Three Cheers and a Sweater for May Day

 Sunday will be May Day, the ne plus ultre of spring celebrations (at least for those of us placidly blooming where we are planted in a free-market economy). The Patient Spouse will be there with bells on, literally, helping to summon in the summer as a member of a Morris dance troupe he has participated in for the past year. This very old dance form has, apparently, something to do with, variously: fertility, battle, and drinking craft-brewed beer. On May Day, the official launch of the Berkshire Morris Men's brief season, it also may involve an early dip in a nearby lake at dawn. It is supposed to be 41 degrees this May Day, and I am very glad to hand this rite of the agricultural calendar over to those with more chill tolerance than I.

     Instead of jumping around hitting sticks together or rushing headlong into an icy tarn, here is my tribute to the soul of the season. Above, the height of tulip bloom in the perennial border: these are mutable yelllow-to red "Gudoshnik" tulips and smaller species "Candy Cane" tulips.
    Next, coffee in the garden yesterday afternoon, (a version of Tasha Tudor's "Delectable Elevenish Parties") just after I installed two "T-Post Platforms" created from scrap lumber according to Herrick Kimball's great design from his "Whizzbang" book. (You can get one at his blogsite or from the Fedco catalog; if you grow vegetables, it's worth every penny.) Once again, his designs are greater than the sum of their parts. This ingenious creation, made at the cost of four 2" screws per platform, means not only the end to spilled or dirt-filled coffee, but also a way to keep from tearing open shins or thighs or elbows on these snaggly salvage posts, which form the ends of my caterpillar cloche system. Kimball is a genius!

Our new chicks may not be geniuses, but this was the day they graduated. Here they are, our suppliers-of-manure, in their new digs in the chicken house (that white building at the far end of the garden in the previous shot). They have reached the teenage stage, with much sizing-up of each other, tiny mock battles, scurryings-about and short flights when they get the urge. That's my crop of wheat from last year they are standing on. It never reached a state of edibility, but they should know that's homegrown, hand-harvested straw they're standing on, and it is the last of my precious four bags of the useful stuff. Next year, it may be I'll accept my neighbor's offer of tractor help after all and grow another crop of it on the narrow "dogleg" of property that runs behind our neighbors' properties. Meantime, things are settling down to business here at First-Flower Farm, come cold rains, lords-a-leaping or what-have-you. Blooming!

Reasons to Hope

It's nice to have a boost. Whether it comes in the form of a cold frame that does as it should, a call from my supportive parents, an interested inquiry from my older daughter/inspiration, or an unexpected and generous monetary contribution from my Master Gardener aunt in Florida, every time I have a moment of doubt, someone or something puts in encouragement. Encouragement is an amazing force!
     The material support of my aunt has primarily gone to the huge, invisible expense of going commercial: farmers' market fees, insurance, possibly the licensure to extend my offerings to jams and other processed food items. It is certainly true that the moment you declare independence, everyone with their rubber stamp in one hand and their collection tray in the other turns to you with avid and severe attention.
     But it didn't seem right to squander all her generosity on prosaic necessities. That's how I rationalized getting some foliage plants and a few seedlings (12, to be exact) that actually look like something. Here, in my older and scrufty home cold fame, is one those selections: Matthiola, or "stocks" (not sure why - Stocks of what? Should I tell my aunt I have bought stocks with her money?). This variety, which I have raised in the past, is "Old Fashioned Mix." They don't get tall like the kind sold in the florist trade, but make a perfectly great and quite respectable table-height bouquet in shades of purple, pink, vanilla-yellow and white, all with a cinnamon-clove sweetness not at all like their muskier relative Sweet Alyssum or their farty-smelling cousins kale and cabbage. I walk by this area, just outside the sink/potting up area my Patient Spouse built for me, and am reminded that the season will warm, things will sprout past their two-leaf infancy, and I will, one day this summer, be picking flowers and herbs here at First-Flower Farm. Even if it takes a lot of encouragement and help from my friends. Bloom!

Breathing Again?

The Morning After a Freeze

I left the last blog entry at a cliffhanger, and if you've been  waiting with bated breath all this time, I do apologize. You can let that air out of your lungs slowly now. There is a triumphant ending to the story: here's the cold frame the morning after that first frosty night, and all is very much alive and well. Inside the frame next morning, the temperature was about 60 degrees, with outside temps at 40.
   
     The weather has been more spring-like in the week since I first moved the plants out to the frame overnight. Daytimes have been cool but pleasant at around 60-65 degrees, and nighttime lows have often been around freezing, with frost on the grass in the morning. I open up the frame at around 7am, removing the concrete blanket insulator and checking interior temps, which have maintained at an even 60 degrees, with a reassuring rush of warm, humid air very like greenhouse conditions as I crack open the light. The pile of grass in the center of the frame kept cooking for only about 4 days after I first filled it. That was enough time for the remainder of the yard to need mowing, and the Patient Spouse brought three more bags of clippings to replace what was cooked (which I added to the hay bales to even up and fill in gaps). As a result, the cold frame has had a successful week-plus run as a hotbed.The only damage I've seen thus far could actually have been caused by too much heat: browned seed leaves on zinnias and cosmos in select areas of the frame, more directly over the clippings pit than towards the cooler perimeter. It is possible to overheat plants, especially when they are very small and fragile, with so little root area and resilience.
    Last weekend, both of us needed a break after a tiring work week, and went off to the Pioneer Valley for the day. It was cool and cloudy when we left, and I spent a carefree morning at my favorite two nurseries, Hadley Garden Center and Andrew's Greenhouse. By noon, the sky had cleared and we were looking forward to a hike in new territory. It was getting warm enough in the car to open the windows. In fact, it was getting quite, quite warm. I mentioned that, at the next stop, I should make sure the two dahlia tubers I had just bought weren't lying in the sunshine with the potted plants I purchased, as they could really cook to death inside their clear plastic bags.
    Uh oh! As could all the tiny seedlings in my hot frame back home, an hour's drive away, with grass cooking underneath and sun now shining down through the unvented light. To his everlasting credit, it was my dear partner who suggested we should go right home, immediately, and skip the long-anticipated hike, though it was supposed to be his reward for a morning of being dragged through nurseries and hearing me chatter on about scented geraniums and The Bold-Leafed Coleus.

     The temperature in the frame, after we had broken land-speed records in our traverse back over the Berkshire Plateau, was a tolerable 75 degrees. Both the seedlings and I were lucky. I have actually roasted plants to death this way. Going from seed to transplant is a dicey and inexact business. In its own way, the "birthing season" for farmers of plants is as fraught as that for farmers of livestock.
Bloom Where You are planted!
   

Dead or Alive?

 Last night, my seedlings (in their pathetically ample pots) looked like this. Right now, it's anybody's guess. Last night was their first night outdoors. This morning at sunrise. the thermometer on the North side of the house read 32 degrees. I feel like I did the morning I sent my daughter off on the bus to her first day of kindergarten.

