Inspired by Laurie, a brand new reader of this blog (find her at Meditations in Motion), I REALLY DID locate my supplies to start seedlings during the snow storm. A hurried walk in the dark and a faltering flashlight revealed the seed starter and potting collection, buried at the back of our shed.
Next to figure out what we are trying to grow…
…and where, I refer to our Garden Plans book. We keep track here so we rotate crops ( ah, the endless effort to fool bugs).
It’s the Olympics, so it must be time to start seedlings. That’s my measure. And whereas last week it was still solidly winter, this week Maryland will begin her flirtation with spring, rising to 70, before dropping us into the 30s again. Another signal. Maybe a dare: get ready! Suddenly, I find I am interested. Until this week the yard had become something I just hurried through. Until this week there wasn’t much happening there except the flapping of unfurling plastic sheeting around our failed temporary greenhouse creation. It’s rough being mocked by a piece of plastic sheeting.
Last issue Suburban Growing took a little sidetrack from it’s stated purpose and looked at the horrors of plastic for the environment: what plastic does, and how much of it is out there in all our waterways around the world and in our drinking water. Tiny particles. Cancer causing. Given my low opinion of plastic as a material, anyone would ask how did we wind up with a massive monument to plastic in our garden?
Sometimes we learn the most via failures. I’m hoping. The idea was to extend the growing season in an affordable way. The reality has been as ineffective as it is ugly: the wind pushed the plastic walls in on all sides, the chickens pushed in below and polished off the over-wintering greens, and the ice broke through from above. Oh and the plastic degrades: after a couple years of exposure to sun and water, the degraded plastic will not be suitable for recycling when we’re done. One more for the ocean. Oh yuck.
But we have big plans for the garden beds this growing season. The chickens we have decided need to go to a summer run and coop for the summer, under the shade of our tulip poplar. Then in their current run we will build up and plant garden beds, on the south side in full sun!
Going forward rather than a temporary plastic sheeting, or the expensive glass greenhouse we were considering to extend our growing season, we plan to put our energy into building cold frames on top of the raised beds we already use. This way we can start plants early, or keep them going late, or lift up and lock the glass “lid” when we don’t need the extra warmth, in mid season. We can let chickens get in, or keep them out, bed by bed. For example:
We could start easy this spring (we could, right Edward?easy!) with some old glass storm windows that I picked up from the end of someone’s driveway years ago. (I know – nightmare. Yes, it’s true, we have been storing these old windows in the shed for years.) The thing to know about using old storm windows for a cold frame is to remove the old paint first before you set it over a garden bed — because old paint contains lead. I am hoping to remove the paint with a power washing and scraping under the pine tree out back, in a garden that does not grow edibles. I will need to remember cover that dirt with other dirt, and mulch heavily too, since my chickens root around back there.
And what about the plastic sheeting? I think we may be able to use it still, as a two-sided wind break to increase the temperature on that south side and start some green beans climbing their poles early. Edward says usually they go in in May. It all depends on warming the soil enough to germinate beans, which are not cold weather lovers. But green bean are tougher than tomatoes or peppers. We eat a lot of greens beans, and they generally like our soil, so this would be a good food to make the effort to grow as many plantings as possible. (We have been getting 2-3 plantings during the summer.) One of the problems for planting early is the heavy rains we get here in spring – seeds rot – so the plastic sheeting could be used as a roof – even if the wind blows it about it could still shed some of the rain off a raised bed. A lady who saves and stores trash-picked storm windows is not going to throw out a pile of plastic sheeting! And when it finally degrades into pieces, unless they have found a better way to handle trash, I may bury it under the pine tree out back. R.I.P. – No reincarnation for you.
More News from the Plastic Front:
Apart from the Monument to the Plastic King in our side yard, we really have been slowly phasing plastic out this winter with some success. Want to hear about it? I am kind of proud of us – it takes a lot of energy to swim up stream. See reviews on products and ideas below. And how aboutyou? If you have discovered products or clever ways to replace plastic in your life, please share! (check out my Instagram feed – suburbangrowing):
Lush Shampoo and Conditioner bars – bite kindness of Owen
Shampoo Bars by Lush – these shampoo and conditioner bars are AMAZING smelling, and easy to use. (You can tell they smell good, since Owen took a sample.) They are expensive upfront, although my daughter tells me they last forever, so are much cheaper in the long run. The Avocado Shampoo and Conditioner bar – the triangular one – is my favorite for smell, but will take a little getting used to since it doesn’t lather (the conditioner is in there too). The other lathers wonderfully. So far they work great for my hair.
