To Garden in September

Okra pod in the north; Deb Marshall photo

 

I picked my token handful of okra this weekend; my poor little stunted plants, overwhelmed by the yellow beans, nevertheless produced their gorgeous flowers and a handful of pods, which I sliced up and put in the week’s soup. 

Scarlet Runner bean flowers; Deb Marshall photo

This time of year is strangely satisfying. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything that needs attention – there are tomatoes to freeze daily, the scarlet runners are still in bloom but also bear pods that need picking and shelling, and whenever I attempt to do so, I get seriously buzzed by the hummingbirds, which are very, very busily loading up prior to their long trip south. The green beans are putting out their second crop, and there were just enough fresh dill heads that I could make a batch of dilly beans while I was waiting for the zucchini relish to cook down enough to can. 

Under this, somewhere, is a compost bin! Deb Marshall photo

 

The morning glories have completely overwhelmed one compost bin and are beginning to cover bin two, keeping the bees very busy, between runner beans, fall raspberries, and morning glories. But half the yellow beans, and some of the shell beans are spent; I pulled out two patches and rediscovered the satisfaction of finishing a job, of seeing plain empty dirt again. It felt so good, in fact, I yanked the remaining beets, too, and sent them to the freezer. Then I trimmed out the part of the fava beans that no longer sported leaves, and picked clean one long tendril of winter squash. 

Squash climbing tomato cages; Deb Marshall photo

Squash amongst tomatoes; Deb Marshall photo

Tonight it’s raining, making me happy enough to be inside canning pickles and relish. We need the rain, but every time I go outside, I tell the hummers to hunker down and wait a week before heading south, because a hurricane is due to land later this week . I wonder, each year, how they manage to make their long way to their winter homes; there’s always a hurricane brewing, so how do such delicate creatures manage? The little female whose wings make a buzzing noise almost as loud as Buzzy Boy’s has been about this last week and hung out with me in the garden one afternoon; we like to think she’s one of his daughters. I thought Buzzy himself had left for the season after the day he hovered about me in the garden last week; but this weekend when I was working in the path between the house and the close raised bed, he came barreling down that pathway and zipped across just above my head, turned, and did it again, twice. Maybe that was this year’s goodbye!

I sent a basketload of herbs up to the French baker this weekend: thyme, marjoram, sage, mint, chives, French tarragon, and some calendula for her to play with. This year has been an amazing year for herbs; I cut back my giant sage plant twice before it occurred to me to find out whether the chef at the café near my office, and then the baker in town, could use some of the excess, and both have taken a couple of herby armloads. There’s always too much marjoram, my yard’s a bed of thyme, and the sage plant engulfs anything planted near it; but this year the tarragon grew lush and long, as well.

Bee headed into the morning glory; Deb Marshall photo

Pollen-dusted bee emerging from flower; Deb Marshall photo

A Week Later

Not enough time to finish writing a blog entry, last week! In just the few days since last week’s several days of rain, the hummers we know have left for the year, and some we don’t know are stopping by on their way south. We assume these are Canadian hummers, and so I speak French to them. Ca va, mes petites! Au revoir, a bientot! Et bon voyage!

The scarlet runners have almost finished blooming, finally; the winter squash vines all have powdery mildew, so the squashes will be coming in by next weekend, ready or not. I scored 38 pounds of ripe tomatoes at Musterfield Farm and spent today making tomato juice – if you’ve never had anything except commercial tomato juice, you have no idea what tomato juice really tastes or looks like. I don’t have the space to plant enough tomatoes to freeze and make sauce and juice, so every couple of years I buy juice tomatoes, then eke it out because a dozen bottles or so go really fast otherwise.

Unknown weed growing under the kitchen wart

Winter squash upon the new pavers; Deb Marshall photo

The green beans are almost done – I’ll pick the last batch tomorrow then pull the vines; the bean tower beans are also done, but it’s loaded down with morning glories, so I’ll keep propping it up when it falls over for a while longer. I pulled the few actual carrots in the patch that’s blooming, and blooming, and blooming, even though it’s impossible that they should be; and yanked a couple more tomato plants that have given up their last tomato. I also picked the almost-red pepper some nasty chipmunk chewed a hole in, ate the seeds out of, then chewed an exit hole in the opposite side. It was a big pepper; I cut out the chewed parts, washed out the inside, chopped it up and froze what was left, and then I picked the other big pepper I was hoping would get red – not taking any more chances!

Lots of beans to shell. Lots of help (!!) shelling them.

Catmandoo in the shell-bean basket; Deb Marshall photo

I’ve got some wicked exciting new heavy chunks of cement that look sorta like rock to build some new flower beds on t’other side of the fence. With any luck I’ll start moving some of them tomorrow, and with more luck, I won’t get sunstruck and wind up shriveled up in a little ball in the wicked solid compost bins the Husband just made from seven of the pallets that were delivered this summer!

