Sidetracked Charley

Hoop House 2018 When I first moved to Black Lake it was a zone 3 and had only about a 90 day growing season. I wanted at least 120 days so I could grow lettuce. At that time the local market only sold Iceberg Lettuce. I do not call it lettuce. But it seems the Moreno Valley was famous for it at one time. Some old timers even claim it developed, raised, and popularized it. And so began my experiment on how to stretch my growing season. The use of pvc for hoops to support 6 mil plastic over raised beds promised to give me ten days on either side of summer. In its last season 2021 I planted in the beginning of May and continued to harvest through September.  Essentially I had lengthened my gardening season to 150 days. But not without trauma. As in late heavy spring snows which required going out and pushing the snow off the plastic every hour all night long. When the snows begin the plastic came off This year we had the snow squall in December. It overturned the garden shed. And then...

I am rather down this morning. Am still teary eyed. A friend says fall is a melancholy time. I concede that. And there is surge fatigue. I am still deep in mourning of what was and will never be again. Though I can cast that off for short spells and begin plans on how to proceed into the new normal. I am happy about a couple of the steps that direction. But there seems to be no good news without a dose of bad. Ignoring the news I petted Thicke and began a chat with a gardening friend in another country. A green witch. Talking gardening always cheers me up. As one season ends you can look forward to the promise of the next. I have all my seeds for next year. Or thought I had all my seeds for next year until I found a chocolate cherry sunflower (no not the one above) and had to locate and order the seeds. Gardening is strange in that so much energy is directed to finding what works and concentrating on those like rainbow mix carrots and Swiss Chard, but always looking for the next go...

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world  the master calls a butterfly . - Richard Bach When it appeared, or I accepted, that we were going to be in this horrid shift in the paradigm for longer than was comfortable I just wanted to scream. No white knight was going to ride in and slay the dark lord and his minions.  There are games like Monopoly and Chess I came to loathe early on because the end was always so painfully long and torturous. Being burned at the stake has its appeal because it is said you lose consciousness when the fire gets to your knees and friends of the victim help out by bringing more firewood to the pyre. But we are living in the political model of the inquisition.  I could not turn away from the news because I figured I had the Watergate experience to do battle in this far worse situation. But I was going to have to figure out a way to survive it. The steps I took seemed so small at first. It began with watercolor note...

I really have been an accidental gardener. I moved around too much to really put down roots outside of containers. And if I chanced, for a short period of time to have a plot where I could work the earth I was haphazard in what I would grow. Or attempt to grow. Now and again I would be wildly successful at something like horseradish in North Carolina. That started a war with my neighbor. She was also not fond of my shredded computer paper mulch. Frankly, I found that funny because all the birds favored it as nesting materials for blocks around. I learned to cook Zucchini because it was the only plant I was successful at in my rocky patch in Sandia Park, New Mexico. I even wrote a cookbook, and for years did a cooking column titled Goats Don't Eat Zucchini .  And they don't. But skunks eat corn. They even know when to do a midnight raid on your about ripe corn. In Questa I discovered why chicos. It is a labor intensive corn product made with corn a week from ripe or before...

First Summer for Deck At least now there is sunshine and green and garden and vistas to divert my attention. But there is also meltdowns in the White House and totally non-functioning GOP congress, firing of the director of the FBI. I try to focus on the positive in my life as the United States gets mired in a constitutional crisis. I keep YouTube news to the hours before dawn and in the evening when I am too tired to work outside. Yesterday I went to an Arts Council Round Table and got the news that funding for 2018 is currently save but who knows about 2019. If we still exist as a nation by then. Meanwhile it has been a wet May which means no stress about wild fires in the neighboring forests. Course Thing One could sell it off to Exxon for oil exploration. But you have to take your fears one at a time. And with gardening season I can at least sandwich them between joys like moving out to my new deck from last fall. Today I plan to sit down and enjoy my efforts. Well, after...

Red Cabbage As I approached the end of April this year I looked out on my old poly tunnel and decided to not garden this year. I was facing two cataract surgeries with the limitations the post op care enforced, and a solo gallery show with more paintings to paint. The garden just seemed too much even if I did not redo the polytunnel. Besides what is all the lettuce I plant really costing me? Couldn't I just make regular trips to the farmer's market instead of growing my own?  Besides Mother had been the gardener. And living at 8750 ft. does not make gardening easy. Perhaps it is enough to just excel at house plants in the studio. New Inner tunnel covered by snow Late spring snows did not help. But the whole lead up and recovery from the first eye surgery left me feeling so helpless. Yes, gardening is frustrating but it does not make me feel helpless. I love having my hands in the dirt, seldom miss a morning or evening walking through the beds and talking to my pla...

Magique in front of the Bow Greenhouse Spent this whole last week working on the new and improved polytunnel. It is 11 x 16 feet. Previously it was 7 x 16 feet so I gained a lot of square footage and that means able to plant more things. Topped out by not tied down More room means more raised bed space and 5 gallon tubs for some plants like potatoes and I think Tomatoes. Been trying them out for size. Tomatoes  started from seed sunning outside before the rains Buckets also protect them from winds until they are in the greenhouse Tubs of potatoes between raised beds Been spending so much time on the bow construction I am a bit behind on the planting. Have a lot of plants under the low tunnel and seeds planted in the far raised bed. Still need to add more soil to the newest raised bed which will get broccoli among other plants. I have raised potatoes in tubs before. As they sprout up you raise the soil level and then when time to harvest you just pour out the...

