O, Fava Rites

 

 

Fava bean flowers

Two short summers ago, I sat with her at the Polish witch poet’s kitchen table, and we filled our mouths and souls with a giant bowl of cooked fava beans doused in lemon juice and chunks of feta cheese. It was heavenly. I licked my empty bowl, when she wasn’t looking.

The Polish witch poet lives up the hill through the woods from me, and she’s a fava bean whisperer. She usually has ripe fava beans in her garden before my fava plants are even thinking about flowering; she has fava beans that fill the pods to bursting; she has fava beans in quantities I look at with jealous eyes and withering heart. She is a Fava Bean Goddess. I’m in awe.

Not this year, though, and I’m sure it’s not that she’s lost her witchy powers. I’m pretty sure her talent with fava beans has nothing to do with being a witch or a poet; I’m pretty sure she doesn’t cast spells on the plants. Besides, her witchiness has more to do with a herd of turkeys and some mourning doves, but that’s another story. And – after all – poets all have to be at least a little bit witchy. Being a poet does…things…to your brain.

No. This year the Weather Gods, who have to co-operate with the Fava Bean Goddess,  took exception to our desires for a nice, productive summer and have done their best to thwart our gardens and twist our brains, trash our fondest hopes and plant bitter nightmares in our hearts. If only we knew upon whom to wreak revenge…we’d parboil them and store them for the winter in the chest freezer in the cellar, in which there will be plenty of room after this truly unharvestable summer.

Thyme in bloom

Fava beans are odd beasts: they like being planted in cool ground, and germinate and grow best in cool weather, so they usually go out to be planted with the peas. They produce tall thick, twisty square stalks, with black-and-white flowers that grow in clumps on the stalks. The pods, which can get very long and very fat if the weather and garden environment is right, grow straight up towards the sky; and on the inside of its pod, the bean, which looks a little like a lima bean that’s been worked hard and put away wet, and which can get quite large, like three or four times the size of a typical lima bean and possibly much  larger, is nestled in a bed of white, soft, bedding that resembles, to some extent, airy Styrofoam – until you touch it, and then it melts away. When allowed to mature fully and dry on the stalk, the beans turn yellow and are huge – the dried beans we plant are often the size of my last thumb joint.

This year, even the Polish witch poet is having little luck with her fava beans. Here at mid-August, my fava beans are finally producing a few pods – I get maybe 5 or 6 every couple of days - nowhere near enough to do the wonderful thing with. I‘ve been sticking them in the freezer, in the same bag as the peas, which also were very, very late and not very abundant.

Where the whisky is now

The weather has been – that’s about all I can say about it. The garden has barely been. Even the garden gnomes/gremlins haven’t been very active this year; they don’t seem to like being out in the rain any more than I do. One released skunk smell right under the dining room window four nights in a row, when I was working there late into the evening, so they are still being obnoxious. They’ve moved the bottle of whisky I left out for them around a bit, but haven’t made it disappear, and they haven’t figured out how to open it. Temperance leprechauns, maybe?

So far, half-way through August,  here’s the garden list:

The peach and pear and half the apple blossoms got zapped by the late frost;

More than half the beets didn’t germinate, and of those that did, one batch produced some early greens then gave up – they have no root ball and their leaves are 2.5 inches tall; and another bunch produced 9 beets; 

Mountain Ash berries

I’ve had 10 ripe cherry tomatoes; and 3 ripe regular-size tomatoes, each from individual plants. Once two of those plants produced their one fruit, they immediately died. Other tomato plants never got thick but got very long hunting for sun, and none have more than 4 green fruits on it; good thing, since they aren’t sturdy enough to support any more than that.

