Wholey /wobbly/wrightly

"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian."
- Dennis Wholey (1937-)

Friend Garrett found the quote and we are terribly fond of it.  Cleaning up the land, getting ready for winter...we are working our butts off and happy to be here doing it.  

As Fall eats our efforts....

What a year.  As if all the crazy spring and summer weren't enough, our pre-fall arrived as completely contrary as the the rest of the year!  Last night we had our first rain since mid-August.  The first heat of the summer came over the same three weeks and our poor gardens just screamed!!!!

Since mother-in-law Sam is sitting at home trying to heal from shoulder surgery (hey woman!) and I am waiting on new lumber for the chicken coops (ugh), I thought I would post a few photos of our end of summer, the interior garden (new) and life at Firth of Fifth.

Our monitor is dying and all photos may not be of best quality.  Please let us know if they are truly terrible.  Click on any photo to enlarge.  Click your BACK button to return to this blog.

Interior Garden

Since we bought this property we have moved at a break-neck speed toward land improvement.  We actually never thought of the cabin (our wacky and disassembling home) as a real house; just a place to hang our hats until we got our land working.  So fun items like perennial gardens had to wait.

While some women may have put a house before such things, I am one of those outside sorts that would sooner live in a tent than do without gardens and this was the year I decided that the house could wait but the gardens could not.

This long L-shaped garden is off our front-of-house and in our newly enclosed private yard (NO sheep, llamas or dogs allowed...I know, how radical).

It will be years before we have the soil and perennials finally sorted but this is a good beginning for our clay and glacial sand hill-top.

In past years it has been only the vegetable garden -situated across the internal driveway- that has had attention.

This photo of the play between the two is especially dear to us as it has taken so long to arrive.

My mother, Lyn, has always been a vigorous gardener and well ahead of her time.  I grew up with herbs and vegetables, fruits and flowers all growing mixed in delightful interplay and "Permaculture"  was a word I learned long after I was already accustomed to working its design into my mother's always extending beds.

Comfrey and Chamomile -two herbs that will come back yearly to provide healing salves and tea- are intermixed with the annual Bachelor Buttons from Thomas Jefferson's original collection and the wildly uncontrollable Cardinal vines and Love-In-The-Mist from our Seed Savers community.

 We collect seeds from our annuals every year, sharing them with family and friends - expanding the joy and keeping history alive.

Interplanting Vine-Peach (a heritage squash that can be jellied) in with roses helps breakup our clay soils. The roses are flanked by many helpers, including the leeks and chives that reseed themselves and French Marigolds that I collect seeds from.

 Adding perennial onion family plants like Egyptian Onion (also called walking onion, for its habit of dropping its seed-heads to the ground and thus replanting itself) helps keep bugs from the otherwise vulnerable roses.

While the ideal of ecological garden design is the enrichment of soil and environmental stability, from a purely selfish perspective the very best part of Permaculture design is simply the visual chorus that it can create. 

The Italian broccoli leaf will hold on until winter -providing food through its leaves- and drop seeds for next year.  It's purple leaves mix with the periwinkle flowers of the borage that draw bees and will self-seed next spring.  The spicy leaves and flowers of the nasturtium will last well into fall, providing additions to salads -and reseed itself for next spring's first green dishes.  The Lovage (hiding behind the Green Envy Zinnia) will return year after year to offer a wonderful substitute for celery.

The roughest end of the bed is our hardest to condition and it is here that the Champagne Raspberries and mints have helped open soils.  The raspberries cannot stay here for long as they really cannot be successfully harvested in a one-sided garden; but they are doing a wonderful job of breaking up soil.  

The mints -in this case they are the Thai mints- add compost and deep mining for nutrients.

Just to the side of them; our first bed of asparagus on the farm.  We found a dying patch of asparagus near our drive when we first arrived and dreamed of setting our own.  Two beds were set this spring -purple and green- with only the green surviving.  As the fall sets its sights on our part of the country the green asparagus has set seed and has taken off like a bandit. 

And sometimes life is simply about the shear joy of the senses.  A garden without a certain wildness is lacking the very substance that our soul craves.  Flowers should -after all is said and done- make us smile.  Christopher loves to come to the garden and just look at it.  His favorite statement seems to be:  "I love how everything is all jumbled together.  So many colors and heights and textures."

Well, then I guess the flowers and vegetables and fruits and bees and birds and bugs have all done their jobs.