Winter, One Last Thyme

By early afternoon, the snows of early morning had turned to light rain. I put on my big boots and headed out to look for signs of spring. I had to look closely, but tender green shoots are pushing up out of bare earth, and from beneath the snow and ice that lingers here still. This will probably be the last time I photograph my gardens this winter. When I do my "Sunday Stroll" on Easter, it will be spring.

photos by Aisling, March 18, 2008 1) English Thyme in the icy herb garden 2) Impression Tulips in the warmest spot in the front garden 3) Crocus emerging in the butterfly garden near the heuchera (coral bells) 4) Salad Burnett 5) The Chinese Elm in the butterfly garden

The Gardener's Dreams

I've had seed catalogs stacking up on the shelf of my coffee table for months now. Finally, it is nearing mid-March and I'm ready to order seeds. So far, my order is going to be through Seed Savers, a favorite heirloom seed source that I've ordered from in the past - always with nice results.

Limerick wants to make pickles this summer, so we're ordering A&C Pickling Cucumbers. Dill self seeds here virgorously, so I haven't had to order that in years! *grin* I am planning to order the Seed Savers Lettuce Mixture which includes Amish Deer Tongue, Austrailian Yellowleaf, Bronze Arrowhead, Forellenschuss, Lollo Rossa, Pablo, Red Velvet and Reine des Glace. It sounds delicious and colorful. I can hardly wait for a summer salad!

I am going to try growing soybeans as an experiment. They are grown commercially in my state, so I am imagine they will grow well here. The variety I'm going to try is called "Envy." This is the year I'm going to try growing Potimarron, an aromatic chestnut-like winter squash from France. It has intrigued me for several years, but I always turn it down in favor of the tried and true. And, I'm going to grow a bit of the herb Stevia here to add to some herbal tissanes. It is nice to have natural sweetness, so that my children aren't tempted to add a lot of processed sugar!

This photo taken in the early hours of the morning shows part of the garden area as it appears at this time of year. This part of the yard will be verdant and lush by mid-summer, filled with beds of herbs and vegetables, fruit trees and berry bushes, roses amid the tea garden, and hollyhocks by the playhouse. In these days of middle-March, the garden sleeps, but the gardener's dreams are green and growing.

photos by Aisling, March 2008 1) seed catalogs 2) dill seed head 3) overlooking the vegetable garden area

A Little Note about Nothing Much...

This morning everything is dripping from night rain, but the sun is shining through the clouds over the eastern hills. We are expecting fair weather for the weekend, though seasonally cool, so my "to do" list grows longer: roll up and bring in the garden hose, clip back some plants that are "done" for the year, cut back dead blooms on the mums, and bring in the rag rug from the front deck. As I wrote this post, the softest rain began to fall, so I ran outside and took a couple of photos. The photo below is of one end of a rainbow across the western sky.

I've included a photos of sunflowers and yellow-orange mums taken this morning. You can see those flowers looking very different, in this post a year ago today.

photos by Aisling, October 12, 2007

Replenishment...

On Monday, a sultry breeze greeted me as I took my morning walk through the gardens. The wind grew stronger as the day went on, bringing with it across the lake waves and waves of heat and a strange sense of foreboding. A storm was churning far away in the west, but we could feel it moving toward us all day long.

The kids and I went to a local nursery to see if the "bargain bin" had been set up for the year yet. It had not, but there were vegetable plants available at a reduced price. We selected mostly herbs and a pepper plant that already had baby banana peppers appearing and then headed home. I called the nursery to let them know that the garden bench in the pavillion by the shrubs and trees no longer had a price (as evidenced by the yellow tag in Tanka's hand) and that the lovely bronze fennel was infested with aphids (which they might want to tend to before selling any more plants.) While I was on the phone, the power went out, and the line went dead.

I plugged in the "emergency phone" which does not require electricity to call the nursery back, so that I could finish my sentence. Then, I called the power company to report the outage. It was about 3:00 in the afternoon. They estimated that the power would be back up and running by 9 o'clock at night. I was happy to go into "power out" mode, which for me means reading out loud as a family. Unfortunately, my "sales pitch" for Wind in the Willows did not capture the boy's attention. I was astonished and launched into the first chapter with great enthusiasm (it is a read-aloud favorite of mine) but still, they would not listen. Sighing, I went off to read a book on my own.

