If you have the patience

[posted by risa]



Freshly blown goose eggs -- risa b

The range trip was fun but I spent a lot of the last few days thinking about food ... At least one meal a day I try to eat as much as practicable from whatever we have grown or raised ourselves.

This weekend's stir fry was heavy on spring greens accordingly.

I diced up radishes, chard stems, shallots, and the stem of a perennial elephant garlic (as sort of a leek substitute) and put them in the hot oil and went back to the cutting board to shred a hard-boiled duck egg, chard greens, chives, onion greens, radish greens, spinach, celery, dandelion, and parsley and added these to the wok, tossed, under cover, just before turning off the heat.

Served with homemade buckwheat/rye bread and a local microbrew (this last was selected by the young folks).

Daughter tried the stir-fry and liked it. I wound up polishing off the rest, as the young men were working hard on the wasabi chips they'd bought.

:::

After everyone left, I made grass clippings all afternoon and spread them on all parts of the garden. Worked on this year's irrigation layout. Gave away a dead riding mower. And I finished cutting and installing the last of fifty beanpoles.

The plan for the poles is that the sugar snap peas will climb them first, followed by a later planting of runner beans. I've learned that if you install these poles very early, in relatively wet soil, and keep them watered along with the plantings, some of them take root and sprout (willow, ash, filbert, cottonwood) and can be collected at the end of the summer and planted out to build up the wood supply.

This has gone so well that I've added another step: gathering the prunings from these species into bundles, with all but the topmost leaves stripped, to set beneath a stone, in the creek. The trick is to get back to them before the water runs dry and pot them up until winter dormancy. The survival rate is fairly high, and this is an easy way to keep your self in kindling, beanpoles, trellises, or, if you have the patience, firewood and/or shade.

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A Special Mother's Day

[posted by Daughter]
*I lifted this from my Sparkpeople.com blog so forgive me, but I felt compelled to share:)
Every mother's day is a very special mother's day for me not only because I have not one but TWO beautiful intelligent mom's, but May 10th is also my Risa's birthday ! (my biological father who is now one kick a$$ mommy.) Her birthday wish was for us to visit a shooting range she had become a member of. As Alex and I arrived with my brother in tow early to browse the gun collection and get a feel for the place. I almost drowned in the testosterone so I can not even imagine how my mom felt stepping into that kind of place by herself. (EEK!) I have to remember that my mom is not just any girl, she's a country girl. She grew up with guns and ammo so the sight of all those shiny toys are not threatening to her. I was a little surprised to see that Alex was just as comfortable handling guns with an innate expertise. I forget sometimes that other than his Colombian culture he has a whole different side being brought up half of his life in a little town outside of Roseburg Oregon where guns and hunting were the norm. His father took him hunting since he was a little boy and he has an expansive knowledge of the subject. He's also a very good shot, too good? The guys at the shooting range laughed at me and told me that "it was a very important skill" I guess this was just a little new for both my mom and my boyfriend to be bonding over metal. Other than that fun (if not unique) little outing we spent the rest of the weekend with my moms at their place and it was just amazing! It is so relaxing there with the wood fire and the half dead zombie cat constantly searching for a lap to sit on (I love her to death but she is decaying). [editor's note ... nah, just a little senile -- like me! -- risa] We sipped on coffee and just relaxed chit chatting with both my moms. I love them so much! I know that I am very lucky to have twice the mom power behind me. I love that I am totally spoiled and both Alex and I feel comfortable enough to revert back to ten-year-olds when they are around. There was pillow fighting, tickling, and lots of wrestling. It's safe to say this Mother's day was perfection.

Where you are ...

[posted by risa]



... there is the sun.

-30-

Homesick

[posted by daughter]


I haven't made it back to the parental units' house for more than a few hours, a hug, a kiss, and a goodbye, in quite sometime. I remember so fondly the last few months I spent there. We did quite well the three of us. Though schedules were conflicting and time was short we all managed to climb into the big bed for a night cap before we went our separate ways to slumber. If ever there was a place of mental retreat that patch of land is my mecca. I've been homesick since Christmas when I was able to spend a night with the family. I haven't been able to make more time than that. Which is so sad, I've been neglecting my roots, and at this point I'm starting to feel it. The overall stress of being somewhat separated from them is starting to become more and more apparent. At the nearest opportunity I'll be making way home, even if it's to be a solo journey, or worse yet on the greyhound...

...but they're worth it ;)

Not too tiring if done right

[posted by risa]

Ah, a little bit of sunshine. But Saturday I went to an all-day meeting in Salem.

Sunday, naturally, I went berserk.

Most of the activity centered around the beds we're expanding/reviving to increase our veggie production.

