What's the Plan, Stan?

I love the feel of graphite on graph paper.  The experience of writing or drawing is as much a tactile, muscular experience as it is an imaginative one.  Anyway, the plan this year:

1.  Build raised beds and experiment with square foot and vertical gardening.  The idea is to reduce the spacing between plants, so there aren't any rows.  Most gardens have rows because they're built from larger agricultural models that use machinery to plant and cultivate large areas of land.  Naturally, you need wide rows to fit those big tires down the line.  In a small space (the home garden) there's no reason to incorporate rows unless you plan on driving up and down the rows on your big wheels or something.  So, you build a bed that is no wider than 5 feet across (figuring your arm can reach about 2 1/2 feet into the bed) and as long as you want.  Instead of planting in a line, you space each seed equidistant from each other (per the seed packet instructions.)  So, say lettuce should be spaced 6" apart in a regular garden row with 1 1/2 to 2 feet between each row.  Using the square foot model, you can plant 6" apart on all sides, doing away with all that empty space and hopefully saving you some backache from hoeing weeds.  Also, if you space the plants closer together, they should give you a good canopy and shade out most of the troublesome weeds.  A few other benefits:  You can continue to modify and build your soil only composting in your bed rather than wasting all that good stuff spreading it out in the row where you aren't growing anything.  AND you cut down on compaction because you aren't (or you shouldn't be) walking on your garden bed.

And it looks purdy, too.

2.  Experiment with companion planting.  Some vegetables grow well together.  For example, tomatoes love nitrogen and peas leave a lot of it in the ground, so you can put in some cattle panel (which is what I plan to do) and plant your peas along the row with your tomatoes.  By the time your peas stop producing (early to mid-summer) the tomatoes will be ready to take over.  Carrots do nicely with tomatoes, too.

3.  Vertical gardening.  This is pretty self-explanatory.  Instead of letting your vining vegetable spread around the ground, you build a vertical structure and let them climb.  Just be sure you aren't shading out any of the plants that require lots of sun--instead, plant lettuce or spinach on the shady side.  It won't bolt as quickly.

4.  Start building on my perennial herb bed.  If you've ever worked with dill or mint or...well, lots of the herbs out there, you have probably noticed that they spread all over tarnation.  This is pretty neat, actually.  I mean, that's how it's supposed to work.  I like the idea of maintaining a perennial bed and watching it grow and change each year.

5.  Plant more flowers along with the veggies.  It's all about attraction, kids.  I need pollinators, and pollinators enjoy pretty.  Sidenote:  I recently went to the local green house to track down something I could spray on my apple tree to deal with the cedar rust that's been destroying my crop the last two years.  Everything I saw said "Kills bees."  I don't usually like to cuss in my blog, but what the hell?  How do you think apples are made anyway?  You kill the bee, you kill the pollen messenger.  I finally found something organic that is only harmful to fish.  Luckily I don't have any fish in my orchard.

6.  Succession planting:  I used to put all my seeds into the ground at the same time (another throwback to the larger model that relies on a single, mechanical harvest), so I'd usually end up with about 30 pounds of lettuce all at once.  I'm going to save that practice for down the line when I'm farming more land and working out the CSA I dream of having one day...  For now, since I don't own a tractor, an entire acre, or enough family members to eat more than 3 pounds of lettuce a week, I'm working on staggering my planting and thinking in terms of cool and warm season crops.  The dance is rather complicated, though, and I have a feeling I'll be working out the choreography for many, many years (God willing).

Here's the plan:

And this is the prettiest flower in the garden:

And what if...

She was raised in jeans and dirt under the sun and open as the wind and dirt comb through her hair.  She goes to the kitchen sink, washes her forearms and cups her hands underneath, lowers her face into them like she's done before in grief but this time, tasting sweat and something cool and clean together, she feels refreshed and worn out at the same time.

And when they make a story using each square of the walkway, the chalk blue dusted and white on their palms, they'll walk back inside certain they've made the best of a day they could have either rejoiced in or cursed about.

All of us together, we move order into the scared and chaotic parts of our lives, interiors that won't risk telling.  A sock matched.  A dish washed and dried.  A plant watered and a daughter's long, golden hair combed and braided.  She puts her feet in motion hoping to lend a small something, not through her own effort but through her (finally) giving up, then lifted beyond the floor and into clean clothes, a shovel now in her hands digging potential and burying the past, as the saying goes.

And what if everything she knows seems familiar, too simple?  Perhaps, finally, she's found the truth she stopped everything to find.

I would like to say so.  So I will.

Today

Oh, lovely.  All of it.   After Nora fell asleep, I went to check on the pansies outside and was wooed by the stars and breeze and the little toad hopping by, hypnotized by the anntenna lights and the blossoming crabapples.  I wouldn't trade this for any city in the world.  Anyway...here's today's story:

We filled up Nora's kiddy pool, ate a few cheez its and planted pansies in containers for the front porch.  Nora dug up part of the yard looking for dinosaur bones.  I'm sure the grass will be just fine.  In a few weeks.

 We drove out to the Day Lilly farm last week and picked up a tray of pansies.  They're tough little flowers, and I love their sweet little petal faces.

I can not even explain the joy of crawling into bed at the end of the day and smelling all this wind.

