Flowers on Pots

I've never been girly. My favorite color to wear is navy blue. I rarely accessorize. However, something is happening to my pottery:

See those little flowers? Where did they come from? My theory is that my love of gardening, which is expanding from just veggies to include flowers, is sneaking into my pottery. I've never been one to put embellishments on my work, but these make me smile. It reminds me of when I placed a Cosmos flower behind my ear and baby Matthew tried to do the same.

Chips and Dip, Anyone?

This new glaze is "Indigo Float" by Amaco Potter's Choice. I bought it a year ago thinking I'd use it much sooner than this past weekend. Joe asked me if I would get back into pottery if the glaze came out well. Joe, I've thrown four new pots!

See a couple more from this firing here.

Sunday Clay Day!

Those of you who follow Love Sown for my gardening posts may not know that I have another hobby. I started ceramics while I was in graduate school, and have thrown off and on as time allowed. This last hiatus was longer than expected, but I suppose nothing goes as expected when you throw babies into the mix. I have a pottery studio in our home garage, and as the weather cools and the garden slows down, pottery season is once again beginning! What a blessed life I have to be able to do these hobbies!

Today, Daniel and I played with clay. He had his own work table that he got good an sloppy while I through bowls on the wheel.

Daniel trying out various tools

I am calling this the "Floodlight" bowl because of its shape.

Sneak peak of a glaze firing.

Friends, be prepared for more posts like these in the coming weeks. I'm applying to a couple shows this winter and spring, and I am so excited to be back at the wheel. Family, I'm crossing my fingers that there will be Christmas gifts for you this year!

Back at it.

The last time I threw a pot, my belly was wider around than the wheel, and I could hardly bend over to reach it. I never got to complete my brother's wedding gift until this weekend. I spent the morning waxing and glazing with a NEW glaze. Kiln opening is coming soon!

Throwing a bowl back in 2009. The Baby Matthew wasn't pleased with this.

So you missed out on summer gardening...

If you missed out on gardening this summer, don't sweat it. It was hot - very hot - and the mosquitoes are still biting. However, now you have two options. You can either go ahead and plant some fall crops, or you can skip that all together and begin to prepare your soil for the spring. If you are starting a new in-ground garden (not a raised bed), I suggest you wait to plant. Because our garden was brand-spankin-new this past spring, the soil was lousy. We didn't have the benefit of fall tillage, mulching and composting and the winter rest, so the soil was not very forgiving. We harvested ZERO peppers from the 15+ plants growing. Last year, we had a bumper crop of bells grown in a raised bed.

Here are some ideas for getting the soil ready:

1. Go ahead and till up your garden plot. Loosen the soil now before the ground gets hard.
2. Remove the weeds. Whether this is a new garden plot or not, there are going to be weeds and grasses. It's better to start the maintenance now than in the spring when they can really take off.
3. Don't rake the leaves off the garden. Let the leaves fall, and early in the spring, turn them over into the soil.
4. Dr. Will Hooker of NCSU suggests doing a little leaf importing as well. Those bagged of leaves your neighbors leave for the city to collect? Collect them! Do ask first of course, because some people don't take too kindly to having their yard waste snatched by random people. Put these into your compost pile or mow them over and scatter them in the garden.
5. A worker at my local garden store suggested getting a couple bales of hay and letting them sit all winter. In the early spring once they have begun to decompose, turn them into the garden soil or use the decomposing straw as mulch. Make sure it is clean straw and not too weedy as it could reseed itself and create more work for you.

In our garden this fall, about half the garden is being rested and the other half is being used for lettuces and root crops. Once the frost comes, we will begin composting and straw mulching heavily. I may set the bales of hay right on top of the beds so I don't have to worry about dragging them back and forth across the yard.

Do you have any more tips to offer? I'm always looking for ideas!

