Front Yard Food Garden: May 15

by George Packard on May 15, 2013 · 1 comment

Two small garden beds

100 Square feet is not a lot of garden. But I've planted zucchini. (click to enlarge)


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 my left hand like a half thimbleful of sand. I was dribbling them, pinched between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, into a dolly-sized furrow a 1/4 inch deep, my face six inches from the dirt, losing confidence by the second as each seed dropped and disappeared into the micro-crevices of soil.

This was new soil, a not particularly homogenous brew of little clay balls, thumb-sized tangles of grass root, sand, half-done compost, crumbly chunks of peat, chopped up leaves from the neighbor’s stash, and bits of yellow oat straw. It was the best I could do, given that just 5 days ago where this 50 square foot bed now lies (you can lie in beds, but do beds themselves lie?) was a patch of lawn that had been growing over hard-pan Indiana clay for 50 years.

As I watched my microscopic carrot seeds drop into the oblivion of this raw garden soil, a burst of wind from a stealth thunderstorm front tore the rest of the seeds out of my upturned palm, and lo, the remainder of my carrots got planted at random down the length of the bed. This was about half a packet of Danvers carrots from Seed Savers Exchange, and at $2.75 a pop, not a negligible loss.

Give me a seed that has heft and weight. Say, a scarlet runner bean (I’ve been growing these out from seeds I got in Tucson 10 years ago). A bean as big as the end joint of your index finger. Step on one on the kitchen floor with your bare foot in the dark and you’ll limp for a week. [read more…]

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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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Fractal #19: The old man’s Christmas

December 25, 2012

The old man slowly hangs four ornaments on the tree, then sits on the sofa, looking round the living room carefully for the first time in maybe two or three years. His gaze lands on the wall to the left of the tree. Stands so slowly it seems he is growing in place, then shuffles [...]

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Ian Lindsay: Front Yard Food Grower

October 20, 2012

Ian Lindsay, a professor at Purdue University, is growing food on what used to be his front lawn at his suburban home in West Lafayette, Indiana. His lot is in a neighborhood of similar neo-middle class homes in this relatively liberal university town.
Good for him, you say, and so what?
The town itself is [...]

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Fractals #14 & #15

September 23, 2012

Fractal #14
The slender young Indian woman in front of me in the chute touches the white wall with her knuckle, traces a small character or two on the surface with her forefinger, wipes the invisible prayer away and boards the plane.
Fractal #15
The vulture on the ground sees me first. She takes two steps on the [...]

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