Garden Planning and Other Looking Ahead

I'm back home, Phil is back, and here I am! I missed blogging the last two days. In some ways, the daily post, the accountability, was helping me do better.

The last couple days have been backsliding, stressful, intense. Per my last post, I don't yet have full clarity on how much I should share here. So, per my strategy at other times like this, I'll focus on something else until I do have space and clarity. Coming up, I'll have a post on protein powders, as I've been promising for ages. I'll also talk about how to increase calories. All my kuntzim are specially directed toward reducing calories, so it might be interesting to apply some smarts to the reverse process. Just as a mirror never gives an exact image, so increasing is never the exact reverse of decreasing; so it's not a no-brainer by any means.

Garden Planning

Around this time every year, when the snow has gone away and green shoots forth thicker every day, we look around our place, take stock, start to think about our garden. Every year, Phil ponders the cost-benefit and wonders whether it's even worthwhile to do a garden, and every year we decide to do at least something. We have serious weed problems. For all the hundreds of thousands of hemp nettles we pulled last year, they are sprouting up everywhere in even greater profusion; ditto the cow parsnip (donor of blistering rashes). The paleocene horsetails are stubbornly ubiquitous--cut them out in one place and they'll spread thirty feet underground over the course of a year to pop up there. The snowshoe hare population still hasn't crashed, and they will gladly eat whatever we put out there. Later in the summer, the slugs clean up. Last year, redback voles ate all our peas from the ground up.

When there was still snow on the ground, Phil planted some carrots and spinach under an old skylight right on the edge of the bluff where it's warmest.

Under the skylight, it's a lush growth. There are some spinach and carrot greens visible in there, but mostly weeds are thriving in the steam room!


Here's a clump of horsetails, with hemp nettles coming up around them.

I took this picture of the view from one of our big garden plots last year up to the bunker as a snapshot of a rather unique time when you can walk clear up to the bunker unimpeded. Within a month, the nettles, fireweed, cow parsnip and other growth will be waist-high.

Here's some dock (with my boot beside it) coming up small but true.

While we were walking around, mama moose went on by, not very impressed that we were so close to her route, but unruffled.

It struck me that this two-acre piece we were walking, lamenting the depredations of bunnies, slugs, noxious weeds, was just a tiny puzzle-piece of the moose's beat, and is only a separate place with its peculiar weed problems in our own minds.

This is yet another push-and-pull point. After all our efforts hand-weeding for several years, Phil has decided to Round-up the worst weeds. I've vetoed that idea the last several years in a row; this time, he hasn't offered me the veto. Phil and I have such different philosophies around so many aspects of interacting with the earth. Phil also was raised on a farm and is much more actively engaged with the dirt on a daily basis than I am. Especially in the winter, I get stuck indoors with work projects and feel disconnected. Sometimes I fear my stipulations against herbicides and other interferences are just a kind of ignorance, and that I don't earn the right to a strong opinion because I don't put in as much work on the place. However, I've read recent literature suggesting that Round-up does not degrade/turn into water as quickly as it was originally claimed to and as Phil believes it does. At least I'm not raising bees this year.

I'm looking forward to raising herbs, but we have some pretty good ones that volunteer. This is wormwood (artemisia)--not the kind used for making absinthe, but a good cleanser, and so pretty! Nettles are in my future today as well.

That rainbow hat I got in Anchorage? Here's a picture of it on my head. It really could have been made for me.

My friend Lynn gave me an avocado pie recipe to rawify--I'm going to go see if I can do that, and will share the results. Another friend also gave grist to my mill for considering incorporating avocados into my diet again--I've been avoiding them for several months or more for a whole raft of reasons that mostly boil down to calorie avoidance and expenditure avoidance.

At least I'm thinking about doing something different! 

I'll have that to share soon. Would love your favorite avocado suggestions too!

Happy Cinco de Mayo and have a great weekend!