Sprout

Spring is a fantastic season to have a little kid around. Nico had a lot of fun playing in the garden last year and I suspect this year might be even better. He and I went down the the neighborhood playground at the beginning of April and somewhere during the course of our visit he asked me what was under the bushes that have been planted to eventually grow into a hedge. When I told him that roots are under plants, he became very curious and kept asking what the roots are, what they do. He didn't really get it, but I pulled up a weedy flowery thing to show him and he seemed duly impressed. I was hoping I could spin this curiosity into a deeper interest in plants and gardening and where food comes from, so I bought Nico two little seed planting kits from the dollar section at Target. He had a great time spooning water onto the little soil pellets, but the seeds were way too small for him to handle (basil and strawberries). I let him poke the holes for the seeds, but I had to put them into the soil for him. Once they were assembled, he did ask about his "little gardens" a few times. The middle stage was rather hard because Nico couldn't really do anything with the kits without possibly damaging the little plants, so they just had to sit up on the windowsill out of his reach. Now that the basil sprouts are getting a little tall for the mini greenhouse, I'm hoping Nico can help me transplant them to a couple of flowerpots this week.

A few weeks after our playground visit, the take-home activity at Nico's playgroup was a baggie with three sunflower seeds. I was so pleased with how well the mini Target greenhouse worked for the basil that I went back and bought another one for starting the sunflower seeds. Nico had a great time again adding the water to the pellets and helping to spoon the soil into the bottom of the planter. The seeds were big enough that he could put them in himself, which was nice. The sunflowers sprouted and grew quickly, so we transplanted them to the garden already. I'll have to go back there and check…hopefully no squirrels or rabbits came along and made a snack of them this past weekend. MB also planted some tomatoes in the garden with Nico's "help." He's definitely still more interested in digging in the dirt than he is in planting things or learning about plants. I tell myself that'll come, though, even if it doesn't come this year. He does get excited about earthworms, which is pretty rad. He also had a fun time filling up our bird feeder to hang outside his playroom window. I have this warm fuzzy little fantasy that we'll watch the birds together and he'll start to learn to identify some. It might actually happen…he learned to identify robins earlier this year and still excitedly says, "Mommy, is that a robin? It has an orange chest!" when he sees one.

As often happens, I feel like having Nico around is opening my eyes to the everyday wonder in the world. Things I've taken for granted for a long time, like robins and little plants growing from seed, are suddenly exciting and miraculous again. It's pretty damn awesome. Gardening with a toddler also teaches me / reminds me to be patient. I went into it with such pie-in-the-sky daydreams last year and then quickly realized Nico wanted only two things out of the experience:   to dig in the dirt and to run through the hose whenever possible. And once I let go of my adult-based expectations and just let him be, it was seriously wonderful. I think as a parent I really need his guidance sometimes to let go of my Type A planning and just be present in the moment. Who would've thought that the biggest parenting lessons sometimes are the ones the child teaches the grownup?



examining some playground plants







digging for earthworms at a local Earth Day event





After hanging the feeder, he stepped back and said, "Here you go, birds!"









The tiny gloves are killing me.



He calls the spade a "spadeship" for some reason. Like spaceship but hinty times more adorable.



an outdoor activity we can all agree upon



P.S. … book giveaway I'm giving away a kids' book from Barefoot Books over on my review blog. Comment here by 11:59 PM on May 18 for a chance to win.

The stuff I was doing while I wasn't blogging

I have attempted to post about six times in the last two weeks and ended up dozing off with nothing written. Today I'm home early-ish because I had to let the exterminator in, so let's see if starting to write at 4:45 is a little less sleep-inducing than trying at 10:45. (Except I predictably got distracted by dinner and Nico and bedtime and now it's 10:00 again…but I'm still awake, so let's see what happens.)

Speaking of the exterminator

I called him because I've been finding little black ants in the house, usually just one, but one more than once exceeds my acceptable level of in-house ants. Mostly they've been in the upstairs bathroom, which is better than in the kitchen, but I have seen a few in the kitchen, too. I always get self-conscious when the termite service guy or an exterminator is in the house, worrying that he'll judge me for my not-spotless house. I realized today, though, they probably see a lot worse than my house. And then, as if to confirm it, the guy was telling me it's going to be a bad year for ants and said, "I went to a house the other day, and well…let me just say the floor was supposed to be white. It was black. With ants." Gentle readers, let me assure you I would move. the fuck. out. if that ever happened to me.

