mom’s blog

Well, here we are in rainy, humid Oregon again, hoping to salvage the garden I have spent the past couple months babying. Even dog toys get soggy.

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I'm sitting in the living room with the computer, since we watched a movie on it last night and I haven't gotten around to bringing it back into the office yet.  Behind me is a fairly large window and dozens of newly returned swallows flying around in the yard.  They come back every year in March (a la San Juan Capistrano) and live here all summer, then they head south the way all snowbirds do. Anywaaayyy....one poor bird flew right into the window behind me and sat on the deck below looking very stunned.  One cat and the dog were outside already-the dog rolled in poop, she's out for life-and I was concerned one of them might attact the helpless bird, but they were nowhere around.  The other cat sat on the back  of the couch making weird sounds as it looked at the fallen bird.  So, after a few minutes, I decided to go outside and se if I can move the bird to a safer place before the dog or cat returns.  As I approached it, it got scared (of course) and flew off-hooray.  So I come back in and feel good, yeah, only now I realize it's just sitting in the nearby tree, still looking a little stunned and watching all the other birds fly around.  it flys in little leaps from branch to branch, maybe twenty, thirty feet at a time.  What should I do?  Can I do anything?  Help folks!

Wake up to find a cat on my feet, can't move, struggle to get out of bed without disturbing the sluggard, notice on the way to the bathroom that the dog is in the recliner in the living room and that the fire has gone out during the night.  It's cold.  Put on a pot of tea, give the now singing dog a biscuit and have  a piece of dark chocolate for breakfast. Check e-mail, disregard cold until it sinks into my bones and I have to get a fire going.  Plan the day.

Be sure chicks have food and water

Be sure chickens have the above,

Check for eggs.

Be sure dogs water outside is not frozen

Let cats out, then in, then out, then in all day.

Look at pea plants and see if more are eaten and if my attempts to foil the critters have worked.

Continue pruning blackberry bushes

have another piece of dark chocolate

weed the flower garden

spray the roses

divide the primroses

plant the chives

transplant the rest of the leeks

gather pine needles for the strawberries, they like it acidic and our soil is alkaline

rake up ashes from burn piles to outline the carrot patches, (this discourages root maggots)

weed the walkways in the veg. garden

have another piece of dark chocolate

water all the wintersown containers

Know that I won't get it all done today, but that tomorrow is another day and eventually it WILL get done.

Well, here we go with a story for you.  This is a story about a dreamy desire to live in the country, a desire which arose in my childhood for some obscure reason, considering the only 'country' I'd ever been around was the Pocono Mtn. resort where my parents took me for vacation at the ages of 4, 5, and 6.  The resort was more psuedo country than real and besides I had two of my worst childhood events there in different years.  So I don't think that's where I got my lust for country.  Whatever.  In 1999 we began looking around for a cooler more country style place to live than Arizona.  After traveling to several Arizona locales to find something that fit the bill and not finding anything that fit the bill, we headed here to Oregon to vist a friend.  It was just what we wanted, but not what we wanted.  Cooler weather, check.  Four Seasons, check.  Moderate housing, no check, ditto for great food.  Beautiful? No.  At least not in town.  In fact, town reminded me of what we were leaving, not what I wanted. But then....After at least three trips here to look for affordable housing on acreage, we found it, our little farm with it's tiny house and great views.

So that explains the why and how of why we're here, but not the awesome lifestyle change that it has wrought in me.  What is the 'could' that this little farm has done?  It opened my eyes and heart to my love of dirt.  Yeah, you heard right, dirt.  Composted dirt, rich dark dirty dirt.  And What grows in the wonderful dirt?  Flowers, veggies, fruit, yumm.  We are still eating blackberries I froze last summer, still eating tomato sauce made from fresh tomatoes, frozen fresh home grown green beans.  Having succeeded last year with a number of crops, this year, I'm taking on more.  Hubby enlarged the garden plots by tilling another 400 feet of area for me.  So far I've planted strwberries, sugar snap peas, carrots, green onions, leeks, parsley, arugula, lettuce, radishes, brocoli, cauliflower and cilantro.  Yet to come are the tomatoes, eggplant nad other summer veggies.  We also put in a few more fruit trees, which won't bear right away, they're too small.

So what can this little farm do?  Hopefully one day it will sustain all our food needs.  We have chickens for eggs but no source of meat on our place and no winery (very important) yet.  There is a vinyard next door but the wine they botttle sells for over $50.00 bottle-not for us.  We have grapes but not wine grapes and the grapes we have are not great, either, maybe we'll replace them one day.  But back to the dirt.  I have compost happening in a container on my kitchen counter, a small nearly ready to use compost pile, a large (huge actually) not ready to use compost pile and a pile of horse manure delivered by a kind neighbor.  I'd like to order a dumptruck load of compost from an organic farm that produces it for sale but I don't think I can afford it right now. It is all in various stages of decomposition and richness and very exciting to know that we will turn our yard and veggie waste into nutrient rich soil.  I even went to a class on worms.  This is the little farm that can!

This is so maddening, something's eating my babies!  I'm going to scream!  I've put so much time into them, damn.  Gotta run, gotta look up pea plant predators, be back soon.

Back again, next morning.  Can't find anything online so far about what could be eating my snap pea plants.  Anyone out there got ideas?

Here we go again-I did this yesterday but the picture I tried to upload took too long and the whole friggin thing got dropped. NO pictures today. 

