frontyard gardens

CNN has the second article I have seen in the past two weeks about people who have planted their gardens in their front yards.

Leigh Anders, who tore up about half her front lawn four years ago and planted vegetables, said her garden sends a message that anyone can grow at least some of their food. That task should shift from agribusiness back to individuals and their communities, said Anders, of Viroqua, Wisconsin.

Read the whole article

I wish I could have a bigger garden in my front yard; unfortunately, the yard is too small and too shady for such a garden to succeed. The sidewalk is little more than twelve feet from the front of the house, and the yard is dominated by a maple tree we planted in the front yard the summer we moved in. Additionally, the yard frequently is shaded by the house next door -- we have small lots -- and by our house as well.

I have been able to grow several things in the front yard, including strawberries, lettuce, sunflowers, hot peppers, and sunflowers. This year we also are growing green beans and wax beans there as well, with two tomato plants doing quite nicely in containers. I wouldn't mind eventually eliminating the rest of the sod we have in our front yard and replacing it with a combination of flowers and herbs.

The bulk of our garden is in the back yard, but it's plagued by a groundhog that has killed my cucumber, zucchini and squash plants. Eventually I hope to raise the beds enough to keep it safe from the groundhog, but I'm not sure how likely that is in the foreseeable future.

first bloom of spring

It's not the warmer days or the sunlight that make spring beautiful. It's the flowers, and it always has been.

By the time those first flowers appear, the color has been leached out of the world for long that it hardly seems possible that there ever was a deep green the color of grass, a white as pure as a daffodil, or a pink as vivid as a rhododendron. For as long as I can remember, the world has been a weaker shade of bland: gray skies of mottled clouds, gray lawns pocked with barren gaps, and a cover of lifeless brown that blankets flower beds where last fall's leaves have gone unraked.

When the first green shoots poke through that dull and tepid mulch, it's like a kind word after a week of indifferent silence. And when a crocus the color of royalty bursts into bloom, it is the gentle touch of a lover's hand on your arm during the night.

Spring, which comes after a long and barren winter, is a miracle and a gift of God. Never fail to treasure it.



Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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fresh strawberies ... yeechh

Never let it be said that I don't do things for my wife and children that I don't personally enjoy.

 

Strawberries, for instance. I don't know, but I've never liked them. Can't stand them, really. Still, Natasha and the girls love them and love to eat them. We buy them constantly at the supermarket, usually when they're on sale but often when they're not.

 

Well, last year I bought two strawberry plants and put them in our garden out front. Over the course of the summer, the plants multiplied and spread and assumed control of about half the admittedly small garden. Once strawberry season hit this year, the plants began churning out the fruits at a steady clip. Every day for the past week-and-a-half, I've gone out in the morning and picked off a half-dozen or more strawberries for the three of them to split.

 

Yesterday, Evangeline gave me the highest compliment a home gardener can
get from his child. She said: "These are even better than the strawberries we buy at the store!"

 

She gets it. She really gets it. Home-grown produce is the best sort. Even if -- and I absolutely mean this -- even if it's not the sort of produce you like to eat yourself.

the pain of gardening

I feel sore all over today. My shoulder aches, my wrist hurts, and even my arm has had better days. My leg is stiff and my back would like to kill me.

I am sore, but it's a good sore.

Yesterday, the girls and I spent a few hours at a garden plot we rent for $15 dollar a year. With the girls' help, over the last two days, I have turned the soil in about half a 20-by-20 plot, dug trenches and piled a hill, gives eleven tomato and three zucchini plants their new homes, and sowed four half-rows of corn.

And when I say that I did this with the girls' help, I am not exaggerating. They didn't do any of the spading, obviously, but they did pitch in at an age-appropriate level. When I pulled weeds out from the soil, they both ran the roots back to the compost pile, and they also disposed of the old sunflower stalks.

And let's not forget their eagerness to help plant the plants we already started. I honestly had to make them take turns digging holes by hand for the zucchini. I'm hoping that this translates into a desire for zucchini later in the summer, or at least into a willingness to eat it.

They've been just as involved in the gardening at home, where a sizeable portion of the yard has been converted to one flower bed after another. This is especially true of the front yard, where I have no fewer than six flower beds, although I'll concede that three of them have run together into one giant spread of color.

