The great outdoors

Friends, we have entered a new era. We don't eat dinner at 11:30 anymore. We don't sling 2x4s around our living space. We hardly ever go in the basement. Instead, we spend all our time outside making piles of rocks.

Along with rock piles, we have created three sifted garden beds, one and a half of which are sheltering seedlings—lettuce, arugula, turnips, broccoli, kale, collards, chard, spinach, beets, carrots, parsley, radishes, peas, and cabbage! We also have an insane number of young tomato plants living in our dining room. We have split something less than half the pieces of firewood that are piled at the edges of the lawn, and stacked something less than half of what we've split. We have planted azaleas given to us by John's grandmother. The spot where the shed used to be is now cleared of trash and most major rocks, raked over and spread with compost. (What should we plant there?) Many, many of these projects have resulted in piles of rocks. Need any rocks?



Also, thanks to John the Goat, two big areas have been freed of tangly vines and briars. One is next to "the second shed"—the one we didn't move. It has a lilac and a small apple tree growing nearby, and after we planted an azalea there he started clearing and clearing, shoveling away a big pile of bricks and exposing a funny little concrete platform with four white tiles inlaid. (One theory: This is where the chickens used to lose their heads.) There's a big boulder there too, good for sitting. It feels like part of the yard now.





After that, he kept on going, clearing a huge space under our favorite big walnut tree, pulling out vines and briars.



It's great to be outside. The grass is growing like crazy; we have redbud and dogwood blooming and the hillsides are getting green from the bottom up. Spring! Spring! The cardinal and the phoebe sing from the wire! The Carolina wren feeds its babies on our back porch! The tufted titmouse opens wide its beak! And the creek, friends, the roaring creek!

We also finished our bathroom trim, but have apparently gotten too jaded about house work to bother taking even a single picture.

- Erika

I'm thinking red could draw us all together.

We've been digging up a garden site for almost a month now. Not steady, just a bit on the weekends and whenever we get a bit of time during the week. It's obvious though, that we really need to pick up the pace if our healthy little seedlings are to have a home by next week, when they're too big to stay in the flats.

Saturday (after running 10 miles, mind you), Erika and her dad set to unearthing the largest, heaviest garden boulder to date. With a combination of steel bars, 2x4s, and grunts, they dug out and leveraged this monolith out of the bed.



Then, as if they'd done this before, they propped it up on small sections of pvc pipe and a plank track and shuttled it down the yard a bit and set it in position as the cornerstone of the stone wall that we plan to redo.



Meanwhile, I was fulfilling a week-long dream of constructing a sieve. Even though we remove about a half dozen boulders and a large mound of rocks for every 12'x5'x1' bed we dig, the soil is still incredibly stony. Carrots wouldn't stand a chance in here, and to be honest I've had my doubts about any of our tender seedlings' chances of survival in such harsh beds.

We bought a roll of 1/4" screen (1/4" refers to the size of the holes in the screen) and I whacked together a 2x4 frame sized to fit nicely on top of the garden cart. I used "safety staples" to attach the screen to the frame.



Took it over to the garden and tossed a couple of shovels-full of soil onto it. Moved the dirt around with my hands and voila, rocks on top, soil below!





So from there, I just started digging a trench across the bed, one foot wide and one foot deep, much like our old days of double-digging. When the sieve would fill, we'd dump the rocks into the wheel barrow. When the wheel barrow would fill, we would dump the rocks in the trench for the hot water lines, since it has settled quite a bit. Once I had a nice two-foot wide trench dug out, I set up some planks in the there to keep the sifted soil separate from what still needed to be sifted, and shoveled the nice soft soil back into the bed. I was totally surprised that it had fluffed up enough to bring the bed back to ground-level.





Also that day, while Erika was digging bed #3, we discovered a baby turtle shell, caked and packed with dirt. Who knows how deep it was buried. We were all pretty excited by this find.





And then it woke up!



The quarters are for scale:



* * *

Sunday was a nice grey day, and we spent a couple of hours pricking out seedlings from their flats and putting them into cells.



We transplanted broccoli, chard, kale, collards, lettuce, arugula, and turnips. We had a lot of seedlings left over, and rather than compost them, Erika cut them at their bases, rinsed them off, and made a nice little salad out of these micro-greens. Even at only two weeks old, arugula tastes like arugula, as does broccoli and chard. We took an eyes-closed taste test just to prove it to ourselves.


Hello, Chard:



Hello, Beets:



We also planted spinach and some more kale, since we only ended up with 5 plants germinated, as if 5 kale plants isn't enough. But, better safe than sorry. We can always thin them once we plant in the beds.

