Cèilidh Nam Freumhan

Tag: garden

  • The Garden Experiment is Winding Down

    Well, the current garden experiment is coming to a close! With the growing season winding down, I have only tomatoes and peppers left in the garden.

    Unfortunately, I got behind on my garden commonplace book and really should try to catch up before I forget everything I’ve learned along the way.

    This year has definitely been an experiment. Some things worked, some things didn’t, and some things left me scratching my head. But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

    One of the things I enjoy most about gardening is that there’s always something new to learn. Just when I think I’ve figured something out, a plant decides to do something completely unexpected. And of course, what works wonderfully one year might not work at all the next.

    I had quite a few plans for the garden this year, and I certainly didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to. But I did learn a lot, and I think that’s worth something.

    Now I need to sit down with my commonplace book and document what I can remember. What grew well? What struggled? What would I do differently? And perhaps most importantly, what do I want to try next time?

    I suppose that’s one of the nice things about gardening. There’s always another growing season, another experiment, and another opportunity to figure things out.

    For now, though, I think I’ll enjoy whatever the tomatoes and peppers have left to offer. And maybe actually catch up on that commonplace book. Hah!

    Not my garden but it kind of looks like this…
  • Payoff is a…Really Amazing Thing!

    Payoff is a…Really Amazing Thing!

    Notice the calendula bottles just keep going right off the photo…

    My calendula-infused oil and yarrow tincture are finally finished and in tiny brown dropper bottles. I have been waiting what feels like an eternity and now the waiting is over.

    One thing I learned: I don’t need to fill up 3/4 of a pint jar with olive oil. I ended up with four dropper bottles and a massive mess on my kitchen counter.

    The yarrow was a lot easier to transfer because I had steeped it in a generic spice jar like you get at a grocery store. A quick pour later and it was settled into its own dropper bottle.

    Please don’t take my words as any kind of suggestion, but I’m kind of hoping I get a bug bite or something so I can test these out. Totally normal reaction, right?

    At some point, I’d like to turn some of that oil into a salve but right now, I’m just enjoying the row of brown dropper bottles.

    *Disclaimer* The evidence for herbal remedies is mixed. I don’t consider my experiments medicine, and they’re definitely not a replacement for actual medical care.

  • Mid-Season Garden Mistakes Have Shown Themselves

    This garden experiment/hobby/passion has shown me that the research never stops.

    I thought I had enough information to have a flourishing garden, with a dozen tinctures, infused oils, and teas in the making.

    But no.

    Right now, I have one oil and about half an ounce of tea. I do have some other herbs drying, and I’ve had much better luck with the culinary herbs, but a lot of my medicinal herbs are looking kind of done for the year.

    I planted 16 corn seeds, but I messed up the timing. When I measured the soil temperature, it was warm enough, but I failed to wait until after the last frost date. So I have a few small stalks that have produced ears, but the ears are tiny and I probably won’t be able to do anything with them except save the seeds.

    stunted corn stalks

    I did plant some other corn later as an experiment, and those plants seem to be doing better. There are no ears yet—which is probably a good thing, because the stalks are still pretty short.

    The jury is still out on the tomatillos. I have dozens of husks, but so far, no fruit inside. I need to do more research to figure out whether they’re still going to fruit or if I’m just getting a magnificent crop of empty husks this year.

    However!

    The tomatoes are looking pretty good. I have, I think, 12 plants, and only a couple of them don’t have fruit. The tomatoes are getting pretty big, and about seven of them are starting to turn orange.

    So I think that in a week or two, I’ll be asking myself what the heck I am going to do with two dozen tomatoes that ripened at the same time.

    And I will not complain about that!

    And now it is time for me to log off and continue planning next year’s garden.

  • Overflowing with Herbs

    Overflowing with Herbs

    I am two days late with my usual blog post.

    Right now, I’m drying several kinds of herbs—some for cooking and others for future tinctures and infused oils. The problem is that I’ve officially run out of space.

    One thing I’m especially excited about is that I was finally able to harvest calendula seeds. This is my second year growing them, and it’s the first time I’ve managed to collect seeds from my own plants. There’s something incredibly satisfying about knowing next year’s flowers can come from this year’s garden.

    The top of the bookshelf in my office is covered with plates and coffee filters full of drying herbs. As one batch finishes, I jar it up and replace it with another. There’s even a bundle of lavender hanging from a wall-mounted desk organizer.

    Storage has become its own project. My herb cabinet is such a disaster that I don’t want to mix the new harvest with the old, so the culinary herbs have taken over a different cabinet. The calendula-infused oil lives there too, and once I bottle it, those bottles will need a home as well.

    I’m also pressing flowers. Since I don’t own a flower press, I’m improvising with paper, a storage container, and a very heavy book balanced on top. That setup currently lives on another bookshelf.

    Eventually, I’d like my Etsy shop to carry physical products, which means I’ll have to rethink the entire room. So far, my best idea is turning an old slatted bookshelf support into a drying rack for herb bundles. Beyond that, I’m still figuring it out.

