “a cabbage with a college education”. Would that make patchouli a mint that dropped out, turned on, and had a lot of casual affairs?

Garden wars

Published on June 19, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

We try to grow a year’s worth of potatoes, onions and tomatoes. These crops don’t excite the deer. Last year we just ran a string around the garden at deer-chest height, and that was enough to keep it safe.

But when Bob built raised beds, there’s suddenly room for beans, lettuces and spinach. And everybody loves lettuces, beans and spinach, so we fenced the garden. (It’s a black plastic mesh that doesn’t show up in photos, but it’s there).

A brown squirrel (which isn’t detered by fences, wire mesh or chicken wire) eats all the lettuces most every day. Bob’s trying to catch it with a Havahart trap. He would then heartlessly drown it in the ditch. He is ruthless.

But that’s not all. The beans were being ripped out of the ground and tossed aside. Who could be so mean? There were magpies in the Havahart two days in a row, and our neighbor clued us in: when beans first emerge, they look like worms.

The magpie plucks the worm, realizes that it’s a sprout, and tosses it aside… so two beds of beans under mesh.

And a coyote ate three chickens. I don’t mind fencing the vegetables, but I hate locking up the chickens.

Clear Water Farm

Published on June 18, 2008 in Colorado women and gardening. 2 Comments

My friend Suzy asked me to take some pictures so she could make a poster for Farmer’s Market.

There was a hard frost just last week–the farm is at 8200 feet– and these lettuces are covered every cold night.

The lettuces are in the new garden, surrounding the house. And there are lots of old gardens.

Here’s another garden of perhaps a dozen total. It’s a miracle anyone survives planting season.

This is the irrigation ditch, with a garden to the right.

This is the solar greenhouse, with a small garden in front of it,

and this is the workshop. Those barrels are so stuffed with pansies because she harvests them for salad mix.

Having so many gardens makes it harder for the pests to zero in on a crop. Which is lucky, because she has gophers. Bob has extreme prejudice against gophers, who can settle in and undermine gardens. He poisons them.

He asked, what do you do about the gophers?

She said: I tell them, Go away, Gophers. I say, Shoo.

Miss Roberta’s garden

Published on June 5, 2008 in Colorado women and gardening. 2 Comments

One of the best things about living in your own house at 95 (Miss Roberta had a birthday in May) is having a 65 year old flower garden.

She is very particular about her garden. I call it an everything garden, because it has flowers blooming in every season.

This season it’s lupines, daisies and iris. She’s an old-fashioned gardener, so instead of mulch and weeding, she uses bare ground and Round-Up. With all that Round-Up, the insect populations are askew and she’ll sometimes lose the whole bed to insect infestations. Which requires massive applications of insecticides.

I don’t say a thing about her chemical dependencies. Sometimes she wonders to me why the populations of pollinators are so sparse, but I don’t explain to her that Round-Up kills the native bumblebees in their underground burrows. She can’t hear well enough to catch it, and at 95 her gardening habits are set.

And it is a beautiful stand of lupines.

Where women lose control

Published on June 2, 2008 in gardening. 4 Comments

About an hour south in New Mexico, there’s a complex of 8 greenhouses that supply most of the garden centers in the region. It’s a wholesale operation with a few retail customers. I went with a wholesale account holder, making everything half price. (Mantra for the day: You have to spend money to save money. )

These are big greenhouses–this one has four aisles–and each of the hanging plants has it’s own drip from a water line along the ceiling.

One greenhouse is filled with babies. The rest of the greenhouses are filled with eye-popping arrays of horticultural pulchritude.

The greenhouse sells a to-the-trade item I’ve never had access to: six-packs of perennials that garden centers pot up to resell at a premium. What a score! Between the two of us, we filled the car.

What is it about the sexual organs of plants that drives women wild?

Snow again

Published on May 24, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

Knock knock-

Who’s there?

Aren-

Aren who?

Aren’t you glad you didn’t have snow this morning?

Planting Leeks

Published on May 20, 2008 in gardening. 1 Comment

Our last frost date is June 1, so in May we’re able to put out the leeks and onions, broccoli and cabbages (the Alliums and Brassicas, if you’re feeling latinate).

Bob and Rick built raised beds the same day they bent the cattleguard for the chicken palace.

The onions went in a few days ago–I had started about 100 sets in 6-packs–and the leeks are ready to be planted today.

The Musselburgh leeks are about 7 weeks old, and they’re very slender.

Since I had been thinking of Roy Roy eating these leeks, I followed British instructions to plant them.

They called for a trenched and dibbled bed (6″ deep trenches dibbled an additional 4″ deep). They helpfully explained that if you don’t have a dibble, you can use a hoe handle.

Dibble isn’t a word I see much, but it dates to Rob Roy’s time …[Origin: 1325–75; late Middle English]

dib·ble /ˈdɪbəl/ [dib-uhl] noun, verb, -bled, -bling.

–noun

1. a small, hand-held, pointed implement for making holes in soil for planting seedlings, bulbs, etc.

–verb (used with object)

2. to make a hole (in the ground) with or as if with a dibble.

3. to set (plants) in holes made with a dibble.

–verb (used without object)

4. to work with a dibble.

A Dibble Tool

I used my hoe handle, since dibbles aren’t standard tools here, and the leeks look as happy in their bed as if it were laid by a Scotswoman using her grandmother’s own dibble.

As it turns out, leeks are lot older than dibblers and Rob Roy. They are from the Bronze Age–perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. By the time of the Roman Empire, leeks were commonplace.

Nero, the Roman emperor, loved to eat leeks. He ate them every day (some sources say he ate leeks cooked in oil, and others say he ate leek soup). His nickname Porrophagus means “leek eater”, and it is said that he believed leeks improved the timbre of his voice.

As a nickname, I think Porrophagus is right up there with Stinky.

High Altitude Wildflowers

Published on May 12, 2008 in gardening. 2 Comments

I took a road through the national forest that goes up to about 9,000 feet.

There’s a lot of wildflowers up here that are already in full bloom. The high altitude plants that rely on snowmelt for moisture grow fast and flower as early as they can. They’ll be fine if they don’t see a drop of rain for months, because they’ve already put forth their seeds.