her able hands

Look at what I get to play in today!

I ran home at lunchtime yesterday to pay the guy from the horse farm. He interrupted what sounded like an incredibly busy day, to load up ten scoops of aged horse manure in his hydraulic lift trailer. I ordered five scoops each of five year-old and three year-old manure, mixed. It was so heavy after the rains of last week, that his lift stopped about halfway up and wouldn’t budge. He had to drive forward on the lawn and then backwards and slam on the brakes several times to get the load to shift. When it tumbled out onto the grass, it glinted with wet, wriggling strands of red. Thousands of red worms. I plan to dig a bunch of them out of the pile and put them in a bin under the rabbit’s cage.

I’ve been wanting to try vermicomposting for years and find a better way to utilize the millions of dry pellets Charles the Female Rabbit litters the cage and its surrounding area with. Now I have no excuse, the worms are just hanging out there in the pile waiting for something exciting to do! What could be more exciting than eating ones way through a bucket of rabbit crap and soiled straw to make black gold? Nothing, I tell you. Though, I’m glad I don’t have to do it.

So isn’t the pile just gorgeous? He said it weighed about 3 tons (which explains the torn up lawn that I later had to explain to Chris). So today’s plan is to use the manure to:

• Mulch Asparagus beds
• Side-dress and work into the soil for the Potatoes and Raspberries
• Build lasagna beds inside my hinged wood frames for quick and dirty cold frames to plant lettuces and spinach.

The weather forecast changed. I could see that by looking out the window, of course, but checked online anyway, and sure enough, the sunny, clear and 68* is now mostly cloudy with a 40% chance of rain for the day. Oh well.

Tomorrow’s a whole ‘nother day, but I’m not going to look that far ahead yet. I’m toying with the idea of taking the dining room chairs outside to strip them. I picked up my special-order fabric from Jo-Ann’s yesterday, and I’d love to get them done before the end of the month. If I do, I’ll post a photo of the fabric. I’m in love, and can’t wait to paint the dining room and kitchen to complement it, I’m thinking a dusty gray-sage.

Oh, also? Check out my next column at 100Hats, about eating local. I have so much more I want to write about food supply and local economies, health and security, but this is about all I could squeeze into a 500 word column. Don’t you hate when you write something and then read it a few weeks later and realize you could have said so much more with so many less words? Me too.

*I have to watch my language on this blog now or I can’t check it at work because of blocks they put on internet use with banned words. Also, I’m trying to clean up my act around here, but old habits die hard. It’s a B*tch.

Technorati Tags: manure, compost, vermicompost, garden, organic gardening

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Goodness, I just put up my winter banner, and already I need to work on something green. The thaw is here, and I hope final, though I know we could still get a dump load of snow straight through till May. That thought nudges the back of my mind but I try to ignore it, especially in light of the 70* evenings, the hawks mating in the sky over our house, the Teenager who spends half the night skateboarding in the cul-de-sac behind us. This is progress. We can make plans.

This is part of the mess in the woods. It’s incredible to me that every effort we make to improve the property just creates a bigger mess that we have so little time to clean up. So far we have two beds made with the chicken tractor, and now the girls are on a new spot to build one more. It’s on my list to call about manure and compost deliveries today. I hope I remember to make the time. I could have peas and other cold weather crops in the ground by Sunday if I manage my days well.

In an ideal world where I didn’t spend 45 hours a week in a cubicle I would be building beautiful paths between the beds with shallow trenches filled with cement and beach stones pressed down into it to form mosaics. But yanno, that’s just not in the cards this year. I just need to focus on getting some food planted and call that good enough for now. Someday, though, that’s the big plan. Get all of the brush and wood cleaned up. The brush into bark mulch, the wood chopped and stacked neatly in the lean-to we’ll build by the new shed barn that we’re ordering. I’ll have lots of shade-loving plants to form low hedge rows around the perimeter of the garden area, and along the paths to form cozy nooks within the woods. I can see it now, but realistically it’s a ten-year plan.

But the girls, so happy in their new spot!

The fun part of this spring is seeing what pops up around the property for the first time. I brought over several plants from the old house and stuck them in bare spots in the perennial bed. It looks like I lost my French Lavender, not surprising after the super dry summer and then the bitter cold. I should have nursed it along more than I did, which was not at all. I dug a hole in June, shoved her in, patted the soil down around her roots walked away. Hello spring and skeletal remains!

The first clump of daffodils opened up, such a striking glow on the brown landscape.

My Thyme seems to have done alright, lots of dead, but some hearty green persists and makes a most wonderful scent when rubbed. Here’s one of the surprises. I stuck Ms. Thyme right on top of tulip bulbs. Whoops!

I also found some chives set back amongst a bunch of bulbs in the treeline behind the swing set and plan to make a light vegetable soup this weekend with chopped chives garnishing each bowl. It’s time for spring tonics and I’ve scoped out dozens of tender, green dandelions.

I need to decide where I want to start my kitchen herb bed. I’m afraid to do anything on the south side by the kitchen door because we eventually plan to add on over the kitchen and across to the garage, make a mud room and office/work space. I’d hate to have to move a thriving garden. So I need to focus on the other side close to the woods, which still gets plenty of sun all season.