Directly in front of the house, running from the stoop on the right to the driveway on the left , is the first bed. This one has an azalea and rhododendron, two peonies, a hibiscus, three ferns, a mass or two of daffodils, and a handful of annuals that this year are sunflowers that Ruthie planted.

On the opposite side of the stoop, running down to the sidewalk, is a gardening bed where I grow my lettuce and some broccoli for easy picking, a strawberry patch that has a few dozen flowers, and a few wildflowers. Evangeline had such a fun time planting annuals with me on Saturday that I let her plant six impatiens of her very own in the back, directly by the stoop.

Next to the sidewalk, one touching the driveway and the other touching the walkway to the stoop, are two triangular beds where I grow daffodils, irises and hyacinths. The flowers on these have died back now, but the area is blanketed with a cover of myrtle.

And smack in the middle of the yard is a raised bed where I grow some mums and whatever annuals we happen to fancy that particular year. This year, the girls chose petunias with three different flower colors and some impatiens. The girls and I spent a nice chunk of last week digging holes all around the front yard for these flowers, and we still have a few other annuals and perennials to find homes for.

I'm telling you, this has been a great springtime for me, and for them. I'm enjoying spending the time with them, and they're not only catching my passion for organic gardening, they're developing a sense of pride and ownership in what we produce. That also will give them a greater appreciation of the environment and a greater connection to the ebb and flow of the seasons and how that affects us.

I feel sore all over today from the work, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

guerilla gardening gone wrong

Earlier this spring I planted a packet of morning glory seeds with the goal of planting them at various places around the yard. There's also a no-parking sign by the street that is kind of dull to look at, so I was thinking how neat it would look to have a morning glory tendril winding around the signpost and bursting into bloom.

So yesterday evening I'm planting it, when my neighbor comes down the street, sees me working by the post, and asks if someone knocked the sign over, as has happened before.

I explained what I was doing, and he said, "Um, Dave, you know this is my yard, right?"

I was mortified. It's about seven feet past the property line, so there's really no way not to think the sign isn't on his property. I don't know what I was thinking. It just flat-out didn't occur to me that I was digging a hole or planting a flower in someone else's yard.

I apologized profusely, and he was really cool about it. He even suggested other neighbors' yards where I could plant morning glories, suggested some work I could do in his back yard, and joked that he might come over to my yard and remove a few bushes that he doesn't like.

If there is an election held this year for Stupidest Neighbor on the Block, I think I would win hands down.

triumphs and setbacks

I'm torn between the feeling of tremendous accomplishment and tremendous disappointment this year where the yard and the garden are concerned.

I'm pretty sure I've stated on the forum before that I'm committed to the organic philosophy where my garden and yard are concerned. In short: no pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. Everything is done the way God designed nature to do it itself.

First is the good news that makes me feel like I've accomplished something. We've come a long way. The guy who owned this house before me didn't share the organic philosophy. He sprayed weedkiller and pesticides everywhere, and bombed the yard with Miracle Gro and other chemical fertilizers. When we moved in, there was a token layer of top soil, the earth was compacted and painful to walk on in your bare feet, and there was virtually no grass. There were entire chunks of the yard where literally nothing was growing, and when I dug the ground with a shovel, I never found a single earthworm. (You kind of need them for healthy soil.)

Today, through the efforts of reseeding the lawn piece by piece and fertilizing with compost (plus some Milorganite, an organic fertilizer produced by the city of Milwaukee from its sewage), we have a lustrous green lawn in the back yard. You can walk on it and treat your toes to a trip across a spongy green carpet. There are flowers blooming everywhere, and some of the parts of the yard that never supported anything are bursting with life. (The back quarter of our yard is an area I haven't planted anything in at all. I'm giving it a sabbath rest and letting it regenerate on its own. All I do is pull up maple seedlings since I don't want it turning into woods.)

Every time I dig into the earth with a shovel, I find earthworms. They're everywhere again. We had a flea problem last year that I eradicated with beneficial nematodes, an organism that also kills lawn grubs and termite colonies without harming people, pets or the lawn. I actually want to get some more of them to make sure the termites we had in the back corner of our yard really are all gone.

