An Early Garden

On Friday of last week, I picked up four 40# bags of pelletized lime from the garden center and came home and spread them - three bags for the big garden behind Pop-Pop's house, and one bag for the little "early garden" (formerly known as "the tomato patch"). I hope I used enough, and not too much. Aside from the chart on the bag (which recommended anywhere from a little lime to a whole lot of lime, depending on the type of soil), my guide is Miss Evelyn, who says she limes her soil "real good." I'm not sure I limed my soil "real good," but I think I limed it at least tolerably well.

Of course, Miss Evelyn does this chore in the fall, and she immediately follows up with a "real good plowing." My liming has come a bit late, and the big garden plot is still far too wet to plow or till. I'm hoping that since the big garden is in a bit of a "bowl," the lime will stay where I put it until the ground is dry enough to work. But the little early garden is on a hillside, and I was afraid that if I did not till it immediately, the lime would end up in the creek at the bottom of the hill with the next rain. According to the weatherman, the rain was to happen the next day.

On Saturday morning, I uncovered the big red tiller. Miraculously, after several months of storage, it cranked. No, it didn't crank on the first pull. Or the second. Or the 54th. And it didn't crank without a good huff (or twelve) of starter fluid. But it cranked. And it ran for long enough for me to till the lime into the early garden.

As I was putting away the tiller, I spied my poor, neglected compost barrell sitting near the edge of the woods and decided to check if there was any compost in it. My sister gave me this composter several years ago. To date, I've had about a handful of compost from it. Admittedly, I haven't been very diligent about tumbling it, nor diligent about adding the proper ratio of green and brown material. But last year and the year before, I did stuff it with leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, and eggshells. And every time I'd add something to it, I'd give it a good whirl or two. By the end of last summer, the thing was so heavy I could barely tumble it. Today, when I removed the lid and peered down into the barrell, I saw rich, black compost, apparently several inches deep. Wooo-hoooo! I ran to find a container for it so that I could transfer it to the early garden.

When I'd set the barrell in place several years ago, I'd set it near a spot where I'd planted some English ivy. Approaching it is a little bit creepy (there are several mysterious burrows nearby).
I wanted to pull it away from the ivy so that I could see where I was stepping, but the ivy had tethered it firmly to the ground. I broke the vines away from the base, and dragged it into the yard.

It was when I tried to dump out the compost that I discovered the consequences of my negligence in tumbling the barrell. Instead of having loose, crumbly compost, I had a 6" thick compost patty, harder than concrete, and it would not come out of the barrell. I got a shovel, hacked the compost brick apart enough to get it out, and dumped the chunks onto a tarp. It seems that someone else has been feeding the composter, for when I crumbled the chunks, I found a crushed soda can, several bits of thick cellophane, and a pair of neon green 3-D sidewalk chalk eyeglasses. (I'd been wondering what happened to those glasses!)

As I was transferring the compost from the tarp to a plastic bin, the predicted rain began to fall. It was just as well, for after all the cranking, yanking, tilling, dragging, and hacking, I was out of energy. The Husband helped me heave the plastic bin onto the garden wagon. We covered it with the tarp, and left it where it was.


And here it is, Saturday morning again. I should be out there spreading that compost. But the ground is probably still very wet. And one more cup of coffee surely would hit the spot....

The Itch

Yesterday, a friend/co-worker laid a seed catalog and a pack of Post-It Note strips on my desk. She said that she was going to order a few things, and that if I wanted some things, too, I should tag them and we'd place a combined order. My heart skipped a beat. I opened the seed catalog with the same excitement I used to feel when opening the Sears Christmas Wish Book for the first time each year.

I ordered lettuce, chili peppers, fava beans, two kinds of sunflowers, larkspur, and, just for kicks, "dinosaur" gourds.

It was a stroke of luck that, while I was still whipped into a gardening frenzy from thumbing through the seed catalog, The Husband showed up at my work. One thought had led to another, you see, and by then I had moved past dreaming of seeds to thinking of other supplies I will need from the garden center - lime, fertilizer, metal fence posts, etc. - things that will not easily fit into my Jeep. But The Husband was in his pickup truck. He had plenty of room, and plenty time to run an errand. I grabbed a pencil and paper and made a "honey-do" list.

It turned out that I was only moderately successful in moving this job from my "to do" list to his. The garden center had the fertilizer and the fence posts, but it was out of lime. They're expecting a new shipment today, so The Husband went ahead and paid for the lime, and they gave him an I.O.U. We've swapped vehicles today so that I can run by the garden center after work.

I'm itching to dig, to spread that lime, to set those fence posts and string the wire support, so that when the time is right for planting sweet peas, I can run out there, poke them in the ground, and stand back to watch the bumper crop appear. Alas, it's supposed to rain this weekend, so I may not get to scratch this itch for a few more days.

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Sweet Peas in 2010

Walmart has its seed racks out. Fool that I am, I bought four packets of Sugar Snap Pea seeds and later wished that I'd bought even more.

I intend to have some sweet peas this year.

To fully understand the determination behind this simple statement, you would need to know some history beyond my first blog entry. I'll spare you the agonizing details, but, to sum them up, I've tried for years to grow sweet peas, with less than satisfactory results.

Part of the problem is that, during the winter, I lie around thinking up more ideas for the spring than I can possibly implement when spring actually arrives. And I get lazy, and my joints get creakier, and it's easy to put things off. Another part of the problem has been that nobody in the family but me really-really-really LOVES sweet peas. Thus, like the Red Hen with her bread, I can't muster much cooperation from the troops until it's time to eat. Every spring, I start bugging Pop-Pop to start bugging Mr. Pete or Mr. Charles to come break up the garden. Neither of them grows sweet peas, and they're not eager to hitch up the plow until it's time to plant summer vegetables; sweet peas should have been in the ground a long time before that (the seed pack says I can start in JANUARY!). I've tried growing fall peas, but I can never get the timing right on the planting, and most of the peas don't mature before freezing weather sets in.

But I'm ready this year. Last fall, the tomato patch - the one at the end of Pop-Pop's driveway, close to my house where I can conveniently tend it - got a serious tilling in preparation for a turnip-seed sowing that never happened because of all the rain. And after that tilling, thanks to an approaching thunderstorm, we brought the machine home instead of returning it to Pop-Pop's shed, so it's out there in my yard, covered with a tarp, handy, just waiting to be cranked. (Whether it will actually crank or not is another matter, but I shall remain optimistic about that.) I've got seeds. I've got hog-wire fencing and metal fence posts. I've got a current almanac. This year, there ain't no excuse.