Waiting For The Call: From the Edge of Darkness: 19

I’m waiting for the annual phone call:

“Please call me as soon as you can,” her voice will say on the recording.  “I’m just wanting to say how much I love you, in case I die during this hurricane and never see you again.”

My dear friend lives in the land of surprise sinkholes, giant cockroaches, giant, poisonous snakes, alligators in the back yard and possibly up trees. From my point of view, living there qualifies one to make that kind of call pretty much daily. Still, it’s not the call you want to get from someone you love.

“What the heck are you and your ancient father doing?” I’ll want to know. “Why aren’t you on your way to someplace else??”

“Oh, because,” she’ll say. “He doesn’t want to leave his house, and we’ve always been fine. And it’s very uncomfortable for both of us to travel and then to stay somewhere else. It would be a strain and we might get ill.  And we’d have to go far up the coast, so it’ll be crowded because everyone will be headed up the coast. And if we were going to do it, we should have left yesterday.”

As she speaks, in my mind I’ll be ticking off items on the Stupid Sheet that would indicate that “Difficult, Uncomfortable, and Should Have Already Gone” are no excuses at all: Item: congenital heart disease and COPD, getting ever worse with age; Item: chronic illnesses – yes, plural – that unexpectedly erupt into violently acute, extremely painful, often hospitalizing flare-ups, especially when the bodies involved are subjected to stress; Item: why would anyone take the chance of dying of a heart attack during a hurricane when it’s unlikely rescue services would be able to reach you, and leave an ill daughter to sit and stew with your dead body until the bigger crisis is over? Item: there’s enough money to fly and there are friends who live and would welcome you who live far from the Hurricane State; Item: this happens every sodding year, dammit, it’s not like it’s a surprise event you can’t plan for; Item: Do you really want to spend the remains of a hurricane in a roofless house – again??? Item: AAArrrrrggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

Well. I’ve already written a SHOUTING LETTER, once again pointing all that out. With any luck it’ll get there just before the hurricane; most likely she won’t get it until after the hurricane, assuming it doesn’t get blown away with untold numbers of other stuff. I’ll call and shout tonight, but it won’t make any difference – they don’t seem to have a copy of the Stupid List. 

Hurricane Season. I hate it. I HATE it!

For weeks now I’ve been trying to marshal my thoughts in order to make a statement about the advanced insanity we’re sinking deeper and deeper into in my state – not her state, her state is ALWAYS a flipping a mad house – and our gasping-for-breath nation. Once again, I’ll say it: I’m glad I’m 63, and not 23. Jeezus. I’m not sure why all our pressure-cooked brains haven’t just burst out of our heads, and there’s not really a whole lot to say about the situation that hasn’t already been said. Except maybe this: the real evil in this situation is embodied by the Republicans in government. Most of them know better, and they aren’t speaking up, standing up, rebelling, restraining, restricting, removing, controlling, confronting, rejecting, or attempting in any fashion to fix our national disaster. There is a special room in Hell for such beings. It makes me wish for a God who throws lightning bolts. There would be a lot of fried pol balls in Washington.

I’m not a religious person, but boy, does our so-called President fit the definition of the antichrist. He’s a deceiver; he’s proclaimed himself the chosen one, the only one who can save us; he claims to have performed miraculous works; he is VILE and DANGEROUS, and yet people believe his lying words and seem to be blind to his actual actions. It’s frightening. It’s incomprehensible. It’s beyond bizarre. It’s enough to make one believe in the Devil. Incarnate.

OK, my brain’s about to explode again.

And then there’s the gun thing. You know what? I used to believe that some people could be, should be, allowed to have guns – some kinds of guns, for hunting maybe, for target shooting, for – well, that’s about it, actually. But now? Now I think those gun-owners who were responsible and thoughtful and safe have blown it, and no one should be allowed to have guns. They didn’t stand up, except for a very small handful of them, and force the issue. They didn’t stand up and insist on the necessary restrictions. They didn’t stand up and insist on safety courses and measures. They didn’t stand up and insist on making military weapons illegal for non-military people. They didn’t stand up.

They didn’t stand up, and now I don’t think we have a choice but to make gun-owners’ nightmares reality. Take their guns away. Make them register them and not let them have them at home. Keep them in an armory, where they need to be strictly controlled and checked out for use. Force annual safety courses and take the use of them away from anyone who doesn’t comply. Don’t allow people to buy ammunition except from specially-controlled sources. Don’t allow sales except under highly-restrictive controls. Force gun manufacturers to install really technical safety locks on every gun. Don’t allow them to be carried around in public. Only allow them to be checked out by people over the age of 35, and only for brief, strictly-controlled periods of time and uses. Make violations hugely expensive. 

Almost no one needs a gun. Wanting isn’t the same as needing. We want lots of things that we can’t have, don’t get, aren’t tolerated. You blew it. Tough. You reap what you sowed.

Oh, there it goes: my brain just melted. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going out to my garden to stomp on squash bugs. Good luck with the state of the world. I’ll be naming the bugs and the tomato hornworms as I deal with them. Garden voodoo.

Hurricane season. I HATE it.

Summer is Weird

White Balloon Flowers

Every summer is weird, but not weird in the same way. Last summer was dry, dry, dry until it rained, rained, rained most of July and then things exploded in the garden and there was a jungle of bean vines and morning glory vines that completely swallowed two compost bins, and there were millions of plant-destroying, very cocky chipmunks plaguing me daily and eating all the sunflowers before they even had time to set seeds. This summer it was wet, wet, wet and cold so nothing germinated the way it should have, and since then it’s been dry, dry, dry, dry and hot and humid, so all the plants are ready in the wrong order and too soon because they’re pretty sure they’re going to die soon so they’re maturing ‘way early – unless they aren’t. Potatoes were done just after the strawberries, which were late; onions and garlic were done a week or so later; yellow beans came and went in a couple of weeks, before the green beans, which are only now producing huge crops right next to the shell beans, half of which are already done. 

Today it’s raining, and has been for a few hours, and weather gods willing, will continue for the rest of the day – we need it desperately. My carrots are very long and hairy – long taproots seeking fluid, lots and lots of tiny hair-like roots to suck up the measly amounts of surface water we’ve been trying to douse them with every few days. The blueberries were early and long-lasting and tasty and prolific, making up for last year’s bummer of a crop; but the raspberries are either dry or moldy, except for an occasional day when I can find a handful of perfect ones to munch on while I’m weeding. 

Indoor hibiscus vacationing on the wart

The French pumpkin plant has taken over the leek bed and is headed for the now-empty yellow bean bed, the apple tree, and has climbed onto and into one of the big compost bins, and sent another vine out into the field. How it’s managing to do that in this weather is beyond me, but, Yay French! The purple French peas are also still producing flowers and pods – not very sweet in this heat, but, hey. I did pull a bunch of them up because they were totally shading out the okra, but one end of the row continues to produce. Almost all the sunflower blossoms are now heavy with seed and are staring down at the ground instead of at the sky; and the grain amaranth is nearly as tall as the apple tree at this point. 

Amaranth up close

Lavender-colored squash bugs, which lay burnt-orange colored sesame seed-size eggs, have attacked the gigantic summer squash plant and are also across the garden in the zucchini plants. I had an infestation of these weird bugs maybe 5 years ago and hadn’t seen them since. They’re strange: the normal shape of a squash bug but odd colors, and really freakily aware of me. When I lift a leaf, a dozen or more bugs will wave their antennae at me then scoot, really fast, to get out of my sight. I can’t find this variety in any of my bug books or on-line, and the preternatural awareness of humans is strange. These are the only bugs I use insecticide on, because they can decimate a plant by boring into its trunk, which then rots, and then they move on to the next plant, and I don’t want them decimating the winter squashes, too. They smell a little like ripe cheese, strangely – or maybe it’s the rotting plant trunk that has the smell. They’re too numerous, too fast, and too aware to scoop off and dispose of. I use a spray pesticide very carefully, spraying the bugs themselves and being very very very careful to avoid spraying any blossoms nearby, doing my best to protect bees.

Every summer brings its own critters, too, often endearing (fawns and hummingbirds), mysterious (the funky critter that lived in the compost one year), annoying (last year’s explosion of chipmunks), or just – well – odd. We missed Old Lady Snapper this spring, no dogs to raise the alarum when she came to lay her eggs, but we have no doubt that she did. But The Husband watched a momma turkey in the front field with her three babies the other day. I missed the whole drama because I was out in the garden – of course – weeding – of course – and they were gone by the time I went to look. The babies, he said, were playing on a bunch of tree limbs leftover from this spring’s cutting down of damaged trees. Momma wanted to move on and headed off for the tree-line, dutifully followed by two of her babies. One, however, stayed behind, perched on a tree limb, and a few minutes later, momma hustled back to collect the bad baby, leaving the others out of sight. I may have missed it, but I can easily imagine what the conversation was between mother and child.

