Preparing for winter

     Today was one of those rare days in fall/winter where it's sunny and cool, but nice enough that you can go work in the garden. Since I still had all that bare ground (and knowing nature abhors a vacuum), I decided to stop off at the first house I passed on the way to the garden that had bags of leaves on the curb, and see if I could snag some. The highly confused man who opened the door accepted my bizarre explanation of needing mulch for a garden with good grace, and I shoved three bags into my trunk before heading off again. Apparently, I have no self-consciousness when dealing with people I will likely never see again.

     Armed with my leaf bags, cardboard from work, and the prospect of having to weed everything in the spring if I didn't get cracking, I managed to get most of the upper bed filled in with either leaves or mulch. Good thing, too, because something was sending little sproutlings up all over the area. We'll see if I caught them in time. Here's what it looks like now:



     Unfortunately, the bottom board fell off of the middle bed there, so I wasn't able to get it completely dug in and leafed/mulched, but that should help immensely! The carrots that you see in the foreground are doing wonderfully, I harvested one row of them today and planted garlic for the spring. Sadly, there was a frost last night, and the tomatoes and peppers are finally dead. I weeded a little bit, and got the boards on the bottom bed kind of in place. "All" that's left now is fixing the top bed, finishing it off, making, mulching and leafing the bottom bed(s), and putting a new layer of mulch/leaves on the rest of the garden. Oh, and transplanting the raspberries. And weeding everything. Before the snow flies. We'll see how that works. Cheers!

Fall garden update

     Back in August, I got word that I and a few other gardeners along the edge would be losing some of our plots. Apparently, the head of the garden asked the county why they haven't been mowing around the perimeter, and the county responded that they couldn't get their mower along it, because we've built gardens to within 5 feet of the treeline. From what I've overheard, they originally wanted a 30' space along the edge, but since that would mean many of the gardens would be cut back to only 10' wide, the head gardener negotiated for a 20' easement.

     What does that mean? The plot that I spent so much time on this year is losing 1/3 of its area. I'm gaining that and a little more back, however, as I was allowed to take over the much smaller plot next to me that had been abandoned since May. That's not quite as fun as it sounds, because the entire plot was knee-high in weeds, strewn with rusty broken garden implements, thoroughly rocky, and had gaps in the fence that a human could easily get through, but I still accepted. Partly because I want the space, and partly because it means I don't share any fences now. There are walkways on two sides of my plot, and forest/grass strips on the other two. Suits me just fine. 

    At the beginning of October, I decided that enough of my crops had been harvested that it was safe to take the deer fence down and start merging the plots. In an attempt to hide the horrible weed-infested horribleness, I'd planted morning glories along the fence. They were doing quite well, but unfortunately, they had to go. So on the first weekend of the month, I did a bit of weeding, took down the bamboo, and took out the morning glories. Next step: the other plot.

Garden update

It's been a busy summer, although thankfully less hot than it could have been. I was finally able to get everything in the ground by the end of April, and got a huge response. Here's what it looked like by the beginning of July:

The farthest tier has sunflowers along the fence; watermelon and cantaloupe on the left; beans, peas, and raspberries in the middle; and cucumbers and eggplant on the right. The middle tier is tomatoes on the left; strawberries, borage, and collard greens in the middle; and okra and peppers on the right. The top tier has sage, carrots, and garlic on the right, mostly weeds and a straggling lavender in the center, and potatoes and blueberries on the right. If it should like a lot, that's because it is!

The eggplant and melons immediately got attacked by various pests, and haven't done well at all. The cucumbers did ridiculously well for about a month and a half, and then died off. Everything else has produced wonderfully- despite a few pest issues- to the point where I have a much better idea on how many plants of each item to plant next year (a lot fewer, in most cases!). Just a few weeks after the above picture, it looked like this:

Some of the harvests:

                  

Unexpected lessons included:

-Apparently, a number of things from bugs and beetles to rabbits, love collard greens, and will eat them over everything else. This is absolutely fine with me. 

-Garlic protects carrots from almost everything, including the aforementioned rabbits.

-Bees adore borage and sunflowers. (Support the poor bees!)

-Even cold-damaged seedlings will rally and overproduce. Don't listen to advice that tells you to toss them.

-Carrots cannot be judged by their tops. The leafiest ones were close to baby carrot size, and some unassuming tops produced monster carrots.

-Big tomato cages are more expensive, but worth it. 

-Pests don't always mean a ruined crop. Mexican bean beetles skeletonized the bean leaves, and left the beans alone, perfectly ready for harvest.

Sadly, I'm losing the bottom tier to a county easement, but I will absolutely be doing this again. It was fun, it was a workout, and we got some good food out of it. Chees!

Lost claddagh

     I lost my claddagh ring this past week, and it's having far more of an impact on my life than I thought it would. Despite the fact that it was bought for me by my ex-husband as a wedding ring, I kept it when we broke up, and simply moved it to the appropriate hand and position for being single. Partially, this was because what he paid for it was a small fraction of what he had borrowed from me in the brief time we were together, but mostly because...

     I am pretty serious about my financial independence. I try not to obsess about money, but staying out of debt (other than student loans) is very important to me, and I do my best to split things evenly, even though my gentleman makes literally twice what I do right now. I do not want to take advantage of other people, financially, the way other people have taken advantage of me, in the past. I don't like accepting expensive gifts, and I certainly don't like asking for things.

     But.... despite its origin, despite the annoyance of the design getting caught on everything, despite everything... that claddagh was the first expensive, high-quality piece of jewelry that someone else thought I was worth the price. I didn't have to ask for it, he wouldn't let me get a cheaper one (although it was still plain, by my preference); he insisted that I get the ring I wanted, regardless of the price. It was the most expensive thing I'd gotten something without worrying about the cost, and without worrying that someone was doing it for any other reason than that they could afford to do something that would make me happy. Even if that person turned out to be not so nice in the end, that feeling lived on in the ring.

     Maybe it's silly to think so, since I'm Scots, and not Irish anyway. Maybe it's foolish to be attached to a thing, instead of eschewing materialism. I've tried telling myself a hundred times this week that I don't wear jewelry anyway, reminding myself of all the times it got caught on things,  how annoying it could be, being loose in the winter and tight in the summer... but I still miss it. It meant a lot to me. And I don't think I can replace that.

Garden progression

     When I first got my garden plot through Columbia Gardeners, it looked abandoned. The fence was made of different sized pieces zip-tied together, some of the beds had been ripped up and dragged off, and there were rusty metal scraps of braces and more fencing everywhere. The previous gardener had a casual disregard for things like whether something was biodegradable or not, and plastic plant tags were scattered and half-buried everywhere. The ground, regardless of bed layout, was a ragged mat of nettle, crabgrass, and dead bits of annual flower corpses. The list of horrors goes on, but needless to say, it was not uplifting.