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Front Lawn Food, Malvern, OH (2026)

08/03/2025

Fáilte, a chairde!

So, I have had a busy and overwhelming couple of months, as have most everybody else in the US. The State of the Everything apparently not being sufficient whackf**kery, the universe decided we needed to deal with yet another round of Nosy Neighbor Who Hates My Garden. 🙄 After weeks of going round and round to get specific guidance on what exactly the problems are and correcting the excruciatingly minor issues, we've been told our yard is now "in compliance", and the court date where the charges are expected to be dismissed is this week. We plan to remind the court that garden spaces are explicitly exempt from the statutes in question, get it on record that we are now an officially certified Butterfly Habitat Garden (so when Madame Nosy Nellie decides she doesn't like my milkw**d & mullein next year she'll be SOL in advance), and most importantly inform the court that as we have been dealing with this unrelenting harassment now escalated to court appearances for ten years, we have retained legal counsel and any further malicious prosecution will be dealt with accordingly.

So hopefully that will be an end to this nonsense. 🤞

Moving on... in my evening harvest walk today, I spot-checked the oinniún (onion) that escaped harvest last year, and discovering that the seeds are black and thus ready, pulled the whole plant. The stems and usable portion of the bulb have been chopped up and added to our dinner; fish & chips, if anyone's curious - an impulse evening at the lake & the munchkins came home with a respectable stringer full of bluegill, crappie, and one smallmouth bass! So everyone got to practice scaling, filetting, & deboning their catch, and all the veggies tonight came out of the garden so it's one of those deeply satisfying "WE did this" dinners tonight.

06/14/2025

Just got home, & said we're gonna grab the middlest small human's harvest bucket & walk the trellises before coming inside to rest, aching feet be damned. 🤣

No tomatoes yet, but there's plenty of greenies out there so they're gonna be showing up soon. Saw a couple of set summer squash & zukes that are too little yet but on their way, a *bunch* of set sweet pepper babies, (mental note: the collards & salad greens need harvesting), adjusted a few pea & cucumber vines, enjoyed a half-dozen raspberries, and brought in this gorgeous bounty of piseanna. Mostly sugarsnaps because they're my garden candy (Cascadia & Magnolia are my favorite varieties) , but I planted actual shelling peas this year so there's a few of them in here too as those slower-maturing vines get their act together. I really ought to have done it this morning, but I put it off so a pile of my favorite yard snacks could be my little reward for a long day.

This really is my favorite time of the active growing season... the lull between spring & fall planting when na piseanna & greens are still going but I'm not inundated with things that need canned yet and there's not much to do every day but walk the garden, pull a few w**ds, & collect the yums for dinner & snacks.

Slán go fóill!

05/17/2025

*flop*

Been a minute, a chairde.

Just came in from the garden. Storm comin', wind kicked up & the temperature dropped, & I'd rather not get soaked. Half a bed of prátaí buí (yellow potatoes) & a whole 100-count bag of oinniúin dhearga (red onions) is enough for today. 🥳

Tell ya a secret ... I didn't want to go out today. Like at all. I wanted to stay curled up in my nice quiet safe little nest playing Merge Dragons & watching nostalgia content and let the word pass me by.

But I cut those prátaí 2 days ago so they need to get in the ground before they spoil, so it was a trick myself kind of day. "We don't need all the tools & whatsits, we're just gonna finish planting that last little bit of the bed with prátaí, it'll take ten minutes & it's overcast anyhow." And then I'm out there, I have water, na prátaí are in and it isn't raining yet, so... okay we'll pull the w**ds in the next bed too. Not raining yet? Cool, grab the onion sets off the porch & start dotting them into the beds where na plandaí prátaí (the potato plants) are already up from where we put 'em in two weeks ago. Wind's coming up & temp's dropping, but there's only a couple handfuls of oinniúin left? Yeah, you know we racin' the storm. 🤣

Remember... survival IS resistance, particularly if you belong to one or more targeted communities. So if getting through it is all you've got in the tank today, that's okay. If you gotta trick your brain to do it, that's fine too (and kinda fun, tbh). Don't stare into the nightmare fuel of the news cycle... peek, take what you need for the work YOU are doing, then get back to living & focus on building community & finding joy.

An hour of garden witchery planting more food than even my family of five will eat, because I can do that & neighbors are gonna need it, & I don't want to mindlessly bingewatch tv anymore... so I'm gonna go paint a window cling instead.

Take care of yourselves.

09/12/2024

Fáilte, a chairde!

