Belated Weedy Wednesday: A Lovely Pile of...Poop?

Okay, yes, it is late Thursday night and by the time most of you see this, it will be Friday. What can I say, it has been a long week. Now that I'm back in the garden again, I'm hoping to start posting regular garden and yard pictures and updates on, you know, Wednesdays. For now, just work with me, will ya people?

As usual at this time of year, there is a mad dash to get everything in the ground in time to take advantage of the limited growing season we get here in Upstate NY. But this year the process has been complicated by Extremely Rude and Erratic Weather. It stayed cold long past the time when the planting season would usually have begun (there was still snow on the ground in early April, when I'd normally plant lettuce, spinach, peas, and such) and then it got insanely hot. Before getting cold again. (We've had a frost warning this week and there is another one for Friday night.) So the planting has all been compressed into an even smaller window than usual, and I'm just hoping for the best.

On the bright side, I got a huge truck load of 2 year old composted horse manure, which will give my garden a much needed boost (and no, it doesn't smell at all). This made me ridiculously happy. And since my garden is across the yard from where the pile was dumped, is negating the need for any visits to the gym anytime soon, as I shovel a load into a wheelbarrow, push it across the yard, then shovel it back out again inside the garden. I'm so happy about the manure, I don't even mind the hard work. Yes, I do realize this means I need to get a life.

Ye Olde Pile of Poop and a yellow wheelbarrow

Manure pile to the left by the barn. Garden to the right.

In we go

And a happy raised bed topped off with manure

The strawberries, and the garlic behind them, get sidedressed, which means that the manure is spread between the rows.

Some other early sights in the spring garden:

A handsome frog, sitting on the pond filter, looking unimpressed by my efforts

Fish, ditto

The big green patch is spinach that overwintered and the little bitty things are spinach and lettuce started this season. The long tomato in the cage has already had to be covered a number of times due to frost threat, so the rest go in later.

Eggplant plants on the left and onions on the right, from the local garden center. They're still pretty spindly looking.

Do you plant a garden? Or do you wish you could? What is your favorite thing to grow?

How the Harvest is Like Life: A Weedy Wednesday Confession

Gardening is one of those things you do because you love it, not because you expect a perfect result. It is sort of like life that way. You plant things, tend to them, and then you harvest the results. Some years the harvest is fabulous; abundant and lush, with glorious colors and aromas that lift the soul and overflow the plate. Sometimes, things go wrong--stuff you could have fixed if you'd done something differently, stuff that was completely out of your control.

We're in the middle of the harvest season now--both in mundane life and the pagan "Wheel of the Year," where harvests are so important, we have three holidays or Sabbats dedicated to them: Lammas (Aug 1st), Mabon/Autumn Equinox (coming up on the 22nd of this month) and Samhain, also known to many as Halloween. I often use this time of year to assess how I'm doing on my goals (both mundane and spiritual). This year, even more than most, my garden reminds me of the imperfections in my own life, which is generally going quite well, but has some places where I could have wished for a different result.

The thing is, I tend to try and accent the positive--other than the occasional falling tree or lightning-killed router--so I suspect there are people out there who think my life is perfect, just like my harvest. Because most of the time, I only show you the pictures of the pretty stuff.

So today, I'm fessing up. This year's garden harvest has been...well...not so great. Yes, I have had some successes. But in general, at least in my area, the rollercoaster weather has conspired to make for a lousy harvest.
The storms over the weekend knocked down much of the corn. Sadly, it doesn't much matter, since it didn't seem to be doing much of anything anyway.

 My tomatoes have the blight. You can see that there are very few leaves left on the plants, and the ones that are there are shriveled and brown. The tomatoes are also suffering from cracking, due to the weather changes, and simply rotting on the vine. I have plenty to eat fresh right now--one of the great pleasures of the summer--but not enough to put away for the winter.

 And unlike the other things, which I didn't have any control over (or at least, which would have taken fairly Herculean efforts to prevent), the bed below shows where I just plain ran out of the energy and time to fight the weeds. There are still carrots and eggplants struggling along gallantly, but the harvest won't be nearly as good as it would have been if I'd been able to keep up.

 For every plate of gorgeous tomatoes

 There are just as many that look like this

Because, you know, that's gardening. And life.
Still, success comes in all sizes and shapes--

And like gardening, whether we consider our harvest a good one or not depends at least partly on attitude.

