CRAZY BUSY

Just got done putting on a little Earth Flag parade for stewardship campaign at church with the help of friends and I’ve been organizing my spring classes.

“Menu for the Future” spring series cranks up again on Friday at Florida School of Holistic Living.  I like teaching that one — I waive my teaching fee to donate to the Homegrown Food Coop.  Tuition from the students is earmarked to go there too.

Then there’s my Earth Cinema class on 3rd Saturdays down at church.  Which carries on as the “Green Movie Night” now that Earth Cinema went under because of the economy.  But never fear! I’ve switched the film club over to Ironweed! It is still free, it is still potluck fun at 6 PM, then movie time at 7 PM with a little discussion post movie. IN fact, we’re on this Sat, Feb 20th and again Mar 20th!

Speaking of movies, there’s Renewal on Sundays (Mar 14 & 21) , a monthly “water” theme small discussion group cranking up in time for Water Day in March…

Oh, wait, Mar 7 there’s the Coalition of Immokalee Workers Share the Plate and farmworker sermon to write.  And the kid’s coloring contest…. and the freedom march… and the grocery bag project… and I have to go to Julia’s school to attend kindergarten art class.

She and I asked her teacher who asked the art teacher who then decided to get all the grades involved in the Coalition of Immokalee Worker’s Kid’s Art Contest.  It was amazing! So I best show up to support my kid and her friends in their justice work even if it means getting all gluey and glittery.

Yeah. No wonder I don’t write often.

RADIO GAGA

But I’m heading out to my first radio appearance on 91.5 tomorrow. I had to prep for that too, but that one took a different approach.  Sure, I got my notes together.  But I also got my hands dirty.

I took off to help my friend Di put in her lettuce in a new raised bed.  I’m going to call her a “kick-butt crone” because I know she’d enjoy that!  I usually enjoy talking to my elder women friends — their perspective on life and a lot of other things is so neat.  Di and I started talking about my daughter and her grandson and the need for kids to know where their food comes from.  We were both sitting on the ground with metal teaspoons scooping out lettuce seedlings and putting them down.  We also talked about how for both of us, cooking and gardening is part of our spiritual practice.  You feel totally broken when you can’t get your hands in the dirt… like some component is just missing.

Back home, I spend part of the time fetching supplies, straightening bits, and setting up the “not EarthBoxes” to take a mess of strawberries. I have to get ready for Strawberry War III — will Julia eat more or the harvested berries or me?

My friend Deidra got me rescued herbs, arugula and chard that were going to be trashed.

I put them in the “plant hospital” and they’re bouncing back well. They started like this:

Now check it… Go Arugula!

Go swiss chard!

I am way later than I wanted to be starting seeds. Normally I want to be doing this around Yule or Christmas.  But we have a long growing season here in Florida.  I’d been without a garden since June and totally missed the fall “warm 1″ season.  I’m going to be ok for cool 1 and warm 2.

GROUNDING

The best part is that the kitchen garden is back in business.

Oh, the compost bins still have to be built, there’s some missing beds. Need to paint the benches. Some of the beds installed need a bit of straightening and reanchoring. I seem to be missing some pots and one whole bag of corn gluten for the lawn went AWOL during the remodel. I have to get the posts and trellis net out again. What happened to the clamps?

But I’ve gone from 130 sq ft withdrawal, to 200 sq ft installed, with another 100 sq ft on the way.  It feels downright luxurious! And now that I’m back into putter mode, I feel so much more grounded.

Sermons, classes, radio interviews, family… come whatever may. I’m ready.

I think I might manage a small 2 ft x 8 ft herb bed.  That would be nice.  I like what fresh herbs do for cookery.

I didn’t think I was going to get anything at all for fall season, and I’m resisting the urge to bite off more than I can chew. The sensible thing is to spend more time planning for spring planting but I’m itching to start now that the landscapers regraded my lawn and hauled in all the mulch.

Here’s the general sketch for the 300 sq ft garden to come.

Heather came over and helped me get the first set of beds put in. Now I have to start filling.

The garden shelf is all crazy with things shoved into it willy nilly and the trellis pieces leaned on it. But I marveled over how a few volunteer tomato plants from the second shelf were shooting for the roof despite being neglected.

One even had a yellow tomato fruiting!

So I pulled the Mom Classic of going selectively deaf.  “Get up. You have to eat breakfast.”

Paul didn’t get her to bed on time last night and she’s grumpy. But Julia is actually adjusting well and she’s having a lot of fun at school with her new teacher and classmates.

She woke me up on “first day of school Monday” an hour before schedule breathless with anticipation. “Mommy! It’s time for kindergarten! We’re going to be late!”

Me?

