gardening

Pear Blossoms

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IMG_20130511_104220I wait eagerly for this each year.  The pear tree blossoming in the back forty.  It is always so beautiful, this year more so because I finally got down there to prune it.  Bill and I drove the tractor down next to the tree and took turns lifting each other in the bucket at different angles to cut off the suckers.  This tree has never been pruned and was rather overrun.  I used the lopping shears and he used his smallest chain saw.  It was more than a little scary being 15+ feet off of the ground and moving into a tree.  I think Bill’s ride was probably a little scarier since I don’t drive the tractor that often.  My ride was fairly smooth backwards and forwards, up and down.  Bill’s on the other hand . . . let’s just say next time he’ll probably opt for a ladder.  At Old Sturbridge Village they always said to prune your fruit trees so a cat tossed into it wouldn’t hit any branches.  Fruit trees like a lot of air.  With any luck we will have more than the one pear we got last year.  The spring has been more “normal” this year with a more gradual warmup so the blossoms didn’t come out too early.  As long as we get some pollinators out there we should be okay.

The patches of what looks like white in the field are bluets.  We always put off mowing the field until these have gone by, the patches get bigger every year.  They are like clouds in the grass.

It’s a drizzly, rainy day today but everything is looking wonderfully green and lush.  Something about it just soothes the soul after such a long, cold winter.

Pay it Forward

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All along the Mohawk Trail through the town of Charlemont someone planted daffodils years ago.  It’s probably a 10 mile stretch of the road on the north side where there are clumps of various types of these flowers.  I look forward to seeing them every year and am always sad to see them go.

Daffodils also grow in what seems to be random places.  You drive by what may once have been someone’s home, now gone and there are daffodils blossoming on what may have once been their front yard. I find the resiliency of these flowers amazing.  Not only do they come back year after year they multiply.  A few turn into hundreds.

This is one of the things I’ve learned about gardening over the years – it’s slow.  Whenever you are planting perennials, shrubs or trees you always have to think years down the road.  Don’t plant things too close together or you will end up digging them up.  Take into consideration the spread of some plants before you plant them.  I have echinacea that takes up a good part of a garden now, that was the intent.  It has other things growing with it but I love that sea of pink in the summer.

Bill thinks the idea of planting new maple trees in the front yard of the house as pointless because we won’t live to enjoy the shade.  I say plant them now so my grandchildren will have beautiful trees shading the front of the house in the summer like they did when I was a child.

Perennial gardens are gifts to future generations in my opinion.  Some of the gardens I have in Rowe were planted by my mother, most of the plants cames from her friends and aquaintances.  She planted them for herself and to beautify the property but as a gardener you know that she probably knew that the garden would go on long after she was gone.  I love being able to go through my flower gardens and know where the peony came from or the dark purple iris.  They came from people I loved dearly that are no longer with us.   I love my gardens because I remember a day spent with Bill or my sister sweating with a shovel or moving stones.  Year after year I will walk down the stone path and see how my flowers are filling in.  A few years from now I won’t have to worry about the weeds because the perennials will have taken over.  A few years after that I will be dividing things up and giving them away – to people I care about.  It’s all about paying it forward.

Heartfelt

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Gerber Daisy Lg

 

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have our heart go walking around outside your body.”

Elizabeth Stone

Today is my youngest’s 26th birthday, it is also the week before Mother’s Day.  I’m not one to celebrate mother’s day in an extravagant way.  For me everyday is mother’s day even though my children are well into adulthood.  Of all the things I have done in my life being a mother has been the most important to me.  It defines who I am now.  I just always hope that I have raised kind and compassionate people, both with themselves and others.

Then days come like yesterday when I get to spend an afternoon with my progeny – two that I raised and one I did not and was recently reunited with. It was a quiet time enabling me to reflect on who they’ve become.  A chance to look at them and see my history in their eyes – my mother, my father, my grandparents and marvel at the wonder of it all.  There are so many things they are born with that just need a little nurturing.  The amazing thing is you often don’t see these things until they are adults.

 I wasn’t fully aware how many of our children’s talents are inherited and blossom with a little nurture.  It’s so much like planting a garden.  You put those seeds in the ground knowing what they are and how they will look but you fuss over them and water them and watch over their growth and maturity.  When they mature it is still a marvelous revelation. You think how beautiful even though you knew it all along.

