Rest assured that my failure to post much here recently is a lack of garden work recently.
Things I have been doing recently:
Planting second round of spinach, cilantro, mustard greens, shallots onions and leeks.
Repotting houseplants and porch plants (coffee plants and spirea).
Harvesting some of my food, most notably including my corn. I know it's early but some of the ears were getting bit of fungus at the base. They are beautiful! Pictures soon, I promise.
I went to the Oregon Nursery Association trade show, and ended up buying two amazing books, Don't Throw it, Grow it! a book on starting plants from your grocery leftovers, and Food Plants of the World: An Illustrated Guide. The latter is probably more useful, and I have definitely looked a bunch of stuff up in it already. Don't throw it is really much more exciting though. I have lychee, mango and avocado seeds planted, and pomegranite seeds saved. Next up, meyer lemon, kafir lime (because these are true-breeding varieties, not hybrids)and almond! Also next up, more windowside shelf space.

HAWK

HAWK
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

If it weren't for the chickens, I would unreservedly say I am doing something right/awesome in having a visit from this youngster, which I am pretty sure is a juvenile coopers hawk. As you can see, though, he was pretty excited by the ladies, who were pacing and bawking in hilariously useless terror (that wire under him is the coop). The chickens, which aren't full grown yet, are about twice his size. The internet says that it was once thought that coopers went after poultry a lot, and were hunted for it, but that they in fact almost never go for chickens. As far as I'm concerned he can go for all the pigeons and starlings he wants.

I didn't get a good picture of its back, but it has these great fawn-like spots.

Chances are good that I saw this kid getting conceived in a park near my house, back in April. (The best you can say about cooper's hawk sex is "grumpy ambivalence")

In other wildlife news, we seem to have a special needs possum living under our back porch. It is tiny, fearless and clumsy, and keeps getting itself cornered by our totally harmless cat, in plain sight. It is super cute. I hope it grows more so it can't fit under there anymore, but it has stayed the same size for at least a month. I'm sure I will find eviscerated by one of the more hunter-like neighborhood cats one of these days.

On balance, I am happy that our yard is a good wildlife hangout, even if it means extra vigilance.

wonder bean in flight

aerialbean
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is my tuscan wonder bean. It has climbed up its six foot tall corn and I may or may not have helped it make the leap to the adjacent shrub. It is also trying to make its way up the peach tree on the patch's other side.

More soon on the early phases of my summer harvest! In the mean time, check out the flickr set.

Summer is doing its thing

sunpattern
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I don't have time at the moment to upload all my new garden and harvest pictures right now. Suffice it to say that that sunflower (the pattern is my doing) and a couple of others have been cleaned and the seeds are drying. Three heads came to about a quart of seeds, and I have approximately a zillion more to collect. We may try to make sunflower butter with them. We have this scheme, in the fall, to make a meal only of food grown in the garden, and if we make sunflower butter we can skim the oil and use it to make sopes or tamales. The first tomatoes are coming in. My volunteer sungolds are in fact sungolds, though slightly darker than they were. I think they may be ripening faster also. The extremely persistent but not totally delicious cherry tomatoes that are on generation 3 are both more delicious and starting to get that seamed look that heirloom tomatoes have! I will have to look up tomato genetics to get a clue about what is going on there.

I am really beginning to find the summer drought difficult. I kind of hate watering. I killed my wood fern by not watering. My sunflowers in the front bed that I haven't watered since my water barrels dried up are finally starting to parch, though they were okay through the heat wave. I will have to turn the hose on that side of the house on again. My potato boxes are also getting neglected over there. Oh well. Chris doesn't like potatoes anyway.

I finally figured out how to take close-up pictures with my crappy digital camera, so there will be many pictures soon.

first corn

first corn
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is the tiny baby corn from the precocious but ultimately stunted red corn plant which is now about a tenth the size of the others (which are probably 9 fee tall!). I probably picked it too soon (I'd meant to let them all dry on the stalk) so we'll see how well it dries. I tried a kernel. It tastes like, well, cornmeal, since it isn't sweet corn. I was expecting this to be more red, since the leafy parts of the plant have a lot of red pigment in them. There were red kernels in the mix i planted. I'll have to do more research to see if I can find anything on heirloom corn genetics.

