The fates gave us rain, and we stayed at home pretending it was November. We went outside in the weepy drizzle and turned the sweet-smelling compost, added some red earthworms, and swung in the front yard all morning long.

I quickly hashed out what I wanted to accomplish with the gardens around the house. Here’s one nook:

Every surface area in the studio is overflowing with seed packets and logs and lists:

Of course, moving into an established garden already has its perks:

especially the lilacs, here in the kitchen and at my bedside table. I love the heady scent that lulls me to sleep.

You can see more photos of the garden on Flickr.
While you’re there, get a taste for some real garden planning in Montanaraven’s “Gardens: From Napkin Sketch to Reality” set. Then look at the hand tool that you can use to make eco-friendly plant pots using newspaper. I found them for sale online here (in the UK) and here (US) and I would love to have one for the kids. About $14.
These wooden pawn-looking tools are great and the children enjoyed planting purple coneflower seeds for our Austin garden using one last year at The Wildflower Center during the Spring kickoff. Fun stuff.

On the way home from the beach, I stopped by my favorite nursery in Half Moon Bay (who doesn’t have a website to google but I can give you directions, if you are interested) and bought plants. Not just any plants, but anything that could double its duty as both gopher proof and textural. So I chose a leaf in every shape: oval, circular, fusiform, serrated. And I picked up anything chartreuse and violet, wispy and hugging. In essence, I chose plants that not only worked double time but put in extra hours at playing off one another: purple huechera and silver helichyrysum, lenten rose and bronze fennel, waving yarrow and succulent prostrate sedum. They sit in congragation together on cardboard flats atop whiteplastic lawn chairs, in the shade of two towering cypress beside the house, waiting for me to finish digging vitality back into the cold earth.

A family of quail graze the ground beneath them, black and purple plumes gleaming in the afternoon sun, ebony bobbers wiggling like alien antennae atop their noggins. It’s hard not to grin every time they pass. That’s probably one of those beautiful things about Spring here, although for all I know the quail are permanent residents. But the Robin has started chattering at dusk with the scrub jays around the grapefruit tree’s birdbath, the frogs start peeping soon afterwards, and nothing sounds more like an American Spring, to me.

As you start to spend more time outside, maybe gardening, maybe taking a brisk walk, what sounds of Spring are ringing in the air around you?

It’s March now and in the valley this means it’s time to prepare our gardens for Spring planting. But on an established lot, with hungry fruit trees, gophers, a terraced topography out back, lots of little flower beds, habitat niches and no clear sun pattern throughout the yard, it’s hard to know where to focus in the preparations. It helps to make a plan of attack:

1. start compost area and begin layering kitchen scraps with leaves from the yard’s fallen leaves.
2. sketch a very basic layout of the lot, just for elements and their relationships.
3. from this sketch, decide where the different gardens will go: kid’s garden, herbs, moon garden, etc.
4. test soil to check for deficiencies.

And that’s where you see us here. This is a simple $5 soil testing kit from the local hardware store that I thought Ford might like to perform. Ideally, you want to get a soil test professioanlly done, or contact your county extension agent. But I chose the cheap, quick method. It comes with a color table that you compare the tube colors against, and there are 4 tubes to test with (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, pH and Potassium). Our pH tube here (soil mixed with water and the given reagents) eventually turned green, indicating that the soil is alkaline. And what do you do with alkaline soil? You feed it acids. Compost. The grapefuit tree looks chlorotic and appears dormant after fruiting, very likely due to the alkaline soil.

I hauled leaves from the oak tree understory and started double digging to incorporate some nitrigen into the soil. We’ll see how this goes. And so my outline continues:

5. amend soil.
6. sow seeds directly,
7. plant seedlings.

