Sometimes things are serendipitous. In June Gleek found a tiny basil sprout and tried to replant it. This led to me buying basil seeds and planting them. While we were at it, we scattered a mix of wild flower seeds. They grew.
This is what I see outside my kitchen window and it makes me happy.
Now I just need to pull out some of the weeds surrounding them.
(Warning: this adventure contains hornets, a moment of panic, but no serious injuries. If I ever have serious injuries to report, I’ll not begin that story by talking about cabbage.)
Near the end of third grade, local kids are each given a cabbage sprout and a challenge to grow it over the summer. In theory they will bring their grown cabbages to the school next fall to win prizes. I’ve never seen that part come to pass, but the cabbages come home because they’re provided free by a plant company. Patch proudly brought his cabbage home and we plunked it into the weed bed which has been a vegetable garden in years past. I expected it to die of neglect the way that Gleek’s had. Instead it thrived and over the summer months developed into a giant plant. This past week I’ve been staring out the window at the thing and realizing why that myth about babies and cabbage patches might seem believable. The cabbage head looked like an alien life pod. I knew that harvest time had to be near, so I consulted the internet for instructions and recipes.
Around 4 pm today I went to Patch to tell him that I planned to harvest his cabbage for dinner. His reaction was electric. He instantly jumped up from his game “We’re going to harvest it? Now?” Then he ran outside. I paused to collect a knife and my camera.
There he is contemplating his cabbage. Unfortunately the harvesting became more adventurous than intended. Right underneath the wood on which Patch was standing was a sizable hornet’s nest. Patch jumped up and down in excitement. Then moved in to a better photography position.
We got the above photo just moments before Gleek, who had come to watch the excitement, said “Wow. There are a lot of bees.” That was the last clear moment before my memories become a fog of shrieking Patch, Gleek yelling instructions, Patch freezing instead of running, me trying to swat a hornet off of Patch while not stabbing anyone with the knife nor dropping it where a panicked person might step on it. Oh, and I was barefoot, as I often am in summer. I wish I’d thought to put on shoes before heading outside. All of that in sixty seconds. Then we came indoors because there was a stinger to remove from Patch, Gleek discovered that one hornet had gotten inside her shirt and there was even more panic while that bug was slain.
The final sting count was three. Two on Patch, one on Gleek. We immediately administered antihistamines and daubed baking soda onto the sting sites. Then I prescribed a medicinal dose of funny animal videos for the next couple of hours. Within fifteen minutes all was restored to quiet. It was quiet outdoors as well. The hornets had returned to normal behavior. I noted where their entrance was hiding and vowed to return after dark with chemical weaponry.
So instead of having a fun family moment harvesting the cabbage, with photography. I went out by myself and cut it.
Patch grew a really good cabbage. It weighed five and a half pounds. I used about a third of it in soup for dinner. The other two thirds are in my fridge awaiting tomorrow’s recipes. The soup itself got mixed reviews. I loved it, as did Kiki. Link did not like it at all. Gleek and Patch both ate a reasonable portion, determined to eat the food they earned with pain, but finished up dinner by eating other foods.
The stump of the cabbage is still outside.
The internet tells me that it will sprout leaves that we can cook and eat. I’m curious to see what they will look like.
Once the world got dark, I went outside to spray the entry to the hornet’s nest. I don’t think I eradicated it yet, but I have other tools to employ on a different evening. I do feel a little bad, because the hornets were only defending their home. I actually find the tenaciousness of these huge nests kind of admirable. Unfortunately this is the second nest of 200+ stinging bugs that has taken up residence in a location that clashes with the safety of my kids. It has to go. As soon as the world freezes, sending all stinging insects into hibernation, I will recruit a crew to help me removed the wood under which these hornets are nesting. I’m tired of providing habitat for stinging bugs right next to my garden beds.
By bedtime the stings had faded to near invisibility. Patch and Gleek say they still hurt some, but they both completely forgot the stings for several hours this evening. Then they fell asleep without difficulty. I suspect another day will heal everything up again.
So: Growing cabbages = really cool and surprisingly tasty. I may repeat that. Housing hornets near my cabbage plant = bad idea, not to be repeated.