Surprise!

I was happy to trade a birthday party for a chance to throw a surprise game shower this year, but it seems some of my friends had other ideas. Danger, evilducky, rabid monkey, and the bibliophile showed up last Tuesday night with a cake and intention to play dominoes. Which we did, for quite some time. It was pretty awesome, and not just because the cake in question is the cake I'd choose if I could only eat one kind of cake for the rest of my life -- Danger's carrot cake recipe with pineapple and chopped nuts.

Road trip

We spent the most recent weekend visiting MB's family. The trip was not without its (probably somewhat typical) stresses - an impending divorce, a once-robust grandparent's flagging health, an upcoming surgery. We got home hours later than planned, I found a tick on the baby right before he took a crap in the bath, and there were several other moments when I just wanted to resign my adulthood card for a day. But we ate homecooked food until we were stuffed, we had a nice time visiting with people we don't get to see as often as we'd like, and Nico got doted upon and played outside until it got dark two nights in a row. Overall, a winning weekend.

Big Exciting Spring Plans™ update

I went yesterday to have a bit more hair cut off, and it was definitely the right decision. I don't feel like it's that different, but it's enough that I really love it now. Unfortunately it won't stay this way for long, but I'm pleased and hope it doesn't grow back out too fast.

I also started the garden overhaul last Thursday with some unexpected help from MB. Evilducky had offered me two blackberry plants and I wanted to get a spot ready for them before we went away for the weekend. The place I picked should be good for thorny, sprawly plants, but unfortunately it was buried in a pile of mulch left from a years-ago project plus a cut-up holly bush and some scrap wood that had been dumped on top. I want to know who decided holly was an acceptable landscaping plant so I can drive to that person's house and punch him or her in the face. I probably will be picking dried-up razor-sharp holly leaves out of that corner of the yard for the rest of my life. I spent about two hours bagging up the trash and trying to get all the holly out of the mulch. On the bright side, I had expected the mulch underneath the trash to be rotted away, but I salvaged an entire outdoor trash can full that was perfectly usable. While I worked on that, MB -- who has never been hugely invested in past garden projects -- cleared dead scrub and weeds along the whole west side of the perimeter and build a new raised bed along the back fence.

how it looked when MB started

how it looked when MB was done

The blackberry plants arrived Friday evening, so I went out Saturday morning to edge their new home with bricks, plant them, and put the salvaged mulch back in place. I have a metal fence-ish frame-ish type of thing someone else gave me that might work as a trellis, so that may be this next weekend's project.

horrible mulch pile of shame

happy little blackberry plants

Nico helping me water the berries

There are allegedly some strawberry starts coming my way, so last night I went out and cleared the original raised bed that I built in Spring 2009. There are so many metaphors applied to gardening, but this was completely gardening as atonement. I did two hours of penance for being dumb enough to fill a raised bed with grass-infested yard dirt and then dumb enough later to let it go wild for two years untended. Once the dead grass was cleared off the top, I took the top row of bricks off to pull grass out from underneath, and then I had to turn over all the dirt in the bed with a shovel and pull out the clumps of grass roots. Finally, finally, I mixed in two bags of composted manure that Nico and I had picked up at Home Depot earlier in the day. Now I must be vigilant against grass re-infestation for the rest of the year.

I haven't filled the new bed that MB built yet, but I think we bought enough dirt. Dad and I also got another half-truckload of free bricks yesterday, so we may get a little more bed-building done this year than I'd dared to hope. Time will tell. I'm definitely only up for gardening in short bursts of two hours or so…spending an entire day out there does not sound at all enjoyable. Of course at this point, it's more reclamation than gardening.

Just for fun, here's a picture of Nico helping me push the cart at Home Depot yesterday. The photo doesn't really do it justice -- it was probably one of the cutest things ever.

