Vitamin G: A Heavy Hit of Garden Love

 

It wasn’t so much of a panic as it was a freak out. Let me say, I actually had room for sweet potatoes this year (imagine having more garden area) and I was going to turn it into potato country. Ok, a strip. A potato strip. The only thing I was missing were potatoes.  I hadn’t been to Natural Gardener since before the Big Shutdown last year. They shuttered their shop and turned out the lights. They started opening up little by little, limited hours, restricted areas. It’s a popular nursery and I didn’t want to deal plus it’s a little ways out from home. There are plenty of other nurseries that are closer to home.  Eventually though, in April, I decided a visit to Natural Gardener could be a nice birthday outing. Ha, ha and ha. It was not. There was a 45 minute wait in the car in which we crept inch by inch just to get into the parking lot. When we did get in, most of the grounds were restricted. The thing about NG is that they have a lot of established gardens and areas that a...

I just can’t say. A week ago I was all about the comfrey. The things I read made it sound like it was indispensable in a permaculture setting. But that’s not really my yard. I want to pretend it’s my yard but no, I have a vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, some chickens and a compost bin.  Things I like about comfrey: it draws up minerals deep in the ground through its long taproot. It is high in nitrogen so it’s great to add to compost. The leaves are large and make a good mulch. It flowers and from the photos I’ve seen, it is an attractive plant. As an herb it has strong healing properties. Things I fear: that damn long taproot. Once it goes into the soil I may never get it out of the soil. It is invasive. It spreads.  The things I don’t like about comfrey are the things I don’t like about bamboo. You have to be committed going in. It’s why I still have Mexican petunias sitting in pots and not in the ground. Commitment scares me. I took the first step though. I took the si...

  May 9, 2021. Austin Shambhala Center 

My aim this gardening  season is to not only expand my garden but to be able to identify everything in it, or to at least be able to identify what seeds I have planted. To this end I have started using a little pocket garden notebook religiously. And of course, maintain this blog as a journal.  Record keeping has always seemed like a laudable act but I’ve never been able to stick to it. I go in fits and spurts and have accumulated a lot of half filled journals, each dedicated to a particular year. I will have 6, 12, maybe 20 pages filled out usually with some sort of rough grid sketch scrawled with vegetable names.  This year does seem different but I probably say that every year. But honestly, this year does seem different. I have multiple media streams, the pocket notebook, the blog and photos.  Today the plant markers that I ordered arrived and I dutifully took them to the garden and jotted down the date and name of my seedlings. They’re not quite seedlings yet, ...

I love the sound of rain and have enjoyed days of listening to the steady rhythm of it. I enjoy the dimmed light from cloud cover and the smell of wet soil.  In between downpours I’ll make a dash out the front door trotting through the trees in the chicken yard and on to the backyard garden to see how seedlings and transplants have   fared.  The French marigold seedlings have made their way through the soil, it’s only been a matter of days since I sowed them near the sweet potato bed. They were reliable two years ago and proved themselves reliable again this year. The potted datura has formed something - a massive blossom, a seed pod? I never imagined it would look like it does.  The mint is in her glory and the thyme as well. There are a host of mushrooms thriving in just about every part of the garden, their super power being that their spindly stems are strong enough to hold a cap but wither when grasped to pull from the ground. I can only ever manage to remove ha...