Home Garden Companion

Ilona's Garden Journal




rural

My Rural Life

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My husband and I bought and started homesteading this place in the mid 1980’s. I had no skills, and plenty of dreams. I never managed to have that flock of sheep I envisioned, but instead raised a flock of children. That became my main crop.

We all worked hard. I sure wish we had used more mechanized equipment. I truly know what the old saying means, ” a hard row to hoe…”

Chickens

It was practical to have chickens, and there were two old coops on the property (everything was old, run down, dismantled or in the process of being dismantled when we moved here.) I used to say the place was within a few years of being condemned.

I started my flock of chickens with Rhode Island Reds. Next added some Barred Rocks, and finally added Golden Buffs.

Someone gave me a couple of their extra roosters. When they fought for dominance- one was given away.

The Rhode Island Reds were the hardiest, the Barred Rocks were less productive layers and the Golden Buffs were the best layers. Originally I had wanted hens good for both eggs and meat, but after the short-lived “meat chicken” fiasco, I learned that our family does better with someone else producing our meat.

We had lots of eggs for many years. I made custards and quiches, gave away dozens to all my friends, and managed to sell a little.

After a raccoon raid left all my chickens dead, I stopped raising hens for many years. Saying for the past ten years or so “Maybe this year, we will get some chicks…”

This year, we finally started with a small flock of six Golden Buff pullets, and added a pair of Bantams.

We introduced the chicks to to the bantams, and they are now all staying in a tiny coop together, in relative harmony. Except for one chick that they all picked on; she is back in the box inside the house to recover, a sort of chickie hospital.

Veggies

herbs and lettuce
A portion of the garage garden with cilantro, lettuces, and strawberry plants.

I have the biggest truck garden this year since those early years when I had something like a 25 x 100 yard garden. In those years we grew corn, beans, greens, head and Cos lettuces, carrots, tomatoes and peppers, raspberries, strawberries, melons, eggplant and zucchini, and numerous other things. I had a separate herb garden.

This year it is tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, cutting flowers, parsley, cilantro, dill, mints, radishes, mixed lettuces, a bit of Chard. I have one conventional garden planted out in rows or blocks and one with raised beds.

I just finished creating the walkways with an experimental weed suppression system of cardboard, covered with wool rug (it got damaged beyond saving) strips, and covered entirely with cypress mulch. As with all new paths it looks wonderful, but time will tell if it reduces the work of keeping that outlying garden.

My friend has started her conventional plot in one section of my old veggie garden. It looks great, and her radishes and beans have sprouted. It is about as big as the one I have closer to my house.

Flowers

I used to grow abundant flower gardens in the English Cottage style. Through the years, my workload with homeschooling and raising kids increased, I entered that limbo where you take care of aging parents and raise your kids at the same time, and kept a very busy Church schedule. Something had to give, and the flower gardens started waning, the food gardens became mostly a few pepper and tomato plants. The native grasses came to claim the abandoned flower and food gardens.

I have always tried to keep a couple borders going, but they tend to get more weedy than I can control. I still try.

Container Flower Pots

Most of my hunger for color is satisfied with numerous container plantings and  now a couple rows of cutting flowers in the food garden.

Some years the containers are painstakingly planned, but lately all is much more serendipitous. I rarely start my own flowers anymore. The garden centers have greatly reduced their variety of offerings, and they continue to put little plants in large pots and price accordingly. I put together the best of what I find.

Still, the spring season is an exhausting crush of tasks, and I am so much slower and less capable. I finally learned that what I picture in my mind must undergo a pruning session when it comes to the actual physical effort my body is capable of making.

I try to control my impulse to apologize for what is left undone.

Changes

Invariably I start musing about the amount of changes… in my life, in the area I live, in society at large.our old house

There are…

Fewer homesteaders who have ambitious gardens, more urban chickens and tiny “farm” plots, creeping development and increasing traffic, fewer animal herds. Many of the old farmhouses are gone, and new homes sprouting up, most of them inferior in architecture- but of course, not all.

My trees now tower over me, and I have lost a number. The ash are all gone, now.

I start my work in the mornings, and go as long as I can (a pitiably short time), but am more thankful for what is accomplished.

