The Independent Stitch

Okay, we're going to try this garden thing again (starting late, but not too late)

I grew up around gardens in the Midwest, and my mother and my sister both garden, and I didn't notice that I had trouble growing things in the Pacific Northwest and New England, but so far this semiarid bit of the West has not encouraged my efforts. I did manage a few tomatoes and herbs and asters and marigolds at the first house we lived in here, but the second house (which we are still in) still has one of those blank back yards, not because I haven't tried.

Last year, we put some containers on the deck and harvested tomatoes and basil. It was fun. We probably could have bought the produce cheaper, but it finally gave us a taste of success in this environment. I've spent some time and energy seeing if anybody wanted to take on this yard as part of a SPIN farming project, exchanging use of the space and of water for a small share of the produce. Although there's an active SPIN network in Boulder, an hour away, nobody here has been interested beyond conversation.

So this year, we're taking it to the next level on our own.

Here's part of the space, and some of the supplies:

Here's my plan, and a resource book I learned about through Twitter and Facebook (with both of which I am only moderately acquainted and active):

One of the challenges for me is that square-foot gardening is pretty rectilinear, and I prefer a more natural or cottage-y aesthetic. However, I'm telling myself that anything we do is going to be aesthetically more interesting than what we have now.

When I was browsing for ideas, I came across garden plan 18 at the bottom of this page. I really like that big maze, and we have room enough for it. However, we can't afford to buy the components or fill the beds with dirt. Plus it might be too much for neophytes. . . . Just maybe. . . .

I also like labyrinths, arbors, garden seats, shade. Those are not in the plan.

Moving right along. . . .

I did figure out an arrangement of simple square and rectangular beds that appeals to me for its slightly maze-y feel. Right now, we are only putting in the beds that are drawn more darkly on the graph paper, but we wouldn't know where to place them without the whole concept (which, of course, is subject to change). We'll see what happens after we get those going. There will be two 4x4 beds and one 4x2 one. They will be 6 feet from the fences, leaving room for 2-foot beds and 4-foot aisles on those edges, should we get even more ambitious in the future. Aisles between the beds are a generous 3 feet, but I want plenty of room to play with a wheelbarrow around the periphery, if we decide we want to do things that involve wheelbarrows.

One thing that's appealing about the square-foot method is that the book gives enough information but not too much . . . especially for someone who wants to do everything right the first time, if possible, by researching the heck out of it, and is already involved with many work projects involving masses of material and looming deadlines. Another appealing aspect is that the soil amendments (of which we need plenty, being perched here on clay) get applied in a focused way to exactly where they're needed. If I'm going to use items of limited global supply, like peat, I want to use them efficiently.

While I was looking at hefty bags of compost (our home compost isn't ready yet), my daughter wandered over to the seed section at the garden center. I hadn't planned to buy any seeds without thinking the whole project through a bit more: I just want the beds in place in time to have a place to plunk down the tomato and basil plants we intend to buy at the farmer's market on Sunday.

Here are the seed packets we bought yesterday:

My daughter wants a zucchini plant (which will consume most of one of the larger beds), broccoli raab, kale, the yellow beets, and several of those lettuces. I added the red lettuce, the red beets, and the chard (I sense a color theme in my selections that I hadn't noticed before).

What's missing? Two of my favorite vegetables on earth: carrots and sugar snaps. I'm contemplating those, while browsing the Renee's Garden online catalog. Carrots need more depth than our beds will have, so I am thinking about that. Sugar snaps require support, which is beyond what I can think about right now. So do the tomatoes, but we have tomato cages from last year.

What else is missing? Wood to frame the beds. Cedar Supply is cutting up rough 2x6s for us and we'll pick them up this afternoon. I'm trying to decide if we can get away without cutting away the sod if we lay thick strata of newspaper and cardboard, topped with weed barrier, beneath each of the beds.

And here's the primary garden helper, who loves raspberries and will pick them for herself:

We don't currently have any raspberries. She probably likes strawberries, too. We're pondering this situation: it's one reason we find the square-foot gardening concept appealing. Because of the modular nature of the beds, we could make wire cages to set over the plants to limit the self-sufficient tendencies of certain critters. Although this helper is quite capable, she would probably need to ask us to grant her access to the strawberry beds (she probably, although not for certain, couldn't lift the cover off herself). We don't mind sharing. She would, however, cheerfully and daintily eat every morsel.

