Signs and Symptoms: Spring

Signs and Symptoms: Spring

Catmandoo herding the turkey herd out of our yard; Deb Marshall photo

Spring is ambling towards us, taking her own sweet time, clearly not in a rush. When I look out the window towards the back 40, all I see is white; when I look out the windows to the north, I see, for the first time in months, dry brown grass and bare dirt on the south-facing bank rising to the road. Not much of it – mostly there’s just white and high piles of white – but enough to know the snow’s in a downward slide, at least.

There are other signs and symptoms: mud season is upon us and The Husband nearly got stuck in it trying to get to the Tall Dude’s house the other day. Note to self: don’t venture down dirt roads unless you’re in a truck (high clearance and four-wheel-drive) and have a come-along stashed in the back.

On the north side of the house, next to the mid-window high snow banks, is a bare circle about 6 feet in diameter. This is how we re-establish where our septic tanks are located, out here in the sticks; they melt first. Mark it now if you haven’t already!

The Back 40, March 28, 2019; Deb Marshall photo

I can see a third of the compost bins that have been totally buried until a week ago. Some willows are starting to turn a spring pale yellow, sign that sap is rising. There are trucks parked alongside the back roads most everywhere, collecting tanks in the back, maple sap running. On weekends and evenings you can smell the sweet smoke when the collectors are back at the sugar shack, boiling.

I heard the woodcock two nights ago, doing his spring mating thing, buzzing, buzzing then swirling pipe as he flies. The parsnip bed – the small one the chipmunks didn’t devastate before first snow – in the raised bed nearest the house is snow-free, but still frozen tight. I tried to dig around in it this morning, but only the very edges are loose, and only down about an inch. However, now my hand trowel has reappeared for the season.

The frozen but uncovered parsnip bed; Deb Marshall photo

The right side of the Buddha on the front porch has emerged from snow, down to his waist; and his whole head is free, again. One morning, the maple tree across the driveway from the kitchen window was full of red-wing blackbirds, shouting at me to hurry up and bring out some birdseed.

Buddha two weeks ago; Deb Marshall photo

Buddha 30 March 2019; Deb Marshall photo

A bear trashed my mother’s feeder, making off with suet cage and feeder and bending in half the cast-iron shepherd’s hook they hung from. Now I bring in the one feeder I own at night, and sweep any seed the birds didn’t finish off the wart railings onto the ground, to keep the bear from coming up onto the wart, at least. I haven’t seen signs yet of our bear, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t out and about, at least part-time. 

A friend of one of the chiros in the office next to mine in the Upper Valley was out hiking one day recently and heard a crying sound; hunting around, he discovered a baby bear alone in a cave. He left well enough alone but went back a day later to make sure momma bear had returned. Pawprints in the snow suggested she had, so he put his cell phone camera on a long, long selfie-stick and threaded it down into the rocky crevasse, and got a fantastic video of baby bear curled up next to momma’s back; in a few seconds, a sleepy momma turned her head back over her shoulder and looked directly into the camera for a few seconds: “What’s that strange thing hovering in the air in my den??” At that point, the human decided a swift retreat was probably the best way to proceed, but the resulting video is priceless.

One of the very fat squirrels; Deb Marshall photo

Catmandoo is spending more time outside, going so far as to sit in the rain on the wart for an hour the other day, and spending many minutes sitting atop the oldest compost pile, staring down between his feet, no doubt listening to mousies moving about below the frozen mass. The little Biscuit, who has grown pudgy this winter from too much lazing, is doing her race car imitation ‘round and ‘round the house more often the last few days, and ventures out to “hunt.” You can see how effective that has been. But I’m cleaning less out of the cat poop boxes every day, so they’re starting to find pawable dirt outdoors to use instead of the inside facilities. Probably on top of my parsnips!

There is one sweet little crocus in bloom against the south wall of the house, where I put bags and bags of pebbles last year. In fact, this one struggled out from under one bag of pebbles that I hadn’t spread before snow fell. I don’t remember planting crocus bulbs against the wall, or anywhere near-by, so it’s a bit of a mystery, but a very pleasant one!

