Yard Sale

"Owl Medicine," collage by Concord, NH artist Susi Richardson. Originally $180, available for wicked good yard sale price of $100!

We had a yard sale, yesterday. We do that every so many years – it’s amazing how much stuff accumulates over time, and yard sales are kinda fun – you get the satisfaction of seeing empty spaces on your shelves and in your closets, knowing that your stuff is being used by someone else rather than just dumped, and you get to meet lots of interesting people – and sometimes their dogs – as they check out your stuff and decide if they want to make it their stuff.

Yesterday, for example, I met a wicked interesting artist who lives one town over, who I felt an immediate connection to and could have talked to for hours. I also met an older woman who’s a non-professional psychic, and we also talked for quite a while, but the sale got busy and I didn’t get to talk to her as long as I’d have liked – I have some pretty good ghost stories I’d like to have told her. There was a very well-behaved, sweet dog – short-haired part collie, part hound – who got lots and lots of pats and made me long for my old buddy all over again. And a young woman who flirted with Catman and made him very, very happy, stroking his head until he drooled and purred. And yes, though I kept Catman inside most the time because he’s deaf and doesn’t believe cars are a threat, he escaped a couple of times, and peed on strangers’ car tires. Dog: He’s a dog-cat. Sorry, strangers!

My best sale was of two of my Mom’s old-fashioned, macramé-like woven seats porch/beach chairs: “mid-century modern, and comfortable, try sitting on one!” It took me 15 minutes to convince them, but an older couple who made the mistake of saying, “How pretty!” in my hearing eventually bought both for a grand total of $1. They got the best bargain of the day. I earned that dollar!

Frog escaped from Mom's yard sale stuff onto my wart rail: NSF

 At the end, we’d sold probably half the stuff we’d put out. Most of what was left were books – I guess there weren’t that many readers of linguistics and philosophy visiting my yard yesterday, but what really surprised me was that the vampire books didn’t sell!

 Getting ready for the yard sale was the process of more than a month. Every day during that time, I was looking at stuff around the house, and asking myself “I’ve looked at this thing for at least the last 15 years, do I want to keep looking at it for the next 15, or have I lost interest in it?” The reasons for keeping stuff are personally interesting, too – I collect books (just dated myself: when I was young, a good book collection was a thing of envy) and it psychically hurts to get rid of any. First I have to decide that I’m never going to read that particular book again, which is hard when I don’t actually remember what’s in it; then I have this weird, but-this-is-part-of-my-personality-how-can-I-get-rid-of-this thing my brain and heart do; and then I have to wait until the sense of ridiculous sets in. Then I can clean off a row of books, but only then.

White Spider; also NFS (not for sale)

Same kind of thing happens with other stuff. This vessel was made by a local artisan, that piece of glass was made by another local artisan, that covered pottery bowl I’ve had since I was 20, this glass vessel was made by an artisan and given to me by a friend, this thing is completely impractical in my world but once was a thing I longed for ‘til I could acquire it, and how many dinner plates, mugs, and kitchen scrapers do two people need? Am I really going to give big dinner parties again, even though many friends have moved or died or otherwise have life changes that would make it impossible to come to a dinner party? So do I need 20 dinner/salad/dessert plates, 20 wine glasses, 20 water glasses, or would 12 do? Do I even like the way these look anymore? What if one breaks and I don’t have any back-up? These drinking glasses were my grandmother’s – shouldn’t I be saving them for my niece and her kids?

I’m from New England – you don’t easily get rid of anything that might be useful some day. My brain even takes me to a place where the what-ifs include extreme poverty, war, mass destruction…

Even so, I managed to let go of a lot of stuff. The Husband has much less problem getting rid of stuff – he’s from Ohio, and hasn’t got a sentimental or cautious bone in his body. Last night, after I’d cleared my books from one shelf in his bedroom, he commented on how much nicer the room was with an empty shelf. He isn’t fooling me – what he really meant was it opened space for him to store more of his ratty t-shirts that I can’t get him to throw out.

I even managed to get rid of – that is, pass along – 3 of the 6 Christmas cactuses I somehow have acquired and don’t know how. I didn’t buy any of them; one came from my mother, who guilt-tripped me into taking it when she didn’t want to deal with it any longer; one from an old office waiting room, ditto the guilt trip from a colleague, and the other four are mysteries. Now I’m down to 3, and I put two plant stands in the sale, too, so it’ll be harder to acquire more plants I don’t really care about. 

Calla that bloomed outside this summer - a plant I do care about!