The first day back to school after walking her in, I took another mom friend to breakfast to celebrate the summer being over. For SAHMs, summer is the crazy time of the year. Boy, was I was feeling it! Running ragged, cranky, low on sleep…

I did nothing that first day. One of my rare days OFF from everything!

Over the next few days I slowly got back into catching up some volunteer work.  I marveled over being able to sit down to a task, work through it all the way, and then turn my attention to something else.  Without interruption. Without endless questions.

I’m excited about what I’m doing again.  I feel productive again instead of all my attention going to the “childcare giving” portion of my SAHM gig.

I even got my teeth cleaned!

Over the last few days, I’ve actually been able to stay awake and be pleasant in the afternoon because I’m not running after a lively 5 year old for 12 hours solid.  I look forward to going to pick her up and the short walk back home when she bounces along babbling with enthusiasm about her day. It charms me and I gain a new sense of appreciation for my child.

Today is Friday, so I turn my focus over to the house.

Which is a wreck, of course. It went to hell in the summer.

I’m not crazy about the clutter, but there are bits to it that I do love.  Paul’s tireless paper models at the dining table means eating dinner on it is hard, but it also means he gives Julia an enviable army of dinosaurs.

“Are these going to be here forever?” I asked.

“No, they are for Julia.  And you know sooner or later she’s going to smash them up and they’ll have to go.”

Knowing that, he’s still sitting there most nights gluing things with tweezers.

I don’t have that sort of patience. Mine is a different kind.

I’ve been having landscapers out here to grade the lawn, mulch, and tidy around to set me up for a larger kitchen garden space. Julia and I had a good time over the last two years building it up to 100 sq feet and figuring out how to to cope with growing food in this zone.

Over the summer, I broke it down early.  In the last few weeks I’ve had landscapers regrade the lawn away from the house to improve drainage. They also mulched that whole side section — something like 17 ft x 50 ft — and built me a small retaining wall.

I was secretly pleased when I heard them admiring my soil.  My mom the flower gardener envies my soil but now professionals appreciated it too.  Florida tends to be all sandy and difficult. I’ve been actively trying to build up our soil though.  Some days I feel like the crazy compost lady instead of the crazy cat lady.

My hands today are going to be busy with tidying clutter away and general housework. But my head is out in the yard, contemplating…rearranging…planning for the raised beds and what I’m going to grow.

I love Fall.  For us here in Florida, it’s the other Spring. A blank slate, a fresh start to new adventures.

This is summer. We’re supposed to be enjoying each other and time off or at least, time for low-key before school starts.

I got up at 8 AM and took Julia to her swim class.  I popped into the grocery store and made us lunch and then did some computer work — email, notices, article, etc. Popped some laundry in.

I went out to the yard and let Julia mess about…

…while I tackled one overgrown bed. It took about 10 minutes, which is why I love Square Foot Gardening. Even after weeks of neglect, I can bounce back quickly because the soil is so fluffy and easy to work.

I got it cleared and the raised bed dismantled and pieces put in the patio. I have two more beds to clear and the seedling shelf to tidy before the garden guys come out to grade my lawn and mulch my new kitchen garden area out.

Julia harvested two volunteer banana peppers. Also the perpetual marigolds.

Then I went to babysit a friend’s kids while she took off for a doc appointment.  Then again to the grocery store to get the few things I forgot, made dinner.

Played with my kid and got her to bed. A good day.

YESTERDAY

Yesterday and today we put in some garden work. We’d started do last month but got derailed, but I think we’re definitely going now. The momentum is carrying us along.

Yesterday we were weeding all the beds and watering, checking plants after the cold snap. Most did ok, some might have to go.

We got the Nantes carrot tape out and planted them in the two squares that were empty in the sweet onion plot.

The exciting part was when I took the cardboard off the plot I had wanted to use for strawberries and found a little black racer snake sleeping. He woke up and glared.

It was close to sunset so I decided to call it a day and go in to make dinner. Julia’s nerves had gotten rattled anyway so she was definitely done.

TODAY

Today while she was at preschool I picked up 16 Sequoia Strawberry plants. I keep telling myself to get organized to start them myself because they’d be way cheaper! But I’m not always that organized.

When I opened the trunk to show her the surprise in the parking lot, she lit up and claimed first dibs on all strawberries. I told her no because last year I only did 8 plants and I hardly got any. So I got extras so I could eat some too. After lunch we planted some flower seeds (petunia and marigold) in the windowbox starters and took a rest.

Then in the afternoon we went out. I raked over the snake bed to make sure he’d gone and we settled into to work. Pulled out all the grass from the edges, dug out all the soil into Rubbermaid totes, and lay fresh cardboard down to suppress any grass or weeds from popping up. It seems to last about a year so turning the garden beds over isn’t much trouble when it’s 4×4 plots at a time. Put all the dirt back and assembled the new grids Paul made. Will have to saw about an inch off one end because the beds are not exactly square.

