My brother-in-law and his wife stopped the night at our house last weekend on their way to the UP (that’s midwest talk for the upper peninsula of Michigan) and they stopped again this weekend on their way home to Albuquerque. It was great to see them, they are good people, but their timing sucked because it’s the mad start to gardening season.

Last weekend we managed to get all the things done after they made an early morning departure on Sunday, which is why no blog post last weekend. This weekend they left later than planned and we are again scrambling. But everything will be just fine I keep telling myself.

This last Friday was the big annual Friends School Plant Sale at the State Fair Grandstand. It is our second year doing it by bike, which means it’s been two years since we have gone car-free, and we have no regrets.

We left the house around 6:45 in the morning to go the the grandstand and get our entry wristband. There are so many people who attend this sale, they begin handing out wristband groups at 6:30 in the morning. Groups are about 50 people. We arrived a little after 7 and got wristbands for group 13. Back on our bikes, we biked to a vegetarian/vegan cafe called Hard Times. This is one of those cafes that have been around forever and has a definite alt-style vibe. The food is amazing. We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and then biked back to the fairgrounds to await our group to be called. They were on number 9 when we got there, and we ended up waiting about 40 minutes.

So we had a pleasant time people watching and eavesdropping on conversations. One of the best outfits I saw was a woman in overalls that had sunflowers printed all over them. Best t-shirt went to a woman whose shirt read, “I sometimes wet my plants.” I heard people saying they talked to someone who came from two hours away. I heard another person telling her friend that she had overheard someone say they had come from Canada! And I overheard a couple talking about how next year they would get a hotel room so they wouldn’t have to get up so early in the morning to drive several hours to get there.

The Friends School (Friends as in Quakers) began their plant sale on their tiny school grounds back in 1989. We began attending in 2001. It was already growing, and while still on their school grounds, we had to arrive very early and stand in a line that snaked several blocks through the neighborhood.

They were becoming so popular that they decided to move the sale a mile or so down the road to the State Fairgrounds Grandstand in 2005. We still had to arrive at an ungoldly hour to stand in a long, snaking line. A couple years after that they came up with their wristband entry system, and it works really well. When we still had a car, we’d arrive about half an hour before they began handing out wristbands at 7, and there would already be a long line. Still, we’d end up in group 4 or 5. The sale begins at 9, and by the time we’d return from breakfast, our group was being let in to shop.

Last year they began handing out wristbands at 6:30 instead of 7. Since we are biking, and the breakfast cafe doesn’t open until 8, there is no reason to get there so very early. Arriving by 7-ish is good enough, since the cafe is only a 20-minute bike ride away and we get there early and have to stand around and wait.

What did we get at the sale?

• Kintzley’s Ghost Lonicera reticulata. It’s a native variety of honeysuckle.
• Willamette Hops Humulus lupulus. Not to make beer, we don’t drink. But for butterflies, culinary, medicinal, and twine-making purposes.
• Contender Peach Prunus persica. There are two varieties of peaches that are now hardy here in Minnesota. I did my research regarding which one to choose. Contender has a later bloom time, making it less likely to have frost kill the blossoms. We have named the tree Marlon, as in Brando, as in “I coulda been a contender.”
• Honeoye Strawberry Fragaria x ananassa. We used to have a large and delicious patch of these June-bearing strawberries years ago and the patch lost its fertility after about 5 years, as they do. We’ve been unable to establish another patch since then because squirrels keep digging up the new plants, or the ones that don’t get dug up flower but bear tiny inedible fruit. We are trying again in a new location and have put metal mesh baskets over the new plants to keep the squirrels from digging them up. So far, so good!
• Chocolate Mint Mentha x piperita. I tried this in the herb spiral a few years ago and it didn’t survive the winter. This year I have planted it in a protected spot on the south side of my house. Fingers crossed!
• Weld Reseda Luteola. Weld is a dye plant used to make yellow. It can be combined with woad to make Robin Hood green. I am not yet growing woad, I thought I would try weld first. I planted two in my front yard and the rest in the back garden in a couple different places. We’ll see what location it ends up liking best.
• Wild Golden Alexanders Zizia aurea. A native plant that blooms May-June, a bloom time my native garden is lacking in so I hope this one likes their new home.
• Wild Northern Bedstraw Galium boreale. Another native plant, this one blooms June-July. The squirrels dug it up within hours. We re-planted it. This morning nothing remains but a hole where it used to be. It’s deer and rabbit resistant, but obviously not squirrel resistant. So much for this one.
• Yellow Foxglove Digitalis grandiflora. This is a perennial foxglove and it was going to be part of a little sidewalk corner planting but the two other plants I wanted to go with it were already sold out. I still got this one though and I will hopefully be able to get the other two plants next year.
• Spotlight Blacknight Hollyhock Alcea. This is a perennial hollyhock whose flowers can be used for dye. I planted them in the back garden near the honeysuckle.
• Filigran Russian Sage Salvia yangii. We had a Russian sage in the front garden many years ago and James and the bees loved it, but it only lived a few years. I think it got shaded out by the apple trees. So we got a new one and planted them in the back garden in front of the hollyhock and the honeysuckle. The squirrels dug it up and ripped it apart within hours. If we try this one again next year, we will need to deploy a protective wire basket.
• Sweet Woodruff Galium odoratum. A native May-June shade-loving ground cover that I hope will spread under the apple trees and help me get ride of all the invasive creeping bellflower.
• Plains Hardy Zinnia Zinnia grandiflora. The Friends offered this one for the first time last year. I had no idea there was such a thing as a perennial zinnia. By the time we got into the sale, they had been sold out. It’s not like the big, showy annual zinnias, these are short rock garden sorts of plants loved by native bees. They like full sun and dry, sandy soil. It just so happens I have the perfect spot in my front yard garden.

