Milton, Myrthful, and Potager Cottage

I wrote this post about a year ago on my personal memoirs blog, My Groovy Entropy . I feel it is pertinent to our Potager Cottage story, so I've decided to post here as well. I hope you enjoy this snippet of my evolution:

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My grandpa, Milton, was a watermelon farmer. 

He grew other melons too, but watermelons were his big crop. I remember loading up his truck to drive the melons into town to sell, just like they're doing in the photo below.

Grandpa Milton, Grandma Myrthful, and helper.

 When we were young, my brother and I would spend summers with my grandparents on their Arizona farm, and later, on their Idaho farm (pictured to the left). My grandparents (the Mundalls) were extremely conservative, hard-working folks. No TV; not a lot of toys; no shopping days or restaurants; no parties; no air conditioning; just farm.

On Saturdays they took us to a tiny church that smelled like old hymnals and dentures. And, during the week, if we worked enough rows of melons, grandpa would take us into the Weiser town pool to go swimming.

I remember missing my mom immensely during these long summer visits, but, I also remember all the smells, sounds, and feels of the farm. It was always hot, even at night. We left the windows open, turned on the loud square fans and stood in the cold shower with our pjs on just before bed in hopes that the wet clothes would keep us cool enough to fall asleep before they dried. Mornings came early and were cool enough to be tolerable, for a minute or two.

The house smelled like comfort, like fresh-baked wheat sticks. I don't ever remember going to a grocery store. Grandma, Myrthful, made everything we ate from scratch, mostly from ingredients grown in her gardens. She had a large deep freezer in the garage, the kind you had to use an ice-pick to dig the food out of, where she froze fruits and veggies for the winter; and a large canning pantry filled with jars of peaches, applesauce, apricots, green beans, and any other garden treasure you might imagine. She grew everything. And I had the privilege (not that I appreciated it) of working right along side her from dawn to dusk.

Myrthful in her garden.  Notice the stick-made bean poles.

We took scraps to the hens and cleared the boxes of the fresh eggs. We milked the cows and carried the buckets to the mud room, where they sat to be skimmed (seems like there was always a bucket or two of milk in there). We climbed the ladders to collect fruit from her many fruit trees. She would send me into the towering tomato plants with a metal-handled bucket and a mission to pluck off every last pudgy green tomato worm. We sat on the porch and snapped beans, shucked peas, and husked corn (which I liked to make dolls out of). In the kitchen I had a stool in front of the sink where I would wash and halve apricots, carefully removing the worms form the center. I set the table, cleared the table, washed the dishes, and collapsed into a cozy chair when the day came to a close.

I don't ever remember hearing a radio, just the crickets, toads, mosquitos, train whistles, chicken clucks, cow moans, tires rolling on rugged dirt paths, and the whispery whistles my grandma would compose while sewing or crocheting in the evening.

Grandpa was a smallish man, I think about 5 foot 7 inches tall, but he was huge in my eyes. He always donned a woven cowboy hat that smelled of straw, sweat, and shampooed hair. When he came in for the night he scrubbed his hands with irish spring (or a soap that smelt of that). He laughed in bellows and told "true" stories of his many adventures with bears and lions and caves, that only seemed possible in the world of fiction. He worked his fields with fierce determination. If I was lucky, I got to ride in his tractor, or beside him in his farm trucks (known to be missing doors) over the dirt roads when he took his melons into town. He called milk, "cow juice" and soy sauce, "bug juice".  And he was my favorite. I would begrudge my brother who got to run off to do chores with grandpa while grandma made me stay in and learn to sew.

We got to play sometimes too. My brother and I would sit at the irrigation ditch and use the mud to make bricks for houses. We would spend hours there. To this day I love the smell of the irrigation ditches when I drive on old farm roads. I roll the windows down and inhale the cool air and childhood memories. We would climb the hay bales in the barn and jump from great heights to piles of hay below. We would put milk bowls out for the random farm kitties that were always skittering about. We would catch grasshoppers and toads. And, we always enjoyed spinning around in the tire swing hanging from the tree out front.

Those years were a gift. They rooted a love within me for playing in the dirt and living a simple, organic, sustainable life. I feel my heritage when I'm digging in our cottage garden now. I sense their  love for the farm and nature; a love that they passed on to their five daughters and beyond. This little corner house surrounded in untamed dirt and weeds feeds that love in me.

