Lasagna garden underway
June 3, 2008 | 7:46 am
June 3, 2008
In this corner of the world, the rule of thumb is: Don’t plant before Memorial Day.
This year, that holiday came a little early, and it happens I was out of town so was unable to plant. Good thing, for we had frost three mornings of the following week!
But then summer erupted. The last weekend of May was a marathon of outdoor labor, resulting in completed yardwork projects and a fully installed vegetable garden and flower planters.
Because I grow only enough food to feed two people during the season (vs. canning and preserving a big harvest — maybe someday!), my garden is small. In previous years, it comprised several plots scattered around the property, each with different soil and light conditions. This year I consolidated into one big experiment: The lasagna garden (see blog entry of 4/22, or various discussions of this in “Open Your Heart with Gardens”).
Our only location that gets full sun is atop a rise to the north side of the house, adjoining a field. That hillock is composed entirely of sand, which is why a lasagna garden made sense. It proved to be as easy to plant as the book said: Just pull aside the top surface, insert plant, re-cover, water. I packed it with tomatoes, red bell peppers, snow peas, carrots, lettuce, celery, green beans, and broccoli, then inserted marigolds and some herbs for companion planting and deer deterrent.
Although we live in the country, we get few deer in the yard. I bought deer fencing just in case, but am hoping to avoid installing it. I read somewhere that the strong scent of marigolds either masks the scent of other plants, or repels deer altogether. We’ll see. Different people testify to different results. It only takes one, though, to clear out a garden bed, so if you hear a loud scream through cyberspace some morning, you’ll know what I woke up to!
In the meantime, the peas I planted in April are already climbing their little trellis, and the carrot and lettuce seeds I put in a few weeks later have sprouted. Sparsely, though, owing to the weather, so I will start another set. Everything else was transplants.
Now we wait.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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What Is Wrong With This Country?
May 28, 2008 | 8:02 am
No, this isn’t going to be a political diatribe. Not really. Well, almost not.
But I’m struck as I’m out promoting Open Your Heart with Reading by the inability of many well-meaning people to understand how destructive it is to live in a country with 90 million functionally illiterate adults. That’s the kind of statistic one expects to see in third-world countries. That’s the kind of statistic one never expects to see at “home.”
And yet it’s true.
Emma Goldman, one of my favorite rabble-rousers, said, “The most violent element in society is ignorance.” It makes for a clever bumper sticker, but it also reflects a clarity of thought we’d do well to consider and even emulate.
No, I can’t be light-hearted about this. Because it’s my fault. It’s my fault, and it’s your fault: it’s the fault of anyone who can read these words that we’ve allowed this kind of situation to develop. Why aren’t we clamoring for better education? Why aren’t we out on the streets, claiming that a basic education — the minimum amount of eduction required to navigate through life in a first-world country — is not accessible to all and required of all? Why aren’t we more appalled? 90 million people in this country cannot read what I am writing here. More importantly, 90 million people can’t read voter registration cards or warning labels or lease agreements. They can’t supervise their children’s schoolwork. They can’t function in an environment that many of us take completely for granted.
And the fact that we’re not appalled is itself appalling.
Other countries take it more seriously. Today’s Shelf Awareness carried this tidbit of information: “I think that each book has its own soul; they know how much I love them,” bookseller Phan Trac Canh told Viet Nam News, adding that during his student years, his book obsession was a challenge. “I skipped breakfast so I could use the money to buy books. I sometimes even rummaged through rubbish bins looking for books.”
If many people in this country did that, they wouldn’t be able to read what they found there.
So I’m not going to be bright and chipper in today’s blog. I’m not going to say that all we have to do is open our hearts and everything will be wonderful. Part of opening our hearts is opening them to others, to take responsibility for ourselves and our communities, and to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to open their hearts as well.
No one can do it for you. Consider contributing to or volunteering with a literacy group today: 90 million people are waiting for you.
-Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Words, Opening the heart, Difficulty, Overcoming difficulty, Overcoming obstacles, growth — jcezanne
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A pause for applause
May 27, 2008 | 8:42 pm
May 27, 2008
A break here from my weekly blog to talk about the book behind it.
