Strawberry Massacre

I got back from videoing the women's crew team this morning only to be confronted with a scene of devastation. Ten out of twenty-four strawberry plants were eaten last night. I have been tempting fate by not covering the berries (with the netting that I have that isn't rabbit-grade).  No footprints were evident. So I assume that the light-footed criminal was Leporidae. I spent some time scouring the internet for advice about my plants. I know strawberries are delicate and if stressed might never produce fruit. But every search-string that I came up with offered me advice about how to soothe a house rabbit that had eaten too many berries. I was being mocked by google.

After fuming all day, I noticed that by evening the denuded plants were already pushing out their next leaves -- which is kind of creepy. But that's nature for you.

In other gardening news, I dug up the sod for the last planned bed (foreground). I also covered with black plastic the bed that I plan to sow with corn (midground). The plastic will warm the soil so that I can get the corn started a little early.

I also fixed some of the erosion-bars on a terraced plot and filled them with loam and the last of the compost. 

Now I need to fence the whole thing before the great destroyers come again.

Hero Gardener

I got a new Hero3 camera for documenting both this garden blog and my rowing blog. I christened the camera by attaching it to the pickaxe while I broke up the sod and dug up stones around the perimeter of the garden. I need to dig a trench so that I can extend a rabbit-fence below ground and frustrate animals from digging under and into my garden. I got some dramatic footage.

On a less dramatic note, I now have a compost bin. 

 Brought to you by the state of Massachusetts (and $53.00 cash). Made locally in New Bedford by New England Plastics Corp. Unfortunately, the state no longer subsidizes these bins. I think they used to be offered for $10.00.

 Some of my seedlings have also been re-potted.

Clay

Last week I was talking to my brother on the phone about my gardening project. He built raised beds at his home in Texas about 20 years ago. He was telling me about how he ordered a truckload of topsoil to fill them. Big mistake. In central Texas, there isn't a lot of top soil. What he got was pretty much clay. Vegetables don't like clay. I laughed. My poor brother trying to grow vegetables in Texas. I had tried to grow vegetables down there when I was in grad school, and I'd given up.

Originally, I had wanted to fill my boxes with compost. I thought I'd mix in a little local topsoil to ensure good mineral content. Over a three week period, I casually called around looking for compost. I called the garden columnist at the local New Bedford Newspaper and sent her an email. No response. I called a garden center in Marion. And I did daily web searches. From those searches and several calls, I found several places that would sell me soil -- but not compost. They suggested loam and said this was perfect for my raised-bed vegetable gardening. The only compost that I could find locally was in bags. I would have had to spend $800.00 to fill my beds with bags of compost.

Loam. It sounds soft, doesn't it? Certainly it sounds softer than plain-old topsoil. Right? I decided that loam was the best I could do. And I could afford a few bags of manure and a good organic fertilizer to enrich the loam. Plus, weeks had gone by, and I needed to fill my boxes if I was going to get some cool weather crops in. 

So I had six yards of loam delivered and filled two boxes. I planted one with strawberries. Then I put a soaker hose on the second one. I pulled off the hose and raked the loam around a little. What I saw wasn't good.

When you push a rake into wet soil, at least a little water should squeeze out. None did. In fact, the soil just snapped back like Jello. I went back and checked the strawberry box. It had been drying for a day. I knocked on the soil. Hard as a brick and cracking. Turns out that "loam" is just the local word for topsoil. And the topsoil that I got wasn't any better than the topsoil that my brother had gotten in Texas.

I went to one last garden center. I hadn't been able to talk to them on the phone because it is a small family operation, and when they're working, they don't answer the phone. They just had bags of compost, too. But they suggested Sunny Nook Farms in Rochester. I called. And by 9 AM yesterday morning, I had compost being dumped in the yard.

You can see the difference in the color of the compost and the loam.

I dug out in between the strawberries and filled the holes with compost.

Then I dug out the other box that I'd filled with loam.

Then I filled that box and the one next to it and a little box with compost (mixed with a little topsoil) and planted my cabbages, kale, lettuce, and broccoli. And I wrapped chicken wire around the newly planted beds to keep the rabbits out until I can build my fence around the whole garden. Yesterday was exhausting. And I learned something about New England soil.

All I Need

All I need is another blog. I am having enough trouble keeping up with my other one, rowing back. But I began working on this other project too. My family's home in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts was a working farm when my mother grew up. They grew cranberries and raised chickens commercially and had a substantial garden for themselves. Not much remained of this when I was growing up. The cranberry bogs had been sold, the chicken houses were falling down, and the vegetable gardens were overgrown with brush.

But a cabinet in the basement was (and still is) filled with vegetables that my great-grandmother canned in the 1950's. This cabinet continues to fascinate me.

And one of my earliest memories is of getting stuck in a chicken box that I was crawling through during the demolition of the last chicken house. What remains of the farm does not function as intended.

It's kind of like growing up hearing your parents speak another language that they refuse to speak with you because they want you to assimilate. I knew that I had a farming background. It was also foreign. In the summer, we had a vegetable garden in order to add some fresh tomatoes to the table. But we didn't grow enough to live on, and we didn't can or freeze anything.

I've thought for a long time about this personal history. And this thinking has led me to consider the urban farming movement and a cultural resurgence of self-sustaining practices. I wonder how much this movement is fetishistic; I wonder if it's possible to go back to those self-sustaining practices -- if they can ever function as they did in the past or if the fact that we can choose to go to the grocery store  fundamentally changes the practice. I suppose that this doubt is related to my longer term research into the aestheticization of labor and craft practices. I consider art to be an aestheticized practice, not an aesthetic one.

I'd been thinking that once I finish the rowing-back project, I'd start gardening -- a growing-back project. But a few weeks ago, I realized that there is no reason to wait. In fact, there is such a steep learning curve, that it would be smart to start a test garden. So I've built raised beds and started some seeds. I'm dreaming of canning and of buying a deep-freeze. There is still a ton of work to do before it gets warm.