Plus I see lots of ladybugs. Ladybugs, to the uninitiated, are one of the nicest insects God ever created. They eat other insects that we consider pests, such as aphids and ants. A garden with ladybugs is a garden that has a happy gardener.

Best of all, my daughters enjoy gardening with me. Now 4½ years old, Eowyn helped me plant sunflowers, corn, tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, morning glories and ornamental maize this spring before she got bored and went inside. She also has helped me turn the soil, stir the compost and dig holes where I don't want them. Ruth, being only 19 months old, has not been quite as big a help, but she's enjoyed digging holes, planting some sunflowers in the wrong spot, and pretending the turn the earth with the spade fork.

Overall, it's a good situation, and I couldn't be happier.

Except for one thing: There's a good chance our soil has some hazardous contaminants, including lead. A gardener down the street had his soil tested and found that it is so contaminated it is unsafe for children to play in, let alone to grow food in.

Things were looking so up, and now potentially to have some idiot rob us of some of the triumphs of gardening is just ... well, it really stinks.

We were fortunate in that we were able to rent a garden plot not far from the house for only $10 a year, and in time to plant some vegetables. The plot's even bigger than what I was able to squeeze out of our yard, but it's not as convenient as going out into the yard to pick lettuce, tomatoes or beans right before a meal. It's also a site that has never been farmed before, so the soil has less organic material than the garden I've been using for the last four years -- and therefore will not grow the food as effortlessly as I was hoping to get this year.

I'm sure that eventually life will clean our yard of any impurities and make it safe to grow food in -- if in fact it is contaminated, which we haven't established for certain yet -- but that probably won't be in my lifetime. Certainly not while we own the house.

crop failure revisited

So far so good. My Yukon gold potatoes have a stack of three tires now. I just added some more compost to the mound this morning, so hopefully things are going well and new potatoes are growing even as we speak. (If I find myself with an overabundance, people are always welcome to come by this fall and share the joys of the harvest.)

The red potatoes haven't done as well. Even though I planted them the same time as the Yukon golds, it wasn't until some time last week that I saw the first sprouts poking through the dirt. Not sure why that would be. To the best of my knowledge, they hadn't been treated with anti-root growth hormone.

Ah well...

new reasons to squeeze them

This morning I went out to walk the dog and found someone had walked into my front yard, stepped in a newly spaded flower bed and cut the beautiful yellow blooms off some of my spring ephemerals. What the expletive is the point of that? They'll be wilted in a vase by this time tomorrow, but they'd still be blooming a week or two from now in my flower bed where everyone could have enjoyed them if they had been left alone. What a great way to start off the day.

Fat stupid hobbitses ... not nice to Sméagol.

The garden experiences crop failure

In the world of gardening, where you supposed to reap more than you sow, I managed to suffer a loss.

I thought everyone would find it amusing to know that although I planted close to 10 pounds of seed potatoes this spring, I harvested only about two pounds of potatoes this fall.

Sigh.

Maybe next year ...

There's no question the soil is deficient in nutrients. I piled compost on to keep the stalks growing, but the consensus seems to be that I planted them about six weeks late and didn't add enough compost.

My brother, knowing my commitment to organic gardening, enjoyed commenting that I didn't use enough Miracle Gro.

There's a trick with tires I intend to try next year. You keep filling them with compost (or straw, if that's your preference) and piling a new tire on top until the end of the growing season.

cucumbers are in season

I planted two hills of cucumbers earlier this year, even though I've never especially liked cucumbers from the store, because I could and I wanted to see if I could get them to grow well. (This is my garden's second year in its current spot, and I'm curious to see how things will grow with the compost I've been adding.)

The cucumbers have done fantastic. ALthough they spread out much farther than I expected, they've produced so many fruits that there's no way we're going to be able to eat them all. I just got a recipe for pickling that I want to try with some of the bigger ones. Others I'm going to take to the office tomorrow.

