Book Club

By Kelly | Published: 07/19/2011

Let’s talk about the books I like to read to help me with my garden quest.

The New Illustrated Guide to Gardening, published by Reader’s Digest, is one of my go-to references. From pruning shrubs to troubleshooting vegetables, this book has steered me in the right direction more than once.  Today I read about Hibiscus syriacus, also called Rose of Sharon, which is the large tree-like shrub that lives next to the shed. This book was required for Practical Botany (Bio 102), one of the best electives I ever took at U of M. That class has since been canceled but I can only guess that either a) the professor retired or b) too many kids tried to grow pot in the botanical garden greenhouse where we had our lab sessions. Once we couldn’t go to class because the police had to come and remove someone’s stash. Also, once during lecture our professor decided to tell us a little bit about his life, which included his four children, the oldest of whom was 34. The next oldest was 31, there was a daughter who was 26, and the youngest… was 6 months old. Upon hearing this, Dave the GSI clapped both his hands over his mouth in wide-eyed astonishment. Scandalous! But I digress.


Carrots Love Tomatoes, by Louise Riotte, was given to me for Christmas by my good friend and fellow gardener Lauren. I’ve yet to make good use of it, but I do use it for reference occasionally. Mostly I can’t use it because my space and lack of sunshine issues dictate my plant selections, not their ideal companions. It’s kind of like right now the plants in my garden have the relationship of cliche small-town tweens who just haphazardly date all kinds of bizarre and unsuitable people because there is a tiny pool from which to choose and their parents just hate it, and then in a few years they will both move to New York-slash-LA and get on Match.com and find their ideal companions. Right? Right.

Various other gardening books that have been recommended to me over the few years I’ve been actively gardening are: Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew, How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible by John Jeavons (about succession planting), Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman, Heirloom Vegetable Gardening by William Woys Weaver, and Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway. I haven’t actually read any of these, so no guarantees (as Farmer Dad likes to say about his cooking).


I’m also reading the last book in the trilogy by Steig Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Aside from the incomprehensible Swedish names and cities that make me feel like I’m reading an Ikea catalog, the books are completely riveting and I can’t put them down. When it’s too hot to garden (hello three digit temps in Virginia…) I will be holed up in the air conditioning finishing up my vicarious life in investigative journalism with Salander and Kalle Blomkvist.

Bonus:

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Automatic Watering Can

By Kelly | Published: 06/21/2011

Rain in the middle of the work day is okay by me. The plants are ecstatic and so thirsty. A rumble of thunder never hurt anyone, either. Lightning maybe. But not thunder.

Updates coming soon regarding the following: tilling a terraced bed for watermelon and pumpkins, scavenging for hoses on craigslist, and plant growth charts. Stay tuned.

Posted in Philosophy, Plans | Comments closed

NYT Book Review – Summer Gardening

By Kelly | Published: 06/08/2011

Good afternoon, friends. Work has been a little nuts lately and any spare moments have been filled with social activities and fabulous weddings. As such, Monday was my first evening spent in the garden in what feels like ages. Things were looking a little shabby back there. Much of my work was focused on re-planting parsley and mint and morning glories, rearranging pots so that they can get as much sun as possible, and transplanting peppers and tomatoes into their forever homes. Pumpkins, watermelon, and eggplant have also sprouted under the relative safety of the grow lights. Beets, spinach, and chard all decided  that my soil is terrible or that it’s been too hot or rainy or whatever so I just dumped some soil on top of their ungrateful little heads and called it a day. I am foolishly starting three varieties of sunflowers, despite the undeniable amount of shade in the back yard, to plant in the terraces.

Gardening is often the work of the foolhardy optimist.

To balance out my lack of knowledge with some expert advice, please check out this summer book review on gardening literature. Most of the authors will probably tell you not to plant sunflowers in shade. But then again, so will most 10 year old children. Because they are sun flowers, not shade flowers. The review also makes me feel overwhelmed and uncomfortably trendy, so please refer to the following photograph for evidence to the contrary.

