Knitting Iris

shrooms in the garden

A few "new" thrifted ceramic mushrooms in the garden this year.  The matching pair are salt and pepper shakers, and the other two held talcum powder at one time, I think.
 
A cement one from a garage sale and the ones the boys and I made together a several years ago. 
Will have to make a note to revamp this garden bed in the fall, taking out most or all of the lily of the valley but for now, I'm loving the mix of lush green textures right beside the front door of the lily of the valley, lupine, hops, valerian, and lilies, along with trollius, lady's mantle, creeping jenny, white bleeding heart, and columbines, just outside the picture above.  There is a stubborn burdock that pops up somewhere in the middle there, adding another leafy shape to the mix but that I never allow to get very big before picking off the top at ground level.  Their roots can get up to a meter long, so I suspect it will keep coming back as it has plenty of reserves in its taproot, and I just don't feel like digging it all the way out!
 
Two chicks that weren't growing well were put in "sick bay", which consisted of staying in a straw-lined rubbermaid container in the house at night, drinking cream alternated with their water, being fed carpenter ants found in and around the house, and access to fresh air and food outside in the garden bed by the front door a full week or so before their counterparts were allowed out of the coop and their chicken yard.  They liked to hide under the mushrooms in the garden during the warmest part of the day.
After they moved back to the coop with the others, this little red hatted guy joined the other gnome who's been living in our garden for a few years now.  They tend to wander the garden freely, showing up in different spots from time to time.  You can barely see them amongst the overgrown lily of the valley now unless you get right down there and peek between the leaves.  The're maybe only a couple inches tall after all. 

garden pictorial, may 2009

 

You just haven't seen much of me here because, well, great big piles of dirt and manure, and the ensuing back breaking strengthening, bicep building, digging of said dirt and manure by the  seemingly endless shovel and wheelbarrow full is 1) heavily time consuming, 2) just not all that picturesque, and 3) tends to leave one, at the end of the day, without energy for anything other than a hot soak in the tub before falling over into bed. 

After-dark stints in the garden by flashlight don't really make for the best of pictures, either, as if one would ever be inclined to even consider taking a picture at that hour of night while trying to finish up the last of the day's garden chores!

That said, a handful of pictures from over the past week or so:

 

 

Yes, the daffodils and grape hyacinths really only just now began blooming in our garden this past Memorial Day weekend.

The house is now in such a state of disarray, abandoned so completely for the outdoors, that the dandelions the boys picked and placed in jars a couple of weeks ago have gone to seed on the dining room table, which is, itself, half covered in gardening books, catalogs, and several revised versions of our garden and greenhouse planting plans.

The garden beds are filled with dirt and manure.   Leeks, onions, garlic, and cole crops have been transplanted.  The pea trellis went up today and peas have been duly planted.

Oh, and I should mention that the two books above area couple of my favorites gathered over the years:

A Way to Garden: a hands-on primer for every season, by Margaret Roach (former gardening editor of MS Living), is out-of-print (and listed for used prices from $34.85 on up to $180.63!) but I was delighted to happen across her gardening blog filled with great info and beautiful pictures, under the same name as the book.

 Organic Home Garden, by Canadian gardeners Patrick Lima and John Scanlan, also out-of-print, is a reprint of the version I picked up off the bargain table at the Trident, years ago when we lived and gardened just a few blocks away on Pearl Street in Boulder, CO.   I had that copy, under the title The Natural Food Garden: growing fruits and vegetables chemical free,  Well, that is until I lent it, along with several other gardening books, to friends and they accidentally were packed up with their things when they moved away.  The books have since moved, in the past few years, from Montana to Wyoming to Tennesee and recently back to Montana again (although still an 8 hour drive away) never being unpacked,  and until they are truly settled for good and can finally unpack their things, I won't see my own dog-eared, dirt-shmeared, heavily underlined copy. 

