late summer

The late summer in our front yard can look a bit bleak. The iris leaves are getting brown and wilty (I think I need to dig up a good number of them and space them out- we've got an iris forest forming). The lupines didn't flower this year (apparently they sometimes don't once they've been at it for a few years?) so they are still relatively short and just look like foliage to the untrained lupine-loving eye. Nothing is flowering and everything looks tired. With one massive exception...

The previous owners of our home left a good number of unwanted gifts behind: 3 kitchen sinks and hundreds of pounds of scrap metal hidden in the backyard jungle, walls and ceilings seemingly tacked together, a large painting of someone wearing a headdress (which is still hanging in the barn). They also left behind this glorious hibiscus plant, that blooms without fail every August.

FLOWERS THE SIZE OF YOUR FACE. Bigger than your face, in fact, when you're a toddler.

Alice points and squeals every time we walk out the front door and she sees them.

crunch

Molars are putting up a strong fight against Alice's joy, but she is indomitable, especially when there are sugar snap peas to pick in the garden (and eat before making it back inside).

garden update

My hands were a bit full last summer, what with Alice's arrival. We managed a little garden, but barely. Strawberries, tomatoes, a couple handfuls of sugar snap peas- was there anything else? I can't say with confidence that there was and I have no record of it. The previous year we hit a glorious gardening stride (check out these pictures!). Life ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, fits and starts, yadda yadda, but now we're back on the bandwagon with lots of things- composting, mowing, weeding flower beds, and yes, even vegetable gardening.

An addition I'm excited about this year is using some choice plants to deter bugs from us and from our cultivated plants too. We've added lavender, mint and lemon balm to the mix and split apart our bull onions- the ever spreading, hearty as heck bull onions- and spread them around the perimeter of both garden beds. Slugs go crazy for our strawberries, so I'm also hoping to run copper wire around the strawberry bed to tell them who's boss.

To go along with our perennial strawberries, asparagus, and hops, we've planted three kinds of tomatoes, four kinds of peppers, arugula, lettuce, sugar snap peas, two kinds of cucumbers, zucchini, and radishes galore. I love dirty gardening hands almost as much as I love crunching into my own, backyard grown veggies. I love the hope of planting and waiting- letting those precious little seeds go dark and quiet and then seeing them courageously burst out, faces shining in the sun.

Too much? Too dramatic? I don't care. I'm really glad to be gardening again.

Radish seedlings:

Hops, hops, hops- we need to split and spread these rhizomes:

Grow little sugar snap, grow:

grow garden grow

Our garden is growing. The sugar snap peas are almost entirely past now, but the green beans are coming in full force, as are the tomatoes and yellow squash. We even picked a lovely cucumber last week. I want to make some of our own spicy pickles next month. I like briny pickles more than watery cucumbers.

Its a weird summer, this one. Life is in a different place than ever before. That's an obvious thing to state, but my head is wrapping itself around the reality of things, so its somehow still a significant fact to me. Friends are having babies. Friends are battling cancer. Friends are staying put or moving away or buying homes at alarming speed, and the simultaneous steadiness of other aspects of life is slightly disorienting. These days I find joy in revisiting old loves more than in instigating new ones. Rock climbing for the first time in years, pulling my bike out of the barn for the first local ride in months and months, cleaning a familiar kitchen floor- this is the first time in nearly a decade that I have lived in one spot for more than a year. Instead of trying new things I find renewal in digging deeper into the familiar. 

Last weekend my brother referred to me as the "one who never left." Both my siblings moved away for college. I went out of state, but was still just a couple hours from home. I ventured home for Thanksgiving every year, a luxury neither sister or brother could claim. Still, I prickled at being deemed a homebody, "one who is perceived as unadventurous." But, my pet-peeve is dishonesty, especially when people lack the ability to be honest about themselves (who they are, where they are, where they're going). Maybe I am the one who never left.  Maybe I have been doing this cyclical, delving deeper into the familiar, thing for longer than I've realized. Perhaps I need to act on my own peevishness and acknowledge that I am not adventurous in the most basic sense of the word. I am grounded. In some ways, I will never leave. Staying is more important to me than leaving.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Garden. I started at the garden. My joy over the garden exemplifies my point- if I'm to have a point: you can't grow a garden if you don't stay put long enough to till and seed and weed and harvest. We planted asparagus this year and I watched the little sprouts go to seed, accepting that it'll be years before we drizzle oil over any of our own spears and grill them to perfection. Its takes 2-3 years to be able to harvest asparagus, but then the same plant can produce for 20 years! Investment. Commitment past the first harvest. Its not for everyone, but it just might be for me.

Maybe that's why I love this song so much:

a snake between my toes

I just gained serious farmer cred. I stepped on a snake. WEIRDEST FEELING EVER. Then I cancelled out said "cred" by squealing and hopping around the yard as I watched the snake slither away through the grass and disappear more quickly than is comforting. No, seriously, I have no idea how that little beauty slipped so invisibly out of sight within mere seconds of our interaction.

My foot is still a little twitchy.

We've got a good amount of pretty little garter snakes on our property. One day last summer, as I cleared piles of rocks and paving stones left by the previous owners, I uncovered a small den and 6 or 7 uncoiled and reluctantly left. Last week as I watered our hops bed I knelt down right next to one and it slid past me into the knotweed forest. The one I met today was just sunning itself in the middle of the yard. I imagine that as I jumped and squealed it was muttering to itself about my inconsiderate clumsiness.