Clearly I’ve been at this for awhile, and clearly there is nothing trendy about those shorts.

My own personal favorite of the garden-themed books is not on this list, and it’s Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” I read it the summer after I graduated from college and it left me swooning. Barbara so deftly describes the trials and tribulations of the gardener, and though her family took an oath of local produce and her garden work was on a much grander scale than my own, she writes with an ease and flow that sucked me right in.

PS: I’ve made progress towards completing the backyard plot – the two large groups of wildly spreading leaves of “unidentified plant A” have started to bloom, revealing their tiger lily nature. And the two small clumps of roundish soft green leaves that flank the terrace stairs are sedum, a type of succulent, which I learned when I saw a few of them at Aaron’s parents’ house.

Posted in Article, Leisurely work, Resources, Supplies | Comments closed

Tangent: Zoom, Zoom

By Kelly | Published: 05/24/2011

A few weeks ago my car and I shared a very special moment.

She turned 100,000.

We were driving back from Dulles, after I had spent a long weekend back to Michigan for my sister’s graduation and after the car had spent a few restful days in a short-term airport parking lot. It was a beautiful, sunny spring evening and I had the windows down, music loud.

The other momentous aspect of the car hitting 100,000 miles was that I decided what the car’s name would be Lola, (if I were the type to name my car, which I’m not).

A little background: I was listening to a self-made soundtrack to Pirate Radio that my dad gave me. And, as the little Mazda 3 slowly clicked her way up from 99,999 to 100k, The Kinks came on and started singing about Lola. Aaron continuously makes fun of me for not being able to decide the gender of my car. Some days it’s “he,” and some days she’s just feeling more feminine.

So a song about falling in love with a transvestite was oddly fitting.

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Backyard update

By Kelly | Published: 05/20/2011

Check out where all the plants are.

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Rainy weekend plans

By Kelly | Published: 05/18/2011

The weather forecast for the weekend was rain, rain, rain continuing into the week. For a gardener, once your seeds are in the ground, rain is a welcome visitor and brings a much needed break from watering. Last week I got a bunch of little babies (figure of speech) into the ground, including kale, carrots, peas, chard, beets, spinach, and lettuce. Already the peas and kale are sending up the first brave souls of their kind to greet the late spring sun. Herbs are also planted – rosemary, cilantro, chives, green onions, parsley, and plenty of basil.

The tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, peppers, and more basil are sunning themselves in the shed. They are spoiled.

After a Saturday morning trip to the City Market, I also have thyme, tarragon, and sage in their own pots.

Sadly I have yet to dig up the back beds to plant watermelon, pumpkins, and rhubarb, because every time I have time to rent the tiller it’s been raining like crazy. Mike at the rental store gave me very good advice and said that you just can’t till when the soil is wet. Being the novice that I am, I took his advice.

Which means I still won’t be able to do it this weekend because we had torrential downpours Saturday through yesterday, and more is supposedly on the way. But hey, free water! I’m not complaining.

Posted in Leisurely work, Plans | Comments closed

Poetry Tangent

By Kelly | Published: 05/10/2011

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go

to be in Michigan. The right hand of America

waving from maps or the left

pressing into clay a mold to take home

from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan

forty-three years. The state bird

is a chained factory gate. The state flower

is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical

though it is merely cold and deep as truth.

A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”

can sincerely use the word “sincere.”

In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.

When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.

There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life

goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,

which we’re not getting along with

on account of the Towers as I pass.

Then Ohio goes corn corn corn

billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget

how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.

It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.

The Upper Peninsula is a spare state

in case Michigan goes flat. I live now

in Virginia, which has no backup plan

but is named the same as my mother,

I live in my mother again, which is creepy

but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,

suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials

are needed. The state joy is spring.

“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”

is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,

when February hasn’t ended. February

is thirteen months long in Michigan.