Until then, I'll just keep checking it out through interlibrary loan and renewing it again and again as long as they'll let me do so.  Scratch that.  I've just clicked over and ordered a used copy under the original title(ISBN-13: 9781559582025), where, used, it starts at just $2.00 for a used copy as opposed to the new title (ISBN-13: 9781552979242) which currently goes for $47.00 up to $181.85 used!

Anyways.  Neither of these books could stand alone on my gardening bookshelf, but they do stand out in that they inspire and inform me, year after year.

Do you have any favorite gardening books that you turn to again and again, old or new?

ADDED:  the open book in the picture is a third favorite: The Self-Sufficient Gardener, by John Seymour.  Apparently there is a recent reprint.  Both get good reviews on Amazon.

On my commute. From.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yesterday's post was the "to" version of Tuesday's commute, where I take a series of forest service and other backroads, skirting along the foothills of the mountains to my sister-in-law's house to bring the boys there for the day, then continuing on over more backroads, ending with only a mile or two stretch of highway.

On the return trip, I picked up the boys in town at their cousin's t-ball game, taking our more typical route to and from town, about 8.5 miles of highway driving followed by 2.5 miles on our own road.

On my commute. To.

 

In chronological order, Tuesday morning.  One of these is my contribution t0, in response to a recent invitation to join, this Flickr pool.
Tomorrow, the commute back home.

Old coldframes

Built our first spring here in Montana (1997) using old window frames, it's nice to see our old coldframes back in use again.  Their glass panes broke in windstorms the first couple of years we used them but plastic works just fine, too, and you don't end up having to pick glass shards out of your seedling pots.  They just doesn't look quite so pretty minus their original glass panes.

In the middle frame are nursery bought garden starts and flowers and the other two are filled with our own starts:
 
 
Even using these, on colder nights (tonight) I'll often throw a wool blanket or two over the tops of the frames containing more frost sensitive plants such as peppers, tomatoes, and basil, or sometimes will instead bring those plants into the house overnight.  Even with the extra protection of a blanket, they can easily be frosted on the coldest spring nights.

With such a dark and dreary, cold spring as we've had up until now, all these little babies are so happy to be out in brighter light and warmth now, awaiting transplanting into the garden and greenhouse.....except....

...the top numbers above?  Those are the low temp in the greenhouse on Saturday morning of 33.8 degrees F and the high Sunday afternoon of 103.8 degrees F.  Monday it went even higher to 109.5 F! 

So, we put all this work into creating a greenhouse to ward off the cold, and as soon as it's done, we find ourselves having to buy shadecloth for it to ward off the heat?   All I an say is that it's a good thing we waited to plant in there.  We're going to install an automatic vent and put up the shade cloth and see how that works before planting. 

And thank goodness for those old coldframes.  Just wishing now that I'd never painted them so that they wouldn't be flaking paint all over the place now.  : }

Bench Monday. The opening day edition.

And by that, I mean the very first morning where the front door could be opened, even before the teakettle went on, and was left open all day until after 11 pm, until the scent of a nearby skunk came wafting in (first time this year, too) forcing me to close it, and quickly!

Not the opening day of my childhood home.

No socks, handknit of otherwise, necessary today.  It went from frost on the ground a few mornings ago straight into 85 degrees weather today, oh my.

I've shown it before, I know, but this time around it's for Bench Monday, with notes added here. This is the spot, the impromptu bench where I do my dyeing in the summer months, outside in the woodshed, where a winter's worth of firewood, used to heat the house, is now reduced down to a relatively tiny remaining pile.

Bikes and the canoe, in back there, and now my dyeing area up front, are at the ready.  (As soon as I've overdyed a few more skeins to my liking, I'll be adding to the shop all those dyed late in the winter.)

The chicks flew the coop, spending their first day out in the fenced in yard...

 

 

...and the boys spent a good part of the day waist deep in the muddy pond catching frogs and just generally mucking about, followed by a good bath, dinner outside, and then we all took part in the great chick round up before bedtime.

Then, after tucking in, I went back outside to shovel dirt into the garden beds until I could barely see anymore:   10:30 pm!