Reading:  The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: a Novel in Pictures by Caroline Preston

Playing:  an old mix I made for a friend

Springy

I guess now that it's officially Spring I'll have to stop saying, "But it's WINTER!" every time the daily temperature is forecast to hit 80 degrees. It's been going on for several weeks now, though, off and on. I have been enjoying the mild days (though 80 is a little much), but it feels like shenanigans nonetheless. Is this happening everywhere, or is it just here that the weather has been freakish pretty much since the non-winter started?

As usually happens, I'm all full of Big Exciting Spring Plans!™ that will probably never come to fruition (see: every year of my mostly-failed garden blog). But just for fun, my big ideas:

1. zoo!

One thing that will definitely happen is lots of zoo trips. We bought a family membership this year and Nico and I have already been four times since the end of February. They're open on Mondays unlike most of the museums and other educational kid-friendly places around town, which is quite convenient since I take Mondays off to hang with the kid already.

2. garden!

I had decided to just let the garden go again this year. Last year I cleared and landscape-fabricked half of it before it got too hot and I gave up, and then I never ended up planting anything. I figured I could let it sit one more year and re-evaluate next year, but then Nico developed a sudden fascination with digging in the dirt. It started on a walk one day with my dad, when they stopped by to visit a friend of Dad's in the neighborhood and Nico was allowed to dig around in the guy's front porch planter. All the way home that day, he chirped in the backseat, "Play in the dirt! Play in the dirt with Grandpa!" Ever since then, he's been regularly requesting to play in the dirt again. This week Dad took him to the big park playground and let him play with his dump truck in the big dirt-filled but plant-free planter there.

Knowing that Nico is excited about dirt makes me want to get him out there in it while he's interested. Thus the new plan is to clear out the raised bed I built the summer I was pregnant and plant some easy toddler-friendly things like snap peas and cherry tomatoes. I've also decided that redoing the landscaping fabric every year is too much of a pain in the ass for too little benefit. It takes forever, it costs money every year, and inevitably the birds and Indy tear it all up. The new plan of action is to eventually go to all raised beds back there with mulch or something in between them. To that end, Dad and I picked up a half-truckload of bricks from a freecycler this week (which is another whole blog post that I want to write). Nico and I stopped by the Home Depot tonight after a spontaneous dinner date to price dirt for the new bed I want to build. Hilariously, every time we passed one of their lines of lawn tractors, Nico would say, "Wow! Look at all those toys!" Dream big, my son! He was also quite enamored of the huge rolling ladders that the guys were pushing around the store. ("That's a really big ladder! He was pushing a really big ladder!")

This weather has me all confused about the correct timing for gardening, though. Usually we don't put anything in the ground until Mother's Day weekend, because there's almost always a chance of frost until then. But the trees and grass and flowers have been going gangbusters for weeks so do we plant now? Wait until later? Split the difference? SO CONFUSED.

3. tadpoles!

I don't remember how I came upon this idea, but I'd really like to raise tadpoles with Nico this Spring / Summer if possible. We had some in an aquarium at work last year and it was so cool to watch them go through their metamorphosis. All the kids who came in loved it and most of the adults did, too. To facilitate this, I got the okay from MB (who seems mystified but is willing to indulge my weird whims) and bought a 10 gallon aquarium off Craigslist for $5 tonight. Now I just need to be on the lookout for stranded tadpoles. The ones we had last year came from somebody's pool cover, so I've put the word out on facebook in case any pool-having people find some stowaways. I think this'll either turn out to be a really awesome idea or a really bad one…there probably won't be any middle ground.

4. hair!

This is probably unrelated to my Big Exciting Spring Plans™, but around my birthday I got this sudden and powerful urge to cut off all my hair. I had the same thing happen the year Nico was born and went out around my birthday and got my hair cut to just past my shoulders. I wore it down for one or two days with curl-product in it and then gave up and started wearing a ponytail every day again. I just can't stand hair in / around my face while I'm working. This year, I decided to go big or go home. It's the first time I've had short hair since a tragic haircut at age 12, and so far I think I love it.

(probably the closest you'll ever get to a real photo of me on this blog)
I am planning to donate the chopped-off hair to some wig-making charity or another, so I drove home from the salon with it on my passenger seat. I don't care how good a cause it benefits…it will never not be creepy to walk around with a huge hank of one's own severed hair.

