and given a couple weeks . . .

A very red pepper!

Pumpkins.

The bean jail. That's just baling twine and empty bottles with rocks in them to, hopefully, scare the deer who would otherwise eat the beans down.

The sunflowers in front of the red corn. The red corn seems to be really doing well this year. In general, the corn seems to have done better than the potatoes this year. Except you can't count the corn yet because something could yet happen to it. It is gorgeous and impressive though -- much of it must be 15 feet tall and most ears are set above my head

with beans twining up the stalks.

In other parts of the farm, goats

and clothes on the line which miraculously the goats don't offer to eat.

The bones of former experiences. Not failed, mind you. We learned a lot from it and enjoyed it immensely but didn't find it worth continuing for multiple reasons (the price of plastic went way up, water was difficult in that location, it was really useful for a very limited time during the year). Bones around to remind you are important.

in the interest of real

the white corn. See the shovel? It is 4 1/2 feet tall and you cannot see the top of the corn.

a couple turnip beds. These were red potato beds. The did not have a great yield so we dug them up and are eating them now and growing turnips for the winter. If we happen upon a wet day before these are too big, some might be transplanted to even them out a bit. They will have to be thinned quite a bit but thinning, of course, equals food (greens with turnip bits).

these are october beans, on top of potatoes that are still in the ground. They are still pretty small plants, and meander some on the top of the mounds. The rest of the green is weeds.

***************

Part of what I was thinking as I took these photographs today was, what does this really look like? In the spring we were looking through photographs with family when a sister made a comment about how their garden was weedy and ours wasn't. Which made me think, perhaps the photos weren't telling the whole story.

Although it is true that this blog is for only a part of the story. Still, if people think that a really fertile garden doesn't grow really big weeds, they'd be wrong. In the interest of trying to capture some of the not ideal . . .

this would be the melon patch. Now, we can clean this out in just an hour or so, that is true. And there is lots of good melon growth in there but to have really good melons, we will have to get around to actually doing it. There's also a ton of purslane in this patch which we will harvest and eat/preserve.

and this is the most used gate to the circle garden and really all you can tell from this photo is there is a scythe resting against a roll of fence wire and a whole lotta green. I actually took this to show off the pump in the center and maybe you can see it if you can make the photo bigger. A lot of the green is food, but a lot of it is weeds too. Weeds are just green manure. And sometimes food themselves.

this is just for beauty, real. The very first sunflower to bloom. We have lots this year!

a quick tour

Supper! Really, about a third of this cabbage, along with carrots and onion also from our garden, made slaw for 6 hungry people!

Planting fall beets. Precision technique.

Onions bulbing.

A cucumber plant still trying, and some purslane and a yellow dock.

Beans in the white corn.

Acorn squash between the sunflowers and the potatoes, all nicely hilled.

The red corn, and as always it is punier than the white but it generally does fine. Even though we replanted there are still some gaps (we didn't thin this but we sure did thin the white corn) so hills of squash are being planted in the gaps.

So there is some of it. The pitcher pump in the center of the garden recently got rehabbed so that is quite nice to have easy access to water again (when valves don't seal anymore . . . but our friend put one silicone valve in and soaked the other one in silicone for days until it was permeated so hopefully it is now good for some years -- and it is good to have skillful and resourceful and generally useful friends).

The thing is, it is never all done. And it doesn't have to be. But it sure is nice to have all the whole rectangle garden hilled! Woohoo for us. But we really need to clean out the fruit.

beingness

Welcome to the garden.

Elderberry saved from the farm I work at, where they regularly mow it just as it is about to ripen because, and this is incredibly difficult for me to understand, food is not important to them. They've grown up in our garden and will, at some point, be transplanted out. But this year, this is where these are. Sometimes vines, sometimes trees, sometimes whatever, is in the nursery of the circle garden.

The cabbage about to head, the onions doing well, compost in the back there.

Two tomato plant survivors, Italian drying type, which, when we bought the seed several years ago, was supposed to be a determinate but is anything but. These two plants will likely make a forest, and besides that, we can root the suckers for more plants.

The first extra cute cucumber.

Potatoes, hilled.

This would be the largest part of the rectangular garden. The full width would be marked by that wavy row of sunflowers about 3/4 of the way up the photo, and scale shown by the man hoeing at the top. The red corn is at the bottom. You might notice how weedy it is. It gets weeded out a row at a time. Then there are sunflowers, potatoes, more sunflowers, and the white corn. With some melons and such at both ends and other odd places.

And that picturesque row of sunflowers from another angle. White corn to the left, potatoes to the right. That corn right there has not been hilled yet.

This corn right here has been hilled, and beans planted in it. Squash to be added soon.

So, as you can see, this is a lot of what we've been doing. Things are, generally, going well. Everyone has his/her projects/passions and everyone has the things we all do together, or for the benefit of the family, or whatever. Not that there are any clear lines like that. But if one were looking for camaraderie, well, there'd be no better place to find it than in our garden with us all down there.

A sister once commented that her garden was full of weeds. Our garden is full of weeds. But all the food plants need is a small advantage. Maybe I've said this before, but it doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, perfect gets in the way of, well, pretty much everything. The garden is perhaps the least affective place in the world and is thus the most healthy place in the world too.

the good kind of harrowing

We broke the plowing up into three days. Today was our first chance since then to harrow. The spike harrow is totally cool -- light and easy to work and very effective. If you want more details and photos, go to May 2010 and you'll find them.