We hauled all this, including the peach tree, home on our bikes. As we were packing up we got lots of looks and a few questions from various folks. As we biked home, I’m sure I got quite a few looks, but I didn’t notice because I was too busy making sure we all got home safely.

Seeds we have direct sown are popping up. The peas are already grabbing their climbing twine. We have tiny lettuce, cabbage, radish, and beet sprouts. The potatoes are coming up. No carrot sprouts yet, but those take a long time to germinate. Of course, there is arugula all over the place, and it’s big enough to pick and put on sandwiches and pizza.

This evening after dinner, the onions are going into the ground. I also plan on sowing more radishes and carrots. I’m slowly hardening off all the plants I started indoors. Though we had a major setback on the sunflowers I started.

One usually direct sows sunflowers but the squirrels dig up the seeds every time, so I start the plants indoors. Well. I had the plant cart sitting within reach of the deck railing and a squirrel ate almost all of them. So I am starting over on the sunflowers. The squirrel also nibbled on several of the cabbages I started early before deciding they weren’t interesting enough to actually eat. So they lost a few leaves but they will be fine.

In all the madness this weekend, we also managed to go dandelion foraging. James made two and a half small jars of dandelion jelly. It’s the best we’ve made yet!

I have so much more to tell about, but I’ve gone on enough for one day, and will save it up for next time.

Reading

• Article: What Liberal Elites Don’t Know About Rural Americans Can Hurt Us by Wendell Berry. Berry is a gem who knows what he’s talking about. Liberal urban elites have forgotten, or never understood to begin with, rural America to their detriment and the detriment of the whole country.
• New Story: Romney and Blinken Admit Tiktok Ban Sought to Censor Gaza News. There is more to the Tiktok ban passed by Congress than allegedly protecting privacy. Romney and Blinken both admitted in a discussion at the Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona that the push to ban TikTok was “in order to shut down Americans’ access to unfiltered news about the Israeli assault on Gaza” because Israeli PR has been so awful.
• Essay: TomDispatch: Helen Benedict, Students on the Right Side of History. Benedict is a tenured professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism and she reports that what the media and politicians are saying about student protests and the reasons for sending in heavily armed riot police is just plain wrong.

Quote

“The truth is that when this nation chose to eliminate four million farmers (with their families, hired help, buildings, and boundaries) on the advice of the colleges of agriculture, the agricultural bureaucracy, and the agribusiness corporations, it committed a sort of cultural genocide. It destroyed, that is, a necessary mosaic of local agrarian cultures, which made farmers of farmers’ children by teaching them how to farm in their native places. Imperfect as it often was, this was an asset of immeasurable economic worth, easily wiped out, unimaginably difficult to restore.”
~Wendell Berry

Listening

Haven’t had a chance to listen to any podcasts lately because company.

Watching

Same as above.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

We had pasta with arugula pesto and spicy chickpeas. We had morel mushrooms picked from our garden. We had pizza with arugula greens, tempeh and vidalia onion.