    And don’t even get me started on next year’s seedlings. Apparently my cat decided this year’s starts made an excellent lunch, so I’ll need to find a much safer location.

    I’m certainly not complaining—having more herbs than I know where to put is a pretty good problem to have, especially while I wait for the tomatoes to ripen. But wow…everything needs a permanent home.

    overgrown garden
    How my bookshelf appears to me.
  • The Joy of Learning to Write Grant Applications

    The Joy of Learning to Write Grant Applications

    Since I just opened an Etsy shop—with one product so niche that most people would never think to search for it—I have started applying for small business grants. I have a slight advantage as a female veteran, but that only gets my foot in the door. A strong application still has to stand on its own.

    One of the biggest hurdles will be the fact that I don’t have any revenue yet. Convincing a committee that my business has the potential to grow—and eventually become profitable—won’t be easy. Such is life.

    That said, I have a business plan that I genuinely believe in. My budget projections are also refreshingly simple because, at the moment, I have virtually no overhead. I work from home, and my current products are digital. Even when I begin selling physical products, I’ll be starting with materials and equipment I already own, including some supplies that I’m literally growing in my garden.

    One thing that gives me confidence is that I’ve written an RFP (Request for Proposal) response before. An RFP is how government agencies and other organizations request bids for a specific product or service. Writing one requires answering a lot of detailed questions, but it also results in a substantial library of material that can be reused. By the time I finished mine, I had about fifteen pages, and roughly twelve of those could be adapted for future proposals.

    I’m hoping that experience will pay off with grant applications as well. My contracts professor always said, “Why invent the wheel?” As long as I build a strong foundation now, each new application should become a little easier than the last.

    My goal is simple: secure enough funding to purchase professional equipment for the physical products I want to make. I think having the right tools from the beginning would dramatically shorten the learning curve and allow me to produce higher-quality work much sooner.

    I don’t know that grant applications will become a regular topic here. They’re not exactly thrilling reading. But if I ever receive one, you can be sure there will be an extremely excited post about it.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read Small Business For Dummies.

  • My Garden Compendium Has Already Changed

    My Garden Compendium Has Already Changed

    The garden compendium was originally meant to be a catch-all. It included medicinal herbs with drawings, uses, and recipes; planting, care, and harvest instructions for all of the herbs and vegetables I planted; a diagram of this year’s layout; a planting calendar; and a journal of what I did, what happened, and how I could fix my mistakes.

    That plan hasn’t changed. The notebook will continue into next year, or however long it takes me to fill 300 sheets.

    What has changed is everything else.

    Originally, I wrote herb recipes on the back of each herb page. It didn’t take long to realize that a tincture is a tincture, my handwriting was getting messier, and my fountain pen was ghosting through onto the drawing on the other side. So the recipes are getting their own section, but only for the preparations I’ve actually made with herbs from my own garden. The herb pages themselves will stay as a high-level overview with drawings and uses.

    Then there are the medicinal herbs.

    I have become fascinated by them and have been researching them like crazy. That rabbit hole is deep enough to fill 300 sheets all by itself, which wasn’t the original purpose of the compendium. I wanted this notebook to be something I could leave behind someday—a record of the garden that my descendants could flip through and (hopefully) ooh and ahhh over.

    So, naturally, I’m making another notebook.

    Medicinal herbs deserve one of their own. The subject is practically endless, and if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that I’m incapable of leaving well enough alone.

    I’ve also started color-coding the page edges. The notebook only came with two ribbon bookmarks, which isn’t nearly enough anymore. By highlighting the edges of each page based on the section—herbs, vegetables, diagrams, journal entries, and so on—I can find what I’m looking for without even opening the book.

    And finally…

    I did the one thing I swore I wasn’t going to do.

    I started an Excel workbook to track planting and care information for vegetables I haven’t even decided if I’m going to grow yet.

    Just in case.

    table with seeds, twine, and scissors for gardening
    Photo by Micheile Henderson on Pexels.com
  • The Garden Doesn’t Care About My Plans

    The Garden Doesn’t Care About My Plans

    No matter how much research I did before planting my garden (and I’m certainly not finished), there were still plenty of surprises. Some things completely failed, while others did far better than I ever imagined.

    I organized my garden into separate beds based on companion planting, water needs, soil type, and a handful of other factors. It definitely created more weeding than I would have liked, but I needed to see what worked and what didn’t.

    In some beds, none of it seemed to matter. I planted starts at the right time, paired them with their companion plants, and they promptly died. I direct sowed whatever I could, and sometimes nothing came up at all. I even moved some of those stubborn plants into bins with fresh potting soil. A few are thriving, while others are either refusing to grow or have become an all-you-can-eat buffet for whatever animal keeps digging them up.

    Then there are the pleasant surprises.

    The borage is so big that I’m honestly not sure what to do with all of it. I’ll keep tossing the flowers into salads, and the rest will probably go to seed. It’s one of the best bee attractors in the garden, though, so it’s earned its place. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s gorgeous.

