garden

Finding (and getting back to) my roots

January 25, 2016 Marie Leave a Comment

catalogs

My grandfather was once amused to hear how much I loved gardening and how I wanted a farm. I’m (pathetically) not very knowledgeable about my grandparents and their history/childhoods, as many young’uns are. I knew, though, that every year my grandparents had a large garden they tended. When I discussed how I wanted to grow all these different veggies, he laughed and joked about how he never understood why anyone would grow potatoes when you could go to the store and buy them so cheaply. Ever the logical man, Grandpa felt that the amount of work involved in growing them and, subsequently, digging them out of the ground wasn’t worth the effort when you could buy a big bag for a few bucks.

At the funeral last month I heard something I didn’t know before. My grandfather wrote a bit of a biography (which I really can’t wait to read if it ever makes its way to me), and in it he talked about how he worked as a farm hand during the Great Depression. His parents were farmers, and he used that experience to get a job elsewhere when there was work available. He made a whopping $7/week and was given room and board and, in exchange, worked a lot of the hard labor that comes with running a farm. When he came back from the Air Force and married my grandmother, the two of them bought a 25 acre farm because, as he quoted, “you can take the boy off the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.”

I often feel like I don’t really have anything in common with my own family, but this story resonated with me significantly. Farming is, clearly, in my blood. What I originally thought was just a Great Depression hangover – just something my grandparents did because it was what you did to make sure you survived – was far more than I realized. It was like I had this sudden connection with my family that I didn’t understand before.

These last two years my garden has been an afterthought. I feel as though I’ve somewhat lost my passion since becoming a mom and I’ve just been floating in survival mode these last 2 seasons. I have a lot on my plate right now, no doubt (much of which I don’t even talk about here), but it’s time to stop making excuses and start getting this garden thing back together. If you’ve been hanging around these last two years, thanks for sticking around with me and putting up with me. :) I can’t promise it’ll be like the old days – people change and all of that – but let’s aim for more gardening from this wannabe homesteader, yes?

Garden update: mostly weeds

September 10, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Allow me to present the most pathetic garden in the history of gardens. Ok, exaggeration – obviously. But it’s pretty sad. The tomatoes didn’t get staked. The peppers didn’t even remotely make it. The bean trellis (which is home to beans that were never planted) is full of morning glory vines aka the vine of death and doom that we nearly had beaten back.

Overall, I’ve basically just been the worst person ever about keeping up with it this year.

Oh well. There’s always next year. And, with any luck, next year might be at a new place. IF I can get a freaking realtor to ever return my calls/emails. There’s this perfect property for sale with a sweet little 2 bedroom house on it. It needs work, but it’s perfect for what I’ve wanted, both in the amount of land and the size of home (which would require much purging, but would be totally worth it). It’ll probably be snatched up before we can even get ready to place an offer but I’m trying to not let that deter me.

Regardless, I’ve gotten a bit of motivation again and have been trying to buckle down and tighten up our spending. We have a new roof coming this month, which is draining a lot of our savings (hooray home ownership), so we need to not only replenish that but also start saving back for a down payment. It’s incredibly hard to find the kind of property I want, in the area I want, without spending a small fortune more than I’d like to. My only hope is to put enough of a down payment on a place that I can keep the mortgage low enough that I could work part time and farm part time (my ideal situation, honestly – I don’t want to take care of a house and a kid on top of acres of land and chickens and such while trying to work as much as I am now. That’s pretty much a recipe for a giant meltdown.) So who knows – maybe in a year or two I’ll finally be able to stop dreaming of a farm.

From the urban berry patch

July 14, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Snowballs

May 26, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

The first house I remember growing up in was this little ranch on a cul-de-sac. The front of the house was lined with hedges, there was a crab apple tree in one part of the front yard and a birch tree, maybe – I don’t remember what it was, actually, in the opposite corner. If you were looking at the house from the street, my bedroom was on the very left corner, with two windows – one looking out to the street, another looking at the white house next to us. All of our yards were fenced in, and if you looked down between our two houses, right in front of the fence, there were these “snowballs” growing. I didn’t know them as anything other than snowballs for the longest time. I remember watching them each year and being fascinated by them and how the ants all loved to climb and eat at them.

We moved houses when I was in middle school and my mom dug up the plant and took them with us. I never really knew why, I just figured she loved them and didn’t want to let them go. For years and years they grew at my mom’s house, right next to the foundation. And then, a few years ago, she decided she didn’t want them anymore. I’m not sure why, other than maybe just wanting to do something different with her flower beds. So we dug them up, and I brought them home with me. I planted them in the front flower bed, not realizing that they needed a lot more sun than the front bed gets. They almost died but I managed to rescue them in just enough time to move them to another location.

A relative of mine is big into genealogy, and she likes to post up stories occasionally about my great grandmother (who I didn’t really know). Do you know why we had white snowballs (peonies)? Because those were my great grandmother’s favorite flower. She’s the one that called them snowballs. Years ago I was determined to plant roses in honor of my grandmother (Her middle name was Rose). I wanted to have something in my garden in honor of her and to remind me of her. I’m not, apparently, the only one who felt planting flowers was a great way of honoring loved ones and my mother had already beaten me to it years ago with these peonies.

Garden of Procrastination

May 25, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Well, the garden is sorta planted. I still have peppers to plant, and a tomato plant. There are still zucchini seeds to get in there and cucumbers and such, too. It seems I’ve lost my enthusiasm this year for it. The garden, now, feels like something I used to do to fill my free time when I didn’t have all this other stuff going on. When I didn’t have a baby. When I didn’t have any other responsibilities other than a job. It has lost its fun and feels more like a chore. Which makes me sad, really, because it really was something I loved doing every year. Now I just look at it and see a lot of time that I have to invest in it and balance all of that with a job, other obligations, and my family. But I’m stubborn enough to not let it go just yet (though I may scale it way back next year) so I put it off and put it off until today when I couldn’t put it off any longer.

Planting what little bit I did get in was rough. With only half planting the garden last year thanks to being pregnant, the beds suffered. They didn’t get the compost needed, nor was the dirt dug a bit to keep it loose. In the fall, we didn’t dig everything under like we needed to. This year it was almost like having to start from scratch, digging out weeds and breaking up the compacted dirt. We still need to add more compost to the beds. We did manage to replace the cheap white fencing we put in a few years ago with a much nicer, much sturdier (and more expensive) metal one. Hopefully this one the dog won’t be able to get hooked on and drag it around. It’s black and not what I wanted (I prefer white to match our house trim), but it’s not the worst thing in the world. It might actually look kind of cute if I could get some flowers planted in front of it. That’s a project for next year, though. Or never. Probably never. There’s other things that need taken care of before I go creating more work for myself, like that stupid garage door with the giant rust stain that has gotten worse and worse since we moved here.