Crocus struggling out from under bag of pebbles; Deb Marshall photo

The witch in the woods on the hill seems to have tired of her trick of turning mourning doves into wild turkeys and back again. The last couple of weeks both doves and turkeys have shown up on the same days, even at the same times, but never in the giant herds they traveled in this winter.

Part of the herd; Deb Marshall photo

All my seeds have arrived, and none of the trees and onion sets and so on, so I must have won that battle with the nursery people. Fingers crossed, Spring won’t have fully arrived for another many weeks at the rate she’s dawdling along. I do notice, half-way through the night now, no matter how cold I am when I go to bed, I wake up too warm, and have to strip off jammie bottoms and one blanket in order to be able to fall asleep again.

The last two days The Husband has started fires in the woodstove again, determined to burn up the small remainders of the winter’s cordwood. Even though the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts a pretty big storm sometime in the first two weeks of April, I haven’t argued with him. I may be sorry, but, damn, it’s been raw and nasty at night.

Not sure who's the April Fool here...

....Biscuit or the squirrel? A chase did NOT ensue; Deb Marshall photos

We’ll see who’s right soon. We could very well turn out to be April Fools.

Through the window; Freesia; Deb Marshall photo

The Scent Of Spring Is In The Air

The nearly white visitor on the wart; Deb Marshall art

 

Yesterday was the Spring Equinox. There was a beautiful bright full moon, and there are several signs that Spring is actually on its way, despite my on-going war with nursery companies determined to follow USDA wacky-tabacky-inspired rezoning guidelines to ship fruit trees and asparagus crowns vs. my assertion that I still have many feet of snow in my yard and will continue to have snow until sometime in late April. But, there’s a moist spring-like quality to the air;  the Buddha’s head and shoulders are now out of the deep snow; I can see the very top of the smaller compost bins  and the old compost bin, which have been invisible since December; I can see all the cement-block walls of the raised beds closest the house, and most of the snow has melted from the pea-stone path that lies between those beds and the south wall of the house.

As far as Catmandoo is concerned, the most important sign is that the melting-and-freezing that’s gone on during the last week means that the snow cover is now topped by crusty snow that will bear his not-inconsiderable weight, so he can patrol beyond the kitchen and back warts, finally. We looked out the window earlier this week and saw him perched atop the pile in the middle of the old compost bin, apparently peering intently at his feet. Most likely, there was mousie activity below the snow under his feet.

But from my point of view, one of the surest signs that Spring is coming is: Skunks!

Skunks hibernate and usually come out of their deep sleep sometime in February to mate. You can tell they’re out by the faint scent of them floating in the evening air. Once they’re out, they don’t go back to bed, as bears will if it’s too cold and there’s nothing to eat. 

The skunks were a little late this year, because of the cold and huge heaps of snow, no doubt – I didn’t detect the first one until last week. They usually spend a lot of their evening hours scratching up the compost bins, but there’s too much snow for that to be very profitable this season. As I was heading to bed one night, I noticed that the light on the kitchen wart was on – one of us must have turned it on and forgotten to turn it off. But when I checked, the switches were off.

So, I wondered, it must be the motion-sensitive light that’s kicked on. I wonder what caused that? I wonder if…there’s a BEAR on the wart? Wouldn’t be the first time I misjudged feeding the birds.

I peered out, carefully, from the kitchen door window and didn’t see anything – no moving darkness. I put the light on – still nothing. Yet, the motion-sensor light was full on. Hmmpf. I cautiously opened the inside door to get a better look. Still nothing. Maybe I’ll carefully step outside and see if there’s a bear out in the driveway?

Just as I started to open the storm door, I saw it – a waddling, wide, flat expanse of white with a little black snoot and feet, three feet from the door, snuffling up fallen birdseed and nuts just like a vacuum cleaner. It paid no attention to me. I shut the door, and then the inside door, quickly and quietly. Then I hoofed it to the other end of the house. And considered that it was only about an hour or so since I’d arrived home at 10 pm (I work late) and merrily bounced up the stairs and across the deck without looking first. That won’t happen again; I’m now singing the Here I Come skunk-warning song between garage and kitchen door, and keeping my fingers crossed that there’s no skunk investigating the trash can in the garage when I pull in!