Today I’m starting a new series, we'll call it “Cad é an Planda Sin?” It’s been in my head for a *while*, but being the AuDHD Warning Label that I am, it kept falling off the radar. Thus, you once again have my nosy, racist neighbor to thank for new content, for I can do all things through Spite(TM), which strengthens me. 😁

I’ll post a pic or three, y’all tell me what sort of plant it is and anything else you know about it. Most will be common things to find in a garden or a neighbor’s lawn, some will be a bit unusual, some are food, some medicine, and all are growing here on purpose.

There are only two rules:

1: Google, Plant Finder, et al are fine! Please do look the plants up and learn a new thing today! Fair warning, I’m not going out my way to take botanical reference-quality pictures, and I’m purposely showing plandaí in their harvest-ready & often untidiest stage, so rely on the internet at your own risk!

2: If you call it a w**d, you lose. Why? Because a “w**d” is just a plant growing where a human doesn’t think it ought to be, so if I want it on my property and it isn’t hurting anyone or bad for the local ecosystem, then it is not a w**d.

C’mere to me… I don’t care that one over-entitled neighbor with too much free time & too little sense is bothered that my working food garden isn’t photo-shoot ready 24/7. But when that person starts calling the city & telling them my yard is overrun with “w**ds”, well then we need to have a discussion.

According to the neighbor who chooses to make their dissatisfaction with my property known to the city, these are both w**ds.

I really don't know what to tell you, Karen... it’s hardly my fault you don’t know what food & medicine look like in the ground. 😎

Slán go fóill!

05/23/2024

Fáilte, a chairde!

It was tough getting going today, and I’m calling it far sooner than I’d like. But that’s a pretty average day for me. Those days where I’m hauling soil around & digging & pulling & whatnot from 8-4? Those are Really Good Days(TM), & they happen far less often than I’d prefer. Most days, I get this… 2 hours, going slowly, no heavy lifting or digging, keeping to the shade & off my feet as much as I possibly can.

So I’ve learned to take what I can get and make it work. Today, that looks like one raised bed rescued from its halo of waist-high grasses via the “chop & drop” method (not the prettiest, but low-effort & highly effective in the long run), a few sweet pea seeds tucked in, two cúcamar 🥒 plants moved for spacing, a trellis installed, and everything gone over for damage and trimmed up accordingly.

Remember, loves … your “best” looks different every day, because if you were able to give your best all the time, it wouldn’t be your best. It would be your normal.

Slán go fóill!

05/21/2024

Fáilte, a chairde!

After a week out sick & losing what is likely to be the last of the cool, comfortable "spring" weather 😢, I finally made it back into the gairdín today, if only to water the beds and set up the wading pool so that the nursery plants I hadn't got to yet can drink all day. We'll see what recovers, I really hope I don't lose all that basil. On the up side, everything I put into the beds at the beginning of the month is doing beautifully, including all of na prátaí beag! 🥔The tiny potatoes are ALL coming up, I am so excited it's a bit silly. 😁

See, those first four beds along the driveway are interplanted with potatoes, but not *purchased* potatoes! The seed potatoes in those beds are all the ittybitty ones from last fall's harvest, the ones you look at and think "is it even worth cooking that?" Well this year I didn't. Instead I took all those bitsy baby potatoes, anything an inch or smaller, tossed 'em in a pie dish, covered it, and stuck it on a shelf in my kitchen for the winter. And in the spring, every single one of them had several inches worth of sprouts, even the tiniest! So into the dirt they went, 6-8" deep, and three weeks later most of them are up and leafing out and I cannot express the giddiness. There has been happydancing on the front lawn, y'all. I did plant the rest of the beds with additional purchased seed potatoes, and the resulting staggered harvest is going to be quite nice later in the season.

I also put oinniúin 🧅 in between na prátaí in beds 5-8. You can see they're in quite shallowly, just enough for the roots to catch hold, and well apart so there is plenty of room for their shallow root systems to spread out. This spacing will allow the bulbs to gather the nutrients and water needed to size up well, and the shallow planting prevents soil pressure from restricting bulb growth. I put in sweet yellow, white, and red onions, all of varieties intended for curing & winter storage. The shelves I took off the porch earlier in the spring are going to become my onion-curing station when it's time to harvest, tucked up against the porch where I *know* the rain does not reach.

I'm still deciding if I want all my cúcamar 🥒plants in one spot... that was a snap decision upon realizing I had run out of trátaí 🍅with a whole bed left to go, woops! But memory insists that is going to end up being very very crowded even with trellising, so half of those are likely to end up moved to other beds in the next day or three.

