Blog or folly?
It's been almost a week between the first and second posts. Is this blog a folly already?
How are the follies going? Glad you asked.
The garden is growing nicely. The tomatoes are launching up and should be up to the level of the support wiring soon. The pole beans and cantaloupe are another matter. They are taking their time and have a ways to go yet. I'm thinking of running some strings down from the trellises to the plants, but haven't come up with a good strategy for that yet.
The bush beans are shooting up as well. I love planting seeds. If you put in a plant, you just don't have as much invested in it as you do when you poke your finger into the newly turned earth (or in my case Mel's Mix), insert a seed, water and love, and wait for something magical to happen. Those little finger holes and seeds have now turned into four inch bean plants, and in another few months into probably more green beans than my family can or will want to eat.
One of the immutable laws of family vegetable gardening is that no matter how careful you are: how carefully you select the type and amount of each plant, you will invariably have either way too much or way too little of an individual vegetable.
I remember one year we planted 6 mounts of squash: 3 mounds of crookneck and three of zucchini. Everything grew nicely and soon we were eating the bounty of our harvest. Soon though, the zucchini was outstripping our ability to eat it, or want to eat it for that matter. We were having zucchini for breakfast (omelets, pancakes), for lunch in salads, and for dinner in any number of baked, stuffed and other ways. Pretty soon we began to even get surly about the whole thing and let them go. But zucchini doesn't stop! It keeps growing. I mean most vegetables have the decency to realize that you really don't want them any more and they fall off the plant and rot, but not zucchini. It just grows and grows. From the nice tender 4 inch guys up to the bit tough 8 in guys, to ridiculous football sized monstrosities. And they don't just get longer - - they fatten up as well. In the end, we just went out and beat them into the ground with a shovel. I wonder if Gallagher could use any zucchini for his sledge-o-matic?
Also a bit foolishly, but at the behest of the children (isn't that always the excuse) I planted a few of the cooler weather crops. It's been beautiful and cool this spring in Georgia, but it can't last, and when it get's hot, they'll bolt to seed. Oh well.
And it's funny. I've been working on the garden for two months now and eldest daughter not once wanted to help, but now that the plants are up, she's out there pulling up weeds. Granted she's busy with school and all, but weeding is pretty far down there on my list of what's enjoyable in the garden, so I'm bound to be able to get her to do some of the more enjoyable tasks.
Younger daughter has helped out as well. it's great to get out in the garden with a child and help them see the beauty of turning a seed into a meal. It puts things into a proper perspective. And it's fun. And it's something we can do together.
And if that isn't enough, I'm planting flowers this week. Perennials. I have a large yard and simply haven't got the time or energy to plant that many annuals. They're great for splashes of color, but until I get that perennial framework in, I'm sticking to them for now. I put in a couple of peonies yesterday. What a beautiful plant. Of course it wants a big hole, and my dirt is more what you'd call CLAY, which is more like brick than dirt. I was digging it up with a pick axe. Could have used dynamite I suppose, but I couldn't find it at home depot. Anyone have a good supplier?
Perennials are more of a struggle for me. They have so many chapes and varieties that I'm a bit overwhelmed. And I've really never done much with them before last year. It was so much fun this spring to watch all of last years plants come back (except for a couple of stinkin' coral bells *%@$) and not have to do a killer amount of work.
Gotta go. More plants to bury, I mean plant.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Where to start?
Where to start? I guess with what this blog will be about. The truth is "I don't know". I'm just going to throw it out there and see what, if anything, stinks, I mean sticks. Probably both.
But what's that? How about the name? David's Folly. If you look up Folly in the dictionary, you find many definitions. I'd have to say that I'm going to be using several of them.
Most appropriately there's the "costly and foolish undertaking". I come up with plenty of them. Is this it? The blog itself? We'll see. I'm great at starting things, and thinking about things. But doing things? And sticking with things? Will this blog become a love and a passion, or just another folly to be labored on briefly and left by the wayside? Time will tell.
And it's not one folly. I tend to go from folly to folly. Some people learn, or die trying, or just give up in despair and go off to Tibet and join a monastery where they are abused and oppressed by those damned Chinese (guess this blog's going to be banned there). I'm 44 and still haven't really gotten over the whole practice of moving from one folly to the next.
Currently I'm gardening. This isn't in and of itself foolish, but there should be limits on the quantity of gardening one should attempt to get going at once, and I think I left that behind back in March somewhere. Hopefully the garden police won't come by and whack me over the head with a stick or something. Now the watering police ...
I haven't been vegetable gardening lately for any number of perfectly good reasons (lousy sun, lousy dirt, no time, kids), but I do love being out of doors with the plants and enjoy both the freshness and the taste of home grown produce. So I'm going to produce some. Hopefully.
I've also been inspired lately by a wonderful book called (and this should really scare you away from gardening, not attract you) "The $64 Tomato" by William Alexander. I actually read it last year and loved it, so picked it up and read it again this month. It details the absurd lengths someone can go to in a garden. He's a very ... anal I guess is an appropriate word ... or maybe more politely proper ... person, and some of the lengths he goes to to get the perfect garden are ... well ... lengthy.
My garden beginnings are a bit more modest. I've been interested in a gardening method for years called square foot gardening, and this yard is the perfect place for it. We bought this house 5 years ago, and our back yard was in the former life a horse rink. Now the previous owner was a bit into folly as well. She decided one day to get some horses, so she knocked down half an acre of trees, scraped away all the top soil down to the red Georgia clay, and stuck in a couple of barn stalls. For five years horses walked around on this red Georgia clay, compacting even more what 5 million years of evolution had already done quite a good job of doing, resulting in a lawn that has the rough tensile strength of concrete. It's so hard that crab grass sees it and runs away screaming! Kudzu isn't even interested in growing there.
