A Little Shade on a Hot Day

Skye snapped this picture of Cookie enjoying the shade of the cat cave under the angel trumpet. I wish I had a nice cool cave in the Cottage Garden: I might never come out!

When Life Gives You Angel Trumpet Blooms....

When life gives you angel trumpet blooms… make new dresses for your clothespin dolls.

Skye is never bored for long. I truly believe the best parenting advice I ever received came from my friend Wisty who said, “Don’t be afraid to let her get bored. Kids have to get bored and move through that boredom to become truly creative.” Or something like that. Wisty is a wise woman.

We are not Luddites, but our home is not filled with all the latest technological gizmos. We have cable and a DVD player and cell phones and laptops and a digital camera. We don’t, however, have a Wii or an Xbox or Webkins or iPods. I’m not sure what we’d give up to make time to play with them…. there’s way too much real living to do. I’ve offered to get Skye an iPod for her birthday, as music is such a big part of her life, but she insists that she doesn’t want one. She likes her CDs and making her own music, thank you very much.

And Skye has always enjoyed making toys as much as playing with them. The clothespin dolls have been a favorite over the years. I’ll be sad when she doesn’t play with them anymore. But I’ll never be able to see an angel trumpet bloom in the same way.

The Kitchen Garden Begins

Finally, the Kitchen Garden is more than a dream in my head and a sketch on paper. I first knew that I wanted a Kitchen Garden to surround our pool last summer when I read Jennifer Bartley's Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook. I planned the garden in my head, then put it on paper. At the time, we were adding our lovely back porch and rethinking what we wanted around the pool. I advocated for the Kitchen Garden, and it is slowly becoming a reality -- more slowly than I hoped back in September.

The ground is cleared. I moved everything I wanted to keep, gave lots of plants away, and put even more on the compost pile. The bermuda grass is gone -- there is a time and place for Roundup in my life. The perennial border that sat where the new Kitchen Garden will be had been overrun by Bermuda, which got its foot in the door when Skye was a baby and has been waging war and gaining ground ever since.

Love has tilled the ground. I have picked up rocks. Love is searching for topsoil to have hauled in to build the beds up. My perfectly symmetrical but impractical raised beds on paper have morphed to fit the new layout, and Love has made me a beautiful drawing using his cad program. I have actually purchased my own copy of Designing the New Kitchen Garden -- the public library will be so glad. When Dickson Street Bookshop didn't turn up a copy, I ordered it from Nightbird Books. (I really am trying to buy local more.)

There are more rocks to pick up, more tilling to be done, beds to build, soil to ammend and work, a fence to install, plants to set out and seeds to plant. My brother in Texas has promised to share his asparagus. The strawberry plants that are too close to the blueberry bushes will have a new home. Two roses in the holding bed (the very weedy holding bed) are looking for a new home. And this time next year, they will have one, and we here at the Realm will be enjoying more than just tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and berries. We'll be enjoying the beauty and bounty right outside our kitchen door.

Glory in the Morning

These purple beauties are gracing the fence on the south side of the Cottage Garden this summer. And it's confession time again: I've actually never grown morning glories before. I've bought the seed more than once, but have just never gotten them planted. I think it's a mental block: my mother grew morning glories on the fence behind our home one summer, and when my daddy spotted them, he declared them to be "nothin' but damn tie-vines!" To a Louisiana cotton farmer, the morning glory (aka tie-vine) could make a mess out of a well-kept cotton field. But those little wild morning glories were mild shadows of the beauties in my garden. The deep purple is truly breath-taking. And these guys are in my garden due to the generousity of friend and neighbor Cee, who shared these with me one Sunday afternoon in May.

Packing' Water: A 3rd Generation

Back in June, I heard that we were already ahead of the annual rainfall for 2005 & 2006 in this area. Indeed, I have done very little watering this year. Only twice have we begun packin' water, each time for a couple of days, and we have yet to start all-out watering. I carefully record the rainfall on the calendar by the back door: if we've had an inch in the previous week, we don't water. If we've had a 1/2" in the previous week, we start packin' water on the fourth or fifth day. But we just haven't gone without rain for more than 10 days since the summer began.