The new planting bed and short wall I built with some of the chunks; Charley Freiberg photo

 

I have two sets of garden clothes this summer: the days’ current one, absolutely soaked with sweat, and the one from two days ago, still damp from sweat. This summer has been --- exceptional. Someone remind me when I’m bitching about the cold this winter. 

Last glories of September; Deb Marshall photos

Nasturtium vine; Deb Marshall photo

This is breakfast in late August and September:

Toast a split section of baguette, or a couple slices of any good sourdough bread. As soon as it's done, scrape a raw garlic clove all over it - the garlic will melt onto the bread. Then drizzle a good-flavored olive oil across the bread, and top it with slices of a juicy, ripe tomato - the heritage varieties are especially good for this. Salt the tomato slices, then put summer savory leaves and flowers on the slices. Basil works well too, but summer savory is to die for. Eat; get olive oil and tomato juices all over your plate and hands and down your arms. Lick it off your body, sop it off the plate with a crust, or maybe even another slice of excellent bread. A piece of Brie on the side wouldn't be inappropriate. Store the flavors in your memory to pull out in February when you can't bear winter a moment longer. Try not to repeat - remember, there's breakfast again tomorrow morning, and it's still tomato season.

There is a path there, somewhere; Charley Freiberg photo

And a path here, too, believe it or not; Charley Freiberg photo

For the blog alone, 17 September 2018

Summer Savory; Deb Marshall photo

For the

Work-Day Artistry

Negotiating Tight Spaces with a Big Truck; Deb Marshall photo

 

Sometime kinda earlyish summer I decided I’m too old and too poor to keep gardening the way I have been. My garden is a huge part of our food for the year – I fill the medium-sized freezer with stuff that comes out of the garden, and part of the big freezer with stuff I made with stuff that came out of the garden, and on a good year, I’ll also have several baskets full of winter squashes stored under the dining room table, several skeins of onions and shallots hanging from pegs in the kitchen, a big basket full of potatoes in the pantry, and many bags of frozen herbs in the frig freezer. All this stuff becomes soup, which is breakfast, and sometimes supper, all year round.

The house and the back forty, where the garden is, are smack dab in the middle of what was a cow pasture when I was a kid, and 30 years ago when we bought a chunk of it from the folks who kept the cows, we discovered that under the grass there was about 2 inches of the hardest-packed hardpan I’ve ever heard of – we couldn’t fork it up, the rototiller made no impression on it, the neighbor’s tractor was beat by it. Under those two inches of hardpan are many feet of sand, which we know only because we saw it when the backhoe dug our cellarhole. We threw our hands up in surrender, built some raised-bed frames, lined them with cardboard and lots of newspaper, and brought in topsoil. Since then, the garden’s gotten bigger thanks to 30 years of composting and some judicious application of cow and horse poop. 

Also, for 30 years, I’ve been lining the paths between the beds with thick layers of newspaper and saved flattened cardboard boxes, which I then pile high with straw, in an attempt to kill off the grass that won’t grow in the rest of the field – most of the land around my house is covered with thyme, which apparently doesn’t mind nasty soil – but which loves, loves, loves my garden. Every year I’ve spent a stupid amount of money on bales and bales and bales of straw in an attempt to make my weeding chores easier. And every year, all that lovely paper and straw breaks down and makes a lovely rich hummus that the grass loves, and I get to do it all over again, generally losing the battle with the grass about half-way through summer.

Passion flower and Kaffir Lime; Deb Marshall photo

This year I decided I’m just too old to battle grass, and the garden’s really too big for one person with a full-time job to care for and preserve all its bounty. The Husband tries to help, but if the chore doesn’t involve a gas-powered engine, he’s kinda useless – city boy. So I thought, even if I can only afford to do the weediest pathways, I should start doing something more permanently anti-grass; so I went down to Belletetes, our local building supply/garden center, to inquire about  mulches that don’t break down as fast as straw does, and maybe would discourage grass and --- possibly --- ticks!

Turns out big bags of cedar, and small heavy bags of pebbles, are cheaper than straw – who would have guessed? If you put weed-blocking fabric under them, they work even better. And in the case of pebbles, once down the job’s done – you don’t need to put more down next year. Huh.

“So,” I asked on a whim, “how much do bricks cost? And do you have anything bigger than bricks that might make sense in a garden path?”

Oh, yeah. There are all sorts of things like bricks that can be used to make a garden path, and all of them are things you don’t have to put down again next year – or the year after, or ever, unless you decide to change the whole design. And they aren’t all that expensive – well, some of them are, but a fair number aren’t. Compared to what I was spending yearly on straw, they’ll be a lot cheaper, because I won’t have to buy them again next year.

