Front yard food garden: June 10

by George Packard on June 14, 2013 · 0 comments

Photo of the garden

June 10: The Grant St. garden; so far, so good (click to enlarge)

I’ve been waiting to write this shovel-and-trowel progress report on my test food garden until I was certain I had a garden worth writing about. A month ago, in mid-May, this 100 square foot garden was two naked, newly dug beds, raised up out of a 60-year-old lawn, planted only with some broccoli, tatsoi, and arugula starts.

Now, mid-June, it’s far more productive and apparently healthy than I had imagined possible. I’m growing two kinds potatoes, snap peas, eggplant, peppers, three kinds of beans, beets, two kinds of carrots, parsnips, Japanese climbing cucumbers, two kinds of radishes, onions and leeks, zucchini, butternut squash, and watermelon. Five types of heirloom tomatoes, broccoli, kale, mispoona, rainbow chard, parsley, basil, cilantro, and a small extra bed of Oaxacan green maize. And I’ve planted zinnias, nasturtiums, calendula and alyssum for the bees. [read more…]

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Fractal #21: Indiana Dunes

June 2, 2013

Longing for the ocean, we find the Dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan. Gusts from the lightning storm banging in from the west over the steel works rake sand across our skin, driving off the biting flies.

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May 22: Food Garden for Worms

May 24, 2013

Planting a food garden is an unnatural act, whether it’s me thumbing 15 kernels of Oaxacan Green maize into a freshly dug 4 foot diameter circle in my father-in-law’s front yard here in W. Lafayette, Indiana, or the ethanol farmers out beyond the city limits planting 400 acres a day with genetically engineered glyphosate-resistent corn [...]

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Front Yard Food Garden: May 15

May 15, 2013

The smaller the seed, the less I trust it. An hour ago I was planting carrot seeds in a two square foot patch of my new little 100 square foot test garden. I had my reading glasses on in order to see the darn things in the first place, piled up in the palm of [...]

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Fractal #20: The Painted Turtle

May 5, 2013

Walking in the Celery Bog in W. Lafayette, Indiana, looking for morels, I find instead an old and experienced Western painted turtle on its way to the water. I sat beside it for 10 minutes. It stretched its neck and tilted its head to put its beautiful eye on me. And then, fast and agile [...]

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Front Yard Food Garden: May 1

May 1, 2013

It’s May 1, 2013, the redbud trees are blooming, and I’m some 1200 miles from our garden in New Hampshire. Joan and I are taking care of her father here at his house in West Lafayette, Indiana. The house sits on a narrow corner lot on a busy street about a mile from Purdue University, [...]

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Johnny’s Foodmaster gives it up in Somerville

April 13, 2013

Morgan Packard sends us this note from Somerville, MA:
Johnny’s Foodmaster was one of the last of Boston’s regional B-grade supermarket chains. It was the funny grocery store near Tufts, where I went to college. It was the parking lot where my wife, Crissy and I had our first kiss, inside Crissy’s car, under the rain. [...]

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George’s Sense of Snow

March 25, 2013
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Green Dreams: The mantis in snow

January 21, 2013

On a warm day in September last year I spent a few minutes with one of our resident praying mantises. She was fat with eggs and no doubt annoyed by the interruption in her search for a suitable place to lay them on the rough boards on the south side of our barn. But being [...]

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In 2013: The Daily Screech redux?

January 10, 2013

I have been thinking that the trick to managing multiple personality disorder might be to get them all in the same room together and see if we could work out some of the issues. We’ve given up on the obvious compromises, like allotting everybody a day of their own each week which turned out to [...]

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