Today we did some cool weather planting.  Before Pesach we put in the strawberry plants and started lettuce – otherwise, the only things there are some garlic, leek, and onion that have been there over the winter.  The lettuce has started coming up in the garden bed as well as one of the planters that they were planted in.  One of the planters didn’t drain properly, so I think everything in that one must have drowned from sitting in so much water after the heavy rain we had on yom tov.

There are two times for planting – the spring (cool weather crops), and then the summer (warm weather crops), and then you can plant the cool weather seeds again in the fall when it’s cool.  Last year I didn’t start thinking about a garden until the very end of May, so I totally missed the timeline for the cool weather crops (and when the fall came I was still pretty uneducated so I missed the chance again :)).  This year I’m fortunately a little more aware of planting timelines than I was last year!  The things that can be planted now should be finished by the time the summer plants/ seeds are ready to go in the ground, so it’s a good use of garden space to double up – I think it’s called succession planting.

Today we turned over the ground in the raised beds to loosen the soil and pulled up any weeds that sprouted since the summer.  Then we planted garden peas, snow peas, turnips, beets, spinach, and mesclun greens.  I was a little lackadaisical about how I planted the spinach – bending over for so long wasn’t so comfortable (that’s the reality of being a week away from my due date!), so I sprinkled them haphazardly around and stirred some dirt over them.  I’m not so optimistic about their chances for success.  It’s a good thing my kids planted more carefully than me!

Since this is our first time planting spring vegetables, it will be interesting to see what comes up in the next couple of months.  I wanted to get these seeds in before Pesach but it would have been too much of a rush, and as I’ve said before, I don’t like the pressure that comes with rushing.  I want my kids to have positive associations of the things we do together, even the work, and that would be pretty hard if I was tense and stressed out!

Today the weather was beautiful, and we all enjoyed working outside together.  As I looked around my yard this afternoon, I was thinking how much more I wanted to do as far as preparing more lasagna beds for the summer planting, and creating mulched paths between the beds because it gives such a nice tidy look to the yard!  I’d still like to have that, but unless in the next couple of days I can muster up the energy and enthusiasm to do some major work (driving back and forth loading lots of compost and mulch, unloading, going back for more….), that’s going to have to wait until the fall.

Have you ever felt like moving slower than usual and being mellow? That’s how I’m feeling right now, and I’m not mentally geared up for rushing around in the next couple of days.  I’m glad to have gotten these seeds in the ground, and also to have cleaned up the back deck of all those things that accumulated over the winter.  At this point, the main thing I want to accomplish this week is my monthly shopping so that I know we’re stocked up for food for the next 5 – 7 weeks, and that’s a full two day project (one day of shopping, one day of organizing to put everything away).  (I initially planned to go on Friday, right after Pesach, but it seemed like too much of a rush, so I’ll go this Wednesday instead when my bulk order is ready to be picked up.)

I find it helpful to balance busy and slow periods – when I do, I can enjoy the busy times and enjoy feeling accomplished, but not get overwhelmed.  After the intense busyness of the Pesach season, it’s a good time for all Jewish women to relax a little and enjoy the feel of spring in the air. 🙂

Avivah

In order to prepare for our blueberry bushes when they arrive, I started to get the soil prepared yesterday.  That meant moving one of the lasagna beds that we recently built along our fence and adding all of it to the other two beds.  So I’ll have two beds that are significantly wider and longer, instead of the three I was originally planning.  And then I can plant the blueberry bushes along the fence.

It was a surprise to discover that right under the dirt layer along the fence, there were huge chunks of flagstone.  I can’t figure out why anyone would have put it there. The kids moved all the pieces to create a path between the two lasagna beds, and hopefully it will make it clear what area is meant to be walked on and what isn’t!

