The Current Landscape

Who knows what will happen this year? Which plants will thrive, which will fail? So, I guess I at least need to set a baseline for where I'm at and here it is. This is based on the original plan that the prior owner had done by Gethsemane Nursery. Note the two grow beds in the locations where the dead Kerria bushes were. And I didn't note this in the diagram, but the coneflowers have completely taken over the island. I don't mind because my niece, Charlotte likes picking them when she comes over and the more there are, the more fun she can have!


Square Foot Gardening and the Dust Bowl
A word about gardening, okay, farming and my other love, reading. In less than a week I barreled through The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, describing the wheat boom and severe drought in the Great Plains that resulted in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The descriptions of people trying to live through harrowing dust storms were freakish. They plugged up cracks under doors and around windows. They hung wet sheets over their windows and the black dust still found a way into their house, coating pots and pans, the floor, themselves. People died from something called dust pneumonia--basically because they inhaled too much of the airborne topsoil. Farm animals were blinded in dust storms. Cows died from having too much dust in their stomachs. Nothing grew in the Great Plains for years. Starving horses would chew on fence posts, trying to get some nourishment. And how did this happen? Because people plowed up the prairie grass to plant wheat and make a quick buck. Sustainable gardening or farming could have prevented the Dust Bowl and it's something I'm embracing this summer by trying out Square Foot Gardening.

Square Foot Gardening is a method developed by Mel Bartholomew during the environment-embracing 70s. It's supposed to give you a greater yield using few resources. There are some initial set-up costs. I bought grow beds instead of assembling them myself (it's just easier) and bought compost instead of using my own (again, easier and actually cheaper since I'd have to get a compost bin to make my own compost) and I had to order the vermiculite from a nursery supply company in Michigan. Still, the beds are down and will last several summers as will the vermiculite and I hope to be eating more vegetables than I would have thought possible to grow in that space.

Here's what we're going to try and grow in the bed against the garage:


Here's what we're going to try and grow in the bed against the fence on the north side:


I actually bought the broccoli plants today and will be planting them in the bed tomorrow. (You literally need to seed start broc in mid-February or early March if you want to use your own and I just didn't think that far ahead.)

Tales of Summers Past: Catching up to the Present

What have we done since we got here? Well, here's a quick rundown...

Summer 2007: Landscaping
The Butterfly Bush was dead when we got here. That was the first thing we took out. Rather, Rick watched me take out. We also cleared the spot against the garage. The only thing that was still trying to hang on was a scraggly Rhododendron and some Fountain Grass. I realized that those climbing vines with the white and pink flowers that were just everywhere in the backyard were not part of the landscaping. They're called bindweed and they are nearly impossible to kill. I used Roundup (glyphosphate) on them and it helped a little, but since they're so interwoven into the rest of the landscaping, it wasn't easy. Seems like the only thing that will help control them is starving them from sunlight. (Their roots are too deep and interconnected to pull up entirely.) So, I started pulling. And pulling and pulling. It was the summer of pulling weeds. Every day after work while Ruthie was relaxing in the backyard, I'd spend half an hour pulling the damn things from every surface I could find. I began to hate the whole idea of gardening.

Summer 2007: Vegetables
It was our first time planting tomatoes and cucumbers on the back section of our yard against the garage. I found out that squirrels really dig Roma tomatoes. We got maybe two Roma tomatoes off 4 plants that summer. Thankfully, the grape tomatoes they left untouched and they were delicious! The big surprise was that our cucumbers tasted incredible. A friend at worked remarked that they tasted like she imagines cucumbers in heaven will taste.

Summer 2008: Landscaping
We realized that nothing along the backside of the house is ever going to grow because it just doesn't get enough sun--except for crabgrass and weeds. Hello, Roundup! We got most of the backyard mulched to help with the weed pulling. We realized that the vinca in the front would never grow evenly because the north side of the lot gets more sun than the south side where it's shaded by our neighbor's giant tree. That's also why the arbor vitae on the north side of the lot is twice as tall as the one on the south side. The Kerria bushes died because their roots rotted out. I miss those pale yellow flowers in the spring, but I'm not bothering to plant that bush again. We have a lot of clay in our soil, so drainage is a real problem. I realize that maybe we should dig up large sections of our landscaping and mix in compost or topsoil or even some kind of sand mixture to combat the clay, but that’s a lot of work and a lot money just to have pretty plants in your backyard.

Summer 2008: Vegetables
The cucumbers were good, but not as tasty as they seemed the summer before. We planted 3 grape tomato plants, one Big Boy plant and 6 (yes, 6) Roma tomato plants. We used tomato cages purchased from Gardeners Supply Company. A word about that website: it's freakin' awesome whether you're a newbie, an intermediate gardener or whether you've grown anything under the sun for years. They have great tools to make gardening easy. They know that today people aren't living on a farm where they can keep an eye on their garden all day long--we're working at desks and gardening is something that we do as a pasttime. I imagine my grandma (and other people who grew up on a farm) might scoff at some of the things I've gotten on the website, like the seed starting kit or the aqua cones, but these things just make it a little easier. I'm not rich, but I'm not hurting for money (yet) so paying a little money to get something that has everything I need to seed start is worth it to me. Plus, the site includes customer reviews, so you can check and see if something really is worth it. We put up a small half-fence, trying to deter the squirrels and also got a hot pepper spray that we squirted on the plants after as a deterrent. The spray didn’t change the flavor of the veggies and the squirrels stayed away for the most part. Our mistake was that we had a vacation right during the hottest week in the summer. Our Romas took it hard and every single one came out mealy instead of moist. We also planted green beans and red peppers in containers on a whim. We only got 3 red peppers out of the two plants and only a couple of helpings of beans, but I was never all that diligent with watering.

Opening Day

This blog is for me and only me to keep track of my gardening adventures and travails so that, hopefully, I can learn from my mistakes from year to year. Maybe other people will want to pop in and have a good laugh at my gardening mishaps. Hey, who am I to deny someone a chuckle at my own expense? But maybe I should then explain the name of the blog. My husband's nickname for me is Fussy Britches, based in part on the line from Shawshank Redemption where the warden questions the poster of Raquel Welch in Andy DuFresne's empty cell ("What say you, fussy britches? Feel like talkin'?") and partially because when I don't have something to do, I tend to get a little fussy. Thankfully, gardening takes care of the idea of never having something to do because there's ALWAYS something to do with the garden--even in the dead of winter.

My gardening background
I'm two generations off the farm (this particular farm was located in Granite Falls, Minnesota). My mom always kept some kind of vegetable garden while I was growing up in Michigan, even if it was just tomatoes. (Her mom left the farm and moved to the city when she got married, but lived on 1/4 acre lot and kept the most ridiculously large vegetable/fruit garden that you've ever seen). My mom grew things to eat--pragmatic gardening only.

When I was 14, I went to work. Michigan is state that depends on agriculture and their child labor laws are a little more relaxed than most states' when it comes to that industry. In Michigan, you can work 40 hours a week during the summer starting at age 14. So, I worked fulltime at a plant nursery during the summer. The nursey was primarily a perennial groundcover nursery and didn't get into your fancier, fussier plants like roses (though they did have some miniature ones). The work was grueling. You were usually standing all day, doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes for weeks at a time. When you fell asleep, you'd dream that you were still doing it. If you weren't standing in puddles from soaked cuttings with sticking powder constantly tickling your nose, you were covered in dirt from potting, or had an aching back from working in the fields. I hated that job and I hated my parents for making me work there. I never had any interest in plants or growing anything of any kind. You would have thought I'd have left as soon as I turned 16 (where you can work full-time in the summer in other industries), but I stayed there. The work was backbreaking, but all my friends worked in the same place.

Fastforward 10 years. I'm married and I desperately want a house for no other reason than I want to plant something. I've been living in apartments since college and just want to grow tomatoes that actually have flavor. Standard lots in Chicago are 25'x125' (no, that's not a typo) so we specifically looked in neighborhoods where lots were slightly larger. That meant neighborhoods either on the South Side (I'm not living anywhere that I have to dodge bullets) or on the very fringes of the city of Chicago. We chose the latter.

This is our third year in our house on Nagle that has a ridiculous amount of landscaping in the front and back and we're finally doing something with it this year. Clearly, the former owner thought it was okay to get the landscaping done and forget it, but that's just silly. If you want nice plants, you're going to have to work for them.

Some facts about my area
I'm in USDA zone 5b. Find your zone and what it means!
Our frost/freeze date is around May 12. Find your frost/freeze date! But be leary of these dates! If you've lived in a location for a couple of years, you probably have a better gauge of what date you can expect the temps to dip below freezing at night than some random website. We have landscaping and vegetable gardens and I vastly prefer vegetable gardens to ornamental gardening.