Living with Weeds

The flowers are all in the ground.  There are still a few leftovers that need to get put in more permanent pots on the porch.  Everything is coming into bloom now, and the intense colors of the seasons are taking over, replacing the muted whites, grays, and browns of winter.  This is such a delightful, exhausting season.

The strawberries are forming, like a clock ticking for me in the garden reminding me that canning season is nearly upon us.  I’m trying not to think of the work of canning, and keep dangling the carrot of all the chocolate covered strawberries I can eat, which accompanies the strawberry season as well.  The strawberries need to be thinned very badly, which is why I planted the peas right next to them this year.  Peas are one of our earliest crops, and once they are done, there’s a big empty space in the garden.  That’s where I’ll expand my strawberry patch this fall in much neater rows.  I suppose we don’t need this many strawberries, but in our excess, I’m wondering if the kids want to pick and sell them at the local farmer’s market next year as their version of a lemonade stand.  So we’ll see.

 

We mulched our whole garden this year for the first time.  Of course it doesn’t take care of the weeds completely, but let me tell you the weeds come out now without much of a fight.  They do have to be handpicked which is the downside, but the lack of fight is making it worth it.  Also, we can tell that the moisture retention is better too, so I think so far it’s a success.

I did have a bit of a meltdown a few days ago as I was pulling back the mulch to plant some last minute potatoes.  There were a lot of circumstances surrounding this meltdown which I won’t go into.  As I pulled back the mulch that Knut dumped with the big Bobcat bucket, I saw hundreds of sprouting, unnaturally florescent green soy beans.  Knut has planted leftover soy beans from the farm as a cover crop before, so at first I blamed him, and sent him several angry texts.

It turns out it wasn’t him.  (I should have suspected.  If he had done it, it would have been in nice, neat rows.  These were just everywhere under the mulch.)  Knut was over by the grain bins so came over to see what I was talking about.  I guess somehow when he was scooping up the mulch from our wood chip pile left for us when the power line guys trimmed the trees near us, which was near the seed filling area for the tractor, some of the seeds got mixed in with my mulch.

I was upset on so many levels.  Knut just shrugged and said, I guess you’ll have to just pick out hundreds of soy beans as they sprout up.  He was right, and I was angry at him because he was.  This job turned to me, and now as I have painstakingly covered this garden for this year’s “experiment” it is tainted by these soy beans.  While the farm runs with extreme precision according to professional experts and a team of scientists, this garden is my space.  I love to experiment with new techniques, and apply some gardening practices I read about, and make it a learning space for my kids.  This is mine.

This year we are doing a “back-to-eden,” otherwise known as “sheet-composting,” only organic, no-till, heirloom seeds for collecting, with the wood chips and composted chicken bedding there to promote the proper bacteria/fungus balance in the soil.  I’m so excited about this year’s experiment.

And now the potato section is laced with hundreds, of chemically prepared GMO soy beans.

I know the GMO/conventional farm issue is a hot button one, and I don’t mean to go into that now.  I could write a novel on that, that I probably wouldn’t be allowed to publish.  I think that dreams and reality are tough to reconcile in real life sometimes.  That’s the closest I’m going to touch that issue here.  I didn’t even want to write about it for fear of starting a discussion I don’t want to be in.

I’ll just say that I sat down right there in the wood chips and cried.  This is my sacred space.

But I found down there on my knees the reminder that God does redeem all things.  I’ll make it.  I’ll pick out every one of those darn soy beans as they come up one by one.  I can envision dozens of ways God will use this to refine me, and teach me about his plans, and show me myself.

He’s still got this.  He’s still holding me.  He will turn my sacred space into a place of refining this year.

He will make something beautiful out of it.  He always does.

Our turkeys make a funny whistling like sound, and are funny looking in general.  I love them.  I can’t wait to see what they look like mature.

The roosters are starting to practice their cockle-doodle-dos.  I’m thinking we have 2 roosters left from the ones we ordered.  They are the 2 on the right there below.  The one in the back isn’t the breed of rooster we ordered.  He is aggressive, and charges me whenever he sees me.  The one in front with the white head is the breed we ordered, and while he eyes me suspiciously, he is more curious and guarded.  I think he may be the winner.  We need a name for him.  We’ll see if we can actually keep a rooster.  I still need to be convinced but am willing to try.

With his white head, he may need some old scholar name, I think.  Aristotle perhaps?  Archimedes, or Newton maybe.  Something to think on.