A view under an amaranth leaf

Cedar waxwings have been visiting the blueberry bushes, cleaning up the remains of the berries; and at dusk, our airspace is filled with dragonflies – dozens of them, hovering and darting here and there, with hummingbirds dashing about amongst them as they fly between the scarlet runner beans and their feeders on the wart. There have been too many bitey bugs out all summer, so we’re thrilled the dragonflies are working so hard.

The last week or two I’ve also found several thumb-nail-sized toads, in the garden, in the garage (that one got a ride out to the grass), in the driveway (ours is gravel). I have to assume that the Toady I’ve been annoying all summer as I move from garden bed to garden bed watering must be a mom or dad. I’m not sure where toads lay their eggs…they don’t love water like frogs do. Let me look that up…

…OK, I’m back, without a definitive answer. Most toads lay eggs on grass and stuff on water’s edge – which we have plenty of, as I live on an island, surrounded by two ponds connected in a circle by a running-water marsh that runs through the back forty, and the larger marsh across the street connected to my ponds by streams running under the road. Others breed on land, but I didn’t take the time to read far enough to see if any of those varieties live here. At any rate, let me just say that thumbnail-sized toads are pretty cute, but I haven’t had a camera with me whenever I’ve run into one, so I can’t prove it.

Double Calendula

The season has almost changed: we’re in the beginnings of the fifth season, which the Chinese call Late Summer, the time when all growing things are at their ripest, their most nutritious, their sweetest. It doesn’t have a set time, nor does it last for any particular number of days or weeks. We get to decide it for ourselves – it’s when we begin our harvests, the true harvests of grain, winter squashes, storage beans, and most years, onions and garlic and shallots and so on. In my garden, Late Summer has arrived.

May it last for many weeks, and may the butternut squashes and pumpkins survive untouched by weird lavender bugs!

August 21, 2019

Wild daisies, CA poppies, covering a paved path

All photos Deb Marshall

Full-on Summer

The tasseled corn experiment

The corn experiment is short, but there are tassels, so sometime in September I may actually get a few ears of corn! Most of my onions have been harvested, and all the shallots and garlic, and I’m using leeks regularly now. One actually produced a scape and it was delicious. I also pulled all the Egyptian onions (these are also called walking onions; they’re perennials, and reproduce in a bunch like shallots, from the bulbuls that form up their stems, which fall over from the bulbul weight and the bulbuls then send out roots and start a new plant. The bed was getting crowded this year, so I decided to pull all the older bulbs to eat, and planted all the bulbuls, and when I get a moment I’ll add some composted cow manure to that bed and in fall, plant some of the garlic cloves I harvested this summer.

The shoots and leaves of alliums – onions, leeks, garlic, shallots, Egyptian onions – are all edible; they’re all we eat of the chive plant, and most of what we eat when we’re eating scallions. The older and rattier they are, the tougher they are, but onion tops and garlic and leek scapes (the pod that forms on the stiff stem the plant sends up as a flower) and leaves are all very tasty chopped up and used as seasoning in rice (stir them in after the rice is cooked but while it’s still hot, preferably with some butter or oil) and soups and boiled potatoes (add them as in rice, after they’re cooked and drained but still hot), and sautéed with chard or summer squashes or fresh new shell beans. 

Amaranth flowers and leaves and sunflowers make an incredibly lovely bouquet

 

I’ve been picking small ripe arctic tomatoes for a couple of weeks, and sweet yellow cherry tomatoes started ripening this week. I also have two honkin’ big heritage tomatoes that’re ripe, and another on the way, and some green peppers that are almost big enough to pick – but I won’t, hoping for red ripeness eventually. The sunflowers are opening; the peas are done, except for some very determined French pea vines which are yellow but flowering again; and the yellow beans are pretty much history. Green beans are lovely – I’ve been planting a variety called “Jade” the past few years, and they’re wonderful – they keep well on the vine, don’t get woody or fat, just keep getting longer, and the taste is really good. Many of my new asparagus plants are covered with red seeds, and the blueberry plants this year have outdone themselves, starting early and continuing even now, weeks later – it’s possible to stand and pick handfuls at a time.

