The Garden Cult

The "Man", on the way back from buying our bulk soils, says to me "it is like you are speaking a whole new language that I just can't wrap my head around." I was babbling to him about gardening and some of my plans to amend the soil and how as time goes by we will eventually be able to spend less money on the landscaping/gardening. I was telling him about what I read in the book Weedless Gardening by Lee Reich mixed with other organic gardening theories.

Just like I did when I was a competitive fencer and when I was studying from different mind-body movement discplines, I'm taking what I like from each master that fits with how I naturally work and forgetting the rest. Probably, why I have such a hard time saying things like blah-blah-blah changed my life which seemed to be why I eventually end up quitting things because so many people insist that if you are a true believer you can explain how this changed your life. I'm more of the opinion that it works better at least for me to find things that work with how I already think, feel, and act in a basic core sense, so that I am enhanced rather than indoctrinated. Though in the end from an outside perspective it is all about perception and relative levels.

I've read a few books now that all have different theories of gardening. I like the idea of weedless gardening because it is a no till method where you build yourself (freudian slip? I meant soil not self) from the top down. This means I can just leave all the dead weeds on the ground, stomp them down or mow them down and dump a bunch of compost and then plant a cover crop. Lee Reich explains that it is what happens in nature. I see it as gardening smarter rather than harder or going along with my natural ability to kill things and make rich soil. Making compost seems to be something I naturally excel at like making red wiggler worms. 

Many natural organic gardening books tout that nature does not like bare, naked ground so nature fills it with weeds. I'm trying not only to fix that with less work on my part, but amend the soil at the same time. I'm planning on planting buckwheat, purple hull peas, and black eyed peas to keep the compost I bought today  in place once I spread it over the dead grass and weeds caused by lack of water so that new weeds won't grow  to cover the backyard again once it cools down and we get more rain, and also so that the soil in the backyard can be ready someday for new plantings. The buckwheat, purple hull peas, and black eyed peas will all serve the double-duty of fixing nitrogen into the soil and preventing new weed growth while they are alive. Then in November I'll mow those down since they will die anyway over the winter. The dead buckwheat, purple hull peas, and black eyed peas will serve as a easy compost that feeds the soil and I will plant a kind of clover in it which will serve the same purpose, but will do better seasonally at that time of year and then I'll kill that and so on and so forth until the soil is nice and I know what I want to plant and am ready to plant.

I was explaining all this to the "Man" and how this means I won't need to buy compost anymore because not only am I making my own but I am planting these soil amendment plants which means that we will eventually be spending less money because we will have a natural cycle going. He looks at me and say "oh no, you'll find something else to spend money on in the yard because this is your project."  He goes on to say that it is like I am in a cult. I have whole new language that only other cult members truly understand, a new religion, and to join the cult I had to put in an outlay of money and each year it will be the same, but in the beginning I am told that eventually as I get more enlightened I won't have to spend as much money and that the benefits I get from being part of the cult will far outweigh any money because my family and I will lead happier and more fulfilled lives. All I can say is welcome to my cult, The Gardening Cult. 

I don't know what song it is, but this is running through my head "a new religion that will bring you to your knees, black velvet, if you please." I think that song is about being an alcoholic or a drug addict. Hrm, I hope I never have to stand in front of a crowd and say I am a recovering gardener especially since I am stunned that I am so interested in gardening in the first place and well because I don't really see myself as a gardener. I wouldn't feel right calling myself a gardener, just like I don't feel right calling myself an artist (though I occasionally try it out, calling myself an artist that is) because I doubt I will ever master either subject. 

It is not like I haven't flirted with gardening in the past. I worked a community garden plot when I was in ACEE and my friend Stephanie hired me to do an herb garden when she worked for a landscaping company because I knew about herbs through my enjoyment of cooking.  But I had no interest in gardening then and figured overall I was better at kill plants than growing them.  I was also good at cooking plants. It is only now that we own a house that I want to garden because I don't like how our yard looks and because I now have space to experiment. Then again maybe it is my in-laws fault, my father-in-law fed me broccoli from his garden in the past and for our last visit garden fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. Mmmm, super yummy.

My friend Cathryn  started a gardening group and asked a few months back if I wanted to join and we could all work in each other gardens. I turned her down because I like gardening alone with my ipod mini and only want to garden in my own yard. Plus, I don't want anyone else touching my garden except the "Man", who is by default in on the decision making but he has no interest in gardening so doesn't have that many opinions except for the occasional aesthetic one or practical one and most of the time his eyes glaze over when I talk about gardening (which is part of why I am now blogging).  I want to share my new interest, but I am still learning so I am also rather protective of it.

I guess what this all means is that if I am part of the Garden Cult, I am a cult of one with no master in my own separate branch. Don't worry, though I am interested in meeting members of other garden cults, I have no interest in recruiting you to mine. 

