With the spring moving in, it's been time to tend the garden and, of course, re-stock the sand box. Here in Muskegon, the latter means taking a drive down to Pere Marquette park along the shore of Lake Michigan with a shovel and the biggest containers you can find. All along the drive, houses post signs offering...no...BEGGING people to take away sand. "Free sand!" sand "Freer Sand!" and "free range sand!" and "For the love of GOD PLEASE take away our san...mmmmmmfffff"
Because going back for thousands of years, Lake Michigan has been pushing sugar sand up and out along the shorelines, which means a massive dune will quickly form where the houses currently stand unless folks like me and my small son here pull up in our little car and start shoveling sand into buckets and haul it away for "personal use"
That's a rental property that apparently hasn't been shoveled out since last year. Note the sand encroaching on top of the deck there on the upper right corner.
Anyway, when you want sand here in Coastal West Michigan, that's where you go. Down to the beach to dig out somebody's house....
...which leads me to my organic garden. My wife finally took notice of my slow annexation of the yard and we've agreed, in a final armistice treaty, that my garden would stop at the tiny cedar, and before the gate.
Now that I'm no longer in expansion mode, I'm focusing on improving my garden internally to improve the yeilds, make it more pleasant, and grow more stuff.
I'm sure there's a metaphor in there for our nation, but I can't figure out what it is right now.
Anyway, back to the sand. I've delineated various parts of my garden with some flagstone that somebody dropped off at my house last year. He sort of..........................................................borrowed the flagstone after so and so's friend's home was foreclosed on. His friend said "take anything you want in that yard" and so he was all like "Yeah, okay." Anyway, the short story is a pile of flagstone was dumped in my yard. Not all bad. The rest of the wood in that garden is recycled and repurposed from other stuff.
I put the flagstone down...but now I'm thinking of taking it back up and making a path all proper like, with tamped down sand below it to keep the growth from coming back up. I realize it's kind of a long story about why I'm getting buckets of sand, but what the hell. It's a Friday:
On the lower left there is a raised bed for my two boys. They can go in and plant whatever the heck they want to plant there. There's some pumpkin and carrots and radishes and whatnot.
On the right is my perennial garden. I've got a perennial leek bed in the back there...trying to get that growing more. And then there's my son's strawberry patch. And to the right of that my perennial and semi-invasive egyptian walking onions...
This morning I made some breakfast with those this morning, along with some morels from my parents' yard and some brussel sprout greens from a brussel sprout plant that survived the winter.
Anyway. That's the garden and spring so far.
Howsabout you?
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