Garden ready

 Wes Groff rototilled my garden . The fee was $45. I tipped him $5. Freedom begins at the end of a hoe. Your freedom ends at the end of mine. What is this power discourse?

A garden gives all the freedom I want.

sweet potato harvest in the lot

The neighbors are harvesting their sweet potatoes in our lot, where in the 1950s my parents had a garden.  A team of horses pulled a shovel beneath the row and brought to light the several varieties.  Next they pulled them to the top of the mound to dry before packing them.

first corn picking

Here's the first picking of my sweet corn this week.  On May 26 I planted 4 rows of Butter and Sweet.  Maturity was supposed to be 75 later.  But I picked it 70 days later and it was a little too old.  We froze this picking here and got 8 pints of frozen.  There's nothing quite like walking down your rows of corn the first picking.  Three weeks after May 26 I planted 4 more rows, to spread out the harvest.

tulips search for something

A bit late this spring, but when they had the nerve to open they were as resplendent as ever--the tulips by the pump.  Yesterday Groff rototilled the garden, so no more pretending the earth is sleeping.

Chanticleer

Seventy-five minutes away, in the Wayne-St. David, Pa., area, we spent three hours strolling around Chanticleer. (scroll down on the link and see the rooster we stumbled upon).  There are themes of water and art imitating nature.  One pedestrian bridge is made in the form of a fallen tree.  Bees and butterflies had long ago found this sanctuary, which a London newspaper describes as "planted to perfection."

thistles, beauty and beast

Thistles get a bad rap in morals stories.  It's a bad intruder into the garden.  It hurts to pull them, but it's a joy to look when they blossom.  And their seeds, each outfitted in down, look like they dance away from the pod.  If you like honey you have to let your bees forage somewhere.  So, to spray to not to spray was the question for me today.  The photogenic ones here I left stand--for a while anyways.

dry days

The newly planted sweet potato plants in our rented lot are getting the soaker hose this season of dry and 90-degree days.

brother waters potatoes

Today my brother took me along to his garden plot in the county park.  He took along several gallons of water and fed it to his sweet potatoes and regular potatoes.  There are about 300 plots available.  The office said not all were rented this year.

garden prep

I rototilled the garden and the squash triangle across the road yesterday evening at 5:00. As usual, I rented Groffie's tractor, which this year turned out to be a new one. Kubota was founded in Osaka, Japan, in 1890. Revenues in 2008 were 12.6 billion.

killing frost

This Wednesday at 6 a.m. the outside thermometer registered 12 degrees. I had to scrape ice off windshields. That's a killing frost. Tell that to the Swiss chard still standing unshielded in the garden. Some of my friends don't like the way the Swiss voted on minarets. But you gotta give it to the Swiss for having hardy chard.

harvest by the wheelbarrow

Neck pumpkins just harvested from Joel and Stephanie's patch. From three original plants, here's about three-quarters of the total. From garden to wheelbarrow to kitchen to pie to oven to stomach. You know what makes America helpful to the world? Here's one thing that started here.

potato harvest

Ah, one of the sweet moments of home gardening. Dumping all your potatoes out like candy from trick-or-treating. Seeing the loot. I put 10 pounds of potato seed in the ground and I got back 125 pounds. That's better than a twelve fold increase. The first basket gets the biggest ones, and on down to the last basket of midgets. This year more green ones than usual: I couldn't hoe up the rows as high as I usually do because they had been planted too close.

garden revolution

July 1 is when I can lose interest and let weeds take over. I'm not quitting on these guys yet.

Foreground, peas ready for the second picking. Then potatoes, having lost their flowers last week. The corn has just put out its silk. There's the Swiss chard and tomatoes with yellow buds.

My lame-brain theory of the day. What Yankee gardener in 1776 would pick July 4 for a revolution? The ones who wanted out of garden chores? Or, the ones who couldn't stand to have red coats taking what they wanted. It was a pea-pickin' revolution.

gadget in lot

This spring this contraption appeared beside the tulip poplar tree, on the stump of the wild cherry. It regulates the irrigation of the vegetables in the lot across the road.

nature's way

The garden's the thing these May days. I check out the peas first thing daily because I'm trying peas after at least eight years of giving up on them. Soil, natural, garden--all words of great virtue. But if you go for nature you have to take the whole thing, including dead creatures.

What was it? Dad robin bringing the first worm of the day back to the nest and flying just a little too low across the road and stunned? A pesticide-laced morning dew drink?

intruder in garden

Last night some horses traipsed through the garden, crushing some plants. Here are four lettuce plants off to a good start. The step in the middle has toppled one. I asked a neighbor, who noticed hoof prints in other fields nearby, but the culprits are still unknown.

first plants

The first planting in the garden was done Saturday by Joel and Steph. Here's Mr. Stripey standing proud. Steph photo

prep garden

Day before Easter I used Groffie's rototiller to work up the garden. This year with uncertain economics, we're using a small portion of the lot across the road, too. Joel photo.

paw paw tree

Contractor John Thomas planted a paw paw tree on Friday, close to the cherry trees. That's his pickup in the driveway. Shortly after this shot the burlap was removed.

The paw paw is native to somewhere American. My mother planted one in about 1980 but it never bore fruit. Local people here, particularly Pennsylvania German types, think of it as a local wonder. It appears to be related to the plum. The fruit is tropical, as exotic as you can get in the temperate clines where winter freezes out fancy notions plants get in their heads at the end of a languorous summer of lavish living.

Having just listened to the audio version of the Stephen Ambroise book on the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1805, I learned that Lewis identified a plant west of the Mississippi as a paw paw. I'll let wikipedia sort that out for now. It is native. It is not hybrid fancy.

Notice freshely rototilled garden behind wheelbarrow--which is another wheel for my Eby Road catalog of wheels.

what I do--Monday

Let go of that stress. Borrow the neighbor's rototiller and do the garden. Call my son. He bikes by and we have an ancestral-agricultural moment. Photo by Joel.