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Four Pillars

Tinking Turtle Raverly

Catching Up – and a little bit of Gardening

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After threatening rain all day, it’s finally started.  This Monday’s been a slow one, as I’m getting my momentum moving after a week of being a little slow and lazy.

I’ve spoken before about how I’ve been going, going, going since January, and this last week I finally took a break.  Oh, I didn’t stop working, but I went nearly a week with only doing a minimum of crocheting or knitting.  It was necessary on a few different levels; creatively and physically I needed a break.

So I’ve been trying to tidy up the mess that has become our home, as I’m slowly sucking in the clutter that has taken over… well, any space that Mr. Turtle would let me.  It’s not done by a long shot, but I’ve been given a deadline: put it away before TNNA, or it won’t be there when I come back.  *grins* I think it’s more than fair.

I’ve also been working with Cultivar Designs on the new website.  Two weeks ago I was feeling very grim about the project: it felt like I’d been having meeting after meeting with the Cultivar team, and nothing was showing for the work.  Now, that has nothing to do with Cultivar, and everything to do with my mood two weeks ago. Now, this last week I got to the the beginnings of the developed site (dev site), and I can finally see where this whole project is going.

I’ve also been working on the garden this spring.

Columbine Seedlings, along with some other fun plants.

(You remember the garden?  The woefully neglected one?  And then my knitting friends gave me plants, and I moved things around, and it was a little better, but then then weeds took over?)

Well, a lot has happened since then.  I may have lost my head at one time and bought 150 bulbs from Costco.  And then I started about 50 Columbine plants from seed… because I could, and I was worried that they wouldn’t grow.

In order to facilitate getting the plants in the ground, Mr. Turtle and I had a “garden party” which involved getting our friends over, bullying them into helping get vegetable plants in the ground and the garden mulched, feeding everyone cookout food, and then sending them home with their own seedlings to plant.  It worked out rather well, and the veggie garden is coming along a lot nicer than last year, already.

The peas in particular are pretty happy.

I’m trying out sheet mulching – a method for reducing weeds in garden beds that have been long neglected (which could easily describe the gardens at the house we’re renting).  I’ve been putting down cardboard and then putting down wood mulch on top.  Since we’re on a budget, the wood mulch is coming from the local dump.  The locals I’ve talked to have different opinions on the much.  Some say that it’s pretty “dirty and seedy” – in that the much is made of a lot of different types of wood, and sometimes contains plastic and other bits.  Others said that if you dig into the pile (where the much heats up), you can get much that’s less contaminated.  We’re going to give it a try, seeing as I don’t think it can be very much worse than what I’ve got already.

This would be the flower bed last year (you can orient by that purple flower in the middle)
And this would be the same bed, with the same purple flower, this year, looking more happy.

Unfortunately, even with all the cardboard I saved up over the winter, I’m running out.  But… again, knitters come to the rescue – a call out to my knitting friends, and I’ve been picking up and finding cardboard on my front porch all weekend.  Two more trips, I think, and things will be good.

What have you been working on, outside of stitching?

History and the Garden

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(If you’re normally here for the knitting/crochet, I swear, we’ll get back to topic, but right now most of my knitting is still packed away, and what I am working on you can’t see much progress.  The garden’s another story.  Hang in there with me.)

As part of getting the gardens ready, we got permission from the owners of the house to revive what looks like a kitchen garden plot in the backyard.  Since the soil was fairly compacted, and it looked like the garden hadn’t been used in many years, we decided to turn the soil.  By hand, since we don’t have a tiller, but do have young backs and plenty of tools.

The garden, before we touched it.

So we’ve carefully defined the edges of the garden, and straightened things out.  I raked out all the leaves (which made our compost pile very happy), and tore strips of rags to make sure our edges were straight.  The garden will be 12′ by 24,’ not huge, but not too small either.

Nearly half tilled, and looking a lot happier already.  I mean, happy as a garden can get without plants.

Each evening, when we get a spare moment, we spend a half an hour to 45 minutes working on turning the soil.  It’s clear that this garden hasn’t been tilled in a while, or if it was, only the top 2″ of the soil.  Because, as we are digging we are encountering some very mature root systems, (from trees in our neighbor’s yard), lots of rocks, and pottery shards.

Well, not only pottery shards.  To date, we’ve found 2 marbles, pieces of a broken teacup, pieces from at least 3 different bottles, leather, rusted iron, a very rusted spoon or trowel, chain, tentpoles or stakes, 2 medicine bottles (unbroken) a crockery shards.  Michael, being the historian that he is, has been having fun collecting pieces and matching them together.  I laid claim to the marbles.

It’s taken some hacking away to get rid of the roots we don’t want, and plenty of sweat even though we’re half done.  Personally, if I were to do a garden, I’d do raised beds, and I’d make it much narrower, with rows so I could walk in between the plants.  But this is what was there, and this will be what we’ll use.

A little more about my garden plans.

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Last Sunday I got some time to get the plants that my friends Lois, Catherine, and others had given me into the ground.  I should say I made some time, because as I explained to Michael, I wasn’t going to be able to sit and relax until I had gotten my hands into the soil, and made my imprint on the gardens.

