Bonafide Farm

Late frost

May 14th, 2013 § 0

The average last frost date in Free Union usually occurs between April 11 and 20. This year, however, we’ve had a cool, long spring, and last night were hit with what I suspect will be our last frost of the year.

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My only frost victims in the veg garden were a couple of coleus I’d stuck in over the weekend. I like to grow coleus to add to cut flower bouquets. There are the dead plants above, nestled among some oregano, radishes, peas, and a blueberry bush—all of which made it through the night just fine.

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Interestingly, the even smaller coleus starts—above, in red—I’d stuck around the house garden escaped frost damage. Of course it makes sense that the south side of the house would be warmer than the exposed garden out in the field, but I continue to enjoy discovering all the different microclimates on this property.

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Of course I covered the new tomatoes for the night, and they were okay, as were all the pots of started dahlias and other vegetables I stashed in the well house overnight. I wonder how the local vineyards and orchards and other farmers fared—I read news stories last evening that it was going to be a stressful night as many growers watched the mercury with their livelihood on the line.

Looking at the upcoming forecast, in which temperatures are supposed to shoot up to near 90 degrees tomorrow, I am just going to go ahead and call it. Winter is over, let the (frost-free) growing season begin!

Happy Mother’s Day

May 12th, 2013 § 0

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Entropy

May 10th, 2013 § 0

No matter how I try, within days of clearing off every surface of my house things start to accumulate. And not just any things. Usually they’re living, dirt-covered or maybe even sporting a smidge of chicken poop. Sometimes they’re fermenting, in both good and bad ways.

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Case in point: my kitchen table right now. I’ve been puzzling out my vegetable/cutting garden plan for days, laying seed packets out like playing cards. A game of solitaire, this is. I’ve also got a few flats of recent experiments: lavender seeds left over from 2011 that I never got around to and the mother of all herbs, Urtica dioica, or stinging nettle. Yes, call me crazy but I am trying to grow that hiker’s bane from seed, hoping to transplant nettle down in the woods by the creek. I was shocked to not find any natively growing here, and as a source of minerals, nutrition and herbal healing it’s too important to live without.

And there’s a jug of spring water left over from Sunday’s homebrew session (which on Monday exploded all over my guest room, as in, I actually had to scrub my ceiling!) And a nice little collection of recent eggs that I am on the fence about refrigerating, thinking I may offer them to a new friend with a broody hen. I’d love it if one of my hens went broody, as I am dying to see what sort of crosses I’d get from my various hens and my Wheaten Ameraucana rooster. I had given myself the parameter that any new chicks would have to be hatched and raised by one of my existing hens, to cut down on labor, mess, and potential flock integration trauma, but with that gorgeous stack of potential just sitting there I am this close to getting an incubator. As if I need another project!

This doesn’t even show the kitchen counter, which is busy nurturing young plant starts and soaking morning glory seeds for planting out tomorrow. And I have a new pet—a kombucha scoby fermenting on the windowsill, waiting to be released into a jug of sweet tea.

As much as not having clear surfaces makes the Virgo in me a bit panicky, I also love living surrounded by my various projects. I recognize that this sort of “mess” is bound to accompany me wherever I go, and it will ebb and flow with the growing seasons and whatever else I am up to. My house smells like moist potting soil and lilac, fermenting beer and wood smoke, mulch-covered dog and iris. It smells alive, and as long as nothing’s putrid I rejoice in this perfume. There’s always January for empty surfaces and clear spaces.

5 for 5

May 10th, 2013 § 0

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I have confirmed that all five bluebird eggs have transmogrified into five almost-fledged bluebird babies. After years of minimal success in the bluebird box, this is a joy to behold. Of course, a big test is yet to come: fledging.

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Last night when I opened the box, one fledgling let out a squawk as it repositioned deeper in the box. Hearing his progeny sound this warning greatly displeased Mr. Bluebird, who loudly scolded me from a nearby tree. I shut the box and beat a hasty retreat.

Based on the tail feather growth I see here, I suspect fledging at any moment. I will be watching, hoping to catch the great leaps!

First cicada!

May 9th, 2013 § 0

Brood II of the 17-year perennial cicadas has arrived! Last night I found this big guy in the woods sitting on a clump of irises and daffodils. I didn’t think the soil temp is up to 64 degrees at 8″ yet. I suspect some cicadas might have been driven out of the ground by the several inches of rain that’s fallen in the last few days. Still no deafening trill outside—that’s yet to come.

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Please excuse the creepy latex glove. I don’t normally walk around sheathed in plastic, it’s just that I sliced my finger open Sunday night and wanted to keep dirt—and cicada legs—out of the wound.

What food looks like

May 9th, 2013 § 0

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We’re in it now, thank goodness, the season when dinner is picked straight from the garden. Tonight’s salad will be spinach and Swiss chard, both overwintered, and this year’s first radishes along with some wild onions growing around the garden fence. I’ve never eaten wild onions, but they grew tall and lusty while my seeded spring onions failed to thrive, so I sliced them up tonight when I composed my salad. The onions have a very delicious, pungent flavor that I can only describe as “wild lawn-like.” They tastes like the smell of a freshly mown pasture. They may overpower the salad, but I stacked their flavor against a hefty homemade balsamic and dijon dressing and we will see where it goes. The greens were a bit  sturdy so they’re all getting happy in the dressing, wilting a bit before I dig in.

And of course, today’s eggs are in there along with some arugula flowers, which are a beautiful, peppery garnish. All together, this would make a slamming fritatta. And not only does this feed me—the radish and onion tops, chard stems and egg shells go straight to the compost, where they feed the worms that enrich the soil that goes back in the garden. A closed system, and a beautiful one.