Our gardening assistant is ever-so-fond of the back yard even without anything other than grass to nibble on, and even though she can no longer get up the stairs by herself (that's why she wears a harness, so we can give her a little extra support when she needs to climb). She will be happy if we spend more time in the yard, even if we don't grow any berries for her this year.

Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair: Ideas slowly into action

Last year I went to the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair, biking back and forth, and I've been looking forward to this year's event ever since. Nothing earthshaking or of immediate import happened last year, but I had a fine "day off" and learned about new things that I've slowly but surely been able to implement. Same sense this year.

One of my goals is to get solar panels on my house. So far, I haven't been able to find a way to afford them. (Fantasy: a booth with a sign that says, "You provide the roof. We provide the power." There was an outfit that was close to that offer last year, which worked because the excess power was sold by the panel-provider back to the grid, although the start-up costs were still beyond my budget.)

Another connection I located last year provides locally recycled printer cartridges. I've recently managed to shift to using their products in my printers—it takes a while to make such a change. Part of making this particular shift involved connecting with the suppliers when they're open . . . no weekend hours, and my weekdays are pretty crammed with work. So are my weekends, come to think of it. . . .

Recently I read in Edible Front Range about SPIN farming, the use of suburban land that would ordinarily be covered with lawn for the production of food. SPIN in this case stands for Small Plot Intensive farming. My type of spinning involves fiber, but this kind is extremely intriguing as well. There's no way that I have time to take on a major gardening project (beyond my plants on the deck), but I'd sure rather look at a garden than deal with so-called lawn, which isn't an appropriate use of space or water in a semi-arid climate.

The article mentioned that the initial steps of such a project were being undertaken in the city where I live, although there was no contact name. After reading through the property-providers' guidelines for the Boulder project (our space qualifies), I e-mailed Kipp Nash, who is coordinating the Boulder efforts, who forwarded my message to someone in our county offices here who is just at the initial stages of developing a resource list of interested people. She asked if I'd be willing to be a guinea pig on a collaborative mapping project, I said yes, and our site is the first on the list of available spaces. However, it's hard to tell how long it will take the local interest to reach critical mass since so far there are only about seven people on the mailing list for the mapping.

While at the fair, I was talking with my friend (and fellow shape-note singer) Hill, who is spearheading a local food project called the Northern Colorado Food Incubator. (I wish there was a similar business-support effort for very small publishers: I could use it.)

Our conversation naturally came to the point that anyone who wants to start this type of farming in our area needs to be locating space and beginning to prepare the soil and plan crops now if they have any hope of getting it off the ground (pun intended) next year. Hill's on the county-person's guinea-pig list for the development of the map and knew that I was interested in this. We talked about accelerating the communication to see if we can jumpstart the effort. I'm going to be sending him info on our space and he's going to send it to his mailing list and we'll see if anyone bites.

Maybe by the time of the fair next year we'll have instigated a bit more change in the local food scene. . . . Hill's effort is already well on track. I'd like to be part of a parallel project, while continuing primary work on my own passion of writing and publishing and textiles.

A whole lot of potential:

A whole lot of potential from another direction:

It might look pretty much the same next year. It might not.

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Three days a week, I leave my office and spend a couple of hours at a coffee shop or the library, where I can focus on one or another task without many interruptions. On Monday mornings, the coffee shop of choice is part of a renovated building that contains offices with a shared receptionist in the front lobby. The receptionist puts a different quote in a frame on her desk every day. Here's today's, which seems like a particularly appropriate follow-up to the overall atmosphere at the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Fair:

• "Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)

Garden report, computer ?, and ah, nice fiber

This morning there's fall in the air. It's time for a garden-such-as-it-is report.

Last week I noticed that we are not the only creatures who enjoy our plants in pots. This beastie darted in and out brazenly. Usually the squirrels taunt the dogs by racing along the tops of the fences, out of reach. Squirrels in our neighborhood tend to be well fed. My next-door neighbor took early retirement about ten years ago in order to spend his days throwing them peanuts.

