The Artist Presently Known As Ed

Compost

On a few occasions I had to get compost to get the new garden going, or to refresh it each year. Miramar landfill has a great compost program that's cheap. You can load it yourself for free, or for a bit more money, get the skiploader to dump a cubic yard into your truck. I've done that a few times. It makes my truck feel pretty wobbly but I know the surface roads to home. I just have to remember to expose the looped straps that extend the usefulness of the truck bed's corner eyehooks. Not doing so means it can be rather hard to get the tarp tied down!

A note on Miramar's compost: get the premium stuff that has been cooked out and turned the most. The lesser stuff is tempting but I got one load that turned my garden into a patch of grass that was a devil to weed all over again!

Filling the beds

At the first major garden at Calabrese West, Nancy designed the garden and chose stuff. Phil, Kelli, and I were part of conversations and we four did the work of getting the place going. Nancy chose premium soil from City Heights nursery and had it dumped in the driveway. Phil and I wheelbarrowed it back to the yard. The ladies smoothed it out and mixed in the chicken shit and worm castings.

Phil the foreman

Phil "supervising" Nancy's project.

Bed prep with barriers

I think Phil was a bit off in his planning for how to kill the grass. Rather than lay out a full yard of black plastic to solarize the grass to death, he put some of the fiberous weed barrier sheeting beneath the beds and the plastic around them. I argued that the white stuff should be doubled up on the bottom of the bed, and pulled tight almost like we were making a drum. Once set right side down, I said the weeds would have a hard time getting through two layers that were so closely fastened to the wooden bed. But there was a bit of silliness in how it was done. There were indeed weeds coming up at the edges of the beds. It wasn't my garden so I lost that one.

Chickenshit

Chickens are damned useful, aren't they? Good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and gardening too!

Kelli worming

Kelli and I went to the City Heights nursery and spent some time digging for worms. It was a nice eye opening thing to be a kid again. We spent an hour at this squash plant.

Ed worming

I'm not even sure that one must import worms, but it certainly helps. I never did the worm thing at the next garden but it was quite happily populated with them. Maybe it was that we were using raised beds with bottom side barriers?

Planting

We planted on June 12, 2006. Tomatoes, jalapenos, yellow and paddy pan squash, chinese eggplant, herbs, green beans, cucumbers, anaheim chiles. 

Tomato starter

Tomatoes are always a joy. The plants in this garden seemed to take a long time before they fruited. I think we planted a bit on the late side.

Herbs

Rosemary, thyme, basil, chives, sage, oregano, and some others.

Herb screen

We put up a sun screen that did at least part time relief work for the fragile plants.

Starters

Looks like the squash and what else?

Bean box

We had three or four bean plants that got to be a total delight. I enjoyed eating them off the vine. The beans were the clear winners in terms of productivity in this garden. Cucumbers were also successful.

Beans on the vine

This was like digging for gold every day. And finding it. We had two households to share it with, but it was a very beany summer.

Giant beans

I learned to like beans that summer. In particular, since Nancy was sort of like a mom to me for a while, going to parties and other smaller dinners with she and Phil (especially while we lived next door to them), she influenced my interest in cooking. She did this nice pan fried (sort of like you'd do with a wok) beans and garlic dish that still is a favorite. Toss in a bit of water to sweat them after some pan time blackened some spots, and bon appetit.

Beans to scale

Yup. Giant beans as big as my hand.

One day's sample

I never liked squash or eggplant so I didn't touch the stuff or cook it. But the other stuff was always a treat.

Anaheim chile

I liked these for the subtle flavor they added to dishes.

Cukes

Kelli likes cucumbers but wasn't able to keep up with them all.

Drip irrigation

Phil's best contribution came in the form of his drip irrigation system. But even that was Phil-ified in that he was reusing components of an older system that was rather leaky at points in the hose. We used to have to get a bucket to conserve the stuff that got out in greater volume than what was intentionally released by the system!

Squash on the vine

I never liked squash or the idea of squash, but when they are like this, I do have to admit they are nice things to behold. Not even my three years at a veggie wholesaler turned me to the dark side of squash. 

Tomatoes on their way

The tomatoes kept us waiting but they did pay off.

Nashville compost day

A year later at a new house, we started off our own garden. Tara and Kalyn from church helped us dig out the plot of its grass and weeds, and I got the compost from City Heights nursery. It was the last time I did that. Not because of the quality, but that it was rather expensive and the Miramar landfill stuff turned out to be just fine once I tried it.

Nashville weeding

The house was left unattended for some long time and was fallow. The yard was grassy and weedy, but the garden plot was a bit better. Still there was all sorts of junk that we found embedded in the area, including carpet door mats that might have been for a walkway. The soil was relatively light and once the grass was dug out and the dirt shaken loose, it seemed nice. We added the truck's compost right away and blended it with worm shit and chicken shit like the year before.

Weapons of grass destruction

I call it the "Attitude Adjuster." I wish I had it during the 2007 start up of the Nashville garden but it came later on, maybe in 2008 or later. We did not use any powered gear to till the soil. No pesticides but for the organic stuff.

