The grafted tree

 

A few years ago we experimented with grafting, partly as a botany lesson for the kids, but also desiring to preserve the old apple tree that Matt's grandparents planted behind the house that is slowly coming to the end of its life. We had success with eight of the ten that we attempted, but then lost all but one to deer over the winter. HOWEVER, the one survivor has continued to grow nicely, and this spring has its first blossoms! Still undecided if we're going to pull the blossoms to get one more season of good growth before putting energy into bearing fruit.

Blueberry wall progress

 

Also known as "killing two birds with one stone." Ebby and I are toilet training and building a limestone retaining wall at the same time. He's actually a decent help - bringing his little wheelbarrow along to load rocks, and the little blue wagon when we need dirt. In the meantime, if there's an accident, no problem! The ground could use a little moisture!!!

The Cunningham's apples

This has just NOT been a year for the garden. As I looked out from the second story window at the completely fallow garden, seeing the one lone red tomato that I had seen, but hadn't even had the time to get out and pick, even though it would have meant a 30% increase in our yearly tomato crop, it made me think of the Sabbath years that God commanded the Israelites to give to their own fields - a year of no planting, but only harvesting what came up on its own.

We got a hint of that with our ten baby pumpkins. Ten pumpkins for our ten children growing up in this motley garden. Coincidence? I think not.

But, getting just one jar of pear sauce out of all of the fruit trees in the backyard made getting a gift of a bag of apples from our friends' trees that much more special. (The Cunninghams got 3000 pounds of apples this year, and sent a bag via the Engessers last week.) Even more fun was having Mr. Cunningham bring three more boxes of apples - roughly 100 pounds! - and tucking them behind the dumpster at his office in St. Paul.

Evania and I went out after lunch (with Eben in tow), to pick them up. She was my helper in case the boxes were too heavy or awkward for me, and they really were, so she helped me lighten the load by piling some into bags.

 And here's the haul all loaded up in Big Blue. Yum!!!