“Open Your Heart with Gardens” recently garnered kudos from the publishing industry. The Midwest Book Review, one of the prestigious reviewing organizations, released this commentary:
“Growing your own garden, raising the plants to maturity and then enjoying the spoils of your long, hard, arduous labors can create quite the sense of accomplishment in you — it can almost be explained as enlightening. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is here to help those who seek this sense of accomplishment and enlightenment achieve those very feelings using the hobby of gardening. Promoting tips on how you can benefit from gardens emotionally even if it isn’t your own, the unusual quirks of gardening, and the other benefits the garden can promote for its’ gardeners. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is highly recommended for both self-help and gardening community library collections, and for any amateur gardener hoping to get something intangible yet invaluable out of their gardens.”
Wow! Thanks, guys!
On the heels of this review, the Indie Book Awards announced their 2008 results — and OYHG was a finalist in both the Home/Garden and Nature/Environment categories!
(Fellow Dreamtime authors also fared well: Shawn Rohrbach won the Fitness/Sports/Recreation category, and finaled in Motivational, with “Open Your Heart with Bicycling,” while Janice Phelps Williams also doubled-finaled, in Animals/Pets and Inspiration, with “Open Your Heart with Pets.”)
Per the IBA website (http://www.indiebookawards.com): “The Indie Book Awards was established to recognize and honor the most exceptional independently published books in 70 different categories, for the year, and is presented by Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group (www.IBPPG.com) in cooperation with Marilyn Allen of Allen O’Shea Literary Agency.
Big score for DreamTime, having 3 of its authors place or win in 5 categories! Remember that DreamTime is only two-and-change years old.
For myself, over on the magazine side: my profile of novelist Archer Mayor will appear in the August issue of The Writer magazine. Mayor is the author of the esteemed Joe Gunther police procedural series set in Vermont. I recommend his books to anyone who enjoys high-quality fiction, especially mysteries with a literary texture.
Next week, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
–Carolyn
Posted by: Uncategorized, Pets, pet books, bicycling books, writing books, Something completely different, Publishing, Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation — Carolyn Haley
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Time To Get Back to Geocaching!
May 21, 2008 | 6:54 am
I haven’t written much about geocaching lately, not because it hasn’t been on my mind, but because some reading topics really took over. But a recent radio interview reminded me that it’s spring, it’s time to get out there and start geocaching again!
I spend a fair amount of time on the beginner’s forums over at geocaching.com, because a lot of the most expert cachers are busy discussing more advanced topics, and I think it’s important to help folks just starting out — that’s the point of my book, Open Your Heart with Geocaching, after all! And what’s been interesting to me, lately, is seeing how much people are in a hurry.
What do I mean? One new cacher wants to place his first cache and wants to know what to put in it … though he would have known that if he’d found any number of caches; the guidelines tell you to find a lot before you place any. Another poster also wanted to place a cache, but didn’t know where she should do it. Placing a cache should be a thoughtful activity, one that’s inspired by a certain place or idea … not by responses on a forum.
But what all this really says to me is how much we’re, all of us, in a hurry most of the time. We want to grow up quickly, buy that cool new item now, have a promotion before we really understand our current work. We live in a disposable society where everything from batteries to spouses are seen as replaceable, and where instant gratification is the norm. But … does it make us happy? Divorce rates, bankruptcy rates, runaway rates, crime rates all paint a different picture.
What if we stopped seeing life as a race? What if we decided to do some of the things I talk about in my book –slow down. Look up. Find your joy. What if we lived those things, instead of being in such a hurry?
I have a sense of what my life would look like if I took my own words to heart. What would yours?
–Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Geocaching
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Geocaching, Opening the heart, Happiness, Peace, growth — jcezanne
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The need to weed
May 20, 2008 | 8:09 am
5/20/08
An English botanist, Sir Edward James Salisbury, wrote in his 1935 book, The Living Garden:
“We can in fact only define a weed . . . in terms of the well-known definition of dirt — as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it.”
Boy, I can relate to that!
In my garden, the most common, prolific, and interfering weeds are beautiful plants that other people seek out and cultivate, such as pink garden phlox; sugar maples, white pines, and poplars; Johnny-jump-ups; lilacs. The most persistent, invidious weed of all is grass!