The most satisfying plant that we have been tending has been the Sun Sugar tomato. We've had a small handful of fruits daily. As the summer has progressed, they have tasted better and better. The ones in this photo aren't fully ripe. We've already plucked and eaten everything that was. But a couple of those guys in the back are close. We're trying not to hover too close and block the sunlight.

Second best has been the Husky Red. It's yielded ten or twelve nice tomatoes that have tasted great, and lots more are in the offing, weather permitting.

The Cherokee Purple has been teaching us a lot. First, we have only had a few tomatoes and we've had to trim the bad parts out of those. The fruits that are on the plant now and almost ripe all have serious splits in them. I don't know enough about tomatoes to know what causes splits, but I'm guessing irregular growth patterns due to rain/sun quantities. They taste just fine.

There are a gratifying number of fruits on the vine that have not split and may, or may not, have time to ripen before we lose this year's growing season.

We've made several batches of pesto and one of basil-tomato hummus from the standard basil.

And the Thai basil matured into a small but gorgeous plant. We need to use its leaves!

We've been pinching the flowers, but they're just so pretty against the green. . . .

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Computer

This morning I spent another 1.5 hours on the phone with Adobe tech support.

The good news is that I'm not hallucinating. The support guy ran through options with me, quickly ticking off ideas that I'd thought of and tried, and then had me transfer the book file to his desk via FTP. I ran it through an interchange export/import maneuver first; that process is intended to clean out file glitches.

When it arrived on his desk, the file misbehaved for him just as it's been misbehaving for me. Fixing the InDesign problems will not solve all my computer problems, or maybe it will, but at the very least we know some of my problems are InDesign-related and are independent of my computer. His primary comment, repeatedly, was, "WEIRD."

So that was good. I think. It's not just me. If I'm crazy, it's not with regard to seeing computer problems that don't exist.

I told him that I may have messed something up in the style specs, but if I did (1) I couldn't find the problem and (2) I'd be both embarrassed (for overlooking it) and grateful, because I could get my work done again. I said the gratitude would definitely outweigh the embarrassment.

We both tested options on our separate desktops, comparing notes on the phone line about what was happening (same results on both systems), until he declared himself stumped and in need of a consultation with some other folks. He's supposed to call me back.

So I shifted computers for a while. I figured out half of what I need to know to get the laptop (running Fedora) to recognize the new wireless modem. The laptop now appears to "see" the wireless network. However, I have at least one of the settings entered wrong (I don't know which) and can't get the connection to activate yet.

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While waiting for the file to transfer on FTP, I combed a bit of wool. It's so satisfying to comb wool. You start. You finish. It's pretty. It's absolutely a dream to spin.

While doing this I just have to focus on the wool and resist the temptation to fall on my combs sword over the computer problems. In any case, falling on one's sword is supposed to be connected to atonement for wrongdoing. I can't figure out what I might have done wrong in this situation. Other than risk everything I've worked for in my life to build an independent business that depends on computers.

I'm glad the whole problem rests at least temporarily in Adobe's hands, and I do hope they call back with a solution. Soon.

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Meanwhile I plan to take a short, restorative nap (late to bed, early to rise). I'll nap with the phone next to me in case of a tech-support callback. Then I can work on some of the illustrations, on which progress has been delayed by the technology-wrangling. As long as Photoshop and Illustrator don't crash (they have been crashing, too).

Nap.

Tomatoes and sweater ribbing

Here's a photo of the tomatoes as we were leaving on our trip:

We had a few of the little orange ones for breakfast before we left, and we took two big red ones with us. It was so nice to get into the motel last night and have fresh tomatoes from our garden as a before-bedtime snack.

Here's a close-up of the ribbing under discussion in yesterday's post and comments. The buttons are just from the mismatch box, laid on top of the fabric; I'll be doing some button-browsing on this trip:

Now it's time to pack the car.

Mini-garden progress for July 21

It's time to check in with our gardening experiment. While I've happily gardened elsewhere, I've found this semi-arid climate incompatible with my natural horticultural style. However, with my daughter's enabling enthusiasm, we are trying again.

Here are the three tomato plants, as of today:

They have managed to grow quite a bit since June 27, and for comparison there's the first set of photos from June 2. In particular, the Cherokee Purple (closest pot) has finally shot up to be nearly as tall as its neighbors (buddies?).