Along this fence we also have a huge amount of weeds (mostly morning glory – it’s beyond me why people actually plant it on purpose) that grow every year and cover the fence.  Trying to keep the weeds down is pretty much futile because the roots are still there and on the neighbor’s side of the fence.  I kind of like the look of the fence covered with greenery, but I’d like to be able to use the area for planting and the weeds will keep anything I plant from thriving.  So the next part is digging up all the roots – we got a good amount done yesterday, but there’s still plenty more.  I’m tackling this by digging from my neighbor’s side as well as ours – it’s more work in the short term, but she’s not able to do it, and I don’t enjoy weeding every day and still seeing that it’s overgrown.  In the long run I think getting it all out will be the easiest thing. 

Then I need to amend the soil so it will be acidic enough for the blueberries, but I’m not worrying about getting that done right away.  If the area is cleared, the roots are gone, and the soil is loosened, then a big part of the preparation has been done, and it won’t be overly much to add the soil amendments at the same time that we plant the bushes.  I read somewhere that you can do that. 

The yard doesn’t look especially neat right now, because of the digging in progress, but it’s good to know that we’re moving forward.  I was planning today to go get a lot more of the composted manure (from the person I went to a few weeks ago) to start lasagna beds in my side yard, and dig up more of the roots.  But I woke up to find that my dh left to work and my keys are in his pocket.  Then H-shem obliged me with a heavy rain, which meant that I couldn’t have gone anyway and I didn’t feel like I missed my opportunity.  I think it will have to wait until after Pesach at this point, since the weather forecast for the next two days is for rain. 

It was nice to be able to do all of this even though my oldest two kids were out for 6.5 hours – ds15 had his first Little League practice (he got his paperwork in just in time) and came home very happy.  It didn’t hurt that he hit a home run his first time at bat (he had been worried that because this was a higher level league, that he would be one of the weaker players).  He told me he thought he liked basketball as much as baseball, but when he played baseball yesterday, he realized it was different for him – “It’s like baseball is part of me”.  He’s a very good player and has played every year since he was 8 or so in the spring leagues, except for last year.  At that point, he was too old for the local league so he coached ds’s team.  This year he’s joining a different league, and is now the top age limit for that; I’m glad he’ll have one more season to play.  Dd14 spent those hours helping my mother in law get a big jump on her Pesach cooking.  She convinced her grandmother to allow her to make more complicated dishes than they usually have, and I think their guests will be very happy with the results. 🙂

My kids commented that it seems kind of funny to be so relaxed and doing all of this in the days before Pesach when everywhere I go, people are talking about what part of their kitchens they’re working on.  🙂  But as I said to my kids, everyone gets things done on the schedule that works for them, and there’s no one way that’s inherently better than another.

Avivah

Have any of you wondered what I do with all of my spare time? :)))  I don’t seem to have a problem staying busy with something – I don’t relate to being moms who say they’re bored staying at home with their kids.  When I tell my husband, “I have an idea!”, he usually looks shocked and jokingly says, “No!  YOU have an idea?”  Because I always seem to have new things that I’m learning about and being busy with. 

One of them is what to do about my fence situation.  I really want to fence in my yard fully, but it’s so expensive.  I’ve been looking online for used fencing, but even when I have seen something that would work for us, it sells so fast that I haven’t yet been able to buy any (after looking for a year).  We’ve looked at the least expensive new options, which would be chain link fencing, and though I don’t love how it looks, it does have its strengths.  One big plus is that it would be strong enough to use as a trellis for training garden plants to grow up, something I very much want to try this year, since it would maximize the amount of plants I could grow in the limited area I have.  But even a chain link fence will come out to at least $800, and probably closer to $1000 once the cost of all the extra supplies are included.  That’s a lot of money, and I could buy a lot of vegetables at the store for that!   So I can’t really justify it as a way to save on trellising costs. 

Several months ago, I read about blueberry plants being attractive landscaping bushes, and good for creating hedges between properties.  I’ve gone back and forth on this idea for months – I like the idea of having a plant that looks good and provides something edible, but I don’t like the idea of my neighbors on the other side eating my berries without permission!  Call me stingy, but if I’m paying the money for the bushes and doing the work, I want to be able to enjoy the rewards of my efforts. 

