Drought? What drought?

Story after story comes through the news of storms and floods, not that we want tornadoes or flooding, but they aren't happening here. We're bone dry. It goes on for weeks, then we get a brief spell of rain but it changes nothing. More dry weeks come. The water table is down, the plants dry up, the animals suffer.


On the rail you see a Lean Cuisine [TM] container with water in it, which I put out for a poor black and lethargic chameleon who hangs around the front porch. He drank deep and greened up in a few hours, and I've left it there as a chameleon-spa. With the container plants we've put out, it's a popular reptile resort now. A light color container would be better, and I may rummage around for something, but I grabbed what I had, since the poor little guy looked like he was hurting.

The cactus photo is kind of a cheat though. Yeah, that cactus is thriving here, next door in my dad's vegetable garden, but not really because of the drought. Coastal SC actually is cactus country, sort of. 4 years ago, that one appeared after a high tide, washed out of somebody's garden, or...something! He planted it right there, for fun, and 4 years of winters and rains and an occasional snow haven't bothered it.

Then last summer, during THAT drought (!) we saw this cactus, which appeared at the end of our driveway by the utility pole, source unknown. It's still there, but we want to transplant it. We just don't yet know where.

I know many of my readers are sick of wet weather, not to mention violent storms. We'll take the rain off your hands. If necessary, we'll take a nasty storm, though that's possibly a "Be careful what you wish for" declaration. Our one tornado scare a few weeks ago had me filling bottles with water and putting family photos in a zip-lock, then stashing it all to take to the basement and hunker down. And it's staying handy.

But I've stayed here through a Category One hurricane and that was no big deal, so a couple tropical storms sound really really good to me right now.

Yard. Work.

A mass migration of Easter guests is coming, and for some reason, I actually looked at our front yard, as though seeing it through the eyes of a visitor.

AAUUUUUUGH!!

It's hard -- OK, it's impossible -- to stay ahead of weeds in this climate, and I'm really OK with kind of a casual natural look. But it did look like the house of people who've ..... had a rather difficult year. And there were things that I had not only ignored this year, but ignored ever since we moved in 8.5 years ago.


Like the dead fronds on these palm thingies. We actually did not want to trim them the way some people do, which is to denude the bottom each year and raise the new growth by yearly increments until it looks like a tree. But taking out dead fronds keeps the live ones healthier, and so this long not-done job thinned the plants out an awful lot. But that was an awful lot of dead material. FIVE packed wheelbarrow loads. It's not a big wheelbarrow, but, still.



Did some edging with the electric edger. Some other edging work required a hatchet.



Larry had to interrupt our edging program to do a fire ant treatment. The white powder is there on a fire ant nest, to kill them. I really really hate fire ants. Anyone who's ever endured the stinging, itching misery of fire ant bites hates fire ants.


I've cleaned up the paving around it, but this hard-to-use patch of quasi-garden under the stairs will stay as is until we get something that can survive in almost no sunlight. Weeds obviously are OK with it, but the plan is a nice flowering shrub surrounded by rocks.

In the background you see our exciting new doormats! Sprucing up is all work and no play if you can't buy something.


This tree planted itself in the bottom of an unused planter. I don't know what it is, but I like trees, so I pulled it out, filled the planter with dirt, and replanted the tree. A few prunings of its scraggly shoots and twigs make it look more like an intentional planting than like a weed that grew in an abandoned container. I might find something similar to put in the other empty planter. Tomorrow. If I have time. Guests start arriving tomorrow evening and there's lots more to do than that, so we're taking the casual approach.

My muscles are sore, which means I've done a good job. Having sore muscles is like carrying around a clipboard. It means you're really accomplishing something, whether the results bear that out or not!

Joyous Easter to all!

Introducing Seattle Smallhold

Please allow me to introduce yall to my college roommate, Rebecca, who has just started
a blog about her urban homesteading experience in her Seattle neighborhood!

I have few pictures that we're both in but here's one pair in which we passed the camera back and forth and took each other's picture, there on the Stephens College campus. Warm spring day 1974.

Rebecca:


...and me:


She's extroverted, positive, and generally kickass, while I'm introverted and a pessimist. Just imagine us rooming together.... 8~) She's one of my favorite people and I think you'll find her blog an interesting read.

First, assemble your ingredients...