So, when spring came and with it that primal urge to dig in the dirt (now I warned you I'm a better thinker than a doer) I pulled up my garden plans from LAST YEAR (the ones that looked so beautiful last year and didn't get done, and set to work.
Here in Georgia, March is truly the month you should begin working on that vegetable garden, maybe sooner. The cool weather crops should be in the ground and you should be getting the rest ready from planting, but in March I am a Set Builder for my eldest daughter's ballet company (another folly) and am usually quite busy enough thank you very much and the garden sits. Last year I got ready to garden, purchasing lumber and compost and other materials that I'd need, but by the time I was ready to start it was May, and last year May was quite hot and very dry and not at all a good time to start a garden and I had some other projects I was working on and I think that's enough excuses already and that this sentence is not at all grammatically correct and has run on to the point that Imodium could no longer stop the running.
Anyway, my plans on paper didn't quite make it to any sort of physical manifestation other than I had an impressively large pile of compost that had sprouted an even more impressive batch of crab grass (which had no problem at all sprouting there), a bunch of pressure-treated lumber, several rather large bags of vermiculite, and a bunch bills to pay. $64 tomato hah. I paid a couple of hundred and had nothing.
This year, I had all the materials and started immediately after the spring show was over. The spring was very nice this year too. We've been getting some rain and it's been in the 70s and 80s. Very nice weather for gardening. By April 15, the fairly secure last frost date for this part of Georgia, I was ready to plant.
Enough for now. More on that later.
But what's that? How about the name? David's Folly. If you look up Folly in the dictionary, you find many definitions. I'd have to say that I'm going to be using several of them.
Most appropriately there's the "costly and foolish undertaking". I come up with plenty of them. Is this it? The blog itself? We'll see. I'm great at starting things, and thinking about things. But doing things? And sticking with things? Will this blog become a love and a passion, or just another folly to be labored on briefly and left by the wayside? Time will tell.
And it's not one folly. I tend to go from folly to folly. Some people learn, or die trying, or just give up in despair and go off to Tibet and join a monastery where they are abused and oppressed by those damned Chinese (guess this blog's going to be banned there). I'm 44 and still haven't really gotten over the whole practice of moving from one folly to the next.
Currently I'm gardening. This isn't in and of itself foolish, but there should be limits on the quantity of gardening one should attempt to get going at once, and I think I left that behind back in March somewhere. Hopefully the garden police won't come by and whack me over the head with a stick or something. Now the watering police ...
I haven't been vegetable gardening lately for any number of perfectly good reasons (lousy sun, lousy dirt, no time, kids), but I do love being out of doors with the plants and enjoy both the freshness and the taste of home grown produce. So I'm going to produce some. Hopefully.
I've also been inspired lately by a wonderful book called (and this should really scare you away from gardening, not attract you) "The $64 Tomato" by William Alexander. I actually read it last year and loved it, so picked it up and read it again this month. It details the absurd lengths someone can go to in a garden. He's a very ... anal I guess is an appropriate word ... or maybe more politely proper ... person, and some of the lengths he goes to to get the perfect garden are ... well ... lengthy.
My garden beginnings are a bit more modest. I've been interested in a gardening method for years called square foot gardening, and this yard is the perfect place for it. We bought this house 5 years ago, and our back yard was in the former life a horse rink. Now the previous owner was a bit into folly as well. She decided one day to get some horses, so she knocked down half an acre of trees, scraped away all the top soil down to the red Georgia clay, and stuck in a couple of barn stalls. For five years horses walked around on this red Georgia clay, compacting even more what 5 million years of evolution had already done quite a good job of doing, resulting in a lawn that has the rough tensile strength of concrete. It's so hard that crab grass sees it and runs away screaming! Kudzu isn't even interested in growing there.
So, when spring came and with it that primal urge to dig in the dirt (now I warned you I'm a better thinker than a doer) I pulled up my garden plans from LAST YEAR (the ones that looked so beautiful last year and didn't get done, and set to work.
Here in Georgia, March is truly the month you should begin working on that vegetable garden, maybe sooner. The cool weather crops should be in the ground and you should be getting the rest ready from planting, but in March I am a Set Builder for my eldest daughter's ballet company (another folly) and am usually quite busy enough thank you very much and the garden sits. Last year I got ready to garden, purchasing lumber and compost and other materials that I'd need, but by the time I was ready to start it was May, and last year May was quite hot and very dry and not at all a good time to start a garden and I had some other projects I was working on and I think that's enough excuses already and that this sentence is not at all grammatically correct and has run on to the point that Imodium could no longer stop the running.
Anyway, my plans on paper didn't quite make it to any sort of physical manifestation other than I had an impressively large pile of compost that had sprouted an even more impressive batch of crab grass (which had no problem at all sprouting there), a bunch of pressure-treated lumber, several rather large bags of vermiculite, and a bunch bills to pay. $64 tomato hah. I paid a couple of hundred and had nothing.
This year, I had all the materials and started immediately after the spring show was over. The spring was very nice this year too. We've been getting some rain and it's been in the 70s and 80s. Very nice weather for gardening. By April 15, the fairly secure last frost date for this part of Georgia, I was ready to plant.
Enough for now. More on that later.
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