Here's what stands between frost and life for those tiny snippets of green promise. I will call it a cold frame, though I hope to goodness it is, or was last night, a hot bed.
   The frame is built to Eliot Coleman specs (minus his pretty "Dutch lights", which I couldn't afford glass for). Built of 2" pine, the front is 8" tall and the back, 12". If it were on level ground, that would give the light an ideal slope for collecting sunlight and not letting its heat back out. The final dimension is 4' X 8'. The light is framed of 2"X2" with gate hooks at the ends to keep it from blowing away. Its glazing began as 6 mil plastic sheeting, but after a snow load caused it to buckle, I added some welded-wire fence under the plastic to provide support. Next year, I hope to be able to replace this with a small greenhouse or at least replace the lights with 3 hinged panels made of real glass like Coleman's. The bottom is covered with hardware cloth, as I've had problems in the past with voles getting into cold frames and mowing down seedlings.
    The whole thing is set on some hay bales left from the neighbors' yard renovation. I wanted it up off the cold ground and hoped the hay might take on water and start to decompose, giving off some heat. The center is open, because I only had six bales and because I thought it could be filled with something that would decompose quickly and make some heat. The only hot compost I could get was lawn clippings. So, for the first time in my 21 years of home ownership, I was FIRST on the block to mow the lawn, packing two bags of precious green clippings under the center of the frame. (The yard looks nice, too.) By the afternoon of the day I put them there, the clippings already felt warmer in the center of the pile than at the surface. So far, so good. In went the seedlings - just two flats of artichoke and sweet pea, to test the process. The rest made the trip yet again from outdoors to mudroom. I draped the whole frame in sheets to help hold in a little more warmth. It only went down to 40 degrees that trial night (April 20), and all was well in the morning. The thermometer in the frame read a full 10 degrees higher than the air temp outside.
     Now it is 10am, April 21, and everybody—peppers, tomatoes, ground cherries, zinnias, snapdragons—is out there under wraps. The sun is climbing. It's time to go out and see if I have a cold frame or a hot frame. Survive where you are planted.

Damp-Off

The Future of First-Flower,  Writ Small

    On April 2, I planted the first seeds: anything requiring 8 weeks' head start on growing before the last frost (traditionally, Memorial Day here in zone 5, but I've often planted as early as Mother's Day —2 weeks earlier than that this year— and not been sorry). In three days, the first seedlings began to emerge. Because it was cold, snowy, and looked rather uninspiring outdoors, I can almost tell what hour they sprouted, since I was running down to the basement to check them 4 or 5 times a day. (We also have a new flock of 6 chicks in a makeshift brooder down there, so I had other reasons for vigilance, lest I sound a little too anxious...)
    Windowsill growing is just not the same as greenhouse growing, though. In the past, I've had better success at least setting up a germination box (two shop lights inside an open-sided wood box, draped in plastic sheeting to retain heat and humidity). The trouble is, using grow lights has a surprisingly significant impact on the month's electric bill. Space quickly becomes an issue, too. The only way to get enough of that is to use an unoccupied area like the basement, upgrade to more lights and more germination boxes ($$$), and hope the resident mouse—there always is one—doesn't develop an uncanny ability to suss out buried seeds. I've also had whole flats germinate, only to be bitten off by hungry rodents in the night. Air circulation and sufficient heat are problems as well. Too many years of these sorts of failure down-cellar made me hesitant to invest in the under-lights method. The only reason the pots of seeds went down there was for bottom heat.
    Bottom heat is magic. It speeds germination mightily, turning the soil into a comfortable nursery eager to rouse dormant seeds and get them stretching roots down and seed leaves skywards. For $50 plus electricity costs, you can buy a germination mat designed to provide the exact bottom heat needed. For that price, you get enough space for 2 flats. Now that's some expensive real estate! Back at the Shaker Village, I got around the need for bottom heat by providing it the very old-fashioned way: hot beds. A "hot bed" (not at all as sexy as it sounds) is simply a box frame with a transparent lid and no bottom (a "cold frame") set over a pile of decomposing manure. The biological process of microorganisms breaking down very nitrogen-rich materials like manure (or green vegetation) generates heat as a byproduct. Market farmers—especially in metropolitan areas where there was plenty of horse manure in the days before the internal combustion engine—took advantage of this free heat source to grow early-season vegetable crops "under glass."  It was the old-style equivalent of the season-extending hoop tunnel (and urban-gardening) now deemed so revolutionary. My set-up at Hancock Shaker Village included 3' high raised beds filled with barn waste and topped with cold frame lights (the glass or plastic lids) inside an unheated hoop house. I miss that setup mightily. Without a greenhouse or hot manure, how would I start my First-Flower seedlings?
    I scoured the local Habitat and Goodwill stores for used heating pads or electric blankets, which make a good, cheap substitute for those crazy-expensive heating mats, although the former are small and both have to be protected from the wet bottoms of pots somehow. Finding none, I settled on the one other source of free waste heat in our house: the top of our ancient boiler. We heat with wood, but the hot water still makes demands on the furnace several times a day, and being an old model, it leaks a lot of heat out the top. (Refrigerators used to work well too, in the days before eco-friendly models.) I was a little worried about melting plastic pots and starting a house fire, so I started with an elaborate arrangement of salvaged firebrick, an old cookie sheet, and frequent checking. Then I remembered how, in the process of setting up this safety-minded nursery, I had taken from the top of the furnace the paperwork left there in 1987 by the furnace guy. Unburned. If paper could age that long directly atop the boiler without igniting, couldn't pots full of damp peat? The pots went directly on the top of the boiler. Germination began.
    Without lights, the germinated seedlings had to go upstairs within the day so as not to stretch too far in search of sun. That's where the trouble began. The only  option was a South-facing bay window, as temps outdoors precluded use of the cold frame I had built (see the next post). That's when damp-off entered the picture. Ugh. Starting plants on a windowsill will give anyone the sense that they have a brown thumb.
     Look quickly at that olive dish full of baby Amaranthus 'Green Thumb' in the photo, and you see two-day-old seedlings full of promise. Look a little closer and you will see doom. A few of the seedlings are drifting sideways. Their stems have shriveled at ground level. They will die. Damp-off has set in. This disease, caused by just the unavoidable cool, damp stagnation of windowsill gardening, can wipe out an entire pot of starts in a few days. It helps to start with absolutely clean pots (I did), sterile medium (I did) and clean water delivered by letting it wick up from the bottom (yup). The best remedy once damp-off has set in is to separate the healthy seedlings out, plant them to individual pots as soon as possible, and get them into the sun and fresh air. I've had some luck watering with cooled chamomile tea, which is reputed to be anti-fungal. I didn't try that this time, but did try to get things separated and potted up and outdoors as soon as possible. This has meant many trips out at mid-morning and back in before supper with my burgeoning population of minute seedlings. But it seems like the situation is more or less under control. Round two of those first victims has just germinated today (2 1/2 weeks later) on the boiler. Weather is expected to soften anytime. Bloom where you are planted... please.

   

Land Grab, Part Two

Before

I just love "before" and "after" pictures, so it's hard to resist telling the story that way. So: here they are. Picture 1 shows the land cleared of most of the building supplies (one afternoon's job) and awaiting removal of vegetation. Keep an eye on that scrufty deciduous tree in the middle of the shot: that's a good way to orient yourself in these two pictures. It's a buckthorn bush, but it's about as close to picturesque as anything in the back quarter of the yard gets. (The one behind and to the left is a black walnut. I once thought that despite their notoriety at discouraging all other growth around them, these trees were rare and wonderful. They are, in fact, fast-growing and rather common in the yard, since the neighbor has a tree of nut-bearing age and the squirrels distribute its fruit freely. Even though Black walnut is as legitimate a tree as has volunteered itself in this wasteland of buckthorn, seedling elm with no hope for the future, and otherwise vining/suckering woody growth, it may have to go if I am after arable soil...)

