Gardens Gone Wild

Remember this charming plot?



No, of course you don't. We weren't diligent about blogging, then. But I promise that's how it looked in its adorable formative years weeks.


Gone are the days when we worried that our tender little seedlings might be gobbled up by chickens or washed away by a rain storm. They've grown up, and they're taking over. I'm afraid we've lost control. The garden has no sense of its former innocent and vulnerable self, and now it has lost all inhibitions. It's beyond reason. It is completely rude.

Observe:

The beans refuse to comply. They have a lovely bamboo trellis to climb on, but instead choose to flail around in the walkways.


The pumpkins also prefer to prowl through the paths rather than stay in their nice comfortable bed.


Half the garlic apparently got loaded and passed out on the job. Maybe it will at least smother some of those weeds.


This nasturtium has no sense of personal space.


The tomatoes refuse to stay in line.


This bean plant feels entitled to climb all over whatever it wants, namely this squash plant.

And the squash. I don't even have the energy to talk about the squash.

This tomato showed up uninvited and doesn't even have the social grace to mingle with the other tomatoes. Instead it's hanging out in the middle of the the spaghetti squash.


And I don't know who these little beasts belong to, but I threw them out as soon as they started brunching on the strawberries.


What do you look so smug about? Jerk.

Drivel

I haven’t quite got the knack of how to include photos; so until the time comes when Meg can re-educate, I am going to have to ask for your patience and an open and active imagination.

I must confess that Meg and I have very little “recent” gardening experience. I say recent because much of our garden know-how came to a halt ten to fifteen years ago. When I was growing up, my stepfather, his father, and most of our neighbors managed fairly productive gardens. Naturally I had learned some basic practices, but after I left home and moved to college, my interactive immersion ceased. Apparently in college, folks are in far more danger than simply loosing their innocence and inhibitions, they are being stripped of their basic freedom to cultivate.

Meg’s story is much the same. She had recently shared a story about her 4th birthday party, which included her guests receiving a lectured tour of her parents vegetable garden. She enjoyed spending time in the garden, but too fell victim to a college life filled with papers, jobs and social interaction.

And all of this I share, not for an excuse, but for a promise. There is no doubt that we are in the learning processes of chemical-free gardening. The benefit of our neophytic circumstance is that we will be able to display our growing pains (hopefully with photos), propagating an environment for other gardeners, of all levels of experience, to basically shoot-the-shit.

Babies!

The Spring vegetables (peas, lettuce) have been in full swing for a month now, and the novelty of them has worn off. We've just spent a satisfying but mostly uneventful two weeks watching our recently-planted tomatoes, peppers, squash, et al bush out and grow taller, but for the most part they hadn't really been doing anything.

But now we've got some action. The bees have obviously been getting busy with our plants, because baby veg have been popping out everywhere:











This phase of the garden comes in as a close second favorite to the phase that will begin in a few weeks, when we get to go out and eat all this stuff.

Damn Chickens

I love our chickens, honestly; but those damn birds need to stay the hell out of Joanne's flowerbeds. We would like our chickens to be free-range (a.k.a. do what they please) and we thought three plus acres would be enough to keep them occupied. Man were we wrong.

Unfortunately we live along a heavily traveled road. I guess the noise makes them a bit uneasy because they want nothing to do with that part of the yard. So, a combination of road noise and the cats lurking around the house, they have decided to make the daily commute to our neighbor's yard.--A little side note. Chickens are in fact in no real danger of cats; in fact just the other day one of the chickens charged a cat that got a little too curious. Be it as it may, although there is no real danger (meaning death) the chickens in our case would rather the cats stay their distance.

So their travels leave us with this: Earlier Meg and I were doing what-have-you in the garden, keeping an occasional eye on the chickens under the fruit trees (our property) when we heard Joanne hollering in her yard. I looked to the fruit trees and sure as shit, no chickens. We ran out of the garden and into Joanne's yard to see her armed with a broom and expletives. The chickens, who are not not known for their stealth, were seen hauling ass for cover into some near by pines. I immediately began apologizing to Joanne and she insisted that it was okay (she's a sweet lady), but it doesn't make us feel any better or less embarrassed. So we gathered the chickens, sat them down, and told them why they had to stay away from Joanne's petunias. Their response was their usual simple and erratic stare, like they knew there was no way they could ever understand, but had an inkling we might be in cahoots with the cats.