The aftermath of a yard sale, of course, is: now what do we do with the stuff that didn’t sell? Have another yard sale? Pack it away in the garage so the mice can frolic with it and it can mold in the humidity? Put it at the end of the driveway with a “FREE STUFF” sign on it? Take it to the dump?

The Husband would just take it all to the dump, but my feeling is, if it was good enough for a yard sale, it’s still good, and there’s someone out there who wants it even if they didn’t get to our yard sale yesterday. So a bunch of stuff (pottery and glass, mostly) that the mice can’t hurt got wrapped up and stored in bins in the garage; a bunch of other stuff (cloth, metal and wood, mostly, and books) came back into the house, where they’ll sit in piles until I decide about another yard sale; several boxes of books got loaded into my car, and I’ll put them out on the bench in the building at work where we all put stuff we don’t want so others can help themselves; the plastic garden furniture went out to the end of the driveway with the free sign on it and it’ll make its way to the dump in a few days if no one takes it; and we took a load of stuff to the dump that could be put over in the corner where folks leave stuff like that which other people might want. If anyone wants a cranky wood chipper or a bunch of old garden tools, you’ll find ‘em at the Wilmot dump.

One pile of yard sale leftovers - new yard sale seeds?

It’s hot and humid today, and even though I need to go into the garden, I find my eyes straying across shelves and thinking about unused clothes and blankets in cupboards, and still wondering if I really, really need 20 dinner plates. Oh, and there’s something I meant to put in the yard sale, and forgot; oh, and there’s another. Hmmm…town-wide yard sale is in a few weeks, there’s probably time to get put onto the map; and I spent several mosquito-bitten hours out in the garage Friday night, pricing stuff. The prices are still on, and yup, it would probably be worth it. It’s too hot to be outside now anyway, I could wait ‘til a little later. And in the meantime: Yard Sale!

It’s addicting…

For the blog, 28 July 2019.
All photos Debra Marshall 

I Survived!

Coriander flowers

I survived the heat and humidity last weekend: this isn’t a digital Ouija board talking. But when I got back onto the wart after picking peas (which lose a lot of sweetness in hundred-degree heat, as do I) I had to strip off and literally wring out my shirt and shorts and leave them to dry (!!) on the wart rail. Whenever I strip down on the wart (tick checks, muddy clothes, sweaty drenching) I’m sure to wave towards the neighbahs’ house. The sights G and D must see during gardening season could curl the whiskers on a cat!

I picked another half basket of peas and pulled most of the first-planted vines, and a small half-basket of the French purple peas. Those might be all podded out when I get into the garden this week, though there were still quite a few flowers on those long vines. I also decided to yank the one shallot bunch that had fallen greens, and a handful of onions that had keeled over; and since I was doing that, I pulled a leek, too.

Scarlet runner bean flowers

This is the first year I’ve planted leeks so I don’t really know what I’m doing, but many are fairly thick already, so I figured - what the heck? And as it turns out, it was worth it. I gave away a good handful of my leek set during planting time – the set bunch had something like 100 baby leeks in it – but that still means I have what is technically called a shitload of leeks. I think that instead of just adding them to soup, as I do weekly, maybe I can dedicate a few to experimenting - braising them or roasting, or both.

I picked one baby zucchini – all of 3.5 inches long – and a first bunch of fava beans, enough for a meal plus extra to go into this week’s soup. I love fava beans, they’re such an odd critter – black and white flowers all up and down the tall plants, and pods, which grow straight up in the air, that appear to be lined inside with a soft Styrofoam-like layer. 

The French pumpkin plant (get the theme?) has taken off and is sending vigorous shoots towards the onion and leek bed. I’m trying to get it to crawl instead down the path by the flax and into the field, and down the path behind the compost beds and into the field by the apple tree. So far it’s winning, but I haven’t given up yet. Last year I had winter squash vines throughout the raspberry patch, which wasn’t too awkward. Kept the grass and weeds down some. 

French pumpkin vines

I cleverly planted a row of sunflowers in the field in front of one of the old compost beds, which is this year a tomato bed. I was very proud of myself – I love sunflowers, I love watching the birds denude the sunflowers, but they are really, really big, throw a lot of shade, and get in the way of other plants. So I was thinking that planting them in the field on the west side of the tomato plants was a clever idea. And it might have been, had I put them more than 6 inches away from the bed. Now they’re 4 feet tall and climbing ever higher and wider, and I can’t squeeze between them and the tomato plants. And just to round out that planting idiocy, on the other side of that bed of tomatoes I planted what I thought was a flower amaranth, which I planted last year and it was so gorgeous I had to have it again. However, it now seems that what I planted this year was grain amaranth, and the absolutely beautiful maroon plants are close to a staggering six feet tall – and I can’t get between them and the tomato plants.