We've been nibbling from the Sun Sugar plant since not long after we took its protective cover off, although we haven't gotten more than a half-dozen ripe fruits in a single day. The plant itself seems to be reaching toward the sky.  That link says that although it can be happy in a container, it sometimes likes to grow to 6 or 7 feet (about 2 m), and based on its behavior on our deck that's easy to believe.

The Husky Red's working on producing clusters of fruits that we'll need to pluck out quickly as they ripen in order to make room for the adjacent orbs. That's our first near-harvest tomato on the plant:

And we've gotten past flower stage with the Cherokee Purple as well:

Over the weekend, we had a couple of 100-degree days back to back that left plants and people a bit less perky than usual (that's about 38 degrees C).

The basils didn't seem to mind much as much as the rest of us. The regular basils are whomping right along; the Thai basil (almost hiding on the right) is less enthusiastic in general.

I'm looking forward to that glowing Husky Red up there. I think we'll just slice it and eat it plain, like we've been doing for the little orange guys. Later in the season I expect we'll start putting tomatoes into salads and sandwiches. But not the first ones.

Gardening progress

As counterbalance to the scurf post, here are some photos of our experimental mini-garden, as well as some old-friend roses (and a few weeds).

We've taken off the tomatoes' protective covers:

We've even had a few of the little orange tomatoes to eat already.

Here's the basil, beginning to look sturdy and like it might support future pesto-making, especially that one on the left:

These red roses represent a number of bushes that have survived (and thrived) despite intermittent care over the years.

I've pulled out the thistle and bindweed at lower right. Pulling thistle and bindweed is one of the primary, unending tasks of gardening in this area. One of the most stalwart organic gardeners I've met suggested that these persistent noxious weeds warrant chemical attack, but I haven't been able to bring myself to do that (it's not like the chemicals work any better than pulling anyway, as far as research indicates). So I pull, and pull, and. . . .

My personal rose bush offered a few blossoms this week:

It has incredibly nasty thorns (small, plentiful) everywhere, so pruning it is always a challenge, and it sends up long stalks that need a bit of pruning, in addition to having some dead canes that need to come out. But the blooms are, in my opinion, exquisite and worth the sting:

I usually like single roses. Maybe some day I'll get some planted in the yard. Meanwhile, I do love this one. And it's definitely as sturdy as a plant needs to be to hang on in my garden. It's an Autumn Damask.

I think I like my roses to have as much history as my fibers. One of the links I found says this rose has been grown since 1000 B.C.E.  Another says it was bred "before 1600." In any case, it's been around for a while.

Those hands look awfully familiar . . .

Spinning cotton and cigar-box charkhas

The new issue of Spin-Off (Summer 2008) arrived yesterday. It's got a lot of good stuff in it. One of the especially good things is Carol Rhoades' article on colored cottons. As I was reading it, I noticed a photograph with the caption, "A cigar-box charkha is a portable spinning tool—perfect for spinning cotton on the go."

My first thought was that the cigar-box charkha looked like an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time, and I wondered if someone had submitted a photo of a charkha built from Marilyn Sult's instructions (published in one of the Spin-Off articles I edited a lot of years ago).

Then I thought, "That wrist bone looks awfully familiar."

The photo's printed kind of small. But . . . "Yeah, and the hands do, too."

My daughter walked in.

I said, "Take a look at this photo."

She glanced down.

"You don't wear that watch any more. That's your old one."

So there I was in Spin-Off again, demonstrating Marilyn's very own cigar-box charkha during a photo shoot to illustrate the original article.

1. The original article
2. The new article

Carol spun her colored cottons for this new article not on a cigar-box charkha but on a Bosworth attache charkha, a Timbertops Irish castle wheel, and a Greensleeves spindle.

They're all terrific tools. Timbertops wheels were available in 1996. I don't think the other spinning devices she used were.

If anyone's interested in building a cigar-box charkha, though, the detailed instructions are in the Winter 1996 issue. There's a series of three articles: "Cigar-box Charkha," by Marilyn Rishel Sult, and "Charkha Theory" and "The Charkha Road," which explain what I learned while building a charkha according to Marilyn's plans with the bits and pieces I could find locally. (Marilyn had a workshop full of collected miscellanea and tools to draw on. The article grew out of a meeting at Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. Interweave has Marilyn's article online as a free PDF. The two supplementary articles are not included. There's a lot of useful information in them.)