This is a Summer Lilac. It is also known as Buddleia Davidii or Butterfly Bush, but I like the name Summer Lilac. It lets me imagine that I can hold on to spring time so long as the bush is in bloom, and this bush blooms all summer. We had one long ago, but it got torn out as part of our massive landscaping project back in 1999. I bought this one last Wednesday when I ventured into a garden center. I was there for basil plants, because Gleek had brought home a tiny basil sprout from a neighbor and lovingly planted it in our weed-filled garden bed. I knew the traumatized little sprout would not survive, so I went in quest of a larger basil plant for Gleek to tend. I came home with six plants and a wish list of a hundred or more. I need more time, more money, and more garden space. This summer lilac was one of the plants. It sits in a bucket on my back deck because I’ve not had a cool evening hour in which to plant yet. Tomorrow I’ll get it into the ground. It is a promise to myself that I’ll do more in my garden than just tame weeds. I want to be nurturing loveliness as well. The summer lilac will help me, because it will bring butterflies into my garden.
My Spanish dancers are blooming. Okay, they’re Irises, but every time I see them I think of the swirling skirts of Spanish dancers.
Even holding still the petals seem full of motion.
I also love the way that the petals sparkle when you get up close to them in the sunlight.
This year’s crop is thick. I’m going to have to transplant some in the fall so that they have space to grow tall and glorious again next year.
All too soon these beautiful blooms will be gone, but for now I can sit close and enjoy the fragrance.
My heart always lightens when I can step outside my front door and see flowers in bloom.
The crocus always comes first. I love crocus because it is the promise of spring to come. Hyacinths are next.
They fill the air with fragrance. Soon I will have daffodils. Then tulips. Then lilacs. I love spring. I love that the kids can finally get outdoors. To celebrate the outdoors weather, here is a picture of a young girl and a young cat stalking each other.
They are having a great time in the gentle spring wind.
There were pears on my front porch; the last fruits from our tree which we’d not given away. They sat there in a row where we’d placed them to ripen. They’d ripened fine, but they continued to sit while we all walked past them off to school, back from school, running errands, shipping packages, fetching mail, or hauling garbage. The pears witnessed it all and they gradually shifted toward the place beyond ripe. My occasional pauses to glance guiltily at the pears changed from “I really ought to can those” into “I really ought to throw those away.” One morning we finally did. Howard and I dumped all the porch pears unceremoniously into the garbage can. I breathed relief. Pears were no longer a little nagging item on my list of things to do.
The back lawn was blanketed with a layer of leaves. This is the natural result of having planted trees a decade ago. If the leaves were left all winter the grass would die. I sent kids out to rake one afternoon and they made leaf houses, outlining imaginary walls with long sinuous piles of leaves. On a different day I sent them out to rake again and told them they were required to fill up six garbage bags with leaves. They did as they were told and the lawn was still dotted with large grass-killing leaf piles. Howard surveyed the leaves and declared a family leaf raking hour. We armed ourselves with gloves, rakes, and a box full of garbage bags. In the course of one hour, our two teams of baggers and one team of rakers relocated all the leaves into bags. From there the leaves could be transported to the green waste station or offered to neighbors for mulch.
Our pear tree had a surprise for us. Protected under the layer of fallen leaves were several dozen pears. Many of them were the sort of rotten fruit one expects to find a month past the end of bearing season, but some of them were perfect. Ripe. Crisp. Ready to eat or cook. We took a break from raking and gathered up the still-good pears. We had almost two grocery sacks full. I looked at them on my kitchen counter. Pears were back on my list. I really did not want to spend another month feeling guilty about wasting pears. I also did not feel excited about canning pears. This was when I remembered apple butter.
Apple butter is a spread, like peanut butter, only it is made of apples, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger. It is like distilled apple pie that you can spread on toast. I’d had some years ago and the memory stuck with me. Another thing which stuck in my memory is that pears can be substituted for apples in almost any recipe. I googled and had a recipe in minutes. I don’t know why smashing pears into a pulp through a strainer is more fun to me than peeling them and putting them into jars, but it is. The pulp cooked for over an hour, spreading the smell of apple pie through the house. Two batches resulted in 9 pints of pear butter. More importantly, it turned guilty pears into delicious spread.