After

    Picture two is the "after" shot, perhaps better described as an "aftermath" shot. (Not, thank goodness, because there was math involved. Although I did have to successfully subtract 2' from the 22' plan to accommodate the fact that otherwise the hugelberm would have been in the way at the top edge. So, that makes the final result 35' X20', right? See, my computational abilities are improving weekly.) There's that buckthorn, center, looking charmingly like a little shade tree. Birds like to perch in it and watch my progress. The sparrows and a male cardinal seem particularly interested in my activities, not just in the worms and grubs exposed by the digging.
     What the picture doesn't show is that the hugelberm is now twice as big. Most of what needed to be pulled from the ground was roots, many 1/2" in diameter: a network of bittersweet (bright orange), Virginia creeper (black with white lenticular spots and mercifully shallow-rooted), grape (shreddy brown bark even underground and roots that branch and cling and shan't be split by shovel tip nor leverage) and blackberry (here to stay 'til the bitter end, by God.) Did I mention goutweed and goldenrod? They stabilized the surface and gave it the innocent appearance of sod, until I tried to push a shovel in and couldn't. Then there was that predictable line of rocks, running on a diagonal at the soil surface in this shot. This area  might have encompass the original owner's masterful drainage plan, as the pattern of large stones, once unearthed, leads in the general downslope direction of several buried culverts. However, there was no evidence of any gravel around them, and the rocks only went one or two wide and one deep - so hopefully I haven't just inadvertently changed the underground flow of water too badly. A single-use flashbulb ca. 1950s, a Victorian furniture caster and a portion of rose-painted china also found their way to this spot. Without enough supporting objects to suggest this was an actual rubbish heap, it leads me to wonder how household objects become such a scattered archeology. Was the flashbulb exploded right there during some long-forgotten but photo-worthy family event? Where is the rest of that piece of furnishing? There are always ghosts in the soil when you dig on long-populated ground.
     I had hoped, up to this point in the blogosphere, to share some new revelation with my readers and fellow land-clearers regarding returning land to arability the Easy Way... or at least, the way not requiring machinery. Well, as it happens, the only keys as far as I can tell are persistence, brute labor, and caffeine. There is no easy way. Maybe if I had a year, I might have gone for a slash-and-burn approach to kill off all the surface roots and stumps and return their nutrients to the soil as wood ash. That would have had to have been accomplished in secret, as slash-burns are illegal in this residential community. Then I would have followed with a smother crop of oats and field peas, let it thrive all summer until frost, and planted something big and sprawling like squash here next year while the soil settled back into its pre-invasion form. Would the roots have remained? I'd put money on bittersweet and blackberry surviving such treatment. Because I lack for time, I have to apply brute force to expedite the clearing process. The project took longer than the first and larger section took, patly because of roots and partly because the soil was heavy, sticky and wet, clinging to my feet, the shovel, the rocks, and giving roots plenty of purchase. Really, I should have stayed off it for another week or two, but once weeds start active growth, stripping sod becomes much, much harder.
    It is done, now. The rocks shown here have left this morning with the Patient Spouse, and will soon become part of the fill behind or inside of a stone wall he's building somewhere in Connecticut. (That's right: we catch-and-release those pesky stones, too - not just woodchucks.) I have the honor - at least, it feels like an honor — of having sustained a real, identifiable sports injury in the process as well: what the Mathematician and Sox GM-to-Be calls "a strained oblique." That puts me on the DL, though not, apparently, when it comes to making meals, vacuuming, putting up window screens, tending six teenage hens and weeding out curly dock and creeping Charlie from the vegetable garden. It's just that my baseball career has been sidelined for the moment. Too bad... I could really use the extra income. Bloom!

There's a Website

Meanwhile, there's a website: not, apparently searchable, but out there if you know where to look:
http://firstflowerfarm.weebly.com

You get what you pay for.

(And you pay for what you get, too, usually.)

It's web presence from the Luddite.

Land Grab!

Fenced in?

     Here is the finished growing area of First-Flower Farm, a neatly fenced 30' X 35' rectangle surrounded in 5' welded-wire fencing, with a lovely gate, a garden shed finally located where it is destined to remain,  and a comfortable 2' perimeter of thick cardboard covered in mulch surrounding three sides. This picture was taken the day before the great blizzard. 

     There is only one problem with fencing a space. It limits you. That's the very idea of a fence of any kind, isn't it? But what it does so well, it also does so ultimately: describes a perimeter, a space within and a space without: in this case, a space for gardening and a space for everything but gardening. I'm not sure if it was driving the last fence staples that turned my attention to the limitations of space. Maybe it was also that two- week hiatus when starting the farm went from being a hands-on job to being a desk job. Sweat-equity is just plain easier to set my resolve to than the cerebral tasks of writing about the farm and portraying it to The World. Anyways, the longer I was indoors looking out the upstairs window at this beautiful pace of possibility, the more it shrank. 

      The real root of the problem, however, was something I touched on in an earlier blog: that list of justifications for starting this year as a flower-and-herb farm and not as a vegetable farm. That tiny inner voice kept muttering about the real usefulness of edible things over beautiful things; about the challenging seed-to-fruit rhythm of growing food, as opposed to just getting to the flower stage and stopping there. This voice of doubt was amplified when my older daughter suggested I contact the restaurant where she works and see if her boss would like to buy fresh vegetables for his kitchen. Without any guarantee I would even be accepted into any of the farm markets I wanted to apply for, here was my first real chance of growing something saleable. The flower idea was—is—sound, but what would it take to add a few vegetables? 

    What I want to grow, in addition to flowers, is tomatoes, beans and squash varieties from Slow Food's "Ark of Taste." In simplified terms, the Ark is essentially a "bucket list" of heirloom vegetables that are both rich in known history and of exceptional flavor, but which are also at risk of becoming lost to civilization if they are not grown from seed to seed (that is, the seed harvested and the germplasm stewarded). In this case, there are two acts of "kicking the bucket" involved: Not only are these specific tastes the Slow Food folks think you and I and everyone ought to be able to experience, but also, these are foods that do run the risk of "kicking the bucket" in the very real  sense of extinction. It interests me that these particular varieties have been chosen. Is it on the strength of their flavors? Their vigor? Their backgrounds? The chance to grow a curated collection of vegetables, provide a taste to my family and other folks,  and along the way to learn more about the Ark varieties is alluring. It pairs well with my growing interest in integrating seed saving into my farming practices. With hundreds upon hundreds of possible vegetable varieties to choose from,  focusing on Ark crops also helps to narrow my choices and focus my endeavors on limited space.

     ....About that space: I have decided, in deciding to grow vegetables too, I'll need more. There sits the unplanted vegetable garden. If it doesn't have to have space in it for my daughter's experimental corner  or the space-gobbling squash or those giant broccolis that put out not quite enough florets for any one menu at a time, it could be filled with more plants from a limited and marketable palette. Still, adding on this roughly 30' X 40' additional garden isn't going to be enough. I pull on my snow boots, go out in the slush, and stage a land grab. Snow may be discouraging, but as my friend Monica once showed me, it makes the ideal medium for marking out new borders and dreaming up plans for when spring finally does arrive. 

     Monica-style, I shuffled my way North from the front edge of the new farm space, past the cold frame and the caterpillar-shaped berm of debris too heavy and large and recently placed to contemplate moving. About 40' out, I had to stop. That's where an ancient fence still sags under a burden of grape vines, dogwood, Virginia creeper, bittersweet and blackberry canes.  It must have delineated the original homeowner's garden. This edge parallels the property line, about 6' farther North. It runs to the back (NW) corner of the property, then turns south. That makes about 35' X 22' of additional space between the hugelberm (my big, immovable caterpillar, which is about to get taller and longer) and the ancient fence. Dig it this year and next year, join the two gardens into one huge space with a hugelberm of squash down the middle? You bet! All that stands in the way is...

   

A hundredweight of salvaged brick, granite and bluestone block, Goshen stone scrap, cinderblocks and assorted chimney liners my mason husband the Patient Spouse has already moved  approximately four times before. Also, those big beams left from an old patio sort of thing, which we've been saving for just the right project.  Before I can grab land, I have to find a new, out-of-the-way place for all these objects. The spot needs levelling,  the cedar needs pruning to make a path to get them from here to there, the bricks need stacking just so. Then I have a thick tangle of brush to remove; the back corner of the new space is to be about where that prominent little sapling to the left of center mid-ground in the picture is. The dark area above the bricks is a mound of grapevine and bittersweet looming over the rusting fenceline. Looks like I'm not done digging after all. In a few short months, this area will be thick in squash and Glass Gem Indian corn. Meanwhile, here I go (again)! Bloom where you are planted, and then spread to the spot next door?

