This day in the garden

It has been a long, long day around here. Early in the morning, I was out in the garden...I keep thinking I have to get out there because by 8:00 a.m., it will be too hot to work. But we really aren't there yet. It is still May, and the mornings are cool, and there is a breeze. But I guess I have heat paranoia. The goal is the mulching of the herb beds. There are 18 of them. They are in rows...3 across - 6 deep. We have a method now. Will dumps bales of hay in the evening and I come out in the morning and do the mulching. Cut the ropes. Drag the twine out from the bale. Roll up the twine and walk over to the benches. Must not leave twine in the garden (0r anywhere else for that matter). Think of running the mower over twine. yikes. Peel off section of hay. Walk to the end of the bed. shake, shake, stuff, stuff. Turn your head when the wind scatters the detritus. Get hay in your shoes. See the little particles stick to your legs where you have slathered the sunscreen. Walk back to the bale. Repeat. Every now and then, hear a bee or catch sight of a bird out of the corner of your eye. Stand up and listen. And look. And remember that you're moving too fast. For no reason. Pull the sweat rag out of your pocket and wipe your forehead. Dab the sweat and sunscreen out of your eye. Step back and admire your work.
When I'm finished with the bales that are scattered here and there, I like to sit on one of the benches and just take stock before deciding which thing needs to be done next. Watch the purple martins for a few minutes. Feel grateful.

Will wants to finish the mowing. We've been doing tag-team mowing the past few days. I like to mow, actually. Like anything else, I like it for the first hour...then it gets tedious. And hot. But there are some places I won't go. Like the steep ditch by the road. Like the entire section by the beehives. Like really close to the pond. We almost have everything mowed. This happens about once a month. By the time you're through, and everything looks so park-like, you're too tired to enjoy it, and wish you had company so they could see it too, but you're too tired for that. You don't even have enough in you to carry on a conversation. So he drives the mower to the front to mow out by the road, on the outside of the fence, and he carries a plastic bag because, as we know, people throw things out of cars. Hey. It's Louisiana, after all. Most times, it's just paper. Sometimes it's beer bottles. Sometimes it's stuff like clothes. Nobody knows why. After this, he starts the dreaded weed-eating. The more stuff we plant, the more things there are that need weed-eating. When we first bought this property, there wasn't a bush or a tree or any living thing on this property, save a single oak, one magnolia that looked rather sickly, two crepe myrtles up against the house, and two little matching bushes in the side yard that we couldn't identify, although the movers called them 'sweat-bee trees'. Six acres. six things. period. My mother tried to cheer me up by saying 'But you have a blank slate! you can do anything you want!" And all I could think was...'there's nothing here. Nobody has ever planted anything on this property. Where to start? I wish there were trees!' Well, we sure fixed THAT problem. It took Will HOURS to finish the weed-eating. Trees, bushes, flowerbeds, fencelines...Literally hundreds of things to attend to. But that's ok. Maybe ten years from now, we won't be able to do all of this. But for now, we can. Hey, ten years from now, the billion trees we've planted will shade out their own weeds, right? And Will will say - 'I 'm not going to plant the whole garden this year. ' But he says that every year. ha.
Will was still working....fertilizing the melons and it was almost dark. So I fed the cats and the dogs and the fish. After my morning rounds in the garden, I kept to the shade. Re-potting plants, labeling the jelly, hanging out the laundry and that kind of thing.
So it's rediculously late, and I have someone coming early in the morning for beans. I am not at all sure whether they wanted to come early to pick beans, or whether they expect me to pick them before they get here. I guess I'll get out extra early and pick at least some. Hedge my bets. And there are more hay bales waiting for me. I don't mind hauling them myself, but I am deathly afraid of the red wasps, so after my first couple of mornings of facing that evil, Will has stepped in to save me from spending 15 minutes carefully prying one bale from the stack and, with much fear, hauling it into the cart behind the mower. I'm trying to enjoy the garden in it's pristine state. It will not be more beautiful this year than it is right now.

About those beans...

I thought, a handful of yellow beans, how nice.
Well, things are never that simple.

The Garden This Morning...in pictures

This morning's sweet surprise
green beans, yellow wax beans

coreopsis...the gift that keeps on giving

feverfew

first sunflower of the season

little sweet potato plant

lemon basil

zinnias in the garden

Honey Harvesting...a first attempt

not so many words - the pictures tell the story. In the previous post, you will see the bee hives, and the 'boxes' on top of each. This is our late (late) evening honey getting experience. And quite a mess it was, I must say (!) This is the result of one box from one hive. I have a feeling there will be quite a bit of honey in our near future...and I certainly hope we can figure out some other place to do this...Like - maybe outside...The scary-looking knife is HOT. (It is electric and smokes like the devil. I am in charge of the extension cords. Plug it in...when it smells like burned honey, unplug! Wait. Plug it in. etc. etc.) The goal is to uncap the little cells the bees have made...stick the racks in the big aluminum thing and spin!