You may note the slug on the chard leaf. We’ve had two days of rain and the slugs are out in force. You may either eat or discard the slug when you make your own version of this salad!

The Stonehenge project: Part two

May 8th, 2013 § 0

Once all the rocks were in place, I covered the turf that extended into the bed with newspaper several sheets thick. This grass-killing trick had been effective when I used it under the mulch rings I placed around my trees. Then I went in to the woods and dug up bucket loads of loamy topsoil, mostly with a shovel so I could pick out the rocks, sticks and vines as I went.

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I dumped this topsoil into the new bed space, on top of the newspaper and up against the back wall of rocks, in effect forming a raised bed around two sides of the house.

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Then on April 10 I called my favorite mulch guy and had ten yards of double shredded hardwood mulch dropped near the woods. This is prettier—and more expensive—than the pine bark nuggets I buy for mulching around my big trees (below, on the ground). It will also break down much faster, helping to enrich the soil as it does.

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I spent a day hand-forking the aforementioned ten yards of mulch into my garden. It was super-tricky, delicate work as many of my perennials were just starting to emerge and hard to see, and I didn’t want to smother them.

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But after eight hours of mulching and only a few blisters across my palms, it was done. And looked pretty nice, I thought. There are a few spots that can use another stone or two, but I will fill those in once I’ve fully recovered.

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It’s not the fancy hardscape I’d most love, but for $285 worth of mulch and untold hours of bodybreaking labor, I finally have some decent-looking garden beds that are in keeping with the informal, cottage nature of the house. What’s more, this project massively contributes toward my goal of making maintenance around here as easy as possible. Now I just run the string trimmer right up against the rocks—which means no more futile hours spent hacking enroaching turf out of the beds. Plus, the mulch will help keep weeds out and moisture in during the hot summer while feeding the soil and coddling the earthworms beneath.

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And, I am really excited to have gained a bit more extra bed space, complete with pretty decent soil—thanks, forest! I have already started planting some fun new additions, including peonies for the shadier areas and sedums for the sunny front corner. My plan is to eventually colonize the rock wall with sedums growing over it and through the spaces between rocks.

The garden has really come on in the weeks since these pictures were taken, so a little virtual plant walk will be coming soon.

The Stonehenge project: Part one

May 7th, 2013 § 0

Much of March and April was devoted to building a rock wall around the front and road-facing side of the house. I’d grown tired of hacking turf out of the unedged beds, and the bed on the side of the house that faces the road was too steep to hold water on the plants in it. As you can see below, within the stone wall, it wasn’t a good look. Last summer I’d gotten some quotes to build a nice stone retaining wall around this end of the house and around the front, with a flagstone front walk and stairs. The quotes ranged from $8,000-$18,000, which just wasn’t in the budget at this time in my life.

So I started pulling rocks out of piles in the woods and used the tractor to get them near the house. Some of these rocks were the foundation of the house I tore down to build mine, and others no doubt came from clearing the pastures way back when. All winter long I played around with the rocks, moving them many times until I got them arranged in a line I liked and that would almost double the depth of the bed on this front corner of the house.

I had really low expectations for this project, as I think rock-edged beds can be pretty stupid looking. And I know that a proper rock wall is dug into the ground for stability and protection against frost heave. But I made peace with the idea that this didn’t have to be a perfectly permanent solution, and I figured that if I used rocks that were as large as I could handle the installation would appear more like a rock wall and less like a line of rocks, which is exactly what it looked like below, during the head-scratching phase of this project.

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I’d been having trouble with runoff from the downspout in the above photo. Every time it rained, water ran down the bed and pooled near a maple tree in the yard, messing up its mulch ring and eroding the bank. So I figured that I’d take care of this issue by burying a drainage pipe under the bed I was expanding. It was easy to dig it in and hide its opening at the inside edge of the new wall. The bottom of the pipe is dotted with quarter-sized holes that let water escape as it flows away from the downspout.

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Then I went back to the woods for more rocks, some of which took every ounce of my strength and willpower to budge into the tractor bucket. I don’t remember how many trips it took, but there are 173 rocks in this installation and many are not insignificantly sized.

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I spent days fiddling with rocks, turning each this way and that, trying my best to fit them into a wall-like configuration. Of course this week coincided with our freak 90-degree April heat wave. Let’s just say I got tan and back to my summer weight during this heavy-labor boot camp!photo(21)Web

Up next, the wall continues…

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Not long now

May 7th, 2013 § 0

The bluebird nestlings were peeking out of the nest box entrance hole when I approached today. They’re fully feathered and there are at least four babies in the very crowded box. I hope I can get an accurate count to see if all five eggs made it to fledglings—a 100% success rate!—but at this stage the birds are easily spooked and I don’t want to scare any out of the box while its open.

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It won’t be too much longer until they fledge into this beautiful blooming spring outside their nest box. The tree with the white blooms is a hawthorne planted as part of the new forest installation.

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I’ll have to keep an eye on Tuck in the next few days to make sure he doesn’t encounter a fledgling in the grass.

Taken in hand

May 3rd, 2013 § 1

Recent creatures found around the farm:

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A little snake making its home in the newly mulched front garden.

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Tuck dug this mole out of the ground near the chicken coop. I was too proud of his hunting skills to be mad about the holes in the yard.

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Periodical cicada nymphs discovered whilst digging in the garden. This is the year Brood II of the 17-year cicadas will emerge as soon as soil temperatures hit 64 degrees. They hatched from eggs laid when I was in high school, which makes me feel old! I need to get some netting up soon to protect my smallest trees and woody ornamentals. For more on the periodical cicadas in Virginia, click here.

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