It has been 4 months since we moved into this cottage in Benicia. These have not been easy months. Our home has demanded patience, creative organization, and hard labor from us, nearly breaking us.  I have always named my homes, a practice I picked up from a short time at school in England. I love how English homes are named. Home is so personal to me that a name seems more appropriate than a sterile number. We have debated names for this home since before we moved in, but have struggled to settle on anything. We decided to just sit with it. Live in the house and wait for her name to present itself. At last, it has! As I was wandering through the land of Pinterest the other day I came across the name for a vegetable garden that sits just outside your door; it's called a potager. Perfect! We have vegetable gardens just outside our front and back doors. So we have dubbed our sweet little home 'Potager Cottage'. She's not a farm but she has revived my sweet memories from those summer days and the two beautiful souls who instilled this home-grown love in me.

Potager Cottage

Planting From Seed... Like A Boss

Potager Cottage has come a long way these past months. Klee and I tore up the weed-infested backyard and added a garden gate that we found in the free section of craigslist.

Then we used the lasagna method to start our back potager. We laid down old cardboard and a lot of newspaper, which we collected from the trash bins behind the Benicia Herald. Then we laid down piles of dried leaves and truckloads of compost, followed by topsoil from a local organic supplier.

I was determined to grow from seed. I mean that's all my grandparents used, how hard could it be? Unfortunately, the top soil we added was water-repellent, making my valiant attempt to grow from seed nearly impossible.

After months of soil amending and reseeding, we finally have some plants growing. It has been a humbling learning experience for me. One does not merely plant seeds in the ground to grow plants.


So here are a few tips I've learned about growing from seed:

• SOIL MATTERS! Make sure the soil has been well blended with compost and will absorb and retain water. This is key. The soil we used originally (which I laid over a thick layer of compost) was so water-repellent that I could actually see the water beed up and roll off of the soil. * Seemingly obvious tip: Prepare your soil prior to planting your seeds, as it is very difficult to amend soil after seeds have been planted.
• Soak the seeds. I read zillions of blogs about planting seeds but none mentioned this little trick. Thankfully, I am a farmer's daughter's daughter. So, my mother told me to soak the seeds overnight prior to planting. This made a big difference in my second attempt at seed planting.
  
• Dig ditches between rows and troughs around mounds to capture the water run-off and to encourage the roots to reach deeper into the soil. I even made a divot in the center of the mounds, with seeds planted around it, to catch more water.
• MULCH! Mulch helps the soil to retain moisture. Straw works really well, but I didn't have any on hand and I knew it was going to be a very hot day, so I surrounded each baby plant with wood chips.
• WATER. This seems like a no-brainer, but I didn't realize that seeds need to be watered twice a day until established. They are considered established when the second set of leaves appear. For us Californians, who are currently in a severe drought, watering twice a day feels like an act of treason. Rest assured, the watering is light and temporary. Ultimately, less than the water required for lawn maintenance; and you're growing food! 
  
• Seeds do what they want. You can plant with the best of intensions, placing each seed precisely as the packet instructed you, but seeds are wily and fickle little nuggets. They migrate with the help of birds, wind, water, to wherever they deem worthy to germinate. And then they mock you. Just go with it.

In my next seed attempt I plan to start my seeds indoors in eggshells or starter pods. I have failed miserably at starting indoors in the past; but that was with transplanting from a tray, in which I managed to destroy each and every baby root that I had painstakingly grown over the previous weeks. This time I will be able to place the whole vessel straight into the ground without disturbing the root. How hard can it be?

The Living Art of Home

Attempting to contain a squirmy Vera

It's a foggy Sunday morning in Benicia. I'm sitting in the green room, scrolling through homesteading tips on Pinterest, munching on Klee's fresh-baked shortbread cookies, and listening to Elliott and Klee as they build Zoob mobiles and robots. I feel divinely content.

When I consider my happiest moments, I usually recall this feeling, a sensations which frequently equates to home. Home is comfort, familiar, warm. For me, home has always been more than a functional structure checking a box on some list of hierarchy of needs. It is an extension of my heart and mind, where I relinquish my guard and expose my vulnerabilities.

Home is my art.

The colors, textures, smells, sounds; the walls filled with stories; the books and magazines tucked on, in, under, behind the collections of tables and shelves; pinwheels and branches, jars of stones, sea-glass and shells, old postcards, peacock feathers, and dish collections; ALL are brushstrokes from my heart.

