When the living ain't easy, and nothing com-frey...

Photo via growsonyou.com

I have a terrible garden confession to make.

Many an otherwise viable root crown, tuber, or seed has gone dry, dead or rotten because I didn't get it in the ground in time.  Two years ago, a bag of asparagus crowns got misplaced and forgotten till they were crispy.  Last year, a bag of jerusalem artichokes got put off until they turned to moldy mush.  Some otherwise lovely fruit bushes have been slowly neglected to death while waiting to find a spot in the ground.  It's a not-infrequent problem.  My garden aspirations consistently surpass my available time and opportunity.

But after I goofed up and hurriedly planted a bunch of jerusalem artichokes (the second bunch after I destroyed the first) in the middle of the damn yard earlier this year, Leah gently suggested that I review the decision making process that determines where vigorously spreading large perennials might go when I do manage to find the time to plant them.  Valid point, I said.

Thus, it was with such considerations in mind that I jumped out of my car tonight upon my arrival home, desperately trying to squeeze enough workable daylight out of the evening to get some of my freshly arrived 'Bocking 14' Comfrey root cuttings in the ground.  I wasn't going to let them spoil!

My "better judgement sense" was already tingling... while almost supernaturally beneficial/useful, comfrey propagates easily from root cuttings and is almost impossible to kill/eradicate once it establishes without the use of extreme measures or nasty chemicals.  Each plant can also grow to several feet across and can be quite tall.  I needed to plant it carefully.

I ended up installing half of my supply of root crowns in two different locations: first in a generally weedy corner along the backside of two of my outbuildings (near the loosely encouraged Stinging Nettle plot), and secondly just outside the edge of the back lawn in a low moist area of low scrub below our Black Hawthorn tree.

Both locations feature at least half-day sunlight and soil that tends to remain generally moist, and are far enough out of the way that the plants can grow and spread without displacing anything important or causing an eyesore.  It actually kind of felt like I was hiding them.

As comfrey makes an excellent companion plant for a lot of edibles, we will no doubt end up planting it in other places in the future.  But for now I merely aim to establish a "mother patch", from which I can pull and distribute viable crowns and root cuttings as needed.

Now I just have to figure out where I'll be putting the second half of the order... with ten more to plant, I know there's still time to make a terrible mistake.

"Vinyl siding is the mulch of buildings..."

"Vinyl siding is the mulch of buildings." - My Dad.

Truer words were never spoken.  On the mend from a uncharacteristically debilitating shoulder-injury, this weekend found my father back in action up at the farm, if not exactly 100%.  Despite having only three good arms, our goal was to get as much vinyl siding up on the greenhouse as possible.  The materials were already on-site.  The weather seemed ready to cooperate.  As usual, I did most of the work but he's the only one in the pictures because he's terrible at operating any form of camera device..

We spent Saturday morning fighting off the frosty air by bending and installing a whole bunch of garden trellis supports on the raised beds.  I learned how to consistently bend 1/2" emt using a conduit bender for the first time.  So now, by the time this year's peas and beans are poking out, they'll have an 8'x6' span of netting to climb to their little heart's content.  Speaking of, I managed to plant 16' of Tall Telephone Peas (which might be one or two generations away from deserving their own varietal name as I've continued selecting out for the huge mutant peas/pods that began appearing last year) and a first-attempt 8' row of Green Beauty snow peas from Adaptive Seeds, especially notable for being a true vining variety.  They're going in awfully late for peas, but we only got the raised beds filled last weekend.  What can I say?  We're doing the best we can.

The properties of vinyl siding are deceptively ingenious, and the stuff goes up relatively quickly once you get the hang of it.  By Sunday night we felt like siding pros, and had managed to get the entire north side of the greenhouse and most of both of the ends covered in the stuff.

The hardest part is successfully tacking it in with short little roofing nails in a manner that doesn't involve smashing your fingers with the hammer.  I got better at that too as we went along, but the middle finger on my left hand remains sad nonetheless.

Due to some warpage of posts and boards (lord, how I loathe pressure treated pine for this reason) our walls were not plumb-straight, but the application of the vinyl siding really smoothed things out visually.  One more good working day, and we should be done with the vinyl and on to the really intimidating part... installing the polycarbonate panels.

We all have lives that we are owed...

"We both have lives that we are owed.  You can own an acre, but not what it grows." - J.Tillman, Diamondback.

We spend a long and strenuous day Saturday working on the annuals beds.  We hand-pulled large patches of well-established turf and weeds out of the raised beds where the cardboard I applied last fall had failed to hold them down.  We shoveled a seemingly endless parade of wheelbarrows full of topsoil and compost and dumped them into the beds.  We planted some the fruit trees from Stark Bros (a sweet pit apricot, a nectarine, a peach, a plum, and an almond).

On Sunday we re-installed a few rain barrels to help temporarily stay the soil runoff problem that occurs when water runs off the roof into the perennial/herb beds.  Still trying to devise a good passive long-term solve for the roof runoff...

