Fall Planting! Tips from the garden...

"What're you doing, Mommy?" my three-year-old daughter asked, finding me sifting through seed packs in the hallway.

"Getting ready to plant fall veggies."

"Can I help?"

"Yes! We'll plant them tomorrow." Both of us smiled in rapture. My girl loves planting as much as I do.

I picked out spinach, carrots, peas, broccoli, cabbage, parsley, mache (aka corn salad), and chard. We already planted some seeds in a cleared bed - mostly mustard greens and beets - but since they haven't germinated I'm going to do the paper towel technique with this next planting. Put your seeds - just as much as you want to plant or slightly more if your seeds are a few years old - between a fold of damp paper towel and put into a plastic bag. Keep checking them and in a few days they will have germinated. Then carefully transplant to the garden (you can do this in summer because the soil is not freezing) into soil amended with compost (a tweezers works well for this task, picking up teeny rooting seeds and plopping them in the soil). Our compost is very high in nitrogen because of all the beautiful chicken poo we've been blessed with this year.

On a side note, if you have chickens or plan to, I highly recommend putting your compost in a shady area and either doing it as a simple pile as I do or in an open cage that is accessable from one side. It is our chickens' favorite hang out: cool, buggy, and speckled with little kitchen scraps. They turn the compost for us as they scratch and they poop all over the pile, adding nitrogen. We also toss all the cleanings from their run and coop on the pile and turn it in. Their poop is so high in nitrogen that a once a week cleaning of the chicken area yeilds a perfect balance of carbon (wood shavings) to nitrogen (manure). The compost breaks down very quickly and we can use it on the garden in a month or so. I have not had any problem "burning" my plants with manure that has not broken down enough with this technique even though it hasn't been composting long.

Anyway - tomorrow we will cover the beds with compost, weed, and get everything ready for seeds. We'll put some seeds in right away - carrot, parsley, peas (which I will soak tonight) - and others in a few days after they have germinated in their paper towel blankies.

Whee! So much fun.

Summer Heat in the Garden

This is, ironically, the hardest time of year for me as a gardener: high summer. Partly because it's just so freaking hot here in eastern Colorado, but also because all there is to do is weed. And fertilize. And clean up after the chickens and heavy rains. No planting (though soon I will put in fall crops like broccoli and kale and parsnip). No planning (besides thinking about all the strawberry plants I want to add next year...). Very little harvesting as we are between the cool and warm season harvest - we still have lots of lettuce and a few carrots, but mostly it's wait for the baby pumpkins and tomatoes to ripen.

The heat makes me whiny.

This year my garden is doing far better than the last two years. I used a ton of compost to amend the soil last spring, I fertilized my plants with organic veggie fertilizer (I've been something of a fertilizer snob in the past, wanting compost to be enough, but in my leached soil it just isn't), and we've had a lot more rain. So I really have nothing to complain about. I'm just impatient for action. And cooler temperatures.

Interestingly, about the time of the harvest, I'll be harvesting a pretty sacred fruit from another of my gardens, my family: My baby is due September 15th. So again the veggie garden and the life garden align: we enter the horse latitudes, the dog days of summer, ripening, waiting, and dreaming of cool sweetness with the fruits of my patience and love.

I wish you peace and lemonade this summer, dear reader! I'd love to hear how you are spending your long summer days in the gardens of your life.

The Goddess of Always Enough

Bee Smith writes, "As I have grown older and my spiritual practices have matured it has been shown to me to have faith in the Goddess of Always Enough. She is always able to provide what one needs right on time. Generally, it seems wisest not to try and second-guess Her or try to tell her what she ought to be doing." (1) Reading this was timely for me. It's been a challenging year, with a lot of doubt about myself, our finances, our health, and whether or not we (as a family) are in the right place, doing the right thing. When I get scared about money, I tend to turn to attempted manifestation, and I tend to try to be very clear about what I feel I need. Then when my prayers are answered but not in the way I specified or envisioned, I get frustrated. When I read Bee's bit about the Goddess of Always Enough, something clicked for me. As always, we are okay. We have enough - even more than enough! All is well, even though by conventional terms I feel on a slippery slope of dept and doubt.

The image of the Goddess of Always Enough helped me to reflect on the challenges we've dealt with over the past few months, and see where She helped us, even though it was not what I thought She "ought" to be doing. A few days after we discovered our eroding plumbing needed to be replaced asap, we got low-interest-for-the-life-of-the-loan checks from a credit card. These were a lower rate than your standard equity loans - and since we haven't savings or equity, a bit of interesting timeing. Then we had to replace our only car. A few days before our old car got picked up by the insurance company's scrap yard, a friend got a new car and was able to loan us her soon-to-be-donated beater (but very functional) car. We found our replacement a week before the insurance was due to run out on our friend's loaner. We were able to get needed repairs done on our new used car just weeks before taking an eight hour road trip (sixteen round trip) that had been planned for months. I'm happy to announce that the car, and the plumbing, are doing great!

Then health concerns hit. I am a little scared and frustrated that we have spent our beefed up flex spending account half way through the year - and three months before our baby is due - but isn't it interesting that I had *just* enough in there to get the chiropractic work I desperately needed?

Speaking of new baby, today my husband and I sat down with the clothes, accessories, and toys friends have given us, and we were both totally overwhelmed. Such abundance! Such a community we have! I do not have to buy anything for this baby. Not even shelves if we can get around to using the last of the scrap wood we have (given to us by a friend) to put some shelves in the kids' closet.

And in case this weren't enough reminder that All is Well and She Watches Over Us, I flashed recently on a memory of about nine years ago. We had just moved to Colorado. I had just finished massage school and barely had a part time job, my then boyfriend had just started graduate school, and his father had just passed away. We drove to Wisconsin for the service, a sixteen hour drive with no air conditioning, paid for by credit card. We found out that my boyfriend had a disbursement coming to him from his father's IRA of about $23k. Recalling this time, I thought, "Things may seem scary and tenuous now, but compared to that time - whew! Life is settled, grounded, and all is well."

I can get so caught up in what I think things are supposed to look like, as in no debt, a fancy (if modest) house, and other wants, but really, if I step back and let my perspective shift, I am amazed at how blessed we are. There is always enough. Always.

Blessings, dear reader! May you too be blessed with the realization of always enough!







(1) Smith, Bee. "Seasons of Change: Gaian Rhythms for Positive Living." SageWoman No 76. 62.