Words&Dirt

They tell me spring doesn’t start “officially” until March 20th, but I think that most people feel spring more than they mark it off on the calendar.  Between alternating heavy rain and lengthening sunny days, Humboldt is coming back to life with undeniable vigor.  And while this place stays green pretty much year-round, there’s a special satisfaction that comes with watching deciduous trees regain their leaves and perennial shrubs suddenly burst forth with flowers of every shape and color.  For my part, I may be enjoying this process more than ever before.  While I’ve lived here for many springs, never have I made the effort to be as attentive to it as I am now, and never have I invested so much time and energy into helping plants prepare for and grow through this expansive season.

I try to stay squarely delighted by all the new growth, but it would be misleading if I neglected to mention that it also feels intimidating at times.  With every new bud, there is something new to care for, something fresh and vulnerable to check and maintain.  And while I realize that a good gardener puts together systems that are as self-sustaining as possible in order to maximize growth and cut down labor, I also know that I’m still very far off from possessing that kind of savvy.  Some days I stumble out to the garden in a daze, unable to take in the rapid proliferation, much of which I feel somehow responsible for.  It appears a great sport of give and take, of intervene here and let be there––expedition and equilibrium.  I’m not yet a competent player, but it’s a thrill to be invited to the game.

The first particular activity I want to mention today has actually been happening in the kitchen, not the garden.  The experiences of making goat cheese from scratch and roasting my own coffee have led me to an interest in making bread, so recently I spent some time to learn about it from Amy Dougan.  She is a long-time family friend and something of a surrogate mother to me, so it felt natural to learn a useful skill from her.  She uses Jim Lahey’s My Bread, a neat little treatise on how to make delicious bread with minimal commitment of time and effort.

The book and newly made dough

Lahey’s no-knead method involves mixing ingredients into dough, then leaving it to rise for 12-18 hours (longer is fine too).  When the bread is done rising, you mold it into the shape you want, dust it with whatever topping you want for the crust (flour, corn meal, rye, etc.), and then leave it to rise for another 1-2 hours.  Then all you have to do is bake it using an “oven within an oven” strategy (I use Ma’s 5-gallon Lodge cast iron pot).  The result is an absolutely scrumptious loaf as tasty as most artisanal bread you can buy at your local bakery.  I’ve only made the wheat bread so far, but look forward to trying other recipes.  Special thanks to Amy for teaching me and sharing Lahey’s book.

Yum!

Out in our embryonic orchard, I’ve transplanted another tree that wasn’t in a very good spot.  It’s a nice looking pear tree that has never fruited, so hopefully with some nourishment and extra sunlight we can get it producing.  I planted it near our new frost peach, which is just starting to sport some gorgeous pink flowers.

New spot

The pear and frost peach together

Another small project was helping our strawberries emerge from their winter shelter of nutrients and rice straw.  For each bed, we took off the rice straw and weeded thoroughly.  After just a few days in the sunlight, the strawberries have started busting out big time.  All that horse manure we covered them with in the fall seems to have done its job of helping to fertilize the soil.

I fixed up this bed, but Ma did the other two

Vegetable planting really begins to get serious in March, and this morning Ma and I were direct seeding as well as transplanting starts into one of our new beds.  I planted half a bed of beet seeds, and also planted some cabbage and cauliflower starts (purchased at Miller Farms), as well as half of our broccoli starts from the greenhouse.  The broccoli starts were still pretty small, so I decided to put half of them into a bed and keep the others in the greenhouse, just as an experiment to see which ones do better.  Ma and I also set up a trellis so we could transplant our pea starts, which have really exploded in the greenhouse and need to get outside.  This Sunday, I will go back out and put our leek and spinach starts into a bed.  We need more room in the greenhouse for the next round of seeds!

Cauliflower (closest), broccoli (middle), and cabbage (farthest)

Trellis for peas to grow on

I am happy to welcome a couple of walking stick kale plants into my new garden space, courtesy of Shail at Tule Fog Farm.  These awesome plants can grow quite tall (6-10 feet), and are short-lived perennials that can be harvested for 2-3 years.  Shail propagates these plants at her house, and was kind enough to let me dig a couple small ones up and take them home.  I decided to put them on the downhill side of my new berm, near the newly transplanted peach tree.  The soil there isn’t great, so I made sure to dig big holes that I could fill with a lot of compost.  I also planted the kale in flexible mesh cages to keep the gophers from eating them.  Finally, I put a layer of manure around them and covered that with rice straw.

Ready for planting

In the ground

On Wednesday I showed up for my regular internship at Tule Fog, only to learn that Shail had given birth to a healthy baby girl the night before.  They’d been anticipating the birth, but it was a bit earlier than predicted, so I was surprised and excited to meet their new daughter and to see Shail and Sean so happy (turns out “new parent glow” is a real thing).  Shail is taking some well-deserved time off from work, so I pulled an extra day of chores on Thursday to help out.  Congratulations to the whole Tule Fog Family.  It’s a great time of year to welcome someone new to Earth!