An aside, I think the husband should make an extra harrow or two and have them for sale. Not take them to the auction or anything, just have them available, because there might come to be a few more sane people looking for something effective. In that same sort of vein, I've been thinking about what sort of a horse I'd breed if I did such things. It ends up being "Justin Morgan had a horse" except modern Morgans are not like that -- it would be a saddle horse that could plow and maybe pull a log. Good temperament would be a priority, as would good feet (so it could go barefoot), and easy keeping too. I do not have the means or desire to be a horse breeder, but I do think of such things. People mainly breed to sell.

Anyway, it was beautiful, cool after the storms of a couple nights ago (such devastation very close to here), sunny, breezy. The earth smelled so good. And even the places where we were saying just a few days ago were "thin" under the plow were beautiful under the harrow. We'd hope to get yet more loads of manure on it this year.

The spring draft horse auction is tomorrow and I think I will go there and see about harrowing again on Sunday.

the beginning of peace, love & brotherhood

current affairs

bee in heal all

current state of the corn field

dirt eater?
let's see, some overwintered kale, a seed bed, some onions, and a couple compost piles

chicken laying an egg

Contrary Adventures

We took off to Shangri-la today, mostly with the idea of gathering in some apples to begin processing for the year. It is such a pleasant place that we wanted to make several trips of it rather than one big one, which also happens to make processing more manageable too. I didn't take the camera in part because being the photographer always changes my experience of the adventure and today I just wanted to be there.

So of course there were some wonderful photo ops. One was daughter up a tree. The trees are probably a hundred years old and so some of them have limbs the size of my body and are sturdy and easy to climb. There she sat, way up in the tree, legs akimbo hanging down below the branch, braided hair snaking across her back, sunshine streaming through the tree hanging heavy with apples.

Another was the service trees. I have not known these trees. When we were picking blueberries, Mrs. Grullo talked about "sarvice berries" and how in old times they were plentiful and you didn't see them anymore and no one knew what to do with them anyway. Husband, who knows everything (and *that*, mind you, is both an infuriating trait and a handy one), said that the trees were plentiful up the mountain. You will have noticed that the tree is spelled "service" but pronounced "sarvice", so when I spell it "service", it still isn't pronounced that way. It reminds me of "pennyroyal" which is properly pronounced "PEN-a-rile".

Anyway, again it was the sun shining through those trees, making the berries (deep and bright red, in clusters held closely to the branch) glow like they were their own light source. I don't know that I could have captured either frame the way I saw it, so maybe words are just fine.

Here are some frames I did capture on a morning walkabout the other day.

tomatoes

Yes, some are hanging rotten and some are rotten on the ground but a great many of them have been eaten and some preserved and you never get everything and if you really seriously try to, you will make yourself crazy. Eat, enjoy, preserve, have fun.

winter squash, acorn and butternut

The squash have done extraordinarily well this year. So did the melons but I don't think the shot I got of one rotting in the garden made the cut for the blog. But we've had more delicious melons than we've been able to eat.

onion bed for fall green onions

ahhh

My very favorite shot, my very favorite scene. Look how big and pretty she is. The cow has never had a baby be allowed to nurse for so long (we just take her off at night, milk in the morning, turn them out together during the day) and she is content with it too. I love the sun beams. I love the fog that means we've had water this year.

Queen

And I love this shot of her in all her regal-ness with the shadows of her daughter and her new concubine with her. The smaller ones get put up at night and she sunbathes in the morning until they are let out then they all sunbathe together. Except for those mornings she chooses to taunt the dog.

weeds

I love the fall flowers. These are jewel weed, joe pye weed, and iron weed. The lobelia is in full bloom, and I saw my first cardinal flower the other day (cardinal flower being the red version of lobelia).

poke

When we went to Shangri-la, we girls painted ourselves with poke berry juice just for fun. Poke isn't much good for much (except mulch) at this stage, but it sure makes good eating when it is younger so you have to let some go and enjoy its rank beauty!

sunflowers

Well, duh. I adore these giants. What you can sorta see beside the sunflower are the hills/ridges where the potatoes are. They've long since died back and we've seeded turnips over them! We generally only dig potatoes as we need them.

hickory king

What sustains us.

map of life

and the way things are, have been, will be.

Shangri-La

This is where I live. This is opposed to some things that are going on around me that I find very difficult. Still, it doesn’t change where I live.

First, of course, there is the garden because the garden is always first.


This selection of beans made up into 13 quarts canned.


This is purslane. That bowl is a really really large bowl and that is just a couple plants of purslane filling it up. As much as we’ve transplanted it out of the corn field, these were still growing there.

And that is certainly not all that is growing in and coming out of the garden but it is what I have recent photos of.

We actually still have blueberries from last year’s stash but they aren’t loose marbles anymore and loose marbles of blueberries are much easier to eat on pancakes and the like so we finally went over to Mrs. Grullo’s to pick some more. Besides, I couldn’t go a year without going over the mountain to see her delightful self. So we put in four gallons of blueberries and headed to Shangri-La. In Shangri-La there are first of all spirits, and second of all apples. Not quite ripe yet (at least not the apples) but soon. I got a big bag of cooking apples the other day, and another half a bag joined them today.




Then there are elderberries. Again, not quite ripe. Yet.

There was also a big stand of spearmint that we harvested a good amount of. Younger son said, “Hey, that smells like tea!” “Hey,” we said, “it is! Pick a bag full and we’ll have tea this winter!” Then there is the pond. We did not take any fish today but they are there.

On the way back out we found a stand of bergamot. And we noted that this would be another place to come check out the blackberries although of course their time is past for this year.


Abundance. Paradise. It isn’t a neat and tidy thing.