It looks like I'm only going to get one cob per plant. I may experiment with clipping the tassel off the top of some of the plants to see if they'll put out more fruit. There is a complicated hormone related reason why that may work which I am too heat-addled to dredge up at the moment.

This is kind of a weird time in the garden. Summer squash is at eat-one-a-day levels, the basil is growing like mad, and I am kind of terrified of all the tomatoes that will be ripe soon. The spring greens are all pretty much toast, (aside from chard and kale, which are pretty much always in season). I would like to plant some more greens, maybe have another go with the cumin, and I have onion starts to plant, but I'm not sure I could keep any young plants alive right now. All I can really do is water.

Chickpeas

chickpea detail
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

This is my most successful food plant experiment. The sprouting chickpeas I got at the co-op sprouted nicely. They took a while to get going once I transplanted them, but took off. Now they are two feet tall, with a pod every couple of inches. I think they are just about done for the year. I'm going to let them die and plant another batch, since it only took half a season for them to get this far. The fresh pods are very sweet, like very sweet peas (which, technically, chickpeas are). They only have one or two peas to a pod. The most interesting thing about the plant is a sticky substance extruded from the trichomes. I haven't yet figured out what it is for. Bug protection? Heat dissipation? They don't seem to particularly require a lot of water, which the second theory would suppose.
I'm excited to see how much my five or six plants yield.

ginger

ginger
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

Tiny ginger sprouts! It doesn't look like much, but its grown hugely in the last couple of days. I got directions for growing ginger here. This batch of my Exotic Herbs Experiment is proceeding. I lost all my tiny cumin starts to water-neglect and cats crapping in the bed. Better babysitting next time. The sesame is alive but not doing too much.

riot

riot
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I haven't really been paying adequate attention to the garden, and really haven't since the end of June or so. Its at the phase where I can mostly leave it alone and let it grow. I've been watering the stuff that is least well-grown, mostly my peppers and the watermelon. It's been raining enough that I can mostly get away with it. Here's my corn patch. You can see the bean climbing in the foreground, and the squash blossom deep in the middle. The red corn in the foreground is the same early maturer I've posted pics of before. Now the squashes are as tall as it, and the tallest corn are a good seven or eight feet--higher than I can reach at the tip of the tassel.

Now, I have been told that you shouldn't start corn indoors, because it doesn't like being transplanted. Or maybe it's just traditional to plant them out because it's less labor. Anyway, it is epically bigger and more mature than any other corn in the neighborhood, which is mostly knee high right now. Either my yard is somehow magically condusive to corn like it seems to be to tomato volunteers, or starting it on April 1 indoors is truly the way to go. Makes me wish I had more of it.

cucumber

cucumber
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

The summer crops are really starting to get going! Since I don't have a lot of time at the moment, go look at my flickr account to see a few more pictures of my 3 sisters plantings. The corn is totally huge and gorgeous! I can't wait for the squash to get going, either.

Gather Light

gather light
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I've been thinking about the ethics of being a consumer of energy, in the ecological sense. I feel like we are, or at least I was, taught that there is a hierarchy of life. Animals are the 'most evolved', whatever that means, and then there are plants, and fungus, and then there are all those microscopic swimmy things (many of which are actually animals and plants, or plants and fungus, or some combination of the two), but . Despite the best efforts of biology professors to quash this notion (as you can see if you take a look at wikipedia's history of the phylogenetic tree ) it still gets betrayed by phrases like "top carnivore" (referring to those animals that eat everything else). And obviously, we are the top top carnivore. Not only can we kill off lots of top carnivores, but we can even afford not to eat them.
The concept of trophic levels*", the way that ecologists look at energy dynamics in an ecosystem, is more helpful. Trophic levels describe the energy efficiency of an organism in relation to available energy (unless you are a deep-sea vent microbe, this is defined as the amount of solar energy hitting the earth). Every step in the food chain is about 10% efficient.
Now, most of us know that more or less all of the Earth's available energy is made available by plants. Ecologists talk about Foundation Species, usually some ecosystem-altering dominant tree, kelp, etc. It now seems astonishing to me that I've never really seen anyone, even the most edgy scifi writer, describe Earth as being essentially a plants' world. Le Guin edges towards it at times, especially in The Word for World is Forest, a novel about a forest culture who's consiousness is linked somehow to the forest?(which I now think I should go re-read) and "Vaster than Empires," a short story about a planet with a single plant-based consiousness, (and whose title is taken from an excellent line in an obnoxious poem, "To His Coy Mistress": "our vegetable love would grow / vaster than empires, and more slow." )

Of course, there are always the folks who came up with the World Tree. A bit more sensible.

