Slapdash Manor: An Uncensored Garden Tour

Everything is a mess but we keep it moving.

Dear friends,

Well! I did not expect such an overwhelming response to this project. I’m delighted that y’all are so into it – that will motivate me to keep sharing, and I hope you continue to enjoy my rambling efforts to be uncurated and sloppy.

It’s a lot of responsibility!

First, a bird update: there are now FIVE eggs (no, seriously). I don’t understand how an egg this size comes out of a bird so small. A house finch is like apricot-sized at best??? Where is the egg coming from? Will there be more eggs or is this it? The parental bird is terrorizing everyone who comes to the front door, and I understand her irritation but like, maybe scout a better nesting spot more thoroughly next time. I’m victim-blaming a very small bird.

Also I am living in fear that one of us will open the front door and the bird will fly into the house. We have the tiniest vestibule between the front door and an inner door, and there’s not really enough space for my big body to close one door before opening another, but I’m TRYING.

My indoor-only cat, Sausage, is also very aware of the bird. He wants to meet the bird. He’s very dismayed that I am keeping the two of them apart.

He always looks like this, to be honest.

In the last letter, I promised y’all a garden tour, and that’s what we’re doing. I feel compelled to explain that I’m still getting things situated for the season, so yes, things are kind of a mess, but I called this thing Slapdash Manor for a reason so I’m gonna get out of my own way and just take you on a little walk through my space.

Please note the bare dirt where even grass refuses to grow.

This is my backyard. The playground equipment is not mine. My upstairs neighbors consist of two adults and two small children, and we share the yard – I didn’t really intend for us to literally split it down the middle like fighting siblings in a sitcom, but it worked out that way. The right half is their stuff, including a raised bed I offered them when they moved in. All my prior neighbors had zero interest in the yard other than as a bathroom for dogs, so I was excited to have folks upstairs who were also looking forward to growing things. They’re very nice people and I like them a lot, even as a person who USUALLY would rather not have small kids in the apartment immediately above mine.

This is one raised bed area. Y’all saw a detail shot of this one in the last letter. The labeled plants are perennials that I’ve been growing since I moved in to this place back in 2018. I’m a big rhubarb fan, not least because, as I recently heard someone say, it thrives on neglect. The raspberry and blackberry plants yield a surprising amount of fruit despite the shadiness of the yard and being confined to containers.

On the other hand, there are two blueberry bushes in there and I think I’ve gotten maybe ten blueberries off them in the last seven years. I’ve done everything the internet said and still no fruit. It’s probably a sunlight issue. Every year I think I should liberate the big planters they’re in and plant something else, but I don’t know what to do with the technically alive blueberry plants, who I think deserve to live despite being very disappointing at blueberrying. Maybe I’ll try to dig a hole in the horrible ground and plant them and see if they do better in free dirt.

I KNOW THIS IS MESSY, I’M FIGURING IT OUT. The wooden raised beds were made for me by my partner A’s family when we moved in; they’re starting to come apart at the corners but I’m trying to get one more year out of them before having to dig them up and repair them. Right now there’s an anemic little rhubarb plant in one of them but that’s it. I’ll plant these beds out when the weather is a tiny bit warmer.

The mulberry, fig, and persimmon are all new this year; I will apparently never give up on trying to grow fruit trees in containers even though they rarely survive their first winter because I am also bad at winterizing container plants. All the perennials you see in these photos have survived not by my attentive and loving care but through their own sheer force of will. I’m honestly always surprised when plants come back in the spring. I assume once they die back in the fall, they’re gone forever. That’s probably related to my abandonment issues??

That lilac is a bastard. It’s a huge in-ground shrub that has never to my knowledge been properly pruned, so as soon as the handful of flowers on it die off this year, I’m gonna cut the shit out of it. Brutality. Anything that can live in the soil in this yard has to be evil. I’m hoping that pruning it back hard will mean more actual flowers next year.

Also a bastard: This big fucking tree. It’s some kind of oak – despite spending a stupid amount of time trying to identify it, I’m still not sure what type – and it’s full of squirrels, all of whom hate each other. A few years back, there was a mast year for acorns; for the uninitiated, a mast year is a year in which oaks (and some other nut bearing -- teehee -- trees) produce a truly deranged number of acorns for some mysterious reason. This is a fascinating and weird event because somehow, all of a particular tree decide together that they’re gonna get absolutely bonkers with acorns, even if they are miles or regions apart. It’s an underrecognized fact that trees are spooky as fuck. You know how they use mycelium to communicate?

ANYWAY, there was a mast year and I could not set foot in the yard without getting pelted in the skull by acorns, which HURT. I was never sure if the tree itself was hurling them at me. I know the squirrels did, doing that wheezy creepy squirrel laugh as I scrambled for safety. I realize this sounds like an exaggeration but I assure you, the fear and the pain were very real. Also, as a result, in my already critter-heavy neighborhood there were suddenly a ton of EXTRA SQUIRRELS – because there was plenty of food for more babies to survive.

We will get into my complex relationship with squirrels later.

Mast years are pure chaos, is my point. And you never know when one is due, unless you’re a tree, or I guess if you’re friends with a tree, and they tell you.

My main issue with the bastard oak, however, is the shade. The garden gets a bit of morning sun and then a bit of afternoon sun and in between is at best dappled shade. Which has limited my growing options significantly. Not that I don’t still stubbornly try!

Today I put those new baby fruit trees in bigger pots, and moved a couple other plants – an alpine strawberry, some oregano – and planted some dandelion greens. I also shifted some containers around because I spend a ridiculous portion of garden time in the spring trying to figure out the best container arrangement, which is one that I won’t bitterly regret when my plants are huge and obstructing my ability to reach other plants or beds. The correct placement continues to elude me, and I’m sure come July I’ll be cursing myself for whatever I’ve done now.

In ferment news, this week I made a batch of water kimchi using a new-to-me recipe and it turned out FABULOUS. Water kimchi is, as the name suggests, a brine-forward short-term ferment of primarily Korean radish and napa cabbage, plus some carrots and Korean pear (or apple, if pears are not readily available). It’s not particularly spicy, unlike regular kimchi, and is more intended to be refreshing, especially when it’s super cold and you can drink the brine after. I’ve made water kimchi a few times from a different recipe but I’m so much happier with how this one turned out.

I’ll end this message with this video clip of a black-capped chickadee hell-bent on breaking into the bathroom vent of the house next door. He spent the better part of an afternoon trying to rip off the louvers that were explicitly designed to keep birds like him out. No, I’m not getting involved, I stay out of bird drama.

Until next week, my anarchic chickadees.

Love,

Lesley