In the bed out back that we remade in June and filled with the compost that came out of the haunted compost bin that the gremlins/gnomes overwintered in, a tomato plant that I didn’t plant has appeared, and it’s the healthiest of the many other pitiful plants in my garden. Many things I didn’t plant in that bed are growing in it – it’s going to be interesting to see what they are;

Another new bed, also filled with magic compost, has produced some massive borage plants, the size of a usual healthy tomato plant…at least, I think it’s borage, it hasn’t actually bloomed yet;

The cucumber vine is happily climbing the sunflowers and has lots of flowers but no cukes;

The pepper plants have no fruits;

The summer squash and the zucchini plants produced one fruit each, which stopped growing at 4 inches. I ate them;

Heron solar light

One pumpkin plant died, the other winter squashes have flowers but no fruit;

The blueberries, onions, shallots, and garlic are doing beautifully; most the garlic and shallots and half the onions are already harvested and drying. Something has eaten the entire bulb of 4 onions, 2 garlics, and 2 leeks – all below ground leaving perfect leafy parts above ground;;

Most the lettuce, and the spinach, didn’t germinate;

I’ve had 4 kohlrabis;

The green beans and yellow beans finally produced, but started to mold almost immediately;

One of my tarragon plants, vigorous in the spring, recently gave up the ghost; and the summer savory hasn’t blossomed;

The California poppies and the daisies, and the golden rod and milkweed, and the Lady’s Thumb and Joe Pye weed, and yarrow and clover and other wild flowers, have been massively happy;

Mother’s Wort and a strange wild bupleurum have appeared in my garden – unplanted – and done beautifully, the Sweet Woodruff has been traveling, but the Egyptian onions are unhappy;

The heather is glorious;

Heather in bloom

 

And on it goes. My freezers are going to be sadly mostly empty this winter, alas.

Every summer is different, and this one is definitely different! At least we’re out of the drought; and we hope for a long, warm autumn so the pollinators have time to build their winter stores. Buzzy Boy and his kind have been sucking a lot of sugar water, and he is personally guarding the scarlet runner beans, which are finally blooming – quite possibly too late to produce beans, unless we have a long warm autumn. And I’m keeping an eye on a potato plant that something – gnome, gremlin, something with a good arm – tossed out of the potato bags (those did well but finished early and are drying and curing under the dining room table) this spring and planted in one of the raised beds. I’m wondering what, if anything, it’ll produce.

Rabbit foot clover

And now, at this very moment, the sun is out again, between storms. Lynxie and I are going to go take a nap. He will dream of catnip – which is doing very well this year; and I will lean back and let my mind drift to the Polish witch poet’s kitchen, and a phantom bowl of fava beans with lemon and feta cheese, which if I reach out slowly, I can almost touch…

 

For the blog, 9 August 2023: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

All photos Deb Marshall

 

A new garden buddy, currently residing on the porch. Freaked the cats out at first, but now they've beaten it up, and no longer have to pay it any attention.

 

 

 

Book Gobblin'

 

I rarely buy clothes. I buy books.

Don’t misunderstand – I also love libraries. Unfortunately, in small towns, the libraries, and even the state library, often don’t have the books I want to read. They have to keep current books that many people want to read, and they have fairly small spaces to store them. Sometimes I do find a book I’d enjoy in the library book sales racks – usually only one or two people have borrowed the ones I’m interested in, and often no one has.  

When I got back from F’ing Florida in April, I’d sent 19 books belonging to my friend, the Hoarder, back to NH because they looked like ones I’d enjoy reading. The weekend after I got back, the Sailor and I went to the 5 Colleges Book Sale and I got another two bags full of books; and in a basket on my bedroom floor was already another pile of books I’d acquired before the trip to F-FL from, mostly, Thriftbooks; and there was a giant pile of books covering the small bench behind my bed, within handy reach, plus a couple I was in the process of reading – including one 750-pager that I’d been reading at for a year but couldn’t concentrate on well enough, because I’d just not had time to read much during the last year while taking care of all the stuff that needed to be done leading up to moving my F-FL friend in March.

In April, finally back from F-FL and finished, I hoped, with the daily distractions F-FL represents, I had time to read again, and I was too tired to do much else; and besides, the weather wasn’t co-operating with any of the faint urges that sometimes rose in my consciousness to do something about the garden. So I read; and I filled a couple of small boxes with books I’d finished. The Scholar took most of those first boxes to his summer camp, and I continue to fill small boxes with finished books. 

At some point it occurred to me: I could make a list of all the books that are setting there waiting for me to read them!

