Even though it has not rained in weeks, and the very green life beneath my feet is wilting and withering away, I am still pretty pumped about the garden. Even though a raccoon or two is prancing into the garden at night like a spoiled only boy-child in China and sampling ear after ear of corn until it finds just the right one, I am still actually thrilled about the garden. Even though the cucumber vines grow and grow, spilling their lucsious looking selves over this and that and the other yet don't get enough water to actually mature their little fruits, I am tickled pink about the garden. You get the gist. The past two days I have combed the carnage of the raccoonage and salvaged what of corn I could for eating fresh or drying, and with the rest I have salvaged the fresh silks for tincturing. (Don't worry, I didn't gather silks that would have had raccoon saliva all over them...) I have neatly arranged rows of bloody butcher corn on blankets in my bedroom floor, in an attempt to dry them off the stalk for grinding corn meal this coming year. My little green-grey jarradale pumpkin-y squashes are growing, regardless of the dry spell, as are the butternuts. The wild green-headed coneflowers (also called sochan) are gorgeous in full bloom along the garden edges.
My biggest thrill is coming from the compost cage I have built and the righteous mound of decay I am assembling inside of it. Truckloads of leaf and twig chips, manure from the neighbors' barn, and year-old leaf mold in neat rectangular layers really floats my boat. Next I will be layering in the sawdust that I stashed in large piles from the sawmill operation of last summer and more manure from the neighbors' barn. This fall, I'll add freshly fallen leaves and, you guessed it- more manure. Oh yeah, I might also be busting up scraps of drywall from the house and composting that too for the gypsum and such, but first I have to find out if it contains any anti-bacterial agents because that just wouldn't work in the compost or soil. Come spring, the compost cage is going to be bustin at the seams with rich usable, fluffy black gold.
I think I am going to ask a neighbor to plow the whole garden under again this fall and sow it with a winter cover again. Next year I plan to really go at at.
3 comments:
I was pretty jazzed to read about your garden. The pumpkin-y squash things look gawjus! I am so envious about your compost. It really feels like something I would do, I've always wanted to, evidently just not bad enough to actually DO it. And will be making your own cornmeal? That rocks my butt off!
Your compost sounds yummy! I plant the garden with rye grass and winter peas every year as a green cover crop and turn it in in spring a few weeks before planting. I also add last years compost in the spring, mostly horse manure and wood shavings from the horse barn next door.
You rock so hard, Dana Nagle. And wrong. I DO want to read about your garden in mid-August. For one thing, I can do it in the nice, cool, indoors. And my cucumbers are doing exactly the same thing. Frickin weather. Loveya.
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