But that isn’t the story I want to tell you. Here’s the actual story:

Confab; the Husband and the Artist; Deb Marshall photo

Getting the heavy straw alternatives  the 3.5 miles up the road to my house in the trunk of my car was going to take forever, not to mention that I’d have to lift the darn things into and out of the trunk and then again to put them into the garden. I am not a masochist. “So, how much does it cost to have you guys deliver this stuff?” I did some quick math – “Do it!” I said. And they did.

A couple of days later a gimongous truck showed up at my kitchen door, after navigating my narrow and difficult driveway. On the back was my single pallet loaded with bags of cedar, bags of pebbles, and some cement pavers to experiment with. “Where do you want it?” the driver asked. “Well,” I said. “Where I need it is over by the rhubarb – way over there. Which is only accessible by driving between the corner of the house and the well head, which is in front of the garage. On an angle.”

Mike S - the Artist; Deb Marshall photo

“No problem,” he said. And then the most amazing and beautiful thing happened. He – Mike Selinka, he turned out to be – eased the front of the gigantic truck between the house corner and the well head, then hopped out and pulled out some braces on either side of the truck, did something that made the cab of the truck change height, and unbuckled the straps holding my pallet. He tossed the end of the strap over the top of the pallet to the other side of the truck, and it went over in a beautiful, graceful arc, like it was dancing; and the second strap followed, just as gracefully. Then he climbed up on the top near the cab, where there was, magically, a seat; and from that spot, he did the most intricate and delicate  ballet with the articulated arm that sets across the load bed of the truck. 

I’ve never seen this kind of equipment in use up close, and I was watching from only about 10 feet away. It was breath-taking. In Mike’s skilled hands, that long, giant hunk of metal and mechanics moved like a live being with fingers and wrist and elbow all smoothly opening and closing and turning and bending and lifting and reaching, reaching, reaching – ah! – until the pallet was gently placed in the exact spot I’d indicated. And then that long arm folded back again, and settled gently in its cradle, “fingers” tucked under like a contented cat’s; the straps went arcing beautifully through the air again, and I thought, “My god, this show was worth the delivery charge and more and I hope I get to see it again.”

Artist's Touch; Deb Marshall photo

And I have. Each time I ordered more heavy stuff, I asked the guys down at the store to please, please deliver it on a day I’m home, so I can watch again. And each time I’m gob-smacked by the elegant, delicate piece of performance art I get to watch. Mike is, without question, an artist. Wow. 

 Oh yeah: I’ve moved hundreds of pavers, bricks, bags of pebbles, and bags of cedar this summer. Take that, pernicious grass!

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For the blog, 16 September 2018

Gunslingers and Goodbyes: From the Edge of Darkness 16

Water on window screen; Charley Freiberg photo

 Gunslingers and Goodbyes

It’s September. Schoolkids have been sweltering in the classroom for a week or longer, The Old Farmer’s Almanac is out on the newsstands, the fall raspberries are in full flower and keeping the bees busy, and my winter squashes are starting to color up. Buzzy Boy is still here – or at least, he was yesterday, taking time out from patrolling the scarlet runner bean flowers to hover near me in the garden, then chase me back to the house at dusk. Whether that was his pre-migration seasonal farewell I’ll know only when I don’t see him anymore.

We’ve said farewell to others, lately: sadly to Mom’s cat, last Monday, and to Aretha Franklin; not so sadly to a number of summer folks who disappear around this time of year, then magically reappear on Columbus Day weekend, then fade away again until the black flies arrive in the spring. I’ve wondered if they’re hidden away in a burrow someplace out back in the woods until snow melt, early hibernators. 

We also said farewell to John McCain last week. He inhabits a strange and kind of bumpy place in my mind, and I was surprised to find myself sniffling a little bit as I listened to part of his services in Washington on Thursday. 

There seemed to be two John McCains – the good one, who, though a member of a different party and a champion of some political ideas I couldn’t swallow, still was clearly a man who had the good of the whole nation at heart, and believed in fair play and justice; the same man who came back from his sickbed to cast the meaningful “no” vote when the Republicans tried to blow up the ACA, because he wouldn’t tolerate the partisan shenanigans that were going on in this administration; the man about whom, when he ran for Republican presidential candidate against George Dub-ya , I thought, “Well, if he wins, and then wins the election, at least I don’t worry that we won’t be safe.” The good John was someone that someone like me could disagree with but not fear; the world wasn’t going to come to an end when he was involved. 

But then there was the evil John, who chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, and who during that run for president too often bent away from his best instincts to appeal to the rabid part of the Republican party. Sarah Palin, we can see now, was the door that opened politics to the scummy shenanigans and self-serving characters we’re saddled with now. She was ignorant, crass, aligned herself with guns and violence, and lied without shame; and yet, because “she said what she was thinking,” some people loved her beyond all reason. I believe that had we not had Sarah Palin, Donald the Chump would have had a much harder time gaining a foothold. Sarah opened minds to the possibilities of bad behavior and gave people their first taste of feeling empowered and justified by the unimaginable. The evil John brought us with that mistake, which engendered a bigger and more dangerous mistake, left us in serious danger; and though he regretted it later, and did what he could to mitigate the error, even so, It’s a bitter irony.

