Project Journal

The more help a man has in his garden, the less it belongs to him. -William M. Davies

All but one farmer has arrived. Seth and Emilee have been here four full days and Ben is working on his second. I have quickly realized that the daily journal should happen daily. The days are quite a bit more interesting with farmers around.

[Emilee, Ben and Seth fish the pond]

Seth and Emilee arrived road weary and farm ready on Thursday night. My brother also flew in for the long weekend and it was fun to introduce the two parties… Brother and Farmers! We took a quick tour around the garden, made a haphazard, non-local dinner, and fell into bed.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, we harvested! Mostly basil and squash. (I have a feeling we’ll all have our fill of squash by the end of July) Then, with an early morning sweat still on our brows, we drove to neighboring Conway. We brought five basil bouquets, 7.5 lbs of squash, and a healthy bunch of arugula to Oak Street Bistro, a lovely local eatery. We haggled over dollars and cents and made the sale. $35 never felt so good.

Still missing two farmers, we opted out of selling at Saturday’s farmers market and attended as shoppers. And so we begin our 100% local diet. To supplement the garden harvest, we bought local meat, peaches, milk, flour, wheat berries, and beans. Seth was mostly excited about the beef, I was most excited about the mung beans. Hah.

Ben arrived Sunday night. Seth and Emilee caught bream and small-mouth bass from the pond and we fried it with some garden squash. Fresh caught fish with local corn, and a gigantic arugala salad. My oh my.

One would think that this so-called limited diet would make things difficult come dinner time. Not so. We have been eating like kings and queens. We giggle every time we sit down to yet another bountiful meal. Here is yesterday’s breakfast of jalepeno sausage, hash browns, corn bread and peaches. It was a Monday even!

In the early stages of the Garden Summer, I had decided on three fundamentals that we could buy non-local… coffee, alcoholic beverages, and chocolate. We have unanimously decided to substitute chocolate for cooking oil in the non-local essentials. No chocolate for a whole month? Child’s play. We’ve even discovered a local coffee roaster and a Little Rock brewery. Not to mention the impressive brew kit Emilee hauled from Charleston.

With all these rich, whole food ingredients, meals become very exciting. We talk about meals hours in advance, cook together, and make quite an event of it all with flowers and a beautifully set table. I like it.

The garden is lovely. I can hardly remember the hot 9 hour days of early June. Many hands make light the work! Isn’t the the truth. (read as a statement) Aside from a little TLC to the struggling plants and some light watering, garden work has been a breeze. We’ve even had RAIN!

The spare hours of the day have been glorious: fishing, guitar, water skiing, bikes, and a lot of porch time. This is Seth after a mid-morning corn-shucking.  

This evening we pick up Marie. And so it begins.  We will drive straight from the airport to our local country store to milk some goats.  Loving this garden summer. 

Here are some photos….

[basil bouquets]

[post nap on the porch]

[Ben’s first fish. Ever]

[Emilee. Ready for battle]

[And Sethro]

More very soon.

It is hot. So hot.

Hot enough to get me out of bed by 5:30 and into the garden by 6:00.  I’m actually growing quite fond of the dew and pockets of cool in the early hours of the day. And there’s nothing better than a midday nap in a cool house when you know it’s 98 degrees and muggy out.

The heat index today is 110. Mercy. Things get a bit wilty around noon in the garden and I get nervous. The well is definitely dry. There has been gas exploration in the valley and it has fractured the water table.  I have resorted to the dribble dribble of gravity-fed pond water.  It takes almost three hours for me to water the garden by myself and I finish smelling like… well, pond water.

I’ll have farmers in days!! Seth and Emilee arrive Thursday afternoon and Marie and Ben will be here Monday. It’s been such a long time coming that all this feels slightly surreal. I have been thinking on these late June days since last November. To say I am excited would be a gross understatement.

In the hot afternoons I have moved into our Garden Summer house.

I’ve been washing quilts, hanging lanterns, clearing out the pantry, and with the help of my handy parents,  installing an outdoor shower. 

And how does the garden grow? In leaps and bounds. Sunflowers are head high and blooming, I am barely keeping up with the harvesting of squash, and the pole beans are a-climbing.

And this is a Zinnia bud… hopefully our showstopper at the farmers market….

What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
— Jane Austen

My thoughts exactly.

