away from the garden this week

Let me introduce you to some other "fault line" bloggers this week while I am away:
  
How's Robb?

The Ladybug Letter

Curbstone Valley Farm

Town Mouse & Country Mouse

From Seed to Table

☄

what's up: moonflowers

Moonflowers remind of my dad.  In the spring we with kindred garden spirits would stake strings from the ground to the top of my childhood bedroom window and plant the impossibly hard seeds. After taking what seemed like perpetuity to a twelve year old,  they would finally overflow the top of the strings to shade my window, and then the blooms would come.

At night the white spiraled cigars would unfold magically fast, a serene and cool compensation for enduring the hot and sticky Arkansas summer days. Each was prettier than fine linens just starched, pressed and creased perfectly,  like the ones my mother and aunts had.  I remember luna moths.

I wish my dad were still here so I could tell him that we (I) didn't have to go through the hard task of filing a notch in the seed coat to help them germinate; that we could have just soaked them overnight in water.  And to show him, all these years later, my little urban farm garden.

☄

do you keep a garden log?

Spotty recording is the best I can claim in my garden journal, but it's very helpful to go back and see how much I've learned from the past I did manage to record.  Sometimes I just draw pictures.
I often tape in seed envelopes, plant tags or planting instructions from bulbs for the record.

☄

seven ways to use bedsprings in the garden

support and protection for new sprouts

helping beans up the fence

support and a little boing for narcissus and daffodils

part of a trellis for vines

holding fence wire together

a twin size for peas

and a double wide for runner beans

friday in the garden: pillbowling

i'll have none of that....

☄

favorite things: farm art

clare leighton, a lapful of windfalls, ca. 1935

clare leighton, scything, ca. 1935

artist unknown, from Robert Frost poetry book dust jacket, ca. 1960s

☄

considering the car as hay wagon

 A neighborhood watch person posted on the Yahoo group that there had been a bale of straw in the street for three days that had obviously fallen off a truck, it was in pieces, did anyone want it.  Sure we did.  That's my favorite mulch material.

In that little morning moment of hurrying we decided—yes, deliberately—not to take the time to get a tarp to spread in the back, which would have saved that hour of picking out the post-vacuum straw bits embroidered into the carpet fibers.

Not sorry. How often does a free bale of straw fall into your urban lap?

I can say that this car is official farm equipment now! And it was worth the almost full bale of straw only three blocks away.

☄