Next day, a patient told me she was taking her daily walk down the road that runs by her house, and noticed that someone had dumped one of those recycled-woven-plastic shopping bags, and it had blown or slid half-way down the very steep  bank on one side of the road. She regularly picks up uncompostable trash people toss from their cars, and this particular bag appeared to be in great shape and potentially useful, so in spite of the steep hill coated in ice and snow, she made a long, shallow trek towards it, and grabbed it by a bottom corner, and tugged to free it from the icy crust.

Oh no, she thought, it’s heavy – it’s probably got something gross in it, like dirty diapers. So she gingerly pulled it up to see what would slide out.

As she pulled, the bag seemed to come alive. It sighed, turned ‘round and ‘round, and settled down again, flicking some lovely skunk fur briefly out the opening. My patient backed up very, very carefully, and said she heard a little snoring sound coming from the bag as she retreated.

I told those two stories to a friend, and she added her own: one night she and her husband had heard a scratching noise either against the wall or the window of their bedroom. There was a bush just outside that room, and she assumed that branches were rubbing against the house. Next day, they went out to see what needed to be cut back. They soon discovered that the scratching noises were actually coming from the gutter drainpipe that ran down that corner of the house. So the husband got a hack saw and carefully cut the drainpipe, expecting that a bird had somehow gotten in and couldn’t get out.

Friend and husband checking out what was trapped in the downspout; Deb Marshall art

From the top of the cut pipe, two black paws and a black snoot with bright eyes and a lovely white stripe on its head peered out. The skunk – maybe a baby, maybe not, they didn’t wait around to see what size critter fully emerged – had decided to explore the pipe, and once in, was too big to turn around to get out again!

My first hound dog was a huge boy: Beauregard Barnaby Pissbark was 110 pounds, tall, with a massive chest. It took him a few moments to get going, but once he did, he could run forever. He was great friends with Squeaker, one of the cats we had then, and enjoyed Puddy, too, and pretty much loved all kitties. His favorite way to greet them was to bound up behind, tuck his snoot under their back ends, and lift them up hind-end first into the air.

Somehow, I never learned not to let him out loose at night to pee. Never. More than once; more than twice; let’s not count – I’d let Beau out, and off he’d go towards the compost bins where a beautiful, unknown black-and-white kitty was digging into the bin. He was there in a few bounds, before the kitty realized it and could back out. His snoot between its back legs and under its belly, he’d lift and the kitty headed skyward. Then the “kitty” would slide off, spraying – but each time it was so surprised it never sprayed fast enough to get him in the face, but only on his massive chest. Pleased as could be with his new friend, Beau would then bound back to the house and whack the door handle to let me know he was ready to come in, and in he’d come, eager for his treat – and shake shake shake shake skunk stink all over the kitchen. And the two of us would spend the next hour or so, in the dark, in the cold, on the kitchen wart, having a couple of baths in “Skunk Be Gone.”

Beauregard Barnaby Pissbark greeting a "kitty"; Deb Marshall art

A friend from the Dark Ages when I worked in the computer publishing industry and he was a techie who wrote for us, had a wife who was completely in love with cats but totally, horribly allergic to them. So they had a bunch of cats that lived in their barn, complete with kitty beds and toys, and my friend fed them out in the yard in sight of the kitchen window, where he often sat at the kitchen table reading or writing. He fed them a couple of times a day, and mentally kept track to make sure all the cats had eaten a meal.

One night, after dark, he looked up from his book and saw that there was a lone cat out by the food dishes  and realized that the food he’d put out several hours before was surely gone. So he took a fresh can out and filled the bowl, thinking about the technical puzzle he’d been working on, and idly reached down and stroked the cat as it was gobbling up cat food.

After a few strokes, it occurred to him that this cat’s fur felt unusually thick, so he snapped out of his reverie and looked closely to see which one it was. As you’ve guessed, it was a skunk; he gave it one last pat and walked slowly away, wondering how many times he’d fed that particular kitty without noticing.