- John

A carved flower isn't identifiable.

Artifacts

Our house has yielded some traces of human hands, dwellments from the past, ghosts that inhabit old Saturdays and crannies inside walls. Surprisingly little, actually, given it’s 76 years old. No gold coins, no newspaper photos of Eisenhower or the Challenger. But these:




Rook card. The 10 of green. See here for more about Rooks, especially My Collection/By Card Back.



Message scrawled on a triangular piece of drywall installed in our attic. It reads “1 Because” with copious underlining. That’s a numeral, not a personal pronoun.




Two sets of initials carved in different areas of the concrete basement floor. Perhaps it was poured after 1932. Perhaps these two humans are related by blood or marriage.



The piece de resistance, mentioned previously on this blog. A set of about 12 Polaroids found tucked against the chimney in a part of the crawlspace relatively inaccessible by crawling, but reachable from the more convenient basement with long arms and/or a stepladder. They show a young woman in various states of dress/undress and in increasing levels of intimacy with the photographer. This one is on the tamer side. Red leaf added for privacy, and I do like how it matches her garment.

Troublingly, in just one of the dozen photos, she is bundled in a quilt and baggy T-shirt, sitting on the floor, with a resentful expression.--Erika

The center ceiling panel is a paradox of envy.

Sowin' the seeds

Sunday morning, sunny and mild, maybe in the 40s by the time I made it outside. We've got a whole lot of scrap lumber piled up by the fire pit. Old 2x4s and 2x6s that have been ripped from the house, the shed, or dragged out from the crawl spaces. Some nailed together or peppered with screws. This is stuff we can't use, really, and it's just hanging around, in 6+ foot lengths mostly, waiting to be burned in the fire pit. But burning is a slow process and we'd like to be rid of this pile sooner rather than later. Walking around it with my coffee, I figured that, with some bricks or blocks, we could actually use a lot of it to stack our firewood on. So I started carrying some of the longer pieces out towards the area I had cleared behind the furnace.

It was when I went up to the shed to look for bricks that I got distracted, called once again by the meadow-like clearing behind the walnut tree on the south side of the yard.



I followed some deer paths and found myself in a clearing that I don't think I've ever noticed. At the north end of the clearing is a stone wall. Growing along the stone wall is typical vegetation - walnut trees and scrub. Turning around to face south, there is a pretty thick barrier of these still-unidentified saplings and thorns. I learned that if I get down on my hands and knees, at rabbit level, I could make my way into the thicket. I hung out in there for a while, took some pictures of the saplings and vines, hoping that these would help me identify them, and then pushed on through the thicket and into another clearing. I knew where I was this time, just a bit further south, a bit closer to the road.

I noticed that this clearing is bordered by another stone wall, and is higher than the final strip of land which is right near the road. We've got real, intentional borders within our property lines. In the past, we've hypothesized that these walls surround land that was once cultivated; the ground is softer, there are more grasses and less trees, and it would make sense that they cleared the rocks to the borders. But what I realized Sunday, was that we've actually got three levels of terraced land, each one bordered by stone walls. The whole thing makes a nice wide strip up hill to the North, and is connected to our back field, the one we always imagined we might start our veggie expansion in. It was a neat and exciting discovery, and it puts that back field better into context.

That was a nice start to the day that we would sow our first seeds.



We washed out our seed flats and mixed up some soil, using 1 part garden bed soil to about 3 or 4 parts potting soil mix. We spent most of our time removing every tiny stone from the bed soil that we added. Once the soil was mixed and added to the flats, we got our garden journal, reference book, and seeds, and started sowing. Two varieties of tomatoes (about 48 plants!), beets, broccoli, carrots, arugula, kale, collards, lettuces, onions, chard, turnips, and parsley. That's the first round - next week, we'll be sowing other veggies and with luck, we'll be pricking out seedlings. We set them up indoors by the windows and we hope that Toes won't jump up on them and think that they're special litter boxes.



Then we packed up some lunches and hiked up to the top o' the prop, and kept going up the steep ridge behind the house. We found a trail of some sort and followed for a while. We didn't make it to the summit, but we got pretty high up. A nice place to eat a late lunch.



Back down the ridge and off to the storage space to bail out a few more things, including another book shelf, and the rocking chair.

Erika touched up the paint on the narrow trim pieces in the studio ceiling, then we swept and mopped the floor in there and it's officially done.

The living room is starting to look much cozier. We made a tasty lasagna.

- John