I haven’t been able to do much in the garden since my encounter with the Land Rover, but this week I hired some help and we dug potatoes, weeded, spread compost and mulch. We left the parseley and a few onions.
Here is the first bed, ready for planting. Then the rains came and settled everything in. Soon this bed will have peas, lettuces and maybe a tomato or two.
I want to post a few photos from my New York trip.
The first two are from the Fischli and Weiss exhibit at the Guggenheim I posted about last week. A photo of their credo, “How to Work Better,” and a clay sculpture of a pig and a book entitled, “The Reader” from their Inventory of Everything. As for the credo, I’d make one edit: “Say it Simply,” not “Say it Simple.” (More about the exhibit here.)
Then from the streets. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of chopping up discarded Christmas trees and using them for mulch. I saw this everywhere–around trees, in window boxes. All around the city. Then a blow up rat holding fliers advertising a union meeting. (Fischli and Weiss would have loved this, as one of their alter egos was a huge rat.) Continue reading “Combo”
The weather here in Northern California has been wonderfully sunny and warm for the last week or so, giving me time to get the labyrinth ready for winter, take down old tomato vines, and get the beds ready for planting. For the labyrinth, I trimmed and added garlic and greens, along with new pebbles for the path.
The tomato vines were a bigger challenge. There were a lot of them! And I had put off taking them down because there were still so many green tomatoes. But now the green ones are ripening on the window sill. It took me three afternoons to pile up all the vines, and then all day to put them through my wonderful Eco Shredder. The shredder is a great tool, and from three huge piles of dead vines, I have about a small garbage can full of wonderful fine green-brown mulch. I let the chickens out and they were very willing to help with the cleanup. They love to forage, and ate quite a bit of the shredded vines, even though they don’t like tomato plants normally.
In any case, they were happy, I was happy, and the garden is almost ready for winter planting. My neighbor gave me some black fava beans and these should make a good cover crop.