Life in the Slow Lane

More rain today. The claypan in my yard where I planted the daikon radish seeds is now underwater (again). I felt sorry for the little guys this week as they drowned. I felt slightly better about the whole lake-in-the-yard business when I went over to S.'s house and lovely wild gardens in Cumberland to dig some plants and she said, "any interest in low-bush cranberries? You don't need a bog..." to which I replied, "no problem! I have a bog!" After 4 hours I went home with a fogged-up carful ( and trunkful) of plants, some of which I managed to get in the ground before it became too rainy and too dark to continue. I'm now completely soaked, muddy and utterly happy with my day.

So, those daikon radish sprouts that have been underwater for an entire week are still alive. The yard finally drained today and I went to take a look. We'll see whether they will make it. I'm rooting for them. Sorry, I couldn't resist. :-)

Last night while Googling for asparagus guilds (a "guild" is a permaculture term used to describe a bunch of plants that support each other as a mutually beneficial system) I discovered the Portland Permaculture Meetup and signed up to go to this month's meeting. I'm looking forward to meeting a few local permies. The group organizer mentioned kiwis in a post so I definitely want to talk to her about that! I'm planning an arbor behind the first floor deck to screen it from the apartment house next door. Maybe then my tenant can use the deck without feeling like he's on display. I was originally thinking grapes or maybe hardy kiwifruit, but right now sandra berry is my favorite. Hmmm...should I do that first, or should I do the cob wall in the back so I can put in the peach tree? Or should I do the big trellis up the deck posts along the driveway and put sandra berries there, and kiwi over the deck in the back? Is this what M. means when he says I have too many projects?? Nawwww...

But speaking of "too many projects", (whatever that is), tonight after cleaning house and practicing the violin for a bit I made the 5 frame struts for my Murphy bed. I need to get a framing square and then I'll be ready to screw together the rest of the frame. The Sawhorse Fairies (how's that for a mental picture?) left me a gift of a beautiful pair of adjustable sawhorses, so I was able to work at a comfortable height. Wheeeee!

It really is getting to be Spring ("Spring" only lasts 3 days in Maine, but we spend weeks getting there...): it's past 6:00, sun is streaming through my southwest windows, seed catalogs are open on the kitchen table as I figure out which permaculture projects I will tackle this summer. At school, they've finally fixed the heat in my room (just in time!); they discovered that a vent had been wide open all winter, which explains why I was often wearing a hat and scarf indoors. What was that about Portland Schools going over budget on heating expenses this winter?

Now I'm gearing up for this Saturday's TML performance at the Downeast Country Dance Festival, holding the last of my parent/teacher conferences, and thinking happily of Easter weekend in NYC. And really making an effort not to eat any Cadbury Creme Eggs. :-)

When I was 8, my family moved from our subsistence farm in Wilton to the big city of South Portland. I had never seen so many cars--the day we moved in, Ryan and I spent every possible moment counting the cars that went by the house. In the backyard were several large trees, but the quirkiest and most accessible (i.e., easy to climb with lots of places to sit and build platforms) was one that one of us named "Apple Tree Avenue".

A few weeks ago my mom told me that Apple Tree Avenue was finally dead enough to be a hazard and had to be cut down. When Dad cut through it, the whole middle was rotten. My ears pricked right up: rotten wood? Can I come get some? Not only was there a bunch of nice, punky, crumbly wood, but loads of decomposed soil from the middle of the tree. So now I have a nice hugelkultur in my yard, courtesy of Apple Tree Avenue and grass clippings from my hayfield...er, yard. I threw down some weeds and clippings, then the smaller pieces of rotten wood, then heaps of grass clippings, and topped it off with the soil that I had dug out of the trunk of the tree. Add some squash seedlings from Mom (I'm not sure whether she planted those or whether they just came up in the compost, and have no idea what kind of squash...surprise!), add some bricks for thermal mass, and viola! [sic] Instant squash mountain.

The squash hugelkultur is cooking along. I refuse to water it, because, I mean, it's squash! You don't plant squash, you wait for the squirrels to bury seeds for you or for it to come popping out of the compost, (thereby telling you that your compost isn't getting hot enough...), but in no way do you coddle it. Same with tomatoes; I didn't plant any tomatoes this year. And then, when I suddenly had 150 volunteer tomato plants, I remembered throwing a tomato plant on the garden last year. I see that I will have cherry tomatoes, probably later than everyone else because they planted themselves from seed, but as it required no work on my part (except for a gigantic amount of thinning), I'll take it. They're very conveniently coming up in the peas, so when I slash the peas down in a few weeks maybe the tomatoes will really get going.

I suppose I am coddling my squash a little bit, because I filled in the brick mulch I started, but that's it. Time to go out and do some heavy gardening, which in a mulched garden means: eating peas.

Finally! Today I had an afternoon off, so I decided to tackle my nearly-complete hoop house project. I strapped the pipe to the frames, screwed in the wood strapping pieces on top of the pipe, and walked over to the Farmers' Union to see what kind of plastic they had. I probably would have finished tonight, but ended up talking to my next door neighbor for a while. I'm so close, though! The icky part will be shoveling mulch into my parents' trailer and then into the boxes.

These houses are a modification of the hoop houses that have been going in around town as the Portland Permaculture Meetup folks hold work parties. I made my boxes in 2 sections out of whatever wood I had left over from various summer house projects. I can't wait to try these out this winter!

Today I got out the apple peeler/corer/slicer thingy and made some apple upside-down cakes. Two 8" cakes this time instead of one big one. One I took over to Liz's today to eat during our sewing date and the other I was going to bring to my sister-in-law until I remembered that I'd put butter in it, and she's off all wheat and dairy right now. That's OK--it was nice to come home from a party and wind down with some apple cake. It's still not exactly the way I want it, but close.

