Summer Sky: Learning as I go

One small change for April (and March)

One Small Change is drawing to a close this month, but we will not say goodbye.  Now it's a habit to sit down every few weeks and evaluate what we can do differently--how we can use resources wisely, leave a smaller footprint, pollute less.  Thanks again to Suzy and Andy for hosting such a meaningful blog challenge.

Our changes for March and April aren't so small for us.  We are planting a little vegetable garden (alongside our herbs) and installing a rain barrel.  I am a bit apprehensive because I have a knack for killing plants--I've mentioned before that several years ago, I grew a modestly large cutting garden with mixed success. Wish us luck!

We made our annual pilgrimage to DeBaggio's Herb Farm this week.

We already get our vegetables via local venues (a "CSA"-type service and the farmers' markets) but I was so moved by this post of Colleen's that I decided we should try to plant a small plot with a few basics. Tending a garden holds so many lessons (for all of us) and we just can't let this slip by until 'next year' as we have in the past.

What's growing in your garden this year?

One small change links to inspire:

Angel Pea at Keeping the Faith is composting

Kerry at Young Ones is also planting a family garden

AG Ambroult at elemental is using vinegar & baking soda to clean up

Michelle's family at The Binker Files is having a weekly night without electricity

At nz green buttons, they're  using water wisely

And just like that, winter is over.

I know it will get cold again--it is March, after all--but a warm spell has brought out all the early spring flowers. 

Last year I made the mistake of not taking pictures every single day.  Spring is so magical, and it can be so brief.

this miniature forest of snow drops is at N's preschool

and these flowers are from our neighbor's yard--I must plant some in our garden some day. I believe they are called 'glory of the snow' (isn't that a charming name?).

One of the many things blogging has brought home is how the weather and seasons are so different across our continent and around the world. I've traveled and lived overseas so I should know this as well as anyone, but it's truly awe-inspiring to think that it's autumn in New Zealand, or the flowers are out in full force in Oregon.

Here's another little flower starting to blossom--my good friend's baby enjoying her dinner. I could take pictures of her all day.

 

I'd love a peek into your world, dear reader, whether in words or pictures.  So whatever the weather, feel free to share!

Water play and roses.

Yesterday afternoon, the kids prevailed upon me to bring out the wading pool. And so we did.

 

I sat in the shade and watched them play and splash, giddy over the early start to pool season. (The water was cold but that didn't stop them.)

Meanwhile, I also enjoyed the first flowers from our climbing rose. I wish so much I could remember the variety, as I should, because I planted it myself years ago.

 

When I planted this rose, it was just a short, thorny stick. It bloomed a little bit, and grew a couple of spindly canes. But a few years ago, there was a pretty bad drought around here, and I was sure the rose was dead. I didn't have the heart to dig it up, sorry I had neglected it so. If I remember correctly, it stayed that way for nearly two years, dead (to my eye) all the way down to the roots.

 

Obviously, I was mistaken. Now it is a vibrant plant that rambles 15 18 feet in two directions along our fence.  There's a moral there, or maybe two, to that story.

Once the kids tired of the pool, we spread out towels along the front walk. I made my first (very unsuccessful) attempt at a hammered flower print. 

 

Before hammering. I learned the hard way, a ball peen hammer is not optional.

 

Then E asked for watercolors. Much better idea, honey!

 

 

 

I sat observing, occasionally providing another bit of paper for another small masterpiece.  What a wonderful way to spend the afternoon.

 

 

Annual madness.

Once again, I went overboard. I finally feel compelled to explain.

 

Last year was pretty tough. As I have told anyone within shouting distance, I broke my ankle a little over a year ago. It took a couple of surgeries to put it back together, nearly nine weeks in a splint or a cast, and on crutches, not allowed to put any weight on the ankle due to a torn tendon in the center of my foot. Many helpless weeks watching my husband, my parents, my in-laws, and my friends, care for my then-2 year old and 4 year old. Not being able, in any meaningful way, to contribute to making food, cleaning the house, the dishes, the laundry. Sitting in the same chair, many times completely alone, for hours and hours and hours.  But there were many special moments: having both kids on my lap for an hour, reading book after book. Receiving tenderness from my little ones, including the 2 year old, who understood to watch out for mama's foot.

So, you will have to forgive me if I make up for lost time.

 

No, I couldn't, like a normal human being, buy a couple of geraniums and be done with it. I had to have a whole garden's worth of flowering plants. At once.

I was at a local nursery, and I was quite taken with the container gardens they had tucked in around the plants for sale. Of course, I was fully aware that these were intended as...shoppers' inspiration. Usually such blatant sales tactics send me running for my car, but instead, I felt compelled to track down several of the plants on display, which wasn't so easy on the bountiful, lengthy tables teetering with incredible loveliness.

