Three years. Actually, more than three years. Almost four full summers. I got a reminder that this blog still exists, and came over to look. Much has changed.
I am well. Mostly. A few joints are reminding me that I'm over 50 now. I live over the garage in an apartment we call "The Treehouse". We have cold running water at the kitchen sink in the summer and I carry water up in jugs in the winter. There's a composting toilet, and gray-water drains. There's a little wood stove that keeps us warm in winter. There's "us".
My last post must have been just a few weeks, or maybe days, before we met for our first date. I wasn't even technically divorced yet, but that's okay. We dated for a year, and she moved in on June 20, 2016. It's still really kind of wonderful.
There is so much that's changed, and so much I could prattle about, but what it comes down to is this: Ticia is a gardener too, and an artist (photography and other outlets), and she's homesteady like me. She knows how to give a gentle nudge to a project. She enjoys tending flower gardens and small animals.
The way this plays out is that I get a lot more positive feedback on my gardening projects, and company, and also some nudges to do things differently. And that's why we've virtually abandoned the old garden across the street.
A few years ago, I bought an electric push mower with a bag on the back. It has to have an extension cord to run, which means we don't mow anything over 100' from an outlet. And there was great rejoicing. Wives 1 and 2 both thought that the whole place had to be mowed. Now we have more "meadow", and when we mow, we think of it as harvesting mulch and chicken fodder. And that helps change our outlook on what various spots can be beside mowed lawn.
I don't even remember how it happened, but at one point I realized that I couldn't have a walkway right next to the garage that would lead to the Treehouse steps. There's too much snow that slides off the metal roof and lands right there. So I built the steps so that they land about 10' away from the side of the building. The walkway is just scrap 2xWhatever from the demo pile at the transfer station, cut to 2' and nailed onto sleepers dug into the soil there. It's almost like an upside down railroad, because the sleepers run long, like rails, but are underneath. Two feet is a little narrow, but it works well enough. It's much easier to shovel snow off of than half frozen soil.
And she said, "How about I plant a few things along the walkway?" Then there was some creep, and now we have a garden there, 16' out from the walkway and about 36' long, with a 5'x10' tomato greenhouse on one end and a small utility shed on the other. It's mostly beets, carrots, kale, cabbage, potatoes, nasturtiums, and callendula. There are some dead peas that gave up the ghost months ago along the fence, and one small area of scarlet runner beans and hollyhocks.
And she said, "I want to do some strawberry beds. I have an idea..." And so I spread what wood chips I had (~10 yards) into a 25' square, raked them into five beds, and put coop cleanings on the beds, and let it sit over the winter. The plan is to put strawberries in bed 3, then plant daughter plants into beds 2 and 4 next year, beds 1 and 5 in 2020, and then keep up a rotation. But for this year we had four empty beds that we planted to leeks, cabbages, turnips, mesclun, costata romanesca zucchini, pickling cukes, green beans, more beets, and some brussles sprouts. I put up a little stock panel fence around it, plus some old snow fence.
And she said, "What about this space outside the strawberry bed fence? We could mulch that and put perennials in there. And over there too..." So I mulched those spots over the winter, and in the spring we transplanted a bunch of stuff. There were no formal rows or anything, so I looked at a few bare spots and said, "Can I put a few squash plants here? If they run, I can train them away from the other stuff." We got those in late, but we may get some delicata from them.
And then we said, "Let's get that old hay wagon out of the back yard." The bare spot it left was really nice soil. Maybe a little powdery. Not the heavy clay of the old garden across the street. And we had some extra coop cleanings that got put in some open bottomed boxes I'd stacked there, and a neighbor asked for help getting rid of some goat poop. I got another fence around it and we've planted most of it to winter squash and more brussles sprouts.
There's a cabinet shop in town that works with solid wood for most things. I'm getting their planer shavings and mulching even more areas. I'd like to inoculate these with oyster and king stropharia mushrooms. We had bees last year but lost them to mites and withered wing virus, and the king stropharia mushroom is said to be an anti-viral they can self medicate with to protect themselves. The sawdust is a short-term nitrogen thief, but a long term fertility builder.
She's from Wyoming. Her immune system reacts more strongly to bug bites than mine. In the spring of '17, she suggested a screened sitting area shed. We call it "The Tea House", even though we're more likely to be drinking coffee out there. It's 10'x10', with screen that wraps all the way around above a 30" lower wall. The roof is a 12:12 gable. It's great. I've been sleeping out there much of the summer, weather permitting. We hang the sling chair and she sits out there with a drink and a book on quiet afternoons. Sometimes in the early summer we sit out and watch fireflies in the evening. It's on the far side of the back yard, just beyond the strawberry and perennial beds, where the land starts sloping off into field weeds.
I discovered (after 15 years) that the apple tree by the driveway makes pretty good apples IF I let them get ripe. They're Rhode Island Greening, plus that other thing I grafted on before I knew better. We can eat a lot of dried apple slices, so I built a drying shed. Some mice got into it last year, so now I want to build it a raised platform to sit on. And the Northern Spy in the back yard makes good dried apples too.
But the other thing that happened last fall was a wind storm that knocked all the apples off the trees. If I'd had a place to store them, I might have picked them ahead of time and saved a lot of the crop. And that's why I've been digging a root cellar in the back yard, behind the strawberry beds and Tea House. I'm building the walls with dry laid stone, and I'm debating how the vault roof will be done.
And finally, we have the farmhouse cleaned up and we're renting it out on Airbnb. This means that all my junk has to be tidied up or hidden, and the place really looks good. With luck, this weekend our tenth guest of the summer will give us our tenth five-star review, and we'll make superhost status. We aren't raking in money hand over fist, but the income is enough to pay property taxes, insurance, and materials for house upkeep and repairs. And she's overhauled the flower bed in front of the sunporch, and the other flower bed next to the farmhouse front deck.
Am I still gardening the hard way? Well, sort of. I still don't use a rototiller. It's still mostly hand work, and there's plenty to do. But it's getting easier, or at least it's getting more rewarding. The gardener's shadow is the best fertilizer, and now my shadow falls much more easily on my gardens.