Yes, this has been a frustrating year (both in the garden and in a few areas of my life). But really, I am quite blessed. Not only am I getting some wonderful food out of my garden, but unlike my ancestors--or people who farm for a living--neither my life nor my livelihood depend on my having a good harvest every single year. And for every blight or storm, there are plenty of things that have come up in abundance, and my plate is still full of wonderful gifts.

Hopefully, I will have learned a few things from this year's disasters, and will be able to prevent a few of them next year. But mostly, I'm just happy for the good tomatoes, both actual and metaphorical. My life isn't perfect, any more than my garden is (can you say GIANT RAVENOUS MOSQUITOES?), but it is still darned good. And I'll probably go on showing you  mostly the pretty side, because I like it when y'all have delusions about my perfection :-)

So--how was this year's harvest for you?

Weedy Wednesday: Garlic! Garlic! Garlic!

Yes, I get just that excited about garlic. More about that in a minute.

First, I want to let you know that I am interviewed in a very cool Aussie book blog along with author Nicola Marsh, who used my "Witchcraft for the Paranormal Author" class as research for her book. Check out what we both have to say (and see how cool the book sounds) HERE

There are Things In the Air here... (and I'm not just talking about all the balls I'm juggling). Stay tuned this week to see what happens. If anything.

Today is a Weedy Wednesday post, when I feature some aspect of my garden. This week, I'm all about the garlic. And why wouldn't I be? Garlic is one of nature's wonders--it tastes amazing, has the medicinal properties of an antibiotic [Fun fact: during WWI, when the Russian Army ran out of antibiotics in the field, they used garlic instead. You're welcome.], and is easy to grow. I'm a big fan of easy :-)

If you've never grown garlic, this is what it looks like:

The actual garlic bulb is underneath the ground where you can't see it.
Garlic is an allium, related to onions and chives. It is planted in the fall, and then in the spring it is the first thing up in the garden. It couldn't be easier to grow. Take a head of garlic and break it into individual cloves. Poke a hole in the ground about 2 inches deep and place one clove in it, with the pointy end sticking up. Ta da! You've just planted garlic. You don't need to buy a special garlic from a supplier--just plant the kind you most like to eat. There are many varieties, but they are divided into two basic types: stiff neck and soft neck. The soft neck kind is what you see braided, so if you want to be able to braid your garlic when you've harvested it, get that kind. I like the stiff neck, because it tends to have fewer but larger cloves and is easier to peel.

Garlic is harvested in mid to late summer, when the bottom leaves start turning brown. Before that, you will want to clip the "scapes" or the flowering stalk that comes up from the middle. Not only do you want to remove this bit because then the energy of the plant goes into making larger bulbs instead of useless and not very pretty flowers, but you can also use the scapes in cooking. They have a mild garlic flavor and are good in stir fries.

This week was harvest time. I pulled the garlic out and let it rest for a few days, then cut the bulbs off the stalks and trimmed the roots off the bottoms.

And there you have it--this year's garlic harvest.
The heads will be spread out in a single layer to cure (dry) and then about half of them (the biggest and best ones, since the biggest cloves make the biggest plants) will be replanted in the late fall for next year.

As for the rest, why, I'll eat them of course.

If you really love garlic, you might want to try making garlic aoli, which is a kind of REALLY garlicky mayonnaise. Here's a recipe on Food.com garlic aoili recipe . Otherwise, you can just cook up a big pot of spaghetti sauce, or saute it with onions and mushrooms to serve with your next barbequed steak. Yum.

Weedy Wednesday: In the Garden Today

My approach to gardening is a lot like my approach to writing: I start out with a fairly detailed plan, knowing full well that it is likely to be derailed somewhere along the way...

Oy. This year's garden is definitely living up to that theory, mostly because we have had a lot of rain, followed by some rain, alternating with a few storms. And then some more rain. Mind you, compared to the scorching heat and wildfires that some of my friends are dealing with, I really can't complain (there is some serious flooding here, but not near me this time--yet). I just wish I could sent some of this rain to the folks who really need it.

I'm a lazy gardener, without a lot of extra time, so one of the things I do is mulch most of my garden beds by laying down a layer of straw or hay in between the plants. This prevents most of the weeds from forming, and makes a lot less work for me later on. The problem is, I didn't get out to do the mulching in most of the beds at the time I normally would. So now I am playing catch-up, and the weeds are growing like crazy because of all the rain.