A very sticky business, all in all. I have to hand it to Will, though. When he decides to get something done (like, bees...like, honey) he gets it done completely, and in very short order! In the end, my thought is this: I have never really seen this much honey in one container in one place - ever.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

bees...finally...Not a hard decision - we'd been thinking about this for a while anyway. But the distinct and mildly frightening lack of bees on this property all spring sealed the deal. Where to get a hive? I found the Louisiana Beekeepers on the 'net. Emailed the current president. He got right back to me. Actually, what he really wanted was for Will to show up at the Tuesday meeting. I kept pushing him for a contact instead - which he did give. But Will thought - no - best to go to the meeting. That was smart. Lots of bee folks, actually; and very nice folks indeed. He came away with cards and phone numbers and whatnot. And a direct line to a guy across the river who had ten or so hives he was trying to sell. So - the following Saturday evening Will goes across the river to Morganza and buys two hives (full of bees, naturally), and a big metallic thing that spins out the honey (looks like a giant ice-cream maker). He calls from the other side of the river at St. Francisville. (the Mississippi river). This means he is waiting for the ferry. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was getting onto a ferry and a guy drives his pickup truck onto the ferry with two beehives full of bees in the back of the truck, I would not be well for that. It was dark, and it was Saturday night, and no one seemed to notice. ha.
Well, everything went without a hitch. A friend was here to help offload the hives. Of course, Will had made extreme preparations, because that's just the way he is. He laid concrete footings, and set up cinder blocks and painted them white, and faced the whole shenanegins towards the rising sun to warm the bees in the morning. Within the first week, the Prez of the Beekeepers showed up out here to help Will 'go through' the hives for the first time. That was incredible. Also, Will's beesuit arrived. He puts it on...'does this look funny?' Well, that's a matter of opinion, I guess. It looks like coveralls with a hazmat hood, I suppose. It looks like 'first man on the moon'. It looks safe, for sure. It's kind of cool, actually. It took almost a week, but the other morning, I picked the first yellow squash of the season, and there was a bee in every single flower (!) whew. After weeks (months, actually) of walking and scanning all things flowering for any sign of bees at all, and finding a pitiful one or two here and there, it was a glorious sight. Lagniappe; ('something extra') The hive with the extra box on top...well, that box is full of honey, waiting to be taken. There are boxes to build and paint (came in the mail, sitting by the bookcases in the front room). And this will be done soon. So that there will be more honey this year. I know so little about all of this. Will is excited about the honey. I am excited about bees on flowering plants. Something for everyone.

a very quick note about a very beautiful thing

My daughter told me these would never, ever grow here. Ox-Eyed Daisies. She said they are wild and rampant in the Northwest...but it's just too hot here. And last year, when I started some from seed and put them in the herb beds, they nearly all died. She was right, I thought. Its just too hot. But one clump did hang in there, and here we are, a year later. There is also a clump of them way over in between two other rows. This means they seed themselves pretty freely. Lesson: if you can nurse something through the first year, you have a fighting chance. Lesson 2: Ox-Eyed. Daisies, obviously a predecessor of the Shasta Daisy, makes THING TWO in the herb beds that works because it is the hardy older variety. Thing One was the Bergamot, predecessor of the hybrid Bee Balm. (see last year). We've had Bee Balm: temperamental, and hard to pull through to next year. But Bergamot - well, it's all over the place now.

Time for a new FISH IN THE HAND picture - but not tonight.

It's been a month or more...but finals at school are at hand, and putting in the garden is an every-spare-minute thing. So...just to get things cranking for spring blogging, a picture or two:
Spinach. Thank you. And little tiny baby salad greens...a beautiful thing, to be sure, but a little harder to be very, very creative about: toss them on a little plate, throw some mandarin orange slices and cherries and sprouts and seeds on there, and...well. The arugula (in the middle of the row): some days yes, some days not so much. It is overpowering when matched with delicate lettuce greens. And a picture of this and that (thanks to Will and his new camera...he couldn't help himself but maybe I'm possessive about mine...) First - the purple martin house. Will always DID want one. We do not know why we have only three pairs of martins in this, the second year. Will seems to think we would have a billion pairs...or at least one in every little apartment. I mean, he went through a lot of trouble making sure each little apartment was separated from the others (I did joke last year that he should just go ahead and give every apartment a little barbecue pit and maybe wind chimes). But we are grateful for the ones we do have, and as long as we keep our distance with the mower and the tiller, they don't fuss to much. And, of course, we have the 'pond and fountain' feature...I laughed at first (it seemed so absurd) but i have come to love it, especially the sound of water...

And now, about this season...young as it is: It think things are different, although I can't be sure. You always think, every year...when did I plant what? When did this or that bloom? Unless you keep meticulous records about all these things, you cannot go back to check of course: This afternoon I looked out of the kitchen window and hey! gardenias! well - that's fabulous. Seems a bit early...and then, tonight, I went onto the patio and, reaching down for the hose, I came face to face with a night-blooming cereus flower. What a surprise! Isn't it early for that? Hey,. If everything blooms now, what's left for later? And we have clover come up and bloom all over the place before we can mow again. Now, clover is a wonderful thing, but I don't remember that ever happening. You know, it comes up and you mow it down and that's about it..in the spring. But over and over again? and so quickly? what's up with that? who knows. Tonight, Will it at the monthly Louisiana Beekeepers meeting. Not that we are beekeepers, but we had a hive a long time ago. The problem is, there are no bees here. Well, one or two. Think about that. One or TWO? Bees? So it's time to get a hive. More later about that. This is pretty serious business.

In the meantime, these rows of plastic have now been planted with melons. Yes, we need bees.