We ran an errand late in the afternoon, to make sure we would have a dinner that was easy to prepare without electricity. Limerick got home and set up the generator, so the guys had their dinner heated in the microwave. Hiaku and I had mini whole-wheat pita's stuffed with hummus and some fresh ingredients from the herb garden (chives, oregano, cucumber-flavored salad burnett.) We moved the generator around to take care of various tasks and then plugged the large upright freezer in the basement into it, to keep the contents frozen.

I finally talked some family members into a read-aloud, but had to select a book that would appeal to all. I read the first chapter of My Brother, My Sister, and I, by Yoko Kawashima, an autobiographical account set in post World War II Japan. As we concluded the chapter, several household items blipped and chirped, the electronic announcement that power had been restored forty-five minutes ahead of "schedule."

Through this all, the wind blew wildly, but the rain never came. Late in the evening, with sand and dust from the road blowing in my eyes, I watered my recently planted blueberry bushes. I slept soundly all night, never waking, which is unusual for me. When I woke before 6 A.M., I saw a world washed clean of dust and grime, through droplets trickling down the window glass. The much needed rain had fallen heavily as we slept and today the sun is shining on wet green fields, 20 degrees cooler than they were yesterday, and replenished by the nourishing rain.

photo by Aisling, June 19, 2007, Blanket flower drenched with rain

A Day in the Country...

Sometimes the slow, quiet pace that one expects from living in the country gets lost in the hurry of daily life. During the school year, there are so many things to hurry to and from, that my morning and evening walk through my gardens and the view from my windows, might be the only thing "country" about my day. For now, the kids are not in school nor any extra-cirricular activities and, finally, yesterday was a day with nothing on the calendar.

Initially, I thought the day would hold only housework and homework (for the two summer courses that start this week) but late in the morning my twelve blueberry bushes arrived by U.S. Mail. I diligently finished the chapter I was reading in my Critical Thinking text, and then I headed outdoors to plant. The sky was clear, the air hot, whatever the calendar says, summer has definitely arrived.

After planting the blueberries and watering them well, I decided that the weather was too gorgeous to spend the day indoors. The little guys joined me outside, supposedly helping me water, although it looked as if they were making mud rivers in the new garden plot. I dug out an entire bed near the playhouse which had become a tangle of weeds and old-fashioned garden flowers. When I had pulled all the weeds and grasses and turned the soil over a few times, I replanted the hollyhocks, tall geranium, flax, poppies and a few wild asters. It was a hot day for transplanting, but this bed is on the shady side of the playhouse and I watered generously when the planting was done.

I ended up spending most of the day outside tending to various gardening tasks. Late in the evening, our neighbor headed down the steep hill that seperates his home from ours on his old red tractor. He mowed the wedge of field that is adjacent to our property, removing the "scrub trees" that have grown there in the years since the farm's last dairy cattle were sold. We miss the cows grazing in the field, but we are looking forward to the sunflowers which are soon to take their place! Sunflowers are grown in profusion in this region. There is something so beautiful about an entire field of one flowering crop (think of fields of lavender growing in France) and large plots of sunflowers are one of my favorite things to see. Amazingly, I will soon see that charming sight from my own window!

photos by Aisling, 1) the Sunflower Lady who grew in my garden in 2005 2) a sunflower in Haiku's cutting garden in 2006

The Rose Moon...

Heavy clouds obscured another month's full moon on Friday. This moon, according to my favorite source, is the Rose Moon. The roses in Haiku's garden (she is the rose gardener in the family) are in bud and will certainly begin to bloom during the month of June, so this moon name seems appropriate. Since the roses are not yet blooming, the photos today are from some of the other blossoms in my various gardens after last night's much-needed rain.

photo 1) Scarlett O'Hara in the front garden... again! 2) Wild Jasmine Iris in Mariah's Garden

3) River Hawk Iris in the butterfly garden 4) Blue Flax in Haiku's Rose and Herb Garden

Of Wild Geese and Snowy Skies..

The photo above is from the butterfly garden last April 6th.

And this photo is from the same garden yesterday.

A few days ago, April's full moon rose as round and bright as always, but I could not see it through the banks of heavy cloud that have filled our skies for most of April thus far. My favorite source for moon names, from Sharon Lovejoy's book Hollyhock Days, calls April's moon The Wild Goose Moon. This seems appropriate to me, for we have been seeing wild geese these past few weeks. They fly overhead, proclaiming their arrival in noisy, gladsome chorus. They land in the fields along with pairs of Sandhill cranes, providing an entertaining focal point as we peer through our windows in the late afternoon hours. I have not seen them in the last four days of blizzard-winds and heavy snowfall.

