Revenge of the Lawn

It is funny where online research will take you. I am always on the lookout for ideas for my weekly newspaper column, the Farm Side. After over ten years of writing it, sometimes not repeating myself is a challenge. Lately I have been mulling over the recent upsurge in home gardening and massive sales of garden seeds and trying to think of a way to get a column out of it. A post Nita wrote on the topic, which reminded me or WWII Victory gardens, was all the stimulus I needed. This week I actually got busy with it and it will run Friday (unless the editor vetoes it or something).

I learned so much while writing this one! I was constantly calling in to the boss, who was reading in the other room. Things like, "Did you know that Sears sold 325,000 pressure cookers in 1943?"
Or, "Did you know that we in America plant three times as much ground in lawn as in corn?"


Here are some of the places I visited in my search for data to back up my positive thoughts about gardens and my somewhat less than positive feelings about lawns.

Victory Garden

The Murder of a Garden

Landscapes and the Law

Garden on Trial

Lawn Nation (if you click any of these, click this one...amazing!)

And, last but not least, Revenge of the Lawn (which will tell you something about my reading tastes in college.

Iris

At sunset

Lilac rustlers

I was supposed to write the Farm Side today.

And I honestly tried.

But the house is abuzz with everybody home.

And the boss offered to help me rustle lilacs.

I mean what would you do faced with such choices? I am just inside to now to see if you can root lilac cuttings with rooting hormone. Web research says yes, so I am gonna give her a go.

We also got some rooted suckers. We had to clamber down a challenging, brush covered slate bank over by the barn, just beyond the old falling down house where the boss lived when he was growing up. I am all scratched up but I'll bet it will be worth it.

He planted those lilacs for his mom when he was a little boy. The house down in town is surrounded by a number of them that I rustled back when we lived down there, but up here on the Dimond Farm side of the place there are only a few plain purple ones and a dwarf pink that I brought up (all frost nipped this year). We are hoping some of the ones we brought out of the jungle are the reddish ones that were Grandma Peggy's favorites. There are some spindly peony bushes over there too, valiantly sending up buds, despite being shaded by dozens of invading honeysuckles and box elders and who knows what all. I think I will see if Alan will dig those for me.....and maybe get a piece of the forsythia the boss planted by the foundation when he was just a tyke....

Growing lettuce indoors

Seems that Northview and my Garden Records blog both turn up often in searches for growing lettuce indoors. (I don't have time this morning to lookie and linkie, but if you want to read former posts on the topic a quick blog search will find them.) I will briefly repeat what we have learned about the topic, so searchers don't have to search further when they land here..

To simplify things: You CAN grow lettuce indoors. Easily. Very, very easily. Just sow some seed in a flower pot or almost any other container (we have even used a Styrofoam cooler), keep it moist until it germinates and either put it in your sunniest window or under a grow light. You can cover the pot or container with a bit of plastic wrap to help keep things moist until the seeds start to grow. (It will consume a pretty good amount of water once it is growing well too.) Then just wait a few weeks and your crop will be ready to eat.

We started doing this a couple years ago, just as an experiment, and have eaten lettuce all winter ever since. Even though it is summer now, I am starting some in hanging baskets to give away. I think a handy basket of lettuce right next to the back door beats having to walk down to the garden every time you want a sandwich, even if you grow lettuce there too.

I grow all of mine, even in summer, in cut off plastic barrels, keeping it clean, relatively slug-free and sorta-kinda-half way out of reach of marauding bunnies
. I wish indoor lettuce searchers good luck and lots of lovely salad!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

But we have indoor lettuce....finally

Indoor Lettuce

I planted a flower pot full today. Not much will make it to the table, as I can't walk past and not pick a leaf, but even a little is a wonder on a sandwich up here in the frozen north in the middle of the winter. I grew some in a cooler last year and we ate it for months. I use two mixes from Pinetree Garden seeds, winter lettuce mix and lettuce mix. I love the different shapes and colors of leaves that you end up with.

I am contemplating starting small flower pots of it and giving them as Christmas gifts to beloved folks who are impossible to shop for. Is this a good plan do you think?

Help me

I'm

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Too many peppers

Not enough pepper people***






***I grew a nice mess of hot peppers for the kids this summer. They eat them. We don't.
However, there are a whole slew hanging out on the clothesline waiting for someone to decide what to do with them. Anybody want to make some salsa or something?

Venison vegetable soup

Italian style (I put in lots of zucchini and parmesan cheese and dump in some Italian seasoning.)

The end of summer

Brings good things to eat.


Special friends stop by bringing gifts from the garden. (Thanks Gordie...we do love corn.)