Julia planted most of them herself all around the bed. I only had to help with the back middle 4 because those she had a hard time reaching.

Most of the plants have blooms. Some have fruit. Probably been in the pot too long but can’t be choosy when you procrastinate and have to go with transplants!

Julia is giving them organic plant food out of the bag in the plastic tub.

One side of the 4×8 bed is pretty much sweet onions and the other is strawberries. Here is a better view of the sweet onions in the foreground.

This is what they were like almost 6 weeks ago when I first put in the onion starters. They’ve come along well.

Julia working her way around the bed.

I just rip them off but she wanted to use scissors to get the plastic labels off the peat pots.

Our little 4 x 4 ft strawberry patch all planted. I hope they are sweet and juicy!

We showed off to Daddy when he got home and then made him put up the bean trellis.

I was trying to do it with Julia but she’s too short to hold her end up high enough so we had to wait for him. We planted purple beans.

I think we are either going to put more carrots down in front of it or more strawberries. Julia is campaigning for the berries, of course.

]]> http://livingthe7th.org/2009/02/26/snake-strawberries-onions-carrot-beans/feed/ 0 Cat nantes1 snake2 strawberry1 strawberry2 strawberry3 strawberry4 onions2 onions1 strawberry5 strawberry6 strawberry71 http://livingthe7th.org/2008/05/21/hello-eggplant/ http://livingthe7th.org/2008/05/21/hello-eggplant/#comments Wed, 21 May 2008 20:36:59 +0000 Cat http://whiteplate.wordpress.com/?p=220 ]]> Here is our most recent backyard harvest for dinner….I was thinking pasta so there were the first two eggplants, then some green basil and some purple basil, any little yellow tomatoes that were ready… and I decided to bring in the next two purple cherokees to finish ripening in the kitchen perhaps for some future lunch time sandwich:

My child has a fondness for the green onions so she insisted we needed some of them too:

She piled them on top of everything else we were bringing inside:

So our dinner harvest looked more like this:

Julia then decided to pretend the eggplant was a telephone. “Hello, eggplant!” she exclaimed.

Which is fine. I much prefer eggplant “telephone” to what my spouse suggested. Perv. LOL.

Here is one of them  12/21/07:

It was like this on  1/30/08:

On 2/8/04 it had gotten this fluffy so I decided to harvest it and its friends and make a salad:

Here is the first harvest:

Julia did not want to be in the picture. She said she’d hide behind lettuce:

Here is some of the salad. It was excellent — vibrant and fresh:

Here we are on 2/17/04. The bottom box that I harvest about nine days ago is filling back in:

I decided to harvest the top box:

Here’s our second harvest in a large, deep, round bowl:

Now I’m trying to decide what sort of salad it will be and we will eat it for dinner.

In the All New Square Foot Gardening book, Mel Bartholomew suggests this formula for making up your soil mix for your raised bed:

• 1/3 vermiculite
• 1/3 peat moss
• 1/3 compost

In a 4 x 4 ft raised bed that is 8 inches high, that translates to about 3.5 cubic feet of each thing.

That doesn’t sound so bad until you go to the store and figure out that compost is sold by the pound, you get peat moss in bales or litres, and then the best vermiculite source I found sells in quarts or bushels. (Hint for homeschoolers: There’s your math lesson of the day — converting things from one volume measure to another!)

Luckily, you don’t have to be exact.

SHOPPING LIST

First, go to the Home Harvest website and order 1.5 bushels of vermiculite. They will ship to your house. Even with the shipping, I haven’t found vermiculite locally in this quantity for a better price than the ~$30 it costs. It is your most expensive soil mix ingredient, but you never have to put it into the bed again. It won’t rot away. (Don’t substitute with perlite — perlite has a habit of rising to the top and floating away in the rain.)

It takes about a week to arrive and when it comes, save the box and packaging.

All the rest I picked up at Lowe’s this afternoon for $40.

• 1 bag of Black Kow compost — 50 lbs
• 1 bag Black Velvet Mushroom Compost — 40 lbs
• 1 bag Timberline Organic Compost (cow) — 40 lbs
• 3 bags Majestic Earth Peat Moss — 44 L per bag

The peat moss doens’t have to be Majestic Earth Brand — any will do. Try to go with 3 to 5 different types of compost if you can. The more varied, the better, but shoot for three at minimum.
FILLING THE BED

Mel suggests using a tarp to mix all the ingredients together. My helper is too small to deal with trying to fold tarp full of more than 120 lbs of soil mix and I don’t feel like washing the tarp afterward so we do it this way instead… sort of lasagna gardening style but not quite.

