We hope you will be tickled that the La Casa gardens biggest bed, the Rib, has now been turned over! And soon it will be home to the type of little green things that are popping up all over out there. If you want specifics, Ronna knows all.
Rib picture coming soon?
Category: garden
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Garden Going
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an urbana community garden
My great friend Drew, an environmental philosopher, has been working hard on getting more community gardens started in Champaign-Urbana. Over the weekend I helped out at one of the locations for an eco-ecumenical group that formed this year. Here’s some phoneCAM photos that I snapped to document the day.
Raspberries were planted along the wall. A generous amount of straw mulch was put down.
Peas, and flowers were planted along the front rows.
A variety of tomatoes were planted in the middle of the plot.
Nice mulch, Gretchen approves.
Drew and Brian, the site organizers.
Workdays are Saturday mornings from 9-12 at different sites around town.
To learn about how to get involved visit: http://www.ecoecumenical.org/
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don’t mind me, just a little mushroom in with the plants
A couple tiny mushrooms popped up among our seedlings the other day. I was unable to accurately identify them using our field guides, and I’m still wondering if mushrooms are some sort of indicator that we’re doing something wrong. Either way, I thought they were interesting.
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fingernail dirt
I type to you today with filthy fingertips. Today’s soil meets yesterday’s soil in the space between my flesh & fingernail. Drew says he heard somewhere about some lovin’ chemicals that get released when you get down & dirty in the garden. That helps account for this great feeling, perhaps, or at least explains it some.
I might also attribute it to a distinct feeling of closeness with the mother. For I have (at least) two wombs from which I sprang: a human womb, in which fetus-me grew these very fingernails (or some preliminary prototype), & an earthly womb, out of which all my particles came & will eventually return. Carl Sagan said we’re all “starstuff,” & to that I add that we are more directly “earthstuff”.
JP, Gretchen, Drew & I speed-dug a garden bed this morning, & then I had a fine time “double-digging” it — turning over the top soil, turning over the next layer, & using my bare hands to blast the clods to smithereens. As I stepped on my shovel, the earth pulled me & the shovel into it, toward her core. Indeed, every day of my life, my mother pulls me back to her. She loves me far too much to let me go.
These garden beds look like mouths of the mother. The rich dark soil looks like her skin. Breaking up these clods in my hands, I touch her so intimately. What a fucking honor!
And also, as visitors are quick to point out, these fresh, unplanted garden beds look like graves. When I die, my mother will take me back, & out of me-made-her, will grow vegetables again.
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perennial emergence
Would anyone like to trade some images for some words? How many words are these pictures worth? ~JP
I meet your five pictures with five poems. Brownie points to those who guess th constraint. ~AndR
Bamboo Shootsblasting aggressively, my bamboo oozes out,
striking hard only once: three shoots
Cascade Hops“climb! a skyhigh clamor! away, dread earth!”
(how ordinary: pursuing sun)
Apple bud blossomsa plump pink leafy existence
but under drunk
billowing laughter of some smiling ovary: my spectacle
Asparagusaerodynamic sunfed plant, arousing rustic “awwww’s”: give us splendor
Stinging Nettlesspines touch. i never go in nighttime gowns
never ever tattle try like embers: sigh -
Walking Onions from the Garden
On Monday, Jacob and I cooked a ridiculous meal (post coming soon!). We ran out of onions. Jacob went out in the garden and pulled out these beautiful walking onions. There was even snow on the ground.
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Beer Dig
Yo! La Casa hosted a BEER DIG yesterday, which means we bribed our friends with alcohol to help get our pit ponded! Something like 40 people showed up, some of them with shovels, for a muddy-fine time digging, grunting, drinking, heaving, hoeing, and drinking.
Some La Casans went out round about 10AM to imagine a desirable curvy shape for our pit-pond to take, wiggling our garden hose and some electrical cords around until everyone ok-ed it. Maria threw down some white spray paint to make it official. “Dig here.” We made a design with two shallow, wiggly fingers and a mound in between.
In the picture above, Liya (purple shirt and fabulous overalls) stands in front of the mound and between the two fingers. You can see how high the water table had gotten from the night before! We bailed out the pit more than once, and it quickly filled back in with fresh water from the ground.
Above: Towards the end of the dig, you can see even the new fingers filled with a bit of water. The north finger is the close one, and on the other side of that soggy mound, you can see a bit of the south finger. We made a lot of progress, and we have more digging to do yet!
Anna, Brett, & Bonnie in a dramatic pic!
Above: Meanwhile, some of us worked on digging new garden beds and raising them up with soil from the pit-pond. We carried sod to the front yard to replant it in a strange patchwork under a tree, hence Vinnie with a wheelbarrow of sod.
Post-dig din: whole wheat macaroni with tomato sauce, quinoa, (leftover) delicious chili, and home-made bread-machineless bread. The sun going down, and the crowd dwindling a bit. The alcohol finally catching up with me….
And finally, as we digested our elbows and beer, we enjoyed a big-ol’ bonfire, the first of the season.
Thanks for digging with us, those of you who did! I, for one, thought it went swimmingly, pit-ponds, garden beds, soddy jigsaw puzzles, bowls of quinoa, and raging fires considered.
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Grafted Golden Delicious
My friend and band-mate Sam generously gifted me this piece of M-7 rootstock with three golden delicious apple buds grafted onto it. Sam’s horticulture class at Parkland College was doing a unit on grafting and he wanted to share what he was learning with me and La Casa. We grafted on two dormant buds in Sam’s kitchen Friday afternoon and I biked home with it all smiles. I’m keeping it in the sunny room with the seed starts until its ready to move outside.
The golden delicious graft with the seedlings in the background. Three buds were grafted onto the rootstock. I did the top bud and Sam the middle. After the buds grow the green on top will be cut off. -
modeling the La Casa permaculture garden in 3D
Here’s a 3D model in that I’m in the process of building to document our permaculture garden. It includes a mock-up design for the pond that attempts to maximize the amount of perimeter. I’m still learning how to use Google Sketchup so I haven’t added too many bells and whistles.
I sense an interesting utility in 3D modeling software when building permaculture designs. I’m already comfortable using photoshop but it was a conceptual leap to start working in the third dimension. Google made Sketchup very user friendly and they have online tutorials to explain each tool. Here’s a good place to start if your interested. The killer feature that google implemented is the ability to download and add models to the 3D Model Warehouse. That is where all the trees in my model came from. Other users have already started adding their own permaculture designs.
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quick-post, bat houses
I found this great webpage that has collected a bunch of free plans for building bat houses. I built a birdhouse over the weekend, when that’s finished a bat house is next. I like this one.
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Bee Hives Arrive
Harvest House resident Robby Nagel brought his beehives over today. Robby inherited the hives from his grandpa who retired from beekeeping a few years ago.
Robby has been going to beekeeping classes offered by the Central Eastern Illinois Beekeepers Association and approached us a few months ago about keeping bees in our big yard. We’re not only glad to share in the honey but the bees will function as excellent pollinators to our trees and crops. In the photo above, Robby is showing me how the different pieces of equipment work.