May 13, 2014 and eight inches of snow My Canadian social media friend, Ien, says you are always behind in gardening. But this year seems to be a lot worse. Maybe it is because of my eye surgery and then teeth extraction or maybe I just had a foggy mind and didn't begin my grand plans to convert the polytunnel experiment to a real commitment to greenhouse gardening on the cheap. Or maybe it was the May full of late, late, late snows. Inner tunnel enlarged I did get the collapsing inner tunnel restructured and taller over my raised beds and even got one bed refreshed and seeded, but that just made it obvious how inadequate the high tunnel was. It would still work as a prop for more plastic to raise bed temps but would make it very difficult to work without removing the upper plastic. Beginning of new bow greenhouse I had saved a link to how to make a greenhouse for $50. The man lies. What you see is $60 and not nearly done. I am planning to use recycled materials a...

Lower Tunnel Modifications Last year was my first year with the poly-tunnel gardening system. It is suppose to extend your growing season by two weeks on either side of your normal season. Last year, however, when I began the gardening experiment 224 for the high county I started with just the low tunnel on the first of May. Mid May I built the high tunnel so I could expand my plantings. And by June I was experimenting with plants late frosts had always prevented me from enjoying. One of our latest frosts I can remember was June 21st. It decimated the carefully tended squash plants I had nurtured in my studio until the date of the previous late frost (June 8) had pasted. The double tunnels foiled the late frosts. And in July in protected the garden, which was lush and productive, from inch sized hail. But by the time fall frosts came it was clear my low tunnel was too low for the thriving Swiss Chard, Kale, and several of my herbs. So my goal for this season was to raise the inn...

Tunnel end of growing season 2012 It did not seem that monumental at the time but this spring I committed myself to gardening again. I moved the neglected raised 4 x 4 beds and built a poly tunnel over the top of them. Except for the initial $150 in plastic and PVC and rope it was mostly sweat equity. But since the mechanics lien in November 2007 was placed on my property by the contractor I had hired to build the studio I have invested no sweat and very little time, money or effort in my property except to improve the rental unit for income. Why put anything into something which could be sold out from under you at any moment? I am not sure what moved inside of me to allow this investment, minor though it may be. And at the time it seemed to be that where I had put the raised beds was just wrong. They were so in the way. A total pain to mow around. And they collected all the blowing snow in the winter. So they had to go. And for a moment I considered doing just that; chopping th...

Garden August 2012 Oh, no, not another garden blog!! Yes, another. But this one is in response to a question which came up during a conversation with a new gardener: Why do I garden? And that is a really, really good question, because I have always been bad at it. Or at least that is my conception of my ability. Mother was the perfect gardener. Never a weed to be seen and nothing dared not grow. I can remember gardens back to preschool days when we had a truck garden that covered a whole acre of land. And sold veggies at a road side stand in the summer and fall. We also sold eggs and puppies but that is another story. My first garden of my own was in 1972. I was being earth mother. I raised goats, angora rabbits, geese and zucchini. I had never eaten a zucchini in my life but it was the only plant that survived Solomon and Sheba my two angora goats. Friends sent me cookbooks and recipes for zucchini and my collection of "Goats Don't Eat Zucchini" recipes for a fu...

New location for raised beds When I moved from Questa to Black Lake I abandoned the large garden plot and three great 4 x 8 foot raised beds. I did not miss the garden plot but the first spring I erected two 8 x 4 raised beds. And quickly found that I could grow more than I could eat in them. Number one I could grow fewer things at the higher altitude and shorter growing season. Lettuce, spinach, kale and mustard greens thrived. Squash was very risky. So when I had to move the old beds for the studio addition and found them rotted out after eight years I decided on 4 x 4 foot raised beds. But I had one summer of container gardening in the back yard in between. When the construction crew was gone I built the new smaller beds and located them in a scattered pattern toward the front of the studio. Mistake. They were not as protected as I thought they would be and didn't get enough sun. Last summer I toyed with beds at the base of the studio window for squash. I covered them w...

And probably why every muscle in my body is complaining today. It is what is called a lasagna garden which is alternating layers of newspaper, grass clippings and peat moss. Bekkieann started me on this when she blogged about it on My So Called Life . It seemed like a good idea. I had started this a couple weeks ago as a way of uniting a couple plants like my peony and current bush in my little back garden and prevent me from having to mow around all of them separately. The rock garden/pond feature at the end is not completed yet. Yesterday I added another level to the garden bed and humped it up in the middle and then planted a blue and white columbine and three colors of poppies I had bought. I transplanted a purple columbine hidden in the front garden to this more airy location. I also put in a creeping rosemary I had in a pot and a start of rhubarb. I like rhubarb as a plant because of the huge green leaves and the red stalks. I have not done all the planting here I want to do but ...