I really enjoyed the recent interview with Frank Aragona on the Diet Soap podcast.

Frank goes into some detail about a new project he's working on with a group in New Mexico that wants to expand a program that teaches gardening skills to school children.

It's a concept that is long overdue and I can't help but to feel like a couple of hours working in the dirt might actually help to calm down some of the more energetic students that can never seem to stay in their seats.

I would take it a step further and teach the kids some basic janitorial skills and put them to work cleaning the school like students do in Japan.

I can easily imagine how a beehive would be an essential part of a cottager's garden since they probably had no other source of concentrated sugar.  Due to the ubiquity of bees in the cottage garden, Christopher Lloyd's The Cottage Garden contains a whole section on bee-attracting plants.

Christopher Lloyd recites the common wisdom that the mint and aster families are bee favorites, but goes on to add several other species that are a must for bee habitat.  Crocuses and willows are on his list as good sources of early spring pollen, allowing the hive to quickly build up their numbers so that they'll be ready for the summer rush.  Speaking of the summer rush, Hydrangea villosa, basswood, borage, fennel, thyme, sage, clematis, and white clover are all given pride of place as bee-friendly summer flowers.  Finally, Christopher Lloyd notes that fall-blooming Sedums are important nectar-providers.

I tend to overlook flowers in the garden, but will have to consider adding some of these top bee plants to nooks and crannies over the next few years.

Huge pink buds under the leaf mulch give way to pale yellow leaves --- the rhubarb is ready to grow.  I rake autumn leaves off the rhubarbs, strawberries, and asparagus to give my early risers an opportunity to bask in the early spring sun.  Within minutes, I count two salamanders, half a dozen spiders, and innumerable worms.  It may just be my imagination, but the soil seems more alive than in mulchless Marches.  Once my plants spread out a bit, I'll push the dead leaves back underneath as mulch, but for now I don't want my perennials to fade away from lack of sunlight.

Meanwhile, with our freezer nearly empty, I'm eying those rhubarb buds with uncharacteristic glee.  I'm ashamed to say that even though I've had a very healthy patch for years, I don't think I've eaten a stalk.  What's your favorite rhubarb recipe?  (Not strawberry-rhubarb pie --- I consider any cooked form of strawberries a waste of their vibrant goodness.)

 

Today I discovered that 7 buckets of manure in the back with 3 buckets riding shotgun and 2 buckets of gravel on the floor board is about the load limit for the new home made golf cart dump box.

I can't believe it took us this long to make such an obvious improvement in carrying capacity.

The traditional cottage garden had to be enclosed by a fence, hedge, or wall to prevent wandering sheep from eating up the plants.  Of these three options, a hedge was the most traditional enclosure since it was cheap and relatively easy to create.  A well developed hedge kept livestock and wind out of the garden with ease.

Traditional British hedges often contained a mixture of native trees, roses, hazelnuts, blackberries, forsythia, quince, damsons, and hawthorns.  Christopher Lloyd noted that hedges did double-duty, both keeping out unwanted livestock and providing edible plants without taking up valuable garden space.  The hedges did require trimming once or twice a year, but that was a small price to pay for free and tasty fencing.