But where does that leave us, as far as organizing idea systems go? I could talk about entropy, which is probably pointless and which I will probably get wrong anyway, and about deforestation and civilization, fossil fuels and global warming, and all the other ideas about ethics and energy and loss which are spinning in my head. Its not that I want to idealize plants, either. Every plant out there is pretty much constantly engaged in all out chemical warfare with all of its neighbors.
I wish I could photosynthesize. Maybe some day I'll be able to approximate it with solar panels. But there is still a lot we can learn from plants. Persistence. Dormancy. Exuberant growth. I like to think of us as being like invasive species like ivy and blackberry, doing our best to make the world uniform and predictable, and maybe we can learn from that in a different way, as we try to eradicate it. Endless variety--every flower more absurd and beautiful than the last.
The thing I keep coming back to, though, is that if there is a good way to model your life, it is to try to be like a tree. To subtly alter your environment, to create shade, sugar, shelter. To transform the energy that comes your way not just for your own use, but in a way that can benefit the rest of the world.

*Wikipedia totally failed me on the trophic level thing. Their entry was AWFUL. One of these days I need to get a wikipedia account...

Solstice

beansetc
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

Another rainy/sunny, hot and cold day, and another dark photograph. It is just only getting to be really dark now, at 9:30. I like this photo because there are five edible plants in it, more or less harmoniously cohabitating. Can you find them? The feature plant is a purple bush bean, which I eat fresh or steamed. Some time I'll try to figure out what makes it purple--something deliciously healthy for you, I'm sure.
I like to take a little time on the solar holidays to think about the turning of the seasons, time's passage and various other organizing metaphors of life. I have felt somewhat less need to go out of my way to celebrate these holidays, giving how much of my life I've been spending outside for the last few years, and I didn't manage to do much today either.

I seem to think about writing in this thing primarily on gross rainy days. Therefore I won't foist another set of gray pictures on you. Instead, I will talk about something I don't have a good enough camera to capture anyway; pests.

Slugs: The slug rings seem to work okay on the things I've put them on, which is a very small portion. They love strawberries. Heat spells seem to be the best thing for keeping slug populations down. Its turned rainy here again, of course, and they are a problem again. To my disappointment, the chickens don't seem to find them delicious. Every time I try to feed them one, they peck at them and then go around wiping their beaks on things in a grossed-out way.

Aphids: Not a huge problem yet. There was a pretty bad case on one of my kales, which I cut back and gave to the chickens. This was a hit. I was given the advice last year that aphids are a good sign that a plant is getting past its prime and its time to pull it out. I have changed this tactic slightly with kale and have started cutting it back severely. Kale is pretty tough and will come back from the stem several times in a year. I gave the buggy leaves to the chickens, which was a hit once they figured it out.

Ants: This one is kind of weird. It is normal to get aphids 'ranched' by ants, who move them around and feed on their sugary poop. However this year they have cut the middleman and have been attacking my potatoes and one of my sunflowers, sucking the sap out like little six-legged vampires. I haven't been able to find a reference for this happening online. I think it is the same species of ant that farms aphids and gets into houses. And holy crap, are there a lot of them this year. There is at least one nest in almost every garden bed, though only the potatoes in the one bed are getting hit. I'm not trying to do anything about it on the theory that a) these particular potatoes are volunteers from ones I planted two or three years ago, and b)I would much rather let them eat things I don't care for much than get into my other food, or, gods forfend, into the house.

