Gardening for the Future

To the Journal Jar, once again!

Have you ever planted a garden?  What was in it, and why?

I have planted several gardens.  One year we had tomatoes and peppers planted, but the peppers didn't really produce very well.  But we had good tomatoes that year.  A few years back we had an artichoke plant that produced a few meals for us.  And some pretty flowers. We had tomatoes again that year, along with a couple strawberries and a jalepeno bush.  The strawberries were good when we could get them before the critters did.  Same with the tomatoes.  Jalepenos didn't fare so well.  But that artichoke produced for a couple years-- might even still be there.  But we moved away.

I also tried planting asparagus one year, but it never produced anything.  Not even a asparagus weed of some sort.  Just dead dirt.  I've planted a few trees in my time, too.  Got a few seedlings from the City on their Arbor Day celebration, where they hand out seedlings to the kids.  They always seemed to have leftovers, and I'd get a couple of different things-- one year my mom, my aunt, and I got Japanese maple tree saplings.  I ended up with them all-- six trees.  I nursed them along through heatwaves during the summer and ended up keeping a few of them alive long enough to plant in the ground.  One, I know, is doing really well in the back yard at our former house, unless the new owners chopped it down.  But it was so healthy, growing so nicely, I don't see why they would have done that.  We had also planted a 5 in 1 fruit tree in that same back yard.  I wonder how it's doing.  It had two varieties of peach, a nectarine, a plum, and an apricot all grafted to one trunk.  Probably finally producing some nice fruit this most recent season.

We've yet to get things going here at our new homestead.  I'm in the planning stages still.  I don't tinker around in the yard like I used to.  Not sure why.  Mostly because I was so depressed that I just couldn't do it.  Didn't feel like it.  Now, I want to redo the whole yard.  Take out the lawn and put in crops.  Or berries and grapes.  No more of this lawn crap.  I want food.  If I'm going to have to work in the yard, it should produce something for me.

Where we're at now, we have more front yard square footage than in the back yard.  And we have a few trees planted already.  We have a Navajo ash and a crepe myrtle that are "City trees" and then an Oregon ash that I planted over a year ago that I don't know for sure if it's going to make it, but it's trying.  There's also some sort of pine tree that I'm not sure what to do with...  In back we have an orange tree, a tangelo tree, and a lemon tree, plus another shade tree that I planted to help keep our bedroom cool in the summer.  (I forget the name of the shade tree or I'd put it down).  I want to utilize the philosophy of permacultre when designing my landscapes.  And I've misplaced my permaculture books.  So until the time when I organize my house so that I can actually find books that I want to read... the yard must wait.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

What?  Like you haven't noticed it yet?  I've been humming Christmas tunes already, dreaming in egg nog and pine scented happiness.  So why not just roll with it?  Screw Halloween.  And like Lewis Black says, Thanksgiving is just Christmas Halftime.

So speaketh the Journal Jar.

Describe getting a Christmas tree as a child, when did you put it up and decorate it?

I think I've already blogged about our jaunts to the hills to visit the Christmas tree farms.  We even passed the tradition on to our nephews, driving them up there several different Christmas seasons to select a tree and bring it home for decorating.  See Christmas in February for some o' dat.  For now, though, how about a picture?  To the left, to the left...

We've borrowed my dad's truck and driven up into the Santa Cruz mountains with the boys, playing the Beatles and singing as we snaked through the hills on the winding roads.  The weather hasn't always been very kind to us, but we got out there and got a tree, nothing stopped us.  One year it was windy and raining and we took a wrong turn and ended up in the back access road, kind of four-wheeling our way until we could find our way back to the tree lot.  We made it back, and little Michael exclaimed "That was COOL!"  And you know what, it really was.

Once we'd get home I'd set to work cutting the bottom of the tree to prep it for the stand, and Suzy would get the boys started unpacking the tree decorations and such.  Christmas music would be played on the stereo, and once I got the lights on it was a decorating free-for-all.  Pretty much ended up with all the decorations hanging on the front of the tree, but that was fine.  It was perfect that way.

We even had fun having the nephews overnight before we'd go to get the tree in the morning.  There's always great food on our get-togethers-- monkey bread, Psycho Donuts, mac-and-cheese, and of course, grapes.  Suzy can elaborate on the food angle better than I can.  Maybe she will.  All I know is, we don't go hungry.

And we do hot chocolate.  I think we've even made coffee for them (decaf), with lots of cream and sugar, of course.

But none of this would have happened, potentially, if it hadn't been for my parents taking my sister and I to the hills to cut down our own Christmas tree when we were young.  I remember getting the tree about a week before Christmas and listening to Christmas music while we untangled the lights, drank hot chocolate, and hung all the decorations with care.  Each decoration brought back a memory, and we came to look forward to unearthing each one from the tissue paper and boxes of all our prized Christmas stuff.  My aunt Bernice used to make lovely bread dough ornaments that she sculpted and hand painted.  They were some of our favorite things and we treasured them as if they were worth more than their weight in gold.  Many of them came to an untimely end because we stored them in the attic of our garage, and during the summer in the Central Valley everything was cooked at well over one-hundred degrees.  We lost a lot of keepsakes to the summer heat, discovering the melted mess when we went to decorate for Christmas that year.  It was sad, but we didn't fret for long.  But I think I'm still grieving the loss of some of the things.  Like the marshmallow ball I had made as a kid.  What a sticky mess it became.  But it had been beautiful, and I had made it.  It's often hard to say goodbye...

Anyway, I now have an even greater appreciation for my parents taking us out like they did.  As a kid it was great fun to hike around in the hills, looking at all the trees, breathing the brisk air.  As an adult-- it's a lot of work!  But so worth it.  The kids love it, and hopefully they'll have fond memories of it when they are adults, just like I do.  And maybe they'll even want to take me up into the hills and run me around in my old age.

Maybe.  Better get in shape just in case.

To Be a Tree

Back to the Journal Jar...

If you could be a tree, what kind of tree would you be?  Why?

I think I'd most like to be an oak tree, majestically towering over a field in a rural area of the world.  I'd inspire those who would pause beneath me, to honor the forces that brought my greatness into being.

It might also be fun to be a Christmas tree, adorning the treasured trinkets of families at that special time of year.  Sure, you'd be sacrificed for the holiday, set out on the curb to be recycled after festivities were done, but you'd have one heck of a going out party.

I would love to be a great redwood, tall and evergreen, moored amongst my brothers and sisters in a grove of amazing grandeur.  It would be cool to be so tall, so alive with smaller species and growing and living in concert with several hundreds of thousands of different life forms.  I would have quite a vantage point, if I could somehow see from the tips of my leaves or the crest of my top.

I'd want to be a tree that had a long life span, so I could observe the coming and going of days and nights, of weather patterns, of seasons.  I'd watch as other crops were planted and harvested, other trees toppled and rotted.

What do you think?  What kind of tree would you want to be?