• The Alumni House Garden at Coe;
• A half-acre vegetable garden on a small farm adjacent to the Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center near Toddville (a garden typically identified as the Wickiup garden);
• The gardens and landscape at Buffalo United Methodist Church, a small church that we attend not far from Mount Mercy College;
• The gardens at my home on Elmhurst Drive in Cedar Rapids.
This Kalendar constitutes about 40% of my journal entries in the second quarter of 2021. In case someone would want to see the layout of the gardens, here are links to maps of the Elmhurst Drive back yard garden and the Wickiup vegetable garden. The Alumni House Garden map is posted on the website’s “map” page. As for the italicized quotations inserted between journal entries, they are passages from Rebecca Solnit’s marvelous book on George Orwell as a gardener. Because of the length of this document, most of the Spring 2022 Kalendar is posted as a pdf. ~Bob
In the year 1936, an Englishman planted roses. Doing so was part of making a garden, and gardens are one way that culture does nature. That is to say, a garden is an ideal version of nature filtered through a particular culture, whether it’s as formal as a Japanese rock and sand garden or an Islamic paradise garden with a central fountain—or as haphazard as a lot of ordinary private gardens are, arising as they do from limited space, time, budget, and planning. A garden is what you want (and can manage and afford), and what you want is who you are, and who you are is always a political and cultural question. ~Rebecca Solnit
1 April (Thursday, April Fool’s Day & Maundy Thursday). 6:30 p.m. At the moment life on Elmhurst Drive is quite noisy. The Tri-County construction crew is installing new shingles. They started this morning at 8:00 a.m. and have been at it all day. They have all the old shingles removed and are now installing the new. A team of 5 guys (plus a supervisor), Spanish-speaking, but they don’t do much talking, steadily working, not even taking a lunch break. It appears they are determined to finish the job in one day. The house is now surrounded by all the stuff thrown down from the roof. Thankfully, not many flowers have emerged. We’ll have a few trampled daffodils, but it’s much better for the work to occur now, rather than a month from now.
It got cold last night, temp into low 20s. The water jug in the back of the pickup was frozen solid. Because of the cold weather (which didn’t faze the roof team), I worked in the garden studio for the first two hours after breakfast. Focused on the spring issue of The Garden Quarto. Spent most of the morning assembling quotes for the Commonplace Garden page and messing with the layout, trying to carve out space for one more poem. I have not printed a copy or done any careful proofreading–and I need to add one more small illustration–but the issue is basically done, assuming the spacing for the final poem looks okay. This is the first issue which has no Coe faculty, students, or alums–which was inevitable sooner or later. Overall, it’s a good, solid issue with attractive, readable pieces. Should be ready for the printer on Monday.
At Coe, I concentrated on sowing tomato seeds in the greenhouse, 5 seed blocks per variety. Today I sowed a mix of old favorites--Gardeners’ Delight and Kelloggs Breakfast (both from Pinetree)--with a bunch of new varieties: Djena Lee’s Golden Girl (Southern Exposure Seeds), Dr. Wyche’s Yellow (Victory Seeds), Galahad (Totally Tomatoes), Giant Belgium (Seeds ‘n Such), Green Grape (Victory), Heartmaster Hybrid (Seeds n’ Such), Livingston’s ‘Honor Bright,’ (Victory), Hungarian Heart (J. Scheepers), and Juliet Hybrid (Totally Tomatoes). I’ve now sowed 20 varieties, and I have at least 15 more to go. Then on to the peppers (which should have already been sowed) and the eggplants. [It’s interesting to see the list of tomato varieties I tried for the first time in 2021. All produced a few tomatoes, but some varieties only produced a few tomatoes (e.g., Heartmaster Hybrid and Livingston’s ‘Honor Bright’); other varieties produced fruit that matured unevenly (e.g., Giant Belgium and Hungarian Heart); a few varieties produced many excellent tomatoes (e.g., Dr. Wyche’s Yellow, Galahad, and the Juliet Hybrid). The Juliet vines were the most prolific small paste tomato I’ve ever planted, far outpacing Amish Paste, with steady production from late July to the first hard freeze in October.]
2 April. Good Friday. Worked at Coe for four hours in the morning, preparing seed blocks (using Johnny’s seed germination mix) and sowing vegetable seeds. I finished sowing three seed trays (50 blocks per tray) and prepared a germination mix for another tray tomorrow. I sowed 100 tomato blocks–18 different varieties, 5 blocks for each variety, except for 10 blocks for the Sungold and Wapsipinicon Peach tomato seeds. I then did 45 pepper blocks, for those I just sowed one seed/block, having more faith in the germination rates for the larger pepper seeds. For most peppers I did 5 blocks, but I did 10 blocks of Felicity & Leysa, my two favorite sweet peppers. Tomorrow I’ll finish sowing the peppers and then deal with the eggplants and a few blocks for broccoli and cabbage.
After lunch I drove to Thiesen’s and bought a roll of poultry wire, a 40 lb. bag of chicken grit, and a 6-outlet power strip for the greenhouse, enabling me to plug in more grow lights and heat pads. After my buying spree at Thiesen’s, I continued on to the Wickiup garden. I took along the Mantis tiller and started tilling the potato rows in the West Field. After 30 minutes, the tiller kept dying on me. It would run fine for 10-15 seconds and then quit; probably a dirty carburetor. Frustrating. But the first two rows are tilled and ready for their seed spuds. I then switched to repairing the west fence, unrolling and stapling the poultry wire to the fence posts. This 3' tall poultry fence should create some challenges for the rabbits, which devastated several rows of beans last year. Because of my inept fence making skills, the installation was slow and the results quite ugly, but I managed to unroll and staple the fencing across the west side and around the corner to the north fence. Once the wire was stapled, I began moving a dozen logs (harvested from trees felled by the derecho) and wedging them against the bottom of the poultry fence . With one more good afternoon, I should have the west and north fences finished.
Garden Kalendar: Spring 2022 pdf