Most of the veggie gardening has been confined, in recent years, to a circular garden fifty feet in diameter. But as we pay more and more attention to the idea of living, year round, on home production, we find ourselves spilling over into containers and the flower beds.

There's room between the house and the grape arbor for four or more 4' beds fifty feet long. That's a lot of room. Constraints have been: water conservation, enough time. We think we can water more garden, with a little planning. And we will just have to make the time.

The perennial beds will remain mostly in flowers, as Beloved loves her bulbs and perennials (I do, too) and likes to have them along the paved pathway from the driveway to the house. I notice she's put a lot of brassicas, especially a variety of lettuces, into one of them, though.

The third bed has been mostly peas and scarlet runners for the last decade. We're widening this one, and this spring it will contain sugar snap peas and scarlet runners, kind of in succession, down the middle, on a framework of poles and wire, and onion sets, beets, spinach and potatoes on the margins. I've built a fourth bed and this one will have the peas and beans down the middle, with radishes and beets, and four rows of potatoes (Yukon Gold and the little thin-skinned red ones) along the margins. These are the early garden and with successful succession plantings, fall-winter as well.

This last bed is a sod-busting project, as what was there before was a failed blueberry planting and we hadn't had the heart to try again there for awhile. The site has a dark, very heavy clay topsoil that drains well compared to the summer garden and can be worked earlier. Even so, it would be too wet to mechanically till until some time in June, so tilling is not really an option. We draped black plastic over it during the late winter, then turned over the sods in chunks about six inches by ten, using a general purpose long-handled five-tine fork. This is what's known as "spading" but I never do it on this scale with a spade (compacts the soil and kills too many earthworms) or "spading" fork (all the ones I've seen have short handles and will hurt your back).

This is a rhythmical and satisfying activity, not too tiring if done right, bending knees, applying leverage, and not trying to lift clay with one's lower back. It's difficult to describe but easy to demonstrate. 1) Tip out one or more turves to make a start hole. 2) "step" the fork into the earth three inches away from the hole, push the fork forward to rip the roots and corms of the grass in your chunk away from those in the ground nearer you. 3) pull back, to lift away the bottom of your turf from the ground beneath. 4) Draw the turf to you, leaning back and using the straightening of your legs to lift the turf. 5) push the turf off the fork tines with your foot. 6) Turn the turf upside down with the fork, poke the tines into it, and drop it into the hole, with the roots exposed to the sun. 7) Repeat till you reach the end of the bed. 8) go back to the beginning, where you lifted out the first turves, start a hole adjacent to the first one, and begin again.

You'll have leftover turf, which can be used to level any low spots in the rough bed before chopping.

This is not the "double digging" described in all the books, but it seems to do the job, just as my bread seems to do fine without the "second rising" the bread books all talk about.

I then chopped up the chunks with a spade, then covered the whole bed with grass clippings four inches deep. Down the middle of the bed, after the clippings had dried to a tan color, I raked back the mulch to make a row about four inches wide, and spread about a half-inch layer of potting soil for a seedbed. Walking along with a piece of aluminum tubing about four feet long, I dropped radish and beet seeds and peas down the pipe, on about a two-inch spacing, then shoveled on another half-inch of potting soil, and tamped it all down with the spade handle (d-ring). And watered gently with a very light manure tea.

The seed potatoes, which I had "slipped" (cut into pieces with one or more "eyes" each) the night before, went into two rows on each side of the pea row by being tucked under the mulch at ten-inch intervals.

Each bed runs north and south, and has in it three iron tee-posts in a line, with a medium-gauge wire strung between them and staked into the ground at the ends for tautness. As the peas come up, I stake them with suckers cut from filbert, willow, and ash trees. Some years these will sprout, and I re-use them after their garden duty as reforestation seedlings. The production of these suckers for this kind of use is something of a lost art, known as "coppicing." It's a low-cost-high-efficiency way to provide yourself with stakes, kindling, and even firewood.

The circular garden currently harbors some of our perennial foods (elephant garlic, Jerusalem artichoke, several varieties of chard, celery, onions and Egyptian onions) and we have been eating from it daily, but at this time of the year, mostly what I do there is add layers of grass clippings to the mulch and attend to the sod-building grasses that invade (no doubt from seeds imported with the clippings -- sigh).

In another month, God-willin-and-the-crick-don't-rise, we'll do the summer things: beans, corn, squash, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and such.

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Lady of the place

[posted by risa]

I started my weekend by getting into overalls and an old wide-brimmed hat. I put my hair, which is well over two feet long, up into a ponytail and did without earrings and makeup for the time being. My feet I put into clodhoppers cut down from old rubber boots.

Olga! Wooga wooga.