5. Jax!

This has nothing at all to do with Spring, but it has to be shared. I watched two episodes of Sons of Anarchy before bed last night, which is not unusual in itself. Then this morning right before waking up, I had a long and elaborate dream which was basically my subconscious mind's version of an episode of SoA. I was even running around with Tig and Opie and shooting bad guys and eventually being rescued by Jax. More of that, please.

"Gardening requires lots of water - most of it in the form of perspiration." -- Lou Erickson

We worked out in the yard for most of the day, and damn it was hot. I love having a yard and a garden, but this was not a day of cute gardening. There were no sassy hats or twee little garden clogs, no pretty glasses of lemonade. It wasn't sexy gardening, either, unless you like your garden chicks pouring sweat and wearing an old ratty baseball cap.

I did some stuff in the garden while MB and R trimmed down the bushes along the fence that MB hates.


When I took this photo, I was sort of sad that the bushes would be gone by the end of the day. Then the guys spent about an hour chopping and chainsawing them, and I spent another almost two hours hacking what they'd cut into pieces that would fit in the trashcans. Some of the pieces resembled that thing that comes out of the lake in the first Lord of the Rings movie, and some of them had inch-long thorns. It was not a nice way to spend an afternoon, but I suppose it'll be worth it to not hear MB bitch about the bushes every time he mows the grass.


The guys also went out with my dad to fetch a truckload of firewood from one of MB's coworkers. I felt sort of like we belonged in a Little House book, laying in wood for the long winter.




"Is it bedtime yet?"


New post up at the garden blog!

Hassenpfeffer

We spent Sunday working in the yard, and at the end of the evening, I dragged a tarp out into the future garden plot. The plan was to stake the tarp down and let it weaken the thick bermuda grass so that we have more of a chance of cutting through it to start our garden beds. As I was explaining my plan to MB, I noticed some weird fluffy gray stuff on the ground. I scuffed at it with my foot, and it started moving. I instantly knew what was up.

Meet Yard Bunny:


Yard Bunny came around every few days before Indiana moved in, and has been seen several times since Indy's homecoming. And now it seems that Yard Bunny has done her part to uphold the stereotypes about rabbits:



Yard Bunny is either the unluckiest rabbit in the neighborhood and had her babies in a yard that would soon belong to a dog, or she's dumb and had her babies in the yard even though Indy was already here. Either way, we have a nest of small, defenseless infant rabbits in a yard patrolled by a rambunctious dog. And to make matters worse, Indy was with us when we made the discovery, and his instincts were shouting, "I can haz bunneh sammitch?"

We hustled him back inside and hoped that he would forget about the juicy, juicy bunnies, but we knew there wouldn't be much chance of that. He did okay on Monday morning, and even Monday at lunch when he and I were out in the yard. And then, Monday night came around. MB and I let Indy out into the yard (against my better judgement) while we carried out a bunch of wine bottles I saved to recycle from a charity dinner at work.

Sacrificing our reputation for the sake of the planet.

When I finished with the recycling and went back into the yard, MB was standing in the garden plot, looking grim. "You don't want to come back here," he said. "You should go inside." Oh, God. "Is it dead?" I asked. "No," came the answer. Worse?

No, this was apparently the luckiest unlucky rabbit in the history of rabbits. Indy got one of the babies out of the nest while we weren't paying attention, but he didn't gobble it. He didn't bite it, maim it, pour A1 on it and chow down. He picked it up in his mouth a few times and dropped it, but when I got back there, it was definitely intact. Unfortunately, when a dog picks up a baby rabbit, the baby rabbit screams a high-pitched little scream. So now Indy is pretty sure we are hiding a nest of juicy, juicy squeaky toys in the backyard, and he loves squeaky toys more than any other toys in the whole wide world. Oy.

I tried picking up the tiny rabbit--barely larger than a mouse--with a paper towel, because I didn't want my manky human smell all over it in addition to the lovely aroma of our dog's slobber, but the little thing was so rubbery and limp that I couldn't be sure I was holding it gently enough. I finally abandoned the paper towel and just picked it up. It was so cold I was sure it was dead, but then it moved. I could see its delicate little claws and hamster-like paws. Its eyes were still closed tight, its fur a soft, fine dusting that only covered its top half. I saw the navel on its tiny naked belly. I did the only thing I could think of and tucked the baby back into the nest with the others, and covered the hollow with a handful of cut grass.

