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The last two weeks of my school quarter, I held out gardening as my reward
for finishing. Recognizing the procrastinative power of dirt, I did not
allow myself to work in the yard at all until I had finished my final
papers. Nature rewarded me by raining nonstop for a week after I
had turned in my last assignment. Now that the rain has let up, I've been
able to make some forays into the world of yard work, but holiday
obligations have slowed my progress. On Friday, I woke up at 8am (early
for me now - 6 months ago I would have considered 8 a tremendous sleep-in)
and was out hoeing weeds in the front yard by 8:30. I just sort of
loosened them all out of the soil and then sowed a bunch of sage
(Salvia officinalis) seeds. Loosening the weeds only killed
about half of them, the rest ended up just re-rooting themselves as pretty
as you please. I got about halfway through the bare patch in the front
before I ran out of sage seeds. I'm not sure if I'll just buy some more,
or plant something else there too.
I also hoed a little bit along the fence in the back and planted Fava
beans like I've been dreaming of. I need to weed the rest of the mud
patch. It's starting to grow a dandelion field, but there's not enough
greenery to prevent my boots from getting caked with mud every time I walk
across it.
When I was planting the Fava beans, I went to check on the lettuces
I planted in my veggie patch. I figured they had been getting lots of
rain, so maybe they'd be looking good by now. A few weeks ago they had all
sprouted and I was proud. There was nothing there. I looked really hard
and found a few mostly-eaten kale seedlings, just enough to prove that I
didn't hallucinate the sprouting event a few weeks ago. Definitely snails
or slugs, but the patch is so surrounded by just dirt and leaves... I'm
puzzled as to how they found their tasty bites. How do slugs find food
anyway? So, I'm going to build a little wood frame for the patch and ring
it with copper tape and try again.
I've got some gladiola bulbs to plant (a pretty orchid-type colored
kind that I picked up at the grocery store), but first I have do decide
where they should go. I have this feeling that I am going to have a very
haphazard garden come spring.
I have not completely let go of Amsinckia grandiflora work -
I went out to the site on the 11th to mark plants for survivorship
tracking. We looped white pieces of string around seedlings like we do
every year. I brought a cool piece of equipment I had borrowed from
school: I was hoping to take a measurement of the light environment at each
seedling. One of the puzzles we are working on with this plant is that it
can either grow large and branched, or it can grow tall and thin. The
large, branched plants produce hundreds of seeds and the tall, thin plants
make less than four seeds each. We're not sure what causes this
"spindly"-ness. Some people have thought it has to do with shading of the
seedling. The spindly event happens pretty early on - some of the plants
we marked on the 11th are spindly already, we can tell, and they only have
four leaves. Taking light measurements at each plant will help us tell if
the spindly plants have a different light environment than non-spindly
ones. Unfortunately, there was a military test going on that day and we
had to get off site before we could take those measurements. I'm hoping to
go back next month to do it.
Continuing to keep my hand in my old job has been a lifesaver for me.
Although school is ok, my true love is thinking about science while working
on it outdoors. Until I come up with a good idea for my own dissertation
research, it's nice to have projects to work on that remind me why I'm
here.
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