The Tall Guy, who was an organic farmer for a long time (farmer: intends to make sort of a living from what is grown and sold, versus gardener: hopes to manage to grow enough to feed self and family and bless all the neighbors with excess zucchini) pointed out that I could pull up the amaranth …and I whined, “But it’s soooo pretty!!” The amaranth lives. There are two more sides to that bed of tomatoes, after all, and the sun spends a lot of time directly overhead.

Amaranth

I’m not sure whether, when I’m planting, I’m bedazzled by the tiny little seeds into bad math, or if I can’t seem to remember that a 63-year-old doesn’t fit into narrow spaces like a 6-year-old, or even 26-year-old once did; or if I’m just an idiot. I do remember thinking about this very possibility and congratulating myself on how cleverly I’d a) saved garden space and created a sunflower fence (and unknowingly, an amaranth hedge) and b) found a way to have more sunflowers than ever! 

Sigh. I’m an idiot. I’ve been gardening (or been garden slave labor) for at least 57 years now. I still squoosh too many plants into too small a space, and give way too much room to self-seeding annuals and even intriguing perennial wildflowers that have made their way into the garden. But you know – just about now, and on through the fall, the garden is lush and magical and drop-dead gorgeous.

The blueberries are also full-on ripe, 2 weeks early this summer, and the birds and we are having our fill and we are trying to tuck a fair number of bags of them into the freezer (blueberries, not birds – we leave them unfrozen). Besides having a yard sale on Saturday, my list of what needs to be done this weekend includes: pick favas, pick purple peas, check for green beans (no signs except flowers as of last weekend), explain again to the pumpkin where it’s allowed to go and where not, check for summer squashes, replace bamboo stakes surrounding the new asparagus with metal fences (OSJL – where you always find what you didn’t know you needed!), pick blueberries, pick raspberries, pick swiss chard and broccoli shoots, manure and put down wood chips around clematis, ditto the two hardy hibiscus, weed, fertilize the new peach and cherry trees and put slow-release fertilizer down for the apple, pear and sour cherry trees; weed, weed some more, and weed. 

Sea of dill flowers

After startling the toad that lives in the garden this summer for the third time in an hour, as I was headed back to the wart (even on that hot hot day Buzzy Boy had given me a dive-bombing warning that I was out too late), I noticed that the potato plants have mostly died back in two bags and completely died back in one bag, so I went in for another basket and emptied that one bag’s contents: Red potatoes with pink insides, and they filled most of a basket. In potato bags the potatoes rarely get really big, but that’s ok because I like the small ones better, anyway. The soil left in the bag – you have to use potting soil plus compost, garden soil’s too dense for potato bags – gets dumped into garden beds and worked in; in this case into the new beds with the winter squashes.

Add emptying out the remaining two potato bags to that list of things that need to be done this week.

End of path towards blueberries

I boiled a potful of the smallest potatoes and put the rest in an airy basket, to dry out of the sun for a few days before they get stored in the pantry basket (prevents mold). Once the potatoes were cooked and drained (do save vegetable cooking water for soup stock, whatever you’ve heard about not doing so is nonsense, let’s not waste the nutrients – and flavors! - that cook out into the water), I put a big hunk of good butter in the pot along with the sliced green tops of several onions and half a small minced onion fresh from the garden, the very tiny bulbs of garlic I found on a scape I’d missed when I cut them a few weeks ago, and torn dill weed, dill flowers (if you’ve never tasted dill flowers, you need to!), tarragon, basil, and a good grind of salt and black pepper. Slap the cover back on the pan and shake it all up – the potatoes will break open and the butter and herbs distribute themselves amongst them. This herb and butter treatment is also wonderful, with or without some grated parmesan cheese, on pasta, too.

Early garden food to die for, and do lick out the bottom of the pot!

For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com      July 25, 2019

All photos Deb Marshall

Much Too Much

Much Too Much

The current state of the garden - peas to the right, wild daisies in front, California poppies - self-seeding - in orange, bee balm at the back!

