FENCE DAY

Ben did this today:

The fence. No, those are not our Priuses. Priuii?

tangled native mess

The native garden, finally looking like a garden and not a weed patch. Still pretty weedy though.

I've been growing these since late February.

Timber

We slept on it for a number of months. A maple that seemed to have grown up by accident was casting a dense shade on the front yard garden, stunting our new raspberry patch, and threatening to join up with the lindens to create a canopy of cool darkness where we want to have light. Was it okay to cut down a tree? We had a good goal in mind - a place to grow food - but even cultivation is a human invention, with a long history of habitat destruction (depending on whom you ask). Maybe taking this tree down would be an act of hubris, human folk once again making the outrageous claim that "the buck stops here," whatever, that we are in charge and nature can suck it.
Maybe debating the ethics of cutting down a tree in the suburbs is pointless, since most trees have been placed there by a human. Almost every tree up here is somehow related to a human act or a human omission, excepting a few mighty old maples and cottonwoods that seem to have been in the so-called "Columbia Heights" since creation. We live in an artificial landscape, not even a shadow of its original form, so maybe eliminating a young maple is not much different from a preschooler knocking down a tower of ABC blocks.
In any case, we consulted a priest, a farmer, a poet, and our tender inner conscience, and knocked the tree down.

We replaced it with this little beauty, a true dwarf Liberty apple from RainTree Gardens in Washington. It came bareroot via UPS in a triangular cardboard box, and for the first month after planting looked pretty much like a stick in the ground. Here, finally, we have some tender first leaves.

Sometimes I Call on my Friends, and They Really Come Through

So, this summer I got really tangled up in garden dreams. I knew I wanted a raised bed vegetable garden, and thanks to my husband, my parents, and the very gracious Kayla and Micah, I had that by the end of May. It could have been enough - at least enough for the year, since I had firmly decided to take it slow with the gardening.

It began so innocently: I just read a few books about garden planning (see post below) to help me place my seeds and transplants. They served that purpose, all the while whispering temptations in my ear - create a space! create a vision! transform your oversized lawn into something really special! I started the summer as a gardener, but by July I had inadvertently become a landscaper. oops.

To make a long story short, I decided we needed a patio between the raised beds. As it stood, the lawn between the beds was very difficult and time consuming to mow (directly opposing my goals of less lawn fuss) and looked rather scruffy up against the cedar boards. It wasn't a complete idea... it was a loose scattering of garden beds and not a garden in the high-minded conception of my garden design books.

ratty beginnings

First there was lawn, then the hideous and embarrassing process of solarization - killing the grass with heat through black plastic sheets for six weeks (no pictures of this, too ugly). Meanwhile, Ben took four trips to Forest Lake for craigslist pavers. My hard-working, ever-giving father came out in August to help us excavate - we dug down around the beds 5-6 inches, leaving dull, hard-pack clay walkways and beds on stilts. The garden sat in this phase for another month, thanks in part to The Incident (will I write about this?), and the ugliness continued.

watch your step

Finally, one Friday morning, we decided to just lay the patio on Saturday. Mom and Dad were booked, and they couldn't come help us, so Ben and I decided to man up and do it - have the paver base delivered, rent the tampers, see if a few friends would help us make it happen.

I sent out three emails for help on Friday morning; on Saturday morning, five willing and able bodies showed up at my door.

Farrah "womans" the rock-sled - yes, we are still moving rocks.

"driveway trap"

level, scrutinize, water, tamp, tamp, add more, thanks Holly, Nicole, and the missing Matt L

the (mostly) finished work at dusk 

it's a place now. "Esther's bedroom" to be precise

Esther and Michael are nowhere to be seen in these photos, courtesy of my dear friend Brittany, who was an awesome playmate for them - until she had to go home and "take her nap too."

It's really humbling to have such good and generous friends, who will work hard, sweat, and get sore side-by-side with you because you didn't have any idea what you were getting yourself into. 

Some Things Spiraled Out of Control

Sigh.

It's more than it looks.

This spring, Ben had mentioned how much he hated the river rock around the house, and, last fall, our home inspector suggested that we raise the soil level around our house and grade it away for water drainage. I filed these thoughts in the "it would be nice to get to someday/after the important stuff is done" folder, since pulling rock, building soil, grading soil, and mulching the new beds is no weekend project. In my wild race to eliminate lawn, I thought I would leave the rock beds alone, since - of course - rocks are not lawn.

Well,

here we are; in our first year at the house, we are pulling rock, building soil, grading, and re-mulching the perimeter of the house. I have reasons, but they're complicated, not worth the explanation. It's a slow, backbreaking, unrewarding task, and, one month later, we aren't even close to being done.

I don't really even want to write about it. It's like a specter casting shadows on my mind, seeding paranoid thoughts about neighborhood scorn, city citations, and general trashiness.

The fruit of this trial will be, quite literally, fruit: I mean, fruit, some herbs, some wafting wildflowers, and asparagus, God willing. I've been able to give my blueberries a blanket of pine needles, and to dig a bed for asparagus, and I have room enough to re-site my rhubarb as a foundation screen (if it survives). My forsythia has a new and happier home and I moved some hostas and daylilies (I found daylilies, they were hiding) to where they can be seen.

Now I just have to finish.

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