The red-breasted robins also returned to our northern climes a couple of weeks past. Since the blizzard arrived, the robins have been congregating near the edges of the paved back roads and highways. The snow melts faster on those dark road surfaces. Perhaps the robins are seeking heat or hoping for a morsel of food, which the frozen snow-covered ground cannot provide. I have never seen this behavior by robins... the congregating or the lingering at the roadsides. We will be happy when the snow melts and Mr. Wiggles (our name for the first robin to visit our property each year) and his friends can seek their worms amid the greening grass and flowers in our fields.

After the rain...

This morning I took a walk in the garden, under cloudy skies. Nothing was blooming, but I saw a pansy with a soft roll of purple, almost ready to open. I saw the swollen golden buds of crocus and a dark purple iris still encased in it's celadon sheath. As I walked, fat drops of rain fell across the garden slates.

A steady rain fell softly but insistently for quite some time, urging the on-again/off-again creek to flow. After dinner, I took a pair of scissors and headed to the garden with the intent to cut away some of the dry brown evidence of winter. In the garden, I found the first blooms of spring: two crocus, a pansy and a tiny iris. Each had unfurled in the warmth after the rain.

The boys have been playing amid the cattails all afternoon, while down by the lake the seagulls are screaming in wild joy over the arrival of spring. They are not musical at all, but they are loud and exuberant and they have a really good point: "Hurrah! Hurrah! It's Spring!"

photo 1 by Aisling, photos 2 and 3 by Haiku, March 2007

The Allure of a Cottage...

From across the sea, a land I have never visited beckons to me. Why have I always dreamed of England as if it were a place of myths and enchantment? Perhaps because, to me, it is. The stories of King Arthur that I devoured as a child are rooted there. The windswept moors of the Brontes are there. The manor houses peopled by Jane Austen's unforgettable characters are there. And always, indisputably romanticized in my mind, tiny cottages with lovely gardens are strewn across the countryside, awaiting my arrival for a long, lazy fortnight. Nevermind that no-one does anything by the "fortnight" in my real world. Never mind that I have no imminent plans to travel to Great Britain. A cottage awaits me. Of that I am sure.

Have I been making scones more frequently of late because the Anglo-mood is upon me once again? Or have I induced the interest in All-Things-English by consuming so much tea and so many scones? The latest batch, laced with apples and cinnamon, was consumed just before I piled my bedside table with a few modern novels set in an English cottage. The two I intend to read first are Thornyhold and Rose Cottage by Mary Stewart. These are old favorites of mine, and I am looking forward to visiting old friends as I read them again!

This afternoon, I watched Emma Thompson's movie version of Sense and Sensibility as I did my ironing. I've seen it many times, but still cried my way through a favorite emotional scene. I'll pull out a few more Jane Austen adaptations as the month goes on. I have to admit, February and March are the months I am most ready to head for "anywhere but here." By this time, late in winter, I am ready to fly thousands of miles to find spring. I'm ready pack my bags and leave a note on the counter saying, "Call me when the first flower blooms and I'll come home."

Why do I imagine that in England it is always late spring, or the soft early days of summer, and flowers always blooming? Why do I imagine that rain there does not ruin plans, but rather softens the hard edges of one's life? I know that I have "picked and chosen" the things I love about England and made of them an imaginary place in which I would love to spend idyllic days. Never mind what my intellect tells me. In my heart, I know that tucked inside a cheerful tangle of rosevines beyond a garden wall, a cottage awaits me.

photos by Aisling, 2006 and 2007

The Winter Garden...

I love this passage from one of my favorite gardening books, Hollyhock Days by Sharon Lovejoy:

"In my gardens I always try to remember the birds with saucers of water and giant bouquets of wheat, corn, millet, and sorghum. I tie them to posts and bird feeders. They look beautiful in the bare winter garden, and they are a true treat for the birds."

In upcoming months, I will be sharing some other information from this lovely book, which contains my favorite nomenclature for the full moons. I missed posting about the January Moon, which is called The Snow Moon according to the information Sharon Lovejoy shares from the September 1925 edition of "Everygirls: The Magazine of the Camp Fire Girls."

You can learn more about this book, and Sunflower Houses, and the other wonderful gardening books from this author here:

http://www.sharonlovejoy.com

A little bit of trivia: The Winter Garden is the name of a book I wrote and submitted to a publisher several years ago. Alas, my little coming of age story was (very kindly) rejected. I guess I will always feel a bit wistful when I hear the phrase "the winter garden."

photo by Aisling, January 2007 - before the snow