Spring Has Sprung

One of the good things about being back in the northeast is the existence of four distinct seasons. I like that. We are now fully in the throes of a beautiful, fresh green spring. It's taken the trees a while to get with the program, but our view is slowly being taken away by leaves. I'm ok with that.

My favorite botanical part of spring -- by far -- is the bright shiny appearance of daffodils. I love daffies of all sizes and color combinations (although I don't really love doubles; a terrible thing to do to a daffodil). So we recently made a trip south to Longwood Gardens to admire the daffies at their peak. I meant to take the camera, but forgot it and was at the mercy of Michael and the iPhone for photos. I think he took less than 20. So sad. But here are a few of them for your viewing pleasure:

Darcy and the forsythia. 

The toothless garden princess. Wish it was a better view of her missing upper teeth!

In a field of small blue flowers.

In the amazing conservatory, where there is an expanded, awesome kids area since I last visited these gardens.

And finally, the bathrooms. Yes, this beautiful hall of living walls is the new(er) bathroom wing of the conservatory. Each of these doorways leads to a spherical, bright red private bathroom. They're awesome. You can see the interior here. (There are also YouTube videos of the bathrooms, but that seems excessive.)

We had a great day. If you live within striking distance of Kennett Square, PA, where the garden is located, you should treat yourself and go visit sometime. It was a great way to welcome and enjoy spring in the northeast.

Resiliency

That's our word for today: Resiliency. 

When we picked Darcy up on her last day of school at Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods (KRECR), she came with bags of gifts from her class and after-school program, and a pea seedling in a plastic cup. The pea had five or six leaves at most and barely peeked over the top of the cup. We didn't have high hopes of keeping the pea alive as we drove straight from KRECR to Ashland, OR (Bed #2 for those keeping track), and beyond across this great nation.

The pea mostly lived in one of the back seat cup holders, where it got a little sun most days. On the first desert-y days, we watered frequently and took it into hotels at night to prevent freezing. In St. Louis, it found a cozy kitchen window with our friends for two days, high above the reach of curious cats. It lived for almost a week in my parents' south-facing windows and for a week and a half in the shadowy light of Bed #16 with the great view.

Over the five weeks (FIVE WEEKS) since the pea joined our traveling circus across the country, it has survived and occasionally thrived. It wasn't getting enough sun at Bed #16 and had grown pale, but it is soaking up the rays in abundance at Bed #17. I expect it to make a full, deep green recovery.

Like the pea, the pea's caretaker-in-chief has also demonstrated her resiliency over the past five weeks. She misses being in school and we hope to have her registered next week, as soon as we know which house will become our next permanent bed. She has put up with all 17 beds with grace and (mostly) good humor. She has entertained herself with a limited collection of her own things and has taken opportunities as they've been presented (anyone else been massaging fan-tail pigeons recently or riding their bike around a hotel's empty parking lot?).

We hope to hear today whether our offer on our first-choice house is accepted and then the pea and the girl can settle in for the long haul and put down more permanent roots.

Angela Works Sometimes

I mostly stick to non-work stuff for this blog, but I thought I'd use a few days this month to let you all know about the work side of our lives. One of the things I get to do at my job is community gardening. This year, we started two large new community gardens that are thriving. One of them has been in the works since before we moved to Crescent City two years ago. The Elk Valley Community Garden serves our local Hmong community, many of whom were farmers before coming to the United States as refugees during and after the Viet Nam War. This garden is amazing, as the following series of photos will demonstrate:

Elk Valley Garden site, mid-March, 2011

We had a break in the rain early spring this year and we were able to get one of our volunteers to go to the site and till the sod. Unfortunately, he discovered that there was a lot of debris (large rocks, rusted metal, glass) that needed to be removed before he could till deeply, so he left the site looking like this:



About a month after that, the Hmong gardeners came out and combed the site, pulling out everything that could destroy a tiller.

 By the time all that was done and the site was tilled, it was late May. We went out and measured and marked the beds (each family has a 10' by 30' plot) and within two weeks, a blush of green was covering most of the plots:

The eagerness of our Hmong gardeners is overwhelming sometimes. When we marked the second half of the beds, gardeners were working within AN HOUR. By the end of the summer, the garden was so lush with plants at every stage of development (new seedlings that had replaced earlier plantings, plants ready for harvest, and plants going to seed because most of our gardeners are seed savers) that it was very difficult to remember that it had existed for less than four months:

This garden makes me happy. It's feeding well over a hundred people, many of them harvesting every day for their family meals. Twenty-four families are gardening here and it's common to see three generations working together on the same bed. There's a waiting list for space and we're hoping that the land-owner might allow us to fence more space next year and add 10 to 15 additional plots. Even that will not fill the demand for long, but it's a start. 

This is one of the most rewarding parts of my job, but there are others, too. We just did an interview with a local reporter this morning about our community gleaning project. In our first year, we gathered over 4,500 hundred pounds of locally-produced veggies and other food from farmers and backyard gardeners to distribute through our food bank. A week and a half ago, we officially elected 14 people to our Community Food Council, which was just a dream 12 months ago when we were planning the very first outreach meeting. Slowly, but surely, we're changing the face of food in our community. The need is great and there's still a lot to do, but we make a little bit of progress day by day.

In a shout-out to my wonderful husband, he helped bring about a system change in the school food system last month. There were several menu items on October's menu that were ambiguous as to their vegetarian status and Darcy is very keen on being able to have hot lunch every once in a while. Michael exchanged several emails with the head of food services for the district and this is the result:

Note the first Monday box on the lunch menu. No more ambiguity! And they even changed the names of some of the entrees. The "whole grain cheese pizza" was called "whole grain piazza pizza" last month. Yay, Michael!

Resident Assistant Gardener

Darcy has stepped up as the number one garden assistant this year. She has her own shovel and hoe. When she uses them, she says that she is "just like the Care Bears" because she has a book in which a Care Bear works in his garden with a shovel and hoe. She doesn't quite have the concept yet, but she tries and she has fun doing it, which is the most important thing.

I made a solo shopping trip to Las Vegas this "weekend" and visited, um, several Starbucks locations to collect used grounds. It looks like a lot, I know, but it just disappears once it's in the garden, I swear! My soil has its pluses -- hardly any rocks -- but also minuses -- not much organic matter. The coffee grounds are really upping the organic, water-holding content.

So that coffee got split between two beds, one of which I had done nothing to yet, and the other one has significant amounts of cow manure, grass clippings, and some coffee grounds already. This somewhat prepared one got a good topping of coffee grounds. Looks like a lot, right? Darcy, as you can see, LOVES the coffee grounds. She likes to crumble the individual discs. It makes her coffee-covered from head to toe, but she's washable.

But after five minutes of turning the soil over, you can hardly tell it had that many coffee grounds earlier. It's the one in the middle. The whole garden is smallish -- about 11 by 14 feet in total, but it's a good start and I have modest hopes for production this year: greens, herbs, tomatoes, snap peas, and maybe some hot peppers and/or cucumbers.