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| 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 20th
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.
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| 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
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