The Gryphon has moved from indoors to the garden

My fava beans aren’t great this year, but the witch up the hill had early and wonderful favas. She planted hers earlier than I did, and she took the time to soak them overnight in legume innoculant – I may try that next spring. I added innoculant directly into the row when I planted, but it may be that with all the rain we had in May and June it just washed away. 

The purple carrots and the beets are making up for it – I keep saying I’m going to have to make some pickled beets, but haven’t gotten to it, but I need to – if they get any bigger they’re going to start resembling softballs. Maybe I’ll roast some tomorrow – they take an hour or longer, so I could put them in then go back into the garden. (Day later note – I did roast them and omg are they good roasted – like eating roasted dessert!)

Irish Bells

The weather today has been perfect for garden work: not too cool, not too warm, a nice breeze, enough sun, and until dusk, no biting bugs. The cleaned-up area at the south wall of the garage is nearly finished. I gave in to my longing and bought another half-pallet of rock-like chunks to make a wall, and some more bricks to keep the pebbles in place, and I planted the azalea The Actress gave me for my birthday at one end, to keep the hibiscus company and maybe bloom in spring when they haven’t even emerged from their winter snooze yet. I need to find another plant for the shed door end of the wall, and figure out how I’m going to handle the weedy mess right in front of the door, but it’s nearly finished, and as I was packing up for the evening I decided I should probably put down pavers in front of the door – that would be relatively easy and solve several problems, including eliminating the freak-out I experience about whether ticks are crawling on me every time I wade through the tall weeds to get to the shed. I’ve seen photos of people whose garden sheds are just beautifully landscaped and cute as a button to look at: mine’s never going to be that nice – it’s just the space under the stairs to the top floor of the garage, after all! But I can try for welcoming, at least…

Part of the new bed on the south wall of the garage

Summer is well and truly here – even the morning glories have started to bloom. This year they aren’t taking over the garden, but the French pumpkin plant is working on that. The last couple of weeks there’s been a female hummingbird who acts, and sounds, quite a lot like Buzzy Boy – several times she’s dashed down to hover about one of the feeders whenever I’ve been out watering the plants on the wart, and she’s come into the garden to investigate what I’m doing on several occasions. Her wing noise is very loud, like Buzzy’s, and she’s curious and pugnacious like him. I assume she must be a daughter of his – I hope so, and I hope she likes it here. I see Buzzy this year, and he’s chased me in from the garden several times when I’ve been out too late according to his rules, but I think he must be fairly elderly for a hummingbird. Long may he prosper, and I’m quite charmed to have a Buzzy Back-up!

Lilies and morning glories

Now, if the weather gods would just cooperate and send some regular, truly soaking rains, the garden would be so grateful…

August 10, 2019

All photos Deb Marshall

Blue Balloon flowers

Amazingly Dim

Sunflower facing east

Took the day off Thursday because this time of year, the garden doesn’t do well if it gets my attention only on the weekends. Since we grow most the vegetables we eat through the year, it’s a more than minor problem if stuff goes to waste because I didn’t have time to weed it, pick it, process it. 

Thursday was a really fine day for the first time in a long time. It wasn’t too hot, and there was a nice breeze. I hauled myself out of bed at the ungodly hour of 9 am, and had pilled and fed cats and myself, cleaned out their facilities, emptied the dehumidifier in the cellar, washed some dishes, found my tool belt and leather gloves, and was out the door by noon-thirty. I had a job to do before watering and picking: I was tackling the weed-infested junk deposit surrounding the hardy hibiscus, which live on the east side of the garage, facing the garden. 

Leeks, calendula, amaranth, parsnips

 

Before I knew that hardy hibiscus die back every winter then sprout again from the roots in the spring…or summer, whenever it gets warm enough for a hibiscus to do something growie…I’d piled hay around them for winter protection, then peeled it back in spring, and the piles of peeled back hay had sprouted all sorts of grass and weeds. Also, The Husband, who was raised a city boy and who will die a city boy, but who in his heart of hearts is a Swamp Yankee, had filled the space behind the hibiscus and the garage wall with all sorts of junk in order to “protect the siding from water damage.” 

