Phil's Amazement

Phil was gone this week, and when he returned home in the wee hours of the morning, there wasn't much to see. (But earlier in the night: have you seen how beautiful Venus and Jupiter are? And on the other side of the sky, Mars? So wonderful!)

We were both wiped out, and the boys let us sleep in until 9:30! (Although, since none of them went to sleep until after midnight, I'm not sure how long they had been awake themselves.) When he went outside, he was utterly amazed. In the week he was away, all had changed.

The redbuds had gone from fully dormant to, well, red.

What had been almost bare ground over by the cows had greened over.

All the peaches had bloomed (so much for the window of opportunity to prune! Oops).

Some apples have leafed out.

So have some hazelnuts.

And daffodils: we have daffodils everywhere. I had expected about 10,000 flowers. But since many bulbs have already sent up two or three flowers, the land is looking colorful.

We actually had neighbors (aunt and niece) stop by for the first time, just to compliment our flowers. And it just so happens that the aunt is the owner of the stud of our puppies, thus solving the question of their paternal antecedent. Father Larry was out of two purebred parents, a Rottweiler and a standard poodle. The Rottweiler explains the black coloring, and the standard poodle explains the little wavy hair that some have.

Their family moved to this ridge back in the 1940s; when asked how they earned money, the response was informative: pigs and lumberjacking. And some moonshining on the side.

(We had another visitor today, too. Neighbor Bill stopped by to buy some eggs. He works for Countryside Organics, where we get our feed, which I thought was a nice loop. We had a good time talking to him. He said that their market pretty much stops at the Rocky Mountains, since shipping beyond there is quite expensive. But he has customers buy the soy free feed, and pay more for the shipping than the feed itself. That customer is motivated to get healthy food.)

Phil walked around for a while, just trying to get his bearings. He checked Denise and said that she doesn't look emaciated.

And then he went in to make a list of all we needed to do. We both went from feeling like we had our tasks more-or-less covered, to feeling very behind.

I spent time in the greenhouse transplanting herbs (most excited that basil, lemon balm, and oregano are up) and flowers (a lot of statice). Then I went to work on my moon-shaped garden bed. I have a few bulbs poking through my cardboard weed barrier in the tip. Stepping down, I have peas coming up under the hay mulch, planted a week or two ago.

Today was time for the next section. It has two trees, a blooming something (pluot maybe) and a plum that is still mostly dormant. After I dug out the few weeds, I subdivided the bed into two parts. In one, with remarkably poor soil, I leveled it as best I could, then put down cardboard. I covered that with manured hay, left over from the cows dry lotting at Christmas, and a layer of decent soil. I put in some tiny lettuces and green onions that weren't doing much of anything in the greenhouse. Maybe they will take off, and maybe they will die.

The part between the trees has beautiful soil, well mixed with the peat from last year. I couldn't bear to cover the peat with cardboard, so I just transplanted soil block beets into the bed and sprinkled it lightly with a little mulch. That little garden looks so nice to me!

Then I went to the other end of the moon-shaped bed. I had wanted to plant daffodils on the swales, and near the bottom of the bed, the swale was basically the edge of the road. The tractor can avoid the bulbs, but the dually cannot, and the poor daffodils were getting hammered. So I dug them up and moved them a couple feet away. They look horrible, all bent over and limp, but I hope, in the long run, they will live, better than they would have.

One of the conundrums we have faced is what to do with the remains of the 1000 raspberries we planted last year, that did absolutely nothing to help prevent weeds and didn't do much by way of production, either. While he was away, Phil did some reading and came home with a plan. We'll put the raspberries in the swales, where they will hopefully shade out the weeds. Of course, our swales have moved since last year, so it wasn't altogether obvious where all the raspberries were, but we were able to find most of them. We were pleased to see how many were yet living, and how many had sent out runners. Perhaps this year will be a year for fruit. It is certainly a year for blooms!

And finally, three little treasures.

First, I had hiked down to the lower pasture to see if the cherry trees were in bloom ("Loveliest of tree, the cherry now" and all that). On the way down, it sounded like massive numbers of animals were fleeing. I looked carefully for deer, but all I saw was a squirrel, clearly having a hard time navigating dry leaves silently.

The lizard I saw was not much better. So I watched him for a time, and he watched me. Such gratitude, to get to be here, to share a moment with a lizard.

I'm also sharing it with an allium, a gift from my friend Melanie. I planted more than one, but one has come up. I love its enormous whirl. It just looks like what nature should be to me.

And finally, a little surprise. I had ordered 25 elderberries last year, but didn't heel them in properly (i.e. not quickly enough), and most of them, desiccated, died. After our blazing summer, all but two or three were dead.

I remembered transplanting those few, but I couldn't remember where. Where would I have hidden them away?

I went to heel in some rootstocks this morning—and there was the sole remaining elderberry, green and cheery. What a gift.

What many, many gifts.