And yet, I sniffled a little. John McCain’s passing may mean that the last – or nearly last – true public servant in what was once the Grand Old Party has fallen. And without John, the unquestionable true patriot, to point out the ongoing nastiness and dirty tricks, there’s no one left in that party who has a chance in hell of shaming the remains into good behavior. Just listening to the opening of the Senate hearings on Brett Kavanaugh proved that unfortunate truth.

Here in New Hampshire, we’ve also been presented during the past two weeks of a near-miss gun-slinging tragedy. Newspaper reports tell us that on the coast, some teenager went into the wrong house in the middle of the night looking for a party he’d been told was there, but that wasn’t there. Like an idiot, which teenagers mostly are, when he went into the dark house and didn’t hear partying, or see partiers, instead of saying, “Oops!” and sneaking quietly back out before he disturbed anyone, he went upstairs looking for the party, and opened the bedroom door of a pair of adult idiots who think that a gun is the proper solution to a weird situation. When the teen heard a woman say to the man, “Get the gun,” he hightailed it out of the house. In the meantime, the woman apparently took a more direct route out and was reported to be standing by the kid’s vehicle taking down license info when the kid finally made it to his car, and her gun-slinging man arrived in time to blast away at the kid as he bashed his way out of the area.

Why, one wonders, when the gun-slinger saw his woman standing by the vehicle taking down info, did he feel it necessary to shoot at the kid? Did he not notice it was a kid? Even if it had been an adult, did he not think that calling the police would be a better response? Why did the woman not say, “Whoa, baby, I got this under control!”? And why did she not ask the kid what the hell he thought he was doing wandering around her dark house in the middle of the night?

What would they have said had they managed to kill the kid? Which the gunslinger was, clearly, trying to do. “Oops” just doesn’t cover it. These are two more people who should lose their privilege to own or use a gun forever. The man was arrested – he broke all sorts of laws (it isn’t legal to shoot at a fleeing person outside your house, in probably any state, although there are a few I wonder about) - but, more importantly – what was in that idiot’s mind? If he hadn’t had a gun, he would have done the right thing, the thing any right-minded person would have done in that or any similar situation – flipped on some lights so they could see who was in their house, got the phone and called the police, made some loud noises to scare the intruder off, then seen if they could safely take down license numbers . Maybe even asked the kid what he thought he was doing, when he found his way out of the house and to his car.

That the woman was standing outside next to the vehicle while the kid was trying to get back to it makes it hard to believe that either of them really believed they were in mortal danger.  And that’s the danger with people owning guns and having guns in their homes (or cars, or under their armpits, or in their purses, or down their pants) – if you’ve got one in your hand, it takes a lot of training and mental and emotional discipline not to use it. 

And a good part of the problem with that is, the person who has a gun in their house or about their person for protection really believes that they’re really, truly going to need to protect themselves from some other person at some point. You don’t spend thousands of dollars on a gun for a hobby collection and then haul it around with you, or shoot at someone with it. These gun owners believe they’re in danger; and in some ways, the opportunity to prove it, and fire their weapon, is going to sway them away from asking the right questions, making the right calls, taking the time to soberly suss out a situation first – they become very likely to shoot it at someone who’s acting oddly around them: the confused teen who mistakenly enters an unlocked house, a drunk neighbor who stumbles into the wrong house, a stranger going door-to-door taking a poll, or soliciting for a good cause, say; or someone approaching them on the street who they don’t know and feel is scary – and when you have a gun for protection, it doesn’t take much to constitute “scary,” because we have the gun because we know there are many scary people out there and every stranger is suspect. Just look at me funny, I might shoot you. 

So, ok, the teenager on the coast was wrong. He was stupid, and in a dark house owned by people he didn’t know, in the middle of the night, and opening doors to closed rooms. Yes, he could have been an armed intruder. But before we say ok, we can understand the reaction of the moll and her gun-slinger, we’ve also got to ask: Was the house locked? How did the kid get in? If these folks felt they were in imminent danger, did they have their house wired to set off an alarm if an intruder entered? If they did, and the kid got in because someone gave him the combination, who had these people given the combination to? Do they have a kid? If so, why would they not assume that if the alarm didn’t go off, it had something to do with their kid? And so on.

Guns have gotta go. And so do the liars, cheats and sneaks in government – state and federal. Please vote, even if you’re sure it won’t make a difference, because you could be wrong – and it never hurts to try.

For the blog, 6 September 2018: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com