Mostly it has been dry (or drier) in the mornings and then raining in the afternoons. So I'm at work when it is dry, and as soon as I get home...rain. (And we're not talking a light rain here. I've been known to garden in a light rain. This is torrential downpour rain.) But Wednesdays are my day off, so I ignored the 80 degree temps and 90% humidity to go try and rescue my corn bed from the weeds.

 The top picture is what it looked like when I started. (And yes, those are weeds growing next to the raised bed too. Don't get me started on the seed-filled straw disaster.) The bottom picture is what it is supposed to look like, with space between the rows.

It took me about an hour to finish weeding the whole bed (you have to be careful with corn because it has shallow roots) and then mulch it so it looked all pretty and wouldn't just go back to looking like that top picture in a week. On the bright side, while I was out there, I might have met my new boyfriend :-)

I went to pull up some weeds at one point and they wiggled. Not sure who was more startled, him or me. But clearly he wasn't all THAT alarmed, because when I was done, I had a bed that looked like this:

 And look who was still hanging around...

I think I'll call him Herman...

Most of the rest of the time in the garden was spent clipping garlic scapes. If you've never grown garlic, you may not realize that it has a flower that grows on a tall stalk. You want to clip that off before it blooms, so that all the energy of the plant goes into making large bulbs under the ground, instead of pretty flowers. It's an easy task, but I grow a LOT of garlic. (Half of it is replanted in the fall, to make next year's crop.) You can see the curly bits on the top. Those are the scapes.

Here are the harvested scapes. You can see the one in the front that I haven't clipped the flowery bit off of. You don't eat that, but you can eat most of the stalk. It has a garlic-y flavor and is kind of tough, so most people use it in things like stir-fries. I'm pondering trying to pickle some of it...

Anyone have any good recipes for using garlic scapes, by chance?

And is this all WAY more information than you wanted? I could just post a few pictures on Weedy Wednesdays, with a lot less commentary. You know, something like this:

Lettuce.

Okay, back to writing like a good little author. Work is progressing quite well on the 2nd Baba Yaga novel; I'm about a third of the way done. Sadly, the rest won't just write itself.

Weedy Wednesday: In the Garden

As requested, here is my first "Weedy Wednesday" post about the goings on in my yard and garden. It has been raining all week, and is likely to rain tomorrow and Friday, so it might more accurately be called "Wet Wednesday," but hey, at least I don't have to haul out the hose and water.

When I was house hunting 11 1/2 years ago, on of the "required" items on my list was space for a garden. I was fortunate enough to find one (finally) where the women who had lived here before me gardened extensively, and added compost yearly to the otherwise clay-heavy (and rock infested) soil. The fall I moved in, one of the first things I did was have someone come and rototill the space, and then I built the first of many raised beds so I could get the garlic in right away. (For those of you who don't garden, garlic is planted in the fall, grows all winter, spring, and summer, and is harvested around August.)

Since then, my garden has expanded to encompass a large section to the right (blueberry bushes, elderberry and cranberry shrubs, and some apple and cherry trees...none of which have ever given me fruit, dammit) and one to the left for herbs. More on them some other day.

This is the entrance to my garden--doesn't it look welcoming and magical? (That's a golden delicious apple tree hovering to the right. It does give apples.) To the left is a giant lilac. If you want, I can post a picture of it in bloom, which it is right now.

Here are some of the beds, planted with this year's veggies.

That's lettuce, spinach and dill in the front left, peas behind them, and the aforementioned garlic to the right. You can see how large it is, because it gets such an early start.

In the middle of the garden, there is a fish pond. Yes, I carried every one of those rocks from someplace on my property. (New York State grows rocks almost as well as it grows weeds.)

 

Behind it, you can see the beds which are planted with soy beans (too tiny to see from here), onions, and broccoli/cauliflower/cucumbers. And here is one of the guys who hangs out and keeps me company out there. Yes, I talk to them--and your point?

Speaking of gardens, since this is the only day this week when it isn't supposed to rain, I'd better get out there and do some weeding. We don't call this "Weedy Wednesday" for nothing, you know. Any questions? Requests for future WW?

Do you have a garden? Big, small, windowsill? If so, what do you grow there?