These infest my yard and garden no matter how harsh the climate. Yes, they are lovely and I feel bad trying to get rid of them. That is, I used to feel bad . . . until I realized that no matter how much I cut, tear, pull, smother, relocate, dig under, give away, or otherwise abuse those plants, they not only bounce back but spread, and continue elbowing out what I want in that space.
Perversely, they refuse to grow in any place I desire to put them. Arrggghhh!
This is one of those paradoxical joys of gardening that forces you into accepting nature’s way and learning compromise. The deal I made with these “weeds” is this: You may grow over here, but not over there. If you show up over there, I will treat you as a weed and remove you. If you contain yourself over here, I will let you flourish.
Thus we remain in never-ending push and shove as I strive to cultivate non-natives like vegetables. I suspect that’s how agriculture began — trying to isolate a food source from the incursion of vigorous spreaders.
After moving to Vermont and experiencing poor results with my gardens, I had to decide whether the cause was me (Black Thumb Woman) or the environment (cold, cloudy, and crummy soil). So I inventoried my yard and looked up which USDA Zone the thrivers fell within. All Zone 3. Aha! On the map, we’re 4 or 5. This explains why my Russian Sages did so poorly (they are now growing tall and lush in my friend’s lasagna garden, Zone 5). Also, the thrivers favor acidic soil. Aha again!
These discoveries have spared me more fruitless experiments. But I still haven’t figured out how to make grass grow from seed where we want it, and how to prevent it from choking out my perennial beds!
If anyone would like to establish an area of brilliant late-summer color, let me know, and I’ll give you LOTS of vivid pink phlox!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, spring — Carolyn Haley
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Challenge Yourself — And Help Others Read!
May 14, 2008 | 7:05 am
I was excited to hear that First Book has teamed up with actor John Lithgow to present this year’s Cheerios Book Donation Challenge, which gives you the chance to determine where Cheerios will donate 100,000 new books to children across the country.
For every question you answer correctly, you can vote for the state you’d like to see receive the new books for children in need. The top five vote-getting states will each receive 20,000 new books for local children. Visit the Cheerios Book Donation Challenge to cast your vote. Don’t delay: the challenge closes on June 15th.
And let’s hear three cheers for Cheerios for the company’s generosity in spearheading this literacy effort!
Jeannette Cézanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Reading toolkit, Words, Opening the heart, Overcoming difficulty — jcezanne
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Lessons
May 12, 2008 | 7:00 pm
May 13, 2008
Yesterday I learned a very basic lesson about gardening:
Don’t plant seeds on a windy day.
You’d think this would be obvious, along the lines of “Plants will die without water” or “In Vermont, you can still get frost in May.” But you know? I’ve never seen this obvious little item in the myriad gardening books I’ve read or browsed, even though some of them have been at the level of “Open the seed packet . . .”
But when the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the air temp is mild enough for T-shirts, even with a frisky breeze, well, one’s thoughts turn to planting. And when one is prone toward dreaminess, one tends to miss the obvious now and then.
I had the wit to cup the seeds in my hand against the air current, but not the presence of mind to realize that they weigh 0.00000001 oz. and are in fact designed by nature to convey themselves on the wind, tra la. So during that fragile moment when I plucked the minuscule seed between thumb and forefinger and moved it the few inches between my palm and the soil, whooosh! Away it went. Another one rolled off my fingertip and dropped out of sight outside the planter. A few more blew out of my cupped palm during a gust.
D’uh!!!
Makes me wonder how much seed is lost by farmers and larger-scale gardeners who use a broadcasting method. I have such a small garden that I plant each seed where it’s slated to grow rather than strew now, thin later (a practice encouraged by Mel Bartholomew in his Square Foot Gardening system. It works — unless you’re not paying attention and lose your seeds!).