Our garden, most likely with the help of our bug-consuming snake tenants, is flourishing. Jake and Stevie build two 5x12 foot raised beds this Spring and they are overflowing with green. Here's the list of what we have growing: watermelon, strawberries, pumpkin, beets, swiss chard, sun sugar tomatoes, big boy tomatoes, black krim heirloom tomatoes, onions, cauliflower, peas, beans, carrots, asparagus, broccoli, cucumbers, lettuce, and three different kinds of hot peppers. We also have a bed of hops, and an herb garden with dill, oregano, sage, basil, chives, parsley, cilantro, summer savory, and mustard. There are lots of flowers too- the dahlias finally have buds and I'm hopeful that the lupines and sunflowers will take over the spaces I've given them.

I'm unabashedly proud of it all.

We had our first modest harvest last night, eating lettuce picked right from our backyard. Food that fresh, from seeds planted by my own novice hands, tastes better than most anything.

Its worth a moment or two with a snake between your toes. 

dirty knees

We went to the Presby Memorial Iris Gardens on Monday. An elderly duo played show tunes on saxophone and piano, and the music mingled with the sweet smells of all those irises. The sun was blazing and I slipped off my shoes to walk barefoot in the grass. It seems lovely and simple, all those flowers. It also looks like a lot of work though. Now that I've experienced home ownership, yard work, and tending my own little garden, the thought of all the weeding and watering that must be done to keep this enclave smelling so sweet is overwhelming. According to the website "the iris gardens contain over 14,000 irises of approximately 3,000 varieties and produce over 100,000 blooms." 

So, I was- is this odd to acknowledge?- relieved to see imperfections on the grounds. After getting over the awe of the sheer number of irises, and walking a past the first couple thousand blooms, I spied some weeds in a small bed along the side of the gardens. Then, in the brush, I noticed the arch-nemesis of our own yard: japanese knotweed (one of the world's most invasive species). I pull and kick at knotweed, call it names and say its not welcome, but still it grows up through sidewalks and sneaks into the densest of flowerbeds. 

Jake and I didn't realize we were buying property next to a forest of knotweed. When we looked at the house it was hardly noticeable in height, just inches tall, but by the time we moved in it towered over Jake's 6'2" frame. One day we realized we would be battling knotweed as long as we lived in this house. We love our little house, so it is a battle worth raging, and I am willing to kick knotweed to keep it at bay and out of our floorboards (an amusing image, and one I don't believe is that far from the realm of this nasty plant's abilities). I guess this is just the reality of life- you don't know what you're walking in to. One day you have a low growth marsh as a neighbor and the next day it is a 7 foot tall knotweed forest. But, keep kicking at your knotweed- don't let it take over. Flowers and tomatoes seem lovely and simple, but really they take work, dirty knees, and broken fingernails. 

plenty of room

Grammy wrote us a letter. The last line reads:
Take care, + don't do anything I wouldn't do. That gives you plenty of room!
She's nearly 93 years old, a widow for almost 10 years, and still she has such life left in her. Its inspiring, to say the least.

Jake is planting seedlings in little starter pots right now. Cauliflower, broccoli, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, squash, tomatoes, okra, carrots, green onion, cucumbers...our GARDEN! I'm getting so excited to be working outside on our little patch of green, and for Jake to really have a sizable garden to be proud of again.

Its been a hard week. A full and busy week. And it has been a good week too. Jake is so blasted supportive, and my family could not be more awesome. Somedays I just spend my drive to work listening to old voicemails from my mom- I have nearly 2 years worth saved on my phone- and that puts me in the best possible mood.

Have a wonderful weekend. Do something you're passionate about; something that makes you feel alive. Life is too short to do otherwise. 

garden update

Remember that time I became a farmer? Well, our little garden has been making great gains. I love seeing green tendrils slowly reaching out and climbing. Our cherry tomatoes taste like candy, and we have a few full size tomatoes which haven't ripened, but will surely make a great sandwich in a couple weeks. I've been picking wildflowers in the backyard too. Queen Anne's Lace on the dining room table is my current favorite.

Happy Wednesday. If you have a moment, pick some wildflowers.

on how I became a farmer*

Before I delve into all the wonderfulness that was our vacation (big beaches, big trees, big campfires), I want to acknowledge the lovely home we settled into in the days before we left. We love it. I want to say it again because we love it that much- seriously, we love our new home. It is old and chock full of so much dang character. Built in the mid-eighteen hundreds, it just feels so full of stories. It was in the same family for almost all of those years, and at least one child was born in it. "If these walls could talk" and all that. It's got a barn with a loft in the backyard and marshland as a neighbor. And it has lots of space for gardens. Gardens!?

One of my LIST items (#16, to be exact) has been to "help Jake have a big garden again." Before Jake and I moved into our last apartment, he lived in a house with a nice sized backyard. He had two chickens (named "Beef" and "Pony"), and a great, big garden. Before we started dating he "courted" me by leaving his own home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers on my desk at work. The first time I went to his house was to see his garden. He showed me a cantaloupe he grew and a few weeks later, in the first stages of dating, we ate it together. When we moved last summer, he lost the yard and gave the chickens to my uncle in Connecticut. He moved all his gardening tools into a friend's garage and gave up on having a proper garden again for a while.

Then this house fell into our laps- it all happened rather quickly and unexpectedly, looking at it on a whim and then suddenly falling in love with it and what it would mean for us. We had such absolute peace about the whole thing, and before we knew it we were moving into a whole new adventure and undertaking. Not until we got back from vacation had I ever gardened before. Sure, I've pulled a weed or two in my life, but I've never cleared and hoed and dug and watered. As of Sunday, I am in love with it all. I worked on the yard for 4 hours on Sunday and another 3 after work yesterday. It is hard, dirty work and is so rewarding. And I've started accomplishing #16- we're on our way to having a big garden again. There's even a cantaloupe seedling.

*Well, not a farmer really, but a gardener. Farmer just sounds so much more surprising. "Farmer Kim" has a good ring to it, right? But is it better than "Director LaCroix"? Doubtful. I'll keep my day job.