Vegetable gardening has a down side. If the garden is a bust, that's frustrating. If the garden produces loads of stuff, I have to cook.

This year we got smart and planted in early March instead of June, and it paid off. My beets and carrots are looking impressive (pictures later), though that, as i discovered last year, doesn't mean there's any substantial root under all the lovely leaves. I'm leaving them in the ground for awhile because Larry's plantings are yielding so much. The squash started coming in, the tomatoes are piling up, and he's picked a couple zucchini.

I will never never never enjoy cooking for its own sake. It really is possible to be a good, if not great, cook, but never really find it fun. Means to an end. Period.

The home grown produce is forcing me -- horrors! -- to learn new recipes and processes. After i'd made 2 of my old standby squash casseroles, I had to blanch and freeze the extra squash. This being a new experience, I couldn't do it in my sleep, the way I can do longtime recipes I've made a gazillion times -- recipes that I have, actually, selected for my repertoire just because they're that easy and foolproof. Not that it's hard to blanch and freeze, but to discover that I had to, like, research and read instructions and everything.

Cooking, in my opinion, should be doable in one's sleep at all times.

But I pulled out and put back books until I found that Fanny Farmer explained it (Joy of Cooking doesn't tell you how to blanch vegetables for freezing - unless I just couldn't find it in the book. You gotta have Fanny Farmer. Or Google, but I like books), and got it done.

Today's project: zucchini. I've never bought or cooked zucchini. I decided to start with something decadent. If I have to actually work at this, I want a treat.

So! Zucchini Bread! I really love it when something that's actually a cake is named a "bread," which sounds like something that it's mature, responsible and healthy to eat.

Still, this would be Work. That 4-letter word.

All the cooking guides tell you to assemble your equipment and ingredients before you start. That's no problem. I wouldn't even consider starting without the most important equipment of all:

1. Music. Keeps my brain from shorting out. Well, usually.
2. My thickest, most comfy bedroom slippers.
3. A headband. Cooking is aggravating enough without hair in my eyes.

Oh...oh yeah, the edible ingredients.
Not pictured are the spices, eggs and oil. Or the zucchini themselves, but they are shown below.

This is our yield so far, but the heat and the bugs that plagued us last year are taking over again now that we're back into June (97 degrees f., yesterday, high humidity, ghastly, and the weather won't break for another day or 2). Anyway these 2 may be it for this year.

Notice the difference! I love genetics. The zucchini were planted next to the yellow crookneck squash and our bees cross-pollinated squash pollen into one plant.


And here's the bread. It hardly rose. It looks less than appetizing, to me anyway.

So I dreaded tasting it, but I steeled myself and sliced off some.

It's wonderful.

It's delicious. Seriously. I'm stunned. So I guess the whole thing was worth it! This will definitely join the recipe repertoire. After all, eating "bread," especially with green vegetables right there in it, is mature, responsible and healthy.

Gardening with allergies

Still haven't caught the gastro-intestinal virus (Thank You, thank You, thank You!!) but my close-up work in the dirt to finish the new raised bed garden did give me an allergy attack of epic proportions. I browsed online for safety masks, but my eyeglasses won't stay on when I wear those stiff ones. I looked at surgical masks, but all the options I saw tie around the head and neck and I hate ties or rubber bands pulling my hair and slipping down. I knew I'd never put 'em on.

Meanwhile Larry had a dental appointment and came home with the best solution ever. These masks that dentists and hygienists wear loop over my ears, and are wonderfully comfortable. The dentist was nice enough to give Larry a half-full box for me! Highly recommended for work that you love but that brings you in contact with allergens.

So - I got my seeds started, in JiffyPots [TM]. Next was how to keep the wildlife from digging in them.



We'd bought a cheap window at Home Depot, to use for a cold frame. Oddly, it's an exact fit for the raised bed, so Larry also came up with this idea for protecting the pots. We used one of the toppers and another broken one to block the uncovered end of the window and thwart our little woodland friends.

Beat the clock

Old box garden in foreground -- and a new one in the background.

We had our first warm day 3 days ago -- a month late (!) -- but I ran out and started this year's garden project, feeling like, in this climate, I really should have started the seeds in indoor pots at least a week ago. Didn't get to it. Maybe tomorrow.