Once I was home, I dragged this huge pot already filled with dirt from past planting forays to one side of the front porch. Yes, it's real terra cotta and heavy as the dickens (I sort of rolled the pot to its current position, stopping to rest every few minutes). Then I put the plants, plastic pots and all, into the large pot to see how they might look when planted:

 

This photo is a little misleading because some pots were higher than others, so this is not what they looked like once planted.

 

Little by little

 

 

Bit by bit

 

 

Getting a little help from E along the way

 

 

Until it was done.

 

 

Did I mention that there were a few leftovers?

 

The monarchs are coming! And the hummingbirds, too.

All winter, I've been thinking about planting milkweed in our garden to attract monarch butterflies. As you probably know, the milkweed plant is central to the monarchs' survival and their migration from Mexico. We've been patiently waiting for the last frost date.

I'm sure there are various sites that track monarch migration, but I found this wonderful one that is very kid-friendly, Journey North.  Journey North tracks not only butterflies, but many different signs of the changing seasons in the form of bird, insect, and animal migrations, the emergence of flowers and plants, the rising of sap in sugar maples, and oh, so many interesting things!

Elsewhere, I'd read that the ruby-throated hummingbird arrives in Virginia in April, but apparently they fly quickly because the website shows first sightings of these birds this past week all the way up to Maine. Meanwhile, the rufous hummingbird is making its way up the west coast.

So, time to put out the hummingbird feeder!

We cooked up a simple syrup--one part sugar to four parts boiling water--then set it aside to cool. E measured sugar and water and helped pour the cooled syrup into the feeder. (We only filled it halfway, because this is the first year for this feeder and the hummingbirds have to find it.)

Then we went out (between downpours) to hang the feeder in the garden.

 

Journey North tracks the blooming of tulips and lilacs around the country, too.  Indeed, the tulips and lilacs have been starting to bloom during the last week or so around here.

 

There's actually two lilac bushes in this photo (taken last Saturday in a neighbor's garden). Just on the left is the second one, and its white flowers started blooming today.

 

Are tulips always pinker on the other side of the fence?

 

P.S.: I forgot to add that Journey North lets you report your own sightings.  

One of each.

Okay, not really. Actually, far from it. But I had a hard time saying no after finally visiting DeBaggio's herb farm this year.

Before I say anything more, a warm welcome to any readers of The Crafty Crow visiting here. I just *love* that place!  So much fun to read about crafty projects that other families are enjoying, that you and your kids might like to try yourselves.

 

But about the herbs.  I am fantasizing about all the cooking that these herbs will inspire (forgive me, I had a small breakfast):

    green lemon thyme: for a perfect roast chicken

    Italian oregano: red pasta sauce

    chives: fresh spring peas

    lemon grass:  spicy prawn soup

    rosemary 'arp' (super winter hardy!): roasted root vegetable salad

    dill: mustard sauce for fish or veggies

    tarragon: picnic chicken salad

    flat leaf parsley: summery potato salad (from The New Basics--gaaah, is it really 20 years old?)

    spearmint 'kentucky colonel': mint chutney for a roast  

    sage:  biscuits for Sunday dinner

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We savored our visit to DeBaggio's.  As usual, I arrived with kids in tow, and they did stop and smell the rosemary, when they weren't chasing each other and scaring the blue birds:

I couldn't possibly buy "one of each," because they have over 20 kinds of lavender, 6 kinds of culinary thyme, at least 11 kinds of sage...here are just 3 (common sage, the one I bought, is in the middle):

 

The farm is named after Thomas DeBaggio, his wife, Joyce, and his son, Francesco, who runs the business now. I believe Joyce was the kindly person who assisted us yesterday and gave me permission to take photos.  There is something deeply connecting about buying herbs, which will be used in many special family dishes, from another family.

Tom DeBaggio started his first herb 'farm' out of a small suburban backyard on Ivy Street, about a mile from where I'm typing. Indeed, that was the focus of his herb-growing and selling for about 25 years--he says he sold over 100,000 plants from his Arlington garden; a few of them, to me.

DeBaggio is not just a simple gardener; he became, years ago, a nationally recognized expert on herbs. Thanks to his little book, Growing Herbs, which I've long owned, I learned that there were herbs I couldn't just trot out and grow from seed.  Italian oregano, for example, is typically grown from cuttings.

DeBaggio is also one of the authors of The Big Book of Herbs (which I covet), and according to this, he's an author for a new "comprehensive encyclopedia" of herbs coming out later this year. 

Ten years ago, DeBaggio was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.  He turned his skills as a journalist (from his first career) toward a memoir about his descent into the disease.  That book, Losing My Mind, has a staccato voice that conveys--only too well--how his mind is chopping into vanishing fragments. The book led to a second memoir, entitled When it Gets Dark, which I'm finishing right now.