Breathe deep: the smell of Spring is in the air!

Ovens and Peaches

Turkeys in snowstorm escaping scary person trying to feed them; Deb Marshall photo

Saturday: The sun’s shining today, and it’s warmer than it has been all week. This week was one bugger of a week and I’m exhausted, but it doesn’t matter: I can actually see the very corner of the cement-block-edged raised bed next to the house, all the snow has removed itself from the south side roof, and after months and months, I finally have a kitchen stove again. Even that it’s going to snow another half foot tomorrow isn’t making me unhappy at the moment.

Our oven – our 3-year-old oven – died, or at least a very expensive part in it did, and we finally had it disconnected so for the last 3 months or so we’ve not had to breathe leaking gas, but also only had the stove top to use, and we’ve been baking stuff in the toaster oven and my microwave, which is also a convection oven if you hit the right buttons. The toaster oven isn’t very high, and the convection oven only takes pans that will fit on its round turntable, so baking anything took some extra thinking about how, exactly, to do it, and if it could be done.

Our new oven – shiny white, because it comes in any color you want so long as it’s white or “biscuit,” which seemed to be a dirty white – is waking memories from when I was a kid. It’s 36 inches wide, which used to be standard, but now is unheard of unless you’ve got the kind of money to spend on a stove that my second and last brand-new car cost many years ago.  Sometime between the time I bought my first stove as an adult – which lasted 30+ years before needing to be replaced – standard stove size shrunk to 30-inches wide. I didn’t realize it when I bought my second stove, but it’s impossible to safely can stuff on a 30-inch stove, so in a way I’m not unhappy that broken part in my not-so-old oven was going to cost almost as much as a new stove would.

When I went stove shopping, I spent a long time trying to explain to the young sales fella that it isn’t possible to safely can stuff on a narrow stove (“can” – a word I had to define, and then demo with drawings and miming) and that I wasn’t going to spend as much on a stove as the most I’ve ever spent on a car. He finally got the concepts and then, good salesman that he is, quickly found me a stove that was wide enough and cost less than $1000, made by a company that’s been making cookstoves since early in the 20^th century, and still makes them in Illinois and Kentucky. 

Just to be sure, though, I said, “OK, let me just do some checking but I think this is it.” Then I went to Lowes just to see what else there might be to see. The salesperson there was a woman about my age. “I need a new stove and I’m a canner,” I said to her. “We don’t have anything that will work for you,” she said. “Go to Barron’s.”

Good on her for being honest, not wasting my time, and knowing what canning is and what I needed!

So the lovely big new stove that was delivered today looks like a stove from my youth. There are no electronic gadgets – just a timer and a clock. No self-cleaning oven. There’s a narrow side storage drawer that’s big enough to store pizza pans and cookie sheets in. It has 5 burners.  There’s an oven, and the broiler’s in its own down-below section. You can lift up the top to clean under the stovetop. You can light the burners with a match if there’s no electricity to fire the electronic lighting system. I’ll be able to can on it without having to shuffle boiling canning pots and boiling relish or tomatoes or whatever I’m trying to pack in hot jars off one burner to another, because all the pots will fit comfortably on the stove at once. I won’t be constantly trying not to scald myself.

If it just had a deep well, I might think I’d slipped back to 1965 when I look at it. 

Peerless Premiere new stove! Deb Marshall photo. Now I have a white stove, black frig, red sink, and as The British Car Gal says, "Yeah, but all your walls and cupboards and countertops are different colors, so it doesn't matter!"

I’m ready for spring. An inch of new snow covering ice on Thursday slid my car against one of the snowbanks lining our driveway, and when I got out to see how badly I was stuck, my feet went out from under me and down I went. Whacked a knee, sprained a hip and some muscles in my back. Not enough to seriously cause trouble unless you consider not being able to comfortably carry stuff or sleep to be trouble. At the moment, it kinda feels like it.

