Simply Leap…

Well, the kids and I dug up an old driveway to make a potato bed…18 inches of packed gravel and chunks of cement. We used a digging fork, breaker bar and shovels. About 3/4 of the way through I measured our progress and realized it was 2 cubic yards worth we had moved…Now where to put it all??

The 10 lbs of seed potatoes are planted on a layer of sod and topsoil, and covered with straw. Straw isn’t cheap, so I have my reservations about using it in the garden, but in this case we are building new dirt in a pit…something has to go in there! Next winter I will run chickens over the area and corn and melons will go there. I hope in the long run the $8/bale will seem worth it!

It is funny, I have added about 270 square feet to my growing area, and I still feel like I have less space than I need, even less than last year. I have to keep reminding myself that I get to plant all that space more than once–successional planting will make the space produce more.

I also got mushroom spawn for my birthday!! I get to plant this kind (wine cap stropharia) in my garden and there is a strong possibility that they will keep coming back every year! How cool is that?!

Soo much more to do…I got the lumber for the garden beds I plan to build in the parking strip, but I haven’t gotten time to build them yet–I want to beg my husband to do it…sigh. Never let them know that you can use power tools.

Here she is! Marmalade is a little 8 week old doe that I just got. I could wish that she was darker, though she will darken up with age. I am thrilled with her chunky little body though, she is 4 1/2 lbs. according to my less than accurate scale. I am hoping to get a darker doe from a breeding of my buck Winston to a friend’s doe Strawberry. Strawberry will be due May 19th or so!

I started lettuce, cabbage, leeks, and broccoli under lights in newspaper pots about a month ago and just tucked them in the garden. As long as I drop a sheet of newspaper over the lettuce on clear nights, they should pull through. Onions are poking up, garlic and radishes, but my pathetic second sowing of peas have yet to make an appearance, much to my irritation.

This time of year I have so many hopeful plans that have yet to scrape their knees on harsh reality. I plan for potatoes, beets and carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, beans, and tomatoes of course, but I dream of maybe melons and peppers too this year…a winter garden that has a full compliment of brussels sprouts, leeks, cilantro, and cabbage, instead of just kale, and maybe over-wintering fava beans? Soo exciting!

March report:

Spent $102.14 on garden seeds, grape, raspberry, and kiwi vines, asparagus roots, rabbit and chicken feed. Produced 3oz fresh herbs, 4oz carrots, 1 lb of kale, 14 lbs 13 oz rabbit meat for human consumption, 5 dog meals of rabbit offal, and 11.5 dozen eggs, 5 of which were sold.

Not bad so far.

I have a plan to find more space to grow more food, but the city is crazy. They will let me plant a street tree in my parking strip, but it MUST NOT be a fruit or nut tree (though oddly they allow mountain ash).

I am sneaky already, I planted a juneberry tree, the fruit is too small to notice so it looks like a garden variety flowering crab apple…and my “rabbit food” plantings are out in the strip along the back alley fence, comfrey, sunflowers, nasturtiums…

But that just isn’t good enough. I have a typical parking strip–grass that I am required to maintain, but do not “own”. It gets muddy in the winter, dies in the summer….produces nothing.

I am ripping it out and putting in raised beds made of trex decking with gravel paths between so I can still get to the cars. I am going to grow vegetables–My garden just grew by 204 sq. feet!!

Now, do I put potatoes out there, or something more fun, like squash? The squash would like all the reflected heat I suppose, as long as I watered it alot, but pumpkins might be awfully tempting for vandals.

I just finshed reading ”The Quarter-Acre Farm” by Spring Warren.

In it, she chronicles a year of trying to produce most of her family’s food on a quarter-acre suburban lot. As I find myself attempting to do much the same thing on an even smaller lot, I was pretty excited to read this book. I wasn’t dissappointed. I wish she had included more facts and figures about her “farm” but I gleaned a few new ideas, laughed at the ridiculous idea of keeping geese in the city JUST FOR PETS,  and enjoyed a few recipes too. It was actully worth the $20 price, because I do plan to refer back to a few sections.

She has a larger lot than me, and because she is in northern California, she has a year round gardening climate. However, I am betting my garden can do nearly as well, since I have no garage, no hot tub, no patios (she has 3!) and no geese to fence off in half of my backyard.