I've been playing Beat the Clock. Not only to have the cool-weather-loving vegetables planted before it's too late, but to get the new box garden built before tomorrow's predicted rain washed the soil out of the wheelbarrow.


This is the new project yall get to watch me do wrong this year! Won't that be fun? What's "wrong" about it is that I've put it right next to the woods, which is practically like setting out a buffet for the wildlife. But for the right amount of sun and shade, it's the only place. It will also get a tall wire fence around it that won't be pretty but might help.

I had to grade the site to make it sit level. Then I needed to weed all the little grass and wildflower roots out of the dirt and shovel it back in.


There. Now it can rain all it wants to.

I used the top layer of concrete blocks from the old box garden -- instead of the one deep box I had last year, they now make two low boxes. The old box garden will stay put, but at a one-block height. It gets used later in the season for heat-loving stuff, so it's secondary priority.

The third reason I'm trying to beat the clock is that everyone here has had a Very Unpleasant stomach flu. In fact, make that two "Very's." I'm fine so far, but, as the Eternal Pessimist, I just know I will get it too. Actually, in this case, I'm more of a realist. So I'm preparing for it (with provisions, laundry, and due warnings to all who might need my services), and wanted this box built before the flu flattens me!

The Broccoli Diaries

The snow didn't harm the broccoli plants, but that didn't amaze me. They'd thrived through lots of nights at 5-10 degrees below freezing, 'teens-to-20's f.

What surprised me was that we're still getting below-freezing nights most of the time, and ... sink me, if there aren't florets starting! Now. Buds have appeared in three of the plants. The biggest one is pictured below, sharpened for clarity.

And I now own a book called Vegetable Gardening in Florida. This isn't Florida but advice that general books give for normal places just doesn't work in our coastal-SC summer heat. I don't yet know if it will solve any of my problems but I can already say that, if i'd read it first, these buds wouldn't have surprised me at all.

The accidental gardener

The LAST thing I ever thought I'd blog about in January was a crop I planted in June.

A couple of our summer crops turned out well, but neither my carrots (all leaf and practically no root) nor my broccoli gave us any eatin'. The broccoli nearly died and even when I put it into its box planter, it never thrived. By the end of the heat season, the leaves had dried up and crumbled away leaving skeletal stems just kind of sitting there in the dirt.

But they were technically alive, and I had nothing better to do with the planter for the winter than leave them in it. Didn't weed, didn't water. Pretty much paid no attention to the plants at all.

In the cooling of autumn, they began to leaf out and perk up again. Hoo-boy. Still, I thought the hard freeze would be their death knell.

I knew broccoli was a cruciferous veggie, making it a cousin to the ornamental cabbages that like cold temperatures and that people put in their gardens for the icy months. But I had no idea just how close the broccoli and cabbage cold tolerance kinship really was!

Here they are - photo taken today. Hale and hearty, after two solid weeks of nights in the 'teens and 'twenties fahrenheit. No flowers, but the leaves seem perfectly happy. Just wow!



(Hmmm... OK, this picture is enormous! I'm still learning the new computer's photo program.)

Frost warning

We've got a frost warning for tonight, so I harvested the last of the crops for this year. Peppers were my only success, though Larry's garden did better. This last batch didn't get very big, as you can see by the basic teaspoon, but they'll enhance a veggie pizza quite nicely!

Fighting nature

My garden makes kind of pleasant, innocuous blog material, but that's because I avoid telling the parts of the story that are slightly more interesting but definitely more embarrassing.

I'm afraid I'm one of those wackos who took survival measures when Y2K was coming. In 1999 we were still in NJ in our wonderful Victorian house with its nooks and crannies, and I piled canned goods and a huge sack of Sam's Club rice into an odd little closet I kept shoes in. Later, when a local food drive arranged with the postal service for carriers to pick up donations, I dragged the 20(?) pound rice sack out to the porch and our poor mailman hauled it away.

c. August 1997, just after we bought the house.

But, no, I have not entirely changed my nutcase ways, because I honestly think that the ability to provide ourselves with at least some of our own food could become a necessity rather than a hobby. If we never need a food-producing farmette, the kids just might. Or might want one. The current economy being the mess that it is, I wanted to begin my learning process now. This place we're in now is not very good for a sustainable life, but it's fine for a learning laboratory. We'll have some acreage eventually. Why be a novice in 5-10 years?