Have you ever heard organic gardeners claim their produce tastes better than what's at the supermarket? It's true. Like I said, I've never really liked store-bought cucumbers. We had one of my organically grown cucumbers tonight in a salad, and it was absolutely delicious. That's the first time I can remember saying that about a cucumber.

garden surprise

I was working in my garden and flower beds today when I made two pleasant and unexpected discoveries. The first was that my peas, which I thought had died in the unseasonal cold snap a few weeks ago, in fact had managed to live up to their reputation as a cold-weather crop, and had survived. I didn't have to replant them after all.

The second nice little surprise was about a dozen lettuce plants that have started growing on their own in my garden area. See, some foul fiend stole all the leaves off the lettuce in our garden last summer, and although the plants survived, they never really grew edible leaves again. They did, however, eventually flower and go to seed, and some of those seeds apparently survived when I turned compost into the soil last autumn.

So after moving a half-dozen or so lettuce plants to one of my flower beds and concealing them with violets, I find myself much further along in the gardening game this year than I expected. I even have an unopened packet of lettuce seeds that I had bought to use this year.

Now if I can just find some place to plant my walnut and willow saplings ...

rooting plants

Found a great gardening tip at on how to get a plant cutting to root against its natural inclination. All you need is a willow branch and boiling-hot water. You cut the willow branch into inch-long pieces and cut them in half lengthwise, and let them soak in the water. (Do not boil the willow pieces.)

What this does is remove from the willow the hormone that lets willow branches root so easily. Into this water you can then dip your cutting from a rose bush or other plant, and start it on the way to growing new roots and becoming an independent plant in its own right.

The page details roses specifically, but it's my understanding that the treatment will work on any number of plants, not just roses. I'll have to get a length of willow branch and try it on a cutting from a rose bush sometime soon.

If that's too much trouble, you can go to the garden center and buy rooting hormone, but this is cheaper and much more satisfying as well because there's a sense of personal accomplishment, much like growing tomatoes from seed instead of from seedlings.

when i rule the world

When I rule the world, everyone with a yard will be required to grow a garden therein. There will be some freedom on what people grow -- flowers and shrubberies (nice ones, but not too expensive) will be permitted, as long as vegetables are consistently raised and harvested -- but the garden itself will be mandatory.

Apartment-, condo- and townhouse-dwellers will be permitted to settle for window planters, but I expect the landlord or owners association to maintain regular gardens for everyone to enjoy. Perhaps sharecropping arrangements could be worked out. Actually, they will be, on penalty of having to watch Ralph Bakshi's 1978 "Lord of the Rings" movie until the situation is remedied.

Businesses with spacious, sprawling lawns will have to lease part of their land to local farmers and agricultural co-ops, and will have to have their landscaping done by someone who knows how to do it in a way that helps to recreate the natural ecology that was present before the developers came in and built everything.

Moreover, all gardens and farms will have to be kept in strict adherence to the principles of organic gardening. No pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Everything will be done through natural means, to rekindle humanity's ties to the earth, to keep the soil healthy and vibrant, to reduce the incidence of chemical pollution in the waterways and food chain, and to give farmer's co-ops lots of business.

The air will be fresher, the produce better-tasting, and all this fine real estate will not be wasted on foolish grass. A much larger portion of it will be put into fighting hunger and helping people stretch their paychecks further, since their grocery bills will drop.

All this shall be done when I rule the world.

Addendum: I suppose when I rule the world I might allow farmers to cultivate cannabis, but it would have to be the nonmarijuana variety, since marijuana addles people's wits and makes them look and act like morons and has few merits.

Regular cannabis -- the kind that gives people severe headaches when they smoke it -- has many useful qualities. It is good for the soil, provides a cheaper and sturdier paper than wood fiber, can provide a healthy cooking oil when its seeds are pressed, and can even be made into clothing. And if you don't want to use it for any of those things, you can always compost it and help it aid the soil that way.

Unfortunately, both strains of cannabis belong to the same species. The difference lies in the cultivation, but both strains are outlawed under existing federal law. (Similar problems exist with the opium poppy, which actually produces a rather beautiful flower, but not worth risking having the authorities seize your property.) Leave it to the potheads to ruin a perfectly good plant.

Living with the curse of the family garden

Recently I have come to feel the full weight of an ancient curse God once levied upon humanity.