When it Rains

Last night it rained and rained and rained. As the boys were working on their highly processed veggie straws for breakfast (I didn't give it to them... Daniel snuck the back off the counter), I snuck outside with the camera. To my delight, there was no flooding. The new French tile drain is working like a charm, and this was a serious rainfall. Just look how the mulch on the path was washed downstream:

A week ago these mystery seedlings popped up out of the ground. I don't know what they are, but I've tossed out cantaloup, sunflower, and possibly squash seeds that I was too lazy to take to the compost bin. Anyone have a guess?

Finally, the spinach has sprouted!

... and the peas!

This is one of the few remaining Swiss Chard plants that the bunnies and bugs haven't devoured. I believe it is Bright Lights.

Changing Seasons in the Garden

This morning we visited Roanoke Park, a sliver of a playground between two roads in a quiet neighborhood. At one point my son Daniel exclaimed, "The leaves are falling!" We have been referencing the coming fall often, and if the seasons were left up to him, we'd skip right to winter and snow.

It has been a long summer. I'm not sure what made it such. It could have been all the days that were pushing the 100 degree mark that sent this pool-loving family to hide in their air conditioned home, and it could be that mid-September is still warm and muggy. But I am ready for fall. We are just now able to enjoy our time outside again, and gardening no longer leads to profuse sweating while watering the plants. It's strange that just as desperate as I was for summer to come, I am desperate for it to leave.

However, I am sad that there are not many days of this left.

The biggest change in our garden is the focus shifts from fleshy fruits and vegetables to peas, leaf and root crops. The spinach is just beginning to sprout and the Black Seeded Simpson is showing some curly leaves. Here's a list of what is in the ground:

Choys (Bok, Pak, Joi)
Chinese Cabbage
Spinach
Chard
Radishes
Garlic
Basil
Kale
Mesclun Mix
Baby Butterhead Lettuce
Beets (these germinated then died)
Carrots (very few germinated for us)
Peas
Sweet potatoes
Broccoli

Some leftover summer crops are still producing:

Green Beans
Okra
Eggplant
Chery Tomatoes
Striped Roma Tomatoes
Adirondack Blue Potatoes

Drainage - My garden Cesspool Part Two

Living in the city on 1/3 an acre of land in clay country, finding the ideal spot for a vegetable can be problematic at best. When we moved to our house back in 2007, our lot was covered in pines. Over the past three summers, our garden has been relocated and rebuilt no less than three times. Finally, this summer was THE summer when my gardening stars were to align. We'd removed 19 pines from our yard (don't worry, there are still plenty of trees left) and we moved the garden to the south side of the house where sunlight abounds. The topsoil appeared rich, and we dug right in.

We live on a hill, so we thought flooding wouldn't be a problem; however, our garden sits on the one flat spot of the yard that retains water. It seems that all the runoff from the back of the lot passes through and gets trapped. The pond-like stench as I sunk my shovel into the soil after Lee passed through told me that I had some work to do if I wanted to prevent some of the diseases and saturated root zone I dealt with this summer. Knowing I had a drainage problem was somewhat of a relief as I'd been down on myself over several failures.

Initially I wanted to just dig a hole to see how high the water table was and to pull some of the water off the lettuce and melon patches. If you know me well, you know that I can't stop at just a hole. By the evening, I'd dug a shallow ditch halfway across the garden. I dug down about 6-10" or until I hit the red clay later. This past weekend, Joe and I finished the ditch, making sure the end of the ditch that emptied into the yard was lower than the ditch inlet and attempting to create a path with as few pooling spots as possible.

Of course, the project was not without incident. This one fell in the mud during the testing phase before we laid the pipe.

We then laid a French Tile Drain the length of the ditch, wrapped it in fabric to keep the fines out and topped it with more fabric wrapped pea gravel before topping with soil and mulch.



We have not experienced a rain event since we completed the project, but already I can tell after watering the garden beds that the water is moving through the soil better.