This is part of the reason why I'm trying things that are more difficult to grow. I like some of the easier crops like lettuce and cukes well enough, but, bottom line, salad holds limited interest for me. I want to be able to raise serious sustenance vegetables that keep better and have more recipe versatility. I'd rather fail more and learn more, than succeed at things I don't care much about. Ideally, I'll have a greenhouse too, and have a small but steady production of salad veggies.

I'm as complete a novice at this as one can be. I've never been into gardening for pleasure. I have to avoid sun, which means getting out there at 6:30 AM to work on it while the yard is still fairly shady. I'm also not a morning person, so this is a radical shift.

I'm also not a detail person. Gardening, especially organic gardening, requires some vigilance and attention to detail. You can't just decide to take a few days off. Nature doesn't.

So I'm not exactly a natural-born gardener. An online friend once told me that if I ever joined her role-playing group, they'd probably dub me The Goddess of Convenience Foods and Take-Out. I have to fight nature, and by that, more than the predators and the weather, i really mean my own nature.

While gardening is kind of calming and satisfying even for my temperament, for me it's more a means to an end, than an end in itself.









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So! I planted my carrots and broccoli almost 2 months ago. We oughta be eating the stuff by now, but neither was the right crop for its location. They didn't die, they didn't grow. They all just sat there suffering in the too-long day of full broiling South Carolina sun.

Both are now in containers. I used to have ornamental trees in these two square planters, years ago. Each crop has a planter now, and both are perking up. Naturally, as soon as I put the carrots into a shadier spot, we've had nothing but cloudy days and downpours. I can move the planters to adjust for weather, so we may get some food out them!

The peppers are happy in the raised bed, though. They love this climate. We harvested 2 and had stuffed peppers, and Larry's (mumble...thriving...mumble) garden produced enough tomatoes for me to make a sauce that looked pink and wimpy, but that had the richest, most delectable flavor... o my! Home grown tomatoes demonstrate the blah-ness of grocery store produce to a mind-blowing degree.

And the rest of my big box garden is now an attempt at, believe it or not, a pumpkin patch. A weird but very sincere pumpkin patch. Larry had a couple plants that needed a spot and I thought I'd try it.

We're also dinking around with pest-discouraging companion plants, which is the reason for the marigolds, and the basil, which you see there to the left, between the pepper plants (and which contributed to my delicious tomato sauce). Nasturtium seeds are in those rectangular planters. Nasturtiums are supposedly good for discouraging certain bugs as well. We'll know a fair amount by the time we've got space for a mini-farm.

I'm learning in fits and starts.

Bowl of Plenty

This is not even the first harvest. We've enjoyed a couple tomatoes and an earlier Japanese eggplant. We actually just ate them without my blogging them first! OMG!

My garden gets credit for the peppers. The rest come from the gardens under Larry's care.

The gardening books lie. "Carrots are easy" says one book. "Carrots like full sun all day," says another. What I'm learning is that we live in a subtropical area in which the instructions given by most books aren't applicable. The Ortho book puts us squarely in what it calls "zone 8" and the book is wrong. At least along the coast, the Floridian "zone 9" stripe ought to creep upward. A few carrots are eking out an existence in the box planter, but 12 hours of South Carolina sun is way too much for them. I will NOT give up on carrots. I like them. They keep. They're versatile. This is a learning experience! More will be revealed.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part IV: Marauder

We have a mystery marauder. Something dug my garden out one night. And I mean dug it out.

We managed to trap a raccoon, but that's not the end of the story. Possibly, the garden was raided by a raccoon, but while raccoons will dig, they generally dig holes. This destruction indicated a bigger and a less precise animal, which threw out half the dirt, destroying most of the seedlings.

But another clue is that something bigger and tougher is preying on raccoons. Something big enough to make a thorough meal out of one -- Larry found the few scraps it left -- and to take off the lower leg of this little guy we caught in our trap (who now lives in Brookgreen Gardens).

There are stray dogs around, often abandoned in the state park across the creek. Coyotes have been spotted in the area, though a little further inland. So far. The species of the marauder is still unknown, but I'm in recovery mode with the garden.

I lost all but 2 little carrot seedlings, but they are hanging in there. And so are the peppers; doing well, in fact!

