Use It Up, Wear It Out

The garage is a universe of ungodly junque including a clear plastic tri-fold egg carton I should have recycled months ago and also a big dirty bag half full of potting soil, and so today, as the world closed down, I spooned soil into the plastic dimples, soaked it and planted 12 collard seeds, showing them the seed packet to encourage them. Closing the carton created a terrarium. It's now in a dark warm place. Possibly the seeds will germinate in five to seven to ten days, maybe. I realized I have utterly forgot how to garden, remembering only that the largest part is faith.

Next I wanted, or rather, needed, for the very first time to put up a house number, but didn't want Mylar numerals stuck on the siding or the constant sight of numerals disrupting my contemplation of nature. Everyone until now has found this house, but one dark night someone had to drive seven miles from here to catch enough phone signal to call me and wail that there was no house number, and I had to go stand on the highway with a lantern to guide them.

What might the solution be? In the garage, behind trashbags of packing peanuts, was a two-foot metal planter so old I had grown up with it, heavy and too corroded inside to plant in. Inverting it over a rock and applying the numerals created a sturdy yet portable and removable house number, a courtesy for the Instakart drivers and first responders one might need in a pandemic.

These frugal up-cyclings enhanced the refreshing and sparkling spring day, ideal for scrubbing the bird feeder and refilling the outdoor mousetraps with poison, admiring the perennial crocuses down by the road; a hawk careering in an uncluttered sky and red cardinals calling to hardly anybody.

Irake

Before this world turns green, it's taupe. And this portion of meadow was covered with fallen oak leaves all the way along this tiny flagstone path to the back area where stands the bluebird box.

Bluebirds begin hunting for homes in late February, but  won't settle anywhere that's covered with leaves. They need bald earth, mown grass, or plowed soil -- because they seize bugs and worms and pin them to the earth, and that's how they eat. No bare ground, no bluebirds. Last year, after securing the bluebird box in a concrete foundation, I was too lazy to rake and had no bluebirds. As you know, they bring happiness. Thus raking equals happiness.

This might not look raked, but on the photo's right see the carpet of fallen oak leaves I've cleared away. The gray brushy stuff needs a chainsaw or, better, a controlled burn. The white things on the left are opaque ground cover held down by jugs of water. Ground cover will retard the growth of grass and weeds on those spots so I might plant collards there.

So this is really a picture of potential. In my mind I see it green, blue, and thriving.

Seduced by Pink Light

These warm and cloudy days create a world of pink light between 5:15 and 6:15 p.m. "Pink light" is a woo-woo thing you imagine when you want to send people long-distance love and protection. Always enraptured and outdoors to see it, I was seduced into thinking about spring and summer. Before I knew it, I was:

1. finding the gardening gloves and the trowel.
2. raking and weeding, and saying hello to worms.
3. fertilizing and then paving a small area with old shingles to smother the grass and weeds to prepare the earth for planting.
4. at Lowe's buying seeds (hard to find!) for collards and turnips, two hardy vegetables that my bunnies and deer won't eat. And buying a garden hose.
5. contemplating the Totally Tomatoes catalog and circling about 20 different tomatoes I want to grow, to be narrowed down to two with three plants each. (Totally Tomatoes sells both seeds and plants.)

This is either patently insane behavior or it's human. Thanks to the wildlife, of the tomatoes borne on these plants I will probably actually get to eat only one or two. I'm not a gardener. I'm kind of a make-believe gardener. That is okay. It's the journey, not the destination. . .

Homegrown

Wildlife ate my perennial flowers every year, so to spite them I planted spring onions all around the house where flowers should go, and the onions grow unmolested and naturalize into huge crops, ready just now. An Asian cookbook showed me several new and strange recipes using scallions and other store-bought vegetables and fruits I'd bought too much of, simply because spring makes me do that, and I had to get cooking today.

In the photos, please see:

Korean Stir-Fry Noodles (cabbage, carrot, mushroom, scallions, with bean thread noodles and black sesame seeds); Hot and Sour Soup (with tofu cubes); Scallion Flatbread (unleavened, skillet-fried); and Two-Banana Salad made with bananas and banana peppers, thus its name; a taste sensation with lime juice and soy sauce, it definitely requires the use of bananas less ripe than mine, and chopped peanuts to top it off; it was the day's only misfire. Asian Asparagus-Spinach Salad I'll make tomorrow; today I made one familiar recipe, the Italian-flag Antipasto Bowl with steamed asparagus and mozzarella. Also shown, an inspirational bunch of homegrown scallions.

Lazy Vegetable Planting

Collards, one of my favorite greens, thrive in extreme weather, especially the extreme Missouri summer heat, and I bought what I thought was four plugs of them but it was six and I let them sit in their tray for a week not knowing how I was going to get the muscle and vertebrae to weed and turn over a patch of soil big enough to plant them 18 to 24 inches apart. It seemed impossible. The little plants' leaves began turning yellow. I had to act or throw them away. I asked the powers that be to solve my problem.

It so happens there are two eight-foot boards left in the lawn from a coldframe that was built around 2001, which I dismantled in 2011 except for those two boards I couldn't move and let lie there. Where the coldframe's vegetables were is now a tangle of wildflowers and weeds (see top left of photo). Yet over the years the boards rotted and weakened a bit and I jostled  one around, pulling it backward; and behold, beneath it was an eight-foot strip of fresh, rich, worm-happy, almost-weed-free, sun-facing soil just right for planting my collards 18 to 24 inches apart. No weeding, no digging, simply planting. How lucky! How great! How lazy! Divinely inspired.

The Garden in the Brain

I lost six days sick with flu and am just now catching up on mid-March's favorite activity: seeding summer vegetable plants. Last year all 12 tomato plants came up thriving. This year I planted 6 tomatoes, 2 parsley, and 4 Genovese basil in potting soil in an egg carton. This was shut in the furnace closet. When the seeds sprout the baby plants will be grow-lamped until May. Directly sown will be (not this week; next week, when I'm m strong enough to break and turn the soil): turnips, radishes, kale. When (or if) the sun comes out, then arugula.

Compared to March 2012's 70- and 80-degree days, here in eastern Missouri we've had cold rain, wind, mud, sleet, and wintry mix (everybody loves a wintry mix!) daily, so the imagination had to work overtime to first plant the garden in the brain, which is required before the garden in reality can manifest.