We freeze all afternoon. (Not freeze as in being cool, freeze as in putting up.)
Husk the corn.
Stack the corn.
Boil the corn.
Cool the corn.
Cut the corn off the cob.
Bag the corn.
Put the corn in the freezer.
Do it again.
And again.
And again.




It is 96 and icky humid. Not a good day for freezing anything in a kitchen billowing with steam...water bubbling loudly...keeping the doors closed to keep the head-banging bane of the heat outside. No breeze. No breath. There are sticky bits of corn everywhere. Sticky corn on the table. Sticky corn on the floor. (Happy dogs, happy dogs. How they love that sticky corn.There is no need to sweep or mop.) The counters and table are another story. No dogs allowed there and it would make good glue, I'll tell you. Still, you make hay when the sun shines and you freeze corn when the corn comes.


Many hands make light work. (And many kids have many hands.) The kitchen is full of teens and twenty-somethings armed with knives and bowls and baggies. There is much silliness and sibling competition. Many insults and near passing of drinks through nasal passages with all the nonsense that is being bandied about. (It is one of my most cherished goals as a parent...to make my kids pass food through their noses at things I say..{ask them about summer vegetables}.....this time they do it to each other though. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree and I guess the corn doesn't either.) We finish in under two hours and save out a dozen ears so we can have fresh corn on the cob for supper. This winter corn that brings the taste of summer right back to us will be a special treat for chowder or just for dinner. It is always worth the effort.


We make apple snacks in late summer too. Ginger gold apples are in, the first of the really hard, crisp, good-eatin' apples...not soft and mushy like Macs. They are so tart and tangy and delightful, just like the great late-fall apples like Spies and Ida Reds. I salute whoever invented the variety.

To make your own apple snack, core and cut up the best apple you can find.
Cut up the sharpest cheese you can find...just a bit.
Add raisins
Granola
Cheerios
Eat
(We often bag this stuff for a quick rake along snack...it will keep a few hours and is full of autumn goodness)

Summertime news

Who is this raider of the green bean patch?

Here is where I am looking to try to find him. And here.

Cammo and carrots

No frogs this summer! Normally as soon as the garden pond is up and running half a dozen show up to claim super-select bug guzzling spots and stay til fall. They soon ignore us completely and go about the serious business of slurping up mosquitoes and errant grasshoppers in contented oblivion. Some even accept handouts. In return for cheap entertainment we take the biggest garter snakes down below the bike path when we find them seeking frog leg lunches. (It is amazing how far we have to cart them before they stop coming back. They put homing pigeons to shame.) However, there have been no frogs this year....it has been too dry. Even up in the field potholes herpetiles have been rare as hen's teeth. Alan found one little green frog which he put in the garden pond a few weeks ago, but that is all.

The game of who can spot the hidden frogs (they have great cammo) loses some of its glamor when there is only one teeny-tiny frog (and an import at that). Then it rained most of our week at camp. It rained almost every day since too (putting a hellacious crimp in the hay baling I can tell you). Rainrainrain...thunderthundercrashinglightningstillmorerain. The driveway is a washout, barely passable by my SUV, (which I find I really NEED this year). It is too wet to pick zucchini. Or peas or beans. Too wet to weed. Too wet to mow the grass (which is growing again). It is no longer dry to say the least.


Yesterday Alan and I stopped by the pond for a game of find the frog. We hadn't seen even the little import in days. Simultaneously we spotted one....at least a foot a part! There were two! Then a third one plopped under a lily pad and frog-stroked for the bottom. Normally we get big, fat frogs; these were barely two inches long. (It makes spotting them even more of a challenge.) Wonder if the weather has anything to do with the small size or if it is just coincidence that we only have little ones this year. Doesn't matter. The pond, which is especially pretty this summer, is once again a fun place to visit.

We grew carrots in half a fifteen gallon barrel this summer. Our soil is so dense that normally you couldn't pull a halfway decent carrot without breaking it, (if you could even grow it in the first place), but a barrel makes it easy. (We grow lettuce, tomatoes and squash in them too.) Half a fifteen gallon barrel is the perfect depth. A mix of sand and compost equals perfect earth. The stuff we wash the pipeline with comes in such barrels and we only get three bucks if we redeem them so the price is right. They are easy to wash and just the right size for a wimpy old lady like me to drag around. Incidentally I have about six more out there in which the guys need to bore drainage holes pretty soon if I am going to have time to grow more carrots before winter.


I pulled this one for salad the other night and was astonished by the color though. Somehow I forgot all about planting Rainbow Carrot mix this year. Yellow is nice, now I can't wait for a purple one.

