finally Clear skys a ramble on gardening

  It's hard for me to believe, that i still have those cheap clogs and that brand new shovel is now well worn, decades have passed.  My then garden is now a lawn and yes, the grass does still grows faster over that 35'by90' patch of well nourished  ground.   Composting is a way of life for me.  every potato skin, every apple core...every eggshell... are taken to the garden and  dung into shallow trenches, Grass clipping and leaves go into another pile which is for  flowers etc and gets to  to steep and brew for a much longer time, supposedly this takes care of any weeds seeds that might be in it, could be true!

I do spend a lot of time in my garden, and  sometimes i sing to my plants and sometimes i just look at them with wonder.  Not because i think that they understand me, or are soothed by my voice, but because they like the CO2 i breath on them.  after about a week of being in the garden the tomatoes are starting to turn a rich green.  I usually also grow some cukes, may-be a couple zucchini plants, potatoes, gourds,  and the seeds this were saved from particularly nice pumpkins, others  are from seed packets that were to be tossed out because  they were thought to be too old to sprout.....and so forth, well they are breaking thru the happy earth in my garden, there are also a small heap of potato plants the grew from last winters parings?!?!!!!  Not a great many but enough of them to have some truly fresh summer potatoes. 

 Ummm sorry i do get carried away with admiration, even a touch of wonder when i talk about my garden.

 

 This year was gripped by a particularly long and bitter winter, much like the winters i remember form grade school days. And like then i thought spring would never arrive, then i thought it was merely teasing us.   my sprouting asparagus, were frozen several times.  I only picked a few, like about 7 to enjoy, didn't want to weaken the plants.

The brief  a couple of days of tending the stoker and a snow shower in late May followed by a string of frosts and freezes each night was a a real puzzler.  Suddenly it was summer, had to get the tomatoes planted....YAH!  And to rained for 8 straight days! the ground that looked like cement dried for a couple days making it easy to till and unlikely to be huge solid  tiller tine  breaking clumps.

So far this year I have found no lost buttons, or marbles, only an almost intact cup handle, but the year is still young. 

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Ramblin' and grumblin' about how gardening is empowering and humbling!

 Gardening not only feeds the body it feeds the soul, it also humbles both the body and the soul.  Anyway that is how it appears to me.  There is always the B&B rights, which stand for Bragging and Bitching, both of which I feel are a serious part of gardening. Whenever I find myself at a get together with a bunch of  backyard "farmers"  I should point out that i find both forms of expression are sometimes difficult to tell apart.

This is the view of my little  garden shortly after planting.  Picture was taken from an upstairs window.  I often find my self yelling at rabbits and sometimes my husband from this window, they both ignore me.

And so it goes, the rabbits have learned to eat not only the tomato vines, but the tomatoes.  I choose the veggies i grow by how much I enjoy them included in my meals, and how much neighborhoods critters enjoy or don't enjoy them as their meals.

sometimes I get surprised, like this year..

and this is my asparagus  bed which I made from "found lumber", and of course I put a screen on the bottom to keep the moles and voles from munching on the roots...that was my brag, now for the bitch part, I should have put the hardware cloth on the top not the bottom ...yup, shouldda done that.

 

 after over 50 years of gardening, I have learned much, some it had nothing to do with gardening and every thing to do with life.  exemplar egregious--- "Look around you, there are tiny miracles everywhere."

Leaning on one's shovel is a good time to look at the clouds, after awhile you will learn what the sky looks like before it rains, storms, or stays dry even though rain was predicted.

Learn the songs of birds, as with flowers and butterflys, etc I never seem to remember the names of said birds.

The Brag....today I saw a Monarch Butterfly, WOW!!! doesn't half describe how lucky I felt.

There are treasures in the earth,like odd rocks and fossils, bits of backyard archeology, and old sleigh bells corroded and mangled by the tiller, bits of porcelain  dolls, clay marbles, broken crockery...you get the idea.

The solitude, a peaceful feeling of being alone with your thoughts, and sometime decisions.  a time when the sounds of the world are hidden by the sounds of the spade turning over the ground first thing in the Spring.

when the time comes i will be found in my garden with my trusty yellow handed shovel, basket of veggies and a smile on my face.

The biting flies and sore muscles...we can talk about that some other time.