Suffering from a Lack of Focus

It’s become increasingly common for me to have conversations with friends about our growing inability to maintain focus on one thing at a time.  We blame the internet.  Commercial break?  Check Facebook real quick.  Pause in the conversation while you wife sneezes?  That’s a perfect chance to check your fantasy football scores.  Three minutes before you have to go to a meeting? Refresh your e-mail to see if anyone else has written.  Sad to say, it’s gotten bad enough for me that it’s no longer uncommon to stop what I’m reading mid-sentence and check stock prices or to see if any of my favorite bloggers have published a new post.  And if someone posts an online article with links in it, you can pretty much write-off any chances of me finishing the original article.

    

All this is to say that this sort of internet fueled ADD has bled over into my unplugged life.  It used to be that I could go outside and tackle a project and work on it until completion.  What is more likely to happen now is that I will go out to deadhead the dianthus and I’ll end up working on sprinklers, picking up liquid amber balls of pain and fury, or check my phone to see just how hot it is because it sure feels hot.  Oh look, here comes the ice cream truck.  I wonder what kind of profit they make on days like this.  Do you think that’s a good job or is it just miserable driving around listening to that one song all day long?  What is that song anyway?  I should Google it.  Now what was I going to do with these pruners in my pocket? 

Gardening is supposed to provide us with a break from these kinds of distractions isn’t it? 

Our drought and the heat make these succulents feel like the only responsible plant I can buy right now.

This past weekend being Memorial Day weekend, I decided to make a mini-vacation of it and I took a couple extra days off.  This allowed me ample opportunity to work in the yard in the mornings before the afternoon temps hit close to 100 degrees.  While I worked, I tried really, really hard to focus on one task at a time.  I was mildly successful.  But at after a few hours of weeding, it occurred to me that maybe multi-tasking does have its benefits.  For one, it allows you to use some different muscles and relax others.  The biggest advantage of focusing on one task though has to be the satisfaction that comes when you actually complete something and know that you’ve done it well. 

I installed a brick mow strip to border a new bed I created a few weeks ago. 

I still need to add some sand to the cracks between the bricks and clean up some of the excess dirt from excavating.

I weeded that new bed, a bed I made last year, and the vegetable garden. 

My fenced-in vegetable garden as seen through a young pomegranate tree.

I planted plugs of dwarf mondo grass in a small foundation bed.  I trimmed and pruned the dead wood from several trees.  I hacked off an enormous amount of mulberry branches that were touching the roof of the house.  I extended my drip irrigation system to include a few more plants that were looking worse for wear. 

One of the trees I trimmed was this potted Chaste tree.  When this tree blooms, it's pretty awesome.

I replanted a Strawberry Tree that was competing with the lawn to gain a foothold.  And I thought about, but decided against, cleaning out the potting shed.  But I want credit for just thinking about it because the thought alone made me tired and irritable.

This tree looks so pathetic right now.  Its droopy leaves and sparse
branches make this look like the landscape equivalent of Charlie Brown's
Christmas tree.  Hopefully my decision to replant it now will help
it along and not sped up its death.

I stretched my body and my mind and I came away with a renewed appreciation for what a little focus can do.

Same view as the one above a couple shots but with a different focus.
See, even my pictures can't stay focused on one thing!

Vegetable Patch Facelift

The first time I saw the house I’m living in now, it was on the internet.  I scrolled through pictures, ignoring the 70-year-old kitchen and the random placement of the laundry machines right next to where the TV was hung on a wall, and I landed on pictures of the backyard.  And then I immediately e-mailed my wife and the real estate agent demanding (nicely) that we schedule a viewing.

One of the things that struck me about the yard was this picket fence vegetable patch.  I have never been much of a vegetable grower.  What I have grown has almost exclusively been done in containers.  

Although I was enchanted by it initially, I quickly realized that there were some problems.  For one, it hadn't been attended to in a long time.  It was filled with weeds, grass, and a struggling patch of strawberries.  I left the strawberries alone and even got to enjoy a few bowls.

I tried smothering the rest of the weeds with the leftover moving boxes and piled a couple inches of compost on top.  I have used this method with some success in the past, but I wouldn't try it again.  At least not for an area that I intended to plant in within a year's time.  For one, I found that even when I dug holes through the cardboard to plant my tomatoes, they all limped along.  I think the cardboard restricted water penetration and I've since learned that it also deprives the soil of oxygen.