Caterpillars: I think these are kind of cute, and there aren't enough of them to be a serious problem. Anyway, the chickens like them. I gave Medulla one yesterday, and they all played a prolonged game of Chicken Tag, over under and through every obstacle in the coop. It was hilarious.

In other entomological news, our compost bins are supporting several sparrow families this year. There are always at least three sparrows hanging out in or off the sides of the compost cage, mining grubs.

cobra lily

cobra lily
Originally uploaded by inverted reptile

I have a little bit of an obsession with carnivorous plants. This guy is a hybrid cobra lily. When I got it, I understand as much about hybrids or know that there's an Oregon native, or I would have gotten the wild type, which also look awesome. But I like the red frills on this guy.

Carnivory has evolved many times in plants, all in plants that grow in very nutrient-poor soil, usually highly acidic bogs. They get their energy from photosynthesis but their nitrogen etc. from bugs, or frogs, or whatever they can catch.

Cobra lilies, unlike many carnivorous plants, don't have their own enzymes to dissolve critters, and instead rely on mutualisms with microbes to break down their food.

This guy has grown a TON already this year.

I have shamefully neglected this blog--but fortunately not my garden! The last couple of months have been both full and stressful, with fun things, family emergencies, new housemates and schoolwork. I have therefore been indulging in "horticulture therapy," which is apparently a Thing, according to some guy in my Urban Planning course. In the oh-god-almost-2-months since I last posted all the green things have shot up. In the first image all that is in that squiggly bed is kale, shallots and strawberries. In the second image, which I took this morning, the kale is about a foot and a half tall, and has already been heavily picked. Also in this bed, from left to right, are lettuce and chives, purple bush beans, sunflowers, spinach, and strawberries along the back wall, then mustard greens and pinto beans, and basil, chard, cucumber and chamomile on the in the curved bit. Yes we still have a Steve Novick sign in the yard.

Also noteworthy--I dragged the bricks over from the free pile Kailash Ecovillage. Last year they changed the sign from "The Cabana" and brought in a whole load of wood chips that sat there for months, which we thought was hilarious. Eventually they got a pretty good garden going, though. I have to approve even though I suspect it is at least 70% greenwashing.

The bush beans and garbanzos are starting to flower now. My summer beans, the Tuscan Wonders, are all sprouted next to many of my corn plants and sunflowers. They have proven their wonderfulness yet again by resprouting after slugs had eaten every bit of cotyledon and leaf off of two of them. These are two of the sunflowers/beans growing in my front bed. Also in this picture is chard, volunteer potatoes that I thought I'd pulled out all of two years ago, an empty beer trap for slugs (which seem to have been pretty well foiled by the dry hot weather we've been having here) and a ton of detritus from the flowering and kind of sick rhododendron above this bed. Last year I had a bunch of crookneck squash in this bed, which did okay for the early part of the summer, and then got a really awful case of the white powder fungus, about a month earlier than anything else did. We're pretty sure the rhodie harbors it.

This year I planted all my squash in Three Friends bed, with my corn and the surviving Tuscan Wonder Beans. The bean associated with this corn never made it out of the ground--its cotyledons got eaten before the first true leaves even came out. The corn seed these came from were mixed red, yellow and blue, and I had thought that they all came from the same plant. I wonder, though, since the corn plants themselves are distinctly different colors. This red one is the most precocious, already having a tassel and baby corns sprouting on the sides. In the background you can see some of my squash. My housemate gave me some copper flashing she had around, and I made them into rings to repel slugs. They seem to have worked so far, assuming that the slugs have been out and about much since I put them in. I don't remember where I heard that copper is a good barrier, or if the explanation, that copper reacts with the mucus layer, causing an electric charge is accurate. Next year I'll try it earlier in the spring and see how it does then.


I planted my artichokes three years ago. They were kind of scrawny and pathetic the first year, and pretty respectable last year. This year they are ginormous and gorgeous. They also produced about eight buds overnight. They almost didn't make it through the winter, but an aggressive mulch of rat bedding insulated them enough to make it. On the left edge of the image is the huge lavender bush, which attracts an unbelievable number of honey- and bumblebees.