For the before picture: Drainage - My garden Cesspool

A Little Color for the Coming Fall

Bee and butterfly garden

Sunflower

Knockout rose

Coreopsis

Butterfly on brick

Butterfly on garlic chive blossom

French Marigolds

Bee and Butterfly Garden Revamp

Our fenced kitchen garden was designed with pollinators in mind. In the southeastern corner, there is a bee and butterfly garden planted with Liatra Spicata, purple Echinacea, red gladiolas and daffodils (primarily for me), and several other potted perennial flowers I picked up during the summer. The Kniphofia (Traffic Lights) didn't blossom this summer, but I think they did at least grow plants.

The real problem with the bee and butterfly garden is that its location in the corner makes weeding a real problem. I was not about to attempt weeding while the Liatra Spicata were in blossom. From sunup to sundown, the bees loved this flower. There was no way to gain access to the back corner without wading through some potentially angry workers. Early in the summer, we obtained a sink from Habitat and installed a small garden water bowl with Water Hyacinth; however, we replaced the water with potted mint due to a mosquito problem, which made that entire quadrant of the garden highly unpleasant.

Yesterday evening, Daniel and I took shovels to the corner, removed the sink and excavated a circular area in the corner while carefully setting aside bulbs and plants. We then brought over rocks collected from other digging projects and laid them out in the circle and topped them with pea gravel.

Because kids love naming things, this new butterfly garden access has been dubbed the Rock Quarry. It's a perfect spot for a dump truck and little guy or for a gardener to squat a pull weeds.

This morning I went back out to recess the header stone a little deeper and added a couple final stones. Right now the plants are dying back, but this coming spring the corner will be lush and manageable.

How Captain Duct Tape Single-sidedly Took Down a Cell of Squash Bugs

Warning: What you are about to see here may be visually disturbing. Let the pictures do the talking.

Drainage - My garden Cesspool.

I'm not sure if it was the mucky shplucky smell, the dead zone, the disease on my tomatoes or the lake under the bean tunnel that give it away. But it has become very apparent that the garden has drainage issues. On our sloped lot, most of the runoff cuts around the south side of the house through the garden before making it down to the street and eventually into the Neuse River. The garden sits in a low spot that retains the water on its downward track. Considering we've had several years of drought, I figured it would be good that it served as a catch basin during storms; however, most recently we've stayed fairly wet.

I noticed in the spring that every time I watered the garden, there were issues with water pooling, but this rose to a whole new level with the tropical depression Lee in the past two days. I went outside in between downpours and dug a trench to dewater the beds. Given the smell of the soil, I suspect that the water table has remained too high for one section in particular that simply won't grow anything - not even weeds. The mosquitoes have loved it unfortunately.

This coming weekend, we will install a tile drain to help move the water out. I'll post pics of the process and the completed project. This is the type of stuff I went to college for. We'll see what I learned...

Gone Fishin'

We took the boys to Tennessee for Labor Day weekend to visit my family. We fished, played, cooked, feasted and hit the road right after the start of the biggest day long rainfall Chattanooga has ever seen.

Sights and Sounds of the Morning

For several hours each morning, it feels like fall. Today while the Man-child was sleeping, the Baby and I stepped outside in the cool air and took a brief walk around the garden, where I plucked several green beans and red okra and felt dew under my feet. He old bamboo sticks that once stood next to pepper plants. The birdhouse gourds and cucumbers in the tunnel are continuing to set fruit and the Melondome shows promise of late season cantaloup. A late season planting on green beans is sprouting. Forever the garden optimist, I planted some several days back just in case the first frost of the season comes late.

Several weeks back, I pulled out the spent dill and planted Renee's Mesclun Mix in the large pot in the herb garden. Mom's daylilies from TN are overtaking the pot and may be transplanted to a sunnier location, but for now they prove a little shade for tender sprouts. There isn't enough Mesclun yet for a salad, but it is looking yummy! I think I will have to devote a larger space in one of the other beds for more of it.

The Baby loves hearing the birds in the morning. They are quite chatty and he excitedly grunts and points when he hears them.