After I gave up on this year's crop of tomatoes, I pulled up the cardboard and abandoned the vegetable patch for the remainder of the summer.  Many of the weeds had been killed, but the surrounding lawn was starting to invade in the absence of the weeds.

Unwanted grass.  Is there anything a gardener despises more?

In the picture below you can see that I have a rose bush planted in one corner.  I originally put it there along with a couple other plants just as a holding bed until a permanent home could be located.  I have since decided to leave it be.  I figure that the blooms might help attract pollinators to the veggie patch.  You might also notice along the edges that I tried placing stones as a border to keep the grass from encroaching.  It worked okay, but the irregular shapes of the rocks created gaps.

Around September I decided that I would try to solarize the remaining weeds and grass.  September is a little late for most people to do this but when I installed the plastic it was still well over 100 degrees here which is more than sufficient for solarization to work.  Unfortunately, the hot weather didn't last long enough and the process was only marginally successful.

In the picture below you can see that most of the grass is gone.  Of course, there's still some lingering beneath the ground and it'll surely rear it's ugly green head in the coming weeks.  I also switched out the rocks in favor of a border of bricks.  I think the bricks will work better to keep grass out from growing through as long as I keep up on the edging.

I scrapped my initial plan of making a pathway in the shape of an X and laid out the form below.  It probably doesn't make the best use of space but I don't need or want a huge vegetable patch anyway.

I filled the middle portion with pea gravel and tamped it down to form a permeable place to walk.

And then I decided to paint the fence "Sweet Molasses" Brown.  The vegetable garden is in a prominent place in our backyard and is visible from nearly every window that looks out on it.  I wanted to dress it up a little bit and also to have it blend in a little bit.  I think the brown will produce a nice foil for the green vegetation and when that white rose starts poking out of the pickets I think it will really make a statement.

I also added finials to the square posts to dress it up a bit and better mirror the shape of the pickets.

Finally, after all the painting was finished, the sand swept between the bricks, and the drip irrigation was installed, my daughter and I planted fava beans and a mixture of field peas and hulled oats. I figured that after the abuse this plot has taken I should give it a good start by planting some nitrogen-fixing cover crops this first go 'round.

I'm happy with the way it all turned out and I'm really happy that it's finished because now I can move on to the next project knowing that I've actually succeeded in finishing something.

A Modest Harvest

"If you have a garden and you like food, then it is mad not to grow your own."  -Monty Don

I like Monty Don's garden writing quite a bit.  But, man, that kinda stings, Monty.  Am I mad?  I mean I like food as much as the next guy (okay, the extra weight around my mid-section will testify that I might like it a little more than the next guy) but I prefer to grow things that aren't very edible.  Like Japanese maples.



This is the produce aisle in my paved side yard.  From left to right: an espaliered Fuji apple tree,
Early Girl tomatoes, Eversweet strawberries, Kentucky Colonel mint, and  zucchini.  

 Though I have been trying.  A little bit.  I bought some new wine barrels this year and cleaned out some of my unused pots to grow vegetables in this summer.  I knew going in that my output wouldn't be as high as it would have been if I had devoted actual earth space to this endeavor but I was okay with that because we don't eat a lot of vegetables anyway.  

With that in mind, I picked these last night:



A few strawberries and some pole beans - some Italian variety I guess.



Yes, that is just five smallish strawberries and about a dozen pole beans.  Not enough to make a meal appetizer for myself let alone a family of three, but it was still met with some excitement when I brought them in. 



My daughter ate all but one of the strawberries I picked.  



Maybe someday more of my yard will be devoted to things we can eat but for now we're enjoying the modest harvest of this year and feeling a little less "mad" in the process. 

Call Me Starbuck

“‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck, 'that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!  Madness!  To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’” 

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or The Whale

Hanging on with just one leg!

If you are paying attention, many of us garden bloggers are focusing on the squirrels in our lives.  The attention they are receiving from garden bloggers must have something to do with the leafless trees and how the nakedness of those trees reveals the dastardly deeds of the cute but annoying rodents in our yards. 

