Garden Envy. Garden Lust.

Gardening really is an addiction. One you get that first, sweet taste of gardening success, you just want more and more.

They really should put warning signs on seed packets. You know, something in big bold letters like "This is only the beginning!" or "Slippery slope ahead!" or "For the love of your wallet, don't plant this!" If they'd done that, maybe I wouldn't have a cabin brimming with houseplants and a perpetual scheme in the back of my mind about how to expand my gardening space in the backyard.

Warning signs or no, I'm a goner by this time. 

Each summer I convince myself that I finally have just the right amount of gardening space. After we put in the large-ish raised bed last summer, I was sure I had plenty of gardening space to keep myself content until we move onto bigger, green pastures (aka, some place where the septic mound doesn't take up all the good planting spaces).  But then the new raised bed was super successful, which only inspired more great ideas for garden expansion.

It kind of defeats the purpose of gardening to be thrifty when you just keep buying more and more bags of top soil, manure, and peat moss. Somehow, there's never compost to go around and I'm always in need of more large pots and building equipment for raised beds.

But then, I always keep stumbling upon something I just have to grow. Here are some fruits and veggies I'm currently lusting after:

Asparagus: 

I love asparagus and we've been eating a lot of it this spring. But each time I throw a bundle of asparagus grown in Central or South America, I suffer terrible locavore pangs. After all, it is a vegetable that we're perfectly capable of growing in the Northwoods and if I simply waited until it was in season in these parts, I could enjoy all sorts of locally sourced asparagus. So why not grow it myself?

As one of just two perennial vegetables (the other is rhubarb), asparagus takes a couple years to establish itself and because it doesn't offer instant gratification (or as instant as any vegetable can offer) I worry that we will have perhaps moved on before we can actually enjoy the asparagus.  The bed would also require special insulation during the winter months and of course, we'd have to built another asparagus bed to house the patch. . .

Strawberries: 

Another source of locavore guilt. I buy far too many strawberries that hail from California. There are plenty of pick-your-own strawberry farms just over the border in Ontario, but when the strawberries ripen in mid-July, I'm too overwhelmed with summer mayhem to make the two-hour trip up to one of these farms. Which makes me want to grow my own so badly.   

But they're kind of a pain to grow (or so I'm told) and I don't think they'd like a raised bed much, since they're pretty susceptible to frost damage. I'd have to figure out some way to make some sort of an embedded patch for them and we just don't have much top soil to play around here.

Potatoes:  

I might just have figured out away to grow potatoes this year. Our growing space has been too limited in the past years to give potatoes the garden real estate they need. But I think we might have some success with potatoes if we grow them using the Stout method.

We recently moved all the soil out of the roadside garden into a new raised bed and I think we'll try to put down a layer of compost in the new empty space, then throw down some seed potatoes, and cover them with mulch and maybe a layer of top soil, just to make the garden a little more presentable to passersby. What the heck, eh?

What veggies and fruits do you have a hankering to grow this year?

 

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Going Dormant

On my last day of my seasonal job last month, Andy and his mother bought me a potted mum. It was lovely: full and bushy, completely covered with mauve blossoms.  I take it out of the cramped, plastic pot the greenhouse had it in, repotted it in a terracotta planter and set it on a living room cabinet. It continued to look lovely for a good month and then it started to lose its blossoms. No big deal, I thought as I deadheaded it, to everything turn, turn.

But as the weeks go gone by, the mum's appearance continues to deteriorate. At the very time when both my Christmas cactus and African violet are loaded to barracuda with buds and blossoms, the mum just looks like it wants to kill itself. Every time I pass by, I can always hear it whisper: "Take me now sweet Jesus . . . and get it over with." 

Actually, I'm sure the mum would love to have a long, fulfilling life. Truth be told, I'm the hitch in the mum's giddy-up. Apparently, I should have been watering this sucker every day if I wanted to keep it green and lush all winter.As the mum's declined, I've queried Google with increasingly frantic searches that are some variant of  "how to keep potted mum alive indoors over the winter." The search results have been less than edifying (would someone please just devote their life to creating a helpful database on houseplant care already?) but I think I have a couple things figure out about my mum.

Turns out, I have two choices on what to do with it. (Well, three if you count my current path of plant homicide . . . Planticide? Pesticide?)

I can:
1) Begin watering the mum daily and move it to a place where it might have a better chance of getting 12 hours of daily light.  Considering that I have not seen the sun in, oh, 10 days, that's kind of a laugh.

or

2)  Put it in the dark, heated (but not too hot) room under the cabin, water it occasionally and let it go dormant for the winter months.

I'm leaning towards option number two, for obvious reasons - aforementioned lake of sunlight, the fact that the rest of my houseplants demand only a weekly watering (and they're lucky if they get that). And truth be told, I'm kind of jealous. Jealous of my houseplant.

Because if the mum chooses dormancy, why can't I?!

We're in the final slog of longest, darkest days until the Winter Solstice is upon us and it is dark my friends. So very dark. How dark?