It was one of the most complicated, and most satisfing, tech-editing jobs I've ever undertaken. I spent a lot of time at Downtown Ace Hardware, sitting on the floor, looking in the parts bins for objects that could be subverted to my intentions.

1 The Winter 1996 issue of Spin-Off
2 The Summer 2008 issue of Spin-Off

If you want a challenging project and you're at least mildly mechanically inclined, find the old issue and make yourself a charkha. It's terrific fun and I'm proud of what I made.

If you just want to start spinning cotton immediately, check out the tools other people offer—there are many more choices now than there were in 1996.

I now also have an Alden Amos mini-T-frame charkha that I love to use.

Reading: Burundi and Kazakhstan

While appreciating the fact that I am fortunate enough to have dirt to plant vegetables and flowers in, whether that dirt is predominantly clay or not, I've been reading a couple of books about places where people live in harsh circumstances. Both come from independent presses: the University of Texas Press and Atlas & Co.

The copy of the University of Texas book that I found lacks the flash-and-neon of most contemporary nonfiction titles (shown on the left in both photos). Here's a slightly more revealing picture that includes its spine:

It's From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years during Genocide, by Robert Krueger and Kathleen Tobin Krueger, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu (the web link shows its dustjacket, missing from the copy I read). My daughter recently sat next to Kathleen Krueger on a long plane flight  and on a call home she mentioned the book to me. Based on what she said, I requested it through interlibrary loan.

When the Kruegers were posted to Burundi, they fell in love with the people and the country even though horrendous events were occurring. Sometimes the only thing a person can do in the face of the unthinkable is bear clear witness. They did that, with humanity and wisdom, and now they've told the story in a format that can reach general audiences. There are pictures here in both words and photographs that I didn't want to have to hear or look at, and that I don't find easy to talk about, but the way the experiences were conveyed cherishes and honors some people who have not had anywhere near enough cherishing and honor . . . and also tells when, where, how, and by whom those people have been betrayed. It's an extraordinary book by two exceptional people.

The other book is Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared, by Chistopher Robbins. Robbins is a British writer who spent enough time in Kazakhstan to be able to talk about the history and the current situation. Each chapter unfolded a variety of surprising discoveries about this complex and promising nation. It's a book I was in no hurry to finish, because I enjoyed its company. Much of the story of Kazakhstan is problematic, especially many vestiges of its Soviet years. Yet the people are obviously by and large (and allowing for the human variability that's everywhere, of course) intelligent, versatile, and creative. (I haven't seen "Borat," which apparently displays almost zero knowledge of the real Kazakhstan.)

Thanks to Donna for the recommendation, and I hope the friend of mine who will be spending July in Kazakhstan will have a wonderful time there. It sounds like a culturally rich and diverse place.

And apples really are from Kazakhstan.

A small adventure in gardening

I've gardened successfully in other places I've lived—especially the Northwest and New England—and I grew up in the Midwest, where dirt was dirt and manure was plentiful, especially in a family that owned a few hundred (older-style) Holsteins. In all the years I've lived in Colorado, I've made efforts at gardening and have only about a ten percent success rate in the changes I've attempted to make. Our soil is clay (impenetrable when dry), water is scarce, and heat beats down in the summer (except usually when hail is falling, although sometimes we get the heat and the hail simultaneously).

What's worked okay here: Mexican evening primrose; Russian sage (which the bees adore . . . we need to be careful opening the car door on that side of the driveway); a few roses (the Louis Gimard is my daughter's; the Autumn Damask is mine; our 'The Fairy' bushes are very willing, even here); the lilac; a spirea; junipers. My daughter's creeping phlox comes back for more abuse by heat and drought every year. Despite more sun than they'd like, the sweet woodruff and creeping thyme show up again every spring. I think last year's catmint is still there, but I'm not sure about the yarrows yet. The rock roses came back. The blue flax is weedy but benign.

(Also weedy and not benign are the officially noxious plants, bindweed and thistle, which a serious organic gardener suggested attacking with poison; I continue to remove them manually, which is really boring).

