A Crop of Characters

In a community garden its not just plants that grow. Friendships can flourish. Acquaintanceship blooms. Stories, advice & news is shared and knowledge grows out of conversations with the crop of characters you meet within the community.

In our community we know some of these characters better than others, but they all make time in the garden more interesting and they bring a wealth of knowledge of things both garden and non garden related.

Mary & Rob are more than garden neighbors they are literally neighbors in Newburyport's south end. Meg had met Mary online, then we discovered we were neighbors and now we see each other at the garden. Meg and Mary chat the minutes away while Rob toils in his garden dreaming about sailing on a beautiful day and pondering his weekly chore of mowing the lawn.

Then there's the former Newburyport city councilor who is also an avid gardener. I see him occasionally and he almost always shares some nugget of advice whether he realizes that's what he's doing or not.

We have a pair of Jane's, both friendly and clearly better gardeners than us. Their gardens are better organized and more productive than our own... makes us wonder what we are doing wrong.

Then there's Patty. She's like the mayor of our community. She keeps us all informed on the goings on around the garden by way of regular news letter. Her advice has helped us more times than I can recall. She advises us all of what we aren't allowed to grow due to certain natural problems that we are trying to avoid. This year it's no beans due to a certain beetle we're trying to be rid of.

The twin brother to the husband of another friend of ours has a garden just around the corner from our own. He and his twin look so much alike I never know if I'm talking to the husband of our friend or his brother. Of course now that I know better I'll be able to call him by name when I say hello.

Chuck, who I like to think of as the Roy Orbison of our garden, not only because he resembles a young Roy Orbison, but because like the legend who was himself a genius of his art, Chuck seems to know the answer to any question I have. His garden is full of things I've never heard of and he gladly shares his over grown plants with me. We have a raspberry shrub and something he calls a poor man's onion now growing in our garden that came directly from Chuck's garden.

Joe is another regular around the garden and I always enjoy chatting with him. He's recently added a couple of children's pin wheels to his garden to attempt to keep the critter's away from his broccoli and we intend to add a few as well as we believe our radishes and lettuce have been falling victim to some mammalian demon. Thanks for the idea Joe.

Annette is a member of the bee committee as is Meg. We see her and her husband, whose name I can't recall, not only in the garden but recently around town... in the grocery store etc. Lovely people... just nice to chat with. Always friendly.

We have some pirates in our garden... or at least they like to fly the jolly roger . They came late but their garden already looks great. Their little drawings on the wood frame that surrounds their garden depicts images of the plants that will grow in rows aligned with those images.

Deb is the Queen Bee of the bee committee and like Chuck she seems to know a lot about gardening. Not a shy woman, she seems fearless as she works around those bees. Reaching into an abandoned garden to pluck a sample leaf and eating it while offering one to me and explaining what it is, she has New England written all over her and yet we'll lose her this year to the west coast as she plans a move.

Meesh, whose name isn't short for something else, looks like she just left a 1970's commune and I mean that in the kindest and somewhat enviable way. She is nature woman embodied. I think her car was also a loaner from the commune.. it struggles to keep running but she knows how to treat it and she knows how to grow a garden. I'd like to be a fly on the wall of her life.. she is by far the most interesting yet mysterious person in the community.

Our immediate garden neighbor Eileen is a former regular of the tea house and I always see her and her husband with their children walking around town. Like us they are first timers here in the community. The garden they acquired is flush with strawberry plants as is our neighbor on our other side... who for some reason hasn't shown up since we started gardening in April. We wonder if the ants will eat all of their strawberries before they realize how many are already ripe. Perhaps we'll have to eat a few if they don't show up soon.

There are others we've yet to meet and some we know but but haven't really seen around the garden, but with the last frost behind us the real gardening is about to start happening and I look forward to our meet and greets throughout the coming weeks and months.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Two weeks ago our garden was starting to flourish. The peas, radishes, beets & lettuce all broke ground. Last weekend we decided to thin out the beets and radishes, as they were in clusters that would have probably choked off any successful growth. Then again... what do we know, we've never gardened before, perhaps all would have been fine. Following the thinning we had several days of colder rainier weather and i'm thinking we may have lost much of the crop. (crop... sounds like it's supposed to be fields of beets & radishes right... you can laugh at me... I'm laughing at me too.)

In a completely separate occurrence our lettuce has all disappeared.   Was it something we did? Was it a little critter? Was it all the rain? We're going to try again on the lettuce.

