Rambling about the garden...

I grew up under fir trees.  Well, actually I grew up in a house flanked and shaded by tall Douglas Fir trees on the edge of an urban forest.  Today that urban forest exists as reservations of trees amongst large houses.  Oh the trees....I always wanted a garden. 

When I 'grew up' I landed in a duplex with my sister and a sunny yard.  The 'other halfers' consisted of a single mom and her kids.  There wasn't much yard privacy between ourselves and the 'other halfers' and they had lettuce...just like that...right out of the ground.  I was well versed in ivy, dog-toothed lily, trilliums, blackberries, ferns, poison oak and other woodsy wonders, but lettuce?!  I marveled at that leafy wonder right there--by the patio!

After I married we rented a totally funky, slopey 1920s cottage with a big, big yard.  At last!  A garden! We played with bouquets of roses, marveled at mint (OK, I recognize the scourge now), and planted cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes.  Oh joy!  I loved it--even with the slugs.  

Over the years we lived in two more not quite so funky cottages with leafy shade trees and ample sun in the yards.  Between teaching school and raising babies I played in the gardens.  I evolved from tentatively putting lawn clippings around the azalea

 bush (will it kill it????) to embracing books like Lasagna Gardening, Eat More Dirt and Four Season Harvest.  I experimented with a walk-in greenhouse I built from PVC pipes, plastic and snap clamps, and bean teepees for the kids.  I loved it, only now the slugs and snails left me indignantly boiling with 'gastropod rage.'

We own a house now, with the required sunny yard.  The house was a broken, repossessed wonder complete with one dead and one sick tree (now gone), neglected lawns (mostly gone), and horrible, orange bark-o-mulch (totally gone).  My latest favorite book is Worms Eat My Garbage.  Yesterday, I reveled in the fun of a sunny, (finally!!) spring day in which to tackle my jungle.  After some helpful team weeding/clean up I worked on the food areas.  I have a lettuce house for fall/winter/spring lettuce in the front and a large vegetable/berry area in the back.  I'm trying to clear and clean these up as the weeds are bolting (why don't THEY freeze????) and I may actually use some Round Up in the nonfood areas (GASP!  Did I write that aloud?  I've always been so opposed.  Now, I'm overwhelmed and want a quick victory over the weed intrusion).  

As I worked yesterday at strawberry relocation, I decided to inspect last season's compost mountain.  I love composting.  I've learned so much from aforementioned books, but must add that I garden on the cheap.  'Lasagna gardening' has been our inexpensive answer to a yard wrapped in lawn and dead grass, neglected flower beds, clay and weedy spaces.   My 'lasagna garden' methods do not employ expensive components like peat moss, however.   The weed barrier recommended in Lasagna Gardening once consisted of the boxes our new roof came in.  (When you pull long pieces of packaging tape out of the soil you get a picture of what happens to plastic in the landfill.)  The layers have been a somewhat non-scientific layer of any leaves we can beg/borrow/steal, lawn trimmings, vegetable trimmings, pet rabbit bedding straw, and rabbit poo.  The resulting soil has been wonderful (the weeds love it too).  We've learned to spread the lawn trimmings soon rather than pile them (PEE YOO!  Even the neighbors will attest to the stink) and to try and mix the greens and the browns (we always seem to have an abundance of greens).   On the cheap side, after reading Worms Eat My Garbage I decided to forgo my hopes of a fussy, expensive  'Can-O-Worms' from the seed catalog and opted, instead, for the available black nursery tree pots knocking around in 'the junky yard area'.  The worms haven't minded and are amazing decomposers.

My strawberry relocation project required more soil, so the compost mountains were inspected and found to be ready for some serious mining.  Hopefully, the strawberry plants are as impressed as I was!  Those little decomposers spent the winter turning compost mountain into crumbly, sweet scented soil.  

I love the garden, the mess that it is.  One rainy morning a few days ago I looked longingly out at the work that needed doing and saw the robins searching for their daily worms.  One discovery from my random garden has been the birds.  We have no feeders but the garden itself.  The finches, hummingbirds, starlings, scrub jays, robins, and sparrows all hunt and peck and return regularly.  One winter morning

 a flock of 17 robins barraged the leafy mulch looking for worms.  I think if I wrote a book, maybe it would be titled Worms Eat My Garbage And Robins Eat My Worms.