My issues with squirrels are nothing out of the ordinary.  Well, except this one squirrel that looked to be pregnant or cancerous.  For the most part, the squirrels in my yard are little more than bird feed stealing acrobats.  They are annoying in that regard but watching them try amuses me in spite of the frustrating consequences. 

I have another critter that has caused me more problems in the garden than any squirrel ever has: my beloved dog.

Recently, I went out to check my newly seeded containers.  I was hoping for signs of sprouting and instead discovered that an entire wine barrel had been ransacked.  Potting soil had been piled up with chaotic abandon on one side of the barrel, burrowed into on another . . . and I immediately blamed my dog. 

But the telltale evidence wasn't there.  There were no bones buried.  There were no stolen socks hidden for later.  I did not hear Ray LaMontagne singing "Trouble". 

 
Maybe it was those villanous squirrels!  Could they have been stealing my seeds?  Or were they burying their nuts in my potting soil?  Or do I fault birds looking for seeds?  I didn’t know who to blame or what to do about it.  I certainly wanted revenge though; swift, thoughtless, and unflinching revenge.

Revenge for what though, exactly?   

I am currently halfway through reading Moby Dick for my “Finer Things Club”.  I’m ashamed to admit that I somehow got through high school plus four years of college (where I earned a degree in English) and never managed to read this American classic.  While some of the book’s questions and answers still await me, I’ve read enough of it to know that one of its central themes is dealing with our desire for vengeance.  The quoted passage above reflects ship mate Starbuck's reaction to Captain Ahab when he finally tells the crew that they will travel to the ends of the earth to make the white whale pay for taking Ahab’s leg off without prior written consent to do so.  What is the point in seeking revenge against creatures who are simply acting according to blind instinct?  It really is madness.

Loitering with Intent to Harass, I'm sure.

So there will be no BB gun vigils and no scarecrows erected - not this year anyway.  There will only be hardware cloth, some heavy duty staples, some crossed fingers, and lots of hoping that some of those seeds will sprout and that my patience with life’s little challenges will grow as quickly as whatever lettuce is left to me. 

(P.S. For those of you with inquiring minds, the coffee company, Starbucks, was, in fact, named after the character in Moby Dick.  They thought it made a better name than the original suggestion of naming it after the ship in the book: the Pequod.  That's pronounced "Pee-quod" so they made the right decision, methinks.) 

A "Regular" 2012

Doesn't it seem like we are all making resolutions and telling people about them or we’re telling people why we don’t make resolutions?  I do make resolutions but I try to be creative with them.  One year I thought it would be fun to learn something new every month and I stuck with it for a while.  One month I learned how to juggle, another month I learned to roll over in a kayak, and then I tried to learn how to return phone calls.  The last one was the most difficult and is something I still struggle with today.  I really dislike answering the phone.

 

This year I resolved to at least try to go “Number 2” every single day.  Yeah, I know.  That’s not really the sort of thing people should announce to the world.  I just figured I’d be happier and healthier if I was more regular, colonicly speaking.  It’s just a little ironic that the resolution itself isn’t exactly, you know, regular.





I’m going to stick with that resolution but I’m adding to my plans for 2012.  Cat, who blogs as “The Whimsical Gardener”, wrote about centering her resolutions around a single word.  For 2011 that word was “espy” and this year it is “stretch.”  You should read both posts in which she explains why she chose the words and what they meant to her.  They have the ring of wisdom to them and are just a few thousand rungs higher up on the evolutionary ladder than my resolution to go poop every day. 

Inspired by what I read, I decided that I would spend 2012 with the word “cultivate” in mind.  I recognize that my life on January 4, 2012 has a perspective unique to today and I also know that life on December 31, 2012 will feel in many ways like a completely different life.  That is why I like Cat’s idea to choose a word rather than a specific goal.  By having just a single word to keep in mind we are free to grow, change, and strive for things throughout the year that we can't possibly conceive of in January. 

And that is great for me because I don’t know how my life is going to change in the coming year.  But I do know that if I work to cultivate relationships with my family and friends that my life will be richer for it.  I know that if I cultivate better habits for how I spend my time I will feel more satisfied with myself.  If I cultivate parts of my character I can improve the course of my future.  And if I cultivate a real vegetable garden for the first time ever I will be better fed and hopefully get more fiber in my diet which will have the added benefit of helping me with that other resolution.  So here's to 2012 and all that it will bring! 