     

Poor Man's Fertilizer

      Looking back, I realize I took no photographs to document last week's snowstorm. Was it that I couldn't bear to dignify such a setback by recording its existence? Was I tired of snow? Or was I just not all that surprised?
     I like to tell myself it was mostly the latter. The snow arrived overnight at the end of the first week of April, and we woke to a world whiter than it has been all winter, with more snow on the way and enough being blown sideways off the trees that from time to time the cleared patch of infant First Flower Farm wasn't even visible from the house. The daffodils had their faces to the snow, and it was with mixed feelings that I saw the neighbors erecting an enormous snowman in our side yard. (His "feet" are still there.) You probably know what snow looks like, anyway, without visual aids: white as the page beneath this blog as I craft it. In the days that followed that snowstorm, there was little opportunity—or desire—for outdoor work, and I've been using the time to apply to farm markets, buy insurance, plant seeds and rethink my marketing scheme.
     Snow in April does not stay, and it would be whining to complain about weather this month, no matter how cold and gloomy it might be. Especially after a snowless winter, the week of white, which has renewed itself a couple of times since that first round, is easy to accept as nothing more than an interruption. I don't have a reservoir or even a well; First Flower Farm is on the town water system. Even so, a spring rain or snow always seems like a sort of insurance against later drought even if I, personally, can't bank any of it underground. Old time farmers had an even more optimistic way of looking at the snows of springtime than this. Snow in March was "sugar snow," because it sustained the period of cold nights/warm days that prolonged the rise of sap in the maple trees. April snow was "poor man's fertilizer." Farmers went so far as to plow it into the soil  rather than letting it simply melt in.  They viewed it as a valuable commodity which would ensure a strong, healthy crop later on.
    I didn't bother tilling in my "fertilizer." Especially on my clay-based soil, I know whatever good it might do by incorporating it would be undone by walking on the wet ground and compacting it into footprint-shaped bricks. Whenever there is just such a spring snowfall, however, I think about the idea of "poor man's fertilizer" and wonder how the idea came to be. Sure, there is a lot of false science in agriculture. Maybe the term was nothing more than a way to deal with the frustration of uncooperative weather. Maybe plowing in the white stuff was an excuse to get outside and do something. (Maybe it was so named by a farm wife who was in the midst of spring cleaning and didn't want a bored husband underfoot.) Then again, that's a lot of labor to devote to something that doesn't at least seem effective.
     It's certainly true that irrigating does not make plants thrive the way a good rain does. Rain is more than water, even if that irrigation comes from a natural source, without the chlorine and other additives of a municipal supply. Back when I had "free" well water to run sprinklers, I often saw that no good soaking by hose ever made the plants grow the way a summer shower did. Was it the increased general humidity? Barometric pressure changes? This experience makes me wonder if snow, likewise, offers something that rain does not; a "something" those old-timers recognized, even if they couldn't explain its reason.
     Snow does consist of more than frozen water. It starts from a seed of dust or other particulate; it brings with it whatever airborne substances it encounters in the snow cloud or on the way to the ground, including bits of dust storms from across the continent and smoke from stacks across the globe. Snow has been known to fall colored now and then from algae already living in it; the same thing that attracts the tiny black springtail insects my grandfather called "snow fleas." They're finding nourishment in what our naked and biased eye sees only as inert white stuff.
    The more the complexity of the soil biome is studied, the more we have come to understand that "good soil" isn't simply a question of minerals providing chemical balance. A fertile soil is a living soil. It involves a complex interaction among microscopic organisms. Is that snow bringing in just such mcroorganisms? Does it contain trace elements the plants crave? Is the make-up of this snowfall working transformations I can't even see? Quite possibly. Meantime, this week I'm in here, stoking the fire and reconsidering my first seed order. Whether it is good for this year's crops-to-be or not, that Poor Man's Fertilizer is certainly nourishing my ambitions. Bloom...

A Garden in My Pocket

Shy of four packets still on their way from Select Seeds, here is my farm. I wanted to share it at that magical point I think anyone who grows from seed can relate to. It is April. The ground is dug. The earth is weedless and waiting. The design on paper says every corner will be full. And here, literally, are the seeds of the dream. All is potential. All is perfection. It is manageable, spread out here on the sunny window seat  in my warm living room on a snowy April morning: no weed can spoil, no rabbit chew, no drought destroy. For one shining morning, the pocket farm fits neatly in my pocket.

FEDCO has been my absolute favorite seed company (and supplier of books, growing supplies, trees and bulbs) for twenty-plus years. They are affordable. Their non-glossy catalog is extensive, rich in information, and a delight to read. (...And read, and re-read. In the tub, in the car, in bed at nights, FEDCO catalogs are my main source of winter entertainment and summer continuing education. Old dog-eared copies have begun to accumulate on my bookshelf as well.) They have a sense of humor. The seeds germinate, the trees settle in without a hiccup. From FEDCO come zinnias, sunflowers, edible nastirtium and marigold, colored and flavorful basil and fragrant additions like sweet peas and mignonette.
     Johnny's Seeds is glossier, and knows how to attract market farmers. Their selection of cut flowers is hard to ignore, despite the high price of shipping a few packets. Fama Blue scabiosa (so much prettier than its name) and rocket snapdragons join the ranks.
    Seed Savers Exchange is similarly glossy and expensive, but has become a greater interest as I make the transition from home gardener to market grower, but also as I begin to consider the value of saving seeds from my crops, not buying all of it in every year or two and trusting there will always be skilled and willing growers out there able to produce this pocketful of promise for me from one year to the next. In the simplest terms, of course, any open-pollinated (non-hybrid) seed can be saved if you have the staying power and skills of observation to see your plants through from seed to seed. Unfortunately, this most ancient of skills is becoming freighted by copyright laws, politics and corporate machinations. Seed saving is at the heart of  many deep-rooted issues having to do with time, money, climate, and sense of land permanence and birthright. Meantime, the folks at SSE have helped foster my awareness of growing seed-to-seed. Plus they have the kind of sage used in smudging, plus artichokes for foliar and floral interest and Mexican Tarragon which did far better for me than the finicky French stuff, with gorgeous little flowers as an added bonus. Now I'm off to round up pots and get this garden started. Bloom!

More the Fool?

Farm Funding!!! Or...maybe not.

I guess it's true what they say. Despite the recent "market correction" in the credit card industry, it's easier than ever to get a full line of credit for your new business. You don't have to dig very far before the offers start arriving.
    Here is the latest. I was digging through a pile of gorgeous dirt where the original sods from our vegetable garden and pre-chicken compost went, and there among the mass infiltration of goutweed roots was this handsome card from American Express, untarnished despite four years under a heap of old eggshells, clams (the non-currency sort, unfortunately; they were left in this midden heap from a couple of memorable summer meals), broken-down bits of tree prunings and ex-vegetable matter.
Look closely at the print on this solid-gold baby: is a "Business" AmEx, no less. As you can see, they have slashed a percentage off on this offer already!
     Folks, I have no idea how this came to be in the heap.
    On a slightly more sober note, however, three things became apparent from the hours it took to salvage 10 wheelbarrows full of crumbly, black earth for the new flower field:
     1: Don't put your compost pile anywhere near an invasive ground cover, or you may never reap the benefits of your "stash". This was too infested to dare using on any established beds, despite the fact that I went through it one shovel full at a time and took out every bit of goutweed root I could find. When we located the pile there, I had figured the stack of sod — originally 5 feet tall and just as wide —would smother the goutweed and even the blackberry canes growing nearby. Nope. They grew up through it and were clearly happier for the added richness of the soil.
    2: The "Greenware" plastic cup my daughter and I buried there four years ago (made of "compostable plastic") was still so perfectly intact, all the information about its biodegradable properties was still clearly legible. There, too was the "compostable" plastic fork included in the same experiment. Don't fool yourself into thinking bio-plastics are the sound way enjoy your kombucha and that deli quinoa salad. Even in this little pile, so close to the soil surface and in the company of aerobic decomposers of all sorts, there they sat, ready to serve. In a landfill, without those decompositional advantages, how fast will bio-plastic break down?
     3: Beware those generous credit offers. When they've even infiltrated your compost heap, it's time to unsubscribe. I just don't know about AmEx: have they checked my credit history? Are they following me? Not sure, but I know this: once I can't dig in my own backyard without getting "important information about my current credit card"  I've definitely hit my limit! Bloom Where You Are.