Now, I LOVE books. I have a lot of books; there are certain authors whose works I want all of: Twain, Austin, Hebert, Mosher, Roach, Sacks, Davies, Chappell, Maxwell, Moore, Miss Read, Heinrich, Bryson, Gorey, Penney, Bird, and others; and certain genres I’m especially fond of, of which I have a collection of  each, filling a couple of bookshelves each: fantasy, restaurant kitchen insider stories, Celtic and old English works, books on language, certain children’s books and series, like Wind in the Willows and Alcott’s books, and books with excellent illustrations, like those by Allsburg, and Christmas ghost stories, and really old books from my grandparents’ day… And I read many of these over and over.

But I also LOVE making lists, because there’s nothing so satisfying as crossing something off a list; and for that matter, the actual making of the list is also very nice. So I made a list of the books waiting to be read – I just wish I’d done it when I first got home in April. So many books already read and gone, but not listed and not crossed off…sigh.

However, after I’d already passed about 20 books on to other people who will enjoy them, the list got made. There were 79 books on the list; since I made the list I’ve crossed off 18 titles. Most of the books go into small boxes, and I bring them, once filled, along with magazines I’ve finished, to the Tiptop  Building and leave them on the “free benches” in the main hallway between the pottery shop and the Café, where all we tenants leave things we no longer need, for others to benefit from. I’ve picked up a few good books someone else left there, myself. And a few books get set aside to give to friends and family at Christmas, or on birthdays, when I find a book I know will be enjoyed by those people. And on that list, there are at least 10 that I know I’ll be shelving in my collections when I’ve finished reading them.

So here are a few observations about books and reading:

Large hardcover books make a noise that causes the startled cats to jump off the bed and flee when you fall asleep reading and they fall on the floor. Claws are generally involved.

Hardcover books are much more painful than paperbacks when you fall asleep reading in bed and instead of dropping on the floor, the book falls on your nose.

It’s hard to carry a 20-lb cat plus the two books you’ve been carrying around all day, plus a glass of drinking water, upstairs to bed at night. Use a book bag, and use an insulated water bottle instead of a glass; that way the bottle can also go in the book bag, and you won’t be drinking bugs with your water in the dark in the middle of the night when you wake up parched, the book covering your face, and with your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth; and you won’t drop the books on your feet as you climb the stairs juggling everything. It’s still hard to carry a 20-lb cat upstairs to bed at night – make him walk.

If you’ve gotten very comfortable with your books and a lap blanket in your favorite comfy chair, the cats will inevitably decide to lie on top of you and your book. If you move to the desk and lay the book on it, the cats will lie on the book and then roll onto their backs looking for tummy rubs. They will also shed and your mug of coffee or cup of tea or glass of water will surprise you with a thick layer of floating cat fur.

Hide the bookmarks – the cats will otherwise use them as toys. Teeth and claws will be involved.

 

If there’s the smallest amount of space left open on any bookshelf, when you can’t find the cat, that’s where he’ll be. If there isn’t room, he will toss enough books onto the floor to make room, so just look for the pile.

It is possible to brush your teeth and read at the same time. Not advisable to wash your face and read at the same time.

When the book you’ve been reading disappears, check the dog’s bed. How it got there will remain a mystery.

This year, especially, don’t take your book out to the garden to read: it will get soaked or blow away or both. You can’t successfully dry out a soaked book, but you can compost them.

Happy Reading!

 

For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com   August 8, 2023

All photos Deb Marshall 

 

 

Soft, Soft

 It’s officially summer! I did get the rest of the garden planted, by racing out many days over this past month between rain storms – the last seeds went in only days ago, and yesterday I watched a couple of pretty little yellow warblers eating the Love Lies Bleeding seeds I’d planted just two days earlier. But they were having such a grand time, and they were so pretty, I didn’t stop them. I’m hoping they didn’t get all the seeds.

My poppies and irises and lilies and peonies are all abloom, and the daisies – wild volunteers that have taken over the wild places in my garden – and California poppies, which are free-seeded annuals from seeds I planted many years ago – and this year, also volunteers from the annual Bachelor’s Buttons I planted last year, and an unknown but lovely mostly green flower that self-seeded from a rogue plant that showed up amongst the Egyptian onions two years ago, are all in riotous bloom. I even have some rosa rugosa this year, probably because it’s rained so much the Japanese beetles haven’t completely trashed them, as they usually do.

