Stone Herb Spiral

The flock and I spent some quality time pulling weeds from the herb spiral, which lives near the back door.  If you remember, this was once a pile of topsoil from our swimming pool excavations.  It's taken me a few years, but I think I've finally arranged the stones so that they create a layered and raised circular garden bed.  

Last summer the spiral was cram packed with basil and holy basil plants, which nearly shaded out all the other herbs.  Turns out, a family of two can't consume enough salad dressing to use a dozen basil plants! 

This year, I'm trying to encourage myself to thin more aggressively so that some of the less bossy plants, like sage and thyme, have a fighting chance.  I made chicken soup recently, from chickens we raised, using fresh green beans from the garden, and flavored with thyme and sage from the herb spiral.  

The wild milkweed I transplanted to the top of the spiral last spring sent up numerous shoots this year, which are popping up throughout the spiral.  I trimmed out a few of the stalks that fell over and were smashing their neighbors, but there are still plenty to feed the butterflies.  I saw a monarch visiting.  Hopefully she was laying some eggs.  

I wasn't sure putting giant sunflower plants in the herb spiral was such a good idea when they first started to dominate the scene, but now I've come to like that they add some height to the spiral and the space near the back door.  Before the sunflowers, the stones of the spiral seemed so large.  Like stonehenge, just feet from our doorway.   A friend of mine once said he could always tell who was a hippy, because hippy's always have sunflowers in their gardens.  Ha!  

Here you can see the large dark green leaves of the milkweed on the left, and the small pale green leaves of the sweet basil in the center right, and the row of small marigold plants growing on the west side of the spiral.  All of the herbs and flowers were started from seeds, in our greenhouse.  

The only plant that survived the winter and the chickens dutiful excavations was the oregano, in the foreground, in front of the small sage plants.  I offered a friend some oregano plants once and she said she didn't need any because oregano came up like weeds in her garden.  I've been waiting to have oregano weeds in my own garden ever since.  Hopefully next year it will be so invasive I can pull it out by the handful.  

The pretty purple plant in the center is a type of basil too.  I started most of the bigger plants in the greenhouse, but you can see the tiny basil volunteers that are sprouting from seeds dropped last year.  I didn't even start holy basil in the greenhouse because I knew that if any of the herbs could reseed themselves, holy basil would.  There are dozens of plants.  Let me know if you want some for your garden. It makes a nice hot tea.

I think we have thirty tomato plants.  I haven't fertilized them with my magic compost and manure tea, like I did last year, and the plants are smaller and not as leafy as they were this time last year.  Some are already loaded down with small green tomatoes though.  If you remember the massive tangle of tomato vines and cages we had last year, you can see why we dedicated so much of the garden to tomatoes this year.  We put six feet between each plant in all directions, with the hope that we can more easily harvest the fruits without crawling through the jungle of vines.  Each plant has a ring of old hay to suppress weeds, and Brandon used the weed eater to trim the pathways between the rows. They are also protected by the garden fence, so hopefully the chickens won't be able to help themselves as easily.  If we get a good crop, I want to make some sauce, and use up some of that oregano.  

Solstice Rainbow in the Garden

Yesterday, on the longest day of the year, Brandon and I worked in the garden late into the muggy evening hours.   Dark storm clouds on the horizon gave us some warning that heavy rain was on the way.  It didn't last long, and the sun burned away the moisture quickly, making a bright rainbow across the sky.  

I ran for my phone so I could take it's picture, and walked all the way from the front yard to the garden admiring it on my way.  Can you see that clump of vegetation near the back door in the photo above?  That's the herb spiral!  It's out of control with giant sunflowers, zinnias, and wild milkweed.  There are plenty of herbs mixed in there too.  When I walk outside from the backdoor I am greeted by a wonderful sweet smell.  It's the milkweed flowers.  

The milkweed flower clusters are as big as soft balls, and make a wonderful scent.  It's a good thing I can smell them from feet away because they have so many insects crawling on the blooms that leaning in for sniff is risking a bug up the nose.  

On the other side of the door is a wild elderberry shrub with giant platter sized flower heads.  It smells nice too, even though the blooms are so heavy they have pulled the entire plant to the ground.  

 

The rainbow is starting to fade as I make my way behind the greenhouse. There's Brandon, busily weed whacking in the garden and completely oblivious to the rainbow above. 

Brandon!  Look up, there's a rainbow!  