But after finally getting the final costs for a new chain link fence (that we would install ourselves, eliminating the labor expenses), my mind keeps thinking about possible alternatives, and going back to the idea of using bushes as a fence.  I considered that even if my neighbors did take my berries from their side, I would still have the privacy of a hedge, and the berries from my side of the bushes.  And a fence would only provide privacy, so even with a smaller amount of berries I might be better off with bushes. 

So on Friday (yes, Friday, what else would I be doing then? :)) I spent several hours researching berry bushes (service berry, ligon berry, huckleberry, and cranberry), before moving on to blueberries.  You wouldn’t think there’s that much to learn, but there are several categories of blueberries – lowbush, highbush, and rabbiteye.  And in each of those categories is a seemingly endless variety of blueberries, with every having it’s own climate needs, height, berry flavor/size – it was almost dizzying.  I researched which were most attractive, which were most productive, which kind produced fruits at which part of the seasons, which had the best flavor (and there were so many opinions on this – ones that some claimed were the best, others in the same gardening zone said didn’t grow well for them).  Which could be grown successfully in my area.  What I’d have to do to prepare the soil for the bushes to be planted.  I looked at nurseries across the countries, searched for reviews on the various nurseries, checked their pricing….and was feeling a little overwhelmed by it all.  It really was a lot of information.  And I don’t especially enjoy cramming so much into my puny little brain at one time.   

I noticed that one nursery not only seemed to have very good prices, but had a note on their order form that they offered an option to choose bushes that would work best for your area.  So that’s finally what I decided to do.   After deciding on this, my biggest concern was that if I ordered on Friday, that the bushes would come on Pesach.  I didn’t mind if they came a day before, because I’d (in theory, anyhow!) manage to get them put in somehow.  But since they need to be planted as soon as possible, I didn’t want to have them sitting around for a week.  I asked about the delivery schedule (on the website it said that April 15 was the end of the shipping period for blueberries for the year), and was told it would take a couple of weeks to process my order, since there were over 200 orders to fill before mine.  So that was a relief!  (And hopefully they won’t surprise me by being overly efficient and send them early, which is what happened with the strawberries and blackberries.)

Then I asked her some questions about the categories of bushes.  I told her my basic needs, and then told her I’d like a selection of 30 bushes.  (I hope that’s the right amount for my needs – I decided on this spontaneously as I was talking to the representative.)  She said they’d give me 5 bushes of six different kinds, all of which are suitable for my climate, and would choose them so the harvesting season would be continuous (ie some would be early bearers, some mid season, some late leason).  She said if I want thick hedges, I can plant them three feet apart and they’ll grow together, but the fruit production will be much less because the sun can’t reach all parts of the plants.  If I want higher berry production, they suggest planting them 5 or 6 feet apart.  So I think that on one side of my yard, I’ll plant them closer (where the privacy is more important to me) and on the other side I’ll stagger them further apart. 

By the way, these come as bare roots, which means they look like sticks.  It will be a while until they grow into hedges, and I won’t get any fruit from these until next summer, but I’m happy with the fencing solution dh and I came to.  He’ll fence in the back of our yard fully with chain link (and use the slats that close the spaces up), and I’ll plant the bushes along the side yards between my neighbors on each side.  My hope is this will look more attractive and friendly than fencing, but will provide us with the visual screen that I want to have.  And of course, the berries will be a nice bonus.  🙂

Avivah

So today was the first day I scheduled to begin cleaning the kitchen for Pesach.  Since Tuesdays are always busy days for me, I knew I wouldn’t be able to start until this afternoon.  And that’s what I was going to do, when there was a sudden knock on the door – a delivery arrived.  And what do you think it was?  The strawberry plants and blackberry bushes that I ordered at the beginning of this month.  And they needed to be planted immediately.