Trash Can Traumas – I am trying out Lawn and Leaf Bags at the grocery store. Pretty affordable, but way too big. Not sized for kitchen trash cans. I chop them down, but My Simple Human Trash struggles to function. Inventors take note!! I have searched, and this product does not exist. Yet. I will also continue recycling old feed bags from the dog and chickens – they fit pretty well. The key is what to do with WET garbage in paper bags – so far I am bagging it separately, in a small bag. But most of my non-compostable, non-recyclable trash is dry or only moist. Here’s our Garbage Breakdown: most veggie trash and leavings go to chickens; Non-chicken-appropriate Veggie garbage goes out to compost pile; metal, paper, glass goes to recycling bins; oil I pour out in garden behind the grill under the old azalea out back (she’s tough).
Replacing Plastic Wrap or Foil — Plastic wrap should never touch your food, and neither should aluminum. Both leach stuff into food that causes disease. So how do you put food away in fridge? These beeswax wraps are wonderful! Highly colored ones shown are from etee – as in “everything touches everything else.” The other I bought at my health foodstore. Find out more here: etee wraps
Sea Plankton by Richard Kirby – published in The Guardian
It was the choking sea plankton that got me.
The topic for Suburban Growing is gardening: growing your own food in suburbia, and tangentially health. During this off-season, while our gardens rest peacefully covered in leaves (that’s the goal and I’m confessing nothing) and snow, we have an opportunity to address larger issues associated growing and eating food.
Issues such as Microplastics, a term I had never heard before I caught part of a radio broadcast last November. I have always disliked plastic (ask my family), but the idea that tiny filaments from clothing are contaminating our water was news. As I digested the unwelcome implications with my holiday meals, I did more research and tried to check facts.
I admit to being an easy target for this topic. Useful tho it is, I distrust plastic because of its inability to be part of the cycle of life: zombie-like, the material may get hacked up, but it never dies. Bits fall to earth or ocean floor, never decomposing, never becoming nourishment for another species. Hopefully everyone knows about the island of plastic that floats in the Pacific Ocean – whoops, no, there are two. (National Geographic 2017, Research Gate, July 19, 2017). And have you heard about the massive stalactite formed of plastic bag material that descends far far below the surface of the ocean, filling caves there? Google “mountainous piles of indigestible trash” and you will find more than you ever wanted to see (Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2016). Did you know that we outsource our RECYCLING to China?? Now, there’s an environmental solution! And you might have seen footage of small chucks of plastics and glitter swirling across ocean floors, where hungry fish fill their guts with it. (Fish Love Plastic, Washington Post, Sept 2017)
Daugopan, Phillipines, photo by OrbMedia
Well, I knew about all those horrors. But I did not know about MICROPLASTICS.
Microplastics are invisible shards or filaments which break off every time we wash our rayon, nylon, lycra, orlon, __ (fill in the man-made-fiber blank) clothing. Wastewater plants have never been set up to capture these tiny particles. They just cycle round again, concentrations growing greater, I assume, with every passing year.
Ever since humans have been styling in synthetic fashions, camping with synthetic gear, shampooing synthetic carpets, etc, we have been shedding these little particles onto land and into all waterways. Water tested around the world by OrbMedia found plastic filaments in different dilutions around the world:
“From the halls of the U.S. Capitol to the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda, women, children, men, and babies are consuming plastic with every glass of water” (Invisibles, by OrbMedia)
A separate study done by the Republic of Ireland found microplastics in Irish well water (The Guardian, Sept 5, 2017). Our buddy the sea plankton at the top of the page is choking on a single filament that extends thru his entire microscopic body, as photographed by . And he is one of 1000s that scientist Richard Kirby has seen expiring in just this way (Invisibles, by OrbMedia).
All this means that while I have been trying to eliminate a plastic bag here or there, avoid plastic wrap, tote my drinking water in a reuseable bottle, nevertheless I have been bathing, drinking, and eating invisible plastic particles all my life. Very likely my body tissues are full of it.