And, lastly, our awesome new urban farming acquisition! We got three baby chickens last Monday. Left to right: Philomena Peepington, a Gold Sex-link, Sativa, an Ameraucana, and Medulla, an Australorp.
They are about five weeks old now. It will be a while before they lay, but in the mean time the are super cut and hilarious to watch. They have also gotten significantly bigger in the last week.
I also made them a rockin' house out of an old cupboard we found in the basement, some extra plywood, hinges I stole from a kitchen demo project a while ago, and a piece of very heavy black plastic that may very well have just blown into our yard. It worked out pretty well, but the chickies haven't quite figured out what to do with it, besides sit under it, and chase each other through the cinderblocks that are holding it up. Someday they will get big and then one of them will get stuck.

Okay, that was an epically long post. I'm going to do my level best to post in here more often, and with better pictures. Once again the day I pick to take all these photos is very overcast. I'll be taking a botanical illustration course this summer, so that should result in lots of pictures. Other things post soon: a catalog of my carnivorous plant collection, and one of my dozens of volunteer tomato plants, a rundown of the rad job I almost certainly didn't get but is still cool enough to post about, adventures in gardening for other people.

I'm really pleased with how my garden is shaping up. Only one total loss so far--my chinese cabbage bolted IMMEDIATELY after I put it in the ground. My cumin isn't doing so hot either, but I just put the two surviving sprouts in the ground, and hopefully they will get going. We're only really eating off the , cilantro, and last years onions so far, but the first few strawberries are ripe, the lettuce is about big enough for real salads, the peas are coming in, the basil is maybe a couple of weeks out from being edible-sized. It's exciting! and delicious!

Green

My life has been busy and complicated recently, but the plants grow regardless. My perennials are starting to get new leaves--the artichokes are a foot tall, the mint family herbs (mint, rosemary, oregano, lavender, thyme and sage) have new buds, my miracle overwintering cilantro is starting to grow again. Unfortunately, the grass and weeds are growing too. Fruit trees are blooming. I spent a good bit of last weekend weeding out the front bed. Lots of nightshade, feral spurge (which is a plant now hate irrationally) along with that little wild mustard that grows everywhere in my yard.

My starts are doing very well. Everything is up--even the peppers and eggplant have a few sprouts up now. The greens are looking particularly luxurious. These are joi choi and spinach. I should really turn them--the plants farther from the window are much smaller.

Behind them are my bush beans--painted beans, from the permaculture teacher, and purple green beans. My housemate grew the purple beans last year and they produced steadily until well into October. This is a good picture of their cotyledons. You can really see the shape of the bean halves in these.

I learned recently that a difference between peas and beans is that pea cotyledons stay underground. My garbanzos--a kind of pea-- have gotten huge, much bigger than any of my other starts. I can see the cotyledons just at the surface of the soil. I'm really impressed with these little plants. It hasn't been very warm out, and the beans aren't nearly so developed. Is it because I sprouted them before I planted them? I'm excited to see what they are like and how big they get, and how much they produce.

As you can see from these images, it has been very gray and wet here. Maybe some day I'll be able to take decent pictures.

While my plants grow in the protection of the sun porch, I've been working the beds in the back yard. I've been doing keyhole beds, to maximize space and bed access, and because they are less boring. I got kale starts a few weeks ago, and on the first day of spring I prepared this bed and planted kale and shallots. I put cardboard down on the beds that haven't been planted yet.

Equinox

Happy first day of spring, everyone. Its drizzling here, which isn't as spectacular spring weather as we'd been getting last weekend--torrential rain and hail mixed with dazzling sunbreaks. I hear its snowing in New York, though. I plan to spend the day turning compost, and depending on how wet it is, doing a bit more groundbreaking, or perhaps starting my potato boxes.
Later today I'll post some photos of my starts, and my newly dug keyhole garden bed. My starts are doing wonderfully; I've got garbanzos, cucumbers, sunflowers, cilantro, basil, corn, bush beans, salad mix, several kinds of cabbage, chard and spinach up. No stirrings from the squash, or watermelon, or any of the nightshades.
Before I get going on that stuff though, I would like to share another bit of symbolic/political garden news. The Obamas are starting a kitchen garden. This is part of Michelle Obama's health campaign, though I'm sure someone is going to spin the economic advantages too--I haven't seen an overt crack about that awful "arugula" campaign line, but if they are growing it on their front lawn along with their other 55 fruits and veggies, at a materials cost of about $200, nobody can complain. But health is certainly the stated aim.