Tomatoes!

Some have heard me tell the story about the day after I got canned at work for a BS job that said I was great at what I did but was not content to let me do it without sabotaging my schedule with all sorts of other jobs I had no business doing. After just over six months, they canned me. It was the fourth time I'd been set free since I returned to "normal" work in 2002. (The first two were layoffs due to the county not having funds to keep the senior meals programs going the same way.) I drove home rather pissed that I was again jobless during a period that Kelli was in school and without income. After having claimed unemployment following the two jobs prior to this one, I was not so foreign to the feeling and knew the ropes. Within an hour of being dismissed from the job on August 9th, 2007, I was at home and had completed my new unemployment claim form. 

The following day, shaped by that odd free but guilty feeling of not working while everyone else is, I took my basket and fetched the tomatoes that were filling the garden with their lovely color. They were a bit on the late side, considering the long overcast mornings we had down in that area. But by the time this was going on, they were amazing. I was out in the sun, blissfully inspecting the garden, and I felt a kind of welcome in the universe. It wasn't based on my being a good employee or not, or even on my being employed. It wasn't rooted to anything I did or was. The tomatoes just offered me their presence in spite of myself. As hard as I worked for one job or another did not matter. It didn't even seem to matter that I was a hack gardener who hardly knew anything about the stuff. The tomatoes validated me at a deep level that day. They accepted me for who I was, and I understood it as being a message on behalf of the universe. It was definitely a spiritual moment.

Nashville late 2008

By the late part of 2008, we were past two summer seasons at Nashville and were fancying ourselves a bit better at the art of gardening. We availed ourselves of a nursery nearby and got some tools or organic pesticides as needed. Kelli had a scheme for starting from seed and she took care of those young'uns and got them into the ground.

Nashville beanstalk

The beans did not generally do as well at Nashville as at Calabrese West. There was one exception though and it did the work of a couple plants. This thing shot up so that I could not reach the top even when on a 5' ladder! We were almost at a loss for how to stake it but we got some bamboo from Phil and fabricated a pyramid.

Nashville strawberries

In 2007 we planted strawberries but got only a few. I guess they take a year to get ready to produce. The next year though, the plant had expanded. I was not so fond of the strawberries there, so we cut the plant back for the 2009 season.

Nashville beans

I can't tell what year this was taken but it might be 2007. Over the years we had a bunch of stuff: red cabbage (fail); chard (runaway success); strawberries; lettuce; broccoli (good when young, except for the cabbage worms that we had to be vigilant against); jalapenos; bell peppers; a couple varieties of tomatoes; rosemary, oregano, basil, mint (still there a year and more after we left); shallots; green onions. Those were the intentional items. One year after getting a mess of greens and veggies from work and mixing them into the compost, some of that compost got mixed in prematurely. We ended up getting a volunteer cantalope that was not really that great to eat, and also got a very nice treat with some hardy little mixed color cherry tomatoes.

Last peppers from Nashville

Now here's where it gets interesting. Thanks to our landlords being screwoffs that let our house get into foreclosure (after we paid them faithfully for over 2.5 years) we decided to leave in October 2009, just after the third gardening season. Suzanne, our roommate there and before that at Calabrese West, stayed behind. She was using the granny flat attached to the garage. We all split the $1800 rent evenly. When we left, the landlords kept Suzanne there and let her pay only her $600 share for the entire place. When they lost the house, they had already written Suzanne a lease at that amount and the bank that took over was legally bound to honor that lease. So she stayed there until June 2011 when that deal expired.

During that time, Kelli or I still visited Suzanne as friends and sometimes she enlisted us to do yard work (Suzanne has MD and uses a chair, and for all she can do, yard work isn't part of that). So we got there time and time again after leaving as residents. The garden was something Suzanne visited but did not cultivate (it was outside her door). It did some good work in 2010 when the sun returned. She'd pick tomatoes and some other things that hung on through the winter with no care. 

Finally, this shot is from March 2011, a year and a half after we left. The garden was losing out to the grass and weeds. With just a few exceptions, it was done for. This was the last bell pepper. It wasn't looking good anymore. I got this pic before carrying on with the mowing. But it too spoke to me of hope and determination to live.

Tenacious mint

This picture was taken months after the bell pepper one. Since Suzanne was finally leaving over a year and a half after we did, and since it was going to the bank, she offloaded stuff she had collected while there, and even gave us a chance to go in and strip out everything of even marginal value. We cleaned it out. Fixtures, curtains, knobs, whatever might be useful.

While outside, I was again moved by the steadfastness of the garden. The mint is hardy. I don't remember seeing it while cutting the lawn in March, but here it was in June, bigger than it had been in a while. I hope it never gets taken out.

Chives in bloom

The chives too, right next to the mint, were still proclaiming their zest for life. They didn't know or care about the comings of humans. They didn't need our management to be the flowering, hopeful plants that they are designed to be. Another spiritual lesson.

After that, we have no ties to the house on Nashville.