OK, so what, you say. Enviro-hysteria.
So this: plastic is considered to have estrogen mimicking potential. Of course I would think that, given my prejudices against the stuff. But the NIH says most plastics leach chemicals. (NIH report, July 2011). False estrogen, that is plastic acting like the hormone our bodies make, has been associated with “breast cancer, ovarian cancer ADD, and the feminization of the male species,” I learned from NPR. While the right to choose one’s own gender is a hot topic these days, from the scientific standpoint you must have a female and a male in any species to allow it to continue – hence the concern. No two sexes, no new life. (NPR broadcast, Plastics are Forever, Nov 1, 2017). SO even if the plight of our buddy the sea plankton (foundation of the oceanic food chain) does not move you, the reality of pervasive breast cancer may. It does me.
Damn.
What about water filters? Can a Brita remove microplastics? It seems so – but don’t quote me.
So then, what is the cure? Rethink all synthetic garments, and or don’t wash them? How can we really resist the convenience that so many plastic products provide? Think how even though our taps run water that we can filter ourselves, even though we know (sort of) how much trouble it will be to clean up each and every single-serve water bottle, we still buy them. After my research, watching people load up on CASES of water bottles at the grocery store before New Years Eve was torture. I wanted run after them pleading STOPPPPP! (One of my New Year’s resolutions is guerilla-water-bottle labeling! “Dont Buy!! Plastic is Cancer Causing!!”
Remember that it isn’t just the clothing microplastics that you are ladling into your body with every bite and sip. Every food or drink item that sits in plastic picks up some plastic from that contact, especially if heated in plastic. I have always thought this, but in researching for this post I came across this in an article from WebMD:
It’s long been known that infinitesimal bits of plastic get into our food from containers. The process is called ‘leaching’ or ‘migration.’ The chemical industry acknowledges that you can’t avoid this transfer (…) almost any plastic container can be expected to leach trace amounts of plastics into food.
Whew!
Well, this wasn’t a cozy post to curl up by the fireside with – next time, I promise. I hope you not only read the piece, but share it, and that it galvanizes you to action! Let’s get creative! How can we re-see our modern world without plastics? Let the stores you patronize know if you want them to abandon plastics, or even that you will not buy from them unless they find other ways to transport and present goods to the marketplace. Make choices for your long term health, and mine. And our grandchildren’s.
This has not been a stellar year for the Simons gardens, as I may have mentioned before. And even so, EVEN SO, once you start really paying attention to what is growing in your yard it is amazing what there is there to eat.
For instance, how about this. Scrolling through Instagram (cell phone use has spiked these past few weeks) I found this GORGEOUS photo of steamed Brussels sprouts leaves wrapped around meat and rice. Looks yummy. I thought this even a thing? eating the leaves of plants from the brassica family?? Brassicas are the cole crops, that is broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kale, collards, etc. That’s great news for us since we can grow the leaves pretty well. It’s what comes after that just doesn’t work out. At this moment I have big beautiful leaves on plants that will probably never see broccoli heads or Brussels sprout bulbs climbing a stalk skyward. At our house, if the chickens don’t break in and get them, them get MUNCHED by caterpillars — or could it be voles?
I went out into the garden with a flashlight tonight, and harvested a quick handful of beautiful Brussels sprout leaves from the two stalks that survived, and chopped them into my Indian/Asian fusion invention (chopped onions with tons of curry, tumeric, and garam marsala, ground meat, diced scavenged thin-walled peppers and last of the green tomatoes, currant, diced Granny Smith) and we ate this over steamed cabbage noodles. (Thin slices of cabbage steamed, another idea that I stole from Instagram, many thanks to Amara and Martin!) I meant to get a photo for you all, but it was so good…we ate it all up without a technology stop in the middle.
It was difficult year for the Simons Gardens — first cold, then dry, then very wet, and cold again — just contrary! our green beans, tomatoes, and pepper plants struggled!! — and yet. And yet the soil gave us enough peppers for lots of salads and some to slice up with onions and freeze. The garlic heads didn’t grow large, but three bunches are dried and hanging on the kitchen wall. Jars of dried herbs lie in the cupboards – lavender, sage, oregano, thyme stored with leftover stay fresh packets from vitamin bottles to preserve them.