Making pear butter is not what I ought to have done today. I’m not sorry for it though. Tomorrow I will find high gear and do all the shipping preparation things which need to be done. The calendars arrived and all the pieces are in hand. Now we just need to do the work.
I should not be looking at arbors and gazebos online. There are so many more urgent and important purchases for us to make. We’re in the fat part of our income cycle, but another lean time is ahead and our surviving it depends upon me being wise now. Buying an arbor does not count as wise, no matter how lovely it would look underneath my wisteria vines. It doesn’t help that our wireless extends out into the garden so I can browse while surrounded by my green things and the scent of oriental lilies. I book mark the arbors and gazebos, knowing that two years from now I’ll delete the bookmarks without having visited them in between. I can hope that by then I will already have an arbor, purchased locally on sale.
Porch swings are less expensive than arbors or gazebos. I look at those for awhile too. I would not place it on my porch, which is too narrow, but I could hang it from the swing set on those evenings when my kids do not want to swing. It would be lovely to have a place to sit outdoors. I have those plastic stackable chairs, but they never were comfortable and have developed a permanent layer of filth from residing outdoors, year round, for eight years. I bookmark a lovely wrought iron swing with a flower pattern.
It is strange having these gardening dreams. They sprang forth from dormancy like flower bulbs discovering the earth around them is not frozen anymore. I love letting them grow even though I know that it may make the coming winter, both literal and figurative, harder on me. I still have time, three months before outdoors becomes inhospitable and I have to look inside for projects to dream. Or perhaps the opposite will be true. Perhaps hours outdoors now are filling my reservoirs, giving me reserves through the cold and dark. That is a lovely thought. It encourages me to sit and soak up the feel of grass under my feet, to smell the lilies and mimosa, to push back the grape leaves and see how many bunches of baby grapes I can find.
My neighbors are gathered outside. It is not an official event, we all just wandered out into the pleasant evening and discovered each other there. I listen to them talk. Their summers are busy, filled with going places. We’ve been at home this summer instead of running around. Ours has been the busy-ness of at-home routine rather than events and adventures. I think we needed this. It let us grow in calm and quiet ways, like the plants in my garden.
We are now entering that portion of the summer which I thought would be crazy stressful. It is busy and there are definitely elements of stress. Then I step outside and wander or work in my garden. I clear out overgrowth or pull weeds. I feel the living air blow around my face and I feel the dirt with my fingers. Sometimes I get hot and sweaty with this work, that is part of it and I don’t mind. Working with plants, my mind lets go of my lists and stresses. I stop clutching them so tightly and some of them slip away completely, not important after all. The garden is good for me and I seek more reasons to be outside in it, which is why I research arbors and porch swings even though I know I will not buy them today. It gives me hope that perhaps next summer will also be a season with gardening.
“Lawn is boring,” the gardening book said. “Why fill your garden with boring lawn when there are so many other things you can plant instead?”
It was 1999 when I read those words and believed them. I was in the middle of my year of peace after a tumultuous five years of life upheaval. It was a year when all my creative energies were split between my two young children and the plants in my garden. I dreamed of the day when the little sticks of wisteria would cover the back wall and bloom in the spring. I dug up grass along all fences and created garden beds. I planned to have strawberries and an abundance of flowers. A large section of lawn was dug under to become a new vegetable garden. A section of lawn around the corner of the house became my compost heap, piled high with lawn clippings and other plant detritus. I had a clear vision for what my yard and gardens would become. In my mind I saw blooming flowers, climbing vines, and some lawn in between to provide play space and visual distance. It would be a place of beauty.
Last week I raked out the four-years-overgrown vegetable garden. It was so thick with dead stalks and new growth that multiple passes with the weed whacker were necessary. My metal rake dug out mats of buried weeds and garbage. The pile filled two black trash bags when I was done. Once I was sure that nothing dangerous remained, I ran over the whole thing with our mower. When the weather cools, we’ll throw down some grass seed. That vegetable garden I dug out a decade ago is destined to become lawn again. So are some of the garden beds and the former compost pile. We learned to our chagrin that a compost pile next to the house attracts pests who then want to enter the house. I am now working as hard to put lawn back as I once worked to reduce it. Lawn may be boring, but it is easy to maintain and still attractive. I’ve discovered that a well-kept garden brings me more joy than a disheveled one, no matter what the plants in it may be. I’m trying to bring the required garden maintenance down to match my available time.