We are a people who by February

want to kill the sky for being so gray

and angry at us. “What did we do?”

is the state motto. There’s a day in May

when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics

is everywhere, and daffodils are asked

by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes

with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.

In this way I have given you a primer.

Let us all be from somewhere.

Let us tell each other everything we can.

“A Primer” by Bob Hicok, published in the New Yorker on May 19, 2008

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Baby’s First Electrical Project

By Kelly | Published: 05/07/2011

The whole point of cleaning out my shed way back in March was to make space for starting plants from seed. To do this you need some kind of light source. Fluorescent lights are a great option. They have enough heat and light output to germinate seeds, but not so much that you have to worry about burning down your house. Light spectrum ranges for bulbs can vary, so you want to get as close to full spectrum light as you can to mimic sunlight. I ended up getting lights designed for plants and aquariums.

My shelf spaces measures about 36″ long by 16″ deep so I was looking for a three foot fluorescent light holder. Unfortunately Lowe’s only carried four and two foot ones, and the two foot ones didn’t come with a power cord – just a bunch of wire that you could hook up to your house’s existing wiring. Discouraged, I asked the salesman what my options were. He told me that I should place a special order for the size I needed instead of trying to hard-wire the one they had in stock. He was probably right… but I was pretty disappointed. I weighed my options and ended up asking another employee what he thought about my situation.

“Oh, absolutely you should get this one! You can wire it to a power cord – all you need to do is attach white to white, black to black, secure the ends with wire nuts and you’ll be good to go.”

Thrilled doesn’t begin to describe how I felt at that moment. I briefly considered leaving Aaron for this incredibly helpful sales person (who is quite frankly the only helpful person I’ve talked to at the Lowe’s on 29 North.)

Never before had I wired something, and also new skills are the best! I bought two light holders, two power cords, the fluorescent bulbs, and a few other things and headed home. After a week or two, some phone conversations with my Dad, and a special care package, I had completed my first wiring project and was pretty pumped about it. The following week I figured out how to attach it to the shelf, and voila, a grow light!

I’ll leave you with these words of DIY wisdom from my dad: “(undoing what you did) + (redoing it again) + (minor loss of blood) = Real Life Member of DIY Club.”

Posted in DIY, Hard Work | Comments closed

As if by magic

By Kelly | Published: 04/29/2011

Seeds turned into sprouts a few days ago, as if by magic. Three tomato seeds, three cherry tomato seeds, a few basil seeds and one or two spinach seeds have broken through the soil up towards the fluorescent lights. As a gardener, it’s extremely satisfying to witness this. Where once there was soil, now there is life. It’s pretty cool. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who isn’t somewhat distracted throughout the day by work, social commitments, life goals, and task lists that feel like mental phone books. But for a few brief minutes I stood in my little shed and breathed a sigh of contentment at the sight of these tiny sprouts that will bear fruit in a few short months, and momentarily forgot about all the other things marching around in my head.

(Note: I’m sitting in the airport right now waiting for my flight to Michigan. Next week I’ll tell you more about the garden plans, because I bought some seeds and stuff. That’s on my phone-book-like to do list.)

Posted in Leisurely work, Philosophy, To-do List | Comments closed

Busy body

By Kelly | Published: 04/22/2011

“One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”  – Wendell Berry

I’ve been using my body for the garden, loading up the back of my Mazda with 1,200 lbs of composted manure and topsoil, hauling it into the backyard, slitting open each plastic bag with a lime-green utility knife and dumping bag after bag into the raised beds. Plans to till the soil got sidetracked by massive amounts of rain last Saturday.

I’ve also been using my body for office work, fundraising, graduation presents, birthday parties, and movie watching. So it’s been a busy week but I want to update you on the seeds that have been started and this summer’s garden layout. Here’s to a beautiful weekend.

Posted in Philosophy, Quotes, To-do List | Comments closed

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