I Was Just So Worried About Bees

The whole bee worry sort of sneaked up on me while I was busy worrying about topsoil erosion, desertification, groundwater contamination, //insert ecological threat//. Some time in 2008 or 2009 I remember hearing that bees weren't coming back to their homes and birds were falling out of the sky, that cell phone signals were to blame, or something. It seemed far away and outrageous, so I didn't dwell on it.

Then in 2013 and 2014, BEES were suddenly the thing - almost the only thing. I think at some point it hit the general would-be-bee-worriers that bees pollinate 70% of our top 100 food crops. I watched some documentary footage from a region of China where rapid industrialization had wiped out the bee population; now migrant workers do the job, dipping paintbrushes in sticky sauce and, one blossom at a time, hand pollinating food crops.

Esther prepares for catastrophe

It's a picture of devastation way more immediate and accessible than "climate change," for example.

Worry, worry, worry, bees, bees, bees.

It turns out there is, by my own uneducated estimation, a fairly healthy bee and wasp population in the Heights. It took a while for them to show up, but they finally found my garden and helped me out. THANKS GUYS!

They loved the catmint and rudbeckia I picked up at the Bee-iesta this spring, and now they are all over our anise hyssop (which, by the way, makes a great cocktail). Thanks to Anna Dains for a generous donation to my native-perennial-bee-corner, which I established in July to make more room for my edibles in the raised beds, and to be awesome. I hope some day it will be awesome - for now it's rather unimpressive.

So here it is:

Viola, a bee garden. Rudbeckia hirta, Orange Coneflower (ratibida), Anise Hyssop, Zig Zag Goldenrod, and one lonely native grass, Indian Something, towards the center. I don't know what else there is; the rest will be a fun surprise next year or the year thereafter. I'm hoping it will all grow up and together into a glorious mass of color and nectar in a few short, short years.

I love the mudpit at the end of the sidewalk, by the way. Hooray, Columbia Heights.

Did I Mention Raspberries

The raspberries came before the raised beds, thanks to Pedro, my accomplished neighbor gardener. I enthusiastically planted them way too close together on a way too short fence one day when Esther was with her cousins. We got berries this year in spite of my enthusiasm, though I must admit that Michael ate most of them while they were still green.

See them? on the right in front of the maple tree.

Shrubs Were a Consideration

I love growing vegetables. For a long time I didn't think any other kind of gardening was worthwhile - I thought flowers were frivolous, wasting space that could otherwise be used to fill bellies, and I didn't hardly know the meaning of the word "shrub." Of course that had to change when I found myself a suburban homeowner with an enormous lot of grass, grass, grass. Some shrubs were provided (sad and spindly bridal veil, poorly placed peonies, a beautiful pair of lilacs in back awaiting the ax, and something I suspect to be rhododendron) but my biomass consisted mostly of a few shade trees and a bunch of tenaciously suckering weed trees.
For Mother's Day I went to Fleet Farm and spent way too much money on bushes and shrubs. Happy Mother's Day to me. First, a forsythia, the one shrub I've known I would plant as soon as I owned a spot of land. This was a beast to place - I wanted it near the front door, which meant scraping away layers of rock and landscaping plastic, relocating a peony to a spot beneath layers of rock and landscaping plastic, and finally regretting how close I put the forsythia to the front door. But now I have a forsythia, and I can't wait for next spring.

Then there were three blueberry bushes. OKAY, not shrubs, but shrub-like, especially considering their bonus vocation as foundation screen. I haven't had my soil tested but I believe it's acidic, in part because the blueberries are killin' it in my lightly amended clay soil.

I also bought a red currant from fleet farm for $10. Who could resist a fruit bush for $10? No, not me. Thanks to my mom who, after weeks of that poor currant sitting in its pot, pointed out the perfect location for it to grow. It anchors the front corner of our yard and balances out the vegetable beds.

The spirea (bridal veil) gave us a lovely bloom in the spring, but sadly the blooms were like a toupee on a mass of lifeless branches. I thank Carol from the Guthrie for suggesting I rejuvenate the poor things. We cut them back drastically, down to 6" from the ground. As I write, they are lush as chia pets in my lawn. I'm talking seven little chia pets, green and bushy and wild.

So I Got Some Friends Together and Put In a Kitchen Garden

I'm a garden voyeur. In the summer you can catch me walking through alleys, peeping over fences at any little garden in the neighborhood. I want to see what people prioritize in their gardens, what kind of veggies they eat, how they structure their growing space. I look for answers to questions I didn't know I had, for great new ideas, and for really, really bad ideas. I am learning how many decisions go into the making of a garden, and how every decision is a reflection of the gardener and the gardener's community; peeking into a stranger's garden is a little bit of peeking into their life. It's an intimate glance at best, invasive in the worst case.
We put our garden in the front yard so that nobody would have to feel like a voyeur if they wanted to look.  And the day we put it in, it felt like the whole neighborhood was looking. They asked us where we bought our beds (we built them from lumber at Siwek's in NE), why we were arranging our beds the way we did, what we were going to plant in our beds. "VEGGIES" I said. Kayla and Micah came over that Sunday morning. The men built beds and played Kubb, the women dug sod and forked dirt. I was foreman, telling everyone what to do and where to put things, and cook, making sure the kids had snacks and the volunteers had beer and spaghetti. We worked all day, drew lots of attention, got four raised beds built, sited, and forked, then we showered and drove to brats at John L's. My muscles quivered from it all.

Some early days in the vegetable patch:

so enthusiastic

When We Bought the House We Gained a Blank Canvas

Here is the property before we bought it. It's very trim, very clean, but there is not much going on - just a lot of lawn. This is what you see when you search for our address in street view. I'm kind of glad google maps hasn't photographed it yet this summer, given the many works in progress scattered around the lawn.