My finals are DONE! My semester is FINISHED! I am now free as a bird until the middle of January. It feels so so so good to not sit and study. I was actually getting a particular hip pain because I was sitting so much. That’s never happened before. I would sit at the kitchen table, hip aching, table full of charts and papers and books, and then I’d look outside and see everything that needed doing, and sigh. Well, no more table! Outside time only! Bit by bit, I’m tidying up the garden and planting for spring. Now, when my body hurts, it’s because it’s getting some work done!
The pollinator gardens in our garden are the spaces people comment on the most. Oh, they like the vegetables and the fruit trees, the bees and the chickens, but it’s the flowers that really make people excited. I’ve written extensively about them before, because in order to get this abundance of flowers, it takes a little doing (it’s not hard, though). Three times a year I go out there and scatter wildflower seeds, the kind of seed depending on the season. That’s the easy part. The hard part, or not hard exactly but time consuming and a pretty big chore, is removing all the dead biomass before scattering the seed. If you don’t remove all the dead stuff, the seeds can’t get the light and moisture they need to germinate. And then, for about a month after removing everything, the garden is bare, bare, bare. Which isn’t all that attractive.
Today
I do have some perennials in there to hold down the space, but a lot of those, like dahlias or hollyhocks, are dormant in the winter, or else, like salvias and sages, need to be pruned hard in the winter. So it tends to look rather forlorn, with only borage (a workhorse all year round) and early narcissus blooming. The very first forget-me-nots are starting to bloom too, so that’s good. But on the whole, it’s very sad looking. You’ve got to hang in there, though, because within a few weeks, there will be a haze of green over this entire space, and then not long after that, the poppies will be up. By February things should be in good bloom. This time of year, I sow both California and opium poppies, Chinese Houses, Clarkias of all kinds, Nemophila, Gilia, Phacelia, Tidy tips - mostly natives. They’ll bloom until May when I will go through this whole process again and seed in the late summer flowers. Sometime between February and May, I’ll get a sowing in of early summer flowers, wherever I can find space.
The amount of biomass that accumulates from just one of the pollinator gardens is tremendous. I put as much as I can in the compost, but once the pile reaches above my head, I start to put the rest in the green bin for pickup. This year I made more space for the compost pile to go long, along the fence behind the chicken coop. I want to keep as much material as I can, especially with 10 chickens now to work it over. I’m making compost faster than ever before.
Taking out all the dead plants takes many days for all my pollinator gardens, two days for the south pollinator garden alone (pictured above). I’m actually still not done; I need to prune the passionflower vine hard and build it a new trellis. This will be a two person job and probably won’t get done until Tom’s holiday break. I’ve still got many gardens to go, though. Lots of wildflower seeds yet to get in! What a joy, though, to get out and use my muscles, instead of sitting!
It’s also time, if you live in California, to cut down the asparagus stalks/ferns and dress the bed with compost and mulch. This chore makes me anticipate late winter/early spring, when the spears will be appearing. Yum!
The new chickens (well, not so new anymore I guess) are figuring out the lay of the land. What makes me happy is that they do not run from me quite so quickly anymore - they are starting to realize I come bearing good things, like leftover yogurt or fresh greens. So now they just eye me warily and stay poised to dash. It’s an improvement. One not-so-happy development is that I think one of them might be a rooster. No crowing, just a very suspicious tail.