Remember a couple of days ago I mentioned that the pears we were planning to pick were picked when we went camping?  Yesterday I accidentally discovered the person who picked them!

It was so uncanny how this happened!  I had an errand to do and went to someone’s house I had never been to.  Walking up her front walk, I noticed vegetables growing.  So when she answered the door, I commented and told her I’d love it if she could tell me what she was growing since I didn’t recognize them all.  She responded by saying she had a lot in her back yard and offered to give me the whole tour – of course I agreed!  As we were walking in her side yard, she mentioned something about her plum tree, and I asked how they did this year, commenting that a number of the area apple and pear trees didn’t do well this year because of the late frost.  She said, there’s a tree they picked this year that had loads in the area – and I said, ‘was that in such and such a place?’.  And she said ‘yes’!  She couldn’t believe that we had gotten permission and planned to pick the very same pears. 

Towards the beginning of our discussion, I finished saying something and she said to me, “I feel like I’m listening to the other side of my brain speaking!”  We do a lot of things similarly, though she’s been gardening lots longer than me.  She used recycled lumber for her raised garden beds, is making large lasagna beds in back, and is using wood chips she got for free from the city for her beds and the paths.  This last thing was really funny, since just a few hours before I made arrangements with the tree service company taking down a neighbor’s tree to dump a half a truck load of wood chips/mulch behind my garage.  What for?  To use for my lasagna beds in back and to cover the paths between my new raised beds!  Unfortunately because of how my yard is situated, there’s not room for a dump truck to dump it directly in the yard, which means a lot of work shovelling from where they dump it into the yard.  So that was part of yesterday afternoon’s chores.  A few of the kids were swimming at a friend’s house and when I came to pick them up and their friends heard we were going home to shovel wood chips, they asked if they could come along and help.  Ane they did.  You see, fun and work don’t have to be entirely separate!  The guy who gave it to us was still working down the street and kept peeking over at us to see what we were going to do with so much mulch. 🙂

– Side comment – if you garden or use a wood stove, try contacting tree service companies to ask if they have wood mulch and/or firewood you can have.  When I asked if I could have the wood chips, he asked if I also wanted firewood – they would have given me as much as they had.  These companies are always chopping down trees and take what they have to the dump, if they don’t find anyone who wants it.  Clearly, they’re not going to spend lots of time and energy trying to find you to give it to you for free, but if you ask them and you’re close enough to the area they’re working in, chances are good they’ll be happy to give it to you for free.  Free firewood would make winter heating costs negligible, but we’re unfortunately not set up for it and when we had someone over a couple of days ago to assess what was involved in changing our heating unit, we learned that it would be expensive and complicated for us to switch to wood/coal heat. 

I also noticed she had something sprinkled on top of her lasagna beds, and asked about it – she said they were wood ashes (which is what I suspected).  Wouldn’t you know, I just brought back all the ashes from our campfire for my garden beds? 🙂

She dug up a clump of chives for me and that’s now in our garden bed, and also gave me a ground cherry for the seeds – I had never seen ground cherries growing before, though I had read about them in my catalogs and considered growing some.  So now I’ll be able to start one.  She also gave me some leek seeds.  She was growing a bunch of flowers, one of which was something that spontaneously grew in our yard that I wasn’t able to identify and ripped out because I didn’t know if it was an attractive weed or something someone would want there.  I didn’t want the seeds to fall into my lasagna beds and grow up next year without knowing what it was, so it was nice to learn what it was and I even brought some of those seeds home with me, too!

It was fun to meet  and chat with someone about these things -though I write about some of it here on my blog, I don’t usually meet people who have an active interest in it. 

Avivah