Posts Tagged ‘gardening’

‘Tis the season of yard work. Garden romps with pointy tools, and smoldering fires are the markers of the day.
Today I climbed up on the roof to commit chemical murder of beautiful little fuzzy green domes of moss. They do remind me of the old “Star Trek” creatures, the “tribbles” who do naught by eat and reproduce. They are very pretty and very prolific. Before I sprayed the roof of the smaller building with a bleachy smelling solution, I scraped the little green pillows off with the snow shovel. They filled a one cubic foot box about four times. This off the small roof of a building only 24′ by 20′!

That mossy mayhem completed, I turned to weeding the garden I think of as the Greek Garden. It is a rocky patch near the barely-demossed building. The soil is poor, but lemon balm, oregano, and lavender seem to flourish anyway. Just cutting back the dead flowering stalks from last year is a beautifully scented experience. The random thought occurs to me—-do I like this garden because I feel so strongly about the ancient Hellene deities? Or do I feel so strongly connected to those gods and goddesses because I have a garden reminiscent of the Greek scents and flavors? Do they favor ME because my yard smells nice to them? Or would Athena still show up to boot me forward on my path even if all I grew were potatoes?

I always feel that my gardening is akin to worship. I get right down in the dirt and am filthy when finished.
Every element seems in play when I am outside: being in the Pacific Nor’west, I am often rained upon while working, and yet can suffer sunburn on a cloudy day as well. The sweet scents of the many herbs all round the yard waft through the air like wild ideas and daydreams, and the earth itself is black beneath my nails and smeared across my face.

I grew up hating yard work. We moved too often. But here? Here with over two decades in place, building the earth in compost bins, re-configuring garden beds to needs sacred and profane, talking to my deities and possibly other non-corporeal beings as I work? It becomes what my husband would call Zen-like and three hours passes like one. It feels right and sacred.

The Vernal Equinox is Saturday and all will be tidy and ready, the earth is warming, the weeds are pulled; and the smoke of my herbal fire today blew uncharacteristically south over my waiting vegetable garden. As if the Greek Garden sent an airy kiss of blessing, scented of oregano, lemon, and lavender to the garden that will have more earthy things like rutabagas and beans planted next month.

Above: Absinthia, the Green Fairy Mop-Being

My gardening experience was better this year! We had numerous successes:

Vine ripened tomatoes- usually it is too chilly in our microclimate to ever get enough of these to do anything.  This year, the Minotaur husband made delicious hot sauce.

Swiss chard – the joys of this in risotto just cannot be sung loudly enough!

Purslane – something you don’t find in stores up here, a delicious thick leaved plant that is wonderful to saute and make an omlette, or to cook in a spicy pork stew!

Beautiful amaranthe – a ruby red plant with graceful seed heads; a grain of history in the Americas, I will harvest it soon.

Salad greens – Yummy, fresh from garden, so many I had to share with the geese.

Radishes – spicy ones!

Tomatillos – green tomato free salsa is in my future!
There are small pumpkins ripening and we have zucchini already.

And last but not least, my artemisia garden flourished: both mugwort and wormwood AND white sage all came up and did great. So YES, we made absinthe and will bottle it this week!  I made the above doll in honor of my artemisia garden—since the plants there will be perennial and I hope to have bundles of my own white sage to incense the house, and many years of home made absinthe free of the pollution of mint ahead of me!

Yes, it is summer and the time of the highly ritualized War of the Weeds. But, you say, violets are not weeds! No, they aren’t, but today, they were Goose lunch. I seeded wild violets onto the Labyrinth, along with a host of other experimental ground covers. The soil there is pretty much unamended thin volcanic deposit atop glacial moraine rocks. So, growth there is a battle, especially in the baking summer sun.

The ritual goes like this as the temperature climbs with the morning sun: I make coffee and while it seeps through the filter, I set the sprinkler to its rounds on the Walk of the Fallen. I drink coffee, check email and reply to message board posts while the ferrets ravage the house, steal my bras from the laundry hamper and hide treats under the bathroom armoire. I drink a frozen protein fruit smoothie for breakfast.

And out to the dappled shade of the Labyrinth I go, bucket and tool in red natril gloved hands.
The wooly thyme and Irish moss (and less pedigreed normal moss) and the ground cover called “Brass Buttons” is all allowed free rein to wander amidst the stones. It does not impede walking or vision and can be scissor cut clear. But the violets are violently leaping up in the moss interlaced interstices of the walk and when fall rains come, they and the sneaky clover hidden amidst the moss, will grow tall enough to obscure the stones. And then, on some grief-soaked heavy-listed day, distracted into forgetting my song, I will suddenly stand becalmed like a small gray sailboat on my own labyrinth—frozen like Lot’s wife. I have to focus there, even so familiar as it is, or I am stricken with the sheer continuation of it all. So, starting at center, round I go, pulling infant violets and some of the larger parents too near the stones. I tug out the clover, too, often ripping phlox, moss, and thyme bits with it. Normal weeds get less mercy still—even scorpion grass, the wild forget-me-nots, are ripped with glee.