I think this is what they call the home stretch. I’ll have major help arriving tomorrow (garden-happy parents) and the farmers arrive in one week. Hallelujah.

I’ll say this. There was a solid three weeks when I was sure that we were going to starve and The Garden Summer was going to be a horrendous flop. 

This terrible notion has passed and last night I picked an eggplant the size of my arm. Thank goodness.

Here is how the garden grows:

The sunflowers are up to my waist and I’m beginning to see the little buttons of buds.

Round one of radishes is harvested and more to come soon.

Cucumbers are flowering like crazy… already harvested two.

Squash… how I love you. Up to my waist and blossoming.

Bell peppers have taken on a comical lean due to fruit and blossoms. I like it.

The peanuts, beets, arugula, collards, marigolds, zinnias, onions, pumpkins, beans, sweet potatoes, corn, and herbs are all cranking now. A few minor casualties from last week’s break-in but no worries.

There wasn’t a chance that I was going to post pictures of the garden a few short weeks ago.  Simply put, it was ugly and I was embarrassed.

Now that I’m feeling a touch more secure and self-satisfied, here is some before and after:

This is early on. Ick. Notice the rectangles of green towards the back…. Those are weeds.  Our plants were choking.

A little later…. Weeds still rule. For a while, the best we could do was clear a little circle around the plants to let them breathe.

And hallelujah… we have arrived. The two beds in the foreground are young pumpkins.

Gratuitous beauty shots:

And so the farmers shall eat.  More soon.

I have spent the last week thinking WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO!?!

Unfortunately:

I got heat stroke.

The well has gone dry.

Despite torrential rainstorms in mid-May, no rain.

Weeds grow faster than anything else.

And there’s a critter stealing chickens.

That said… the garden is mostly under control. And when I say garden, I mean weeds.  I’ve killed a lot of them. 

Here’s the thing. The garden is too big.  It’s definitely too much for one person to maintain. Also, it’s simply to much space.  We could have packed everything in 70% of the land. Maybe even 50%.  I’ve been kicking myself. Despite all this Small is Beautiful talk… I said TILL ANOTHER ROW! THE BIGGER THE BETTER!

….I suppose I wasn’t practicing what I preached. Bah. And so I take a step back, reassess, and learn.  That’s the point right?! To LEARN.

On a more positive note… the basil is looking mighty fresh.

So here’s a little window into my world:

Tonight Charlie the bull and one gutsy gal cow broke into the garden.  I was sitting up on the porch (a healthy 1/4 mile away), cleaned up and eating dinner when I saw Steve the caretaker hauling across the pasture in the orange tractor. He was waving his arms wildly and my heart sunk.  There they were, like two impish children , tearing up cornstalks and trampling sunflowers.  I yelled (at nothing in particular) and took off down to the garden.  I arrived a moment after Steve. He had picked up a hand trowel and was whacking Charlie over the head with it. He’d yell, then whack. The female cow was a cinch to chase out.  She’s skittish like a normal cow.  Charlie on the other hand, is like an obstinate child.  If you hit him with a hand trowel, he’s going to buck his head, stomp his feet, and dare you to hit him again. 

I picked up a rake and joined Steve, yelling in my most serious farmer voice. Charlie went… eventually. Then he stood outside the fence for the next thirty minutes watching me while I watered. Flirting or threatening… I wasn’t sure.

I can’t stop giggling about the whack whack of the hand trowel on Charlie’s massive head. That bull could pick up the front end of a tractor with his neck. I mean…. look at him!

And so I weed, shovel mulch, rake, plant……  I’ve had help the last couple days from family. Lauren, my cousin’s girlfriend, is spending the mornings weeding with me.  She makes excellent mixed tapes. So that is a bonus. My aunt Maura has also been in the trenches.  She’s planted two pumpkin beds and knocked out whole cities of weeds.  Boy am I grateful.

Despite the lack of rain, the weeds, the misbehaving bull… The garden is coming along.  I have already harvested a bucket of bright red radishes.  The tomatoes are blossoming and tiny green globes are appearing.  The sunflowers are thigh-high, and the arugula is lush and fragrant. I am tired, overwhelmed, and a bit sunburned but WE’VE GOT A GARDEN.

Here are some tomatoes. Notice the weeds in the background. The word weed is even taking over my vocabulary. Weed weed weed.

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. -Franklin D. Roosevelt.