I doubt this was his intention, but I'm fascinated with the snippets of Arlington history he included in his book.  He describes walking from his house down Wilson Boulevard, listing the landmarks he passes and what was there before. He took that walk ten years ago (we had just bought this house), and I, too, have watched many of these places transformed beyond recognition.

Well, I'm not sure it's appropriate to use the Ballston neighborhood as a metaphor for Alzheimer's, I am (for better or worse) not emotionally connected to it, but there you have it, I can't take it back.

 

An undated child's depiction of how Arlington has changed. We pass it on the way to ballet class. I suspect it dates from the mid 1990's, but it might be much older than that.

 

Links to NPR and public radio interviews and programs with DeBaggio and his family:

April 2007 (Driveway Moments)

April 2002 (Diane Rehm Show)

1999 - 2000 (All Things Considered -- Interviews with Noah Adams)  

On a hill at the Mall, and in the garden.

Tomorrow is one of the seasonal Washington, D.C. events that we look forward to all year: the annual Kite Festival hosted by the Smithsonian, held at the Washington Monument and along the Mall. It's part of the Cherry Blossom Festival and it can get kind of crazy, with folks driving in to see the cherry trees blooming around the Tidal Basin, tourists visiting the museums, and hundreds (thousands?) of kites filling the sky.  Here's a photo I took in April 2007, not on kite festival day (in case you're looking for them in the pic), but to give you an idea of why we keep going back:

 

I want to try to take lots of photos, but juggling two small kids and three kites might make holding a camera, um, difficult.

There's been lots of kite making going on over here, although I'm not quite ready to show anything, but it's been fun and the kids are enjoying it too.  Here are some photos of the process:

 

The other event I'm looking forward to this weekend--that I look forward to all year--is the opening of DeBaggio's Herb Farm.  I received the catalog yesterday--just in time for opening day, which is also tomorrow.

I think we'll wait a day or two to go to the farm so it's a little more relaxing and we can take our time. Plus, I need a chance to dig into the catalog and ponder what to buy. I'm also planning a little herb garden for our co-op preschool, and that calls for curling up in a comfy chair with the catalog and a cup of tea.

Hope you have some fun plans for the weekend, too.

Dreaming of spring.

Once upon a time, in a land with no little children, there was a cutting garden.

 

It was not a raging success. For one thing, *someone* thought you could plant flowers from a book about an English cutting garden straight into mid-Atlantic red clay. Yes, I tried valiantly for two or three years to grow flowering plants that like their climate, well, a little colder, or a lot drier, or both.

So I learned the hard way. Fortunately, the mists of time have veiled the larger disappointments...um, say, starting sweet peas, which love cold weather, on St. Patrick's day, a la Martha. (Connecticut is how much further north? oops.) 

Anyhow, enough time has passed, and the little ones are old enough now, that I'm willing to try again. Not a full-blown cutting garden, but something a little more manageable.

You might have noticed on the right side-bar I keep a list of Projects that I'm Pondering. That doesn't mean I'm ever going to actually do them. If I can, I provide direct links to the source so that if you're more ambitious or organized than I, you can try them yourself.

Included on the list of future projects is a sunflower forest. I'm very excited about that but will leave the details for another post.

The other gardening project on the list is to plant a butterfly garden, including milkweed. As you probably know, monarch butterflies migrate from Mexico through the United States to Canada, and back again (over a couple of generations). They rely on milkweed the entire way, but this naturally occurring plant is becoming more scarce due to land development.

Monarch butterflies have lots of survival issues, obviously--logging in their overwintering locale of Mexico is killing off the ones east of the Rockies by the many millions. Back in January, I sat down with E and N to watch the PBS NOVA special about the monarch migration and parts of it were truly depressing. (The kids learned so much, I was a bit surprised that it held their interest.)

A simple thing that anyone with a bit of garden land can do is to plant milkweed. The very name conjurs up an ugly plant, and I guess some wild versions might not be so attractive. But they are sold as decorative flowering plants. You want to make sure that you know whether you are buying a perennial or an annual and choose accordingly. (They can get pretty tall so consider that too.) You can also search this plant database for milkweeds ("asclepias") native to your state (example here). Also, this website will send you milkweed seeds for free, and along with a lot of other sites, provides information about starting milkweed in your garden.

   

I went the easy route and ordered from a well-known seed catalog company. I'll be starting these indoors pretty soon and will show the process later.

But first, I have to blow the dust off my basement seed light. *Cough.* I made this years ago and trust me, if I can do it, you can too. I'll provide more info on that another day.

Back later for green week.