While cleaning out one of the octagonal annuals beds, we came across a juvenile snake beneath a sheet of cardboard.  Not being an expert yet on matters of local snakes, I have been working from the general rule that one should pay attention to the shape of the snake's head... they that have a slimmer head more in line with their body are generally harmless, while those that have a more protruding, arrow-shaped head are more likely to be venomous.  This one had the arrow-shaped head, and seemed far more aggressive than the snakes I'm used to seeing in the garden, coiling up, spitting, and even striking at the cardboard.



Leah happened to have her camera, so we photographed it, but we weren't sure we would have time to go inside and positively ID it before it disappeared... if it did turn out to be venomous it could be a problem as I've still got lots of tall grass around the garden beds and we had a fair bit of work left to do in the garden that day.

I respect snakes and the function they perform in the local ecosystem, and have even gone out of my way to provide habitat for them in the garden beds and around the house... but I don't want venomous ones taking up residence around my garden... if somebody got bit and injured while helping me I'd feel terrible.

So we made the call to kill it.  I dispatched it quickly with the blade of my shovel.

Upon later research online, we sadly discovered that it had indeed been a variety of garter snake that does happen to have a more triangular head when small (they grow into them later), and can occasionally be aggressive when confronted or surprised.  My heart sank.

I do not take easily to harming or killing living things.  The decision to remove life cannot be revoked.  In discussing it later, Leah and I were both of a mind to better learn the characteristics of the snakes in this area, so as to not make a similar mistake in the future.

If I can, I'd like to make a small physical reminder to place in the garden bed where this occurred... not because I'm so distraught at the loss of a single garter snake, but more as a learned reminder that unfounded fear of something unfamiliar is no excuse for causing same.  "Let not my ignorance be cause for harm" seems fitting in this case, and looking back on some of the mistakes I've made here on the farm since I moved here, it's a lesson that bears repeating.

The more I learn about what's happening around me, and find myself more aware of multitude of natural exchanges and tiny interactions that get made constantly in any natural ecosystem, the more I am humbled.  By and large, things which have no place or purpose in nature do not exist, and if I cannot see the place or purpose they hold, the fault for such a failure is most likely my own.

On a lighter note, I'm beyond plussed to report that the farm will be acquiring it's first (under our ownership, at least) chickens in early May.  I found a breeder and poultry concern up the road who hatches Buckeyes (the heritage, cold-hardy dual-purpose breed that originated here in Ohio).  This will be my first time having chickens, so we're going in small at a straight run of 6 chicks.

We're just hoping not to get all roosters.

We have soil!....

Some storms came and went, but my topsoil arrived on time, and Leah ended up being able to come down for the weekend from Kent.  I bought an extra shovel, and I hope she's ready to get dirt-y, cause we've got a lot of beds to fill.  Hmm, that whole sentence sounds a bit off.

Experimented with HD video on my new phone for the first time tonight.  Inspired by Paul Wheaton's videos over at Permies.com, I might try doing some short narrated clips to offer more detailed insight on the goings on around here at the farm.  I did a really short one about the burdock mini-plantation that seems to be in effect along the soggy south side of my woodshed barn.  If I can get it uploaded to YouTube, I'll post it up.

The best laid plans...

Earlier in the week it seemed we were destined for nice weather this weekend, and we might get another strong work week in on the greenhouse/outdoors.

Now the weather is hinting at thunderstorms and my normally iron-clad father is nursing a busted shoulder that will likely keep him home in Cincinnati this weekend.

But the twenty cubic yards of dirt that are likely being delivered as I type this wait for no man, and neither do the bare root trees that showed up in the mail from Stark Bros. yesterday.  The garden beds need filling if I'm going to be putting plants in them this year, and those trees need planted, pronto.

So, help or no help, I've got work to do.

Link: Biodiversity Heritage Library

In searching for the full text of an old reference from vegetable varieties from the 1920's, I stumbled across an amazing project over on the Internet Archive called the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

At first glance, it appears to be a huge collection of old (but still very useful) texts on a great variety of topics.

Some random titles from the top of the stack include:
Insects, their ways and means of living
On growth and form
Fish hatchery management (sound familiar, oh beautiful rescuer of library cards?)
Ants and some other insects; an inquiry into the psychic powers of these animals (!!!!)
Birds in legend, fable and folklore


And oh so many, many more.

In a separate post soon I will post links to a variety of more practically useful texts I have found on Internet Archive, some of which are not part of the BHL... so stay tuned for that.

This almost (almost) makes me want an eBook reader, so I can peruse this awesomeness in bed at my leisure.

Spring blooms

Pulled in the driveway tonight with enough light left in the day to take a quick tour of the property and see who amongst my fruit trees and bushes is budding and blooming this (sudden) spring.

The peaches are blooming hard, even the ones I planted just last summer (pictured above) .  The apricots are already falling out of bloom, and might just be big enough to take a shot at making some fruit this year without stunting their own growth.  The pears and plums are swelling into bud, and a few more plants I had written off as potential casualties appear to have pulled through another winter (I will have some replacing to do in the vineyard, however... I don't think many of the grapes I planted last year survived).

Checking my dear Leah's blog Foxglove and Folksongs, I see she too is thinking of spring tonight and posting pictures of it's resulting blooms, and has posted some seasonal prose and verse.