Garden Time

Plant a garden. work in the dirt. Good for the soul. Put hot weather plants (melons, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers) on black plastic because Grants Pass Real Estate is in an area where the climate is warm during the day and cools off during the night. Those cool nights are not good for the hot weather plants. They will grow better and ripen sooner with the black plastic to hold the heat overnight. When I first came to Grants Pass, I planted a garden and planted melons. My first mistake was to think, 'Well, it's not raining today, maybe it will tomorrow.' I got up the next day and the sun was shining, a nice day. That happened the whole summer. Eventually I gave the plants some water. Now I have a sprinkler system on a timer. Much easier.

There are benefits of using the black plastic: you till the soil and put the plastic down, cut a hole in the plastic and plant your plant, turn on the sprinkler system and wait. The plastic not only keeps the plants warm it smoothers the weeds. No weeding. Lazy gardeners unite! Enjoy your Grants Pass Real Estate while you watch it grow and wait for God to finish His work for you to have garden produce.

Another treat this time of year for Grants Pass Real Estate is Foxglove (which is the source of digitalis used for heart medicine). The original old fashioned flower color is purple, but now there are white and red and yellow and pink colors as well. The leaves are very poisonous to humans, cattle and horses. The leaves contain a heart stimulant. Plant away from livestock.

Enjoy your Grants Pass Real Estate.

So long for now.

chuck

The Sun Shines Again

Hello,

The sun shines again. Yeah! The rain was cool and fresh, and the sun shining is warm and comfortable. Spring here in Grants Pass Real Estate is wonderful to behold. Now I need to develop my own piece of real estate by planting a garden. However, first I need to mow the weeds from last year and till them under before I plant.

A few years back I wrote this about our garden real estate:

I planted asparagus over the weekend. It sounded simple. Dig an 18 inch deep trench, fill in with 8 inches of topsoil and 4 inches of compost, plant the asparagus roots, cover with 2 inches of topsoil and as they grow fill in the other four inches with more topsoil.

I have a tiller so I thought 'oh a couple of hours tops.' It's Friday night about six o'clock. So I started tilling--10 feet long and 14 inches wide. The soil I was working in was decomposed granite--hard but not so bad since we've had a lot of rain. I would till down about 4 inches and shovel it out into a wheel barrow, then dump it around the garden fence to fill in spots where the soil did not come up to the wire (I am trying to keep digger squirrels out of the garden). Three hours later I am 10 inches down, have 8 inches to go, and it is now dark.

The next day I am pooped from digging and hauling dirt. So I rest.

Sunday afternoon, I start again. Now it is raining, but not hard, and I am living in Oregon. The trench is too deep to till in any more so I take a couple of shovels and dig down. This time I pile the dirt beside the trench (I'll haul it away later).

Once the trench is done I have to get the topsoil which is about 300 feet away. Back to the wheelbarrow. The topsoil is moist because of the rain, which is good for the asparagus; however, water is heavy. So I put in some topsoil and then 25 gallons of compost (the compost maker is right outside the garden fence {it makes compost in two weeks, such a deal}), some more topsoil, plant the asparagus and cover with two inches of topsoil. Done (except moving the dirt later) six hours. And now next year I will get a crop of fresh asparagus (purple asparagus that turns green when you stir fry it or steam it). This year I might get a couple of spears, mostly it has to grow to get established.

Years ago I rented a place that had an asparagus bed and I picked some fresh and stir fried it within the hour--it was really great. Nearly everything that is that good takes time to produce. And the time that it looks like it will take is nearly always shorter than the time it actually does take. In this case six hours instead of two (plus a year to wait). Along the way in those six hours I saw a sunset, heard several birds singing, saw a snake, saw a pair of Goldfinches sitting on the fence, saw the Purple Martin mama poke her head out of the birdhouse that we hung up this spring, saw three deer about 50 feet from me (one doe, one yearling buck and one older buck, both with their antlers in velvet). Nice surprises that I wouldn't have seen had I not been there then.

So long for now from Grants Pass Real Estate.

chuck