Photo by Rick Gush

While I’m waiting for the soil to dry out so I can prepare the beds for spring planting, I spend time in the garden building a new terrace on the lower part of the cliff. 

Since I use empty glass bottles instead of bricks, the first phase of my projects is always to assemble a huge amount of bottles.  I had stockpiled almost a thousand bottles a month or so ago, so I thought I was good and ready for the construction of the new terrace. 

Well, actually, now that the wall is close to completion I know that the project will need even more bottles than I had prepared.  Luckily, there are a whole lot of bottles available to collect, and my neighbors continue to bring me their empty bottles for recycling.

To make the terrace walls, I stack the bottles up in between layers of fresh concrete, keeping the bottle bottoms flush with the outside edge of the wall, and letting the bottle tops stick into the bed area.  The resultant walls are pretty strong even though the concrete is really only about 8 to 10 inches thick in most places. 

Photo by Rick Gush

At key points, where the wall is anchored to the bedrock and at sharp angles, I double the concrete thickness to give extra strength.

Once the walls are built, I put on a row of clay bricks or hollow building blocks that serves as the top edge.  The orange blocks and bricks add a decorative touch that acts as a visual theme and makes a nice sturdy finished edge to the tops of the beds. 

Before backfilling the terrace with new soil I usually knock off the bottle necks on the top few rows in order that the bottles closest to the eventual bed surface are about a foot and a half below the surface of the soil, which is well below the normal cultivation depth. 

I’ll also knock the fronts out of a few bottles on the top row and fill the space with dirt so I can plant hanging things that will eventually cover big parts of the wall front.

This cliff where the garden terraces are built was too steep to walk on and too overgrown to climb up when I started, but now the scrub is mostly gone and there are a number of nice big flat dirt areas to plant with a network of steps leading up and down the slopes. 

The sunshine reflecting on the bottles is attractive and although the plantings are still young and the garden will become better looking in a few years, it is already much nicer than the scrub trees and wild berry vines that used to choke the area.

As usual, no matter how much I build, the garden always seems unfinished to me.  When I look at the garden, the four of five next major projects all appear fairly urgent.  I estimated this construction phase to last two years when I first started the garden four years ago.  These days I estimate another two or three years until the garden really looks spectacular.

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Photo by Jessica Walliser

My husband and I have wanted to build a better compost pile for a few years now.  We do have a standard compost bin right in the veggie garden to collect whatever scraps the chickens aren’t interested in and it’s been great, but we need more—more space and more finished compost. 

It’s been our (mostly my) habit the past few years to dump any collected debris over the fence and let it break down in its own time.  Certainly not a good system considering that the woods now look a little ‘junked up’ and no usable compost is being produced. 

As we were doing the seemingly endless leaf clean-up last fall, John dumped the tractor carts full of leaves into a big pile in the woods just outside the back gate.  And I emptied three carts full of debris from the perennial gardens there too.  It’s quite a nice pile now; several feet high.  I’m certainly not turning it or anything, but I know that eventually it will become beautiful, useable compost. 

So now the topic has become building some sort of containment system for it so that we might continue to dump organic material there and create a huge compost system instead of tossing stuff over the fence.  We both have always wanted to do it, but as with everything else around here, time seems to run out before we get it done.

We’ve discussed using cement blocks to contain it but we don’t want to buy them and lug them all the way up the back hill.  Railroad ties are out for the same reason.  A friend suggested using wooden pallets wired together—a good idea if I can find them and I am absolutely sure they didn’t once hold chemicals of one sort or another. 

Yesterday I went back to the pile for the first time since last autumn and I saw that my smarty pants husband has already got a jump on it with the perfect material—pieces of tree trunk.  Last year we had a gigantic ash tree removed from the yard. 

So much of the trunk was too large to split without the right power equipment so he took all those leftover pieces and built a ‘wall’ across the back and sides of the compost pile. Brilliant!    

