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All of a sudden, it was officially spring. I checked the soil in the barrels and decided it was time to plant the coolest crops: snap peas, petit pois peas, radishes, and lettuces. It turns out I probably could have started the broccoli raab and the black garbanzos too, but now they will have to wait until I get back into planting mode the first weekend of April. It will be time to see if the overwintering Walla Walla onions are ready for harvest then too!
Well...sometimes compost happens and sometimes it doesn't quite. It turns out birds really ARE messy eaters. At least half of what seemed to be empty sunflower hulls were actually full and viable seeds, and since I'd placed them in the barrels as compost they are now very happily sprouting. So Stu and I are out there every couple of days, plucking them out and laughing.
The front yard looks good, largely thanks to the overwintered pansies and the daffodils. Of the annual wildflower seeds I'd broadcast in the fall, so far the big show has been the baby blue eyes. They are forming thick, low carpets of green with their delicate little flowers all over the yard. There seems to be another, lower, more succulent leafed type of wildflower plant following closely and we are waiting to see what it turns out to be. Meanwhile most of the perennials are leafing out beautifully, the native "beach strawberry" has big white flowers; a few are still dormant and a couple I suspect are dead. They will not be officially pronounced until May.
Photos of the front yard were posted a few minutes on my Flickr page.
There are all kinds of changes involved in a big move like we've made. Neither Stu nor I can quite believe one 180 degree attitude change of mine, and it has to do with worms.
As a child my response to living things was pretty much based on the presence or absence of a spine. There wasn't a reptile, bird, or mammal that scared me. 6 foot long snakes, alley cats, dogs, bats...loved them all. My one clear memory of an Ontario provincial fair I attended as a pre-schooler is kissing the stomach of a Clydesdale draft horse because it was the only part I could reach. But insects and worms were the bane of my existence; I ruined several summer lake outings for my parents because the dragonflies had me in inarticulate panic. Realizing that domestic animals get intestinal worms was the main reason that as a pre-teenager I decided NOT to be a veterinarian!
Over the years, my fear response abated, but a visceral aversion remained. Until we got the house in Ukiah and there was no way to avoid creepy crawlers. I got to be as casual around them as I'd always been (like any true New Yorker) around cockroaches.
But it took composting and gardening to get me to LIKE worms. Our clay soil has drainage problems, but man is it fertile and full of earthworms. Stu was shocked the day, about five years ago, I came in from digging around to put in some native plants, cheerfully announcing "hey, we got a lot of worms out there!" Our compost is chock full of red compost worms, hooray! And the areas of ground where birds let the sunflower and niger seed hulls fall are becoming miniature compost heaps also, full of healthy squirmy red worms.
So here I go, happily picking up handsful of seed hulls, mud, and red wigglies to relocate them in my half wine barrels. My strategy is to do some direct "lasagne gardening" in the barrels to nourish the soil. I'd already added lots of coffee grounds from our local roaster, and now I've inoculated them with this compost mix; the next step will be to start adding small amounts of our compostables to the barrels during the next month so it will be broken down by planting season. This will also give our current compost pile a chance to turn into usable compost.
The photo: I was visiting a client today way out on highway 20 about halfway to the Lake County line. Between the time I arrived at her home and the time I left, a neighbor had tethered this calf to the fence along their common driveway. I drove to Petaluma on Sunday and there were lots of tiny calves plus wild mustard, wild radish, and purple lupines were all in full bloom.
A SWALE BY THE COMPOST BIN BECAME A SMALL POND, SO STU THOUGHT WE NEEDED TO PUT OUR RUBBER DUCKY OUT TO SWIM.
Cats don't understand time in quite the same way we do: they have a strong sense of patterns and rituals, but they take their cues from the rise and set of the sun and from our actions, not from the location of the minute and hour hands on the clock.
The sun has started to rise "earlier" relative to the clock that guides my day. So Leo starts his plaintive crying for breakfast outside the bedroom door 15 minutes before the alarm clock is set to go off. It's a good thing daylight savings is coming!
Whatever the time, once I'm up to feed them, Leo and Lily are able to decipher what kind of day is coming. There are the days that start off really well: I feed them, then a toy comes out, and for at least 15 minutes they get to run around and play with me. They like this, and it means that we are in the pattern where I go away, sometime later Stu gets up, and they get to sit on his lap at intervals, with long lapses of sleep in various favored spots (um, that would be the cats, not Stu). Eventually he feeds them. That usually means I'll be home soon, so they hang out in the front window to watch me pull into the driveway.
But some days, I get up and feed them, then inexplicably go back to bed. Leo tries to be patient, but by 8:30 he is back at his post outside the bedroom door, carrying on pathetically like a doomed creature. Eventually one of us will get up and open the door. He leaps onto the bed, knits on my bathrobe, bumps heads with us, purrs his head off, and settles down for some face rubbing before he does his ritual exploration of the room, opening closet doors and the drawers under the bed. Meanwhile Lily sneaks in for some pets from Stu. Eventually the two of them start the Let's Run Up and Down the Halls and In and Out of the Rooms Really Fast game and soon its time for more laps and sleeping.
Hard to know, from a cat point of view, if one kind of day is "better" than another. But my brother in law, Howie, says that if there is reincarnation he wants to come back as one of his cats. I totally understand.