The good news is that our peas our doing great and our asparagus has actually started growing. We have about 4 thin spears ranging from 1" to 8" tall. Our asparagus will grow into 3-6 foot tall ugly weedy looking things that we'll ultimately let die into the same spot so that they will provide us with a more significant crop next year. We'll most likely do the same thing next year and then the following year we should start getting asparagus for eating.

Moving Mountains

When first moving mountains one will approach with gusto and determination to tackle the mountain with great strength and power. But mountains have their own pace at which they will allow you to move them. You can throw yourself into the task with all the strength you can muster and that mountain will not move any faster than it wants to. You on the other hand will tire long before the mountain gives in and accepts the new location you want it to be.

Granted, the mountain that taught me this lesson was nothing more than the remnant wood chips that once sat in a pile adjacent to the parking lot of our garden. But even that small spread of wood chips which had come to settle quite content, lay undaunted to all my sweat and might.

Tired from digging in with my strength, I stumbled to my water, removed my heavy shirt, took a few breaths and changed my approach. It was no longer my intention to move this mountain but to gently coax it to move just a little closer to our garden so that it might have a better view of all that the little valley below had to offer. Gentle relaxed sweeps of alternating rakes over an hour seemed to work much better than my original plan of knocking this task out in 10-15 minutes with brute strength. And I'm the wiser man as recompense.

the bee yard.

“I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't.

 Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.” 

{Sue Monk - The Secret Life of Bees}

One of the lovely things at New Eden Garden (among all the other lovely things) is the feeling of community. In this delightful community of earth and vegetables and dirt and worms we are a team. With many committees that need tending just like our plots, I have joined the Bee Committee. I've always been fascinated with bees, you know, being a queen bee myself. The bees have arrived and been "installed" along with the queen. While I wasn't able to be present for the actual install on Saturday, a few days passed and Monday evening,  the hives needed to be checked to see if the Queen had been released. She arrived as most queens do in her own little box, I have come to learn that at the open end of the box is sweetness, candy for all intents and purposes for her future subjects hopefully, to nibble on while getting used to her pheromones and vise versa. Basically they eat this candy wall until it no longer exists and the Queen is released from her box. Hopefully as I type this, this act has happened and she is busy being entertained by her subjects while requesting tea and cake and enjoying a mani/pedi. Oh the life of a Queen.

Well we couldn't see the Queen on Monday, too many bees about that box. We hope it's a good thing but one can never tell. We don't want anarchy. Sugar syrup - made by Annette, was placed in each box to feed the bees. Our fearless leader Deb donned in her bee armor - soon to be the latest fashion craze - opened those boxes without breaking a sweat. I was impressed. New frames of bees wax were installed so our bees can start doing what bees do. Amazing the jobs each bee has - male drones only role is to mate with the queen, worker bees (all female, no surprise there) tend to the queen, build the comb in which honey is stored and eggs laid by the queen, tend  young drones and defend the colony. Exhausting. The foragers scout out the pollen and nectar. Talk about busy bees.

This bee journey is so fascinating and I am so excited to be a part of it. There is much to learn. Our next visit to check on the Queen we will use smoke to keep this gang calm and sedated. Let's hope the Queen has arrived and is accepted by all. 

I wonder is she's wearing a fabulous hat?

Rainy Day Dreams

On a rainy day like today, if I can't work in the garden I can always transfer the garden related ideas I have onto paper (or into a CAD file). The above is a rain water collector that I've been thinking about.

In our garden we don't have the luxury of a convenient roof to collect water from. The idea of this rain water collector is that it can collect rain via the half barrel on top and the water gets passed into the two lower barrels. It's a reasonably sleek design that holds up to approx 130 gallons of water.

I'm not sure if I'll ever get to actually build one of these.. but in my mind it's a reasonably low budget, fairly simple to build rain water system.

------------

Slept on this design and discovered three flaws overnight in my dreams:

1. The relatively open top design is a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Need to look into that.
2. The structure may be attractive to kids wanting something to climb on. I should add stabilizing features or plan on permanently fixing in place via cement.
3. The pipes between barrels currently force this design to require building  around the barrels while assembling them (or after) and once assembled couldn't easily be disassembled. Pipes out the back side of the middle barrel down to the lower barrel would be a better design. 

See the updated design here: http://itsonlydirt.blogspot.com/p/cad-files.html