It's worse than the curse of Tutankhamen, worse than the mummy's curse that legend credits with the fate of the Titanic. This one's a real doozy: Children are destined to do the same thing their parents did.

Now you should understand that at my parents' home in Saunders Station, Pa., my father has a huge garden, easily 40 feet wide and 25 feet deep if it's an inch. Dad loves that garden, and spends several hours in it every weekend, pulling weeds, watering the plants and generally avoiding any housecleaning.

One summer in the mid-1980s, dad planted three rows of Swiss chard. For the entire summer those bitter leaves showed up in everything we ate. We had Swiss chard salad, Swiss chard sandwiches, Swiss chard casserole, Swiss chard on our hamburgers, Swiss chard with our cereal, and Swiss chard in our pancakes.

Dinner became a screaming match as the four of us would shout in unison, "No! Not Swiss chard again!" and Dad would say, "It's good for you; have a no-thank-you helping." (No-thank-you helpings were my parents' way of making us eat things they knew we hated. I once tried to outsmart Dad by asking for a thank-you helping, and regretted it immediately. To this day, I insist on serving myself lest I make the mistake again.)

Relief finally came that summer when we offered to help Dad weed the garden. First we weeded out the actual offender, followed shortly afterward by anything that looked remotely like it. Many innocent plants were martyred for the great cause before we felt safe.

"Carrots?"

"Dunno. Could be related. Rip 'em out."

"Tomatoes?"

"Don't take any chances."

Dad still plants the stuff, but only half a row, and he never serves it to our mother or to us when we visit. He's probably afraid that if he tries, we'll soak his garden in gasoline and burn the whole thing down.

Now one of the other things I should note about my father's garden is that it's made entirely of red clay. Red clay, to the horticulturally challenged, is really bad for growing things. It has virtually none of the nutrients plants need to grow up healthy.

Dad's solution was to conscript my two older brothers, and later my younger brother and myself, to dig a compost pit. Into that pit went pulled weeds; old litter from our menagerie of rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs and gerbils (they themselves eventually were composted separately in small cardboard boxes buried throughout the back yard); raked leaves; bad produce and other organic waste.

The result of 20 years of composting is that Dad's garden now rises noticeably above the surrounding yard. This is handy in the spring, when rain turns the yard into a swamp, but it makes life difficult for the local topographers, who have to update their maps every couple years to show the steady increase in elevation.

The irony is this: Even with all the composted leaves, egg shells, potato peels and God knows what else, Dad's garden is still made of clay. It's almost black now, and he gets better produce than some farmers -- but it's still clay, as he found last summer when the sun dried it up and nearly killed the entire garden.

Despite my childhood travails in Dad's garden, I was thrilled to discover when Natasha and I moved into our new house that the previous owners had planted a garden in the back yard themselves. There are a few things in there I could do without -- like the brussels sprouts -- but there also are tomatoes, onions and a few herbs I'd never heard of.

As I was saying, the curse is coming to fulfillment and I am following in old dad's footsteps, albeit without the benefit of forced labor.

This past weekend I dug my very own compost pit. It's not as big as the pits we dug for dad since our yard is smaller and since he's not here to make me dig it any deeper, but it should be big enough.

"It looks like you're digging a grave," Natasha said as she stood over me in the hole.

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "Hey, could you do me a favor and lie down in this for a minute? I want to see if it's long enough."

She muttered something inarticulate and walked away.

I was feeling proud of myself for having done something so useful, so I called my younger brother Ward, who said I'd have been better off with some above-ground palettes. Such a set-up helps aerate the compost, encouraging actual decay instead of just putrefaction.

"You only dug one because dad had them when we were kids," he said. To his credit, Ward not only was right, but also tried to share my pride. "Well, how big is it?" he asked.

"Probably about 5 feet long, about 2½ feet deep and about as wide," said I.

"That's it?" he said, and started laughing like a howler monkey. "I thought you dug a big hole or something, the way you were talking about how long it took you!"

I thought of getting even somehow, but it's all right. Ward is two years younger than me, and I figure it's just a matter of time before the Curse of the Garden catches up with him. And when that happens, I'll be ready to help him out. You see, I know where I can some seeds for Swiss chard ...