Well.  That certainly wasn’t part of my plan for today.  In fact, according to the estimated dates they would be sent, I didn’t expect them for another three weeks, after Pesach.  Accordingly, I didn’t even have a prepared bed to put the strawberries in, or know what conditions they needed.  But adaptability is a great trait to develop in being happy day to day.  And so I adapted.  🙂 

I’m happy to say that after doing some quick research, my 25 strawberry plants are now in the ground, as are the newest blackberry bushes (along with the one extra one from last week’s purchase that I couldn’t find a place for).  Last week, ds10 planted the raspberry bushes in the rain, and the next day when it was sunny, got the other blackberry bushes put in.   And this morning, my ds ran in excitedly to tell me that there are already signs of green buds on the raspberry plants that he put in on Thursday afternoon – it was so nice for him to see them already showing signs of growth!

Are you wondering what ended up happening with my kitchen?  You’ll have to wait for my next post.  🙂

Avivah

Wow, I have had a very full and productive afternoon! 

Last night I saw an ad on Craig’s List by someone who had free composted horse manure available.  (Composted, for those who don’t know gardening terms, means that it’s broken down to be rich soil, no smell.)  I emailed him last night for details, and called him early in the afternoon to confirm when I’d be coming.  I was going to take just my ds10, and then said my dd8 could come, and then ds6 asked if he could also come, so I said, ‘sure’.  And then my almost 3 yos also wanted to come, and I almost successfully put my foot down, but then thought about how much he’d appreciate getting out of the house.  So I took him, too.:)

Compost is so valuable to the soil that I’ve often seen it referred to as black gold, and people pay a good price for it.  So being able to get as much as I wanted for free was a big boon!  I asked the guy who had the compost what would be the best way to bring it home, and he suggested bringing shovels and five gallon buckets.  I only have one shovel (not including the kiddie one), so ds10 suggested calling friends of ours to see if they had any shovels.  Since they didn’t answer when we phoned them, we swung by on our way there, and they had just gotten home.  They lent us several shovels, and we took their 9 and 10 year old boys with us to shovel compost – our exciting field trip for the day!

So off we went, and it was really a beautiful day and a nice outing.  The kids all worked hard – even my littlest one took a little pail and a garden trowel so he could fill his bucket.  He felt very accomplished.  They filled up the equivalent of 20 five gallon buckets with compost to take back home for our garden to be.  I think there’s something really invigorating and simultaneously relaxing about working hard outside on a beautiful day.

There were horses, cows, a billy goat, and a flock of chickens there, and the kids enjoyed being able to look around and see all the animals.  Initially my ds2 was so apprehensive about the chickens that he was actually shivering when he was walking towards the barn area, and so my ds10 walked with him to reassure him.  It didn’t take long before he was telling me how nice the chickens were – “the chickens are my best friends” was what he told me when we came home. 

On the way home, I stopped at the supermarket to get a bunch of cardboard boxes so that we’d be able to unload the compost right away.  Cardboard is the first recommended layer for lasagna gardening, which when placed on the ground kills the grass or weeds underneath and provides a dark and moist place for earthworms to make their homes.  Compost is the next layer.  The idea behind lasagna gardening is to layer different kinds of organic materials and let it break down over time to be a good growing soil, thereby minimizing the hands on effort involved in preparing the soil for a garden. 

I made two twenty foot rows with the cardboard, and the kids poured out all of the compost on top of the cardboard.  Then we raked a bunch of leaves on top of that, from the leaves we had piled along the sides of the fence during the fall for this purpose.  I was amazed at how much compost we needed – I thought we must surely have gotten enough to practically cover my entire yard!  Not anywhere close. 

It’s really fast to put together a lasagna bed once you have the materials, and it’s so nice to have gotten this done.  I’ve been thinking about doing it for quite a while, and have been procrastinating because I wanted to have a fence all around the yard before I started, since it makes the yard look kind of untidy where you heap the organic matter.  I still don’t have a fence, but when I saw the offer of free compost, I decided to get started anyway.  I told my dh all last summer how much I wanted a fence, but this year I think he realizes that I really mean it.  Maybe when I said that we’ll pay retail for the fence if I can’t find it used that helped him realize that it’s a priority for me! 

It’s supposed to rain tonight, and I’m delighted to have this done before then, as the rain will help break everything down.  I’m also glad to have it taken care of before I get busy next week with Pesach preparations.  Officially in this gardening zone, it will be another two months before we can put out warm weather plants in the garden, so now I don’t have to do much but let these newly prepared garden beds ‘cook’ between now and then.  