I am presently sitting on a beautiful deck (which my husband built) in an anti-gravity chair. My life did not turn out as I imagined, but it is good now. Satisfying.

Ambitions quiet, small enjoyments shine, and I see how important allowing the moment to have its due attention is, in the movement of time.

I am returning to some of the roots of previous times, but with a different attitude, and my goals are stripped of competition and restless achievements.

There is a great deal of value in growing content, doings ones tasks, and enjoying the pleasures given in an honest and quiet life.

Living Vs. Writing

During my homeschooling years I discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder. Came to love her books and read everything I could get my hands on by her and about her. Somehow missed her books during my childhood years.

One thing that struck me was that she carefully edited her histories to show the sunny side of life. At times, real life was so trying that this was difficult. When you read of her early married years, you understand how challenging it must have been to give an optimistic view of a long string of tragic circumstances. Even her own early years were laced with what an adult reader understands is a lot of heartbreak.

There is much that is not written of the hardships of life, of how much a toll is taken by unforeseen obstacles and trials.

When we write of our gardens and farms, there is much that is a tradeoff… shall I do the work or write about doing the work? All my life there has been an ebb and flow, time and attention to one area of effort and neglect of another, then taking turns so that all may have something of a balance.

I see why some value a narrowed focus, but I continue to make my rounds (ever more slowly) to try and keep all the tops spinning! We have our choices of how we live our lives and I no longer see a hierarchy of value as much as a diversity of choices in these things.

I imagine that is partly an outcome of the changes in our society. My father might have seen that there are “right ways” of doing things, even though I think it handicapped him… I see there are more ways to deliver the same outcome. Not to extrapolate it too far, but it does help to be more accepting of oneself and of life in general.

Enough personal history and philosophy, I have a few chores to do….

‘Til Later, Friends.

chickcoop

Rural Landscape

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Shepherds from my nativity set

I’ve been in the middle of my Christmas devotions on my Advent blog.

While writing about the shepherds watching their flocks (from the Christmas story), I thought about the fact that while sheep were once a common sight in fields around here, there has not been a flock in recent years, now that I think about it.

I know that agriculture business changes quite a bit and sheep raising in Ohio was once big business, before it all moved out West. Then some years ago there seemed to be a resurgence of flocks, so that they were a common, if not ubiquitous sight in my “neighborhood”.

I once thought about raising a few sheep myself, but that is yet another dream that didn’t materialize. There was never the money for simply satisfying my personal curiosity and love of sheep.

Now, I must be contented with a “Sheep” Pinterest board!

From my Pinterest collection

 

 It Has All Changed

Some Natural Changes

It makes me think of the many changes I have observed in the rural landscape over the years. I’m sorry to say that most has been to the detriment.

Windstorms, ice storms, the entry of Emerald borers, Japanese beetles, Stinkbugs, and Asian ladybugs… all are changes in my history here. But it is the manmade changes that most trouble me, as they are those which we could exercise some control over.

I actually saw the last deep economic recession as having a silver lining, in that it put a damper on the mindless development that is steadily creeping into our county.

We have some of the best farming soils in the world, but the greed of people who must ‘develop’ as they call it, and destroy those lands is disheartening. People are not generally long-sighted, and the voice of money has shut up many of the reasonable voices for environmental stewardship.

Are there people who value the production and quiet of the rural countryside left? I mean those who value it enough to preserve it?

We depend on laws and regulations to somehow control the greed, but I really think we need a mindset change. For people generally to be introduced to the beauty, the needs, and the cultivation of the land.

All the shilling about education, and little thought given for education of this kind.

The back field, Alfalfa growing on the right

 

Except From Passionate Gardeners

No Pesticides in my Garden
This is the one light I see shining in this dismal picture.
I see hope in gardeners who carry their love of nature, of growing things and what that inspires, in encouraging responsibility to the environment.
I am so happy when I see people who advocate for sustainable gardens, organic foods and cultivation methods, green tips that are made generally known, and all the many avenues that individual gardeners take as they band together to make a difference.
In their gardens and in society…
I hope that it will extend to create less demand for “people who want to live in the country” – those who then complain about animals, fence off their properties, pour chemicals into their suburban style lawns, and generally make a city out of the once open country.
Instead I wish citizens and homeowners throughout the country would give thought , money, time, and effort to creating places of production, of green spaces, of even the “village green” of old in their own venues and choices of living.
Give some green, space, and quiet in the midst of the cities and suburbs. Make them more “country”. Or at least large swathes of them.
That is a worthy, if lofty and impractical goal.
What is most attainable, however, is our value system. We can fend for that.
“Love for country” takes on a whole new connotation in that case.
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© 2014 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal by Ilona E. An excellent blog.

