Gardening Stupidity

Our kids toast to my own foolishness

Lest I be accused of glossing over my life and portraying only the pretty, photogenic moments, let's take a little look at the other side of reality.

I've planted my garden more than once already. Why? Because I'm an idiot. I was so excited to buy plants and get them in the ground that I didn't want to wait for the garden fence to be built. I bought onion starts from our local hardware store (which also happens to be the only place I've ever seen autographed John Wayne photos for sale....honestly, who would buy those things? This establishment is part hardware store, part garage sale.....odd). I could hear them calling my name in little aromatic onion voices as I looked into the box of plant starts. I couldn't resist. I bought a little bunch of 50 baby onion plants. Excitement began to well up inside of me from the moment I held them in my hands and smelled the sweet dirt clinging to their roots.

Onions are the most instantly-gratifying thing to plant in the garden. You just pop them down into the soil and 'presto!' there's pretty green rows of plants smiling at you. I thought I'd use those little plants as a way to motivate me into building our garden fence. You know, because now I had a deadline. I had to get that fence done before the plants could go in the ground. I was so motivated now to get it done, but several things happened that week.

1- It rained for most of the week. Have you ever tried to do ANYTHING in a muddy, overgrazed pasture? Not happening.
2- I had a lot trouble getting the fence supplies over to the garden plot.

Before I could build our fence, first I had to take it down. Seriously. I didn't want to actually BUY fencing materials (you'd know why if you priced fencing- oh baby!- it's not cheap!). So, genius that I am, I decided to reuse the fencing already on our property. There were two goat pens built into our lawn space. It was good fencing material just sitting there. Those goat pens needed to come down for more than one reason.

1- I could reuse the $150 worth of fencing.
2- More importantly, there is a fantastic tree branch just waiting for a swing to grace it....but it hangs right over the fenceline. We must make way for progress, er....swings. Down it comes! (I'm happy to get that swing off the lawn....it's been sitting there each day, asking me when it will finally be hung up.)

I thought I'd pop into the yard and pull down the goat fencing in one afternoon, then relocate the materials into the new garden plot and install everything in one more afternoon. Two hard days of work and we'd be done! I could just imagine my little seedlings happily growing behind the protection of my fence line.

Um...I had those thoughts 2 weeks ago.....and no, the fence still isn't built.

Ignoramus that I am, I didn't realize how difficult it can be for a weakling like me to wrestle fence posts out of the ground. I spend hours on this darn fence (even spending those most-coveted hours, "baby naptime" on this!). I removed a lot of fencing from the posts, then tried to tackle the posts themselves. I threw my weight against each one, trying to use leverage to loosen it and wriggle it out. After lots of effort, sweat, and panting, all I had were bruised hands to show for my time. Not one fence post had yielded. Erg. This was a job for Mr. Kingsley.

Unfortunately, he gets home after dark (it's surprsing what a hour-long commute does to the family schedule!). This also means it's too late at night to send him tackling a fencing job for me. One day last week he went to work extra early just so he could come home early and work on removing this fence.

Sometimes I tease him that he must have the Jedi force. I feel like he waggles his fingers at a problem, breathes a command, and the offending problem quivers in awe and rushes to obey. At least that's the way it looks to me. Stuck jar lids? Gone. And he only used one hand to do it. Surely it must be the force.

In less than an hour he had a row of posts out of the ground and a roll of fencing ready to be moved to the garden. Thank goodness for the strength of our husbands! (Unfortunately it rained several days right after this, so the fencing materials are still sitting on our lawn, waiting for a sunny day.)

While Mr. Kingsley wrestled fence posts, I had been focusing on building the garden bed. After spending all afternoon digging in the dirt, I could hardly wait to plant something.

Back in the house, the onions were looking wilted...after all, it had been more than a week since I purchased them. They really needed dirt. The fence line wasn't protecting our garden yet.

"Do you think the deer will eat onions? They don't like onions, right? Maybe the chickens won't eat them either. Surely nothing will eat the onions because they taste so bad," I tried to convince myself I wasn't doing something stupid. Sarah tried dubiously to dissuade me as I pushed each onion into the fluffy garden bed.

I was right, nothing ate the onions, but they were still all uprooted in less than 24 hours. Our chicken flock had been irresistably drawn to the freshly-dug soil. It was the perfect place for them to scratch for bugs. They didn't eat a single bite of onions, but flung them all out of the garden in their search for tasty morsels. By the time I discovered them, they were wilted and mostly dead. What would be the use of rounding them up and replanting them? There was no fence yet. The chickens were still irresistibly attracted to the garden bed. Our dog Bella was having a grand time chasing them out of the garden for me, but this was no long-lasting solution.