I realized recently that my garden last year wasn’t the failure that I thought it was – it was more a matter of having an unrealistic idea of how much we could produce in the small amount of yard we dedicated to our garden, and I realized that if we wanted anything more significant, we’d need to use more of the yard.  I’d like to use my side yard for a garden this year, too, and I’m thinking that I might need to make another trip or two back for more compost!  But it’s a big chunk of time – including the driving in each direction, loading/unloading/spreading the compost, it took about five hours.  Which is basically an entire afternoon.  So I’ll have to see where preparing more lasagna beds falls on my list of priorities in the coming week or two, and if this is all that I get around to doing, it will still more than double the gardening area we’ll have available compared to last year. 

Avivah

I just finished placing an order for 25 strawberry plants and 2 thornless blackberry canes, for less than $25.  I’ve been thinking for months about getting some of these (along with blueberry bushes), but didn’t come to any decision.  When I heard about this great online deal, I decided to finally stop thinking about it and take action. 

Spring Hill Nursery is having a special right now where you can get $20 of free plants.  Two blackberry canes would be just $20, which means you can get them free except for shipping (an additional 7.95).  I couldn’t decide between the strawberries or blackberries, so decided to get both. 🙂  Both of these are plants that come up year after year, and don’t need to be replanted, so it’s a one time expense.  If I remember what I read about blackberries, they tend to spread, so hopefully the two canes will turn into more without any further financial investment on my part.

Here’s the link, if anyone is interested: http://springhillnursery.com/article.asp?mid=659596-2-0-ARTICLE-0&ai=583&sid=414217&eid=081506&lm=&eicioi&bhcd2=1236204630.  The $20 will come off of your order automatically – last night I started to order, and thought I needed some kind of coupon code that I didn’t have so I planned to call the order in this morning.  I was too tired to notice that it had already been taken off the final price!

Avivah

This past summer was the first time I had a garden, and I have to confess that it wasn’t extremely successful.  It was a good learning experience, though, and I enjoyed the feeling of being outdoors and doing something timeless and real.  Gardening is something that takes knowledge and skill, and I had very little of that when I started out.  And because I didn’t give any thought to having a garden until May, I was at a disadvantage for starting out late.

If crops don’t have to be planted until May or June, what possible disadvantage could there be?  Soil quality.  We built raised beds and purchased standard garden soil and hummus, but that wasn’t enough to create a rich growing soil for our plants.  Sure, we got zucchini, tomatoes, green beans, peppers, onions, spices, etc – but the yield was very unimpressive. 

Since this is the time of year when you can easily and cheaply get free materials to enrich your garden, now’s the time to think about it!  What I’m referring to are the huge number of leaves that are being bagged in every neighborhood and waiting to be collected.  Leaves are a fantastic compost ingredient – compost needs a mix of moist/green and dry/brown items, and leaves provide the dry/brown part of the mix.  Your regular kitchen scraps (vegetable scraps, not meat or bones) provide the green. 

Since we now have a compost tumbler, the kids filled it with lots of leaves from our yard (after building a huge pile in and spending days doing tumbling tricks head over heels into the pile – ‘Mommy, we’re drowning in leaves!’), and we’ll continue to add kitchen scraps to it.  (Prior to this our compost consisted of mostly green, which meant that it had a smell and flies around it in the summer – though since it was outside in the yard, it wasn’t a problem for us.  But if we had more brown matter in it, this wouldn’t have happened.)  But if you don’t have a tumbler, or even a compost pile, you can still benefit from the leaves.

All you have to do is dump them on top of the area where you plan to garden next year.  If you can chop them up (by running a mower over them) then it will break down much faster than entire leaves, but plain leaves are good, too.  Someone told me last week that he was amazed at how rich his soil was this past year, and all he did was dump leaves on top of his garden spot and let them sit. 