Fence and Gate

Corner posts waiting for a shave

It's April 1 and we are putting up the fence around the perimeter. At first I considered going with an electric fence, since no rigid fence shy of eight feet tall will keep out the deer. Amazing writer-homesteader Will Bonsall suggests in his book, The Radical, Self-Reliant Gardener that deer will learn to avoid a single-strand of electric fence if (skip the rest of this paragraph, Mama) it is festooned with strips of peanut-butter-and-jelly-coated tinfoil. Even I can feel that effect on my tongue right now, and I'm nowhere near a wire!
     It seems like that would work, and Will is such a smart man I'll believe anything he's written. But what about the woodchuck? Or rabbits? And hasn't our 5' fence so far kept marauders out of our vegetable garden, maybe simply because deer would rather not feed in an enclosed area unless there is nothing else to eat? A charger strong enough to get deer to listen is $70 at the feed store. Then I'll need wire or tape (another $8-$16), a ground pole ($18) and a bag of insulators ($4). For a single strand fence, it's a tiny bit cheaper to fence electrically than with welded 5' fence. But how much energy will it cost to run the fence? I'd rather not be feeding it fossil-fuel-generated juice at an unknown cost for the full season in order to get a few tutorial jolts in return. A solar fence charger built to generate a sizeable-enough charge is over $100, and will also require a new rechargeable battery ($50) to keep it going long-term. However, a single- or double-strand electric fence would be easier to mow the perimeter of, and it would also, when turned off, allow access to the edge plantings from outside the fence, so in essence it would make the space more user-friendly and the useable space a little larger.

Fencing and a gate

   I decide to go with the 5' fence as the ecological, cheaper-in-the-long-run choice. I can always add extra gimmicks at the top and bottom if it doesn't do its job well enough. Meanwhile, I will not accidentally zap my dog, the neighbor's dog, the neighbor's kids, or myself. Or, for that matter, any deer, Mama. 
     The Patient Spouse talks me into buying 3 50' rolls to get the job all done right. He has also built that nice gate laying on the grass in the background: 5' X 4', two layers of scrap wood from a failed attempt to build an aftermarket greenhouse, with a layer of fencing sandwiched between them. It will require locust posts for a gate, (strap hinges on the gate side, square hinges on the post side which is curved). He also suggests we put locust posts at the corners for extra stability. The rest of the posts will be T-posts salvaged from around the property.  It will be about $150 to fence this spot, with free posts from the family farm.
    Step one is to take all the bark off the two gate posts, and peel the ends of the other posts two feet up, so the buried bark won't rot and loosen the post after it is set. Pictured above are the first three posts and  the ancestral draw shave used to peel them in long, smooth strokes. The wood is green, the blade is sharp, and those details make it so much easier than trying to peel seasoned locust. Pounding in the fence staples on green wood is also easier, and anything that makes those little buggers go in easier is fine by me.
    Also in this top picture notice my product endorsements for hot, cheap, home brewed coffee wherever you go, from a 100% plastic-free thermal cup that doesn't burn your lip or store old coffee smell. It keeps me running; thank you, gifters Krin and Dan. Also, my leather gloves, which were once a serene turquoise blue and had that lovely Martha Stewart design sense, back when Marth was still making homemaking beautiful for average people. I bought them as a splurge about 12 years ago or more, and they're still my favorite non-insulated protection when I wear gloves, which isn't all that often. Fencing is a good time to have gloves on. So is sod stripping. The rest of the time, I'd rather have my fingers in the dirt. Feeling is the first way of knowing. Bloom where you are...

April 1: Ecological Border Patrol

My neighbor Mario is so smart! I explained that I wanted to lay down a two-foot strip of cardboard around the outside edge of my field to slow the goutweed from growing back into the planting area. He suggested I go to the bike shop, because those bike boxes can be cut in half to make two long, long uniform strips. I decided to use two layers of cardboard for extra smother potential. Mario was right: the whole perimeter is nearly done after two trips to the store, and the boxes make the perfect strip of material: very neat. It should decompose and feed the worms, too, adding to the soil in a way that my nemesis, black plastic, never can. It has been a little expensive, though. And I'm not sure what to do with the eight bikes that are left over.

Done! (For now)

Taking a break

Four days of digging, and a 30' X 35' space to plant. !!!!!!!! (Yup, it got five feet bigger at the front edge again - of course it did!)(And now it has been proven to me that 27 + 3 + 5 = 35. Pretty good math for an ol' mom, huh Margot?)
Now I'm resting next to my garden shed, which has been moved twice, so that the Patient Spouse is probably glad his indecisive wife did not put it on a foundation or build it any larger.
    We discussed celebrating by breaking a bottle of champagne over it, but maybe that should wait a few weeks, until it can be determined how much of the goutweed and thistle is actually gone, gone. The removed debris is to the right of this shot, and forms a berm three feet high, five feet wide, and about 20 feet long. Nest step is to cover the perimeter with a thick layer of cardboard covered in wood chips, to try to keep relatively weedless moat around the outside edge. Beyond that, the tall weeds can be scythed short a few times over the course of the summer. The two huge stumps in the back are just inside the fence line. It was probably a bad choice to include them, but they look about half rotten, would be nasty to swing a scythe around, and besides, they've made nice places to put a hot drink, a shed layer of jackets, and for The Farm Dog to perch while he's watching to see if I'm going to the kitchen. Bloom where you are (by golly!)

Naming the Future

First Flower Farm
 

     Of  all the labors of love needed to get my small farm up and growing, finding a focus and choosing a name are proving to be the most emotionally involved (aside from handling rejected farm market applications and not earning a paycheck). A name is a big deal, whether it is labeling a new baby or a new business. Come to think of it, new babies and new businesses seem to have a lot in common: lost sleep, sore bodies, emotional roller-coasters of pure euphoria and intense self doubt, and heaps of hopes for the future misting every moment.
     During four idle hours in the car over Easter weekend, I came up with about 20 possibilities for farm names. Some were based on things I like or consider part of my sense of self: the color red, zinnias, red shoes, braids, my Michigan childhood, the several ancestors who inspired my lifelong love of growing things. Other names suggested the humorous things that inhabit life here at this particular place: our charming house, which looms up from below with its added metal chimney like the Toonerville Trolley, The Farm Dog and his fertilizer-contributing role, the feisty red squirrel who sits just outside the kitchen window everyday at breakfast shouting at nothing apparent, then climbs straight up the stucco to the second-floor roof when we come out to fill the feeder, or the two big white cedar tees that were about the only landscaping of merit this place still had when we moved here.
     Everyone had a different opinion, depending on their interest in back-story and opinion as to the value of including humor in my business image. Should the name be geneeric, or should it immediately reflect that mine is a flower farm? Will that leave me restricted to only flowers if I go on to grow vegetables, too, once I can afford to expand? Hmm... Lots of decisions!
    It was my elder daughter who declared mine to be a "Pocket Farm," not a "micro farm," categorically speaking. What is a "pocket farm" and how is that different from a "micro-farm?" There is no difference, really, aside from the marketing flavor injected into each of these categorical terms. "Micro" is trendy and high-tech, verging on haute—micro chips, micro fridges, micro-greens. A "pocket" is something my sewing, small-town, rotary-phone-using semi-Luddite self can get behind. A pocket is cute, a place to put important things like candies, allowance and yes, Kleenex. A micro-anything is gratuitously small and easily lost.
My interpretations aside, a "pocket farm" is like a "pocket park": small, unexpected, a little surprise out of context with its surroundings, like my farm in the midst of a residential suburb; a little green spot of respite.  So there, for those of you that have missed the tiny-everything wave sweeping through pop culture, is why this is a pocket farm.
     The actual farm name is not so easy to settle on. But I have chosen one, and it has started to feel familiar: First Flower Farm (or maybe it's First-Flower Farm, if I can get that hyphen to be a flower, for which I will have to call in tech support). "First Flower" because, as I write this, it is spring and I, like almost everyone in the cold-bound North, am starved for those first flowers to arrive. First Flower, more importantly, because the earliest memory I have of thinking of myself in connection to plants is that of spotting, in my grandmother's rock-edged garden, an Easter lily she had planted the year before, and toddling in to sink my face in its fragrance. I have always been certain that was the moment I became a gardener. Also, First Flower because of my mantra, which I am investing all my energy into following quite literally at long last. So that this farm, First Flower Farm, becomes the first open bud of Bloom where you are planted.