“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”

Here's a map of their garden. It has some interesting features--check out the border plantings, for instance. Marigolds, nasturtiums and zinnias are frequently used in organic gardening to draw slugs away from your more valuable veggies. I personally have never tried this; won't it just mean that you'll have a bigger and healthier slug population? My strategy this year is going to be copper borders and early-and-often beer traps. Maybe I'll plant some nasties with beer moats for additional incentive?

Also note the mixed peas and alliums on the right side of the plot, and the lettuce with radishes. Those are good example of companion planting, which I am going to try this year pretty intensively. Corn, beans and squash, tomatoes and basil, strawberries and bush beans. Many people have many opinions on what grows well together. Most of those examples are recommended by How to Grow More Vegetables, but the first is an ancient Iroqois method. The Three Friends, or Three Sisters method, has a lot of interesting things to recommend it, and really makes you think about a lot of important aspects of sustainable agriculture.
First, there are some practical, physical considerations. Pole beans need something to climb on, corn is tall, squash is a groundcover that is excellent at keeping the ground moist in the summer, with is huge leaves. The plants use different spaces within the same plot of land and don't compete with each other (as long as you wait for the corn to get big enough that the beans wont pull it over). That's good for space conservation. Then there is plant nutrition. Corn is an extremely heavy nitrogen user, and nitrogen is kind of hard to come by in the soil. But! we have just planted nitrogen fixing beans. Squash blossoms are especially exciting to pollinators, so they will all set lots of seed. But perhaps the most interesting element of this system to me is that between them, corn, beans and squash have complete protein, meaning that all the different amino acids that your average carnivore-descended hominid needs to get by, something that only animal products can usually manage. How did the Iroqois hit upon this
convenient triad? Did the plants just happen to have complete proteins and also work so well together? Is there something about a plant community with different amino acid complexes that grows better together? Did american veggie varieties get bred for these traits over millenia by people who were just working with varieties that kept their kids healthiest? I have no idea. But its good to remember that we essentially evolved in tandem with these important agricultural plants, and people who practice all the various forms of traditional subsistence agriculture usually have a pretty damn good idea what they're doing, because all the ones who failed to figure it out died of starvation. Its the advent of cash crops that set us on the current road of energy-and-fertilizer intensive monocultures.

Okay, enough ranting. The sun has come out, and I'm going to go outside.

Now we're talking

People who know more about these things than I do were disappointed by Obama's appointment of Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture, because of his ties to Agribusiness. You might guess that I'm not a fan of agribusiness, but I do think it probably wouldn't be a good idea to pull the rug from under them all at once. Anyway, there was a piece about him this morning on NPR which sounded very promising to me. He wants to "remake American Agriculture," outlined a very broad plan to begin our changes in energy use, environmental impact, and reduce the deficit. Among other things, he wants to largely replace farm subsidies with cap and trade. Sweet!

But really, the thing that excited me most was the news that he took a jackhammer to his building's driveway, so the office can put a garden there this summer.

"Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack Operates a Jackhammer Breaking Ground for the People's Garden Project on the Bicentennial of Lincoln's Birth at the Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC. The Event Took Place 12 Feb 2009."

as wild as

It is March and snowing today. What a weird winter.

In the interest of doing something enjoyable today (I've been at school since 9 am and will be here til 8:30), here is the post I've been meaning to write about this blog title. "We once did grow wild as apples" is a quote from the Veda Hille song, appropriately enough called "Plants."
Veda Hille is not for everyone, but for those among us with a hippy dippy animist bent, she's amazing. Much of her music describes the way I feel about my relationship to nature. My very favorite song of all time is "Greenery." I've never been able to find the lyrics to this on line, so here is the chorus from memory

Woods you are very sly
reveal yourselves to us
sway the rythm of spaces
woods you are very sly

for all that you stand so firmly rooted
there are comings and goings
there is sunlight and shadows

The more I learn about plants and their constant, silent activities, their warfare, making and breaking of alliances, their precarious, dynamic balance, the more insightful that seems.