What could be better than a roller coster straw?  TWO roller coster straws, naturally.

I mowed the yard this morning, came inside and vacuumed and was suddenly struck with gratitude that carpet doesn't grow.  That would be weird.  Anyway, about the sun tea...I like it.

Mom and Nora made these last week.  I love them, too.

Here are the crabapple trees trying to compete with my red truck.

I read this earlier tonight:

"She stared.  Such beauty; and she there to see it.  Such beauty; and she alive to feel it.  Her face was bathed in light.  Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her.  A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair...How beautiful, how beautiful.  Not to have died before this...to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this...She stared, her lips parted.  Happy?  Poor, ordinary, everyday word.  But what could one say, how could one describe it?"

-- Elizabeth von Arnim from her novel The Enchanted April

Moving on Down the Line

Nora woke at 4:45 this morning, and I was tired and cranky.  We still stay at Mom's on Wednesday nights.  We've done this for a few years now as Mom watches Nora on Tuesdays and Thursdays while I'm at school.  Between preschool and Mom's and work, I'm a regular commuter down 34.  For those of you who don't live here, 34 is a two-lane highway that runs east to west and stitches many of the tiny towns (and a few of the bigger ones) together with asphalt fabric held together by the white painted thread of the center line.   The majority of vehicles are called to farm work--semis hauling beans or corn, trucks pulling anhydrous tanks to the fields, the occasional tractor crawling close to the median.

I've come to love this drive, especially in the mornings when the sun is rising and I can talk to God about where I'm headed and where He'd like me to go.

And there was this today:  that beauty of the sun splitting the clouds, driving straight into the dark ground, those silken curtains parting and outlined.  And I'm forgetting myself and this is such a relief.  I have been looking forward to this summer break so I might be still, be quiet, and move closer into this beauty, that tactile, secret place where I forget myself, dissolved and stronger as I become the passageway between God's beautiful, speechless things and myself, the instrument made to receive them, a gift.

Kneeling in the garden or in front of the screen door at night as the wind speaks hush into the house or the stars tell me how small and perfect we are or the bird call or the creaking cedar whose arthritic bark aches in strong winds, the crabapple tree blossoms and bursts so I might look through them as one would the stained glass of a cathedral.  And, oh Lord, how I long to release what I've found to pick up and carry over the last few months in that impossibly strong and silent peace doing something where I am not always hearing myself talk but for what my hands find to say in their doing.

Spring

Dear fragile thing I found; you found me, too. 

Just put you back up there where I won't be tempted to examine too closely what we are made of and if it will freeze or snow before we do or you become what is required and then when we do whatever that thing is we won't know we were like bumblebees who shouldn't have flown but did anyway because we never stopped long enough to doubt that we couldn't be lifted buzzing toward the nectar of another flower talking sweet life, sweet abundant buzz and heft of each one of us being carried because I believe it has and will happen forever bloom that passes between us the pink echo of something planted and dark below us wanting to speak to birds.

Sweet and sincerely.

Is it too late in the day to start Spring cleaning?

1.  Nora just fell asleep.  It's 9 PM, and I'm wide awake--the kind of awake that says, "If you wanted to, you could wake up tomorrow to a completely clean house, four loaves of banana bread, 36 pumpkin muffins, and a clean refrigerator."  There is another voice that says, "Lisa.  Lisa.  Watch another Hallmark movie.  Crochet.  Eat.  Lounge."

2.  The place is cleaned up except for the garden, which is my dumping ground for dead leaves and branches until Lynn brings the gator around and hauls them to the burn pile.  The asparagus is up already, and the patch I planted three years ago is starting to show some promise.  (It takes two years to get to a harvest--talk about learning patience...)  Nora and I have started transplanting the seedlings into dixie cups (punch holes in the bottom for drainage--I was doing this individually until Nora said, "Mom.  Watch this."  She stacked 5 or 6 cups together and punched through all of them at once.  That's my girl.)  I'm showing a little yellowing in the eggplant and am hoping that by providing some new soil, they can spring back from the nutrients they're lacking.  I'm so happy with the difference between this year and last year's seedlings.  The fluorescent lighting works wonders.

3.  I have a hard time just sitting, so I crochet dishrags while I watch my Hallmark movies.  Aside:  Let me explain something about the Hallmark thing.  These are movies with plots so predictable, you can look at the cover and pretty much know what's going to happen.  I've been shooting a 3 out of 10 when it comes to guessing what the next line is going to be.  These aren't challenging movies--they don't make me think that hard.  They don't challenge any of my assumptions about myself or society.  Sometimes I just need to watch something that reminds me that problems (even imagined, predictable ones) have real solutions.  I need movies right now where love wins every time, and where you have to build the house you live in out of materials readily available in nature.

Watch and repeat:  Love is possible.  You have everything you need.  Also, be sure to add "help at a barn raising" and "tame wild horses" to your bucket list.

Ila's gifts...

Meet Apple, Our New Truck

Blame it on the feeling of contentment after eating at Culvers.  Blame it on red.  Blame it on the low pressure car salesman.  The big tires.  The rhino lining and the tinted windows and the stereo and the safety rating and the mileage and the price.  Blame it on Spring.  Blame it on how we both have Colorado in common.  Blame it on Apple.