Here I go on my Reading Rainbow soapbox:
Do you have a garden plan? You you want to have a garden plan but lack inspiration? Here’s a great book to share with your kids, one that we love: Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots. It’s a book just bursting with kid-friendly gardening ideas and sweet watercolor illustrations. My favorite tip from the book is to take naturtium seeds and plant them in a dirt-filled old gardening glove and then tack that to the wall. Because nasturtiums thrive under desperate conditions and because I see all sorts of other possiblilities from this idea. Why not use old hats? colorful stockings or socks? Squares of lace, tied into bags and hung in random spots here and there…

Another book I have that I reference often is a book I checked out from the tiniest local library we have ever belonged to (when we were Airstreaming it on an abandoned farm in Texas) and that I eventually bought for a penny plus shipping online. It’s The Organic Gardener by Catharine Osgood Foster. It’s an older book, slightly verbose but brimming with wonderful and proven strategies for gardening with nature. For example, I’m interested in companion planting, which is a permaculture technique that involves planting different crops in close proximity so that a sort of harmonious balance is created, a model for natural biodiversity, with each plant serving another in one beneficial way or another. It also looks cool and cottage-gardeny, full of texture and visually unexpected. This book pays attention to companion planting as a way to reduce pests. It’s very oldschool, written in the 70s I think, and full of old-fashioned wisdom.

So, tomorrow we continue the double-digging.
Do you have any garden plans of your own? I need to go poke around the blogs. Happy Digging!

Despite my occasional irritations with way the boys continue to remain so close by my side, there are upsides to their lingering dependence on me. I can still redirect muddles between them by simply leaving the room, a perfect curveball. This morning, I quelled an escalating feud between them in the living room, one I was almost ready to fuel with my own frustration, by halting mid-step, turning round and retreating to the mudroom, where I silently baffled them as I put on my socks and boots and headed out into the yard. They watched me from the stoop as I opened the shed door, near the garage, and began excavating hoes, cultivators and shovels from an ethereal matrix of dusty cobwebs, spreading them like battle artillery, single-file, to rest along a low-lying branch. And within minutes, both were eagerly digging into the understory of a giant oak tree in the front yard, heaving shovelsful of composted peat into random piles around me.

Chas soon began to look for earthworms. Crouching over the dugout, in the space I’d carved beneath the tree, he picked fat glossy creepers between his fingers and carried them around the yard, through the house for a little while, taking them on a helpless tour of distraction before returning to my side. As if he’d forgotten it was still in his hand, Chas would ask to take another bath (perhaps his third?), doe-eyed and head tilted, and I’d look down at his hand to find another gleaming, limp, pinched annelid. “I wanna put him in the bathtub,” he’d say, quite matter-of-factly. And I’d have to disagree, smiling apologetically, as I turned the compost in the drizzling rain.

We’re still unpacking. The front entry to the house offers a mudroom, which we’ve cluttered with towers of broken-down boxes, and I have to climb over these in order to get in and out of my studio, which is also half-unpacked and, incidentally, chilly. In a former life, this room was a sunroom. Now, I have a pile of baskets in one corner, plastic binfuls of fabric, open boxes of different art mediums: an encaustics box, a box of kid’s art supplies (mostly kid-claimed art media made for grownups, since I insist they use the “real” stuff under my supervision), a box of stationery supplies, textile paints, watercolors, the list goes on and I wish it would never end, but it does. I’m short on space.

I’m finding a rhythm again with the kids, home-based, and feeling more stable. Last week I made a daily schedule, surprisingly fascist in its organization, and I started using it throughout the day as lifeline in this sea of chaos I sail with these two wildchildren. I noticed myself returning to the paper mostly during the early afternoon hours, reminding myself that it was quiet time, and following up with whatever needed to be done at the moment so that I’d stay on course. I found it oddly relaxing, comforting, knowing that this happens at such-and-such time and that happens at 2:30, so there was no guesswork or thinking on the fly about what to do next. For so long I’d been in transition-mode, hungry flotsam ready for anchor. It’s not enough to have the house, have the stuff, have the cars, and have the heat on. In my case, as with probably anyone, it’s not really home until you start to sink into the saddle and ride from the seat. Not quite autopilot, but operating more fluidly. Gracefully?

And I’m starting to feel like I’m home, as memory picks up and I am recognizing the seasonal shifts and nuances of the different habitat here. It has started raining periodically, like it’s supposed to. And the rain–it’s finally sinking into my head now–is not the torrential, melodramatic rain one is accustomed to in Texas, but instead a wispy, snivelling drawn-out weep, not unlike the vegetable misters in the grocery stores–that crisps the new fern fronds, standing attention over last summer’s spoils, and coaxes Spring out of the tips of each branch and stem and sleeping bulb. It smells like a florist’s shop, evergreen and eucalyptus, lily-of-the-valley, quince blossom perfection. We ate grapefruits off the tree in the yard, yesterday (delicious! like a sweet tart).