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Photo by Rick Gush

I was at my friend Richard’s house this week when his neighbor came over and grafted another one of Richard’s old cherry trees.  Richard fired up his chain saw and cut the top of the tree, leaving a couple of waist-high stumps.  

In the meantime, Franco the grafter went to another neighbor’s house and got scions from a sweet cherry tree that produces great fruit.

Franco cut three inch long, quarter-inch wide notches in the top edges of the stumps and then carved the bottoms of the scion pieces into an odd triangle form, with two edges of the scion cut fresh, and the third part of the stem left as is. 

The fresh cut sides were then shoved inside one of the notches cut in the top of the stump, leaving the uncut part of the scion with bark intact positioned toward the outside.  Once all the scions were in place he wrapped electricians tape around the top edge of the stump, in such a manner as to hold the scions firmly in place.  He also had a bit of grafting wax that he daubed on the top part of the joints.

Photo by Rick Gush

I was surprised that instead of a fancy grafting knife, of which there are a lot on the market here, Franco used a big Opinel folding knife.  He says the steel is good and the knife can be made razor sharp. 

Hmm, I own that same Opinel knife, but mine is far from being a razor.  I usually use it to cut cheese and apples when I picnic with my wife.  I’ll have to see if I can get it razor sharp one of these days, perhaps before I do my own grafting on the fig tree this June.

There are a lot of old cherry trees in Liguria, and it seems this fruit tree was a longtime favorite of the local small farmers.   While hiking around in the hills here I’ve seen quite a lot of old cheery trees that have been cut back to stumps and re-grafted with new scions. 

There are also a lot of wild sour cherries that grow around here, called “Amarena” or “sour one.”  I am a Ligurian gardener, and so I myself planted one sweet and one sour cherry this year.  I’m crazy about fresh cherry juice, and a mix between sweet and sour cherry juice is pretty close to paradise.  I also always order Amarena flavor ice cream cones in the summer.

Richard’s problem was that he had a few mature trees that were supposed to be sweet, but produced only mediocre fruit.  The prognosis for the grafts is pretty good, not only because Franco performed a similar, successful, grafting on one of Richard’s other trees last year. 

Today’s second photo shows last year’s tree, and the good growth of the grafted sections is obvious.  I think they may even get a few fruit from the one-year-old grafted sections this season.

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Photo by Jessica Walliser

Things are finally starting to thaw.  How thrilling it will be when spring finally arrives—it has been such a long winter.  Yesterday it hit 56 degrees and today we are expecting the temps to reach the low to mid 60’s.  Yipee!

I managed to spend an hour yesterday afternoon in the front perennial bed, raking out some leaves, cutting back a bit of dead growth, and giving it a general sprucing up. 

Seeing the new growth peeking out of the plant crowns nearly made me giddy with glee.  My Leopard’s bane, Chinese forget-me-nots, Nepeta and spurge are already forming tons of new little leaves.  I’m always happy to know that ‘my friends’ actually survived the winter and are willing to show up again for another year.  I did all this clean up while trying very hard to not actually step in the garden. 

The soil is totally waterlogged and I think if I leave any footprints behind some alien archaeologist will still be able to see them a millennia from now.

I’m planning to take advantage of every bit of good weather I can get in hopes of catching a heads-up on all the spring chores over the coming weeks.  Every other gardener out there probably will do the same.  It feels so good to go out in the early spring wearing just a light jacket and actually get something done.

Another chore I (unfortunately) had to do yesterday was poop scoop—probably one of the most horrible jobs to do after a thaw.  But, as I was walking around the yard with shovel in hand, I spotted a bunch of my lawn crocuses peeking above the grass. 

Three years ago I planted a few hundred crocus in an area of the lawn with the goal of creating a spring bulb meadow.  It was so easy to do and looks really lovely every spring.  I always seem to forget they’re there so seeing the new growth yesterday confirmed that somehow, someday, spring will indeed put on her party dress and grace us with her smile.

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