"Plants" is a song about our relationship with poisonous/medicinal plants and domestication. The line "we once did grow wild as apples" didn't make any sense to me in this context until I learned from Michael Pollan's excellent Botany of Desire. Pollan spends a chapter discussing the apple's history and it's essentially wild nature.

Apples come from Central Asia, like many of our most common food plants. In Armenia there are huge forests full of apple trees, as big as oaks, or shrublike, with fruit as sour and small as olives or huge and soft and red, or anything in between. The tasty ones were propagated by travelers who took the sweetest apples. Apples are heterozygotes, and sweetness must be recessive because they pretty much always cross back to the crabapple--breeding the sweet apples we eat today was the result of thousands of cider-apple orchards and probably yet more thousands of hours of labwork. Since cider has gone out of fashion, the genetic stock of the domesticated apple has become dangerously homogeneous, requiring ever more chemical assistance as its predators evolve but we hold it in stasis by our need for the perfect apple.

I won't push the analogy to far, but Hille and Pollan make me think about our relationship to plants, especially as food and medicine, and the way we shape them, illustrates how we have been shaping ourselves.

Outside, the sun has come out, and I am watching a man walk slowly around the park, touching every tree, grinning. He might be crazy, but I think it's more likely that he is some kind of hippy dippy animist.

Starts

These are my flats of starts for this year. They are sitting in my south-facing sun porch. It would be better if I had a place to put them inside, but we don't have many sunny windows in this house, and all of them are taken up by my absurd number of house plants.


Nothing has sprouted yet, except the garbanzo beans that I put in a little water a few days ago.
They are beans from the local co-op, and about 3/4 of them sprouted. I planted about a dozen. I also tried to sprout black beans from another grocery, which just swelled up and started smelling funky. I bet most beans from co-ops will have a least some level of germination. It's just as well, because a little internet research told me that I almost certainly can't grow black beans in the PNW. Garbanzos will be a stretch, but I think it can be done. The guide to shell beans I found on Mother Earth News seems incredibly comprehensive.

I'm excited that my garbanzos sprouted, though! Tomorrow I will go to the co-op and get more varieties to try. For way cheap, compared to buying seed packets. Even hippie beans are less than $2 a pound, and seed packs with twenty or thirty beans are at least a dollar and a half.

The first day

In the last few days, I've run around all over the place to find seeds I want to try, getting some new compost, and going through left-over seeds from last year. This morning, after waking up restless and early, I finally got my hands in the dirt. I mixed some potting soil, compost and water, sorted out my seeds, made labels out of old chopsticks and masking tape, and filled three flats with seeds.

This garden is not going to be a work of art. This is a rental propert, I will probably not be living here for more than another year or two. Over the last couple of years we've reclaimed more and more of it from lawn and weeds, but they keep creeping back over the property line. This garden is more experimental in nature, an education in what I can grow, how, where, how cheaply. I'm in many cases riffing off of How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons, and getting advice from every other source I can mine. I made a spreadsheet today, to keep track of my varieties and their productivity. I cannot express how unlike me this is.

Last year I went to a lady's permaculture farm, and she gave us all some of her seeds. Multicolored corn, painted beans, and what I have started calling the Tuscan Wonder Bean. I planted three beans last August, to propigate seeds. They took about three days to sprout and were still making more beans in late October. I have since given some of them away, and one girl grew them at her apartment's one window, in the winter--she's gotten beans too. These are the spiritual core of my garden.

Along with ordinary garden beds, I'm going to be experimenting with community planting, growing potatoes in bags, planting a bean curtain to shade the outside of my bedroom, growing ginger indoors. I have grand plans.

I'm starting this blog for a few reasons. I want to keep myself accountable to recording my progress. I hope I can provide a bit of education or vicarious pleasure for those of you who can't or haven't started serious gardens. There will be pictures very soon, and perhaps later there will be sketches or paintings. Along with the progress of the garden, be assured that later in the season there will be recipes and pictures of food, and probably pictures and information from other community and conservation projects I am involved in.

Happy spring,

Acer