The garden wall

The following was lifted from Room for More:

~~~

So, Saturday night, about 7pm, Bobbi was discharged from the hospital and got to come home. That began a truly miserable night, culminating in a 4:30am 911 call when we'd exhausted our options for pain management, and her anxiety over the pain (not helped by the narcotics) causing the pain to escalate even further. Poor girl. Matt followed the ambulance down to the hospital in our little Jetta (easier to park!) and spent a few hours there not sleeping while they got things calmed down a bit, and swapped out one of her meds to give her something more effective at relaxing her muscles. Then they wanted to send her back home. (Yikes!!) So Matt had to drive back - so nice that we're so close! - and swap out for Big Blue because she doesn't fit in the Jetta with her casts. Honestly, we'd been thinking with the state she was in that she would be readmitted and he would not be bringing her back home that same morning, which is why he took the Jetta in the first place. He parked the Jetta way up on the driveway next to our trailer to give plenty of room to navigate Big Blue on the return trip, came in, got some breakfast, gathered a few things, and about 45 minutes later was back out the door to bring her back home.

I realized that we were going to need some extra hands during the day, because caring for her was a full-time-and-then-some job for both me and Matt during the night. We were both terribly fatigued, and knew we had a day full ahead of us. I made two unsuccessful phone calls while staring out the front window. Then I saw the Jetta heading down the driveway, and I mindlessly wondered where Matt was going...and then remembered...Matt had already gone!...the Jetta was leaving the premises of its own accord!!!! Phone in hand, I dialed 911 for the second time that morning (is that what you're supposed to do for runaway cars? I don't know.) Somehow, the car made it down our curving driveway, over the low garden wall at the bottom, across the street, through the ditch, across the west-bound highway lane, into the central ditch where it settled down and there it sat.

You have to zoom in, but it's there if you look.

Um. This is not good. The woman I spoke with from the highway patrol was delightfully kind, and said not to worry at all since it was out of both drive lanes. I called our neighbor and she took on the task of getting it towed out of the ditch. Then I emailed our pastor. "We need help..." And help came in the form of Faith and her mom (who is in our small group bible study).

It's kind of a scary thing to realize that you are so sleep deprived that you are (apparently) missing really important things like making sure your car is properly secured before leaving it, but the story became even more curious when we learned from the man who towed it out for us that it was in gear and the parking brake was engaged when he checked it out before towing it out. It started for him, too, amazingly, as he turned it a bit to get a better angle for the tow.

What in the world???

I'm only being slightly facetious when I say that the only option I can think of is that it was the hand of God that pushed that car down the driveway.

Because, apparently, we needed just exactly that much more stress layered onto that Sunday. I remember thinking at the moment as I was thanking God that my car was running away down the driveway that there must really be some truly marvelous shaping and forming that is going on. The precision with which my Surgeon is breaking and cutting and re-shaping is incredible.

I went out the next day to survey the damage done to my garden. I really, really enjoy my gardens (even to the point that I keep a crazy little blog that only I have the address for where I post photos of what's blooming, show me and the kids working in it, tell stories about plants that have come with special memories of friends and family, and talk about the progress, or lack thereof, of Matt's and my vision for the yard. It's fun having almost an acre to play with, and all of the raw material from his grandma's amazing perennial gardens). The garden at the bottom of the driveway is a newer one, and the limestone wall along our edge of it is still being constructed at the top edge. Just not this summer. Nothing at all happened in the gardens this summer, and only a little bit last year. When my parents' friend Carrie spent a week with us in June, one thing that really mattered to have her help with was mulching that garden around a few new plants our neighbor split off and shared with me so that I had one. nice. tidy. place that gives the impression that the home and yard is being cared for. It looked really nice all summer. To have that one bit of garden-sanity that we have this year get run over by my own car was not missed by me.

And yet, beautifully, when I went out the next day to inspect the damage as I checked the mail, (Oops. Columbus Day. No mail.) this is what I saw:

Since it's hard to see, here's a photo-shopped version to help you see the track that the tire made as it went through the garden.

It crushed one begonia (an annual - not a big deal in October), but ran right in between the others and my wild geraniums. It missed the daylilies, and one sedum was hit, but only lost a few branches. It will come back just fine in the spring.

The only real loss out of the whole thing was my favorite piece of limestone that I had placed carefully to work as a seat while we wait for buses at the bottom of the driveway.

Now that's the precision work of an extremely talented surgeon, if you ask me.

For some reason, the whole thing with the car has served to be a hugely tangible reminder that not a single thing that happens during this extremely strenuous time is happening by accident. It is all designed just as precisely as the way that car ran through my one decent looking garden.

An off year

 Walking around the yard this year is a little bit challenging, and a real reminder of how much time we're needing to invest on the human side of the Motley Garden this year! The plant side is really taking a hit.

But this single plant, coming around the corner from the garage to the vegetable garden, is a bright smile - this is a cosmos that seeded itself from the annuals that Sam gave us last year. What a fun little bright gift.

 Because this is what we mostly grew in the vegetable garden this year. Weeds, weeds, and more weeds. Weeds of all kinds, and many taller than I am. And all going to seed. Underneath those weeds are some poor pathetic pumpkin and squash plants that the girls and I quickly stuck in the ground this spring, but I doubt the poor light-starved plants have produced anything. There are also potatoes hiding in there, too, sprouted from the ones that we didn't find last fall. It will be interesting to see if they amount to anything if we (hopefully!) can get out there to dig them up.

 But, ah, tomatoes. It's hard to go wrong with tomatoes. They, too, are feeling the effects of neglect - no water when it's hot, no weekly tying up and pruning, no regular picking, but still - look at those beauties that grace our table!!

And there was one plant that did survive, and is finally flourishing: the pie pumpkins! We have at least a dozen 8" pumpkins trying to turn orange before the growing season is over.

 And then there's THIS ... thing. It came up by itself. It's growing the most incredible, large (14-18") warty pumpkins! Won't these be fun to put on the steps in a few weeks?? There's one beautiful orange one, and two or three more giving it their best effort.

 And, up in the front, the eggplants are thriving. We're giving them away to friends (and strangers! That was a fun story. Matt was at the kitchen window and saw a woman walking on the path stop to look at our plants. He ran out and told her to help herself! So she came back the next day and did...and came back a few hours later with a two-serving helping of what she had made complete with recipe. It was good. We made it again! Still don't know where she lives or what her name is! We'd love to plant more edibles by the path garden next summer with a sign saying, "Enjoy!") and we're trying to eat some of them ourselves.

Orange Lilies

 These orange lilies are not one of my favorites - it's just not a color I prefer - but they ended up being the right choice for this location. I realize I need a photo with just a little bit more context, but we have this incredible piece of granite that used to be in our neighbor's yard. [back story: our house and the house next door belonged to brothers who were truck farmers. The house next door no longer exists after an accidental fire.] Even though this came from our neighbor's yard, it has a great personal story.

 See that long, vertical groove that runs half way down the rock? Well, the neighbor in the house two down from us grew up in the house next to us (Matt's Dad's cousin), and her brother was over one day and shared the story - when Matt's Grandpa and his brother were clearing their fields, they had many rocks to clear. Some, like this one, were too big to remove as is, so Grandpa Walter used a hand drill to drill that groove that you see, and filled it with TNT, and made the rock smaller. 😊

 I wanted to plant something around the rock, but didn't want to hide this fantastic bit of family history, so these lilies were the right ones - they have enough height to stand up to the rock, but also leave the view clear.

~ ~ ~

Also around the yard tonight:

The blueberries continue to grow. This is our first full season with the bushes, and it's great to see how many are on there! We have three varieties, plus a bonus one from Sam from the garden store, and they intentionally bear at different times. These are the earliest ones, growing plumper every day.

We had incredible winds yesterday, resulting in the larger half of the top of our old apple tree blowing down. We're going to try grafting with this tree - we love the apples, and have no idea what variety they are. Besides, grafting just sounds so cool, and not too difficult! If we do, we'll probably end up with a few of them, so if anyone we know wants one, they could have one (friend Elisa who is the only other person who reads this blog that I know of besides me!!! I thinking of you!!!)

Owen and Matt went out today to tackle the first pass at getting it cleaned up.

Please also note that the tomato trellises that Owen and I so carefully dug in also blew down. So now Matt has to do it anyway. I am grateful, on this year when we really don't have time to devote to the vegetable garden as we're still busy adjusting to life with the two newest members of the Motley Crew, that the plants were not big enough to be ripped out by the loss of their trellises! Also grateful that I only planted on one side, so far, of each trellis. That makes it easier to put them back in without disturbing plants.