What to grow?

    What will I grow on my pocket farm? A focus is a matter of heart and of marketability, and the two seem to conflict early and often as I forge ahead on my solo farming endeavor.
     This first year, I have decided to focus my growing efforts on cut flowers. I have always loved growing vegetables above all other things — something I'd like to blog about later on when the furor of getting started is settled and writ upon. Meanwhile, my reasoning is as follows:

Aug. 2015: Bouquet- in-progress from my CSA fields

•     Space: It takes less space to raise flowers. Once they start blooming, you can—and must—keep picking annual flowers to keep them producing. Some vegetables produce all season—or most of it—from the same plant. Many are one-harvest crops: things like root vegetables and seasonal crops like peas. It takes more real estate than I can get ready for planting this year on such short notice.
• Infrastructure: To make produce marketable means you have to keep it coming, it all has to be appealing (meaning you have to grow more than you can sell), and it needs to be washed and packaged appropriately. That means lots of wash water, containers, and abundance. A greenhouse for seedling production is pretty important to filling limited space most efficiently.  Much as I would love to have one, a greenhouse is out of my budgetary reach this year. 
• Justice: What would I really, really like to do? Grow food for low income folks—people like me who can only afford fresh and local if they skimp elsewhere or grow it themselves.  I live in a very wealthy area, with a concomitant high cost of living. "Buying local" is very hip, CSAs are everywhere (this county was the seat of the CSA movement a few decades ago), and every other store in town is a restaurant. There is also a big and largely invisible population of working-class residents with strong, ancient ties to the area (and, for many very valid reasons, an aversion to this imported hip-ness) and a growing population of immigrants who serve the wealthy population and struggle to pay for food and housing , let alone find the kinds of foods they grew up eating.  Who is providing fresh, local food to these folks? Flowers seem like a luxury item, and in some ways, it makes me embarrassed to choose this as a crop for that reason. On the other hand, it would be nice to spread the wealth around. How about an affordable, local source of flowers for weddings? I used to make arrangements for small weddings —some of them very informal affairs—through my church, and it was fun to give luxury and beauty to those occasions.) Imagine getting a deal on fresh flowers that let you make a conscionable bunch part of your housekeeping budget? Further, while flowers should be something one gives as a symbol of everything happy, joyous and hopeful, the hothouse flowers we can get from the grocer or florist are very often not produced under conditions in any way happy or joyous. There is a dark underbelly to the cut flower world, which relies heavily on fossil fuels from farm to florist (think fertilizers, greenhouse heat, air transport, packaging), pesticide use, environmental degradation, and unfair and unhealthy working conditions for those who grow and harvest that happy bouquet for your sweetie or ill friend. 
• Skill base: I have been growing flowers for as long as I have vegetables. I love to work with color, texture, and the seasonality of flowers. Putting together the weekly bouquet for CSA shares was the high point of my former job. Nobody who gets flowers is ever mad about getting them, and nobody ever complained that they didn't know what to do with them. Making bouquets is happy work.

   So, for a startup endeavor, flowers it is. Besides, even if I don't make a profit, I get the chance to spread a lot of joy and make the yard a lot more beautiful than it was, and provide a lot of food and habitat for butterflies, moths, honeybees, native pollinators and hummingbirds. Besides, isn't my motto Bloom where you are planted?

Day 8: Laying it out Mathematically

View East from SW corner

View West from SE corner

Here we are with much of the digging done. How big is the garden, and am I digging the edges crookedly? Time for a string line (shown in blue). I set one of those free, found posts at the SW corner, figuring this is a permanent boundary since it is about as close to the adjoining woods as I want to go, and pretty close to our property line. That's my cherished posthole digger in the foreground - one of the best tools in existence besides a wheel hoe, a T-post setter, a chipper-shredder and good clippers. (And, I hear, a tool called a grape hoe, which I would be more than happy to get from any company that sells one and wants some free online copy writ about its merits...)
As it happens, this eyeballed space is 30' X 27'.
When I go inside at night after laying this out, I find that I am designing (on paper... the pen is lighter than the shovel) a crop layout for a 30' X 30' space. "What's two extra feet?" I asked my younger daughter, who had come out to do her homework in the spring sun. "That's three extra feet," she said. The kid is brilliant. She wants to major in math with a specialty in statistics and a minor in psychology. You can see why.
    Tomorrow, the string will move East three feet into goutweed sod. Meanwhile, this endeavor needs a name. And a mathematician. Bloom where you are planted.

Budgeting, Part 2 (Day 5)

1/4 of what is under the surface

    While it may prove impossible to hold to, a $500 budget for this farming endeavor is easy to settle on (see earlier post). I want to be able to do this without machinery (aside from our Ford Transit van for transporting produce off-farm and supplies back). I'm used to making do with what's on hand, especially after 5 years farming for a non-profit. Above all, as I mentioned earlier, working from a tiny budget not only scares skinflint-me less; it also prompts a lot of creative problem-solving, which is fun and deeply satisfying. In fact, it often makes me feel richer than I am when I understand how much of my "economy" is actually things with no price tag: support, advice, inventiveness.
       Budgeting my time is a different matter. If I'm not good at spending money or taking risks, I'm also not good at taking on only what can be reasonably accomplished. Friends and family know this. I blame it on my January birthday; I don't study astrology, but every Capricorn I've ever known is the same: we think that if we can conceive of doing something, we are obligated to go ahead and execute it. Capricorns invented "multitasking."
    This recognized, how do I budget the time, energy, confidence, and sheer hours of labor it will require to start a home business? Not just any home business, but one which, being seasonally dependent, comes with a pre-set timetable for setting up "shop" (growing , processing and office spaces), for stocking "inventory" (plants!), acquiring permitting (insurance...grumble), applying for venue opportunities and advertising. It all has to happen. Plus, meals must be made, appointments kept, family members nurtured, Farm Dog walked, etc. Sleep is also a good idea.
    Right away, it's obvious that I will have to give myself a time budget if I'm not going to drive myself, the Patient Spouse and other family members crazy.
     In the herculean task of starting up, I've decided on the following. Every day, I will set myself to do five things which forward the endeavor of establishing the farm. (At first, I thought I'd buy myself a white board and write them out. Then I remembered I had a big poster frame with a masonite back and missing glass, and a can of chalkboard paint in the basement. Voila: free task chalkboard—and, in making it, one task accomplished!)  All jobs go on a to-do list, which lets me keep them from racing through my mind. The to-do list has two columns: jobs for good weather, and jobs for foul weather/evenings.

