Qui transtulit sustinet

He who transplanted still sustains.
— Connecticut state motto



Sunday evening found us at Stacy and Jim's, planting some Maximilian's Sunflowers in their backyard.

Earlier in the day, we had M+D over for some brunch — and some housework. The adirondack chairs outside had suffered from a year's worth of exposure and needed a fresh coat of stain, so M and I tackled that. Monica had decided that the sunflowers outside the office window needed to be moved, so she and D started digging.



The flowers were occupying a raised bed that gets good sun and water, a space that we could better use for growing herbs and vegetables. Plus, they were always getting caught in the window.

The sunflowers are all over the place around Santa Fe in late summer, tall and beautiful. I requested that we retain some in our yard. Mon and D cut down the stalks, dug out the plants and roots.

One batch went to the opposite wall in our yard. Another got bundled up in wet paper towel and a trash bag for M+D to take back to Connecticut with them. More got bundled up and packed in a box to go to Monica's mom in Maryland. The largest pile got brought over to Stacy + Jim's where, in the waning daylight with Bernice looking on, we quickly added them to their garden.

A few more transplants among the transplants.

[post by Bram, cross-posted from G2NM]

foraging

Went back to the fruit trees over by the interior design parking lot. I'm thinking jam.

[cross-posted from G2NM]

garden update

Last I wrote, the veggie garden had just gone in:



It's been a few weeks now, and I: have applied another layer of straw; have to keep pulling up the bindweed that survived the solarization; have put in some marigolds to keep the tomatoes company. Some plants have done better than others.

Tomatoes: 0 for 3
Squashes: 50/50
Beans: woo hoo!



So, the tomato leaves slowly tuned brown + shriveled. I couldn't figure out what (if any) disease they maybe had. Plants never got any bigger, never set flowers. I snapped off the brown stuff, but lately, two of them seem to be setting new leaves. Weird.



Next year we'll plant any tomatoes in the perennial bed, against a south-facing garden wall. I think it will help keep the plants warmer, radiating heat into the evenings — it still gets down in the 60s most nights. All of our friends who have successfully grown 'maters this summer seem to have done the wall thing.

Squash #1 (Delicata): Also failure to thrive, but not dying either. It's about the same size as when it was planted — just not spreading out or anything. Blooms a plenty, just all squinched up there in the middle.



Squash #2 (Acorn): Yay! Lookit it go! It's sprawling all over like a good squash plant should. (Those are the beans in the background.)



All kinds of baby squashes underneath. Biggest is about the size of a large orange.



The beans are the most heartening, seeing as how they were a package of seeds (beans) I poked into the ground the day I put all the other plants in, and they're really going — beans already! They're drying beans, though — I hope they'll have enough time to mature before it gets too cold.



[cross-posted from G2NM]

garden experiment

So, three weeks after putting a tarp on our lawn, it was time to see how the solarizing worked. Bram took off the plastic, and stacked the wood off to the side and this is what we had:



Looked pretty dead to me. But while breaking up the dirt with the spading fork, I came across some subterranean-fungus-white-but-still-alive stuff, connected to long roots. Probably the dreaded bindweed.



So, after spading, I raked all the clumps to the sides. Pulled out the root balls, amended the dirt, and raked it flat. Decided that the wood should go back as edging, at least for now. Figure it will keep the dirt in place a little better. Tested the sprinklers, to see what kind of coverage we got. Pretty good, but some of the logs needed to be dug in lower, so the pop-up sprinkler heads near the edges would clear them. Here's the area, ready for mulch.



I decided to use straw. Mulch is pretty much mandatory in these parts — it's the best way to keep the dirt from drying out immediately. Joa introduced me to using straw my first summer here, while I was helping her with some landscaping at her and Janie's place. Then I got Ruth Stout's No-Work Garden Book out of the library. It's all about using straw as a really deep mulch; to control pests, to keep weeds down, to keep things from drying out, and as it breaks down, it's like adding compost to the soil. It's also pretty entertaining, the book, I mean.

