Tickling the Bed vs. Defensive Gardening

                 According to a recent article, “In the spring, you just need to tickle the bed if you are using the no dig method.”  No need for roto-tillers, no need for back breaking labor, just tickle the bed with the metal tined rake  and lay down your seeds. Maybe in bucolic Britain, I thought. Here in my urban corner of the Pacific Northwest, I practice a much more defensive system of veg gardening that begins in October.  Each bed experiences:

Mulching with leaves in the fall—weed control.

Chicken

tractoring—break down the leaves into organic matter. Pill bug and slug egg destruction.

Seed selecting—what will actually grow here?

Seed starting—prevents wireworms from eating all of the pea seeds, slugs from taking out the early greens, pill bugs from munching through the zucchini vines, etc. Also allows me to space my plants and not waste seed.

Monitoring the starts—bring in when really cold. Check for water every day.  Cheer them on.

Tossing the bed—All of our gardening is by hand, no machines, unless you count Mark’s push mower. We pitchfork over the bed at least twice. Once in the winter to work the leaves and chicken poop in and again right before planting to break up the big clumps.

Planting—this takes about half an hour to plant an entire 10 by 4 foot bed. Even if I have to paint a sign.

Laying hoses—after planting, the soaker hoses go down for the summer. It’s easier now, rather than in June.

Hooping— Five metal hoops, one large sheet of plastic protect against hail, rabbit munching, squirrels digging up hazelnuts, cat poop, blue jays, etc.

Transplanting to four inch pots-- all of the extra starts are bumped up to four inch pots, watered, labeled,  and moved back into the greenhouse.

Replanting next week—some of the bumped up starts are used to replant.  The rest go into the random plants bed at the school garden.

Shooing the cat out of the hooped bed; despite my best efforts, she loves to nap under plastic.

Fencing—finally, when the hooping comes down, I staple low fencing around the entire bed for the rabbit.

Mulching—with straw this time for weed control and moisture retention.

Weeding and harvest.

 

 

 

Mr Beezhold, The Rabbit

 

Mr. Beezhold, the rabbit, spent the evening inside on Wednesday night. We were worried. Tuesday night had been chilly—32 degrees at dawn, but he has a cozy hutch and has been out all winter in much colder weather.  When Mark went to let him out for the day, he was crouched in his hutch, shivering and looking miserable.  We rubbed his nose, checked for fever, and lifted him up to the hutch roof for a good look. Miserable, like he had the flu. He was interested enough in life to hop to the edge, so I lifted him down. He ran under the hutch, dug around a bit, and flopped on his side, like someone taking to the couch for the day. Mark left, promising to come home a bit early and check on him again. When I left, he was sitting in the rising sun, nodding off. We were worried.

Mr. Beezhold is an elderly rabbit, at least seven years old. We got him as a stray, a runaway from Newport who had some wounds and was shipped to Corvallis for better care. For a long time, he was skittish and only ate rabbit crunchies, despite having free run of the yard. As he has grown older, he has mellowed and become far friendlier. He will hop up to me when I am working in the garden to have his nose rubbed and he has learned that late afternoon garden work often leads to bunny treats of tender kale leaves. He also knows that the best stuff is in the basket and I have caught him tipping it over and chomping on the cauliflower. He follows Mark’s bike to the gate, hoping to slip out to bunny freedom. He spends hours in the back yard, nibbling on everything and moving from sunny spot to sunny spot, a little miffed if I let the chickens out for a late afternoon run. He has a good life.

When I came home in the afternoon, he was much better. He’d moved to the garden bed covered in bamboo leaves and was sunning himself there. While I talked with Mark, he made a mad dash to another spot in the yard and we laughed.

“It’s going to be chilly again tonight,” Mark worried. “I think we should bring him in.”

I agreed and headed down to the basement for the small animal cage I found by the side of the road one day. It’s in excellent shape—it could easily be used at the county fair this summer. We piled some hay inside, filled a bowl with crunchies, found some greens for a treat, and brought him into the living room. He spent the evening moving straw around, pulling at the bowl with his teeth, and cocking his ears towards our voices. He’s been inside before, when the air quality was really bad or someone was doing loud work in the yard. He is resigned.

The next morning we let him out. He bunned around all day and, when it came time to go in for the night, ran away from me and towards his hutch. He was clearly ready to return to normal. After a few moments, he hopped up into his bedroom and settled in for the night.