1/2 empty ground

     Of course, there are many projects that just can't be finished in one day, like the garden-making. Here, I set myself to dig one quarter of the space a day. Roots, buried wood and tree chunks go on a big pile along the side I will expand into in later years (I hope!). Rocks go in another pile out of the way at the back of the garden along the property line. I haven't measured out the space, but it looks like a manageable amount to get ready for cultivating at this point, 10 weeks out from the last frost date. It is great luck to have the frost out of the ground and the weather warm and dry this first week of digging in.
    As my daughters would say, "So... How's that workin' out for you, Mom?"
    8 hours a day is about all the digging I can muster. The gorgeous photo at the top of this entry shows the roots removed by the end of day 1 of Big Dig 2.0. For scale reference, that pile is 3' high and about 5'wide X 5' long. Bottom pic shows day 2, looking south, with remnants of the latest burn pile and my trusty wheelbarrow. It's working out. Budgeting my ambition is a huge help. But that space... how big is it? It's looking kind of small for a farm—even a pocket farm. Hmm...
Bloom where you are planted.

Keeping Guard?

The Farm Dog? (Burping)

Tomorrow, it's back to writing about the budget. Today, April 4, in honor of The Farm Dog's 11th birthday, a few thoughts on farm security.
Let me begin with a recommendation: if you want to protect your crops from woodchucks, don't get one of these (see photo at left). This is a very cute dog: 40-45 pounds of mixed variety shelter dog, containing sheltie without the herding instinct; spaniel without the pointing, flushing or retrieving instinct; basset hound without the  howl; beagle without the sense of smell; and probably some chihuahua without whatever it is they were designed for. Off duty, he goes by the name of Curtis (not sure why: he came with that handle). He occasionally flushes a songbird from the grass beneath the bird feeder, makes a stab now and then at chasing five minutes behind a squirrel, and once he caught a mosquito and ate it. I think he sometimes looks at the deer when they come as close as the back porch. He's a nice guy, and he does a great job of making sure that I, the farmer, am where I am supposed to be (the kitchen, preferably). Since our vegetable garden has a good fence and the deer seem to respect it, that has been fine. There was a resident rabbit for a short time two summers ago, but it came and went. Supposedly there is a red fox in our neighborhood, and so we didn't really need the mad skills of The Farm Dog until the very end of day one of the Pocket Farm endeavor.
     It was about 5:30pm, and after a day of digging goutweed, I had gone inside to shower and make dinner when the Patient Spouse called from upstairs, "Hey! Look out the window!"
     About 30 feet from the house, a giant woodchuck was ambling across the yard, looking, I swear, from me, to the vegetable garden, to the farm-plot-in-progress. He had that fat cat look of entitlement, too. There was a tiny bead of drool on his whiskery undershot chin. He was salivating for locally grown produce. It was the first woodchuck I had seen or heard of in the neighborhood since we moved here four-plus years ago. He or she must have picked up on the optimistic vibes emanating from my seed-catalog-riddled mind on that historic day of groundbreaking.
     Nothing, and I mean nothing, is so deadly to growing succulent annual crops of any kind than a woodchuck. They are ravenous and catholic in their tastes: asparagus to zinnias, they will try it, and they will like it. A woodchuck's life is predicated on the assumption that any crop grown by humans is in all ways superior to that found in nature. They are methodical: they start at the end of the row nearest their two-or-more-front doors and work their way down. They feed at dawn, dusk, all day, and probably at night, too—in fact, I think they do all their sleeping from December through early March, so they can pretty much operate 24/7 the rest of the agricultural year. They can dig and tunnel better than any Marine. Fat as they are, they can also climb fences. Smoke bombs, as far as I can tell, upset my sleep far more than theirs. Trapping and transporting these guys isn't as humane—or effective—or legal—as it sounds. Only a good farm dog can help in the fight against woodchucks, in my frustrating and lengthy experience. I did (prior to Himself pictured above) have a collie who quickly and effectively dispatched three during her lifetime. I called The Farm Dog, and ran outside in sock feet with Chuck in my sights and the Man in Curls at my side.
    He stopped to check a few pee spots on the way. I took off after Chuck, who beat it for the stack of lumber behind the garage, where he (or she) hunkered down like a trembling buffalo robe and glared up at me with slitted eyes. I grabbed a board. Chuck started to chatter its long, ivory-colored chompers at me. Every time I averted my gaze, it lunged.
     A word of assurance to my mother, who is surely reading this: this tale does not get much more violent. The board was used for purposes of physical discouragement, but I am notoriously bad at killing anything, even for mercy or in what might be considered economic self-defense. Most of the five-minute exchange that followed involved a loud verbal discourse (me) and a staring match (both of us). Where was The Farm Dog? He sniffed from a safe distance, caught sight of that pair of yellowy incisors gnashing, and decided woodchuck was on his list of Things Other Dogs Pursue. Granted, this is more help than I received from the Patient Spouse (although he did come outside later on more of a post-war consulting basis).
    Maybe 11 is too old for more than cursory protective services? The neighbor's dog, to whom The Farm Dog is semi-officially espoused and who is of equal antiquity, has a strong instinct for finding and burying all manner of post-decease "prey" (including the cardboard I laid down for mulch), lets no screen door stand in her way, and has been known—in her youth—to keep this small nation-state safe from poultry. Her coloration also makes her serviceable as a stand-in Holstein from time to time. So maybe she had words with Chuck.  He has not returned in the two weeks since this bit of opening-day excitement.
     There are horse-whisperers and baby whisperers, dog whisperers and lately, chicken whisperers. Woodchuck shouters? Maybe that's an unexplored avenue I can monetize. In the meantime, if you're in the market for a farm dog,  I know where you can't get one. But if you see this fellow, wish him a happy birthday (and send him home; he's probably celebrating in at your compost pile.) Hey: Bloom where you are planted.
   

Shovellin' Out the Money? Day 2

 

Free fence posts!

As I work the first quadrant of my pocket farm shovelful by shovelful, a song from the Little House books (you guessed it - they're high on my list of things admired) runs through my mind. Its last verse is, There's gold enough on the farm, boys / If only you'll shovel it out. Even Almanzo Wilder, the song's vocalist and a born farmer, recognized the irony in his tune. Farming and money are uneasy bedfellows. Farming is a gamble, and which way the balance sheet will tend is ultimately dependent as much on chance as it is on skill.
   Money—making it, losing it, spending it— isn't fun. In my family, money has always been something that is best 1: not discussed and, 2: not spent. The more emotionally influential side of my family, my mother's, was comprised of midwestern German shopkeepers and Scotch midwestern potato farmers. I was raised to understand that "if you can't pay in cash, you shouldn't buy it"—whatever "it" might be. You shouldn't even want "it." Besides, Something Might Happen (I'm still not sure what, but it's a powerful boogeyman): when It did, you better have a rainy day fund.
   My parents were ingenious and inventive when it came to raising children and a farm on a shoestring during an economic recession and in a poor area of the country. My father taught himself every handyman skill possible, from repairing the well pump and keeping the old lawn tractor running, to jacking up a barn and repairing the foundation, building several outbuildings sturdier than our jury-built house, and pretty much repairing everything that could be repaired. Once, rather than drive the half hour to a car parts store, he machined me a new washer for my car's oil pan plug! My mother made our best clothes herself, restored the sandblows on our eroded 80 acres with salvaged materials, and partnered with the Soil and Water Conservation District to get all the plants for hedgerows, ornamental plantings and soil stabilization projects as cheaply as possible. Making do and making from scratch have always seemed like normal things to me, not some new-found ethic of the Salvage-chic era. My house—and this pocket farm— was paid for on the backs of generations of this self-imposed scrimp-and-save ethos. It is a great gift, and a good ethos. It also makes me fearful as anything when it comes to spending my savings.
     Scotsmen and storekeepers do not quit their paying jobs. They certainly do not do so, and then go on to write big checks for infrastructure on a new enterprise for which there may or may not be a market. So it is a gut-wrenching thing for me, this waking up in the morning with the intention of spending money and not making any. My patient spouse says, "You have to spend money to make money." It is a scary thought for me in so many ways.
     So, says I, I'll set a limit. A week before the farm idea arose, my parents sent me a $500 check. They claimed it was money they "forgot" to give me for my (already lavish) birthday. $500 of "free money." Well. There's the budget for starting my farm.