A couple of days prior, I called one of the nursery places that will send you bare-root, dormant trees and bushes, in theory at the right time for planting in whatever area one lives in. Our peach tree bit the dust last year – it has some sort of peach tree disease that isn’t treatable. And this particular nursery offers a bush cherry that’s supposed to have sweet cherries on it – I’ll believe that when I taste it; and a very tall, perennial sunflower – again, I’ll believe it when I see it. But everything was half-off, so I called ‘em the day before their sale ended and ordered one of each, and a bean tower and a few other things.

After the nice lady took my order, she says, “So we’ll ship your peach tree next week, and your cherry and sunflower in early April…” and I quickly interrupted: “No you won’t! I’ve got 4 feet of snow in my back yard, and will almost certainly have nearly as much in April. Don’t ship any plant matter until early May.”

“But this is the right time of year for you to plant in your zone,” she protests.

“I don’t know what zone you think I’m in, but you’re wrong. I’m in zone 3, on the edge of zone 4 some years. Don’t ship any plants until early May!”

“No, no, you’re in zone 5!” she says. “We need to ship next week!”

After arguing some more, she agreed to change the ship dates to May. When I got home and checked my email, there was an order confirmation waiting for me. “We’ll be shipping your peach tree March 15 and your cherry and sunflower April 9”

My brain exploded. I sent an email: DO NOT SEND PLANTS BEFORE MAY! I have no intention of planting trees using a blow torch and a jack hammer! I will be sending back to you dead plants if you send them to me before May!

It took some more back and forth, but they finally agreed not to send any plants before May. I’m polite, so I emailed back: Thank you; now my brain can reassemble itself and I can stop hyperventilating.

I wonder whether I’ll get an interesting delivery next week.

Now, of course, I’m worrying about the onion sets and leeks and asparagus crowns I ordered elsewhere. I checked on-line the US Dept of Agriculture zone map, and discovered they’ve put most of NH in zone 5 and the seacoast in zone 6, and only the tippy top is still called zone 3. No wonder the nursery is confused! But what wing-nut changed the zone map to be so radically wrong?

Maybe I’d better make a few calls.

Tonight we’ll turn ahead the clocks, and pretend that spring has arrived. The birds won’t be fooled; early risers won’t be fooled; nor anyone who steps outside for a few moments without a coat on. 

Sunday: Yup. It’s snowing. I can’t see the corner of the raised beds anymore, the head of the Buddha on the front porch has disappeared under 6 new inches of snow and it’s still snowing, and the cats and I have just about had it. 

I didn’t think I’d start dreaming about gardening this early in the year; when the seed catalogs started arriving before Christmas, all I could do was groan and toss them into a pile to look at later – much later. But now I’m trolling the flower catalogs, and I’ve already ordered all my vegetable seeds and some have even arrived. I’m counting pennies and trying to decide how many I need to save for more rock-like chunks to finish lining beds and building a new one along the back fence, how many bricks and pavers and bales of straw and bags of cedar I’ll need, so how much might I have available to buy a few more perennials? And I fall asleep trying to decide where the new asparagus bed should best go, and also that giant, so-called perennial sunflower that I hope won’t arrive ‘til early May. And should I experiment and try planting corn in the field, in hills, along the back fence? And where should I put the bird houses this spring, and what about that mason bee house my niece gave me that currently adorns the kitchen?

If this spring acts like most springs, there will be snow, there will be snow, there will be snow, there will be huge snowbanks and pockets of snow and frozen ground, I’ll be able to pry any parsnips the chipmunks didn’t find out of the mostly-frozen ground, and the next day it’ll be 80 degrees and everything will need to be done all at once, and my brain will be exploding again. 

The joys of country living. Oh – and blackflies.

But for now, it’s still snowing. I hope Andy comes to plow the driveway before dark – spring dark since the time changed last night – and I’m going to go hunker into the couch and read the Sunday funnies and do the Sunday sodukos and probably take a Sunday nap. And try to think of something to make for supper that won’t use the stove.

Because it’s brand new – and as all New Englanders know, that means it’s too good to use!

For the blog: 10 March 2019