And home spills out into the dirt, pushing out toward the fences, and beyond. Potager Cottage is the first home I've lived in that has provided the opportunity to develop that beautiful dirt into whatever my creative spirit desires (within in the limits of the landlord's restrictions and our own funds).

I have visions of how our little homestead will evolve. An abundant and overflowing potager, with flowers all around, and drought resistant ground cover to run and play on, a rich compost heap, and CHICKENS (and bees... a goat?)! I imagine us sitting comfortably outside, on garden chairs, sipping Klee's kombucha and chatting with neighbors. On weekends we could open up our side yard as a farm stand to sell excess produce and Klee's jarred delectables.

We got a good start last summer. We rebuilt our front fence, built raised boxes, and excitedly seeded the front potager. I spent months diligently weeding, amending, and planting. It was starting to look like a real garden. Neighbors were stopping by to say what an improvement it was over the weed jungle that we had moved into only a few months before.

And then it rained. It rained for most of December. All Californians were celebrating the small relief from the years of drought. And, in just a few wet weeks, this happened...

WEEDS! And crabgrass, and mounds of fallen twigs and leaves! It was as if all those hours of careful grooming never even happened!

So, of course, I intensely personalized this rebellion of our soil to mean that I had failed as a homesteader and a human, and should go back to bed indefinitely. But, after several days of walking outside and staring at the organic mess with hands on hips, only to return to the warmth of the wall heater in defeat, I resolved to dig back in.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, the garden began to reveal herself again. As the weeds diminished, I could see that the ground cover of elfin thyme had spread beautifully in the rain. The artichoke plants were strong and reaching for the sky, promising deliciousness to come. The tomatoes gave a big last hurrah, enough to fill a small basket.

I even pulled a pot-full of beet greens, spinach and twisted up carrots and made a soul-warming soup.

I hadn't failed! I had merely experienced my first lesson in Fall.

Like everything else about home, homesteading is a process of education, self-discovery, and expression. It feeds my peaceful center.

It is Living Art.

The Sky is Falling

Well, about ten Potager Cottage blog posts have come and gone from my brain over the past month. And now, I've no clue where to begin.

The weather has finally decided to cool, in a Noah's Ark/"Pharaoh, let my people go," kinda way. Anyone who isn't rowing through their living room or ringing out their mattress is grateful for our recent deluge. We've been told (by them) that it will only take another 20 or so more catastrophic rainstorms for California to be drought-free. So, that's encouraging.(?)

I love the rain. I love the clouds, fog, drizzle, cold, excuses for warm sweaters, heaters, fires, hot cocoa, and cozy blankets. And, living in Droughtifornia, it has been a great relief to not have to worry about watering my garden. Of course, I haven't been able to do much at all. I just sit by my front window, helplessly succumbing to the insidious blades of unwanted grass and mounding clumps of clover as they mock all of my countless summer hours of weeding. Sigh. At least it's green out there.

The Potager

Books, Tattoos, Kayaks, and Pomegranates. Just Another Benicia Weekend

This weekend was warm and sunny, beautiful weather for the spring... only, it's NOVEMBER. I can tolerate sunny days during their appropriate seasons, but as soon as those school busses start to roll, I expect the air to chill. I wait for it, checking weather reports in an almost compulsive manner (almost). Unfortunately, I have not yet managed to bend the weather to my will.


Weekends in Benicia have the flavor of a Norman Rockwell painting. People walk around outside their houses, concerts are held at the city park, sidewalk sales abound, and power tools are heard in chorus. And, on a sunny springvember day in Benicia, fishing rods, paddle boards, and kayaks abound.

My Saturday began (after the usual semiconscious hobble from bed) in the green room, with a compulsory mug(s) of freshly Keurig-brewed coffee.

Situated at the front of the house, the green room is furnished with two opposing emerald green sofas and a double window view of our front potager, and the neighborhood. I love to sit in that space with the windows open, listening to the sounds of life outside. Neighborhood kids yelling out instructions for their recently imagined game, the collection of court neighbors to our left chatting and laughing full-heartedly about some inside joke that they've shared over the 20 plus years that they've shared this street, and the sweet family across the street herding their littles into the car for some fabulous Saturday adventure.

After an adequate caffeine infusion I dressed our wild son and tossed him outdoors. He grabbed his scooter and raced off to seamlessly fuse with the on-going zombie apocalypse of eight to ten-year-olds. At four years old, Elliott (our boy) is the short one in the group, which is sometimes a disadvantage, but he tends to hold his own.