The Garden Shed

     This is personal info, but it is also a good thing to keep in mind as you follow me through this adventure. Being a tightwad is stressful and a downer, yes. But it is also a delightful prompt to  ingenuity, and it heightens my awareness of the generosity of those known and unknown who contribute all the time as I take this leap. For example, check out my free fenceposts. Whoever kept a garden or livestock on this property left them behind for me to discover - at least $12 worth of materials I won't have to buy. Ditto the locust poles harvested from my husband's family property, where like many good farmers, someone once started a "fence grove" to supply free rot-proof posts for generations to come. My "border patrol", an attempt to keep goutweed away from the fence line, is a layer of cardboard freely and cheerfully provided by the local bike shop. Then there is my "rototiller" and "garden shed." A huge tip-of-the-pen here  to "Whizzbang Gardener" Herrick Kimball, who has solved so many tiny but crucial gardening dilemmas beautifully and cheaply, he has written a book on the subject. (Check out his ingenious blog!)  His "Whizzbang wheel hoe" was my big splurge last year. Now I get to use it in place of the gas-guzzling, noise-making, weed-seed-replanting, burn-causing rototiller I don't own, to keep garden paths in trim. It is the world's best tool! More on that in future. Meantime, above is his design for a "Whizzbang Garden Shed," which looks deceptively like my brother-in-law's unwanted mailbox set atop two chunks of a blue spruce tree dying in our yard which were too big to burn in this spring's heap. Voila: A place to put my camera, notebook, permanent markers, scissors, and anything else  I brought to the garden and don't want to leave on the ground.
     Then there is the support of friends, neighbors and family—no dollar figure can ever express how much this generosity of spirit and these gifts of confidence bolster my shoestring endeavor as no equity loan could. Add to that birdsong, the play of light and shadow, the incredible healing capacity of getting hands in dirt, and the sparkle of the Housatonic River visible from my garden only just at this time of year between thaw and leaf-out. It is a generous budget indeed. Almanzo would agree, I think. Bloom where you are planted.
     

First, Weeds - March 22

Gardener's-Eye View of Competition

 The first step in starting a farm is making a place to plant. Neither of these pictures do justice to the proposed space for my pocket farm, because much of what needs to be dug out to make the soil available is still dormant under the surface.
    There are three kinds of "weed" any gardener must contend with: woody plants (these have heavy root systems and perennial tops above ground: anything from established trees to the blackberry and black-cap briars and grape vines pictured here), perennial herbaceous plants (whose tops die off in winter but whose roots store up energy to regrow the plant the following spring), and annual plants (those that grow from seed in the spring and are killed by the frost or winter). I know just by looking at this cover of twiggy tops that the soil beneath my proposed growing space is a thick mass of mostly perennial weed roots.

Thorns and Thistles

     Weeds are part of the original literal curse of Adam. There's good reason why the God of Genesis tells "sinful Adam" not only will he have to grow food on his own from now on, but that the land will bear "thorns and thistles." Any farmer reading those words knows what that curse amounts to in painful slivers, cut hands and unending hard work. My pocket farm on day 1 is right out of Chapter and Verse, with an almost Biblical serving of thistles, goldenrod, and goutweed.
     Weeds are more—much more—than a boring impediment to pretty plants and tidy spaces. It is almost more important and helpful to know and understand the botanical workings of the plants you don't want in a space than the ones you do want there. Why? Because weeds tell you about your soil: its fertility, its history, its pH, its potential. Moreover, each kind of weed has a different way of persisting. (The very trait defines them as weeds, as opposed to desirables. Even Himalayan blue poppies would be a "weed" if they grew in similarly adaptable and prolific ways as crabgrass, lamb's quarters and chickweed.) What is a weed's lifecycle? How does it reproduce? How does it coexist with other plants? This all might sound boring to the weekend gardener. But those weeds are the first way of knowing a soil, and they will, like it or not, be the most constant of companions every day of the gardening year. The less you understand of them, the more companionable they are likely to be, because you won't know what you are fighting and how best to eliminate it.
     What does this have to do with breaking ground at my tiny proposed farm?
      Everything.
     Thistles are tough. They are equally at ease growing from seed (as the upstarts hiding out in my lawn waiting to stab little bare feet can testify). They send down long, brittle roots, finding places to thread under and through (rocks, buried tree branches, old roots, submerged trash), making extrication difficult. The smallest piece of root can form a strong new plant, even springing up from a foot underground, so any of those brittle pieces left behind become a means of multiplying thistles by thistles. If artichokes (another member of the thistle family) spread half as easily, we'd be eating them breakfast, lunch and dinner.
     Goldenrod clings tenaciously. It sends thick runner roots in all directions from the parent plant, so that where there was one stem of goldenrod one year, there will be a fairy ring of them the next. A field of goldenrod is the result of these overlapping, interwoven circles. I've pulled out goldenrod runners two feet long ferreting out the best place to surface and flourish.
     Both are no equal to goutweed (or bishop's weed, as it is sometimes called). Aegopodium repens is it's Latin name, "repens" because of its creeping habit, Aegopodium because... well, I don't speak Latin, but I can imagine this is what the first Roman boarding students called that kid who was boastful, obnoxious, persistent, and always in someone's face — the one nobody could stand as a roommate. The tiniest, tiniest nubbin of its slender root will make a strong new plant, which will reproduce endlessly and everywhere, laying down a mass of roots so thick it's difficult to get a shovel through the tangle underground. Sun, shade, good soil or bad, goutweed isn't picky. Spray it with herbicide ( I have even resorted to the evil R-product to try killing it)  and it turns the other cheek faster than a field of GMO corn.
      How to turn a 30' X 27' space from a triumvirate of these adversaries into open soil? (Okay, okay - I know even "weed" is a human judgement call and every plant has not only some use to humans but also a crucial role in the greater ecosystem. But I also know I can't sell goutweed, goldenrod or thistles at a farm market, other than to a few gouty folk and those longing for the days of Adam. Out they must come.) For about $80 a day plus gas and noise, I can rent a sod cutter, which makes short work of turning lawn grass into bare (compacted) garden space. But there are three problems with going that route. These roots run deeper than grass sod. In some places, they would lift in one slice like turf but in others,  the soil is too loose a network of roots below and dry growth above to lift out, rather than mix in. Oh, and that $80? It's a big chunk of my $500 budget to spend on one tool. (More on this in the next post.) Nix on the sod cutter.
     Big fields are turned to cropland by plowing and harrowing or by rototilling. I could rent a tiller for the same price as that sod cutter I'm not springing for. This would be a bad, bad thing. Remember what I said about those tiny pieces of root? Rototilling would essentially amount to a day spent on a big dividing-and-propagating effort. I would turn a thatch of goutweed and a patch of thistles into a big, nicely aerated nursery area for a million propagated gout and thistle youngsters. Yoicks!
      The best easy way to deal with perennial weeds is probably to till, plant a series of quick-growing annual smother crops, mow or till, repeat two more times, follow up with a thick winter cover crop, and try agin next year. Alternatively, I could cover the whole thing in black plastic, which is a good smother method, too, but doesn't help the soil and also means waiting a year.
     The next, and only, other way is to dig out those roots. Every one of 'em.
     It seems reasonable at the time. By the second shovelful, when my patient spouse comes out to check on me, I confess, "This is crazy."
     It is, too. The 30' X 27' space looks awfully big. But as Ma said in the Little House books, "Where there's a will, there's a way." She also said, "What must be done is best done cheerfully." She also probably said a lot of things under her breath, but those have not been printed in the Little House books.   I say, Bloom where you are planted, and put that shovel to the dirt for a third time.