Category Archive for ‘gardening’ at Beside the Stream

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »

Archive for the 'gardening' Category

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.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

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. 3 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.

and a little closer

The lupine are particularly prolific

and there are so many patches in so many shades of blue that the pollinators are having a field day.

and here’s two at a time

The garden lupines at 7,000 feet haven’t even set their buds, while these wild lupines at 9,000 feet are in full flower on May 12.

Fleabane is sprinkled up the slopes, soon to disappear.

The Oregon Grape keeps its leaves year round, but the flowers don’t last long.

Everything I’ve shown so far grows in big patches. But when you start looking at the little flowers, it looks like everything’s blooming.

This wild candytuft must be the source of the ones we plant in our gardens

and this one’s a mystery to me.

The landscape still has streaks of snow, and you wouldn’t think the wildflowers would be blooming. But they are.

Transplanting day, with 4 ducklings

Published on May 2, 2008 in Colorado women, birds and gardening. 1 Comment

The day finally came to transplant the seedlings we started last month–the proverbial 13 varieties of tomatoes. I did a few hundred today and have plenty more to go.

They look sort of dazed, but are coming along fine.

These birdhouse gourds are my current favorites: they grow 15′ to 35′ vines that want to be trellised, with gourds that are good for birdhouses. I thought these were quite endearing until Steve arrived with four ducklings.

It’s the bills that slay me.

Modern Cinderellas

Published on May 1, 2008 in gardening. 1 Comment

We’ve accumulated substantial brushpiles over the past two years, and I hoped to chip them for mulch. But when we really looked through the piles–posts and firewood sorted out long ago–it was clear that the wood was too small to chip. We burned on Sunday, starting around 11 am.

We use water to make sure that the fire stays low, and the hose is hooked up to the irrigation ditch.

This is dry country, and instead of building a big bonfire you have to feed the fire slowly, all day long. Bob sets us up with a big pile of loose brush next to the fire, and Sandy and I settle in to tend it.

Tending a fire is slow work. Every now and then it’s time to toss on more wood or hose the perimeter, but there’s a lot of waiting time too. Five hours later, the piles are gone.

What a nice afternoon: it was like being Cinderella without the icky shoes.

Rick’s Rock Garden

Published on April 29, 2008 in Do It Yourself and gardening. 3 Comments

When they were younger, Rick and Janice bought a lot on the edge of Durango that butted up against a mountain. Part of their lot was relatively flat, but part of it was a steep slope of naked earth. He had no intention of watching that slope erode, so he stabilized it with stone.

A lot of stone. Rick built channels for the mountain’s run-off to flow through, and stone bridges over them.

This is my favorite bridge of his,

and this one is also lovely. There is a complete system to channel run-off, with a detention pond at the bottom

and there is also a network of paths built of stone.

Most people use pebble paths, or flat slabs. Not Rick. His stone paths are built of honking big stones.

He likes to relate the size of the rocks in his path to the immediate environment. Here the rocks are modestly proportioned as they arc around a tree

and here, where you stop to smell the roses, they are ginormous.

When you first see this rock garden, it might look like a pile of rocks. Instead, the closer you look, the more you see. Rick is a rockhound, and has collected rocks his whole life from an area that spans many states.

Take this one small section of garden here: he has this monumental rock at the base,

but when you look closer you see that every single rock is something special.

Really: nearly every rock is something special.

Over the years, Rick built this garden with his back, his hands and a prybar. Now, we all know what a prybar looks like. Rick is a married man and I’d not be doing Janice any favors posting a photo of his back online, plus you can see one like it in any beefcake mag. But his hands are something else.

Rick’s hands have moved so many rocks for so many years that they are no longer supple, but they are very, very strong,

and very thick.

Garden Club has a luncheon

Published on April 24, 2008 in Colorado women, gardening, old-timers and small town life. 1 Comment

Once every three years, the Animas Valley Garden Club hosts the spring meeting for the area’s three garden clubs. This was our year. The day before, we gathered at the grange and set up the tables and chairs. The tables, homemade with folding legs, had been made by Ruth’s grandfather.

The menu was soup, salad, and desserts, and we all cooked the night before. (I made cheesecake and 3 salad dressings.)

That morning we decorated the tables.

Each person got a little coleus plant grown in Jennifer’s greenhouse. Ruth and I wrapped each coleus in waxed paper, and tied raffia around it. There’s a poem about gardening in pink paper, and a lavender agenda. The baskets of flowers are borrowed from Kelly’s store; the tablecloths are borrowed from a grange member who has a full set of tablecloths for all the grange tables.

Miss Roberta particularly enjoyed the desserts. She said that she wasn’t used to not doing it herself, but she certainly thought we did a fine job. She said, I thought the club acquitted itself very well.

Beside the Stream