I made and carried about eleven mower bags of grass clippings into the circle garden and spread that around, then gathered up a few tools and a ladder and headed out to the barn to reroof where yet another windstorm had ripped the roll roofing loose. One waits until the temperature is above sixty (F.) to do this, and the roofing had hung there for a couple of weeks, with Beloved dodging around it get inside and collect eggs. Now the roofing had softened in the rare but welcome sunshine, and I set the ladder against the barn and climbed up. I set the tools out of the way, and pulled up the errant section.

This stuff is called 90 lb. felt for a reason, as a roll of it, which doesn't go very far, weighs just that. I'm much less strong than when I was, ostensibly, that other person, so there was quite a bit of huffing to get it all onto the shed roof, but it came along graciously enough -- i.e., all in one piece. Getting it down to the roof edge from which it had blown took a good deal more effort than hauling it up, as it turned out, because I could not take the ladder around and pull, which would have been the thing to do -- the chicken run is roofed over with poultry netting, up to and even with and tacked onto the barn roof -- and prevents that. And walking backwards onto the stuff would result in a dismal scene. So I had to kneel, in the heat, and push, encourage and cajole the roll roofing into place, then tuck it under the next course above it before nailing down.

Besides the nails, which had failed, I chose this time to also put in two- inch screws every three nails, using a Phillips-head bit fastened into a brace-and-bit. This tool has been in the family for a good sixty years, is precision-machined, with a chuck that rotates in the hand to lock up the bit, and large and comfortable freely-rotating Bakelite handles. This brace has been sometimes abused with weather and it has never rusted. You couldn't get one of these now, for any kind of money, I should think. It sinks speed screws almost as fast as a power drill, but without all the noise, and is one of our most prized possessions.

Looking over my work, I wasn't satisfied. This roof is always the one that catches the worst of what the winds have in mind. So I concluded to climb down and go get some one-by fours to bolt down at intervals, perpendicular to the troubled edge.

I leisurely backed down the ladder into the farmyard, with Barred Rocks running to me from all the corners for a chance to peck at the paint spots on my trouser legs, and turned around. There, not twenty feet away, stood a heavy-set young man, mustachioed and t-shirted, with his mouth flapping.

A woman alone for the day on a country place does not expect unheralded intrusions of this kind, and I checked my hip pocket first to see that I had unfettered access to my equalizing device, which I did. I then realized that the mouth-flapping meant that I had turned off my hearing aid, probably in response to my own hammering. So I reached up and switched my ears on.

The young man stopped talking for a moment, and covered his mouth in embarrassment.

"I'm so, so sorry, ma'am, I thought .. I called you 'sir' as you came down the ladder, but now I see my mistake."

"That's all right; roofing can be kind of awkward to do in a dress. Can I help you with something?" I moved toward the front of the house, where our current woodpile is, and he accompanied me, presumably in the direction of his vehicle. There it sat in the shade, with a passenger, another young man, this one with a walrus mustache, in the shotgun seat, who waved companionably. The back of the pickup truck was clearly a cooler unit, and was emblazoned with the name of a local meat locker outfit.

"I sure am sorry, ma'am, and that's a fact. Well, we ... uh, we just made a delivery to your neighbor across the street, and we, we wondered if you'd like to buy any meats -- we got beef, lamb, chicken ... " He looked back at the Barred Rocks, who were lined up along the fence, straining to hear every word. "Umm, I guess you got chicken."

"They are all layers. Good ones, too. But we have, in the freezer, mostly goose."

"Oh. wow, goose. Well, uh, maybe some good fresh beef, whaddya think?"

"I think that I like good fresh beef, but the freezer is full. Thank you so much for stopping by."

True about the freezer. Well, it's mostly fruit and vegs, but our geese, Sylvia, Susannah, and Sylvester, had turned out to be Silvio, Susannah, and Sylvester, and we do discriminate against extra boys in the farmyard. So we are down to Susannah and Sylvester, and some pretty good roast goose. Much quieter now, too.

:::

Poor fellas!

I know that I present with mixed signals when my guard is down. One does. They had, presumably, seen me in the distance, and attempted an impromptu cold call. Men with something to sell, who are at all mannerly, as these pretty much were, are more apt to walk right up into a farmyard, two hundred feet from the street, when they see whom they believe to be the man of the place pottering about, and say hello from about thirty feet away, where they might never attempt such a thing if they see, from that distance, that it is the lady of the place. Hence their confusion. They had committed what could have been interpreted as a serious faux pas, and both apologized several more times before they drove away.

Gee, kind of sweet. I had had no idea I could pass in overalls, farm boots, and a man's hat! Such is the power of body shape, for mine, once I had turned around, was clearly not that of any man.

Made my day, anyway.