 

 

Loren Eiseley

 

               

Loren Eiseley…does anyone read him any longer? He wrote about paleontology, and time, and humanity, with a wild and dark perspective. He rode the rails as a young man during the Great Depression and has always felt like a voice calling to me from the distant past. I am working my way thought his autobiography, All the Strange Hours, again after many years away.  It is still haunting and haunted; he knows that he is at the end of his life and an era as he writes. As someone who roams the stacks of our library, looking for the oldest covers on the shelves and bringing them home to read (and save, for another round, from a purge) it’s made me wonder how we will find these voices from the past in the future, as our public libraries move more towards cotemporary and popular literature and away from the older writers.

                When I was young, my father took me to our local library one night a week. It was a tiny place—no bigger, in my mind, than my house now, which is 625 square feet. There was a children’s’ room to the right when you walked in, the magazine room to the left, and adult books towards the back. It was kind of dark and dusty. The librarian, who was also my neighbor, baby sitter, and an old student of Robert Frosts’, sat at a large wooden desk facing the door, surrounded by cards from the catalog, piles of toppling books, and paper bags. Because I was a voracious reader, I started with the A’s and worked my way up and down and around the room, checking out every book.  There was no system of purging and replacing; books spanned 50 or more years of publication.  I roamed through time on those evenings, bringing home a stack every week. When I had read every book twice, my father negotiated with a friend to use his address and gave me a library card to the Haverhill library, which was a large, modern concrete bunker of a building. I roamed those shelves as well, searching for the older books, away from the young adult angst and death of friends that dominated the contemporary selections.  . Books were a way to look backwards, to learn about the culture of our country—and others—from primary sources, not from history texts. I am sure this experience led to my history degree.

                And so, Loren Eiseley resonated with this exploration. He traveled much further back in time, in his mind, back to the Ice Ages when bison roamed the Great Plains, to the grave of a child wrapped in rabbit fur in Texas, deep into caverns in the southwest. Time was fluid in his mind, as it has been in mine. I don’t know when I first read his essays—it must have been in high school.  I may have just stumbled onto him as I roamed the shelves of our tiny library. Or was he part of a high school anthology that I read on a winter afternoon when it was cold and rainy outside?  Did my senior teacher hand us a copy of one of his essays as a model?  I loved him then—and he is still a pretty fine time traveler, so many years later.

 

 

Garden Records

 

Garden records…I have a notebook from our first years here, with my original designs for the yard and gardens, which was not at all related to the reality on the ground, and a series of photos as we built some, but not all, of the beds. It’s entertaining, but not useful. We were always arguing over timing and weather—is this winter really long and cold or it is just me? When did we start the fall cabbages last year? Shouldn’t we be moving the coop again? Etc.

 In 2016, I got systematic. I found an old binder and divided it into four sections: order forms for seeds and potatoes, garden maps, next year’s reminders (plant mustard under the vines!), and a week by week accounting of events. The maps and order forms are nice, but the real useful information is in the weekly notes. For example, this is Week Nine.

2016: one egg, peas planted in greenhouse, Camilla and daffs blooming, 10 metal hoops from Sunbow.

2017: Daffs are blooming. Beehive out as a lure to wild bees. 1.5 inches of rain and chilly.

2018: Daphne is blooming. Chilly. School starts are looking good (home starts bad? I don’t know.) Lettuce and sweet peas starting in the house.

2019: Coop moved. Tomatoes started. Peas in the house. SNOW—twice.

2020: Plum is blooming. Rosemary is blooming. One egg every other day. Warm and sunny all week.

2021: Daffs blooming. Plants out. (I broke my arm that spring—it is a short note)

2022: Cold spell—20 degrees and clear. Cleaned and pruned the fig. Starts are in the house.

2023: Cold rain, sleet, snow, grim. Peas are up in the house. Snowdrops are still blooming. No daffs.

When I look back over the years, it is not unusual for the weather to be grim in the first week of March; I suspect I remember the few lovely weeks more clearly and fondly than the years of sleet, rain, and snow squalls.  There are clearly pea starts in the house every year, even though I have heating mats in the greenhouse and the spring greens are growing cheerfully out there.  That’s helpful. Next week, according to my notes, I will start the tomatoes and hop the coop over to the last bed of the season.  Making notes every week has cut down on the household debates, which is good, but it also reminds me of the seasonal rhythms of the year. It is time to spend the evenings with the peas, counting daily germination.