It's hard for me to line up the apple on the apple peeler/corer/slicer so that it takes the core out straight. Sometimes I get the side of the core left in the slices, and it's tough. I have to cut it out with a paring knife. I wonder if smaller apples also have smaller cores and so would work better? I can't believe I never noticed.

Other current apple dilemma: what kind of apple tree to plant in the yard this year? The Fedco catalog always makes me want to hang city life and go plant a whole orchard of different varieties, but I have managed to narrow it down to 3 choices: Black Oxford, Canadian Strawberry, or Esopus Spitzenburg. I confess that a large part of the attraction of the Esopus Spitzenburg is the name of it. Come on! It's an Esopus Spitzenburg! How could I not want one of those in my yard? But one of the others may yet beat it out.

The viburnum tried to die this Spring. And then it tried to produce a gazillion little suckers. I thinned them to the ones that looked the most promising, planted a bunch of scarlet runner beans around them (I left the old dead tall branches for bean supports), mulched the whole lot, and left it for the summer, hoping that the beans would fix nitrogen for the struggling viburnum.

Today I cut down the dead part and then got busy with the pruning saw in other parts of the yard (dead larch in the back). Finally planted the daylilies my mom gave me, carted tons of mulch hay around, and dragged the logs from Apple Tree Avenue to use as edging for my keyhole bed. Then I was tired. Then my mom called and said "Merry Christmas! 3 yards of mulch will be delivered to your house on Monday." My mom is the best.

Inside, I shelled the dry pods of the scarlet runners. I think I'll save them until Spring, when I can inoculate them and plant them with the hazelnut seedlings for a living windbreak.

During one of the permaculture work parties this summer a bunch of us were talking about composting and what happens when you start composting: all of a sudden, everything is compost. You eat lunch at work and save the scraps to take home to your pile. You eye your neighbor's plate and wonder how you can convince him not to throw that out, but to let you have it to take home for compost instead, and so on. Liz now sends me home from rehearsal with a bucket full of scraps.

A few weekends ago at the permaculture solstice potluck I was talking to a fellow permie whose childhood job it was to walk around his family's farm with a jug of blood to fertilize the fruit trees. This conversation came on the heels of a conversation with A. about our menstrual cups, so my ears perked up immediately (particularly since I'll be planting a Black Oxford apple in my yard this Spring). How cool. I mean, I already love my menstrual cup (5 years now!) but now I'm thinking, wow, I could actually save this blood (maybe in the freezer? Dunno. Is that gross? No more gross than, say, a bunch of bloody beef, but that's just my opinion. I didn't have to die, for example...) and put it to good use.

Huh. Now the real question is: how to broach this subject to other ladies, even the ones who already use menstrual cups and are thus more chill about the whole blood from your body thing. If sending me home with a bucket of compost is Level 1, what the heck level of acceptance of your body and of the whole life cycle does it require to get women to come dose my apple tree every month? Now some possible scenarios are making me giggle. But still.

I love the hoop houses, but they've been losing heat because I can't keep the fronts shut. After a conversation with another person from the Portland permaculture group, I revamped one house yesterday in the hour of daylight I had after getting home from school. I screwed a brace into the tubing on each side (to hold them together as I took the house off the rebar spikes), lifted off the tubing/cover, pulled out the 4 rebar spikes, and drove them in inside the box. I carefully put the house over the new rebar locations and stapled the plastic back down. It now closes much more tightly in front. This morning as I left for school in sleet/freezing rain, the remodeled hoop house looked steamy on the inside.

On Saturday it was 45 degrees and sunny and the apartment was all cleaned and rearranged and ready for the party, so J. and I went outside and remodeled the other hoop house. In November I had planted a bunch of seeds in that one, and then was disappointed with the gaping fronts of the hoop houses in the winter winds. The ground froze, just a little inside, so I gave up and figured I'd do a planting in the early Spring.

Anyway, as we were getting ready to lift the tubing and plastic off of the frame, J. said, "is there something growing in there?" and I poked my head in and...yes! 3 kinds of lettuce and Asian greens and who knows what else (I forget exactly what I planted), tiny sprouts that must have surfaced in the last few days of relatively balmy (30s and 40s) weather. Woohoo!

I returned from a bike ride to Tina's today to see both hoop houses nicely steamy and much better sealed. I'm hoping to see bigger lettuce in one, and a nice environment for my wild-blueberries-from-seed experiment in the other, come March. But first let's see if they make it through tonight's snowstorm.

Happiness is planting in the garden (hope it will rain tonight...) and picking huge stalks of lovage and chopping it into salad. My whole kitchen smells of lovage--or maybe it's my hands that reek of it. Powerful stuff. Mmmmm. Springtime.

See, I knew there was a reason I hadn't yet taken all of those maple tree limbs to the "transfer facility". Clearly they were waiting to be a trellis for my cucumber plants! A. came over on Friday and helped with the transformation. The uprights have holes drilled in the bottom, with rebar pounded in, so no digging was necessary...just 2 ladies hanging on pieces of tree branch to get the darn things down in the ground.

A. suggested the use of the forked branches for base supports, with the added benefit of several minutes of "crotch" comments. We finished just as the thunderstorm arrived.

Wow, what was today's weather all about? Warm, sunny, Bonita outside chasing her tail in the crispy leaves...pretty soon I won't even need the hoop houses. But yesterday I finished getting them ready, and today they were hot and steamy. I planted lettuce, shiso, and herbs. This year I set them up together as one long house with 2 doors. In their new spot, they'll get more Spring sun than last year, and with my new design, they won't be flapping open in the Winter winds. I hope.