We didn’t get that many cherries from our trees, but more than before. We ate and froze some blueberries, black raspberries, and strawberries. We did great with salad greens! Grew onions for the first time ever.We only lost one hen over the summer, and the little chickens raised by the adoptive mother last spring have laid their first little girl eggs.
Then let’s not forget the piles and piles of pruned crape myrtle that I made everyone cut into sticks and stack on the kindling pile! Looking over this year in our gardens as we wrap up our harvest, I’d say yes, in spite of the frustrations we’ll do it again. It can be maddening. But we love growing things. And there is something to be said for learning to let things go, recognizing how little we control, appreciating what good arrives in our basket or on our plate.
There is always more to learn, always more to understand about the way weather and soil and insects and even irritating #*%#!! voles operate together, a symphony that we hardly understand. So we make guesses. We chop down tall foliage to create more light, raise beds higher to ease our aging backs, build new enclosures to better rotate the chickens, and set up rain barrels locally in more gardens to simplify watering in the coming year.
But for now as cold creeps over the ground, we’ll cover our beds with leaf mulch to rest them and us for a season. Enjoy the fireside. Crush the dryer sock full of lavender in the laundry room….and dream of what might be possible next season…
Even in a suburban garden, you sometimes get to witness remarkable wildlife in action. Such was the case the other day when I turned around while feeding my chicks, to find a magnificent clean up operation going on.
Maybe I just identify with beings that stuff their mouths. I really do like and appreciate the snakes on our property just much as I dislike and cuss at the mice and sparrows that invade it, spreading their vermin inside and out. True, those grungy sparrows are just trying to make a living and get dinner — but then, so is the snake.
Even if snakes are not your thing, I hope you can appreciate this remarkable achievement in a young snake’s life –
Go snake.
Mischief Managed.
Enjoy this piece? Check out the “Part Two” at my other blog, embracingchaos.net
Sometimes I hate August gardening. Or so I say to myself as I pick my way through humid, wet, over-grown tomato plants that tangle with wild morning glory vines. Those crazy vines grow so fast, and twist around and around every vertical stalk or post or fence, through the other leaves, around the other plants, an agony of overgrowth. They scramble my view of any harvest. What harvest? That is what I am out here looking for, after all. Last month I wrote of heat, but this month of outrageous amounts of rain has seen barely enough sun and heat to turn my fat tomatoes red, or my green peppers into green peppers. Ugh. Will there really be NO HARVEST?
But I know this feeling from of old. I remember how just when I am are ready to say “After all that work?? Is everything sick and dying?! I quit!” that the plants seem to groan, “Okay, okay” and searching around under those piles of messy, mottled, chewed on, sprawling leaves (and scrambling vines, damn them) yields ripe tomatoes! Green beans! and peppers that you didn’t see at all at first. Suddenly, sure enough, I can bring in supper from our own yard.
But this August is a little different. This last week of August, my harvest included some unexpected and unwanted tubers. I did not plant these ones – at least not on purpose. These tubers are in fact breast cancers, growing in the soil of my body along with everything else.
To be seeded with spores and growing a harvest of cancer should not really be a surprise for me . Both my mother and my great-aunt fought this same weed of the body. But the mind can play tricks. My cerebral cortex just did not really believe that I would get cancer. Why? Because it would be too obvious? Because I grow and eat a lot of veggies? Because my role as the mother of a special needs young man would protect me? Superstition made me immune. Only, it didn’t. And as surely as the morning glories run wild all over my gardens every summer, my body has been growing a useless and invasive crop.
As Edward and I gather in the green beans from the poles this week and watch the acorn squash mature, I am also gathering my energies, preparing to be weeded, and to wrestle out the roots of disease. I am making better habits, getting rest, eating well, stretching and working my muscles. I am reading, educating myself to know my enemy, just as I have poured over pages on plant diseases during other troubled harvest times, trying to plan my attack on marauding viruses, bacteria, or parasites. Will it be chop, or burn, or poison? I favor chopping this time — less toxic, and perhaps more permanent. I will consider all my options. As Edward and I worked through the garden beds over the weekend it was satisfying to rip down useless vine off fences and out of netting, wrench roots from the soil, and watch the liberated plants shake free and breathe. I will think of that as I am healing.
