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| The little brown bird's house and two newly-paved paths |
Chrrrr! Chrrrr! Chrrrr!
Chrrrr! CHRRRRR!
The little brown bird is totally ticked off – I ventured too
close to its birdhouse again and the language coming out of that little body is
truly peppery. Until three days ago, whenever I ventured too close to the house
perched atop a garden post, he would immediately start scolding, and I could
see his mate peek out of the birdhouse door to see what was going on, then pull
back in, out of sight. Three days ago I heard peeping coming from the house,
and both parents started flying back and forth from house to woods, bugs in
beaks. I haven’t been able to get close enough to get a good peek inside, but I
hope I’m in the garden when the babies fledge.
Facing away from the garden is another birdhouse, attached
to the garden arch, this one with a sticks-mostly nest. It’s deeper than the
little brown bird’s house, and so I don’t see anyone in it; but there’s a lot
of to-ing and fro-ing around it, and I’m pretty sure I hear a deeper voice
adding to the cusswords flying about when I try to do work at that end of the
garden.
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| The red house on the archway and more paved paths |
The garden – boy, this has been a wicked slow, frustrating
slog this spring. Between night-time temperatures too cold for tomatoes, a
virus I caught that kept me in bed
during my annual garden-planting vaction when I should have been outside
laboring in the dirt, and the lack of rain that means I’ve been poking seeds
into what appears to be dust, I’m still not entirely finished. It’s late enough
in the month that I think I’m going to have to give up on the remaining beans,
but there’s still time – barely – to plant the basil and annual flower seeds.
To add to the slowness of the process, I decided that this
year I was going to change some stuff – I waste so much time weeding every
year, trying to keep the field out of the garden and needing to spread hundreds
of dollars worth of straw mulch between the beds, something had to break. My garden is all raised beds – when we bought
this field a hundred years ago, it had been a cow pasture, and below the first
inch of topsoil was nothing but hard-pan, something that no rotor-tiller or
even tractor was able to dig up. So we built raised beds, trucked in topsoil,
and began the long and laborious job of building more soil with lots of
cardboard and newspaper mulch covered with straw, and several compost bins
always in play. Then one year some nasty grass seed in my so-called straw took
over the entire garden in one season – that grass could sprout through15 layers
of paper and cardboard, and did. I eventually gave up, after The Tall Dude, at
the time a farmer, when called in to give his opinion and I asked, “What can I
do to fix this?” answered, “You can’t. Give it up.”
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| Bird's-eye view of most of the garden |
A few years later, after enjoying thoroughly a few years of planting
a few things only in pots on the wart, I got sick of battling the chipmunks for
the tomatoes and not having enough to freeze, so I started, one bed at a time,
reclaiming the garden. Many years and many tons of newspaper and cardboard and
heat-treated straw (in theory it kills any seed that might be in it), we’ve
remastered the beds to a large extent. Some of the things I’d planted that had
disappeared – bee balm, Jerusalem artichokes, asparagus – reappeared in
unexpected, but mostly fortunate, places. Some things had disappeared
altogether – most of the asparagus. And even though the beds are mostly
re-domesticated, the paths remain a constant struggle, and if I turn my back
for a moment the grass will happily jump back into the beds.
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| Wasteland waiting to be conquered - yes, that's cardboard and newspaper! |
But this year it occurred to me that really, I know where
the paths are and I’m no longer looking to build soil between beds in order to
make them larger – at this point, the garden’s a little too big to take care of
comfortably. But it’s the smallest size that makes sense, because we fill one
of our freezers with vegetables and fruit from the garden and that’s a
necessity for our health and our finances. But, damn, all that treated straw is
expensive, and needs to be replaced every year, and all that mulching and
weeding is time expensive.
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| Bath and Ball |
So I made a trek down to the local building supply place to
see what pavers would cost me, and was shocked to discover they’re a whole lot
cheaper than the straw I’ve been using, and if I put some landscape fabric under
them (blocks weeds) I shouldn’t have to even deal with weeds between the
pavers. And, for 15 bucks they’ll
deliver a palette stacked high with pavers and bags of pebbles and bricks and
bags of natural cedar mulch with their big truck, saving me about a thousand trips
back and forth to the store, and lifting the heavy things twice more than I
absolutely have to, and I get the
entertainment of watching the amazing drivers use their on-truck crane up
close. It’s worth the $15 just to watch
them delicately lift the palette and stretch it across the lawn and put it down
exactly where I want it right next to the garden. Whoo!
It's so much fun to watch that I’ve repeated it three times already.
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| Waiting to be used |
I’ve moved 5 bags of pebbles and about 150 pavers so far,
and I’ve got another 5 and 75 waiting for me, plus 60 bricks. The bricks and
the pebbles make the gaps between pavers disappear – this isn’t a structured,
measured garden – it grew and was lost and was regained bit by bit, and it’s
not at all organized except in my mind. The pavers set wobbly, and sometimes
crack, and there are gaps because where they need to go wasn’t prepared with
pavers in mind. But you know – I kind of love it, anyway.
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| Pebble path between beds |
I know myself well enough to know that if I don’t fix the
paths as I plant the beds, I won’t go back into the garden in the hot days to
hump brick paving blocks around. So that’s also slowed me down some, and made
me glad for the cool weather and nice breezes that have kept mosquitoes and
too-hot-to-work at bay most days. But I think the extra work’ll be worth it.
And my aching arms and back are reason enough to stand up straight and watch
the birds try to tell me off. I still find myself in the garden at 8 pm some
nights, unless Buzzy Boy has chased me home when it gets later than he thinks I
should be in the garden. Since the peeping started, he seems less inclined to
visit the garden than he did earlier this season. As little as the angry brown
bird is, he’s several times the size of Buzzy Boy the hummingbird!
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| Peas, beets, onions, fava beans and some escaped Johnny-Jump-Ups. |
All photos copyright Deb Marshall 2018.
For the blog alone, 15 June 2018.
