Stream of Consiousness: Seeds, Gourds, Heirlooms, and Favas

Since I'm so amped to have planted some peas, I started trying to order other seeds for the garden.  I have used Seeds of Change out of Santa Fe for so long.  But it was a bummer this year, as it seems maybe they were hit hard by the record cold temps and state of emergency in New Mexico this winter?  Not sure, but nearly everything was unavailable.  I did order some buckwheat, as I loved planting that around all the summer veggies (squashes in particular).  But more on that later. . .

Caveman's Club Gourd

Last year we grew pumpkins and they took up a lot of our plot.  And then, actually, someone STOLE our pumpkins from the plot.  We never had the heart to tell Eli.  I ran out and bought some that looked similar and brought them home "from the garden."  But, maybe because they will be new, Eli said he didn't want to grow pumpkins this year, but is interested in gourds.  Seeds of Change has bird house and Caveman's club gourds, both of which are really excellent to grow, and when I told Eli that he could GROW a caveman's club, he just about flipped his lid!

But after ordering them, I remembered seeing something in one of my catalogs and pulled it out.  The catalog is from John Scheepers' Kitchen Garden Seeds, and it's a GEM of a catalog.  Get one!  (They also have a website at www.kitchengardenseeds.com.  The website is quite beautiful, with botanical drawings of vegetables to start your searching).  It has great varieties and choices for veggies, flowers, and. . . just what I was wanting:  a large fruited hardshell mixture.  It comes with 25 seeds including apple, baby bottle, birdhouse, martin house, cucuzzi (a Native American basket gourd), long handle dipper, maranka (the caveman's club), speckled swan (a personal favorite), and bottle.  All for $3.15 for the pack. I don't even know what they all are, but we'll find out!

Cucuzzi Gourd -- Can be grown straight if hung, or in curved form on the ground.

Gooseneck Gourd

Heirloom seeds are those that have been cultivated at small scales, usually over several generations, if not hundreds.  They provide variety, diversity, insect resistance, and are so much fun to explore.  And they usually come with great stories, too.  When I lived in Louisiana, I grew an heirloom tomato just because some grandmother in Kentucky had worked so hard to maintain the seeds.  I think this will be a good year to invest in some heirloom seeds and stories.  I know Eli will really enjoy that!  My hands-down favorite source of heirlooms is Seed Saver's Exchange:  www.seedsavers.org.  They exist to preserve garden heritage and plant diversity.  And their seeds are good quality and interesting, too.

Examples of heirlooms at Seed Saver's

Boy with Favas

Something else I want to plant soon is fava beans.  They are a great early season cover crop, a legume, providing good nitrogen to the soil, but they also are large enough that they help break up clay soil (which tends to settle over winter) so it's nice and loamy for summer plantings.  Unfortunately, Seeds of Change had a crop failure this year, but I'll find them somewhere?  Fava beans also are quite good sauteed in some olive oil with soba noodles or some other pasta.  They are popular in northern New Mexico and in Meditteranean and North African foods, too.  More on food, soon!

For a nice article on fava beans see Gardens West:

http://www.gardenswest.com/qry/page.taf?id=30&_function=atcldetail&sbtatcl_uid1=2017&_nc=b525ec3373850dda8af890bd5a74f4d6

Spring, Peas!. . . Or the start of Mommy's Happy Season

It's an early spring in Boulder, though Father Winter is sure to poke his head back up at least once more.  But we are all getting antsy for spring.  Bulbs are poking up, and we saw our first crocus blooms today.

Yet, it is still February, and there's not much to do in the garden yet, I thought.  I've walked our dog, Amber, through the community garden a few times and the winter rye and hairy vetch have endured the winter and are showing signs of waking up.  On one of these walks, I noticed some new piles of wood chips in the main paths, so on Sunday, Jeff, Eli, Amber and I went to the garden.  It was one of Eli's first opportunities to ride his new pedal bike since the fall, so he rode that, while we all trotted along, trying to keep pace (easier for Amber than the rest of us).  A few days earlier, I spied a neighbor breaking down a mongo box (some Target table purchase) and quickly swept it out of the recycling, and hauled that along to the garden, too.

Our goal for the day was to be outside, enjoying whatever there was to see in the garden, and to SHEET MULCH, which is my favorite method of preventing weeds, and is best done in early spring.

So we got a couple of pitch forks from the community garden shed and a couple of wheelbarrows to cover the huge sheet of cardboard with wood chips.  This layer of cardboard doesn't prevent the most tenacious weeds, but it definitely slows them down, a lot.  While we were shoveling the mulch into the wheelbarrows, we all discovered a blue mold, which spread moldy dust into the air each time the mulch was lifted.  This reminded Jeff that he'd seen an article recently that children who grow up on farms and are exposed to manure, molds, and everything we work so hard to remove from urban environments, actually have FEWER allergies.  This reminds me of the research I mentioned in a previous post, that there are so many beneficial bacteria in the soil, just waiting to be . . . eaten?  Well, ingested anyway. . .  I was so happy to be in the garden, that I said, "It's the start of Mommy's happy season."  I think there's really nothing I love better than growing plants, especially outside, in the sunshine and dirt.  Eli said, "me, too!"  And Amber really did bark right at that moment!


 While Jeff and I scooped mulch into the wheelbarrows, Eli ran up the woodchip pile and then jumped down.  Over and over again.  Until the wheelbarrows were ready to haul over to the garden bed (all of two-three plots away).  And then he'd jump in the wheelbarrow for a ride.  After about 2 trips, he was ready for a "train ride" around the garden, with Jeff and Eli in the first wheelbarrow as the engine, and I the caboose.  We did a tour of the whole garden and then back to the plot.  On the trip, we looked at the Hmong garden plots, which I admire, because they are very scrappy (i.e., low budget) in their use of materials, but they just feel so comfortable.  Last summer, one of the Hmong gardeners put a bunch of tree branches in the ground as bean poles.  It looked like a miniature forest of beans, and Eli was always wanting to wend his way through them.  It's an organic style of gardening that children really seem to respond to.  There's a mystery in it.  It's called "enticement" in design -- what's around the corner, what is alluded to but cannot be directly seen, offers appeal and a sense of excitement.

While we were inside the garden plot itself, we discovered at least one deer had been there over the winter, as evidenced by their POOP.  Eli was so excited, he looked around at all the rye and thought they'd probably been eating that.  He hopped from one stepping stone (loose rocks stolen from here and there) to another, and just seemed to be looking for any signs of life.  There aren't many yet, but there are a few bulbs poking up in the garden, too.  Soon, soon.

We overheard a fellow gardener several plots away shouting "The peas need to be UP by St. Patrick's Day or it gets too hot."  SCREECH.  My ears took a break to hear that again.  Time to plant peas!  Yippee!  So today when I picked Eli up from school, we took Amber and a picnic lunch to the garden and did just that.  The water isn't on in the garden yet, so I do hope for some moisture.  .  . 

Just not in the form of snow! 

The peas can probably handle it, but I don't know if I can!