But there is still more to the Simons garden harvests this August — can you believe it? What a rich month we are having!
The most superior harvest for our family was expected in September – but could not wait. And so in the last week of Augyst she was coaxed from her mother tree, and out into her father’s arms. Four pounds four ounces of pure sweetness. Baby Marlee Faryn Simons was born a wee bit early. Edward and I are grandparents, and before too many more days we will fly into September in the Rockie Mountains, leaving Maryland far behind. For a little while at least.
Today is a watering day. I am grateful and so are the cucumbers that it is such a simple matter to get a drink out to my plants, so they do not croak in the blazing Maryland sun. As I run the hose under the beans, I find these words from a poem flowing through my mind —
Water draws us together
We float and swim
in a sea of rushing leafy branches
in the sparkle of light from those trees.
I am just back from a delightful road trip vacation that included two lakes, the first a family reunion on a Wisconsin lake called Kaubashine. As a twenty-something in 1988 I wrote this floral and unabashedly romantic poem about love, loss, and family – and about the power of water, the lake which brought us all there to be together there.
As I pick the pole beans and the sweat trickles into my eyes, I try to recall the next lines of the poem —
Lying on the lake-view porch
our words swim to each other
in leaf tossing air.
The lake and its children,
wind, pine, and loon,
draw us to it and to each other–
we are a family again
not one missing.
We recognize each other
responding ripplingly.
Well I said it was unabashedly romantic and floral.
As I stand in the wonderful baking sunshine armed with my hose, it seems clear to me that we are drawn together, knit together, our bodies and our civilization, by the clean water that we take so much for granted. Remarkable, really on a 90 degree day in a chain of 90 plus degree days to have water to drink, to wash the sweat off my itchy arms in the gardens, to splash my face, or to climb into a shower after hours in the muggy and baking heat, rinse all that salt and sweat and hopefully as yet-unattached ticks away, under an outpouring of clean H2O!
That is if you can’t dive into a lake to do the job. Mentally i am still on the shores of Kaubashine, or swimming in it, and I am remembering the loons. When I was a child they predicted that the water birds would not stay on the lake in the advent of noisy motor boats. But loons adapted. They still swim and call their crazy call on Lake Kaubashine in 2017 (For the uninitiated, the bird’s hysterical sounding call is where our we get the word “loony.”) Some things have certainly changed though. Many more houses, and big houses. And the lake water seemed a little less clean than I remembered, which could be a function of the large lawns these mansion builders have laid down. A lawn usually means petroleum, fertilizers, and insecticides. And these the rain washes right down into the lake. Today all around Kaubashine where birch trees used to lean out from forest at the shoreline bright green lawns slope instead. It is hard for me to understand why anyone would put a lawn in, at lake in the woods – wasn’t the point of coming to the woods to leave all that behind? Like Thoreau, “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”?
In my great grandfather Oscar’s day, the logging companies had chopped down all the trees around this and many other lakes in the area, raping the ecosystem completely. Then realty companies sold the naked, stump filled land for water-front vacation property. Oscar Scalbom, once a 13 year old Swedish immigrant, had just made a successful invention and was able to buy a huge piece of treeless land around this lake. For a long time hunters and fishermen lived in little cabins here, and vacationers swam and rowed. A vacation on the lake in those days meant encountering the water up close and personal, and living with and in the woods environment, which was a nice change from the summer heat of Illinois. My grandma swam all day in this lake all summer long, peed in the out-house, pumped and drank water from the well, and washed and hung her clothes on a line. Before air conditioning was invented to keep us from actually touching the air…before the mighty gasoline spewing motor boat…before water skiing….But I am not going to pretend that i am not grateful for my modern hose and the complex water system that backs it!
Let us pray the wild loons and the plant, fish and crustacean systems in existence for so many millennia carry on, as we keep trying to figure out how to do better.
My friend and I went out to lunch yesterday and compared experiences with our young not-quite-adult children. Our youngest sons are both high school graduates this year. We mourned children who were communicative as young ones, and now necessarily shutting mom out in their effort to become independent. We held hands across the table and almost cried over our sense of loss — almost, but we didn’t. Because this process is entirely as it should be. If the kids didn’t do it, we know we would be worried. Still, having kids home from school for the summer can be enough to drive any loving mom crazy. It could be worse though, I said to my son at supper. You could have a chicken for a mom.