I've been working the soil in the garden in preparation for spring which I thought was around the corner, but has disappeared for the time being, wintery weather returning.  I've been spreading steer manure on top of the already tilled in composted soil in the beds to get ready for planting.  I've already put in carrots which supposedly can go in as soon as the ground can be worked and supposedly like the cold.  We'll see.  I've planted peas for the first time, sugar snap peas, those flat little ones you can eat raw or in stir fries, they can be planted in the deep cold too, I feel sorry for them, the ground is still quite cold but not frozen.  I've done some 'wintersown' containers too which have not yet sprouted but should any day now.  Put in flower seeds, brocoli, cauliflower and leek seeds. 

Last year I had good luck with wintersowing on a small scale so I decided to try it on a larger scale this year, been saving containers for quite a while.  One of my neighbors looks very dubious....

I haven't posted in quite some time as ALL of my loyal readers (the vast hordes of them) can testify.  The reasons have been twofold-first a very stressful and depressive situation and secondly not much free time.  Wanna hear about it?  I knew you would!  The stressful situation has grown for two years but is on the decline now.  We built a house to sell finishing about two years ago-we'd done this once before (hub is a contractor) and made a few thousand on it so we decided to do it again.  Wrong timing.  Very wrong. Just as we finished and put it on the market, the housing boom busted and it took almost two years to sell at much less than we built it for originally.  We renewed the building loan twice and were told by the bank that they would not likely renew it a third time since times were so uncertain, even though we'd never missed a payment.  This put more pressure on us to get it sold and we wound up reducing and reducing the price to even get people to go see it. 

Our realtor was very supportive of the original price since she knew what we'd put into it but that wasn't getting it sold.  The banker also supported the original price but our family kept telling us to lower it and take the hit and we should've listened to them.  Instead we paid out an incredible amount in payments for the two years, reduced the price dramatically and now that it has finally sold, we owe so much money on our home equity account which we took out to help cover the expenses that we will never see the light of day.  Does that explain the depressive times?  Good,I thought you'd understand. 

Next the stress of family emotional and health problems.

Here I am, 11:00 p.m. and more, tired but can't sleep.  That's not really late, I know, but Hubby goes to bed really early because he has to get up really early for work.  So in the spirit of togetherness I went to bed early too, and as I knew would happen, I can't sleep.  I seem to get my best sleep between 3 and 6 am.  If I could figure out a way to light the garden without alarming or disturbing the neighbors, I'd be outside gardening.  Which brings me to another topic.

Today I went with a neighbor to the local garden club for the first time.  Real cool.  Bunch of women from 40 to 80 yrs. old who are nuts about gardening.  Todays guest spoke about bulbs since we are fast approaching that time of year when we crazy fools think about making next years garden even better.  I learned a lot in that hour.  The speaker was a seasoned master gardener who knew her stuff.  Turns out I've done more than a few things wrong...you knew that didn't you?  I've been dividing and  replanting my much too crowded Iris's for about a month now.  I've given three huge black garbage bags full of lifted, fanned, cleaned Iris's to a friend to sell at her yard sale.  This represents a tremendous effort, just in case you had no clue.  Well it turns out they should be thinned to about eighteen inches apart.  I thinned mine to about six inches apart.  That explains why this past spring I had very few Iris blooms.  They were  too crowded.  My recent thinning didn't do the job (in case you didn't read the above statements).  SOOO.... now I need to do it again.  I have hundreds of them.  I need to whittle it down to the low hundreds. Tonight I started and got one huge trash bag partially full with Iris's going to the dump.  I hate to get rid of them but they do multiply every year and I don't want to have to take care of more of them.  I thought about planting some down in the woods but they'll crowd themselves out down there too. 

The speaker actually was there to speak about bulbs, not rhizomes but another woman just wouldn't let go of the topic.  So the speaker hit on it and then we all had questions.  Turns out they are the speakers hobby and she has hundreds of types of Iris.  Back to the bulbs.  They like water and food. And dryness after they bloom.  Well most of us plant them in gardens that have other things growing in them too, so the watering goes on all summer, in which case the bulb rots and you can kiss your money and your work from the previous fall goodbye.  Been there.  Done that.

Ah, it's that time of the year again.  Time to put up string beans and tomatoes for winter.  The tomatoes are having a hard go of it this year with our erratic weather but the bush beans have made up for it.  Most days, I can pick twice a day, beans and berrries.  Blackberries have been prolific this year and raspberries are delicious, but we don't have any raspberries planted, so I'm mooching off anyone who'll give up a few.  Anyone who's been to the Northwest knows blackberries are the scourge of our existance.  Except in August.  People burn them out, hack them out, even hire bulldozers to tear them out and a year or two later, there they are again.  Tenacious bugers.  But, as I said, in August it's different.  We pick 'em, eat 'em, freeze 'em and plan to bake with 'em all the coming winter.  I have recipes for muffins, coffee cake, bread and more that include blackberries.  Sunset magazine has been real helpful that way, providing recipes over the years.  Soon the apples will be ready and our one lone pear.  We planted a little pear tree a couple years ago and this year we had two tiny pears.  We know you're supposed to remove the fruit the first couple years so the tree can get strong, but we were too attached to the one pear, so we left it and now if the birds don't get it, we'll eat it soon.  We also have been given five tiny olive trees to plant just to see if they do well on our property.  There were three thousand left over from the planting at Bellinger but we haven't got a water system to sustain them and no money to put one in right now. 

Our lives flow past us, through us and around us day by day.  What we do with each day is up to us.  It's time, again, for me to look at my life and evaluate where it is going, what I am hoping for and whether that is worthy of pursuit.  Our world, especially in this country, puts high value on sucess, monetary gain and aquisition of 'stuff'.  The older I get, and of course birthday time is the reminder, the more I realize what's important for me and the more outspoken I am about it.  This can lead to ones being thought of as a cranky old lady.  It doesn't matter.  That's what's funny.  It doesn't matter.  With the time there is left, being true is more and more important.  More later.