Grow Your Own
(Page 4 of 13)
May/June 1970
By Jeanie Darlington
The nearest available mulch for me was right next door in the vacant lot - dry wild grass 4 and 5 feet tall. I cut a lot of it and put it down 6 inches deep between the rows and up snugly against the plants.
RELATED CONTENT
Then I didn't have to cultivate or weed anymore. 1 found I used a lot less water. The plants seemed to like the even soil temperature. It acted like a thermal blanket, and it looked nice and felt good on my bare feet when I walked around picking things. Our cat, Lurvie, loved to lie on it in the shade of certain plants. She thought I put it down just for her.
A few days after Thanksgiving, I took the turkey bones out to the garden to bury them. The tomato and squash vines were brown and dead from a very light frost. This left just a few swiss chard plants here and there. I buried the vines well in the middle of the compost pile so that the thick stems would decay sufficiently.
The year was almost over and the garden was finished. I didn't think about things I might have planted for winter crops, not knowing then that it was possible. But I wasn't sad. It had been a fine summer. So I sprinkled the ground with bone and blood meal and put on a nice blanket of leaves. The hay mulch had long since decayed away into the soil.
During the fall of that year, Sandy and I noticed how many birds there were in the yard and especially in the entwining rose and pyracantha trees outside our kitchen window. We had been living in our cottage for a year and four months by then, and hadn't used any poison sprays for the past 9 or 10 months. The birds had passed the word around and had already eaten every red pyracantha berry. The berries made them drunk. One tipsy bird flew into the window once, but luckily didn't break the glass.
I made a bird feeder by tacking a 1 inch edge around a 2 by 1 foot board. I tied it up in the rose tree 3 feet outside the kitchen window and we spent many hours watching them. It's a lot better than the Today show at breakfast. Sometimes we layed out a smorgasbord for them of suet, birdseed, oatmeal, raisins and peanut butter. They even developed a snob taste for health food peanut butter, and wouldn't touch that cheap, hydrogenated stuff. The scrub jays were really funny. They came exclusively for sunflower seeds and would squawk and carry on so that they could have the whole feeder to themselves. They would try to fill up their beaks with three or four seeds and then fly away to a rooftop to eat them. Invariably, they would drop all but one seed while they were trying to stuff the fourth one in, but they would keep trying anyway. And there were catbirds, song sparrows, house finches and a cute little thing I called fat fluffy.
By mid-January, I was already planning for next summer. The seed catalogues had begun to arrive, showing all kinds of delicious things I could raise. It was too early to begin planting, but at least I could write an article for the paper Sandy had been writing for during the last year - the San Francisco Express Times. I wanted to help people get started on gardens and not make the mistakes I had. I wrote an article on soil preparation, so that the organic fertilizer applied would be in an available form come March or April. That was the beginning of Grow Your Own.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
Next >>