My biggest win for the day came with the quick harvest pass... a nice handul of súatha talún 🍓 and maolghais gairleoige, or garlic scapes! Scapes are the immature flower of any allium... onions, scallions, shallots, chives, garlic, all can make scapes. Snapping off those immature flower stalks as they emerge redirects that "make flower & seeds!" energy back to bulb growth, and also gets us a tasty treat that goes beautifully in any savory dish.

Anywayyy... with the hotter summer weather kicking in, my garden time is first thing in the morning and after the sun drops below the trees in the afternoon, which isn't as much as I'd like but until we get our pool open for the summer it's about staying in the shade and not overheating myself. Gardening while disabled, y'all... constant exercise in "work smart, not hard".

Tell me what's going on in your gardens, friends! We're getting into the exciting time of year now, those early spring crops are wrapping up, na súatha talún are coming in, and we get to focus on herbs for a little bit while the summer crops start to pump out flowers and get the bees ready to work!

Slán go fóill!

05/13/2024

Fáilte, a chairde! Busyyyyy busy today! Descriptions & details coming later but right now I gotta get planting! Slán go fóill!

04/26/2024

Fáilte, a chairde!

Tá brón órm (I'm sorry!), loves, I completely forgot to take a "before" picture of the porch area I've been working on this week, but I have fun progress pics to share!! :D

The first thing I did was remove the shelving from an old mini-greenhouse from the right side of the porch, and move it down to ground level under our picture window, where it will be the front yard "home" for my most frequently used gardening tools & materials, tucked up nicely under the porch roof where they will stay dry. That will make my supplies more accessible as well as easier to keep things tidy. Gardening While Disabled, y'all... a constant exercise in "Work Smart, Not Hard".

I treated myself to a new, much smaller compost tumbler this tax season, you can see it just behind the display pot on the right there. 15 gallon capacity, just a bit larger than your average kitchen trash bin, and easily spun by my youngest small human, which means even when it's full I'm not going to put my shoulder out trying to turn the old 60 gallon monster tumbler in the back anymore.

04/19/2024

Fáilte, a chairde! 🌱

First thing today I went out to the garden, pulled the last of the winter veg out of four beds, and sat down to chop it all up for a delicious creamy ham & potato soup. Cairéid (carrots), raidisí (radishes), several very small cabbages, into the crock pot with several cups of chopped prátaí (potatoes), an onion, a couple of celery stalks, a meaty hambone, and a buncha fresh herbs. When it's time to serve, I'll mash up about half the potatoes and add a cup or so of heavy cream to thicken up the broth. Yummmm.

Now, lesson time. Na cairéid (the carrots) are pale, particularly the orange & yellow ones, because there hasn't been a lot of sunlight where I am. They were also pulled from beds where I had grown corn during the spring & summer last year, and it's possible I didn't add enough organic material to those beds in the fall to compensate for the nitrogen consumed by the corn. They're small despite having been sown in early Deireadh Fómhair (October) because the soil is a bit on the compacted side and that'll be addressed this coming week, as well as soil testing to ensure there's plenty of nutrition for this year's veggies.

The dark purple cairéad in the 3rd picture is a Cairéad Réaltnéal Dubh (Black Nebula Carrot). They're delicious, not as sweet as orange types, but all those teeny hairy roots? That's what happens when your carrots don't get enough water.

The cairéad bán (white carrot) in the last image, with all those wonky branches? Well, a chairde, that's what happens when you don't thin your cairéid seedlings properly. Oops. 😅

Over the weekend... plant flowers in the porch pots... do some rearranging of herb & berry pots... assemble the composter...

How about y'all? Got any fun weekend plans? 😁

Slán go fóill!

04/18/2024

Fáilte, a chairde!

Tá gnó spreagúil ar siúl! Exciting business is underway! Topsoil, composted manure, and peat, 3 cubic feet each PER BED, and that's after I looked at the bags and the math, said "there is absolutely no way twelve cubic feet of dirt is going to fit" and chopped the order by 25%. 🤣 At least it's in bags of a size I can manage alone this year instead of in piles on my drive!

Over the rest of mí Aibreáin (the month of April), I'll be pulling the last of the winter root veggies, topping up the beds, soil-testing the resulting mix to see if I need to add anything else (my spouse was just *thrilled* at the stench in the house when I decided to make my own bone meal, lemme tell ya. 😅), and planting out the garden. Yes, I know it's a risk, just four years ago it snowed this week, but THIS YEAR I HAVE COLD FRAMES! *glares balefully at the sky* I am PREPARED, ya got that?!

(Now watch it never drop below 40F/4C the rest of the month.🤣)

For me, Aibreán is always a mad scramble to get everything sorted & the plants established before the heat of summer arrives, and at the same time it's delightfully restful working in a softly rainy gairdín. What's going on in your veggie patches, a chairde?

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