*As a postscript, my ADD led me away from blogging long enough to click on over to Botanical Interests and place an order for some vegetable seeds so I can get started cultivating that new vegetable garden.  I have ordered from them in the past and I was very pleased with my success with the seeds and their packets are like little pieces of informative art. 

Each packet has an illustrated picture of the vegetable, common and botanical names, a plant tag, and information on when to plant and harvest.  As a hidden bonus, the insides of the packets include tips, recipes, pest control ideas, and a little history.  All for about $2.00 a packet. 

Growing Excuses Not Food



A must-read book about
our relationship with food.

In theory, I’m big on the whole “grow your own food” trend.  I passionately believe that doing so makes sense on so many levels.  It’s economical, it’s environmentally healthy, it’s a source of exercise, it provides the grower with a better sense and appreciation for what it takes to get food on the plate, and (for the Mad Max scenarios of my imagination) it will be what keeps us alive when the whole world goes to hell.  I follow Michael Pollan on Twitter, I have King Corn on my Netflix queue, and I refuse to support Monsanto so, you know, I totally get it. 

In practice, however, I’m basically a hypocrite.  It’s not that I don’t grow any of my own food; I do.  But it’s more of a novelty than a bona fide food source.  For example, I have a mature peach tree that produces more fruit all at once than we could ever hope to eat.  So for about 10 glorious digestively-regular days we have peach milkshakes, peach cobbler, and grilled peaches but that’s where it all ends.  We don’t can our extra peaches to extend our bounty and we don’t have any other trees that produce fruits or nuts for us to eat until December when the oranges are ripe so we'd probably develop scurvy should the world as we know it come to a screeching halt.  You can basically repeat this scenario for all the other things I grow.  A lot of my tomatoes end up in the compost bin.  Much of the lettuce I grow in the spring winds up there too.  I chewed on one single piece of broccoli (and spit it out) before I pulled up this year’s plants in favor of the warm season bell peppers I planted a couple months ago (and have yet to harvest).  I have every intention of increasing my homegrown food yield, but when it comes right down to it, I haven’t devoted the time and, more importantly, the garden space to doing it right. 

Part of the problem is that we just don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables in my household to make it worthwhile.  My three-and-a-half year old recently interrupted a conversation we were having about what we needed from the grocery store to note that "we eat a lot of potato chips".  The other part of the problem is that I’m still hung up on growing ornamentals and perennials in my yard.  I don’t want to apologize for that.  It’s just where I’m at in my evolution as a gardener.  But at the same time, I am apologizing for that because I disagree with myself philosophically and it’s about time I confessed before it ate me up inside.

You see, for years I’ve found excuses not to become a more self-sufficient link in the food chain and my excuses are growing (unlike my neglected butternut squash). 

My friend, Brian, took me along on a fact-finding trip to a bee shop a while ago.  He was interested in starting his own hive and I was curious about the whole thing too.  Who doesn’t love honey?  And more bees in the yard would be great for my plants.  Besides, bees need a little help with that colony collapse disorder, right? 


I could stretch my dollar by also using one of these suits to play paint ball in.  If I played paint ball.


Well, in spite of being gung ho about it all initially, I found ample reasons not to pursue bee keeping myself.  First, my wife is allergic to bee stings; a fact that, by itself, should have precluded me from even thinking about keeping bees.  Plus, I’d be signing up for regular trips to Walgreens to restock EpiPens and after the first ER visit I have a feeling that my Queen Bee would make me look for a hive/apartment of my own.  Second, it’s not exactly cheap getting set up as a beekeeper.  It could easily run a couple hundred bucks after you get the robotic looking netted-hat contraption, a smoker, the wood boxes for the hive, the bees, and the equipment to extract the honey from the honey combs.  And really, it seems like a whole lot of effort for just a little bit of honey.  And that's the real reason.  I don't have the time or the energy to do it right.  So I chose instead to spend $10-$15 a year to buy local honey and support those dedicated farmers who’ve already got the set up and depend upon customers like you and me to keep them in business. 

