how will our garden grow

and welcome to our noisy village

first, a note on these letters: with the dawn of spring and the house-cleaning and the fresh start of it all, I am giving Warmly a little refresh, too. I am so grateful for the support I receive for this substack, and I want to pour more energy and time into that. Instead of once or twice a month, I am going to come to this space every week, rotating through four themes so there’s an update for each, each month. One week will be a letter from Vermont with the comings and goings of life at home and on our scrappy homestead, a week for recipes, a week for craft, and a week for updates from my studio. I’m calling my monthly home letters series Noisy Village after the Astrid Lindgren stories and today is the first one. Me and the boys love those stories so much, and when I was thinking up a name for these letters it sprang to mind right away. Welcome to our noisy village, current population: 23 (one mom, 3 boys, one dog, 5 geese, 2 ducks, 4 laying hens, 2 roosters, 4 baby chicks, one wild Canada goose)

There’s a tarp in a box outside the door and a jar of seeds on the counter, four baby chicks in a metal tub in the garage, and two nests of giant white goose eggs. There are firm bright green garlic stems shooting up from compost and straw and fresh chives pushing up through the pale brown stalks of last year. There are daffodil leaves, maple buds, horseradish sprouts, patches of greening grass, and shovel marks where one son has decided to start pulling up sod for a flower plot. Everything is coming alive and the new season of growth and garden is about to begin.

Spring is still cold, last night was down to 16 here with a fresh dusting of snow on the ground when we woke up. The chicks hatched in the incubator on Monday, four perfect baby birds we watched break free from their shells and dry their fluff and open their eyes. They were each given morning names: Early for the one who hatched a day before we expected, Dawn, Sunrise, and Misty (short for Misty Morning Cheeper, according to Osa). One is black with bits of yellow, one is all golden yellow, and two are honey-colored with auburn and nearly-black marks. They’re a backyard mix hatched from our own eggs so we don’t know exactly what breed they are but we’re looking forward to seeing how they grow. We’ll have another batch of chicks coming in from the feed store this week, lots of beautiful breeds we haven’t had in the flock before like Lavender Orpingtons, Cream Legbars, and my most anticipated, the Blue-Laced Red Wyandotte. Baby chick season is short and sweet (and a little smelly), and there’s work to be done before they move into the coop. That tarp I bought will go up over the roof where there’s a leak, the winter’s worth of manure needs mucking out as soon as the weather permits. Hay needs buying and nesting boxes need sprucing and I’ve been meaning to paint the wood slats we used to put up a new window in the fall.

To the south of the chicken coop is my garden. Circled in a wire fence in need of a new gate and new stakes and flecked with unstoppable horseradish, I hardly grew anything in it last year. I can’t remember why to tell you the truth, I simply didn’t have it in me. I did grow some flowers for joy and some pumpkins for Halloween, but I suppose looking back perhaps I just needed a summer off, a season with fewer challenges and upkeep. What I do remember about last summer was really regretting by June that I hadn’t started a garden in April. This year the garden is a phoenix and she’ll have a gate and stakes before the month is out. I’ll plant all the usual things I love to eat or infuse fresh in summer and store through autumn: basil, zucchini, calendula, onions, potatoes, squash, tulsi, cosmos, sunflowers, peas, broccoli, and on and on. I’ll use every square inch this year, pack it full of food and effort and grace. I’m going to try landscape fabric to help with the horseradish, and we’re going to cut down all the brambles and keep them mown down so they don’t creep in.

I have a silver tub from the dump I’m going to fill with flowers, and River already started his flower patch by the road. Will this be the year I finally grow the boys a sunflower house? April me says hell yeah, and only time will tell. Below is a short list of things I’m looking forward to this garden season: