Getting Busy In The Dirt

Due to my extreme influenza that almost killed me I missed the prime planting time for fava beans and peas in this region.  The average person might decide to wait until fall to plant their favas.  But I'm not your average person.  I'm a delicate female who breaks ribs when I cough and I'm fearless when it comes to the garden.  It might be a little late to plant favas, but it's worth a shot.  Especially taking into account that these seeds aren't the freshest.

This is one of my favorite sights of all:  seeds laid in the dirt ready to be pushed in.  It's like laying out little parcels of a trousseau on the bottom of an enormous dirt filled hope chest.

This little lupine seedling explains why I don't always follow the garden rules.  I should have sprinkled my wild flower seeds in the fall but missed my opportunity (I was probably in the middle of puncturing my spleen or something) but I refused to lay down and shed tears for the wild flowers I couldn't have...because some plants will thrive no matter what and if there's any plant more tenacious than a wildflower or a "weed", I have yet to meet it.  I sprinkled some anyway and now I have some little seedlings popping up in a box with bulbs.  Lupines and what looks like it might turn out to be corn flowers.  I love cornflowers!

Wild flowers need to be stratified in order to germinate but some are less picky than others.  The ones that are more particular won't sprout this year.  They might sprout after spending the winter in the cold cold ground like a stiff corpse with nothing to protect it.  That's what they like.  So I won't see a great variety this year.  But now I'm thinking that I need to spread more of these seeds in some other areas.

We are on a pretty tight budget so not everything is getting done in the order we might prefer and we are having to order dirt for the raised beds as we build them and as we can afford it. We had to steal some of the wood we bought to finish the monastery garden to build beds for our three peach trees which desperately needed to be in the ground. 

Here you see Philip filling the two bonus beds he got done on the monastery garden this week end after he had already made, filled, and planted the peach trees!  I would like to point out that although I didn't do most of that hard work, I did cut the wood for the beds.  I'm not totally useless!


This pretty flower is not in my garden.  It sure is lovely though, isn't it?  Don't you kind of want to look out your window and see such delicate clusters of pink hanging around?  They have a very dark side to them though.  You wouldn't know just from looking at it.  I know two things about this plant:

1.  It is an Oregon native plant.*
2.  It exudes a very strong smell of cat piss.

I have a theory** about the odor.  I believe that this plant evolved in a symbiotic relationship with the native Oregon Cougar population.  Here's how it works: the plant attracts cougars to it with its delicious -only- to- cougars scent, the cougars discover (to their surprise) that the plant isn't another cougar of the opposite sex and in a terrible state of sexual frustration it then attacks the bush/tree making pollen drop thickly onto the cougar's fur spreading the pollen around to the plant's satisfaction.

It's maybe a little more symbiotic from the plant's perspective than it is from the cougar's.

In any case, as much as everyone wants me to be just gushingly in love with growing native plants, I refuse to grow something that smells like a cougar's odorific pee and that might inadvertantly on-purpose attract more cougars to its locale.  There have been cougar sightings here in McMinnville!  Who wants that kind of trouble?

Back to my garden- this is our first peach bud.  The peaches we planted are: Veteran, Frost, and Improved Elberta.  I am so excited about these peaches I can hardly stand it.