Not the straw. Nothing funny about straw.

Nope.

Straw bale rides! Yee hah! That's a flattering pic Bram took of of me, eh? Thanks, sweetie. :)



Anyway, Ruth Stout apparently was a bit of a nut, if a charismatic one, and while her technique isn't exactly "no-work" it is, as this essay points out "no-till, no-dig, no-water, no-weed and no-composting." Eh, I don't know if I'd go that far.

After mulching, I grabbed those sticks that were leaning against the back wall (I knew I was saving them for something!) and stuck 'em inna ground as supports. Aaaand, here I am, putting in the plants.



There are 3 tomato plants, 2 winter squash plants, and I put in a buncha bean seeds (I guess those would be "beans") around the foot of that teepee-looking thing. Here's the final setup, and a long view of the yard from the patio:




[click for larger]

Bram is on the intertubes, looking up the kind of tomatoes we got. They are (all 3) Black Krim, which I confess I grabbed mainly because the nursery tag said they were "extremely early." The squashes are (1) Acorn squash and (1) Delicata, and the the beans are (were? will be?) Hutterite soup beans.

I think maybe I'll put in some marigolds, they're supposed to be good for the tomatoes. We'll also probably have to put up some chicken wire or something around the perimeter, to keep out critters (skunks? neighbor cats? chupacabras?). Ah, it's an experiment. I read once that if you're not killing plants, you're not stretching yourself as a gardener. My hamstrings are killing me — maybe I should stretch before gardening.

[cross-posted from G2NM]

killing the lawn

We've been kind of conflicted since purchasing a home with a lawn — no matter that it's a tiny one. We don't really do anything with in or in it, and it just consumes water, arguably our town's most precious resource. Last year, it was less of a question, with rain that didn't even have us thinking about the irrigation system until July. This year it's been drier and we haven't really turned it on, just kind of letting whatever would naturally happen happen (dandelions and bindweed, apparently).

Monica's been reading gardening books and blogs, drawing diagrams, thinking about planting a vegetable garden. I had an epiphany a couple weeks back, just looking over at the lawn, and thinking, "why do we have this? What's it doing for us? Let's just rip this whole thing out." If we're going to be using water, it should be for something that produces something. We'll convert the entire back yard to a vegetable garden and be ready for when the revolution comes and we all have to grow what we eat.

Fortunately, she had been planning for this already. And had a slightly more realistic take on what could and should be done about it. Step one, we gotta kill what's there (dandelions and bindweed, apparently) before we can even think about planting. That's where the solarization comes in. Churning up the dirt, soaking it, and covering it in clear plastic will basically bake anything that's there. It'll be a couple weeks, but should give us something that we can think about planting; it'll be late in the season, but it still might work. In any event, we'll be ready for next year.

The size of the experiment is dictated by the piece of plastic we bought, much less ambitious (and more realistic) than my vision of getting rid of the whole thing. Its position is determined by the sprinkler system and the exposure to the sun. Today was turning over the earth and then covering it up.

 

More later.

[post by Bram, cross-posted from G2NM]

compost bin

We started a compost pile after moving in, but it was never contained and properly started. So today, got some worms at the Farmers' Market in the morning, and some straw bales in the afternoon. The guys at the Feed Bin took one look at my 2-door, 1991 Sentra sedan and burst out laughing — I had bought eight bales for them to load. They crammed three in the trunk (left open), two in the back seat, and one in the front passenger seat. I had to go back for the other two (trunk). Good thing they're only four blocks away. The inside of the car was at least three inches deep in straw after I got everything unloaded. Spent a couple hours clearing out space for the bales around the existing pile of yard-clippings-and-mummified-lime-rinds crap, stacking the bales around the perimeter, turning over the contents, watering, and adding the worms to their new home.

Then I had to clean all that straw out of my car.