With Elliott sufficiently occupied, I grabbed my gloves and hand-trowel and continued with the seemingly futile effort of pulling blades of rogue grass and stubborn patches of clover. I've heard that clover can actually be good for the soil, so I lean on that excuse when I feel the clover winning. I also clipped a few flowers to keep as trophies in the kitchen. This was an exciting weekend for me on the flower front. Months ago I planted seeds of zinnias and cosmos all around the outside of my front fence; and then I waited... and waited... with great naive anticipation of a lush floral display... and waited. Well, this weekend, the ONE cosmo plant, of the many hundreds that I planted, finally produced a single, perfect flower.

Along with the flowers I clipped the lettuce plants that were going to seed down to their bases. I read that if they have about two inches of stalk they will produce again, so, we'll see!

And, I filled a basket with pomegranates from our heavily fruited tree for the UPS man, because he asked for some, and just how cool is that? Our UPS guy knows us and is chummy enough to ask for pomegranates! If that isn't straight out of Mayberry, I don't know what.

By early afternoon the kids had all retreated to their respective homes and Elliott sulked back into ours.

Earlier, a neighbor had stopped by to tell us about the exciting book sale being held out of the Benicia Library basement. Done!

The basement was full, beckoning us with the elegant and soul-comforting scent of yellowing pages and loose bindings.

It was a sea of slightly dated books, journals, and magazines.







Just look at this beautiful little treasure that Klee spotted. The title is, "Happiness is A Warm Puppy".

All for just $5.00 a bag! 

We filled two!

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Sunday followed Saturday's pattern for the first half of the day. By the afternoon we again needed to escape the preschooler-induced madness of home. Kinsey (my girl) was at the library again, this time to focus on some schoolwork. We opted for a stroll down 1st Street, Benicia's main drag.

First Street is a romantic downtown assortment of independently owned shops, restaurants,
community gardens, and businesses, many of which are house in historical buildings.

And thanks to her short, 13 month stint as state capitol, Benicia's 1st Street even has a Capitol building!

We like to meander through the various antique shops. One of our favorites is Mimi & Co., found in the Tannery building, at the end of 1st Street, down by the pier.

Four-year-olds tend to transform into the proverbial bull when perusing shops full of china and other delicate and valuable what-nots. This outing was a fine example of that. In an attempt to grab Elliott by the horns (so to speak), I gathered him up and cozied into a fabulous vintage love seat (that I covet) in the Mimi & Co. shop.

While we relaxed, shop owner, Lindsay Mitchell, chatted with us about her shop, her cats, and motherhood. She's friendly and creative, with an obvious eye for vintage treasures.

I inquired about the colorful and bohemian collage of tattoos on her arms. She proudly explained that each one is designed after a vintage piece of jewelry, and that each has been artfully applied by tattoo artist, Landon Mao, of Creations and Illustrations, also located in the Tannery building.

On such a postcard worthy day, a 1st Street stroll wouldn't have been complete without a walk down the pier.

The fishermen were congregated along the boulders lining the pier, meditating on the unusually glassy water, hoping to fill their buckets with a few of the salmon making their run.



The beach on First Street is tiny, mostly comprised of wetlands,

but there were just enough pebbles and sea glass for Elliott to add a few more "shinies" to his collection.

And then he was sit-on-the-ground-carry-me tired. We were too.

Spirits lifted from the friendliness of locals and the lightly salted air; ready to retreat back to our little Potager Cottage.

Who Needs Weeds When You've Got Grass

Today I did a lot of this...

For months I've been coddling this elfin thyme ground cover in an attempt to grow a drought-tolerant, lawn alternative. Growing grass in the midst of a drought and mandated water rationing is such a challenge that many Californians (myself included) have opted to abandon the dream of the all-American front lawn.

Here's the thing...
For decades men have slaved tirelessly to produce elegantly manicured lawns. Hardware stores have devoted entire rows of flesh-melting, DNA-perverting chemicals to the pursuit. However, when grass is no longer the desired goal, it tends to grow relentlessly.

Choosing the Cottage Life

Last April our family moved to a small cottage in Benicia, California. Cottage. Sounds quaint, romantic even. The term "cottage" conjures visions of rustic wood floors, white canvas furnishings, sun-graced reading nooks, and fresh cut lavender. Something like this serene space from farmhouse5540

Found at farmhouse5540.blogspot.com

It's... not exactly like that here.