It’s in the 90’s and it’s humid. There’s a blessed little breeze, but the sun is beating down on my garden – exactly what one wants it to do – except that the peas, which need picking, and the garden plants, which need watering, are smack in the middle of it. If I wait to pick and water ‘til the sun moves, because of the humidity the mosquitoes and deer flies will be out for blood. If I do those things now, the plants won’t enjoy the water – could sunburn their leaves – and I could expire of heat and humidity overdose.

When it’s hot like this, and especially when it’s hot and humid like this, I first get cranky, then irritable, then shaky, then angry, then furious, then sick to my stomach, then a headache blossoms, and by then, I’ve burst into flames – I turn into a dragon. It isn’t pretty. And every old injury in my body starts to ache, so the cranky/irritable/furious/etc starts again. With any luck, I won’t do any real damage.

Even indoors, with the A/C cranked up, is right on the edge of too crappy to live through.

I’ve tried shouting at the plants that they’re free-range, and should find their own water, but that doesn’t really work, especially with the perennials I just planted a few days ago because it was supposed to rain the next day – it didn’t. Nor does it work in the cement-block-sided raised beds, and the pots that are scattered here and there. And if I don’t get the peas picked today, I’ll be picking dried peas in a day or two.

Drumstick Allium

I picked peas a week after July 4^th and there were enough to have a couple of good meals, and to add the leftovers to last week’s soup (which you should all make: first make a broth by taking a big pot, fill it with  freshly emptied pea pods and cover them with water. Slap the top on and simmer them for about 45-60 minutes or so. Then remove and compost the pods, strain the juice to use for the soup broth. The soup is a fresh herb-green vegetable soup. Mine was : sautee onion, a few shiitake mushrooms, a couple of stalks of celery, a leek from the garden if one’s ready; add a chunked-up broccoli head and small its leaves, also fresh from the garden  - watch out for cabbage moth worms - and a big handful of sorrel if your garden has it, or lettuce from the garden if you don’t. To this you can add tough herbs, like thyme or rosemary, bay, fennel fronds, and such-like, and salt.  A large glog of white wine and the pea pod broth must then just cover the vegetables in your pot; simmer until just before the broccoli is soft enough, and add tender herbs like parsley, basil, dill weed, cilantro, basil, thai basil– whatever you like, and preferably several different herbs, just long enough to wilt them down. Then fish out the bay leaves or other tough herbs, then blend or food process it all smooth. Add a hunk of butter and a cup or more of heavy cream, adjust the seasonings, and you have an herby delicious soup that’s good for you and also wicked tasty served cold on a day like this.)

Three days ago I spent almost 2 hours picking peas, and it took the Husband and me two hours to shell them all. For the first time  in a very long time I have enough peas to freeze some! But there were still a lot of peas not yet ready to pick, and my French peas -  which get planted last, are more heat-tolerant, and generally get picked later - had suddenly shot up from 4 feet high to 8 feet high and bent over – I don’t have a tall enough pea fence for that kind of giant vine, and have never needed one so tall. And  they were covering up the okra! So I eased an opened tomato cage under them so they at least aren’t (mostly) hitting the ground, but the pods were almost full, so I need to have a close look at those today as well. This variety of French pea has lovely pink-and-violet-colored flowers and purple pods, though the peas themselves are green. And no, I can’t tell you what variety they are because in the spring when I’m ordering seeds, I just kind of go through the catalogs until I recognize the one I want. Who needs to memorize stuff that’s written down somewhere?

Row of sunflowers, smack in front of the tomatoes so I can't get at them. I'm an idiot!

The dill is flowering, one bean tower is loaded with vines and reaching to the sky, the drumstick allium are in bloom, as are the bee balm and marjoram and borage, which I put in one of this summer’s newest beds on the far side of the fence, behind the cherry tree. When I’ve picked the last peas I’ll tug out the vines which will give, in one bed, more space for the beans to move into, and in the opposite bed, more space for the giant zucchini plant to spread out; and in the third bed, let the okra be in the sun again. 

Now it’s after 4 pm and about as cool as it will get until the sun goes down. The thermometer on the back wart has retreated from 105 degrees at 10 am to 95 degrees – almost a cold wave. I’ll put on waterproof sandals and slap Ralph’s old hat on, which has a partially-netted section for cooling (yeah, right), and see whether if I keep my feet wet, maybe it won’t be as bad as I think it will be.

Parsley likes this heat.

But if you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know the dragon won and I flew away.

Horrible picture of a visitor we had last week, taken through screen and glass window, Spent an hour hanging out near a brush pile, chewing cud, clearly aware of us but not terribly concerned!

For the blog, 20 July 2019.

All photos Deb Marshall