Sunday was a perfect spring day in Rhode Island--cool, sunny, with bright blue skies setting off the new leaves and the pink and white flowering trees: dogwood and flowering almond and the waning crab apples.  The lilacs are in full bloom.  It''s beautiful hereabouts. We spent the day, and most of the previous one, working in the gardens, which is exactly the way I'd choose to celebrate a perfect spring day.  If gardening posts bore you, you'll want to skip this one.

The three Cunningham guys bought me two apple trees for mother's day, a Macoun and a Granny Smith.  They got one planted last evening.  It's a lot of work to dig a hole wide and deep enough (at least twice the pot width and depth).  After you get about eighteen inches down, you can see why there was a brickyard in Barrington for so many years. The soil is mostly dense reddish clay, tough to dig, heavy to move.  I've been adding organic matter to my soil for years so the established beds aren't bad, but opening a new bed requires hard work and lots of soil ammendments.  Bill and I both come from farming families, but our sons were a little bemused at the notion of dumping 50 pounds of manure into the hole (Andrew, after ripping open and dumping a bag, observed, "I need to take a minute to not think about what I just did....")  But it's all worthwhile, because now we have apple trees!  They're a good size--about seven feet tall--and in full bloom.  

We're putting in a veggie garden this year, experiementing with Mel Bartholemew's "square foot gardening" method.  After sod removal and tilling, we built 10 wooden frames, 4x4, and a couple of 2x2 frames, then spaced them about two feet apart with wood chip mulch making walkways between.  Dump 50 pounds of manure in each square, spade and rake it in.  This process has taken us the last three or four weekends. Last weekend we finished and planted two frames, this weekend we finished all the prep work and planted five more frames.   I've got seed potatoes coming this week, and those will fill another two frames (32 plants in all, one per square-foot), but the rest of the frames will be kept open for successive plantings.  You plant small amounts of seeds in each square foot, and for some crops--such as lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, and beets--you plant a square every week during the growing season, replanting each square with something different when you harvest your itty bitty crop.  It'll take some trial and error to figure out what to plant, when to plant it, and how much to plant.  Is six tomato bushes too much?  Two cucumber plants not enough?  Couldn't tell you.  I grew up with a big summer garden, but I haven't grown my own since we lived in Michigan, which was--egad--about 25 years ago.  This year will be a learning experience, no doubt there.

I love all kinds of gardens, from grand public gardens on down.  One of things I like about historical villages such as Williamsburg are the small kitchen gardens around most of the houses. They are attractive, practical, and proof that you don't need a lot of space to keep a garden.   

We live in a small New England town.  Most of the houses sit on one or more "town lots," which isn't a huge amount of real estate, but still considerably more than you'll see surrounding most Colonial Williamsburg houses.  So, why not?  I'm really pleased to note little backyard gardens popping up hereabouts.  It would appear that an interest in kitchen gardens is on the rise, judging from the sales rankings of gardening books on Amazon.com.  One such book,  Gardening When it Counts:  Growing Food in Hard Times is ranked at around 500.  The title sounds a bit grim, but a backyard garden makes perfect sense.  It's practical, it's healthy, its pretty, and it's one way of countering rising fuel and food prices.  Also--and I know this is taking aim at one of our culture's sacred cows--I consider the American preoccupation with lush, green lawns to be an economic and ecological nightmare.  The amount of water lawns require (most grasses want to go dormant in hot weather, so we're battling against their nature to keep them green), the poisons and chemicals we're dumping into the ground water, the polution from horribly inefficient, fume-spewing gas mowers. Lawns are an expensive, destructive indulgence--very pretty, but not exactly respectul of the environment.  

It feels good to be moving in a more earth-friendly direction.  We've been slowing making changes to our patterns of consumption and fuel use.  Last year we replaced our gas mower with an electric, our mini van with a Prius hybrid.  Next year we hope to replace the single-paned windows in our house and recycle the old windows to build a small greenhouse.  Even small things can make a difference.  This weekend we got our new composting bin up and running.  Now kitchen scraps, yard clippings, and coffee grounds will all go toward humus for next year's gardens. This week I'll be ordering a worm farm that processes nothing but pet waste.  Apparently you can run damn near anything through a worm and it ends up being good for your garden.  This stuff, though, I'm going to reserve for the flower beds, just . . . because.  This particular innovation is good news for the future:  in another twenty-five years or so, I'll be the crazy old lady with ten Siamese cat and amazing flower beds.  Hey, you've gotta have goals.

Another thing I like about gardening is the dose of no-nonsense pragmatism it brings to life.  A bag of organic fertilizer might be labled "Cockadoodle DOO," but no one pretends it's anything but chicken shit.  Especially in an election year, that is amazingly refreshing.  

Tags: gardening

(Leave a comment)