Category: garden

Super Healthy Compost

I’ve lived with composting since childhood.  It’s hard for me to imagine a life of throwing away perfectly good compostables to be buried forever in and with plastics that will be around until the sun swallows the earth in its death throes.

Having said that, I’m supremely lazy with my compost.  I don’t break up the deposits into similarly sized pieces. I dump and dump forever, never turning it.  I plan on using the soil, but there’s always  something left to break down, and then exclaim at the amazing and unplanned tomatoes and bell peppers that grow OUT of it every year because there are so many tomato and bell pepper innards in the kitchen waste.

In some circles it could be termed more of a forgotten science project.

This spring however, in a fit of gusto, I decided to turn the pile. I know why I should do this more often—aeration, redistribution of microbes, ensuring proper moisture—but most of…

Bugs

Still Life with Grasshopper

Is it the heat?  These jumpers are everywhere right now, and they look like the desert too. Which matches perfectly with my dead brown crunchy grass.

Elusive Dragonfly

This guy flitted off so fast I could only get one shot.  Hopefully he is busy eating bloodsuckers.

Fruition

And just like that, all the digging, weeding and watering bears fruit.

Zucchini

Zucchini is a favorite of mine to grow because it is so blasted easy!  The first year I grew them, I crowded them with tomatoes, to which I gave higher priority.  Not only that, but my kitchen compost carried with it an extremely fast growing mystery squash, whose color and shape matched nothing I saw in the grocery stores, until it sat on my counter for a few months (at which point it turned yellow) and I cut into its stringy flesh to discover one of my favories—spaghetti squash!

Did any of this daunt my zucchini’s??  Definitely not. They gave me an abundance of fruit, large and small.  And I vowed thereafter to cut them as babies, because there are always so many, and the babies are delicious.

Cucumber

This year Jared took a gardening class at a greenhouse next door to his school, and brought me…

Summer Sun

In the grip of a run of stunning hot and humid days.  Even the weeds and vines are dying off.  And yet some plants are engineered to last.  Like the day lily.

When I moved to New England and into my own house, I vowed not to be a “waterer”.  Each year I look for landscaping flora that will survive on its own.  The daylily is one of the few.

Friendly Neighborhood Nessralla’s

It’s that time of year, the time to think of FLOWERS.

I know it’s twice as expensive as Lowe’s, but I have to do it.  I have to get the bulk of my impulsive yearly flower and herbs from the neighborhood nursery, in my case, Nessralla’s Farm.  It’s not fancy, and I can’t buy every last thing I ever wanted, but I’ll always remember my first forays into the greenhouses in late spring with the kids, new enough to the South Shore to never run in to someone I know—the owner gave each of the boys free gardenias 2 years in a row.  Yes, I can be bribed.

What a wonderful gig, to grow things and dole them out.

Ebb and Flow

What’s crazy about this picture…in the summer, the viney whatever they are’s will completely engulf this fence post in green strangulation.

Rain Rain Go Away

It is the grayest sort of day today, and I suppose I needed a reminder of sunny, vital fecund summer.  Okay, so this past summer was rather rainy and drab as well, but clearly there was enough there to grow things.  A lot of things.

It’s been such a period of change—house renovation, lay-offs, more house renovation, father with terminal cancer, still more house renovation—that sometimes I can’t tell if history is blurry because so much is happening, or because I’m drinking too much.

But I can say with authority this summer we had a GARDEN!  And in that garden, we watched life, and sturdy persistent seedlings, and an unexpected bumblebee hive. And it was affirming.