I’ve taken to a particular walking place that overlooks the bustling Silicon Valley. Today, a muddy trail where I did more skating than walking (and certainly not running). Rain has puddled in day-old hoofprints of horse and deer, a few lone large cat paws. Birds, everywhere; around a bend the quail
bolt in muffled exodus through the heather. It’s good to be connecting several times each week with the real natives of this paradise, hidden to the side of the sprawling concrete abandon of startups and box stores. We’re lucky enough to live close enough to it’s edge, in the agricultural transition zone, ripe with fruit trees and vineyards and borderline healthy air to breathe.

((sigh)) Back to unpacking…

A circuitboard made of white foam and leftover yarn that Ford’s friends made during his birthday party; Chas’ wild volcano painting, originally with volatile sound effects; A featherwreath adorned by Betty and Boo; Ford’s rock collection: “magic rock,” amethyst geode, coral from Galveston, birthday geode from CZ…

Our Fall nature table. Little Ivy Elizabeth Walker, Ford’s favorite character last year from The Village, sitting on the resting rock in the middle of a little Hill Country glade; Burr oak and Post oak acorns from around town; Edwards limestone; Ball moss from everywhere around town; chickenfeathers and unknown native grass, what I pretend is a White-Tailed deer…

at Ivy’s feet: “HEXAGONS!” that Chas found on our walk through the neighborhood (courtesy of a sunbleached, long-dead armadillo skeleton)…

Gretel, another storybook favorite, plays cavalier atop Big Billy Goat Gruff; and no nature table in our house is grounded without a chicken.

It’s mid-August and we’re roasting under happy white hot skies with evenly-spaced, cottony clouds. And it’s dry. Natives hark back to the 1950s and dust storms and hectic farming, and they get giddy about gray clouds on the horizon but are too supersticious to predict rain. When the clouds pass overhead, they spit fat droplets that pat the pavement and vanish magically, evaporating before you can call it rain. And then you sigh and shrug your shoulders.

In the morning, I crawl downstairs to start a pot of coffee and let the hens out for the day. Almost immediately they run for respite in woodier shade, and I start watering the deer-picked, rabbit-picked, chicken-picked truncation of a summer garden: wrinkled and dark green, prostrate. Within minutes, the cicadas start humming a low, warm-up drone. Like dry beans shaking in a parched pod, the cicadas rattling trance intensifies as the heat sets in. I slink back inside.

Chas wants to be outside at all hours, so for him it’s all a matter of being buck naked out there. I have no choice but to follow him with a tube of sunscreen in my back pocket and a narrow set of eyes, since the job mostly entails shepherding him out of direct sunlight. Which is difficult, really, because our yard is mostly sun. He glows in the sunshine, his white back reflects the entire spectrum of light as he examines a pillbug in the brown grass, something the hens must have overlooked; they’re busy meanwhile under the boxwood, flinging dusty mulch onto the walking path as they burrow six inches into the landscaping. I re-pave the path with the broom as I return for cover, my feet now dusted with roasted umber dust. Chas runs in my wake, the chickens flurry from the hedge to follow him, but the door closes. From inside, Chas laughs at the unaffected triplet standing on the doorstep, wasting little time before they start scratching again and picking at the potted ferns.

The chicks are hardy in the heat. This has been the hottest week this summer and they’ve spent the whole time outdoors in their new tractor. I’ll return home at noon from the gym, walk barefoot to the edge of the deck, and peek down on them. Looking back at me are three chicks that are always an ounce heavier, more feathered and panting with open mouths. Every few hours I give them cooler, fresher water. I love the way they peep quietly as I move about, rinsing and rearranging.

We’ve been terrestrial lately, despite the heat outside, tending droopy plants, cultivating the soil, digging. We have a few good books to inspire more curiosity and garden-play: Diary of a Worm, by Doreen Cronin, and Thumbelina, by Hans Christian Anderson. Ford digs Thumbelina. Yak yak. We haven’t yet made it to Microcosmos yet. Then, of course, we have all the nonfiction we could need at home. The huge sci/nature nonfiction library in our bedroom: that would be my fault.