Which was a good thing, as the very next thing I did after roofing was to round the corner of the house and discover that the hose between the solar water heater and the house could not take the heat from a sixty degree day. The polyethylene outer sheath had swollen in several places, and water had forced its way through the woven inner sheath and burst the polyethylene in one spot, hosing down the house with hot water for I don't know how long. I swiftly shut down the spigot on the hot water tank (hot hot, HOT!) -- and reflected on how prone to error is this business of lowest-of-the-low-budget plumbing.

Having nothing on hand with which to carry out a better scheme, I went back to making and carrying loads of grass clippings, this time to the new potato patch...

-30-

Nesting songs

[posted by risa]

I was at a conference, and was asked about my hearing. "Did you lose it all at once, or gradually?"

Neither. I lost about half of my hearing all at once, when I was maybe eighteen months old.

Then half of the remaining half, or all of the hearing in my left ear, during a catastrophic illness back in the nineties.

I was explaining how that involved a strep infection, and my new friend said, "two decades ago, I lost a newborn to strep."

That brought a halt to the conversation. Feeling for her, my eyes filled with tears, then hers did, then we just openly wept with our arms round each other's shoulders, as passersby milled around us.

I told her about Benjamin.

Beloved had a couple of very late-term miscarriages in about 1983, when we lived in an area that was being sprayed by the Forest Service with 2,4,5-T herbicide, the spray schedule of which was later shown to exactly correlate with steep increases in miscarriages among farm families and their livestock in our valley.

There was, as was happening to others up and down the valley, a completely unexpected labor.

We lived seventy miles from the nearest hospital, around many hairpin curves between steep mountain walls, and when we got there, Benjamin, who would have been a little too young to have been a viable preemie anyway, had already died. We took it hard -- but, the hospital being a small-town one in logging and commercial fishing country, had more relaxed rules about these things than the big-city hospitals do, and allowed us to take him home with us in the morning --

-- which helped a lot, actually.

I walked a very exhausted Beloved into the house, the one that we had built with our own hands, and put her to bed, and then brought in the little kidney-shaped plastic dish, with its green towel folded over the tiny, and very still, pink form. We uncovered Benjamin and sat with him between us on the bedcovers.

He had all his fingers and toes, and his boy parts, and his eyes were closed.

I covered him again and went out and buried him by the side of the front steps, near the little apple tree, and went to bed, as the sun rose and the mountain birds set up their nesting songs all round.

:::

One doesn't think about these things so much, and then someone says something, and -- boom -- there it all is again, and hurts about as much as it did the first time.

And this morning Beloved and I talked about this, and we both think -- it helps to understand a hurt or a loss if you have had that same hurt or loss, or a close analogue. So that the best nurses, sometimes, are people who have been very sick (and recovered!), and counselors who have been through a loss may make the best bereavement counselors, and teachers who struggled with math are sometimes the right people to teach remedial math, and so on.

Last Son, who was conceived not long after we lost Benjamin, did make it into the world, but it seems likely that the contamination issues were still present. He had six serious birth defects, two of them life-threatening, and has to contend with Asperger's syndrome as well. He handles his circumstances with immense grace and dignity, and does not concern himself with the might-have-been.

"I am who I am," he says. "I'm not less than someone else, just all of me. How is that different for anybody?"

He volunteers at a commercial-scale nonprofit food-bank garden, and his supervisor had this to say about him in a recent recommendation:

A strong team player, [he] works well in both large and small groups. He is able to remain relaxed and composed, lending a sense of stability and calm to situations of high intensity and commotion. He is at ease with the huge diversity of volunteers who come to the Garden. Having incredibly strong interpersonal skills, he is comfortable working with everyone from preschool and elementary aged children, to special needs adults, high school and college aged students and retirees. He treats everyone with the utmost compassion and respect.

She notes particularly his rapport with those with "special needs." Many have acquired a sense of shame from the way others see or treat them -- as being something "less than" others. He teaches, by example, that there is no need to accept that burden. You want to handle a shovel? Here's how. These are weeds. Those aren't. The lettuces and fruit trees have their own clock, and all of us, however "slow," that wish to have a hand in this work will find that the garden has time for us.

Having a quiet young man around who is about the garden and not about limitations is a real help.

... that's nice to know. I won't pretend raising him was easy, though.

:::

I'm glad I could relate to my friend's sorrow. One may wish that one hadn't had to acquire the qualifications through like pain, but there it is. Life is to be lived, and death is a part of it, and if corporate greed hadn't been a factor, perhaps something else might have. Being born with Aspergers sometimes builds character, just as lifelong deafness does. Another friend once said, "I'm not the Blind, I'm a person who experiences the world in specific ways, and sight doesn't happen to be one of them." It's nice when circumstances can be played as strengths.

After the conference, a member of my organization checked on me. "Were you okay in there?"

Yes.

In a manner of speaking.


-30-

The best way

Sharon Astyk says:

"I garden for food, but also, I garden because it is the best way into myself that I know of."