A little puff on the celebratory graduation cigar
Yesterday mama hen must have woke up and decided she WASN’T a mom any more. All day long we watched as the little flock of five juniors straggled around the back yard without her. And to make the new status really clear, (to them? to herself perhaps?), by the end of the day she began pecking their heads when they were trying to eat. I couldn’t take it – I shooed her away. I imagined pecking my recent high school graduate’s head to clarify our new relationship. The mama hen looked a bit confused, as well. She shook her feathers when I told her to shoo, and she didn’t come into the run again until very late. After weeks of worrying and foraging for six, her job was done, and she was a solo bird again.
I am fascinated to see what today brings, since phase two will have to be that each hen figures out where she comes in the flock pecking order. (Where did they all sleep last night? I forgot to check.) One of the bolder little pullets (a young not-yet-laying hen) already forages with the big girls. But the tail-ender of the group doesn’t seem ready for this new stage of things, and was too scared yesterday to even come out from under the coop and into the back yard with her nest-mates. She kept running up to the gate in the fence, and then back under, “panic peeping,” trying to work up the courage to face the world without mom to hide under. Life, as Glennon Doyle Merton writes, is brutiful. (That’s brutal and beautiful.) True enough.
Meanwhile, having two of my human fledglings home is working out great so far – lots of yard work and house projects are getting done. I am enjoying the extra bodies around the house and the conversations at dinner. My daughter has us watching Game of Thrones. No writing is getting done, but that seems to be my way. When the sun is out, I want to be out there too.
Bronwyn cuts fire blight from a pear tree with Clorox dipped shears
It’s true that we are paying them for this work (Susan says that’s cheating) but family rates! I told her that I realized I could do this since I saw my neighbor doing it. Since we are still supporting them it all makes a cycle anyway – if they work and we pay them rather than hiring other help, and then have them buy more of their own stuff. (Does that count as pecking heads?) Win-win.
Oskar pruning the crape myrtles – more light for the vegetable garden
Maybe the mother hen is wiser than I. She knows how to let go, while I cling. In fact, I am a bit more like that tail-ender chick, running back under the coop, peeping for the past rather than run through that gate into the wider world. But the chick can’t go back into the egg. I have only to try advising my young adults to realize that a doink on their heads would be about as effective as any maternal advice on money or jobs – or probably any other subject. They just have to get out here and scratch for themselves.
Lavender and sage
This morning the black raspberry harvest starts. As I head out into the yard to pick before today’s rain threatens mold to destroy the berries, I am grateful for cycles of life and transitions — and I find I am admiring the bravery of chickens.
My pool guy and I stood outside one early morning last week, talking about politics and sustainability. (We manage a property next door with a pool.) The absurdity of this situation was not lost on me. There is just nothing sustainable about a swimming pool. Unless you turn it into a fish pond, like my friend Mary. Mary does her research, adding appropriate plants and sub-species, and in a few years that former unused swimming pool will yield many pounds of protein to feed her family. With or without society’s approval, she has made something productive out of what was a waste of resources in her back yard.
Mike the pool guy and I agreed that in order to address the environmental challenges the earth and we face at the current time (dying corals were under discussion), what it will really take is not pontificating pundits and whatever they do, but US making uncomfortable choices every day. Changing the way we do business. How completely can you remove plastic from your life, for instance? Let’s say just plastic trash bags. If you don’t use plastic trash bags, what do you use? How do you manage garbage? Shopping bags are much easier. If you use cloth diapers or menstrual pads, which I have found superior to for the users’ skin, you use a lot of water to clean up. Caring for a special needs young adult I use a great deal of water anyway – and I feel like it’s easier to clean water than to find a home for garbage that won’t ever break down. But maybe this will not always be the case – in a well-run trash-to-power incineration process for example.