I learned my lesson the hard way. I have to curb my enthusiasm and sprinkle in some wisdom (I'll even settle for some good ole common sense, since I seem to be lacking that as well) and work. Today it's supposed to be sunny, so I'm heading out to dig fence post holes. Then I'll go buy new onion transplants.

(Editorial update: It's been 2 hours since this entry was posted, and I DID IT! The fence posts are ALL set into the ground and ready for the fencing to be attached. I even reclaimed some more posts from other areas of the property, and uprooted them all by my self (BOO-YA!!) since the heavy rains loosened the soil. Thank you, Rain!)

Garden plans

I just ordered our seeds for the garden this year. So exciting. This is the best place to buy seeds, and they have the most unique collection of heirloom seeds from around the planet. (Absolutely NO GMO's allowed, it's not owned by Monsanto or Cargill, and they proactively preserve natural genetic diversity.) I haven't bought seeds anywhere else for years. I love curling up in a blanket each winter and perusing the seed catalogue. I can hardly wait to get the seeds in the mail.

Nathan and I started measuring spots and digging holes for our fruit orchard this week. (Chuckling....) Have you ever tried digging a hole in bedrock? I thought not. Most people have something called common sense and don't even attempt breaking up bedrock. We have about 6 inches of very rocky soil before we hit solid limestone. Erg. I'm trying to re-map our property plans or else figure out a way to coax baby fruit trees to grow in that soil...er....rock. I was feeling so disappointed after spending what seemed like hours digging and excavating rocks, only to have a beensy little hole to show for my efforts. I was even less excited at the prospect of attempting to grow a vegetable garden in this stuff. In our last house it took several years to build up healthy soil. We'd be starting at square one again (or negative one, if you count all the clearing we'd need to do before we could even work the soil....I was not excited to cut out tree stumps to make way for a vegetable plot.) I was feeling so flustered at this  point.

We walked around the property scouting out our options. Nathan experimentally dug a hole in the pasture so see how bad the rocks are. He dug....and dug.....and dug without even seeing a single rock. Oddly enough, the bedrock wasn't in sight either. How could there be such a drastic difference? I suspect the years of horse manure and oak leaves just naturally composted and created rich soil. There aren't even weeds for me to clear, and the spot seems perfect with morning light and afternoon shade. I'm giddy. 

It's time to get dirty.

Millions of Peaches, Peaches for Me

Millions of Peaches, Peaches for Free. 

Our backyard peach tree has a bumper crop of large, delicious peaches! I absolutely love harvesting nature's bounty and preserving it in jams, bottled preserves, and freezer bags. This is the first real crop we've collected from our peach tree. The branches are heavy with fruit, and the peaches are growing in clusters of up to 6 peaches!

Rachael, Nathan, and I picked bowls full of fruit. Rachael was kind enough to begin washing the fruit in the kitchen while Nathan and I worked on collecting more.

Actually, Nathan did the picking while perched on the top of a precarious ladder, and I held the bowl up within his reach. It sounds terribly lazy of me, but in my defense I spent an hour picking fruit yesterday without him. Our bowls were quickly filled to capacity, so we'd pass them through the music room window to Rachael, who slipped up empty and clean bowls from the kitchen. Matthew was very eager to climb the tree and reach for fruit.

After picking everything we could reach, we worked together to pit and slice the fruit. I was very delighted to discover that this peach tree is a Freestone variety- which means the pits literally fall out of the fruit instead of clinging to the juicy flesh. Sarah and Matthew really enjoyed joining the assembly line. Rachael washed, Nathan did a long circumventing slice, Sarah and Matthew twisted the halves open and removed pits, and I sliced them and covered them with a sugar syrup.

I originally made a few batches of peach jam. The best one is Blueberry Peach Jam....oh it's like candy! After pouring the cooked jam into jars, the children and I gathered around the pot and collected the remnants of sticky jam with pieces of bread. Then we popped it into our mouths. It was SO good! 

We ran out of pectin, and TIME, so we just sliced and froze the remaining gallons of peaches so we can make cobblers, pies, fruit smoothies, and more jams later in the year.

It's hard work, and we're very tired, but there is something so deeply satisfying in harvesting food yourself and preserving it for later. Perhaps it's the pleasure that comes form good old-fashioned work.

I feel so happy and fulfilled with my work. And then there's the benefit of the food itself: there's no pesticides, and the flavor of tree-ripe peaches is unbeatable.