Sure, we're bound to have a more frost, cold, rain, and maybe even snow.  We just know to take full advantage of days like this, days when the cold dreary winter days can be left behind and we remember that THIS is precicely why we live here and love it so.

Dreams really do come true

Greenhouse, minus the glazing (above) attached to the south side of the chicken coop.  The chicken yard is on the north side of the coop (above  right) and the chickens will have access to the greenhouse and the garden (above left) as well early in the spring, late in the fall, and during the winter, while no crops are growing there.  We may even be able to grow a cover crop in the greenhouse early in the springtime and late fall for the chickens and geese and for tilling into the greenhouse beds.

Seriously, it's been 10+ years that I've dreamed of having a greenhouse and a deer proofed, fenced in garden.  The chicken coop was never a part of the dream as imagined, but it works so well with the other two.

I'm serious, pinch me.

But, I can't take any credit for much of this.   Sure, I've read up on permaculture, gardening, and greenhouses from many sources over the years, but it's Chris who designed all of this and built just about every inch of it himself (except fence post holes dug by a neighbor with an attachment on his backhoe, help from a couple of friends putting in the fence posts and top crossbars, and borrowed fencing stretchers from another neighbor).  

The boys have been good helpers here and there, too, and have been so very patient with our being so wrapped up in all these projects.

OK, so I did help the littlest bit with getting things plumbed, snapping lines for the roofing, holding up the occasional board, stretching chicken wire, filling the greenhouse beds with soil and compost, and stringing trellis for tomatoes inside the greenhouse.  Oh, and I almost forgot, planting and caring for all of the plants that needed starting ahead of time indoors.

Except for the polycarbonate glazing panels, the rest of the materials were, relatively speaking, quite reasonable.  Most of the lumber is local cedar, utility grade but perfectly functional, and was crazy cheap, even with the gas money to and from the sawmill 1.5 hours away.  The long window in the coop is an extra from our house, one we'd replaced with an opening window.  The two windows between the greenhouse and coop are from a salvage yard.  The coop roofing isn't our first choice of color but was marked down about half price at a local building center, and besides, it faces north where we'll hardly ever see it.   Other materials include insulation, chipboard coop ceiling and floor, plywood coop door, feeders, waterers (some made from plastic buckets), metal bins for feed, and of course, screws, hinges, and other hardware.  Wood shaving bedding mateiral inside the coop is from C's woodshop, gathered only from solid woods, not any melamine or otherwise laminated materials.

With greenhouse glazing on, below:

 
 
 
   

C didn't have the greenhouse door finished and installed even 10 minutes before we let the chicks (not even 3 weeks old yet) out into the greenhouse to run around. 
 
 
Despite temps still only getting up into the 50's most days lately, the less than 4 week old goslings are spending most of their days outside free ranging out in the yard.
And the four grown hens are now venturing out into their fenced-in yard more and more each day, actually squacking and lining up at the door to get out in the morning after they've laid their eggs.
Can't wait to get planting!  We're going to try cracking the windows between the coop and greenhouse at night to see if the heat lamp in there will raise the temperature in the greenhouse enought to ward off a hard freeze.  If not, I just might have to break down and plug in a small heater on colder nights over the next few weeks or until the weather becomes more settled into warmer temps.

Moving right along: building raised beds inside the garden.

Early May

 
 
"Happy Hens" is in reference to this Daisy Comes Home, by Jan Brett, a long time favorite in this household.

Have had my eye on that truck all winter long.  Yesterday, a trip to town revealed the entire town suddenly covered in a a carpeting of dandelion, convincing me to finally stop for a pic.

Digging up and dividing hops for transplanting yesterday evening, I came across some long forgotten garlic in an ignored garden bed on the neglected west side of the house.  After separating it out and planting it into proper rows in the garden, it'll likely take a couple of years to grow it back out into viable bulbs.  Hardy stuff worth the effort and patience.

Spring hands, knees, and feet

 

and yesterday's bench monday contribution.

More pics with chicks

 
...'cause that's what's going on.