I’m hoping to expand our garden for the next season (and will do a lot more reading and learning in the winter/early spring so I’ll be more prepared this time!), so I had the kids spread cardboard in those areas (to kill weeds/grass), and then cover it with leaves.  As the season goes on, the leaves will break down, and I can till them into the ground before planting if I want.  Though being a person who doesn’t want to do work that seems extraneous, I’ll probably just leave them on top.  🙂

This is actually very similar to the idea of ‘lasagna gardening’. I heard about it this year as a cheap way to build your garden soil, but after learning more about it, realized that while it didn’t take much time, money, or effort – but did take advance thought and planning.  The premise of lasagna gardening is that you build layers on top of the area where you plan to garden of things that will break down and enrich the soil.  I think she suggested starting with newspaper, followed by grass clippings, leaves, compost – whatever you have will break down over time.  The book is Lasagna Gardening; check your library for it if you’re interested.

If you’re in an area where lawns are still being mowed, grass clippings are an incredible fertilizer.  A couple of months ago I was walking down my block when the lawn service was taking care of a neighbor’s yard.  I saw he was almost finished bagging all of the clippings, so I asked if I could take both large black bags home for my garden.  He was happy to give them to me – in fact, he was going to carry them all the way home for me.  🙂  I dumped those on top of the garden and a bunch more on top of my compost pile (not to be confused with the tumbler – the pile came before the tumbler), but that was all I got for the season because I do actually have a pretty full life and not much time to actively scout for bags of grass clippings :).  If you do this, only use clippings from grass that wasn’t chemically treated.  I saw afterwards in a Mother Earth article that grass clippings are considered one of the very best soil fertilizers, but because they break down so quickly, they can’t be packaged and sold in retail stores, so most of us would never know how good they are!

Avivah

Oooh, I’m so tired tonight.  What a busy day, and tomorrow will be busy, and the next day, and then next few days after that…..

One of the things I accomplished today that’s worthy of commenting on (to me, anyway!) is purchasing a used tumble composter for my garden.  I haven’t written much about our garden, even though I’ve loved it and it’s been a great experience.  I very much want to expand it significantly for next year so that it will provide a serious amount of vegetables for our family, and realize that part of why our crops weren’t as successful as I would have liked this year is that the soil wasn’t strong enough. 

I decided that I’m going to need to be able to make our own compost in the amounts that we need (I’m certainly not going to pay retail for that!), and that a compost tumbler would be a very useful addition.  The way it works is that it keeps the clippings or plant matter in a contained area where the heat can build up, and there’s a handle on the side that allows it to be turned for aeration.  After as little as a couple of weeks, you can have a large load of compost ready for use.  It’s pretty simple, but very effective.  Since I currently have an informal compost pile (that currently has sprouted a bunch of watermelon seeds), I know how inefficient and time consuming it can be to wait for it to break down otherwise.  They only problem is, they’re hugely expensive to buy new (well, I consider over $500 expensive), and I’ve only one time before seen one advertised used and it got snapped up right away.

Last night I was browsing Craig’s List and saw this composter, and immediately I wanted to buy it.  But it was too late to call, and a part of me really didn’t want to try to squeeze something else into a day that was already jam packed – especially since I could see the seller was located 45 minutes away, and I knew it would be a significant amount of time to get there.  But the other part of me knew I better take the opportunity when I had it because I would end up regretting not taking action later on.

So we went late this afternoon, directly from our homeschooling monthly gathering.   We took out the front passener bench before we left in order to make space for it, but when I saw it, I was concerned that it wasn’t going to quite make it.  And the seller was even more concerned than me, but it was obviously meant to be for us to get it, because it fit, with some creative finagling.  After $100 changed hands, we were off to home.

When I got home, my 7 and 9 year olds were so eager to take it out that while I was on the phone (which of course was ringing before I even got into the house), they took everything out themselves and set it all up.  I have no idea how they did it, because it’s really bulky and not too light.  They were clearly highly motivated, though.  I overheard them tell their siblings that they rolled the tumbler part most of the way, and only lifted it to get over the fence and then to put it in place.  They feel very accomplished, and they should.  In any case, now we have a very useful new addition to our yard, that is going to get a lot of use! 

Avivah