Those little wisteria sticks have done a beautiful job of covering the back wall. They grew and twined, cracking the lattice right off of the cinder blocks. In the spring they bloom. In the summer everything is shaded by a canopy of trees which Howard and I planted with our own hands. The scraggly oak remains scraggly and we’re finally admitting it will never thrive, but the others are all marvelous. This summer I am reaping the consequences of yard decisions made a decade ago. On the whole there is more good than bad. A decade from now perhaps I’ll once again be digging up a patch of lawn to plant more garden. Its all good.
I wander out my front door and instead of being depressed by waist high weeds, I see attractive plants and dirt. This is not the normal state of my yard in July. My bare feet step off the warm pavement of my walkway on to the soft lawn. The lawn is neatly mowed. All the bushes are trimmed. The grapes are growing along their wires instead of along the ground and up trees. My front garden is a place of order. Not surprising since I’ve spending an average of an hour per day working on it for the past several weeks. My garden is tame again for the first time since I began working full-time. I wander around the corner of the house to the one spot where weeds still lurk. Many more weeds still lurk around the back of the house. Four years of neglect is not quickly corrected. The weeds have a reprieve for the day. My back and arms are still too tired from the exertions of the previous days.
What changed this year? Why is my garden steadily looking more beautiful? Why do I find myself outside without actually deciding to go? Then once I am there I see a small task and decide to do it. Then one task leads to another and I discover that I’ve amassed yet another black trash bag full of detritus. I stand there with the bag and realize an hour has gone by and my arms are sore again. Some of it is a feedback loop. The yard is nicer, so I want to be out in it more. Because I am out in the garden, I see those small tasks and am drawn in yet again. It is a happy cycle. I enjoy the work and the sense of accomplishment. In the last week I have again found a stable happiness which somehow incorporates focused business thoughts, family chores, some writing, and a significant portion of gardening. All these things are fitting together defying my statements of past years that I simply did not have time to garden. Perhaps this blending is gifted to me now because I need it. It feels strangely as if all the digging unearthed secret deposits of time and energy, buried treasures.
It will not last. I know it will not. I am beating back the weeds with a vengeance now, but soon all of my energies will be absorbed by other things. There will be days and weeks when I step outdoors far too tired to begin even the smallest tasks. The weeds will gain ground on me then. Yet beyond those busy days and weeks there will again be times when I can tackle the weeds. I have finally come to believe that slow and steady is actually a better way to accomplish the things I want. I don’t have to hurry and get it all done before I become distracted. Instead I can do some now and trust that I will do some more later. Perhaps it is trust in myself that I have found. I finally have a long enough baseline as an adult to know which things will always cycle back into my life because I love them and seek them out. Or perhaps I have learned to trust that I will be gifted the peace and time that I need when I need it. Again this is cyclical. I’ll probably need to re-learn this trust, but it comes easier than it used to. For now, I am glad that gardening has come back to me. I missed it far more than I realized.
I don’t need a weed eater for my yard. I need a scythe. I don’t have a scythe, unfortunately, so I am making the best of the tools I have to rescue our yard from four years of neglect. One of the tools that I have this year is minions. Two Saturdays in a row I have rousted them out of bed in the cool of morning and made them do yard work. They were not pleased, but they did good work. I love that they are old enough to get the work done while they grumble about it. With five of us working the yard recovery progress is easily measurable. I enjoy walking out on to the back deck now. I’ve spent three years avoiding my deck because it was surrounded by things to do.
Usually when I get bitten by the gardening bug it is in spring. I get enthusiastic, do some weeding, plant some flowers, and then run out of steam by July. In July and August the grass and weeds take over. September finds me back out doors making a few feeble attempts to beat back the grass. October gets cold and everything goes dormant for the winter. This year feels different. I’m starting in July and I’m thinking long-term. My goal is to prepare the yard and the flower beds so that September can be full of planting. I’m turning some former gardening spaces back into lawn. I may even get the deck and playset stained. If I can accomplish all of that I will have proved to myself that I can maintain what we’ve got. Then maybe I can get a gazebo for my wisteria vines to climb on.