I'm restarting the carrots, this time in starter pots, and fencing the garden when I get them in. Raccoons climb fences, but we also employ cayenne pepper and Critter Ridder [TM]. This is a real learning experience!

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part III

On Monday morning I went outside, looked at this thing, and thought, This is absolutely hideous. A vampire would sleep in it. What was I thinking?!

And that was even before I saw the photos of Sherwood and Diane's beautiful, and productive, gardens.

Out came the pad and pen, and I started redesigning it (yet again!) into several lovely little terraces. Then I kind of came-to and remembered that what I wanted it for was growing food, not decorating the yard. Lots of lovely terraces would take up more square footage with stonework and leave less actual growing space.

Larry suggested we simply build an attractive adjunct with just a few pieces of the pricier decorative stone. Thus the new half-circle broccoli bed you see here:


It still looks like a tomb. But a nicer tomb. One with a place to leave offerings.

And with some hi-tech irrigation equipment, we're good to go.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part II

It's bigger! It's better! It took 15 bags of soil to fill it up and I'm starting to think this project has become slightly ridiculous in its grandiosity, but there's no turning back. Two little green pepper plants await their spots, and the carrots will go in next. And I'm trying to make this vegetable bed as organic as possible. Thank you, Thomas Supply (for concrete blocks) and Home Depot (for soil and seeds). I haven't even got the growing started yet -- the photo is from this morning, and lugging in the dirt was today's project -- and I'm already realizing that concrete block is going to absorb more water and not hold it in the soil as well as wood would have. I may line it with stone after this year's crop is done with, finances willing.



Long long ago, I copied this Once and Future King quote from a brochure that promoted a library reading campaign (You can click it, for a readable enlargement). It moved from bulletin board to bulletin board with me and then, when wall space was limited, to a file folder labeled "bulletin board type stuff," which I've just perused.

I have very little to be sad about. Everyone and everything is doing OK. My tendency toward melancholy is mostly brain chemistry, and mild at that, and what triggers it lately is more a matter of seeing "the world about [me] devastated by lunatics." But that's a big one. The lunatics are attacking on so many fronts.

On ronniecat's recommendation, I'm in the middle of reading Three Cups of Tea, and finding it very soul-lifting. The fact that it's won prizes and sold so well bodes well for many of the things it has to say; one of which is that fundamentalist, violent Islam is not all of Islam. The people of these villages embrace a Western stranger, and support education. For their daughters. For all their children, for everyone's future. Their ranking Muslim cleric supports the effort.

As I read it, i think, Good! the more understanding this book and this project brings to people who equate Islam with violence and oppression, the better.

Then I wonder, Why can't such an understanding of Christianity come about??

Why is only the fundamentalist brand, the brand that calls for the beliefs of fundamentalist denominations to be imposed on all, why is this the very definition of "Christianity" in the minds of so many people? Not just simpleminded, lazy, or mediocre intellects, but highly intelligent people?

In part, it has to be because we've let the narrow version of the faith co-opt the word. Those of us who honestly believe that the message of Christianity is one of love, not sweet sentimental gooey luv, but healing, feeding, building-for, lifegiving love, a message of offering, never forcing .... we've been too quiet. We've let it become synonymous with a politics that seeks to force the tenets of particular denominations on the most personal aspects of every person's life and heart.

It's something to work on.

All of which leads back to the garden. Learning really is a terrific therapy for being sad, but I'd add one. Another good thing for being sad is to build something.

The Raised Bed Chronicles - Part I

Larry is growing the squash and tomatoes. I wanted to make a raised bed, for carrots and maybe something else. I tried raising carrots back in New Jersey 10 years ago and found that they are quite picky about soil conditions.

And I didn't want to use wood. Untreated lumber will rot. Treated lumber - I just do not want the chemicals around. I know they aren't as bad as they used to be, and i know that they don't leach all that far into the soil.

I don't care. I wanted concrete block. Also unnatural, but it'll have to do.

How to abuse a compact car.

Larry could carry two blocks at a time. I could only carry one at a time, plus I kept stopping to take pictures.


But I did almost all the building!

The Building Inspector

And .... this bed is too small.

So I redesigned it. It's now larger than the version in this picture.

Stay tuned for further pictures.

And for our negotiations with other interested parties: