Searching for green
Last
week, I was paging through old blog entries from this summer and
literally couldn't remember the earth looking so green. On the
south side of the trailer, the ground is still covered by snow where
it's shaded by the hill, and the rest of the world is mostly
brown. I watch deer pulling honeysuckle out of trees and dream of
a big, black bull calf doing the same in search of green leaves.
How
do I relieve winter gardener's blues? Luckily, I've got some
house plants in need of attention. My citrus trees (dwarf
Meyer lemon and
dwarf tangerine) have sunken down in their pots over the long growing
season and need a new infusion of stump dirt. I also have a
rosemary in need of potting --- one of the six sprigs I got from my
father finally sprouted roots.
So I climb the hill
halfway to the cars, heading straight to my
favorite, hollow beech.
This old beauty churns out around seven or eight gallons of stump dirt
every year, which I scoop out with our yellow-handled shovel, savoring
every teaspoonful. I chose a warm day so that the stump dirt
would be shovelable, but that means the driveway is too wet to drive
on. So I lug the dirt home in five gallon buckets. It's all
worthwhile, though, when I get to sink my fingers into rich soil, the
combined scent of actinomycetes and rosemary smelling as good as baking
bread.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.