    The calendula is massive. I’m drying flower heads for a future tincture, chamomile for tea, and I have dill coming out of my ears. The lettuce just keeps producing, and the carrots have done far better than I expected.

    All that being said, the garden has been a fruitful learning experience. (Fruitful. Get it?)

    As the season goes on, I’m no longer fighting the garden. I’m letting it show me what works, what doesn’t, and how I can make next year’s garden even better.

    And as the universe is my witness, I will not let the quince from hell win.

    stock photo of a calendula head
    Photo by Prashant Gangwar on Pexels.com
  • I Like Knowing Things

    I Like Knowing Things

    One of the things I’ve realized this year is that I don’t really collect hobbies.

    From the outside, it probably looks like I bounce from one thing to another. Gardening. Bookbinding. Norwegian. Citation templates. Herbs. Cocktails. Ancient history.

    They’re all over the place.

    To me, though, they’re all the same hobby.

    I like understanding how things work.

    The garden has made that clearer than anything else. Before this year, companion planting was something I’d read about. Soil composition was something I’d heard people discuss. Medicinal herbs were mostly names in books.

    Now I get to watch it happen.

    I’m seeing why one bed dries out faster than another. Why some plants seem happier next to certain neighbors. Which herbs attract pollinators and which ones don’t. Which vegetables struggle through a heat wave while others barely notice. It’s no longer just biology in a textbook. It’s biology happening in my backyard.

    That’s probably why my garden is organized the way it is. It isn’t the most efficient layout, and I’ve certainly spent more time weeding because of it. But separating plants by water needs, companion planting, shade, and other variables lets me see what works and what doesn’t. I’m treating the garden as one giant experiment.

    The same thing happens with my other projects.

    I didn’t start making notebooks because I thought notebooks were too expensive. I started because I wanted to understand how books are made. Every mistake teaches me something, and every notebook gets a little better than the last.

    I originally started learning Norwegian because I had a reason to. Somewhere along the way, though, the language became the reward. I enjoy the grammar, I enjoy listening to it, and I was ridiculously proud of myself for using it in Oslo, even if it was only a little.

    The citation bundles might be the clearest example of all. I don’t enjoy formatting bibliographies. I enjoy solving problems, and I kept thinking about how much easier graduate school would have been if I’d had something like this on my desk.

    Maybe that’s why all of these projects seem connected to me, even if they don’t to anyone else.

    I’m not really collecting hobbies.

    I’m collecting understanding.

    woman surrounded by books and studying on her bed
    Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com
  • How Many Notebooks is too Many?

    How Many Notebooks is too Many?

    I first learned about commonplace books while reading the second book of A Discovery of Witches. It sounded like such a cool idea.

    I immediately found an unused notebook in my inventory and started carrying it around.

    I had been told that one simply writes down anything interesting. Unfortunately, I wasn’t finding anything interesting at first, and every time I wrote something down, it felt forced.

    A few months ago—maybe a year, time has ceased to have meaning—I started a bullet journal again. Instead of writing down things I needed to do or making trackers, it slowly turned into a commonplace book.

    I started devoting entire sections to things I was interested in: four pages on whisky, seven pages on Gàidhlig grammar, and assorted bits of trivia that appealed to me for reasons known only to my brain.

    Eventually, I had to start making separate notebooks. I simply had too many interests to fit into one.

    As far as I can remember, I currently have notebooks for:

    • Baseball
    • Gàidhlig
    • Norwegian
    • One for a game I am playing but refuse to admit to publicly
    • Religious studies
    • Gardening adventures (which covers enough topics to qualify as several notebooks by itself)

    And I still have many blank notebooks waiting to be filled.

    So how many notebooks is too many?

    Like the question of how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know.

    Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
  • Finally Some Small Bounty

    Finally Some Small Bounty

    After weeks of weeding and sending good thoughts into the universe, I finally have some legitimate progress in my garden.

    My calendula and borage are starting to bloom. It’s a small thing, but it is so nice to see something that isn’t a weed.

    blooming calendula
    Calendula!

    The borage is starting to bloom, too.

    borage blooms
    The borage is starting to bloom!

    Speaking of weeds…

    I took a picture of something growing all over the garden, and Apple told me it was black nightshade. I wasn’t convinced, though, and looked up potato plants instead. Last year, I’m fairly certain I pulled up tiny potatoes when I cleared the beds out.

    volunteer potato plant
    Unwanted potato.

    As it turns out, potatoes are part of the nightshade family, so Apple was mostly correct. I also found some datura, which is a very toxic member of the same family. Even though the flowers are pretty, it is not welcome in my garden, just like the potatoes.

    datura flower
    Deceptively pretty datura.

    My vegetable beds are finally clear of weeds, so at this point I just need weekly maintenance. Right now, I’m working on weeding everything else so nothing can steal nutrients from the things I actually want to eat, and definitely yanking out those darned nightshades.

    Except tomatoes.

    Tomatoes are yummy.

    For the record, potato plants stink for some reason.