  

The Backyard

This first picture was taken sometime last fall. It is part of our back fence which leans a little inward. To the left and straight back is a ligustrum or what I like to call a very, very tall weed. You probably can't tell, but it is between 20 and 30 feet with the tops hanging out in o

ur electrical wires. That bare patch of ground in front of the fence is pretty much what it looks like most of the year beyond the intense 5 month green unidentifiable weed period and the mass leaf period during the fall/winter. Of course, the ligustrum is hardy and green, pretty much all the time or at least they used to be... 

The next picture  is another view of the ligustrum in the winter. The finger is pointing the odd hackberry that has managed to live alongside the line of ligustrum."The Man" and I wrestled and guided the the tops down with an extension chord, so we could cut them down bit by bit and not take down the electricity wires with it. Now you might be asking yourself, shouldn't the city take care of those since they could create some kind of hazard with the electrical wires. I did call them and they chopped a ragged line through the ligustrum, but they didn't feel the need to remove the evil weeds. The arborist we hired to trim the trees in the front was kind enough to add one of the large hackberry trees and two of the last remaining ligustrum to what we were paying done to our keep happy trees since he had some time. 

This next picture is a different angle on that back fence and was taken in June. There is a pomegranate bush on the other side of the chain-link, but notice no tall ligustrum. Those little bushes  by the fence are what has grown back since we chopped them all down. There were at least 10 different groups that were 20/30 ft tall growing along the chain link fence with the odd hackberry growing in the chain-link fence between them and a rather large hackberry at the end of the line toward the house. I feel pretty proud in seeing how much we did.

On the other side of the back privacy fence is another ligustrum that "the man" does not want me to cut down. There are two on the other side of our back fence. I keep trying to tell him  that the roots of those ligustrum are steeling nutrients from our side of the yard, dropping their evil propagating berries on my garden plans, and from experience trying to plant some new happy little trees those roots are more than 6 feet in length and near the surface. I suspect if you now know why I will be doing my food gardening in raised beds. After making a heroic effort to dig up and pull out some ligustrum roots, I decided I better start gardening smarter and figure out a way to only dig up what I feel absolutely must go, though, that doesn't mean I don't have plans to cut them all down and keep them from taking over the yard again.

In the middle of the yard is a triangle shape of sheet mulching and three plants. The alligator juniper closest to the back fence is alive and still doing well though the push of the wind makes it lean forward. The plant in the foreground is a will yaupon holly. It's dead. I planted it too late and I suspect it required more than I realized in care. You can't really see it behind the chair, but there is a single mountain laurel hanging out which I had tried planting in the front yard and transplanted just before it was about to bite the dust into the back yard. It likes the back yard. I think the front yard is too moist for it and there is too much grass.

I suspect that my overall landscaping plan of sticking to drought-tolerant, low-water needing, low maintenance, sun-loving Texas native plants or other desert region plants is the way to go for the backyard just by the survival rate of the few plants I've managed to stick in the ground. The only yearly gardening work I want to do eventually besides pruning which I like is food gardening. 

So far what I have discovered in my gardening travails...

Is that I'm pretty sure we are in the blacklands prairie section of Austin with the hard to dig in clay just under the dusty ground.  

That the getting my yard ready to garden is going to take a lot more time than my impatience may be able to withstand or that somehow I will figure out how to manage the lack of real progress in the yard. I'm hoping blogging about it will help.

Tools are expensive, but having the right tool for the job helps a lot.

Nature really doesn't like bare ground and "the man" is adverse to me spending money on covering the ground all at once.

This is the opposite side of the yard from the line of ligustrum. There is just one ligustrum left standing tall next to the shed and it is the widest of them all. I think I may wait another month or two to cut it down, though I did cut the one on the other side of the shed down. You can see the shoots growing up already. 

I think this picture was taken only a week after I cut the evil thing down. Of course there is evil and then there is really evil. That pretty green viney thing in the back left of the picture on the privacy fence that is all poison oak.

 I don't think I am allergic to poison oak or I would have been covered in rashes long before now, since there was a pile of leaves 4 inches thick in that corner in the winter that I raked up. From my research, poison oak even dried can cause a reaction 3-5 yrs after it has been killed. Don Gardener, the arborist we consulted about our trees, wasn't sure if it was poison oak because it didn't have leaves at the time he saw it but it looked pretty ominous as if it came out of a cemetery in a horror movie. I found a website that had an easy way to test it. Take a white sheet of printer paper and crush some leaves in it. Don't forget the gloves. I did this and within ten minutes the paper started turning black. The black streaks was the uroshial oil which is apparently what causes the reaction in humans. "The Man" and I joked about hiring some goats to come eat it all since animals don't tend to have problem with it. 

Oh my, it is raining outside. Well, that is the end of my blogging for the day. We are in stage 2 water restrictions, so I want to set out our spare trash cans to catch as much rain as I can. I'll finish talking about the rest of the backyard some other time, when there is no rain dancing to do.

Preparing for a Food Garden

"The Man" is going to build me a few raised beds to plant a food garden in the next couple of weeks. I was hoping to have it done by this weekend because the Natural Gardener has 20% off of soils and bulk mulches through August 31st, but we are also having a garage sale on Saturday and I feel like raised beds on top of everything else going on is asking too much of both of us, besides the fact that it is way too hot still to spend more than an hour outside at time. We are going to pick up a bunch of organic garden soil on Sunday. I will be guesstimating how much we need to buy, at least soil doesn't really go bad. I'll also be limited in how much we buy by what we can load in my Volkswagon golf and how much time we can handle bagging our own in the Natural Gardener's bulk yard.

I was originally hoping for 4 raised beds that were 24inches high, but after pricing cedar at both Lowes and Home Depot it looks like I will be getting only one 24 inch raised bed and one maybe two 12 inch high raised beds, if I am lucky. I think most people right now would be asking about the other dimensions, but I'm not sure if it matters if the beds are 4x4 or 3x5 or any other permutation since we have the room in our backyard and since it all depends on the available wood and cost. I want cedar because it has some natural properties that will make it last longer than making the beds out of other types of wood. It is going to take a minimum of $120 for supplies for one 12 inch raised bed that is 4x4. I had wanted to go with 24 inch height because that gave me the most options over the long run, but I eventually told "the man" that since it is all new anyway I can make do with whatever we can reasonably afford this first go around. I just need to keep reminding myself of that because I get carried away way too easily.

I went to the Natural Gardener's veggie gardening 101 class. I will eventually post my notes. I had no idea that not only would I be buying garden soil for my raised bed, but a regular supply of fertilizer. I could use compost or stuff from my worm bin, but then I would be having to add it almost daily versus every 5 to 6 weeks. I know myself well enough to know that daily and me just don't work well together.

My list of possible veggies to plant in mid-September so far based on what we actually eat on a weekly basis.
Cabbage
Kale
Collards
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Brussel Sprouts
Mustard Greens
Sugar Snap Peas
Spinach

Most of these are in the same family which makes me wonder how I am going to follow the recommendation of rotating veggies in the same family to a different bed each year so that my soil can stay in good shape since different families use different nutrients. I now know why I had such a problem growing anything but cilantro and snow peas in the community garden plot I managed for the Americorps program I was a part of in the late '90s. I didn't do any research back then, I just planted stuff and hoped it would grow. Who knew that gardening had so much involved in it. Okay, gardening where you actually want to harvest stuff.

Memories

The only garden I remember as a child is from the first house we lived in here in Texas. I remember the yard at that house  in many different variations. We lived in El Paso, not too far from Fort Bliss since I walked there from my house once, though it took several hours. I remember thinking it was 10 miles, but who really knows with childhood memories. We lived within sight of Trans-Mountain. I suspect it was a new suburb since the house had no landscaping when we first moved in and the small neighborhood was surround by what seemed a vast desert playground to a small child. I remember a picture of me standing in front of the house in the dusty front yard with my mom's arms around me. I was 4 or 5 yrs old at the time and mostly legs. 

I don't remember if my dad planted the big tree in the front yard or if it was already there. I just remember climbing and falling out of it, and being devastated when I found the house in adulthood and saw that the tree had been cut down. I had a major epiphany about myself that day. I prefer my fantasies to stay fantasies. Somewhere in my head, I imagined other little kids enjoying that tree. Now, I know that it's gone and I wish that I didn't. When "they" say you can't go back, boy, do they sure mean it. 

At the same time around this new house, I find that I want to have some of the crazy garden elements that my mom put together in that large corner yard in El Paso.  I remember being chased by my friends through the arbor which was right next to the house and covered in grape vines. I would reach up as I was running by, grab grapes and stuff them in my mouth. If I stopped in the arbor I could look out and see a Japanese rock garden with a red bridge going to a small green island mound with stone houses in an Asian style. I remember being both ashamed because of how different our yard was and also thrilled by how fun it was to play in. 

I thought my mom was crazy for many years at how she designed our backyard with all its disparate elements. I still think she's crazy, but crazy is no longer a bad word to me and I look back at it all with a hazy nostalgic light. We were the only kids on the block with a pool, a Japanese rock garden, a half basketball court, a arbor with grapes, and way in the back  was my mom's food garden all fenced off to keep running kids playing hide and seek out. 

Hide and seek in our yard was a neighborhood event as the sun went down and the shadows played with all the strange shapes. As I write about it, I wonder if my mom created all of that to distract herself from my dad's death in that very garden, to wipe clean the memory of him laying there dying in the grass between the newly planted trees. The grassy spot where he died was where the Japanese rock garden eventually sprung up. A garden that would take no work once made, a garden that had no living elements in it. No one else would die planting trees or taking care of grass in that section of the yard, now the only life in that part of the garden would be the kids running over it, hiding behind the mound of fake grass or under the red bridge, and posed pictures of girls in pretty holiday dresses sitting on the red bridge surrounded by a lake of white rocks trying so hard to sit straight and still for the camera.