Garden Tour Insanity

What was I thinking, agreeing to be one of the stops on the first annual Bend Backyard Farm Tour? It's all Duane's fault. A week and a half ago, he came to deliver my new cold frame. After we carried the cold frame in through the carport and next to the vegetable garden to await final placement, he spotted my raspberry vines loaded with fruit (which he sampled), my jungle of cherry tomatoes (which he sampled) in the greenhouse, my apple trees with fruit falling on the ground (which he sampled), not to mention my chicky girls in the run he had built ..... he turned to me and said, "wow, this is a real urban farm. I want you to be on the tour!" Blinded with flattery and a completely unreasonable concept of how much time was left to get things looking presentable and how much there was to do, I said, well, um, ok.

http://celebratetheseason.net/upcoming-events/

One of the things I have since realized is how many unfinished projects I have accrued, through the, er, years. Another thing is how much of a difference it makes, being 60+ years old, and not 20 or even 40, when doing formerly easy tasks as hauling and setting 1/2 ton of rocks for a sitting area ...... cleaning out grassy perennial beda ...... or just plain weeding for hours on end. Yikes. I have been taking a hot epsom salt bath nightly for days now and the end is still not in sight. My hands are sore, my back is sore, every muscle in my arms, neck and upper body is sore, but I can't stop yet. I used to whip such tasks off in half a day and never feel a thing. I guess I've been procrastinating on some of these jobs for longer than I thought -- the decades seem to be flying by. But it's amazing what fear -- and the expectation that possibly hundreds of people are going to be traipsing through MY garden in just a few short days -- can accomplish.

I have to admit I have never thought of my garden as a 'farm' before this. Well, we have joked about it being a farm since the chickens arrived. But I have read Nigella Carpenter's book 'Farm City: the Education of an Urban Farmer' - and that is not me. To me, it's just my garden. I love it, but it seems very ordinary to my eyes. And weedy. But maybe not everyone has all this stuff I take for granted in my yard: vegetables and fruit trees and chickens and herbs and the 30+ years' worth of composting that has created some amazing (for Bend) soil. It all started as lawn, with a few overgrown trees and shrubs around the edges. In those 32 years we have buried, ripped out and just plain starved out all the grass, built terraces and built paths and beds everywhere. And, probably the biggest factor is that, I talk to my plants and the garden itself, and I listen when they talk back. It's a lot easier to figure out what to do when you have the biggest garden expert of all (Nature) on your team.

Here's the latest progress on the biggest current project (also the biggest current source of sore body parts):
This is the ultimate 'before' photo: the weedy, rocky plot planned as a gravel path with flagstone sitting area


Here it is last week: rocks gone, weeds out, soil leveled and smoothed:


Here it is a couple of days ago, covered with the horrible plastic weed barrier that set back my environmental conscience at least 25 years:


And here is the beginning of the sitting area, with official tester.


Stay tuned. And if you're in my neighborhood between now and Saturday, stop by and I'll hand you gloves and a garden tool. I need all the help I can get!

I can't believe I bought this (continued and ongoing)

'Topsy Turvy Pepper Planter'
Ugh. I hate things with cutesy names like 'topsy turvy', though at least it doesn't have a cute spelling. I don't know what got into me. (Doesn't this sound familiar?). There I was at the nursery, harmlessly looking around inside a warm greenhouse on a cold, windy day, eating the free hot dogs and munching the non health snack Cheetos. Suddenly I was accosted by my friend Alyce, who works there. We had our usual lively and enjoyable conversation, and half an hour later, without realizing it, I found myself driving home with only the Spring Open House free plant, some biiiiiig black pots for growing potatoes (more on this later) and .......... the topsy turvy.

Honestly. I don't even LIKE peppers. My body doesn't like them, anyway. I do, however, grow paprika peppers, and apparently the topsy turvy (should I be putting in the little 'c' in a circle for copyright?) is going to make this job not only efficient but very, very fun.

Look, it has 8 cunning little planting 'ports'. A cool twirly thing on top to make it easy to rotate. And it's bright (very bright) red, in order to .... I don't know, encourage the peppers to ripen faster? How could I have resisted?

I brought the thing home and selected 4 hapless victi---- I mean, 4 brave volunteer pepper plants to jam through the ports into the t.t. Ack. My homegrown seedlings did not have the usual nursery 6-pack, compact root balls. In fact the root balls basically disintegrated as I shoved them through the holes. I apologized, watered them with lots of extra ETS+, and put them in the shaded sunporch to (maybe) recover.

The following day I went to see how they were faring, fully expecting to see 4 shriveled corpse peppers ...............and: whoah. Not only were they not expired, they all had their little heads up and I swear, had already grown 2 inches. Maybe there's something in this topsy turviness after all.

Not that I'm totally trusting in it. I just couldn't believe that 8 pepper plants, no matter how accommodating and happy, could grow in that one bucket's worth of soil. So I planted 4 peppers and put nasturtium seeds in the other 3 ports.

Stay tuned