This morning (and most mornings) our little fairytale looks more like this...

In case you didn't notice, I used an Instagram filter on this photo in order to add a magical glow to the bag of trash at the entrance, air-freshener/paper towels/cards/what-not on the island, and miscellaneous madness on the dining table (and most-likely a second cat on the counter to my right). Granted, we have only lived here for 7 months; clearly not enough time to established a solid sense of  order. And, we are renting, which inhibits many of my masterful ideas for proper flow and function. However, I'd be less than honest if I suggested that the above scene would be clutter-free, regardless.

The reason simply being that we LIVE here. We brew our morning (noon and evening) coffee, feed our pets, wrangle our 4-year old prodigy, create/package/internet for our home-based shop (Entropy the shop), chop, boil, bake, taste, clean, chat, discuss, storm off, play, and kiss in this space.

This small cottage space.

Don't be misled, we are not living in a small house because we have to (although, finances kinda did encourage the decision). We chose the cottage life. Or, more accurately, I should say, I chose the cottage life and my family kindly obliged me, with only the most gentle of derogatory comments regarding any and all cottage-related discomforts (e.g., lack of storage, lack of dishwasher, lack of central heat/air).

We chose this little 1940's home because she has been graced by years of stories evidenced by mismatched paint, tilting floors, and sticking doors. She is unique - earned through genuine endurance.

Upon first sight she was surrounded by dirt and weeds and tattered fencing, guarded by two large trees, and perched on the corner of quiet T-shaped court - I fell in love. Well, at least as much as one can fall in love with a rental. "Imagine what we can do with all that dirt!" I exclaimed to Klee (who shares my dream in theory, only slightly resenting its reality). We've nurtured gardens before, but this little cottage offered us the opportunity to grow a REAL garden... a Potager!

Potager: A French term for a garden set just outside a cottage, designed to grow both ornamental and edible plants; also called a kitchen garden.

Hence, our cottage name, Potager Cottage.

Since moving in, Klee and I swiftly (over a period of two of the hottest recorded months ever in history) and skillfully (we remained married) replaced the front fence.

After which we repurposed the old white picket fence scraps into a raised planter bed in which to grow our very own potager. And while some of our farming attempts flourished...




Other endeavors have been more of a learning experience...

Damn cabbage moths!

FREE green striped midcentury modern sofa
(and felines)

At Potager Cottage we own NO white furnishings; in part because that would just be INSANE with four kids and four furlings, but also because we tend to collect our furniture by chance, while treasure hunting for our shop at estate sales (and occasionally via the side of the road).

TV room lounge chair (with feline)

Our motto is, "The closer to Free, the prettier it be!"

Not really, I just made that up, but we have actually scored quite a few free pieces - and that works out just fine.

Mail sorter-turned dish cubby

With space at a minimum and a noticeable absence of a garage, storage closets, cupboards, and drawers, the keeping of stuff has required cleverness. Hooks adorn many of our walls, along with bookshelves, cubbies, and trunks. Stuff hangs, stacks, slides under, and frequently lingers in the purgatory that is any flat surface.

I hope to fine-tune this process, but I suspect this is a common pattern among any space that houses a collection of humans.

At any given time,

• there are cars/blocks/legos/leaves strewn from our 4-year-old's room to any other room he chooses to consume
• there's a stack of my work papers bundled with rubber bands and paper clips, sitting on the coffee table in the 'green room', so called because of the two green sofas dominating the space
• there are paper shreds/catnip mice/small rollie things, once the center of a feline's universe, but now discarded, on any and all floors; 
• there's a large jar of vinegar and another of kombucha, and possibly a crock of kvass brewing in a cubby, awaiting my chef-husband, Klee's approval 
• there's a bucket of pulled weeds, along with several sets of worn gloves, a trowel, and some gardening sheers below the front door stoop 
• and there are two or more bikes parked in the driveway, just far enough from the bushes to prevent unwanted spider dwellers, patiently resting on kickstands until the next time my daughter (and if I'm lucky, myself) can take them out for a tour of our new hometown, Benicia.

I like it here.

** Shameless Plug**
Did I mention that we have shop? It's really just a byproduct of our life. Please peruse Entropy the shop here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Entropytheshop
**End Shameless Plug**