Spring and other musings

For the DeKalb County Times
by Karley

With warm temperatures in the forecast for the foreseeable future, the gardening season and spring are officially on. People are tilling up their plots and throwing seeds in the ground. It's time for cutting up your seed potatoes and planting your onion starts. Now, this doesn't mean we won't get another frost. It thundered in February, so according to the old timers, we can expect frost in May.

We live tucked back in hollow (excuse me, holler), so our daffodils are a couple weeks behind the flowers up in Smithville. Last year we had frosts almost a full month after our friends who garden up on Short Mountain, and this year their daffodils show is already over.

We're already seeing butterflies and bees. I've already also found a tick embedded in my side and have been bitten by mosquitoes. The toads and frogs are busy every evening serenading the cool nights, so we have to drive very carefully in the evenings, so as to not to squish our amphibious neighbors.

There is a huge flock of wild turkeys who roost in the trees on the hillside near our house. Driving back to the farm just before dusk a few day ago I saw a gathering of at least eighty. Some of the huge males were displaying their tail feathers for the females, but none of the ladies seemed terribly impressed. When they all decided it was time to roost, it sounded like they were going to break all the branches as they hefted their large bodies into the tops of the trees. Turkeys make a great commotion when they're all congregated in a big group—remarkably like a big group of humans.

The turnips and mustards leftover from the fall planting are bolting and blooming right now. Those cheery little yellow flowers are edible, and they do a beautiful job dressing up salads and even chicken or fish dishes. The unopened flower heads look like broccoli sprouts, and you can very lightly sauté them for a spring tonic mess of greens. Heat up some olive or coconut oil in a pan and throw the sprouts on there for just two or three minutes, until lightly cooked. Toss them with some soy sauce and some fresh grated ginger for an ethic treat.

The wild, peppery watercress is growing like crazy right now. You can find it growing in clean, flowing spring water, which we have a lot of here. It's easiest to pick the leaves growing above the water. Those leaves are usually cleaner, and you're less likely to find hitchhiking snails. You can make pesto with the leaves or eat it raw as a salad green. Since watercress is extremely easy to identify, abundant, and edible raw, it's a fantastic, easy wild food to start out your foraging adventures.

Now is the time for starting tomato and pepper seeds, but be prepared to keep them warm if we get a cold snap in April—or that frost in May. You can transplant broccoli and cabbage into the garden and direct sow peas, spinach, mustards, turnips, lettuce, and kale.

You can also be scattering flower seeds to dress up your landscape. This past week we made flower bombs. We mixed about five parts clay to one part finished compost and then threw in dozens and dozens of packets of seeds I got on sale last year. We used all kinds of herbs and garden flowers—everything from dill, poppies, zinnias, and bachelors buttons to Scarlet Ohno turnips, fennel, and sunflowers. We just formed handfuls of the mixture into roundish balls and let them dry in the sun. Now as we're walking around the farm, we throw the flower bombs in areas where we just don't get around to mowing very regularly.

At our farm, that's most of the grass. I hate mowing because I hate loud, stinky mowers; that's my own personal crusade. However, a more broadly applicable reason for mowing infrequently is that small engines like those in weed eaters, leaf blowers, and even lawn mowers actually produce many times more emissions than an engine in even a large truck. A study published on insideline.com found that a two-stroke leaf blower generated 23 times more Carbon Monoxide (CO) and 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) than a large pickup. To put that in perspective, you would have to drive that truck 3,887 miles, from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska, to produce the same level of emissions as half an hour of yard work with that two-stroke blower.

We use our goats and horse and donkey to mow our grass. They're more than happy to oblige. Our head goat, Dolly the Despot, doesn't seem to mind being tied on a long line, which fairly reliably keeps the herd in a twenty to thirty foot radius. The horse and donkey are never opposed to face planting in lush green grass, but their services have to be more closely monitored, as their big feet can wreak destruction in zero seconds flat. In return they all leave us free fertilizer, which the chickens very enthusiastically spread out in their diligent search for anything that squirms.

And then I don't have to mow, which leaves more time for other things, like working up our beds with the broadfork, since I don't like tillers either. We also end up with a beautiful privacy screen that blooms purple (ironweed), yellow (goldenrod), with puffs of white and lavender mixed in between our garden and the road. This year we're hoping the flower bombs will add every shade and color you can imagine to our privacy screen and then go to seed for a repeat next year.

Having wild areas near your garden is a great way to attract lots of beneficial bugs, like the Soldier Beetle, who feeds on grasshopper eggs. They love goldenrod. Those red wasps that deliver such a wallop if you upset them are the same wasps whose larvae parasitize those huge green tomato hornworms. If you've ever found a hornworm with little white eggs attached to its back, it's those wasps that laid the eggs. And after the flower show is over, the migrating song birds love the tall dead weeds, which they dance and flit through all winter.

I might hate mowing, mowers, weed eaters, and tillers, but I love living here where the color palette changes with the season and my office has no walls or ceiling.