But each of these choices take consciousness and trouble. Not doing things just the way we always did. I love the story my brother-in-law Allen told me of Lebanon, which in ancient times was covered with forests. Today you know Lebanon as a desert nation, (map of Lebanon). As I was told the story, ancient people discovered plaster in their soil, and became a huge user and exporter of this product. But the process required heat, which meant fire, and chopping down those trees to fuel an exciting new economy … and centuries of business as usual meant that a woodland area became irreversibly arid. How do you reverse from desert to a forest again? It’s a lot of work, maybe impossible. (Lebanon’s environmental issues today )
Then Mike went on to clean more pools, and I went inside to eat breakfast made up of food trucked in from miles and miles away.
But not all of it. Trucked, I mean. I am working on that. The Simons Gardens are having a good year so far.
As the sour cherry harvest rolls in from our three little trees, and pepper and tomato seedlings go into the soil, and sunburn prickles across my shoulders and back, I pause today and take a minute to rejoice for a good start to this season of growing and harvest. Five little chicks have become so much bigger in the two weeks since you saw them last –
“Don’t get too close,” says mother hen
The sugar snap peas are producing crunchy deliciousness, thanks to the extended cool weather and rain that is otherwise driving us crazy. And we have never harvested lettuce and kale like this before, though I sure hope to again.
Several salads-worth, just picked…Rinsed to remove unwanted participants…Shaken, layered with cloth or paper towel and boxed or bagged in fridge. Yum!
We suburbanites truly can grow a portion of our own food on our 1/4 acre lots. A box of salad greens costs $5-6, and is often partly rotten, since it is trucked from distant California, subsidized by your tax dollars. We can do better – we can eat better. But whether we choose to do so or not depends on so many factors in our crazy busy suburban lives – mostly whether we love to do so or not. Ya gotta wanna, as they say. I say the sour cherries are “rolling in,” but it is fairer to say that I am stealing them from the birds and mold who are trying to eat them up ahead of me. I got out there each morning last week, sometimes up in the dewy leaves on my ladder, picking for 20 minutes. I pitted them pretty quickly (thanks to with the wonderful German cherry pitting tool my son Scott gave me years ago) and I froze 5 Ziploc-ed quarts so far – best ever!
Graduation cherry pie on the way?
But I last year I missed the cherry harvest altogether – and the black raspberries too. Before I knew it the trees were stripped and those harvests gone. But I wanna! So this year I am attuned to the early signs. I know to change my schedule, and to pick a little every day. The birds and the Maryland mold don’t wait around to give me my turn. The movements of nature will also not wait for us to figure out how to do things better – nature will work as she her laws dictate. And do what she has always done.
Pre-script: I didn’t do yoga as scheduled this morning. I also didn’t clean the house as needed. Instead I got my zen squatting in a corner of the chicken run, watching a mama hen teaching 5 chicks how to scratch down to the dirt, hunting out tiny bugs. If I hold very still then she knows I am not dangerous, and they all carry on as usual. Usual, but amazing at the same time. This is a prequel because when I wrote Spring Broodies, just weeks ago, I could not know how it would all unfold…
So spring is finally really here in Maryland. Uh, isn’t it? That 80 degree weather in April sealed the deal didn’t it? I don’t think cold weather can zap us again with a near freeze…in May…well, merely 40s. Yikes. What a strange year we have been having.
Looks like the cherry blossoms escaped that last frost (at least in our yard), and see!
Fruits are coming where blossoms just were. The winter garlic looked good but now it needs to be pulled before it rots in the ground. The asparagus finally came up in that blast of early hot April weather, and finished too soon. No manure on that bed last fall equals skinny stalks this spring. In 2016 the stalks were fat like I had never seen before! For 2017 we got lots of skinny little guys. Lesson: ALWAYS put manure on your asparagus in fall! Especially if its sharing space with strawberries…
Look at those skinny stalks! Lesson learned. The strawberries love the asparagus bed, enthusiastically expanding, growing huge green leaves. If we feed the bed in fall, maybe the asparagus will get some of the food too…
Here is the re-planted and recovering greens collection, is now nicely fenced to protect from other ransacking greens appreciators —
HOORAY for this greenhouse structure Edward put up (with help from Oskar)! Right now it holds agricultural fleece above the lettuce and greens to protect them from that hot weather we had…(can you remember?) It will stay up year round, covered in plastic sheeting during cold months to extend out lettuce and greens production as far into the winter as we can. So many of my ideas never achieve reality (I know. I have too many.) It is pretty satisfying to see one up and working.