Not sure exactly what the message was,
but this was part of "Chalk It Up"
in downtown Sacramento last week.

"Besides," I told myself, "I’d rather have chickens."  Which was a convenient thing to tell myself, because I already knew that Sacramento County prohibited keeping chickens unless you had a lot that was at least 10,000 square feet (which most homeowners in this area don't even begin to get close to).  Oh, and one minor financial consideration: in case you did have a 10,000 square foot lot, you still had to submit an application along with a non-refundable $4,500 application fee.  Yes, that’s four-thousand-five-hundred United States dollars.  And just because you applied did not mean you would be given approval.  So you could either fund your Roth IRA for a year or apply for the privilege of keeping a couple chickens.  Clearly, Sacramento’s City Council was just egging us on to follow the old adage “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” 

Undaunted but uncommitted, I researched the quietest chicken breeds (Black Australorps, apparently) and some covert coops designed to look like garbage cans and herb gardens so nosy neighbors wouldn’t have enough audio visual evidence to turn me into the chicken coppers.  I was really into the idea and thought it would be great.  Free, nutritious eggs and an ongoing source of manure for the garden?  Plus they would make fun pets for my daughter.  How awesome would that be?   

But I never followed through with it.  I told myself it was because I didn’t want to break the law.  And now, in my revisionist historian ways, I’m telling myself it was also because of my wife’s debilitating ornithophobia, but we all know my sympathy for that has its limitations.  The truth is probably closer to the fact that I don’t want to add taking care of chickens to my list of things to do right now.  Not without a good place to keep them.  Not with an aggressive shepherd-mix dog that would harass them non-stop.  Not with dreams of going on vacation and not wanting to ask my neighbors to water the plants, take in the mail, turn on the porch light, get the dog water, AND feed the darn chickens. 

So last week when the City Council finally came to their senses and lifted the backyard ban on chickens I knew that it wasn’t going to change anything for me.  I’m really, really thankful that people in my county can now pay just 1% of the former application fee to keep up to three chickens.  They have to pay $15 upfront and then $10 for each hen – no roosters allowed!  Still, in spite of the drastic reduction, $45 in up front costs for a few chickens, not to mention the cost of the coop and the feed, reduces the economic benefit when a dozen eggs is only $1.89 right now.  Even if you consume a dozen eggs a week, half the annual money you'd save by having chickens of your own would be lost due to the fees.

Of course, once those Mad Max scenarios come to pass, those chickens are going to be worth their weight in gold.

*For a really great chicken related blog, check out Scratch and Peck.  And do yourself a favor.  Start reading from the very first blog entry.  

The Vegetable Garden Will Save Us

"The vegetable garden, it turns out, is a ripening political force: the best response to the energy crisis, the climate crisis, the obesity crisis, the family crisis and the financial crisis." – Dominique Browning, NY Times

I think the author of this quote may have been a little sarcastic when he made this comment. It was part of a book review of a popular book about vegetable gardening, but I also think the author believes, as I do, that there is some element of truth in what he is saying.

At the very least it’s hard to argue that vegetable gardening wouldn’t help, on some level, with several of these issues.

Energy crisis: by growing your own vegetables you reduce your need for trucked-in vegetables from other states or countries not to mention saving your own gas by not having to run up to the store so often.

Climate crisis: see above. In addition to “climate crisis” I would add that organic vegetable gardening can also help with the environmental crisis by reducing the carbon footprint.

Obesity crisis: eat a goddamn carrot once in a while! (Courtesy of The Onion)

Family crisis: maybe less obvious how vegetable gardening addresses this issue, but if you get the family involved it couldn’t hurt. I know I have cherished my time in the garden with my daughter and we have fun talking like Bugs Bunny when we eat our lady finger carrots.

Financial crisis: you can buy a packet of lettuce seeds for $1.79 or you can buy 25 heads of lettuce for $50 (or whatever the going rate is these days).

I'm still a rookie when it comes to growing my own food.  I've tried my hand at some of the usual suspects (tomatoes, strawberries, oranges, etc.) but this was my first spring trying my hand at broccoli, lettuce and carrots.  I was pretty successful, I think.  And I'm encouraged to keep at it with some summer crops that I hope to get planted out this weekend before the weather heats up.