Evilducky had given me a good-sized roll of rabbit fence, designed to keep rabbits out of gardens, but it's all we had to put up to keep the rabbits in and the dog out.



This fence was just the thing. Indy has not been able to get at the juicy bunnies again, and when I checked on them after my Pilates class Tuesday evening, a new layer of insulating mama fur had been added to the top of the nest. I was so relieved. And then, as I was stepping over the fence to go in the house, I caught my toe on the top wire and totally bit it. Life really is a comedy.


Wiggly bunnies:  painfully adorable but hard to photograph

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! *

Reading:  The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

Playing:  the Decemberists mix I got from Heather Feather

Planting a seed

I grew up in the city, but my parents had a pretty respectable vegetable garden in their large backyard. There's a photo in the family album of me at about 12 months old, a blue plastic hoe in my hands, "helping" my dad get the garden ready for planting. I don't know what they grew in those early days, but by the time I was in elementary school, they planted corn, green beans, and tomatoes. They experimented with other crops, to varying degrees of success. One year, Mom planted a small watermelon patch, and by the end of the summer the things were plotting world domination. Potatoes always seemed to go in too late and come out too early, never getting much large than seed potato size. The yard had be leveled with fill from a dump, so it was full of rocks. When my cousins and I complained that we were bored, my mom would offer us a quarter for every gallon ice cream bucket we filled with rocks from the garden. Surprisingly, all kind of interesting pursuits always came to mind before the bucket was full. I don't honestly know if we ever earned a single quarter.

My mother babysat a girl who was a year younger than me. Her father lived out in the country and kept apple trees. He invited us to collect apples, and so we did. My mom canned jar after jar of apple sauce, some with cinnamon turning the sauce pink. I think the same guy gave my mom a few raspberry and blackberry canes one spring. She planted them in a small plot by the fence, and while the raspberries quickly gave up the ghost, the tame blackberries thrived. They were moved to the back corner of the garden the following spring, and in years to come grew into a thicket four or five feet deep and ten or twelve feet wide. Mom collected the berries all summer, freezing them in buckets and ziploc bags. When berry season was over, she ran all the berries through her food strainer again and again until all the juice and pulp had been extracted. Then she made dozens of jars of blackberry jam. I never learned to like raw blackberries (too many seeds) but I still love blackberry jam. Just writing this down has awakened scent memories long forgotten--the smell of the crushed fruit, of the strained-out seeds, the aroma of the juice and pulp cooking on the stove.

Tomatoes also went through the strainer, and Mom canned tomato juice to use as a base for soup and cooking meat through the year. Ears of corn were sealed in ziplocs, either on the cob or just the sliced-off kernels. Green beans were soaked in the sink, snapped into manageable pieces, and sealed in Ball jars. I can still call up the sound of snapping beans and the way I'd see a sink full of beans behind my eyelids when I went to bed after a long bean snapping stint. I always knew that when I had a yard of my own, I'd have a garden, too.

When we moved into our last apartment, I was initially excited about the tiny yardlet in back, and succumbed to visions of a tiny vegetable patch. But then the reality of neighbors throwing cigarettes and trash over the balcony upstairs, the lack of an outdoor faucet, and the yard man's slash and burn style of lawn grooming all came together and showed me reality. I amassed a pretty huge collection of houseplants, but never put anything much in the ground. Then we found this house, and I knew immediately where I'd put the vegetable patch if we managed to buy the place. Once our offer was accepted and we set a closing date, MB and I started talking about what we'd plant in our garden, how we'd fence it off from the dog we wanted to get. It won't ever be the huge corn / bean / tomato / blackberry extravaganza that my parents pulled off year after year, but I think it'll be pretty fabulous anyway. And since we've never done this before, I'm sure there will be lots of ridiculous missteps, too. If you want to follow us on our gardening journey, you can visit me over at my new sideblog, Pardon the Garden. (Don't worry, I'll still be posting normal stuff right here.) My homie J Dog announced that she was starting a gardening blog the very day I decided to start mine, and with several years of gardening experience under her belt, I'm betting hers will be pretty cool to read:  J's Snappy Garden.

Happy Spring, everyone!