This afternoon, Ford and Chas helped me pin together a 3x4ish compost bin out of some remaining galvanized builder’s cloth. Once we’d finished, they helped me rake leaves and pile them into the compost bin. Somtimes they’d run through the piles and the lawn would look no different than it had before I’d organized the chaos, and a fuse would blow in my brain, but I’ve been more mindful of my wiring today. I’ll have to write more about that later, about what it’s like lately, ramming horns all day with the four year-old rebel. But right now I’m slipping like mercury through planks of burnout. And I’m falling asleep. But god, he has his Hallmark moments, too:

We’ve lived in this rental house for a year now, and the place is finally beginning to fit like a glove. Though a temporary rental (we begin building this year on a lot down the road), we have given it our patina. We have adopted and lost two pet fish here, but also begun raising the chicks, who have, for their part, done a tremendous job connecting us with the outdoors. In mid-July. In Texas. Which seems entirely difficult, given the heat, but by God we have learned to enjoy it and sweat it out. By the bucketsful.

Today in a tube dress, straw hat, pigskin gloves and flip flops, I cut and nailed rolls of galvanized builder’s cloth to the pesto-colored poultry tractor. As I tatted away in the shade, the little chiquitas chased each other for earwigs, sometimes peeping quietly by my side, asking for a wing. Boo, the bold one (because they really do have different personalities), flit perch-by-perch to my neck, where she inquisitively pecked at my moles and freckles. The other two weaved around the timber, little Buffalo shortshanks they’ve become, content to scratch around my workspace, dusting themselves occasionally in a patch of dark topsoil, peeping their quick, velvety peeps of contentment.

I’ve gotten to know the deer, who rarely make themselves seen anymore, much less sleep with their twin baby fawns out in our front yard (they did this daily, last year) but still continue to eat the runner beans, flowerheads, morning glories, sweet potato vines and god-knows whatever gourd/pumpkin/squash seedlings I tried to grow from seed. They continue to surprise me, sometimes grazing feet from me as I jog along the trails, with their fawns stumbling close behind them and at other times, sneaking about like elves in the moonlight, grazing tiptoe across the lawn.

I am finally proud of the boy’s room. Finally, because it has never felt, no matter where we have lived, to be their own– it has always been a post between travels: en route from the bathroom, to fetch a toy before going to the living room; the halfway point between breakfast and brushing, where they can dilly dally five minutes while I clean, playing with forgotten toys. Never has their room been theirs in the sense of belonging until we added the bunk bed. That was two weeks ago.

In the time that’s passed, since the purchase of the bunk bed, the room has taken shape into a sleep playground and a place to stay and play. The quilt my mother made during the 1972 summer Olympics (when she was pregnant with me) is now draped over the top bunk rail, making Chas’ lower bunk the sleep fortress. Before naps I lay there and read to them as they scramble over me like lion cubs, and I, heavy with exhaustion, lay there and read. At night, I sit at the foot of the bottom bunk, reading Grimm and Anderson by the light peeking out of the closet. I’m surrounded by goose down and log pillows and quilting and childbreath and the warm pads of feet resting against my legs. Ford is content to lay in the bunk above while I read “because there are no pictures in the book” but also because he delights in his new space to sleep. The sleep king, who has to be awakened in the morning because he is so heavily renewing his energy during the night.

When I pause mid-Ugly Duckling, I ask “Ford?” and listen for an answer. Only the soft sound of a stuffed nose: slowly in, slowly out, waltzing in the summer nightmusic of the air conditioner, turning pages and other little snores here and there (I think Damon must be asleep, too, now). I reach over to rest the book under the bed. The floor beneath the bed has become a charter library: The Story of Pooh, The Story of Ping, Aeson/Grimm/Anderson classics, Baby Animals, Hedgie’s Surprise, Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek makes a cameo appearance.

The place feels like home in the way I’m starting to settle in: a mixed bouquet the color of sunrise on the kitchen table; the way I can make stovetop coffee blindfolded; clothespin artwork to the back deck’s lattice, and hang my jewelry to a piece of driftwood in a windowsill in the bathroom; I smile to see Damon shepherding his harware in the garage, replacing stagnant unused stuff with the stimulus of welders and grinders and routers and saws, all in singlefile attention. Some people settle in quickly to a new domicile, but I think we’ve grown jaded to constant change. After all, we lived for a year in a 22-ft. trailer. With a baby. We want a sense of permanence so badly against the the tech industry flux. Here, we can at least afford to stay; it’s now only a matter of believing that roots are, beneath all our lingering doubt, indeed growing.