sweet smell of gardening

One of the women in my knitting group generously offered another woman in the group manure for her garden. i pounced on their private conversation "MANURE?!?!?! REALLY? Can i have some? pleasepleasepleaseplease..."

these are very kind and gracious women who are getting used to my flatlander manners and they let in on the manure loop! the soil we are putting in the garden boxes is purchased and beautifully clean, but devoid of organic matter. a generous helping of animal poo would go a long way to make happier plants.

today i spent four hours in the gathering and delivery of cow/goat/llama poop. i drove a truckload to the original recipient of the offer and then a truckload back to the house. then about two hours shoveling it out of the truck and into the boxes.

it was kind of a gross day, but totally worth it. there were interesting conversations, beautiful homes and gardens and i came home with not only fertilizer but a bag of hothouse tomatoes and a jar of homemade maple syrup. absolutely worth a little hard labor and a little smell.

Boxes! Yay!

Let me explain about why these boxes are amazing. They are far and away better than any boxes ever seen! They are made from the white cedars that were once growing on the site.

White cedar is one of those indestructible woods that will resist rotting and insects and last at least five years in box form with wet dirt packed against them. and that's without any sort of stain or weather proofing on them. i figure they will last 10 years.

so, My Guy cut down the trees, milled the trees into lumber, chipped the parts of the tree that weren't mill-able, built the boxes, and then helped me move the boxes on top of the mulch. then, above all of that, he left me alone to move them around until they were just right by my own plans.

Our Neighbor, upon hearing that i was under the weather and unable to spread the mulch around under my own devices, brought his tractor over and pushed it around so all i had to do was rake it into an even 3" cover.

Behold! a raised bed garden built entirely from the ground that it is standing on! There are another eight or nine boxes in the works once he has finished dispatching with The Big Tree. It is lying on top of the other half of the garden plot. My Guy is great.

Snow in April

It isn't sticking, but it is falling in tiny, hard balls of cold. Since Miss CP and i are still under the weather, our out-of-doors time is limited today.

Allow me to introduce one of our trees that shrugs off cold weather all the way down to -40 degrees! This is a Garfield Plantation sour cherry tree. It was traditionally grown on farmsteads in Aroostook County, Maine, the part of the state that abuts Quebec. If left to its own devices, the Garfield Plantation Cherry will sucker into a large shrub but it can be kept as a tree with determined pruning.

I have visions of sour cherry preserves and sour cherry pies and cherry pit necklaces for the Miss.

Creepy

I have planted seeds of creeping thyme between the flagstones of our front walk. supposedly it can handle being stomped on, and it will gently fragrance your approach to our front door! the trick is, it grows in alkaline soil and our is so acid it almost burns. Pine trees prefer to grow in acidic soil and their needles decompose into a lovely low ph compost. so it takes acid soil for them to grow and they like to keep it that way.

i sweetened the dirt with ash from our wood stove. not only does it raise the ph but it also adds yummy things like potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, calcium and delicious delicious sulpher. add a generous dollop of compost and it's great soil for creeping thyme! i hope. cross your fingers for a creepy walkway!

So Honey, what did you do with your day?

Miss Critterpants and i dragged our sick selves (yes, still sick, eternally sick) to a friend's house In Town to collect on her very generous offer of plant divisions. Wild Ginger, whose roots taste kind of like the ginger you get in the store. Lady's Mantle, which has all sorts of good properties, mostly to stymie bleeding and things to do with mysterious Women's Ailments, and anti-wrinkle tonic. And Alpine Strawberries. they are short on fruit, but long on pretty pink flowers. All of these lovely plants are going into THE SHADE GARDEN. the garden that i will putter around with in all my spare time.

when we got back from Town, My Guy had taken a tree down. The Big Tree. After the local school bus had pulled his hot rod truck from the muddy ditch (that is another story), he showed off his morning's work. He totally wins the big project of the day.

Easter

Even though we were still all ill, we made a good showing.

Never give up! Never Surrender!

After sleeping 19 hours yesterday, i was fed up with being sick. We are all fed up with being sick. So we took our orange juice outside and did springtime things. The mulch with the sticks poking out are our much beleagured berry bushes.

sick

two out of three of us are sick. i am holding out, but it isn't pretty. you will be spared pictures, for now.

three days of rain

It has been raining solidly for three days, and entertainment is scarce on the ground. our front yard is under three inches of water and the soil is so saturated i fear i will never plant anything. my perception of New England weather in entirely different this year with the garden in the works.

MAPLE SUNDAY!

delicious! the annual celebration of the sugaring season. we go to my favorite local sugar shack for maple candy, maple syrup, maple creame and the smell of sap cooking down. this year we brought home dark maple syrup (it is more strongly flavored), maple cream and we bought candy. that didn't make it home at all.

it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup!

Next year, My Guy hopes to tap a few trees for sap to make homebrew.