My Rural Garden

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Or How I Got To Be Here

…it all begins somewhere.

I had been gardening in the city for some years. I don’t remember ever wishing to move into a country place, particularly, but my city neighborhood was deteriorating and my family size was increasing. My interest in history, and then gardening, began to branch towards homesteading. It was the seventies that developed that trend, and so by 1980 I found myself here on a plain that was so flat that it looks as though God took a plasterer’s knife and scraped it hard across the land. The farmers took things further in the ’60’s and began felling all the trees in sight. All for endless acres of corn and soybean. Until I began planting there was very little between me and the far horizon westward. One can see storms coming from a long way off, their anvil-piled wrath thundering in from the west. Long pale gray strips of slanting rainfall give sight to storms across the landscape far away. In the aftermath are visions of light rays that step forth from the masses of breaking clouds.

Sunsets, too, are bright and unhindered, now only trimmed at their horizon line by my trees and bushes. But there are places, still, where one can see the sun melt into earths crust, sherbert colors left too long upon the sky’s table, inking dark the night with its liquefied rays. Twilight is a Parrish painting of silhouette against an oddly transparent blue, like looking long into a darkly clear ocean. This is the best part of being on the cusp of a visually endless plain.

As a gardener I was impressed by the soil, and knew nothing yet of the domineering winds which cut through this garden at all times of the year. The soil is what was left from the wet prairie which kept this area unpopulated and uncultivated until relatively lately… when after the cattle barons of Ohio (oh, yes, there were some, once) gave way to inventive farmers who laboriously dug deep ditches to carry off the ponded water which had disallowed cultivation until too late in the growing season. My property lays at the head of one of those deeply dug ditches, the only elevation difference in the land, unseen until nearly upon them. The Midwestern Haha.

I know my little acres were once very different than when I arrived here, as I had met and talked with a former occupant of the house whose father had purchased this place in 1915, when she was a young girl of 16 years. But by my time, the oaks were gone, the orchard no more, and only the silver maples were the trees that hugged the house incongruently with a misshapen Norway spruce, whose own story was one of tornado force winds tearing out its upper parts leaving opened arms reaching out for mercy.

Two of the largest arborvitae I had ever seen stood marking a long, longgone, front path which she told me was the place she and her brothers rode bikes straight into what was then a ditch her depression era father paid to have covered… for fear of his children’s wellbeing. I realized then that arborvitae are not shrubs for foundations or in proximity to a house… they are full fledged trees when mature. From signs at the corners of the house it seems some were once planted there as well- remaining long past the time they could be tolerated, or should have been.

The house had the unwelcoming hodgepodge of partly planted, partly weed grown things around a deeply listing front porch, I pulled out a number of weedy silver maple tree saplings and gave them to a neighbor. Helped her plant them, actually. The crowded mailorder (I’m pretty sure!) combination of forsythia, weigela, and bridal spirea were all cramped into the area under the front window. I dug each one out and moved them to far reaches of the property. a large rangy growth of lilac with an empty center remains in the front. It embraces my garden bench and presents offerings of common lilac each spring. It has too much history to cut down, and I am too old now to attempt it, anyway. It will likely outlive me.

Most of the yard was mown grass. Something in me does not love a lawn, though I appreciate it in its place. So to the disgruntlement of the children, and sometimes the husband, I have ever enlarged the garden beds and sometimes surrendered some of them back to the prairie grass beginnings, grudgingly, but of necessity. But grass is my form of nefarious weed. I still plot to take back my front border from its greedy grasp.

The ruined pig barn had a trimming of elderberry bushes, and the back acres were farmed… and that is what I found here when first beginning my garden. And that is where I leave us until I write about the garden’s development.