Come on over and bring the kids

Here are some new kids on the block who came to visit yesterday while I was planting petunias. I was in the dabbling mallard pose under the honey locust, grubbing out fox tail grass and grubbing in fluffy-ruffled double pink petunias, when I heard urgent chink-chinking calls right above my head. A much harassed and nearly de-feathered mother downy woodpecker was feeding a pair of chicklings, (which were nearly as fluffy as the flowers,) suet and then sneaking away trying to get them to fend for themselves. She is already pretty tame and they don't know any better, so even with 3X zoom, I could get some fairly close shots. The big fluffy birds are the kids; the small scrawny one is the mama.

Mama is the little beleaguered bird on the bottom
Baby is the big one

Should I fly away from the fool shoving that little camera at me?
She looks sort of dangerous...

Na, this stuff is pretty good....
MAAAAAA...come over here and chip some more of this out for me, will ya?

We stopped to pick some Vitamin C today

We had to run to Fort Plain today to get some barn calcite, which we sprinkle on the floor so the cows don't slip when they come into the barn.

I did NOT want to go.
The garden beckons.
Vigorously.

However on the way home we stopped at Cashin's and Liz and I picked two quarts apiece in about five minutes. Literally.

I think it is going to be a good year for strawberries.

Babies

I guess it's that time of year. Three calves this week, two heifers, one bull. One of them will put to good use a fine name that was suggested by a respected fellow blogger recently.

Frieland LF Bama Breeze made her long-awaited (nine months in fact) debut in the Holstein Heifer Cowbell Choir here at Northview just a couple of days ago. She is the much-welcomed daughter of Frieland MG Beausoleil, who was given to me for Mother's Day some nine years back. (Actually, it wasn't so much that the boss gave her to me as that he wanted to sell her as a baby because he didn't think much of her dam. I liked her right from the start so I begged. She is a sweet old cow now, and a big favorite, which just goes to show...) The other heifer will also be named after music, Countrified. Her dam is Cisco, out of Cubby, who was thus named because she was tied next to the barn cupboard as a calf. (Desperation often rules the naming around here so we are always grateful for good suggestions.)

There was a baby on the bridge this morning too, hop-skipping cheekily just out of reach. It was new and not long out of the nest, but quite able to handle itself, thank you very much. The new-fledged song sparrow was just a shade less brightly colored than the adults, perhaps offspring of the one that sings on the heifer yard gate every now and then. It wasn't exactly soaring like an eagle but it certainly could fly better than I can.

Other critters are having babies too, some of them causing me very mixed emotions. After all, bunnies are cute. The bring chocolate at Easter and look pretty bouncing around on the lawn. They are soft and fluffy and have big, brown eyes. Bunnies also reproduce at a phenomenal rate and eat just about anything vegetative. They consumed my apple trees this winter, despite wire cages three feet high (the four-to-six-foot snow gave them a paw up so to speak.). Anyhow, Alan uncovered a nest with the riding lawn mower, exposing fourteen little syvilagus floridanus babies, which rolled out onto the grass. (This is the first mowing this year and the lawn is about hip high.) I will spare you the details, but lawnmowers are not good for animals. They provided a quick meal for some passing crows and a couple of barn cats anyhow.

I tried to feel bad about them, really I did. I mean, how awful to be run over by the mower and eaten. It will be at least a couple of weeks before their mother, which escaped unscathed, can produce fourteen more. However, I'm sorry to say that I failed miserably.
I like apples.
They are my favorite fruit except cookies.
There is a whole orchard right next to the lawn, full of untended trees, large and small, which the rabbits could have eaten this winter. They could have mowed down as many box elders and mulberries as they wanted too, no complaints.

Why the honeycrisps I ask.

Why?

Yep

Spring!

Planting

Things are finally greening up around here. I actually walked through real, honest to gosh, genuine green grass on my way around the garden pond this morning. (I walk around it every morning just in case it has somehow gotten warm enough for the fish to swim around.) I am grateful for the green. I think I will go plant some lettuce and carrots to get my mind off all the ugly of the past couple of days.

Mike
*A border collie is never too old and never too tired to play ball*

The things you see

Seen on the street in Fultonville

Seen creeping up out in the main garden

Seen from the big windows just before the sun went down

....on a fine (finally) spring day.

Growing lettuce indoors (part two)

This has worked out amazingly well. We have enjoyed lots of lettuce for sandwiches and small salads and it just keeps coming back no matter how much we pick. The boss makes amazing croûtons (really good in soup too, so I made some of that Saturday, with venison, homegrown ground beef and a little Italian sausage from our 2006 piggies) so with a little super sharp hunter's cheddar and some ranch dressing we are rich indeed.