The garden, needing some love.
The back garden, pictured above, was where I focused my efforts, as I’d be spending the most time looking at it.  We’re using the back door as our main door, so I look at it each time I go in and out of the house, and during any time I spend on the porch.  I needed to fix things there, pronto.
The first thing was clearing out all the dead leaves, branches, and growth from last year.  There was a hard winter this last year, so many things that would have weathered pretty well had died back to the root system.  Snip, snip, snip went my garden shears, and the bush was thinned out (I know what it is, I just can’t remember the name – the plant which, if you get it in the store, will boom purple/blue when exposed to nickel?copper?, but is normally pink clusters of little flowers).
Bush thing whose name I *should* know.
The graslike mounds there are a plant I’m again, familar with, but have no clue of the name.  Clearly I need to look these things up.  Anyone have a clue?  In the fall these plants have a dark purple/black berry which is pretty, I suppose.  Still, the line of these, slightly overgrown and in places quite crowded, was driving my crazy.
I dug up nearly half of them from this garden, and transplanted them to other places.  A few others got split and transplanted also.  One of them got shifted over 6 inches, because the placement was *just* off.
Now, in between each of these, is some of the plants I was loaned.  Lois gave me several irises and some type of orchid thing, which went in the corner, what I’ve come to think of as my display spot.
Siberian irises, orchid, and other lovely things.
Several of the lilies that Catherine gave me (just out of frame, I forgot to get a picture of them), went right next to the steps.  Around the back of the porch, I put little groupings of plants in between the shifted grasses.
The grass things given some room to spread, and the “little groupings” of plants between them.
On the sound advice of several people, I’ve been told that things look better grouped together, so I tried to keep the plants that I’d been given in the same area, with the exception of the Coper Iris that just had to show off it’s attitude.  You can see in the corner the bush looking much happier now that it’s dead growth is pruned back.
The bush, (again, whose name I can’t remember), I know has a tendency to put out roots if you take a cutting.  I’m thinking later in the season, when it gets a bit more growth, I’m going to take some cuttings and put them against the outside of the gate, or perhaps on the side of the house.  My pay it forward to future occupants.
I got several Lilies of the Valley which I planted in what I’m planning on making a shade garden, under some bushes in the back.  I’m planning, when I head to the farm soon, to dig up some more of them and put them in the back too.  Perhaps in a year or so, they’ll have spread into a nice bed of them – something that is low maintence, pretty, and much nicer than the vines that were taking the bushes over.
There’s a bare patch of ground where it looks like the driveway once extended all the way to the back of the yard, previous to the fence being put in.  It’s quite rocky and compacted, and the grass doesn’t take there.  I’m hoping the grass/bush things, which I know to be quite hearty, will do well in the corner.  I’m thinking that I might try and make this area more of a rock garden, putting some plants that are hearty and okay with nutrient-poor soil there.  We’ll see.  At least they brighten up the corner, and give the other plants some room to grow.  If it doesn’t work out, then no harm, no foul.
Potential rock garden.

Knitting Roots

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Over this last weekend, after we have moved the last of the stuff out of our apartment, after we’d said goodbye to our apartment complex, after we’d driven 2 hours with the mattresses strapped to the top of the car, after we’d moved everything into our apartment, I walked our new property.

It’s a tradition, you see.  Many evenings in the spring, summer and fall, after my father came home from work, my parents would walk the garden, talking about what they planned to do, what my mother had worked on over the day, or just observing what had bloomed and grown.  I’ve inherited (or have been taught) a love of gardening.

Gardening, to me, is a lot like knitting or crochet.  There’s an initial rush for both – for stitching it can be buying the yarn, picking out the project, casting on those first stitches.  The potential streams in front of you, waiting to be fulfilled.  Gardening is similar – the planning, the dreaming, the buying of plants and thinking of what’s to come.

Stitching and gardening also have that initial sense of great progress, as the stitches stack up on one another, or as the sprouts shoot out of the ground.  But then, in the middle, there’s the long haul – where nothing much seems to be happening, even as you know that you’ve been knitting forever or as you water each day.

After slogging through for who knows how long, the end, all of a sudden, is in sight.  Fruit or flowers start appearing on plants.  The bindoff draws near.  Suddenly, all the progress and effort becomes worth it.

There’s probably a reason I have hobbies that have a long payoff, and I’m not quite sure what it is.

Air Plants

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Okay, brief little weirdness.  I like growing strange things.  Right now, I’m trying to propagate lichen with my tree, and I’ve been known to grow a mean batch of mushrooms.  Chances are, if I like a plant, it’s got an 80% chance of being a type of bromeliad.  That’s just how I roll.

Lately though, I’ve been wanting to grow some air plants, also known as tillandsia (which are actually a type of bromeliad).  They absorb their nutrients through the AIR, which is really cool.  They don’t really need their roots as anything other than the means to hold onto wherever they grow.  Heck, this is one step better than hydroponics!   These things don’t even need DIRT.

THESE

Which means you can do what I really want to do, which is to get some of

… and then get some of

THESE

Glue them together with water insoluble glue.  And then stick them on my magnetic closet doors.

How cool would that be?

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