One of life’s miracles that draws so many people to gardening is the process by which a microdot of matter grows into a flower, or food. Same concept applies to mammals, of course — we all came from a little seed we can’t see. But mammalian micro-matter is usually safe from wind, so take care when you’re planting. Else your zinnias and carrots might end up in somebody else’s yard!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, spring — Carolyn Haley
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Read to Feed
May 7, 2008 | 7:42 am
Another DreamTime author, Kelly Smith (Open Your Heart with Quilting) turned me on to this extraordinary event that happened in her community and that I’d love to see spread to others.
A teacher at a local elementary school organized a “Read to Feed” program with his third-grade class. The goal was for the kids to read a combined 9,000 minutes at home; if they did, then a local grocery store would organize a $500 shopping spree to benefit a food pantry.
The students took the mission seriously and read for a combined 16,900 minutes; the store director was so overwhelmed that he doubled the donation. The children did the shopping themselves, armed with calculators and carts and with the help of mentors, after which they formed a fireman’s line outside the rescue mission to pass the 15 carts’ worth of food––3,459 pounds in all––in to food pantry staff. “We’re definitely feeding more families now,” said the mission director. “The numbers are way up compared to last year.”
Want your kids to read more? Want to support the hungry in your community? Read to Feed could be the answer for you, too!
–– Jeannette Cézanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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Edible landscaping
May 6, 2008 | 9:51 am
“Edible landscaping” has become a buzzword in gardening lately. It means cultivating edible plants — vegetables, fruits, nuts, herbs — instead of solely flowers, and integrating them into a garden design versus setting aside a food plot.
To me, however, the term means eating from your yard, regardless of whether you plant something or forage from the wild. I’ve always been keen on learning what’s edible and medicinal in the wild without actually wanting to consume or process the plants. So since I’ve fallen behind on my studies in recent years, it’s time to brush up.
First wildflower to bloom on my turf is coltsfoot. This is a peculiar little plant, in that the blossoms come weeks before the leaves. Yet the leaves are what it’s named for, forming a crude shape of a horse’s hoof viewed from below. The flowers are a yellow disk of thin rays, similar to a dandelion, one each atop a scaly stalk tinged with red. They open during the day and close at night, and stay closed during raw weather. The plant grows throughout the northeast in what the guidebooks call “waste ground.” Here I find it in the the moist, sandy soil found at roadside, even where salted in winter.
A native of Europe, it’s considered invasive in America in that it will form large colonies and push out native plants. I’ve never seen it spread; mostly it grows where nothing else wants to. It’s very welcome along my driveway as an announcer of spring.
Coltsfoot flowers disappear about the time the trees come into foliage. Its leaves follow, growing as big as horse hooves and sometimes dessert plates! The leaves have been used for centuries as a folk remedy, made into teas, decoctions, even smoke to treat sore throats, coughs, asthma, bronchitis, and lung congestion. Modern research, however, has turned up a chemical in them which can do bad things to your liver, so use is now discouraged. However, if you’re ever in a survival situation you can burn the leaves and use the ash as a salt substitute.
In ordinary times, you can just admire them. They lead the yellow parade that marches through in spring: coltsfoot, daffodils, forsythia, marsh marigolds, dandelions — all of which bring sunshine to any day and highlight the bright new green of the season.
PERPETUAL DISCLAIMER: Don’t mess with wild edibles without training!
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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Magazines, Anyone?
May 1, 2008 | 12:22 pm
I’ve seen so many statistics on the demise of the printed (as opposed to electronic) word, that I sometimes think that newspapers and magazines are quickly becoming a Thing Of The Past. Not, however, if my family has anything to say about it!
Having moved recently, I’ve had to perform an inventory of our magazine subscriptions — not what we read online, but what actually comes to us as dead trees through the USPS. And I found (somewhat to my surprise) that it’s a hefty list:
- Smithsonian
- Wired
- Ms
- Sojourners
- Car and Driver
- Equus
- Poets and Writers
- Seed
- Technology Review
- Glimmer Train
Don’t get me wrong: I do read a lot of material online, and I do want to save as many trees as possible. But I am one of those who still loves the physicality of reading: touching the pages, turning the pages, underlining a passage, putting an asterisk next to a concept or news item to which I want to return.
What about you? What’s your subscription list look like? Do you read more online or off?
Inquiring minds want to know!
РJeannette C̩zanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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