CA Poppy and bug

The heather has started to bloom, as has the yarrow, and the clover this year is tall and gorgeous. Wild columbine has mostly gone by, as have the pussy toes and flax; but there’s always something new about to bloom, and some of the Johnny Jump Ups are done, but others are still vibrant. Chipmunks are trying to kill my remaining delphinium be eating its roots off; but so far they haven’t quite killed the whole plant, and have left all but 4 shallots alone. The cats are on it, but the chipmunks are generally smarter than they are.

Anyway, any of you who have said you’d like to come look at my garden some time are welcome, and this is a great time of year to do so, if you can time it between storms. If you have cats, I’ll send you home with catnip to dry for them; and if you like daisies, bring a jar and we’ll cut you a daisy bouquet; there’s also plenty of mint and marjoram for anyone who’d like some. I’m usually home weekends and Tuesdays, but email me first to be sure: taichideb@tds.net. And you need to be aware that though my garden paths are mostly paved, they aren’t even and you have to pay attention to keep from taking a tumble. I may do paths, but the flowers often take over, so there are clumps to navigate around, and I never tried to make a flat even space and it’s easy to catch a toe on a crack or a jutting brick.. 

A garden path

My peas – at least, the ones I planted earliest – have bloomed! And the beets and some of the carrots and the parsnips need thinning! The garlics have scaped! And I’m going to be dealing with all that between storms, it appears, this next week. One of these days there will need to be weeding, also, but right now the ticks, mosquitoes, gnats and deer flies are strongly discouraging that activity.

Sauteed beet greens and garlic scapes, on rice, was the first meal from this year’s garden. The strange weather (and the cats, and the garden gnomes) have caused some of the beets to not germinate. If I’m clever, I’ll quick look for some more seed and plant a second batch. Beets have a short season, so there’s time, but they do prefer to be planted when it’s cooler.

Wild columbine

The weather has been dry enough for us to hang laundry to dry out on the clothesline only three times this year, so far. I’m covered with mosquito bites. The cats are kind of disgusted with the weather most days, and spend lots of time sleeping in chairs on the porch, or they go back to bed around noontime.  The hummingbirds are managing, and Buzzy Boy has chased me out of the garden at dusk a few times. I’ve explained to him I’m out there sowing the scarlet runner plants he loves so much, but he has rules about when it’s ok for me to be out, and he’s going to make sure I follow his rules. He is a bit of a stickler for his rules.

There have been a few days recently, when the sky was blue, there was no humidity, there was a light breeze and no deer flies – a soft day. I sat out under the porch roof, watched the hummers come to their feeders, smelled the sweet flower smells on the breeze, and listened to the wind chimes: one bamboo, one made of silver spoons and forks and butter knives, a third of copper leaves, the fourth a tuned delight. I pretended to read, and didn’t jump up to spread cedar shavings in the paths, or to top up the potato plants.

Warding off gremlins; whisky in front!

 

I just sat; and it was a soft day; and it was perfect.

 

For the blog, 25 June 2023: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

 

All photos Deb Marshall

Interesting bug

 

Bird, and peonies captured in the rain!

 

 

O, The Way of All Things

 

Guy with a Mohawk

Day I-don’t-know-what of mostly continual rain. That is not a complaint, it’s been so dry until this rainy spell started that the garden - what I’d managed to plant – wasn’t growing; now that stuff is growing but I can’t get the rest of it planted. And it was so very dry before the rain, that even after these many days of rain, the ground’s still dry 2 inches down. Keep raining, weather gods!

I’ve been trying to plant between showers, but today it’s showering just about every 30 minutes, which isn’t long enough to be productive. All I’ve managed to do (besides get my feet soaking wet and collect more bug bites) is plant some Thai basil seed in a pot on the porch, and take the cloches off the squashes and cuke and pumpkins, because those seeds aren’t getting any of the rain. In one foray out, I discovered that something cut off one of my tomato plants, which I got in the ground 3 days ago between storms (and at the same time got myself covered with itchy black fly and mosquito bites, all over my body); and discovered that the gremlins are digging up, but not eating, the cranberry beans I also planted that day, much like they dug up the fava beans last year. At least the cranberry beans are too newly planted to have sprouted yet. I’ve now erected around them, and the pumpkin seeds I planted in the same bed, a gremlin-confusing structure of old window screen, small lawn ornaments, unfolded tomato cage, and sticks and empty flower pots that I hope will muddle that spot in the gremlin’s mind so they leave it alone. It worked on the onion bed and Rasta Furian.