"We" here means Skye and me. She likes saving bath water, catching kitchen sink water, and hauling buckets of water around in her wagon and doling them out to the trees and bushes that I have identified as top priority subjects. I think she's actually a bit disappointed that we've had so much rain.

I'm very proud of Skye. Besides being a curious kid, she's very environmentally conscious. She's been trying to convert Love to the Packin' Water Philosophy. Check out the signs she posted above our kitchen sink last week.

The Garden as Art

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Dee came over for supper and some downtime on the back porch. Image my delight when she showed up bearing gifts!

About a year ago, as we sat outdoors on the deck that preceded the back porch, she told me about how she had started etching and painting gourds. She even brought some of her finished and half-finished gourds to show me. The next thing she knew, we were tramping out to my gardening shed (locally known as "The Barn") to root around for gourds. I knew I had a couple out there that had come off a gourd vine here a few years ago. I had been saving them for a project that I doubted would ever happen. So my gourds went home with Dee.

Now they're home again. Isn't sharing fun?

Mamaw's Canning Jars

It's confession time. I've been spending more time indoors than out these last few days. Aside from picking blueberries and Japanese beetles, I haven't really done much in the garden. But I have been weeding.

Weeding? Surely I've been in the garden. Nope. I've been weeding the garage. And the attic. And the pantry. And the linen closet. And that pesky cabinet over the stove with toothpicks spilled all over the place. And I feel better. It's a big psychic load to get rid of the clutter and the unneeded stuff that threatens to take over our modern lives. If it weren't for all the stuff, we wouldn't be neighbors to a mini-storage facility, where the busiest business day is December 26th. But I digress.

The hardest thing for me about weeding stuff is the concern that we might need this stuff some day in harder times. Part of that is my parents' heritage from The Great Depression, and part of it is the constant news reports of prices going up and the economy going down. But why keep stuff that we will never use again? So the baby stuff is going, along with some other things.

But not the canning jars, even though they take up lots of space on the garage floor. Years ago, Love and I rescued 13 dozen canning jars from behind his grandmother's vacant home. They were all bagged up and ready for recycling. They've mostly sat empty in our attic and then our garage since then, along with a few jars collected over the years as my mother has gradually gotten rid of hers. Canning comes out of my kitchen in a trickle these days: a few pickles here, a bit of apple butter there, but mostly jellies and jams that go into my collection of smaller jelly jars. But, I promise, Mamaw, I'm working my way back. Some year soon, hopefully next, our pantry will overflow with green beans, peas, tomatoes, tomato juice, and all the other things I used to can B.C. (before children). And your jars will be at work once again.

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day, from our garden to yours!

July Ozark Gardening Calendar

One of my goals is to create a single gardening calendar for each month. I have lots of goals and not enough time, but today is the day to start. I have a few minutes while Skye finishes her Latin lesson.

I've been looking for a good gardening calendar for this region, and I think I've finally found one: Gardener's Tote-Book from Ozark Seed Exchange. My hope is to start with the information provided there, the notes I have scribbled here and there, and what's in my head and put together a gardening calendar for my microclimate.

July Calendar

July 1
Kitchen Garden:
plant bush & pole beans, beets, cabbage, carrots, lettuce
Monitor tomatoes for stink bugs & spray with pyrethrin.
Berry Patch:
Continue blueberry harvest.
All gardens:
Continue beetle patrol.

July 7
Orchard:
Patrol for webworms in pecans, cut, and burn.

July 15
Kitchen Garden:
plant bush beans, collards, southern peas, Irish potatoes
Indoors:
brocolli, lettuce, cabbage

July – after blueberry harvest
Berry Patch:
Fertilize blueberries with cottonseed meal (6-2.5-1.7), feather meal (13-0-0), fish meal (10-4-0), soybean meal (7-1.6-2-3) or alfalfa meal (3-1-2).

July 25
Kitchen Garden:
Plant turnips.

July 29
pre-sprout corn to plant August 1