A crow sits above me and converses with himself about the idiocy of me duck-walking round the stones as noon approaches with solar fury. I make a note to attack the small patch of weedy grass between the Walk and the Honey House tomorrow morning. Finally, bucket full, and the stones in the sun beginning to steam off the morning’s water, I go to dump the bucket of greenery into the little pond in the goose enclosure. Their “Hey…get out of our space” honking turns to anticipatory murmurs as I turn and they contemplate their lunch.

Now, having begun at the heart of my daily life, with the best maintained part of the gardens, I will move outward to attack the rest. Order will be restored. I am grounded in the element of Earth…even thru gloves, it is beneath my fingernails sinking into me. And the cycle goes on and on and on…month after month. My piece of the planet owns me day by day. And like a captivated lover…..I submit.

It will be slave in the gardens day today….momentarily and before the heat strikes.

So, just a picture, no more, of Alba, Mith and their baby.  In the woodruff being lovey to each other.

Rites of spring around here include the following:

Breaking back over row upon row of garden seeding and hour upon hour of garden weeding.

Smiling to see the black garden rows (nothing germinated yet) steaming in the sun.

Watching pink cherry blossoms by the thousands ‘dancing’ across windswept asphalt.

And then for fun: Drunken flower towers!

The first spring weeding of the Labyrinth began yesterday.  It is always a long task, involving a good deal of time crouched on my knees on stone, or duck walking around the spirals with a weeding tool in hand.  Yesterday, I “duck walked” in a whole new way: accompanied by a tiny black duckling.

The Labyrinth has been an evolving piece of art in terms of plant life there.  I tolerate many wildflowers there, such as the sweet violets.  Wooly thyme and moss live side by side and California poppies sprout on the larger outer rings.  But a local weed pest known as “shotweed” is my Garden Enemy #1.  It grows from a pretty rosette of leaves, sending up a stalk with non-descript white flowers very early in spring.  Before the last frost is over, long thin seed pods hang where the blossoms were a week before and the merest touch of the plant sends them shooting like a biological Claymore mine.  So, while I pull many weeds, I really do search and destroy for the shotweed before its blossoms can go to seed.

The little duckling, Daffy, was an impulsive purchase at the feed store—alone in a cageful of buff ducklings, I suspect he was a Easter duck that parents talked the feed store into accepting just to be rid of it.  Daffy is unusually fond of humans, far beyond the incubator raised human imprinting of other ducks we have known.  He is small enough to sleep in my hand and yet keeps up even as I stride from Labyrinth to compost bin, peeping frantically at me.  Daffy is companionable, staying close and pecking speculatively at the weeds I pull.  Tiny fluff that he is, he uses a water filled plant saucer as a bird bath; and when I find and drop an earthworm into said saucer  a madness of peeping, pecking and gobbling ensues.  When a big raven or a few crows go overhead, Daffy dives between my knees or climbs UP my knees to shelter in my shirt.

The weeding is less onerous with such a tiny feathery friend alongside.  I take breaks more often for the duckling’s sake, to feed him soft food from my fingers or fill his water saucer so he can cool down as the shade of morning vanishes and the sun bakes us both.  Usually, while weeding the Walk, my mind is filled with 21 gun salutes and folded flags; but this spring I am thinking of Easter egg hunts with children, violets in the garden and  the laughter of hide and seek.  And perhaps those for whom the Walk was built would prefer those memories as well?

The Summer Solstice is within reach, yet here in the Northwest the wet, chilly, dark spring lingers.  This isn’t all bad, of course, but it is keeping me busy.

My winter aches and age related body stuff doesn’t go away so well in dark skies, I am sleepy and harder to start than my Minotaur husband’s old 70’s Harley Davidson on a cold morning. (Yes, yes, I call him the Minotaur, what else would a woman in charge of a Labyrinth call her mate?)

But the weeds proliferate and fight with the “chosen plant people” in my personal gardens not-of-Eden.  So, I have lots of chores to do.  Also, magic calls, I am engaged in somewhat esoteric alchemical shaman stuff of confusing profusion just lately.  So, yes, there will be fewer posts for a bit perhaps.

On the strictly grounded in everyone else’s “normal” reality based lives?  I am not posting until some of the emotionally intense shrieking over the political state of the Democratic party dies down.  If I participate right now, there just might be blood, at least on a metaphorical level!

So….off to cook potions, fill bottles, and be all kinds of improperly unchurched.   And with luck, to make candles scented with “Wake up and smell the freaking coffee!”