Andy went into the bedroom last night at 6:30 to "stretch out" and promptly fell asleep. In these deep grey days, I slog through my workload in a half-conscious daze. As an example of how desperate things are around here, I just got down on my hands and knees to feel around on the floor, which I have not vacuumed in months, for a single milk chocolate chip I had dropped . . . so I could eat it. Seriously, put me to bed with a warm cup of cocoa and wake me up when the lake is frozen over and the sun is shining (aka, January) when I can actually do something!

Oh, these are dark days, dark days indeed. But sadly, only the mum gets to go dormant. 

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Wordless Wednesday: It's A Mystery!

I planted a seed back in April. I thought it was kohlrabi. Then I thought it was cabbage. Now, I don't know what to think. Anyone have any guesses about this year's mystery plant?!

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Feels Like Home to Me

Feels like I'm all the way back where I come from
Feels like home to me
Feels like home to me
Feels like I'm all the way back where I belong

A window breaks down a long dark street
And a siren wails in the night
But I'm alright 'cause I have you here with me
And I can almost see through the dark there's light

-- Chantal Kreviazuk

It's been a rough couple days around here. Both Andy and I spent the weekend away from the cabin: me at my parents' place in town, Andy at an out of state sports show. The last few days have been low on sleep, high on drama. While I'm normally a huge proponent of shaking up the everyday, this go-round, I just wanted to be home.

So imagine my delight when we pulled into the cabin late yesterday morning.

Back with the cheeky squirrels.

Giving the houseplants a well-deserved drink of water.

Hearing the fire roar into life in the stove.

Making a batch of homemade chicken noodle soup.

Enjoying the quiet twilight hour when only chickadees and nuthatches flit quietly about the feeder area, delicately selecting a sunflower seed before fluttering back to the shelter of trees.  

Dorothy said it best: "There's no place like home."


What's your favorite part of being home?

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Unfurling, slowly

The Christmas cactus under the living room window formed teeny tiny buds towards the end of October and over the last few weeks we’ve watched the buds grow and grow until finally it burst into bloom last week. Now the African violet on my desk is following suit, shooting up little bitty buds that slowly turn purple and carefully lift a petal one at a time. I’ve been feeling less the Christmas cactus in its current state of bloom and more the tightly closed buds on the African violet waiting to burst free. 

I think every writer’s been here.

These dark moments when the doubt demons flare up. When there never seems to be time for the creative writing – all the “good” time gets allotted to things with deadlines. When you wonder if you’re ever really going to make it as a writer. And when that fleeting thought that maybe your mother was right and you really should have tried for law school after all passes through your brain with uncomfortable frequency.  

I don’t think this feeling of general discomfit is limited to writers. Although the nags and worries might be slightly different, this is unease is just what the middle of November brings

Don’t get me wrong, the snow was (still is) pretty. But after too much time penned up in your home office, when the temperature won’t break above freezing and the skies have been grey for a week straight and the days keep getting shorter and shorter,  it’s easy to get down into a “this might be the beginning of seasonal affective disorder" funk.

I ran into an acquaintance earlier this week who's been running a seasonal business for a long time: she’s used to the whole “winters off” concept and winding her way carefully through these short, grey days.

“Are you going nuts yet?” she asked. Then she reminded me of the value of this quiet winter time. This is meant to be the time for germinating ideas and allowing fleeting thoughts to percolate and grow in an organic setting. But I’m the kind of girl who loves the idea of whole, organic foods, but when given the choice between fresh squeezed guava juice and a diet Pepsi is going to shyly reach for the pop. Sometimes I don’t want percolation. Sometimes I want instant gratification.

But the middle of November is not about instant gratification. It’s about the gathering up the little light you have and slowly, slowly forcing your petals to unfurl.

Andy stumbled across this Stephen King quote the other day: “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

We don’t actually have a light bill, but I’ve seen a typical utilities bill around here. And I have to say I have received several checks for my writing that could cover the light bill. Is that talent? Well, if it’s good enough for Stephen King, it’s good enough for me.

So I’ll keep at it. If Stephen King’s to be believed, this writing business is a good way to have “light.”

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Wordless Wednesday: Dwell in Possibility

Emily Dickinson said to "Dwell in possibility."

And when the outside world looks like this,

or this,

it's good to know that inside, it's possible for things to still be blooming.

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I Will Buy You A Garden

“I made you something,” Andy said when I got back to the Shack on Sunday. Cranky from my five-hour drive back from the Twin Cities and feeling (somewhat melodramatically) as though I’d arrived up at the very end of the world, I raised my eyebrow.

“Yeah? What?” I asked.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe, a necklace made out of bubble gum wrappers?

It turned out to be a lot better than a bubble gum wrapper necklace.

While I gallivanted in New York City, Andy constructed a raised garden bed at the cabin where we’ll be spending the summer. My mother gave me some flower seeds for my birthday in March and at the time, I didn’t know quite what to do with the seeds. While I’ve been dreaming of a garden all winter, the Shack is located in a shady valley that doesn’t appear particularly agriculturally viable. But my new summer job has lead to shift in residencies for the summer where the raised bed Andy built as well as the pre-existing terraced beds with warrant plenty of digging in the dirt this summer.

Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

Now that the means exist to have a bit of a garden, we’re faced with the dilemma of deciding what to plant. Although it’ll still be awhile before any seedlings can be put out in the garden, we’re a little behind on starting seedlings. I really don’t want to bite off more than we can chew when it comes to garden maintenance, so I want to be as smart about this project as possible. One of my concerns is that the garden is as sustainable as possible.

Gardening seems the ultimate sustainable act, but gardening can generate a ton of largely unusable plastic waste. Just think of all the dinky little plastic 4/6-pack containers you accumulate on a trip to the greenhouse. Molly over at the Snyder 5 has a great idea on how to use egg cartons to start seedlings: Composting for Newbies. That’s so smart! I need to pick up some potting soil from my parents’ house tomorrow and then I plan to start a batch of flowers in an egg carton tomorrow evening.

We plopped a few tulip bulbs – excess favors from coworkers’ wedding last September – in the perennial garden last fall. Like most things you “plop” in the ground, I promptly forgot about them. So it’s fun to see all three tulips poking up now.

I have a cold, probably just travel fatigue catching up with me. We’re also in the process of moving out of the Shack for the summer. Our bedroom currently looks like a suitcase vomited in it and my desk space is a teetering cityscape of notebook towers and paperclip ponds. I should spend the evening organizing, but I’m more keen to plant my sweet pea seeds in the far corner of the raised bed.

I’ve gotten back to work. I have some calls out for an article that needs to be done by the end of the week and as long as I actually get some calls back, I think it has potential to be a really good article. I’m also in the process of setting up some interviews for my radio project and my current priority needs to be hammering out a draft of a commentary.

Speaking of commentaries, here’s my recent effort.

A college colleague got in touch with me yesterday regarding a freelance opportunity for the website he edits. My interest is piqued, but I need more details before I make a commitment to any more work.

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Home Check In

Some things change when you return home from the Pacific Northwest. For one thing, all the trees seem so small here in the great Northwoods. And they’re really close together.

Some things really change while you’re gone. When we left, ice still covered the majority of the lake. The ice went out completely the day after we left and today was the first time since December that we’ve seen the ripple of open water on the lake. Typically the ice goes out in early May. This irregular spring weather is discomfiting to the point of being scary since its turning the woods into a veritable tinderbox. Fire danger is currently “very high.”

But it’s not all doom and gloom on the home front. The bird feeders that I filled before leaving are empty and this afternoon I brought them in to retire them for the summer. The plant caretaker who stopped by the Shack a couple times to water the plants is worth her weight. Both the African Violet and the Christmas Cactus are showing off lovely blooms and the spider plant is getting ready to throw its first plant since I took in the little guy.

Of course, the house plants aren’t the only things that did some growing in the Shack while we were gone . . . .

Ick! I predict some bleach action in the future.

I had some good writing news waiting for me in my inbox this afternoon. A short story I wrote in December was accepted by my alma mater’s annual literary and artistic journal and actually won this year’s “best prose” award. On the flip side, the couple poems I also submitted were not accepted which reinforces my belief that my writing energy should not be wasted on poetry. I respect a good poet and I fear that good poets are far more talented wordsmiths than I will ever be. However, as someone who seeks to make her living with her writing, I do not have the time to develop my poetry to the extent that it needs development, nor has poetry ever proven especially lucrative.

Speaking of freelancing, I also had an article assignment waiting in my inbox. Am only mildly freaking out about the amount of work I’m supposed to complete upon my true return home at the end of the month.

Right now, writing is not the priority. Laundry and figuring out what to pack for New York City trip are at the forefront of my mind tonight. But first, after nearly two weeks straight of travel, I think a good night sleep in my own bed is in order.

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Harbingers of Spring

It’s no secret. Spring has been on its way to the North woods for quiet some time now. Despite the gusty wind, today saw temperatures of nearly 60 degrees and the air holds a softness that must mean spring.

A lot of good signs have been popping up.

Like pussywillows: 

Or suitcases waiting by the front door.

 (No, they're not packed yet!)

Some signs, not so good:

Granted, I’m not sure that the fire danger in the area is truly “high.” After a couple major wildfire events in the last few years, the locals are on heightened alert. And they’re right to worry until the trees bud out. Things are looking really, really dry. By all accounts we should still be out skiing.

But then things have been a little odd this year. . .

I went into the bathroom and noticed this:

For a couple weeks now I’ve been really excited that my dormant Christmas cactus is putting on new leaves. Does anyone know what Christmas cactus leaf buds look like? I’m starting to suspect that what I thought were new Christmas cactus leaves are in actuality, Christmas cactus flowers.

Flowers?! At the end of March? Right when I’m about to leave on vacation for a month? Not only are we a good nine months off from Christmas, I’m going to miss the flowering Christmas cactus! As Tina Fey would say: BLERG!

These days I find myself finishing up articles and other projects that won’t be worried about again until nearly a month from now. I wonder when exactly I’m going to find time to pack and do laundry before the trip and I fear I will not get around to throwing everything out of the fridge that is going to go bad while we’re gone.

Oh yes, spring, or something like it, is right around the corner.

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