Chris had his awakening to the season of outside work the other night as well. He bonded with the new back neighbor by taking turns tossing a steel weight tied to a rope over a very high tree branch. The tree is on our property, but the offending branch is rotten and hangs right over their back yard where their lovely 3 year-old daughter plays every day. It took them about 30 or 40 tries, but eventually they snagged the branch and together, with much groaning and brute-strength, pulled it off the tree.

Chris brought out the chainsaw (grinning ear-to-ear, for this is the way the man likes to garden, with a motorized tool of destruction growling in his hands). He trimmed up the branch and brought over the nicest piece, with such an interesting curl to the wood.

Any suggestions on what I could do with this beautiful hollow log?

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What a glorious spring day. Wow. The whole neighborhood buzzed with busy outdoor projects. Roofing, chopping down dead trees, cleaning cars, washing windows, raking, burning brush (I even rode my bike in the morning for half an hour-oh, delicious endorphin rush). And in the evening all settled down to the quiet hum of traffic on the main drag a few blocks west and joyful bird song while we sat on the porch and stared at the moon and enjoyed the warm breeze. We didn’t get as much done this weekend as we’d planned due to the fact that Chris worked both days and we had a birthday party for his dad. But we did do a little brush clearing in the woods and got the chicken tractor moved to a new spot with the help of our burly wrestler neighbor and his friend (also a burly wrestler). It pays to know people with big muscles. We paid him back with eggs fresh from the chicken’s butt (so to speak).

Oh, my goodness, the girls were so thrilled. Silly me, I forgot to charge the camera battery, so I have no proof of this. You’ll just have to take my word that after the indignant, squawking, shrieking, wing-flapping fuss it was nothing but pure bug buffet contentment. Oh, the scratching and pecking and gobbling! Such happy noises, I swear I heard them chanting thank you as they scratched around in the humus for the rest of the afternoon.

We moved them over about ten feet onto a spot that had a big brush pile on top of it for five months. That pile got moved to one of the other (dozens) of piles in the woods in preparation for the day our friend brings his industrial chipper. Mulch! So after we raked up the area, the bug and worm activity was just incredible. Those girls were all over that protein like Chris on Prime Rib.

Speaking of Chris, that wonderful man decided to mechanize my light stand. (Heh. That sounds mildly p*rnographic.) He still has a little more work to do on it (several important pieces are still down at the old house—oops). But he made a crank system for raising and lowering the lights, a very fancy way of solving my leggy seedling problems. I haven’t seen it yet, it’s still at the shop, but I cannot wait to get it set up and dig into my seed starting mix from Fedco. Looks like not until next weekend, which may be too late for onions, but I’m going to do a tray anyway, because hey, maybe it’ll work just fine and then I’ll have incredible Italian sweet onions when it comes time to make roasted tomato sauce.

Again, from the Fedco Seed Catalog:

Borrettana Cipollini Onion (105 days) Open-pollinated. Italian heirloom makes the quintessential boiling and braising onion. Shaped like a button, up to 4″ wide (normally 3″) but less than 1″ thick. Flattened spheres with shiny golden skin slightly brighter than Copra’s. Fine-grained flesh has a very mild yet well-developed flavor. Appreciated in soups, stir-fries and shish kebab. Braids beautifully and keeps till late winter.

I’d say that’s worth the gamble, wouldn’t you?

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We fed the girls yesterday afternoon around 4:00 and the big nested straw hole they all lay in was empty. This is what greeted Chris when he opened up the tractor lid this evening around 5:00 after work.

I counted 21 eggs in the bowl. We have 11 chickens. Somebody’s working overtime without pay.

ETA: Turns out Chris found about 8 or 9 of these under some straw next to the spot they always lay in. We had put down fresh straw the day before, so clearly they worked that batch underneath with all of their scratching. But still! All of a sudden full production—I have 4 dozen eggs in the fridge. Yum!

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We’re having one of those Sunday’s that feels like the clock is moving double-time, and the work week looms just the other side of a too-short sleep. It’s the fourth day in a row where things are conspiring against us, and the cranky level of the two adults in the house is pushing against the ceiling.

A short list of things:

• Lila is getting sick again.
• I have a toothache.
• The cats are revolting against something (?) and have so far pooped on the rug three times, and peed on a pair of Chris’ work pants, instead of using one of the two perfectly useable boxes in the basement.
• I discovered right after I found the most recent tower of poop on the living room floor, that last weekend when we fell asleep without blowing out the votive candle on top of the piano (dumbasses), that we’re damned lucky we didn’t burn the house down. The glass charred a circle in the veneer on the top of the hundred year-old Baldwin.
• I left a glass sweating on the piano bench and it now has a hideous yellow ring.
• The leaves are still in huge piles on the lawn, smothering it to death, I’m sure, but it’s too wet to rake them.

See? It’s all just minor crap, but for some reason it’s not rolling off of us. Chris and I are at each other’s throats. I guess we’re once again facing the avalanche of evidence in favor of the fact that we’re not in control of very much.

I think we should all get kitty-fur-lined mittens for Christmas.

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