Right. I pulled out of there, after removing a lot of dirt and weeds and old dried leaves, this list of stuff: 2 old half-rotten rugs, a piece of what looks like painted veneer, some round black things I don’t recognize and don’t want identified, and four pieces of old tiles/leftover granite countertop/the stuff the countertops were originally made of; and that’s after I got him to move the dozen rusting cans of old paint he’s been saving for years to bring to some toxic disposal day some time, somewhere.

California poppies self-seed every year; I haven't planted any for at least 4 years.

I filled two giant weed bags full of old hay, weeds, leaves and plant detritus and dragged them to the compost bins. Then I put down landscape barrier between the garage wall and the plants and covered it with pebbles. Then I made many trips into the house for the entire supply of 3 months’ newspapers saved for recycling, and put them down in a heavy layer around the plants, and covered the newspaper with another heavy layer of cedar wood chips. Then I put down composted manure in the circle I’d left around each plant, and watered heavily. 

Finally, I was able to head into the garden to water and pick stuff that needed picking.

Since last weekend, the summer squash plant and one of the winter squashes have decided to mate and are lovingly entwined with each other and totally blocking one pathway. Another of the winter squashes is traveling towards the summer squash (popular lady this year) via the main path into the garden, which will be a problem if the plant recovers from me not noticing how dry and wilty it had gotten. I’ve apologized and watered and watered; we’ll see if it recovers.

All the yellow beans have ripened all at once. I had to wade into the summer squash bed from the back while trying to miss trampling it or the new asparagus plants in order to pick 5 squashes that weren’t there 3 days ago. There were 4 ripe arctic tomatoes, and one cherry tomato. The Swiss Chard is out of control. All but 2 garlic plants have turned brown, so I pulled those; and half the onions have keeled over, so I pulled those. The French pumpkin has taken over the path between the compost bins and the rest of the garden, and is rapidly taking over the leek and onion bed and the sea of dill.

Caterpillar on milkweed

Green beans are nearly ready to pick, there were two zucchinis, and I picked fava beans (I learned from the witch up on the hill to mix cooked favas with a little garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, mint, salt, and feta cheese, and eat it warm – it’s incredibly delicious) and what’s almost – almost – the last of the peas. The beets are jumping out of the ground in their eagerness to be eaten; I may have to make pickled beets this weekend. I didn’t have time to pick blueberries or raspberries, but did eat a handful of each, and picked what’s almost the last of my lettuce, but the 2^nd planting is coming and will be ready before the last, which never got bitter, is completely gone. There were also several cucumbers, finally! 

And, I noticed, one of the self-seeded sunflowers has bloomed, and has its head turned determinedly to the east.

It seems like my potatoes (all harvested and dried and put away) and onions are early this year, but what do I know? I know that the impenetrable wall of sunflowers and amaranth that are on two sides of one tomato bed make it impossible for me to efficiently water, or to see what’s going on in there. I’m going to have to come up with a way to water from another side. I’m experimenting this summer with the really light, cloth hoses that scrunch up when emptied, and so far I really like them but I’m also really careful not to scrape them against rocks and the block-like-things walls for fear of tearing them. The hundred-footer scrunches up to something like 15 feet when you empty it, and I’m guessing it might just reach from the far side of the garden to the front side and around as far as the tomato beds. It goes from the far side of the garden out into the field and reaches all the new fruit trees and the flower and plant beds all the way to the new raspberries. It’s an amazing thing to see, and looks like a snake when you turn off the water and let it empty itself, slithering along as it shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.

Broccoli under huge sunflower leaves; nasturtiums and lettuce

At 8:30 I decided it was too dark to pick anything more or even to water, so I hauled my full baskets inside and announced to The Husband that he’d need to finish watering the next night, because I couldn’t quite do it all as I could no longer see properly. He looked right at me, so I know he heard me, and said ok, he’d take care of it. 

I headed back to the kitchen to shell peas and favas and tip yellow beans and wash lettuce and all that jazz. Around 9:30 I decided I needed to take a break to wash my glasses because I was finding my eyesight was more than a little dim. They were probably sweat-smeared, I thought, as I took them off.

I was still wearing my sunglasses.                                   

For the blog: August 2, 2019

All photos Deb Marshall