The first step is to put down cardboard at the bottom of the bed. If you saved your vermiculite shipping box, you can use that. If not, use a thick layer of paper grocery bags, newspaper, or a mix of all three. This will kill off the grass and prevent weeds from popping up into your bed. If it is flying around, wet it down with a hose so it stays put.

Next, dump two bags of peat moss in. Use a rake to spread it around to cover the cardboard.

After that, dump in the two 40 lb bags of compost. Spread it evenly over the peat first, then start raking it so it is mixing together.

Now dump the vermiculite in. Have child stand back because it tends to be dusty coming out of the bag. Wet it down a little bit with the hose if you need to so the dust isn’t flying around. (If dust sensitive, wear a mask or bandana around your nose while doing this.)

Do the same thing as before — use the rake to spread the vermiculite evenly across the raised bed first and then start to mix it into the other ingredients.

Now add your last bag of peat and your last bag of compost. Spread it out evenly, and then mix. Children tend to like the mixing so let them go at it as long as they want to. Just remind them to keep the soil mix inside the raised bed. You will end up with something like this:

You may also end up with a planted rake or two!

NEXT WEEK:

• Making the Grid and Planting

Introduction

I started putting in a 100 sq ft kitchen garden for myself last summer. I’m still nowhere close to being done installing beds and I’m still learning as I go along when it comes to growing edibles.
But I’ve really gotten to love spending time with my preschooler puttering around in the yard. I’ve watched her make mud pies, catch anoles, plant marigolds, find caterpillers, harvest herbs, and draw endless pictures of little squares with dots inside them representing seeds.

It’s high time she had a 4×4 ft raised bed of her own.

For those who want to give it a whirl, I’ll be writing a series of mini articles about organic square foot gardening with small children that explains how to copy our efforts at your own homes. Most of our January weekends are going to be spent setting one up so she and her friends can do a homeschool gardening unit in February.

The budget for a 4 x 4 ft bed is between $100-$150 depending on where you source your supplies.

If you want to jump ahead on your own, the Orange County Library has copies of Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening and his website provides tips for the basic set up. The GardenWeb community has a great SFG FAQ and the SFG folks at Flickr have a good collection of photos.

Goals

We only have three goals for our little gardeners:

1. Set up an organic 4 x 4 ft SFG correctly
2. Plant it up
3. Grow something for a while

Whether or not the plants last the season or we get to actually harvest anything edible is bonus.

Children’s Tools

Children especially like having their own garden tools. I bought my daughter a metal and wood long handle set that included a leaf rake, rake, hoe, and shovel by Toysmith for about $25. Brio also does a metal and wood set. We mainly use these to stir dirt around when setting up a new 4 x 4 or digging in new compost in an established 4×4 at the start of a season.

Julia also has a small hand shovel, trowel, and scissors for harvesting. We use these the rest of the time during the season.

I was recently at the SuperTarget on Orange Blossom Trail and Town Center Blvd and noticed they had brought back the colorful long handle tools they’ve had for the last two years in animal designs. The also have the hand tools, garden boots, butterfly nets, watering cans, magnifying glass, and more.

There are online retailers also:

• Child Size Garden Tools
  
• 6 Piece Kid’s Tool Set
• Little Gardener Tools
  
• Kid’s Garden Tool Set
• Child’s Gardening Equipment

Let It Be

Preschoolers are best at digging, watering, and harvesting. Just don’t be surprised if they dig what you don’t want dug, water what you don’t want watered, and “harvest” everything down to nothing well before it is time to actually harvest.

If the children want to plant feathers and sticks right along with the seeds — why not? If they want to plant and unearth the same flowers over and over — go right ahead.

My daughter recently planted peas — cooked ones. She’s still waiting for them to pop up. She’s also planted earthworms and toads. They didn’t seem to mind it because they burrowed down even further.

Let it be. Kiddie gardens aren’t going to be like a grown-up’s garden. Keep your sense of humor and let their garden become whatever it may. You can always make a second raised bed for yourself to maintain and grow things for dinner. The kiddie raised bed is for growing wonder.

You may find that while your crops are tasty, theirs are more exciting!

Next Week:

• Building a wooden raised bed frame.

They were great growers though. A little slow, but no pests in the foliage nor the roots. I didn’t even spray them much. Homemade seed tapes worked out. After keeping a sharp eye on them to make sure they germinated and weren’t going to wash away in the rain, I could ignore them other than watering. Unlike the beans and tomato which had to be kept hand picked from bugs!

Julia explained to me that the one in her hand was one of the sad, tiny ones that didn’t get enough light.

Tiny or big, she was pleased with her carrot crop.

We’ve got enough there to juice, steam, or make into salad tomorrow.

My favorite shot today:

After rinsing them off, they just glow with that awesome purple! We’ll have to try other carrot colors.