To Do

• Cut down lots and lots of bamboo
• Build contraptions to string up peppers and tomatoes
• Keep chickens away from Joanne's flowers
• Weed
• Put netting over strawberries and blueberries to keep the birds out
  
• Harvest peas, lettuce, spinach, chard
• Give snow peas to Steve-o
• Get bales of straw
• Smell the tomatoes
  
• Breed hundreds of ladybugs; sic ladybug army on aphids
• Update the garden map so we don't forget even more of what we planted
• Thin turnips, carrots, radishes
• Turn compost
  
• Attempt to dig out some potatoes?
• Seek and destroy cabbage worms
• Watch the beans grow
• Organize seeds
• Plant grass near garden gate
• Mulch around plants
• Admire the garden

Almost ...

Countdown to tater tot casserole. mmmm.

Introduction to Future House Farm

Future House Farm, the place, does not in fact exist—yet. Currently our operations are located on a 3½ acre piece of rental property in Downingtown, PA. We live in a sizable 3rd floor apartment in a massive house built in 1906. There are four other occupants: the landlord, the maintenance man, and a couple who live on the second floor. Each of these people contribute in their own way to the experience and mission of the property, kind of like a co-op without a charter or elected officials. I’m sure Meg and I will talk more about the house and it’s residents as this forum builds, but for the sake of letting things unfold on their own accord we’ll keep their definition uninvolved.

Before we moved into our apartment, Meg and I sent applications to schools in hopes of earning PhDs; knowing how academic institutions suffer mood swings, we also developed a plan B. We worked often together as tutors at the university writing center and one evening we constructed the following proposal:

Plan B - If we both received rejection letters from all of the schools we applied to, we would become roommates. It made sense; we were great friends who spent a fair amount of time together hiking, working, drinking, and so on. So, sharing the lives of misplaced academics seemed to be a logical step, but if we were going to be roommates, we needed a house and it needed a name.

The name was easy, El Rancho Rejecto. We know it sounds ridiculous, but it stuck, even with its embarrassing adulteration of the Spanish language. The guidelines for house hunting were also simple: 1.) We had to get the hell out of West Chester. 2.) Meg wanted a place to ride her bike without having to drive. 3.) I wanted the freedom to piss off the back porch with the piece of mind only found in a rural setting.

Criteria we had not included in our search were gardening and livestock. A few months into our search we found an apartment advertisement that said “—great for gardening and chickens welcome in moderation.” A year after signing the lease we have three chickens and a 1200 sq. foot vegetable and herb garden.

Gardening had begun as a dedicated interest, but has now become what we want to do for a living. Our mission as production farmers is to supply high quality produce that is faithfully organic. Currently there are some limitations due to our lack of ownership of the land, but we do hope to expand our interests to dairy, baked, and preserved products. What we are accomplishing is not only available for those with mountains of time to play in the dirt. We both have 9-5 jobs, so the practices explained on this blog are accessible to anyone interested in self-sufficiency and environmental awareness. In order to share where we obtain the information we apply to our mission, we will make every effort to create and update a resources page.


A few months after moving into El Rancho Rejecto, Meg and I discovered something that apparently was obvious to our friends for quite some time; our relationship was built on more than friendship. —Please pardon me here. This is our first public forum and although it is designed to be about two people who love to garden and wish to share it with others, there is no hiding that I am very much in love with Meg. She’s laughing at me now and said that saying “love” will not deter from the factual intention of our blog; and I believe her. —On the first day of Spring, 21 March 2007, Meg and I made a trip to the justice of the peace and got married.

We have a garden.

We talk about it a lot. Here it is:



We talk a lot about our rain barrels, too. They're pretty impressive:



We also have chickens. We love them, but they're a pain in the ass. Here are the ladies:



We have loads to blog about, including why the chickens eat our neighbor's flowers and why our red bell peppers might turn out to be junk. Stay tuned.