Rainy Day

Well, I was going to talk about the seeds we've started outside, but mud. So instead, I'll talk about nibbling away at the sea of mud, one tiny patch at a time.

I've basically picked an area that needs landscaping at random and begun a garden plan -- the front yard. It recommended itself to me because it's small and reasonably well defined by the house and driveway. Here's what I've got so far:
(click to enlarge)

I an plainly not a professional landscaper. But I think it's pretty good. The "W"s are to indicate plants with winter interest, since we basically have winter for more than half the year. The circles around the herb garden are pavers.

Of course, it's all well and good to draw a picture. Now I just need about $1500 worth of plants.

Do you ever wonder how great-grandmas made their fantastic gardens? Everyone I know has at least one great-grandma who had just a fantastic garden, like an acre of dahlias and hollyhocks and lilac, and the best tomatoes and sweet corn on earth. But these women grew up in the Depression -- there's no way they spent thousands of dollars on seeds and plants. I imagine that they must have shared seeds and divisions with their neighbors. That seems like a completely different universe from what we live in now.

You make me feel like spring has sprung...

Apologies for the radio silence -- non-homesteading stuff crept into our lives this week. Also, I'm not sure what happened to the text of the seed catalogs post. I assure you it was fantastic; I'll try to recreate it.


Pictured: Signs of Spring

We found a spare half hour to stop at a nursery and buy a few things: Alpine strawberries, tarragon, rhubarb, and an Italian Prune plum tree. Not pictured: rosemary (it can't sit outside yet, so it's hanging out in a windowsill). We have several more fruit trees on the way: two cherries (Hartland and Montmorency), two apples (Honey Crisp and Yellow Transparent), and a Green Gage plum. We still have pears to buy, and maybe a Haralson apple.

The weather has been fantastic the last few days, getting into the 70s and sunny, sunny, sunny. The winter wheat is coming up in fields all around us; it looks like a green haze on the ground. Spring is here!

Seed Catalogs

Come with me, my love... to the sea, the Sea of Mud

Looking at yesterday's photo, you may have wondered what the odd, wave-like formation in the foreground was. Well, without the gentle and forgiving blanket of snow, it's this:



Basically, a sea of mud and construction debris. Remember our 25 feet of topsoil? Well, this is what happens when you pull the grass off 25 feet of topsoil, throw garbage on it, and let it sit all winter.

I could make a lot of excuses (we moved into our house in mid-November, about a day before it started raining/snowing in earnest; I was eight months pregnant; a few weeks later we had a newborn; we are honestly sort of lazy), but the upshot is that our idyllic rural getaway is surrounded by an impassable trash moat that won't really be dry enough to walk on until June.

Which sort of encapsulates our main problem: what do you do with seven acres? Luckily for us, about half of it is woodlot, but that still leaves us with more than 3 acres to do... something with. At most this year we're going to put half an acre into "production" with vegetables, and another maybe quarter-acre devoted to fruit trees and berries. I have a romantic vision of about half an acre in front (where most of the mud and garbage is) as a sort of cottage garden, with a lovely small lawn for the baby to play on. But honestly, that's going to take years. Right now I'd settle for just not being the neighborhood eyesore.