Winter Garden

This is the view from my kitchen window. I sit and drink coffee and look out on this every morning. This is how its been since November.

My Rose Garden

End of Summer (Vegetable Garden)

The crickets are having a god-damn field day.

There is no utopia

I interrupt the regularily scheduled program to complain about one aspect of country living: the pests!

Yesterday I found a wee mouse alive in an empty jar that had been sitting on the floor in the basement. I threw the mouse in the front bushes, still alive. Its my policy. The jars are in the same room as our cats' litter boxes. Last week I found a not so wee mouse floating face down in the water I left in the kitchen sink overnite. This mouse was not so lucky. It had drowned. I expect to not find any mice in our house at all. With four cats, professional assasins, I might add, you would think this would be a non issue.

I knew the mouse in the kitchen had been living under the stove for sometime. In fact, one day i found it on the top of a window blind just out of reach of one of our "professionals". From there it did a somersault leap to the kitchen floor and scurried under the stove and thats where it stayed I guess till it got thirsty and I made the horrible discovery in the sink . I was totally surprised that we would have a mouse in our furnace room; the same room the cats regularily visit to relieve themselves if they aren't outside. Apparently I am feeding them too much, or they are spending far too much time on the couch. And this leads me to another subject (i showed this to my sister as a periodic "Make Art Every Day" email series and all she replied was "your weird", so again, i just do it for fun and i think i should keep my day job...)


THERE IS NO UTOPIA

The ants in my kitchen
herald the coming of spring.
The ants with their anthills
in the rose garden, they won’t come in
the house again this season.

Small like flax seed, big as a house
Ticks drop from the trees, or the rafters,
or the porch. The cats bring them in on their fur
and they crawl up my toes from the rug

June bugs barrel into the screen door,
nightly, like bombardiers
They litter the porch come morning.
Their large bronze bodies stiff and crunchy
Summer has arrived

The cicadas buzz and sing
Crickets and grasshoppers and slugs
Lay waste to my hostas
Or slip through the cracks
in the screen door and I have to catch them
to throw them back outside.

Autumn marks the soybean harvest
and a plague of ladybugs all red and black.
Like the children’s poem,
I wish they would fly away.
Instead of hovering around my house
on warm days.
They are everywhere and they smell
Like the earth in my vacuum, and they bite.

Elder bugs the color of leaf litter
In great hoards, same as lady bugs but
They look like cockroaches
And they are everywhere, in my kitchen
And I hate them.
I have reached my limit of tolerance.
This year I will kill them.

Garden

MizMell , i found this picture. (Thanks for your interest!) Its just alot of green right now. I tend to overplant to discourage weeds, but this year I think I am crowding out the zuccini and the gladiolas. Everything is late. Marigolds are planted along the edge, mixed with cilantro and brussel sprouts. There is dill everywhere. I like to pick it and put it in vases in the house. I just let that and cilantro reseed themselves every year. On the either end I plant pumpkins and sunflowers. The pumpkin vines grow over the edge of the garden on the high side and into the grass on both sides. This give them more room to grow. I have cana planted around the center edge which keeps the blackberry bushes under control and stops them from bothering everything else. The other side of the garden has pole beans and is edged with calendula (i use that in soap - the petals retain their yellow orange color in spite of the lye). I have tomatoes and green peppers on the end by the woods. There is also corn (i planted lettuce, spinach underneat, and radishes under the pumpkins, because that stuff all is gone by the time the corn or pumpkins mature). The potatoes are on this side of the picture in mounded rows,with onions, parsley and basil. They are just starting to die back (gold and white potatoes - mid season.... red potatoes don't do well here). Pretty crowded place eh? More diversity than a New York City block.

Why oh why did we swallow the fly

I wanted to put a garden in the back of our house where the trailer used to sit. Just a big square garden like we had in Maryland. My husband disagreed. He wanted a raised bed. In Massachusetts, where he was from, they used raised beds for gardening. His brother in Massachusetts gardened with raised beds. Raised bed gardens were superior, end of discussion. He also thought a raised bed would be more accessible, which I went along with. How it ended up being in the front yard near our first tree field (constant reminder to weed from my kitchen window) is a complete mystery.

John built the garden with help from Harry and others. He used 12 foot long, 6 by 6 timbers, tons of them. It was a strip of sorts, maybe 30 feet long by 10 feet wide. It didn’t take long to figure out that the location was not ideal. The bed was built on an incline and so one end had a three feet high wall of timbers, and the other side was the same level as the low part of the yard. John had to buy a truck load of dirt to fill it out.

Oh, and we have this John Deere garden tractor with a tiller attachment. The one thing about John Deere garden tractors; any woman can use them. Install the attachments for the tractor? Easy, just look at the brochure, especially their sales brochures and technical data sheets. Each page has a cheerful, average sized woman riding or working on the tractor installed with one or more attachments, like the tiller or the snow blower. We have one of those too. Honestly, the woman who could install these attachments would have to be able to press at least 200 pounds and have strength in her hands like Lou Ferrigno. I’ve tried and I cannot, and I am only slightly smaller than the woman in the picture, but I digress.

John quickly discovered that the design of the garden was not optimal; another problem being I cannot back up the tractor with this big ass tiller attachment on the back of it, in the narrow strip of garden which is the raised bed. So then he added the West wing. The garden is now a U shape, so I could till riding forward at all times, no backing up required. The whole back side of the U is made up of a 3 foot wall, more bucks for timbers, and he had to order two more truckloads of dirt to fill it. In the process we discovered that it was much cheaper to buy dirt than six by sixes, and I got a center island, which was a closed rectangle that wouldn’t be tilled ever. Here I planted blackberry bushes and asparagus and gladiolas, which I dig up every fall. Of course, after a year of having to mow the grass in the center between the island and the bed I had had enough. So I told John we needed to get rid of the grass. And he did with more dirt. This last year I went out and bought an electric tiller, that I absolutely love. There was no woman pictured on the front of the product brochure, but there should have been.

Last year I got a plaque that I attached to the “wall” of the garden. It says “John’s Folly”.

Side note: Negatives aside, it is a really nice garden and with my new tiller I am starting to enjoy it more.