But most exciting to my readers will be the Chicken news! Starting late April we seemed to have two broody hens. Two of my hens began staying in two nesting boxes day and night, making those intense little noises that I recognize. When a hen goes broody all her instincts tell her “Stay put and keep those eggs warm and you will be a mother!” A true broody hen plucks feathers off her breast to get skin to egg contact and the 90 plus degrees needed. A good broody will go out only to relieve herself, grab a bite or a sip, and then get back on the nest. Less informed broody hens poop right in the nest. (Read more about broody hens here: The Modern Homestead)
What this means to the suburban grower though is a chance for an adoptive mother to raise a couple new chicks. I did it once before with success. But I don’t have the space for two mamas to raise chicks in the privacy needed — in nature they like to go off alone into the brush or a corner of a big farmyard. So I discouraged the Golden Maran, and encouraged the Buff Orpington. This wasn’t easy. I moved her three times trying to convince her that the broody box in the little coop was a better place than the nesting boxes with all the other hens. There is no way that a hen can raise chicks safely with the other hens around – they would be attacked by the other hens as interlopers. But most broody hens have about half the required instincts – they don’t isolate themselves. So I did my best. Finally, after some more research online, I moved the warm eggs first to the new location, and then took her, struggling and resisting, to sit on her eggs in the new spot. This time I remembered to close the door, so the other hens couldn’t bother her. And there she stayed.
Three days later, I picked up 5 one day old chicks from a local feed store – and Edward (who kindly accommodated this errand while on his way back from a medical procedure) agreeably held the box in his nice warm hands.
Once home (and my ailing husband settled) I threw the chicks into a warm oven and scurried around setting up a temporary box – we had to wait for night to make the switch.
Trum would like to play with the chicks…
It was hard not to worry. This night would be the night that the previously warm weather turned cold again! Fifty degrees — and baby chicks like 90. That night I carried the box of them out, and by cover of darkness I slid the hot eggs out from under the broody Orpie and slid the panicked, peeping chicks underneath. I had to shove one little guy under twice – she seemed frozen. All the next cold day I didn’t see or hear a peep. But the hen was all puffed up though over top of them. That was hopeful. She looked…surprised.
Next morning I pushed a flat dish of food and then water up close to her chest, and she ate and drank avidly. Prior to the cold snap, the weather had been very hot and she had been brooding for weeks, hardly leaving her nest for food or water.
Then she pulled away. She wanted me gone. So I went away, hoping that young and inexperienced as she is, her instincts would tell her that those babies need to eat and drink too, somehow, despite the cold.
I shouldn’t have worried.
I have doubted this broody hen every step of the way – doubting whether she could sit a nest, whether she would reject these adopted babies, whether she would know to feed them on a cold day! I have been distressed to find that she wants to sleep on the ground under the structure I built for her, instead of inside it. Even after I made a new ramps for the little chicks yesterday to get up into it, they showed no interest. We tried moving her once, which caused extreme distress to her and her chicks and she hid them in a corner. But she is proving herself to be a good mother – and she knows better than I do about the whole process. Last night it went down to the 40s again — but I gave up on the idea of moving her into that nice little coop, and just piled pine shavings around her to help her hold her heat. She did not object.
This morning I opened the top of that little coop to get something out, and noticed that the temperature in there was a lot colder than the air temperature in the run outside it. Ahh. I see. That little house was colder than the ground. Being wood, and drafty, it holds heat more poorly. Yep – I guess she knows.
I have no idea what this upbringing will do for these babies. They are having a pretty au naturel experience compared to most American suburban chicks: enduring cold, sleeping in the dirt under mom, scratching in the straw and mud for breakfast. I threw them some of the strawberry tops this morning, and they were all excited, mama too. I notice that two have paste butt, which isn’t common for chicks raised by a mother – maybe it’s the switch from 24 hours of heat lamp life to Real World cold spring. I am waiting to see if the mama hen will do something about it, or if I have to intervene causing great panic and distress. These little ones are eating just the right stuff to be healthy. They have very little interest in the Organic Chick Starter feed I put out. (It doesn’t smell good to me either.) Ah well – on to the next adventure!—-
Suburban Growing 