We've got two crabapples, one of which was here and one that volunteered in not-the-greatest location, but it was happy and the positioning was not totally impossible so we left it.

There's a small area of the back yard, right behind the garage and almost under the deck, that has a bit of shade. The mints are happy there, and for years we have snipped mint and chives (less enthusiastic but recurring) for cooking. The lamium's okay back there, and so's some of the hyssop we've planted. The irises sometimes like it here and sometimes don't. It's a challenge to keep the grasses from invading their space.

Up front again, the true oregano (that I got as a start from an Italian friend and at-the-time co-worker whose plot was overrunning itself) is ecstatic with its dry spot next to the driveway and we just let it take over. We have one well-established sorrel plant growing between a couple of pavers. Its predecessors were planted in the garden, but got weeded out by a helper one year.

What's failed: berries (raspberries, gooseberries, strawberries), other herbs, other perennials I've liked that are supposed to be okay here, including most of the penstemons (which are reputed to be comfortable in our climate and soil), and even the state flower, the columbine. The two birch-like trees that were here when we arrived should probably be taken out. They're ailing sadly. I'd like to replace them, perhaps with a linden or a honeylocust that would give us more shade during the summer. Then again, I give them credit for persevering at all . . . and replacing trees, even smallish ones, is beyond our budget right now. So they continue to limp along.

You'd think with steady trials over years the yards, front and back, would not still look about 75 percent neglected.

I don't have much money or time to put into this effort, but I do miss having a garden that feels like a garden. I feel like a wuss for not having been able to get what I consider the minimal gardening results together in this locale. I've been here a long time. I've read about xeriscaping and visited demonstration gardens. The gardening prospects haven't gotten more appealing with the years. This combination of soil, precipitation, climate has almost stumped me. If I could build raised beds and fill them with good dirt and compost, I think I'd have a chance. But that takes a both money and time to set up.

Nonetheless, yesterday we bought:

• Three tomato plants at the farmer's market: one each of Cherokee Purple, Sun Sugar, and Husky Red
• Two basil plants, one regular and one Thai (more basil to come; we can never have enough basil . . . or garlic, but that's another topic)
• Three 14-inch plastic pots (plastic to conserve moisture) for the tomatoes
• Three 10-inch plastic pots for the basil (because there will be more basil later)
• Three tomato cages
• Potting soil (because the dirt in our yard isn't dirt)

The farmer's market gardener we got the tomatoes from had a lot of heirloom varieties and it was really hard to choose. He described his varieties well, but we've been eating the store varieties so long we don't know how to tell what we might like: more or less acid? sweeter or less so? color? shape? "Homegrown" will probably cover our requirements for now. We decided on three radically different types of tomatoes by almost random guessing. There's a purple heirloom that's supposed to have great flavor, a yellow cherry tomato that should be abundant and very sweet, and an all-around red tomato for sandwiches and tabbuli and the like.

We will also be getting:

• Additional basil
• Marigolds, and something to plant them in

I remember from somewhere in the recesses of my brain that basil, tomatoes, and marigolds look pretty together and the combination does something about keeping pests at bay.

This is primarily my daughter's project, although I'm pitching in with some of the investment in pots and plants and a lot of encouragement. We both love real tomatoes. And we envision batches of pesto frozen in small containers to get us through next winter.

The pots are now on the back deck where we can see and enjoy them. They have good dirt in them (because it's not from the yard). The challenge we'll have is making sure they get watered daily because the pots will dry out faster than the ground (or maybe not, since the ground is almost always dry).

A wonderful friend who has acquired much wisdom in her travels and gardens beautifully in Colorado suggests that we get some water-holding polymer crystals and work them into the soil around the plants' roots. That's on the list for tomorrow. She also says to stay small in our efforts (very welcome advice). She has some suggestions as well for next year, which I look forward to implementing.

That thought is predicated on success this year. Here's a picture of hope:

(Yes, the dirt in that front pot has become deeper since the photo was taken . . . we had to get another big bag of soil. And yes, the plant also rose within the pot so the "deeper" part is down where the roots need to be able to expand.)

Anybody who feels inspired is invited to send us good gardening thoughts.