I have a decent laying flock of chickens, and though I can’t really grow dried beans here, I am betting between the chickens and the rabbits, I will end up producing more protein year round on less space.

The book was inspirational for me, and I plan to weigh and track everything and put a monthly accounting here of what we bought, what we produced, and try to get to 75% of the food we eat(by weight) coming from this lot by mid-July.  And then, I plan to try to keep it that way right through the year. Particularly, I need more winter storage crops.

I can call it the .15-acre farm!

I don’t know if you remember all those school vacations with fondness or if you remember them as long boring stretches of disappointment. I was in the latter camp.

Nothing ever seemed to happen for me–I was just stuck at home on the farm with the family, nothing to do, nowhere to go, while all my friends were traveling to Hawaii or Disneyland or something, going on camping trips, to the grand canyon, and summer camp. I had the same 3 trees to climb, the same radio to listen to, the same dog to walk…

I find now as an adult in college, with a bigger perspective of just how little time you really ever get to yourself, spring break seems wonderful…in theory.

In actual fact, not much has changed. I still have the same responsibilities, we can’t go anywhere because the kids’ spring break doesn’t match up with mine, and we don’t have any money anyway. It is almost over and today is the first day I haven’t had to get up early–I slept until 7:30am. I haven’t done much of anything but play catch up for  all the things I let slide while I was in school. I need a class on relaxation and having fun!

Spring break is a useless section of time–like intermission. you don’t have enough time to go anywhere, you are just awkwardly waiting for it to be over so you can get back to work.

Today I drove my daughter to the airport, put her on a plane and sent her 637 miles away. I wont see her for a month. And this has become normal.

She is 14. We have been making this exchange one way or the other for 12 years. It is a brutal price to pay, for her and for us.

When I was her age, I thought I would be the coolest mom ever. I would let my kids wear whatever funky styles they choose. I would support them however they wanted to express themselves. If they wanted blue hair I would help them do it! I would let them wear makeup and pierce their ears…as many times as they wanted! The worst thing I could imagine was that I would have a preppy little cheerleader-type who wanted to follow lockstep with her cookie-cutter friends…But I was determined to support even that.

These days, I would just be happy if teens saw showering and shoes as necessary, rather than bedroom slippers and and pijama pants as a reasonable wardrobe selection. “I am a lazy slob” was not the kind of self-expression I was hoping for. I am not a cool mom at all.

My garden is waking up. I have an old-timer local who convinced me with youthful enthusiasm that you should always get your “peas in by President’s Day!”

Now, in case you have forgotten, that would be mid-February–early by most people’s standards. I tried it and I’ll be darned if they weren’t twice as early as my neighbors’ and longer-bearing into the bargian.

Until last year. When they rotted in the ground and I planted peas twice.

And now this year. Sigh. Life is a gamble.

Every spring I am tempted by something new–a new variety of vegetable, a new fruit, a new chick…I have new fruit this year. A peach tree.  A pear tree. A grape vine, asparagus…A hardy kiwi variety that looks good, but I have never tasted. Life is a gamble.

It will take years for them to produce, but I will be 3 years older, whether I plant a tree or not. The question is simply whether I will be three years older with a new tree and a shovel in my hand, or three years older with a bowl full of fruit in my hands. I hope I will be both!

Hello. 

I have had blogs before and they have had various functions for me, from promotion to recipe sharing. Always in the past they have been narrowly focused on one small aspect of my greater self, and I have found that when my energy shifted from one focus to another, the blog died.

I am a whole person, with widely varied interests, and I think it takes a whole person to fill up a blog on a consistent basis. I lead a fairly compartmentalized life, and I would like to become more integrated and whole. This is a fairly tolerant community and I feel like it would be a good place to sort my head…

Because of that this blog may have big stretches of boring that no one will want to read. For that I will apologize in advance, but at least I wont be cluttering up the boards with my mental woolgathering!

The real, whole, true me, is nearly 37, no longer young, not yet old.

A mother, a former waitress, a wife, a college student completing a biology transfer degree to major in Molecular Biology. 

A gardener, a wannabe farmer in trapped in suburbia, an artist, a teacher, a homeschooler, a conservative environmentalist.

An idealistic pragmatist.

A contradiction in terms.

There are not enough hours in just one life to do everything I want to do and be everything I want to be.