The greenhouse, which was an oasis of warmth during the late winter and early spring, is not a very comfortable place to linger now that the summer heat has arrived and there's no more lettuce to harvest.  I routinely look in through the open sides to make sure the plants aren't dehydrating, but it had been more than several days since I ventured inside to face the heat.  Weeds have colonized the pathways, but the sunflowers, kale, brussel sprouts, volunteer tomatoes, and the nasturtium flowers must be loving the heat, because they are growing fast.    

The brussel sprouts in the greenhouse got sprayed with thuricide/Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is helping keep the caterpillars from doing too much damage.  The brussel sprouts I moved to the garden outside look terrible.  Two of them turned yellow and died, and the remaining plants are less than half the size of those in the greenhouse.  

The sunflowers are blooming!  Most of them are so tall the flowers are smooshed against the plastic on the roof. 

Some of the nasturtiums have orange flowers and some are red.  I ate one of each and they both taste super peppery.  Like eating hot wasabi!  Whew! 

Out in the garden, Brandon cut down all the weeds around the tomato plants, which have a ring of hay mulch, because it's time to add the tomato cages and stakes.  I pulled weeds by hand from around the dying brussel sprouts, and tiny lettuce plants.  I have a healthy patch of kale, some marigolds, zinnias, sunflowers, some green beans, and sprawling tangle of cucumber plants.  Despite the rabbits, I can still find the sweet potato vines, too. 

A cucumber!  I've had such terrible luck growing any kind of vine plant that I really never expected to harvest a cucumber.  The seeds for these plants come from our good neighbor.  He always gets a glut of cucumbers and shares.  He told me to save some seeds, so I let some dry out on a paper plate.  So easy.  These must be hardy plants because they got no special treatment and they are making fruit! 

Look at that.  I could make some pickles!

Vacation or Not

I got to spend last week at a stream restoration workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado.  My friend, coworker, and travel companion corrected me when I referred to this trip as our vacation.  He didn't seem to think that an intensive week of training bracketed by late nights of travel, complete with delayed flights and rental car negotiations qualified as a vacation.  

But, I didn't have to cook a meal, clean up after anyone, or feed a hungry goat for five whole days!  Sounds like a vacation to me!  We attended class each day, but still managed to fit in some local travel to explore the foot hills of the Rocky mountains.  

The class included an entire day of data collection on a restored stream that flows through a local park.  It was incredibly hot in the Colorado sun.  I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass - like the sunlight was a force field that was pushing on my skin and roasting me in my hip waders.  I was quick to volunteer to be in the creek with the equipment.  

Because we are used to a different time zone, we were up early each day and could spend a few hours exploring before class started.  We traveled up the Poudre River canyon one early morning, and watched the sunrise cast light on the mountains.  We left the class a little early on Friday so we could drive to Denver and catch our flight.  Things were delayed and we made a stop in Omaha for fuel.  I left the lights on in my car at the long term parking at the Cincinnati airport, so by the time we got a jump start and made the long drive home, it was after four in the morning.  

Back at home, Brandon started teaching a summer class at the university, harvested nearly all our hay, and stayed on top of all the farm chores while I was gone.  He was not on vacation!

The pool water has turned green, but all our critters were well fed and happy when I returned.  He said he was glad to hand the morning animal chores back to me. 

It has only been a few weeks since we had the annual firefly festival farm party.  Everyone agreed that the fireflies put on the best show this year.  It was magical.  After the sun set, the kids ran through the fields catching fireflies while the rest of us sat in chairs and watched the world come alive with flickers of light.  

For the first time, when I showed guests the greenhouse, they seemed rather impressed instead of confused by the tangle of weeds.  The lettuce we have been harvesting all spring was starting to bolt by the day of the party, but we managed to get enough tender leaves to make a big salad.  We loaded the smoker down with meats.  We may have gotten our fire a little too hot too quickly, because the meat reached the correct temperature hours before we expected it to, and it wasn't as tender as I'd hoped, but no one went hungry.  

The five chicks that hatched under the white speckled hen are thriving.  They are out of the coop now during the day, and run beneath the legs of the flock grabbing bits of chicken food.  The goats and donkeys are fat and always hungry. Max, our twenty year old cat, was buried under the apple tree while I was away.  All of our first generation pets, Attila, Max, and Puck, are under the apple tree now.  Last night we took an evening stroll with Wendigo past their small graves and Brandon started talking about getting a puppy.  Oh my!