garden centerpiece
Get in the Time Machine! I wrote this 01 June 2023
It has been HOT! One of the reasons we moved is because I wanted a pool and this place already had one! Well over the winter the liner failed completely along with a number of other issues. If we knew anything about having a pool, we might have seen the signs and put a deposit on a new liner last year. Putting the deposit on now means we might be swimming August 27th. Anyway, I don’t want to moan about this for too long, but the real point is that it’s HOT and I want to go swimming! I even worked up a sweat doing chores at 6 this morning! To be fair, I’m more of a winter weather person and can work up a sweat once the temp is over 50, but still, 6:00AM?
Still no rain. It’s been almost a month. It’s stressing me out! Our hay field is short and I’m trying to keep everything in the perennial garden going. I can’t imagine how people are feeling who rely on crops for their livelihood. We are forecasted for thunderstorms for the next two days, so we’ll see what happens!
Work here over the last few days has been primarily on the perennial food garden. We finally finished building the garden beds and filled them with soil. My idea for these beds to save money right now when we have a lot of expenses was to make them 6 inches high and then in future years build them up a layer at a time as we add compost and as my knees become less tolerant of kneeling.
Alan dumped some soil near the garden so we would have it when we were ready and we decided to use the two-machine approach to scooping it up. So Chris got on the skid steer and I got on the tractor and we drove slowly toward one another to kind of push the soil into each other’s buckets. This is where things started coming apart. Chris started talking to me which I absolutely couldn’t hear and then he gave me some indecipherable hand signals and when I didn’t understand he got annoyed with me thinking that I didn’t like his idea. I can never hear anything under normal circumstances. I spent way too much time watching loud bands in basement bars in my 20’s, and I have to watch TV with closed captioning, and rely on lip reading and context clues in noisy restaurants. Chris KNOWS this! To think that I could hear anything over a running tractor is totally unrealistic. Also, I wear hearing protection and had to take it off to attempt to hear his instructions (mansplaining?) and finally we turned off the machines so he could hear me when I yelled that I am NOT TRYING TO BE OBSTINATE!!
Recently one of our conversations included this phrase, “if you didn’t want to be mansplained to, you shouldn’t have married an insufferable knowitall”, so there’s that.
We did eventually finish moving the soil and Chris shoveled the last bit of it which probably wasn’t fun, but I crept away into the cool of the barn for some other task. I feel like I have mentioned this in the past, but it’s a bank barn, so the lower level is kind of underground-ish and it is super cool and pleasant in there even on the hottest days. The sheep think they’ve hit the jackpot and take a long midday siesta. People pop by and ask where the sheep are. I’m like, “they’re special nocturnal sheep”, they sleep all day and then they graze all night and sleep under the stars. Sounds nice, right?
I have managed to get 15 raspberry canes, 50 asparagus crowns, and 75 strawberry plants in the ground over the last couple of days as well as getting weed blocking plastic over part of the currant hedge. It doesn’t sound as impressive as it should. Digging the holes for the raspberries was ridiculous in this rocky soil, the next morning I felt like I had ridden a pogo stick across the state after all day standing on the shovel. OH! We also set up the sugar bowl and sculpture as the centerpiece of the garden AND I brought all of the garden supplies out to our new garden “shed” and set up a 300 gallon water tank for a future gravity fed irrigation system.
In 2020 we had a really rough year dog-wise. This is a lot of depressing back story, but I am going to bring it back, I promise. Scroll down to puppy pics if you want to skip it!
My beloved, retired competition partner and constant companion, died at a very advanced age which I cannot be sad about, but I still miss his sweet presence and beautiful face. Then later that same month, the dog I had such high hopes for and probably the best dog I will ever have the opportunity to train was diagnosed with liver cancer. He is still with us after an unbelievable effort on the part of multiple veterinary specialists and I am so grateful. Finally, at the end of that horrific month, my 2 year old puppy died very suddenly under terrible circumstances. At that time, she was my farm dog, working with me every day, riding the quad and quietly observing the sheep. I was and still am completely broken. People who have easy relationships with humans don’t end up childless on a farm with 100 animals, you know? I know people love their pets, but the relationship of a working dog with handler is one of respect and partnership along with love. These losses, the loss of two beloved companions and the loss of a hopeful future for superdog were devastating.
At that time, I felt like I had to do a few things in order to keep moving. One thing was to get on a list for a litter of pups. I would typically start looking for a pup 1-1.5 years before I will be ready. Seriously. I know I might get flak from the wonderful people who rescue dogs who need homes, but all of our dogs are bred for a purpose and there are waitlists for these animals. They aren’t ending up in shelters. At that point we had Ari (superdog) with an unknown, but probably poor prognosis, and Louisa who is 14.5 now - a completely unheard of age for a German Shepherd Dog. We didn’t want a different dog, we wanted our family the way it was, but that wasn’t an option and we couldn’t imagine not having a dog, so we felt like we needed to make that move. I contacted a breeder in Belgium who had bred Louisa and our beloved old man’s father and eventually we got our current baby of the family Big Sugar (I couldn't settle on just one puppy photo of this gorgeous boy).
Also, by some twist of fate, Chris’ friend, colleague, farmer, and working border collie breeder, mentioned that they had had an accidental fall breeding. I have always been interested in working stock dogs and as I may have mentioned… my heart was totally broken, so we got a couple of Border Collies. You know… the dog that almost nobody should have even 1 of? We got TWO.
This brings me around to where I was going: Another thing I felt compelled to do was to make some kind of memorial, a piece of art, or a statue, for myself to find some beauty in that moment. It seems like a really strange thing to do, even for me, but I felt like I needed to. So we built an area at the old farm that we called the contemplation garden. The centerpiece of the contemplation garden was this sugar bowl. It’s an actual antique cast iron bowl where sugar cane juice was boiled to concentrate it at sugar plantations in the south. This one was trucked from Mississippi. I was just going to make it into a pond or fountain or some type of water feature and then I found an artist who makes these beautiful metal sculptures which give me such a sense of energy and life, like the cherry on top!
And that is the super long and personal backstory for a garden feature that probably nobody wanted to know or enjoyed reading. I know I risk being branded a ‘crazy dog lady’, but since that’s absolutely true, I’m not offended.
Placing the sugar bowl and sculpture in what I hope to be such a beautiful and productive space on The New Farm felt really good. I can enjoy looking at it while I swear and jump up and down on the shovel trying to plant the upcoming blueberries.
UPDATE: Last night (22 June 2023) I was working in the garden and realized that the sugar bowl and sculpture are centered east to west, but are FAR off center north to south. EYE ROLL. Additionally, Chris shoveled the holes for the blueberries, so that's a relief.