DAY 15,
THE REDWOOD PLANTERS
October 11, 2009 "Don't sweat the small things" is good advice! Today being Sunday, at church I had the choice during communion of crossing my hands on my chest for a blessing when the “cup of salvation” was passed, or dipping the wafer in the wine and eating it. Starch with sugar, tsk, tsk? Or part of a ritual that I believe brings me closer to God and all creation?
I chose the latter, and believe it was a good choice. In my opinion it would, however, have been a bad choice if I had felt compelled either to do it or not to do it. Wine, of course, is highly acidic, which is why I’m not using it during this alkaline year. However, according to homeopathic principle, a minute amount of what will kill you will cure you.
Likewise, after church, Jack and I went to our favorite restaurant, Enzo’s, which serves incredibly-healthy buckwheat crepes filled with a variety of ingredients. There is some small part of an egg in each crepe; I nonetheless had one, filled with fresh baby spinach and dried tomatoes. I asked the chef to hold the mozzarella cheese that goes with this dish, thus observing the dairy part of my preferences for this year. Instead of coffee, I had a mug of hot water. Each bite and each sip refreshed me.
This afternoon, Sam is coming to help me plant the new redwood planter boxes that Damien, our house guest, made. These boxes have a story that needs telling.
Thirty-one years ago Joe Long, our former San Juan County Extension Agent, planted a grove of coastal redwood trees on this Pacific Northwest island. Usually they don’t grow this far north. However, surrounded by tall firs, the grove withstood violent storms in 1991 and 1992, to grow so tall themselves that by 2008 they needed thinning. Bill Griswold, who had bought Joe’s old farm by then, culled them. He couldn’t use all the logs, and offered some of them to me because I wanted to make three 5’x10’x3’ boxes to grow vegetables and--what else?--more lavender.
I found some help to move the trees, cut in five and ten-foot lengths, each around seven inches in diameter. This spring, another helper stripped the bark off them, fuzzy red bark after it was shredded, used to mulch my young photinia hedge. Now I had a huge dilemma, which turned into an impasse: How to build these boxes so they would last? One builder friend felt that the logs would need to be drilled and bolted in many places because, when filled with drainage gravel and earth, the pressure from inside would be huge and result in seepage. Money was a problem, even though I could invest much of the summer proceeds from lavender sales in the project.
When Damien arrived, he spent several days figuring out what to do. He decided, and I agreed, that we could use gardener’s cloth—the sort you put over the ground to inhibit weed growth—to line log boxes so the earth wouldn’t seep out. He also realized that instead of drilling holes in each log to pound in bolts (five logs piled on top of each other to achieve the three feet of height so I could sit on them and weed), he could pound in long spikes, some horizontal, some vertical, to hold the logs in place.
A couple of weeks ago he finished the project! The three boxes now sit in my fenced garden, which also includes apple trees. Today is the initial planting day; I have lots of lavender from cuttings that have been immersed in perlite for a few weeks and (mostly) kept damp so they would germinate. Sam is coming to help and also to pull a few weeds, and Hazel, for whom he worked this morning, is bringing him over and staying for a while to see the boxes. Also, I hope she will give me some advice about what else to plant, if we have room.
Not sweating the small things gives me more mental and emotional room for growth, whether it be lavender or heart!
LATER: Hazel explained more about cuttings today and as a result I have 18 new babies to take to Arizona this winter. I threw out most of the cuttings I’d made because, as she explained it, they were too big; the roots had to spend all their time supporting what was above ground and didn’t have time to spread out underground. She told me the she consistently got best results from dunking wet cuttings into Perlite, placing them into small plastic pots until the new roots came out the bottoms, then placing them either into larger pots or into the ground. AND she advised taking the cuttings from the growth edge of my healthiest existing lavenders, only about three inches, just under one of the little grey-green sprouts.
After following her advice, I now have the 18 little cuttings, with which I’ll experiment this winter to see if they grow faster in the warmish climate, albeit with cold nights, of southern Arizona. I can spray them every day, as I do here when it doesn’t rain frequently. While doing this, I ate a big Cox's orange pippin apple, moderately to mildly alkaline, right off the tree. Yummy!
Hazel also gave me, for one of the new planter boxes, a Silveredge, silver-grey lavandula which now is planted and mulched for the winter. Also today, I finished putting a cup of bone meal on all the lavender plants, which enjoy an alkaline soil better than most other plants such as rhodies and azaleas. Maybe that’s why lavender and I have a natural affinity!
Topic for tomorrow: What is pH and how does it relate to you and me?
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