We’ve had loads of excitement here in the past two weeks. On Wednesday last, there was an earthquake centered next town over, at 6 am – 2.2 on the Richter scale. A few early risers were aware of it; I’m told it was more noise than shake. If my sleepy brain did register it, I would have assumed it was just a pulp truck trundling by on its way to the wood processing plant up the road. 

Then on Friday last, day of many, many thunder-boomers, we had a close lightning strike. The Husband and the cats (I wasn’t home, not sure if I’m glad or sorry to have missed the experience) dove for cover – it seemed to have landed on our garage, which isn’t far from the house – like, maybe 15 feet or so. When they decided they weren’t being attacked, The Husband went out to see if the garage, which has his photo studio on the 2^nd floor (as well as a bird’s nest in the stairwell) was on fire. It wasn’t.

However, next day we had no water. The lightning strike fried our well pump. The well is just in front of the door to the garage stairwell.

Our next-door neighbors thought the bolt landed in their backyard – they lost their tv. Wherever it landed, it was plenty close enough. But as my father used to say (when he was teaching me to drive) “an inch is as good as a mile.”

Well – kinda.

The only other times we’ve been without water have been in the winter, when there’s snow to melt on the woodstove for toilet flushing, and we’re rarely out of power for more than a few hours or, at most, a few days. The Husband and I have found that our brains are wired for winter outages – if we have no water, the brains say, then we must not have electricity, so don’t open the frig or freezers, don’t bother flipping on light switches… it’s a strange phenomenon.

Spring Iris

I’m glad it’s not winter because opening the well and pulling out the dead pump, replacing it with a new one, and then flushing the system of the sludge that process coughs up, for several days, and hauling water, would be a lot less fun in winter. It isn’t fun this time of year, either. The ponds are full of frogs and tadpoles, so water has to come from elsewhere.

We’re still hauling drinking/cooking/toothbrushing/washing water, 6 days later, though we can use the slimey well water for toilet flushing, though it’s turned the toilets an interesting shade of black. And The Husband has to keep draining the water tank in the cellar so that the sludgy water gets flushed out sooner and doesn’t ruin the hot water system or house water pipes. Showers have been something we get at friends’ and relatives’ houses, when we go fetch drinking water; and until the well was fixed, The Husband made many trips to the neighbor’s outdoor hose across the field to fill many buckets, which he toted in the wheelbarrow, for toilet flushing –trips he made in the rain. Irony. Remember “water, water everywhere, and nary a drop to drink”? Yup. That’s us this week.

Dish washing takes place with a tea kettle full of nearly-boiling water we’ve hauled from friend’s houses, tempered with cold potable water so we don’t burn our fingers off, and it’s slow and a pain in the butt, and not totally effective, unless we limit ourselves to sandwiches. Or eggs fried in cast iron – we (that’s the old-timer’s “we”) don’t wash cast iron, we wipe it out so it doesn’t rust. The compost bins are getting a good feed on paper towels covered in various oils, cheese and peanut butter smears, and so on, this week. I was never so happy to go to work as I was this week, so I could easily wash my hands and face in hot water!

The cats have spent most of the last week abed – smart thinking. I did find Rasta Furian perched in the dry end of the wheelbarrow earlier today, though. He’s been using it, pre-showery days, as a nice napping place. He was a little surprised when he hopped in today!

It is possible to make soup and bread in spite of the circumstances. But The Husband, who’s been trying to sauter something or other in the cellar having to do with water pipes all afternoon, just muttered something incomprehensible about needing to put bread into the pipe he’s working on.

I don’t think I want to know.

 

For the blog, 8 June 2023: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

Photos Deb Marshall

In the garden, looking for trouble. Garlic in the background to the right.