Seeing what they’ve become is only part of it though, there are no words to express the swelling in my soul that encompasses them.  It defies description, yet I know when they have children of their own they will know the feeling.  The idea that your heart is walking outside of your body embodies so many things.  I think I’ll try to remember next time I’m out in the world that every person has a mother who has this same primal desire for her child to feel the sweet kindness of those who come to know them.

Every mom’s heart is out there in the world walking outside her body.

 

 

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120828 Back Forty Sunset (1)

 

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God.  Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be.  And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

Anne Frank wrote those words when she was 14 years old.  She must have been an old soul, so much wisdom, so young.

It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve been to Rowe.  I need to see the stars and get away from traffic, take a walk in the woods.

The pear tree needs trimming although it’s later to do it than it should be, it still needs to be done.  The raspberries need trimming, the beds need to be semi cleaned out, mulched.  There are brush piles to be burned, wood to be split, gardens to be spruced up.  I need to check into what I have for seed potatoes and get some onion sets.  The Ball jars need to be inventoried.  Just the beginning of the busiest time of the year – now until October.  Always too much to do and just enough.  I love having an outdoor to do list.  There’s always an excuse to be out there.

So even though I will be working I will also be alone with the heavens, nature and God.  I will return to my work week renewed and refreshed.

Thrive Where You’re Planted

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During the Blizzard of ’78 my sister was in the hospital for some emergency surgery.  Her later to be mother-in-law sent her a pot of daffodils – there were a dozen in the pot as I recall.  Once they had died back they were planted in a border garden around the patio.  Over the years they have naturalized to the point of hundreds.  They are all over New England at this point.  Everywhere I have had a garden they are now too numerous to count.  They have been given away to friends and family in  MA, VT, NH and CT.  They are now in full bloom in Enfield, around the front of the house, along the driveway, in the perennial garden in the back yard.  They are scattered all down the bank going into the back forty in Rowe.  These amuse me most of all.  For years my mother’s mulch pile was over that bank.  There was a stone wall there many years ago and it was completely grown in with trees.  She would dig up things that she no longer wanted or bulbs were perhaps pulled along with the weeds – over the bank they would all go.

I have planted many plants in a perennial garden only to watch them migrate to where they really want to be.  They will self seed in a sunnier or wetter spot and the original will die back.  It’s no use trying to get them to grow where you want them to, they just grow where they are happy.  That’s how I feel at times about being caught between Enfield and Rowe, suburban and rural, noisy and quiet.  I just want to be where it’s sunny and quiet.  Then I think about those daffodils. They speak volumes about thriving where you are.  It doesn’t mattered the soil type, the sunlight, the moisture – they all seem to like where they are and continue to multiply year after year.  In my head I know that’s how it should be – thrive where you are – but some days (especially sunny spring ones) I just want to be in a quiet spot.  Maybe transplanting daffodils.

Happy Earth Day – go dig in the dirt!

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Food Rant Friday

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There's Nothing Like Homemade.

Farmhouse Cheddar and Apple Pie

 

There are few things that fire me up more than food.  I mean fake food versus real food.  I follow a blog called Auburn Meadow Farm.  This week her blog brought me to this informative pdf called Food Stamps, Follow the Money by Michele Simon.  Take some time to read it.  Or you could be like me and be soo angry after the first page that you have to put it down for a little while and come back to it.  Do come back to it though because in the interest of being informed on so many levels it is an excellent read.

I’m dating myself here but when I grew up we still had home economics required in high school, cooking and sewing.  I also belonged to a number of 4-H clubs including cooking, sewing, knitting, etc.  Over the years all of these opportunities for education have gone away.  I think some of it has to do with the women’s movement, some has to do with budget cuts in schools and some with the perception that this sort of thing is just old fashioned – why knit yourself a sweater when you can go to a store and buy it right now at half the cost.  Home Arts has gone out of style.

As I age in this land of consumerism I fear for my children – all of them – sons, daughters, nieces, nephews.  They have grown up in a society that values nothing but money and instant gratification.  Instead of going to a market to buy the ingredients for a meal they buy fast food.  It has little nutritional value, contains GMO’s, huge amounts of sodium, and a whole lot of things I can’t even pronounce.  My daughters do go “shopping” in Rowe from time to time and raid the canned goods shelves.  I take satisfaction in knowing when they take that jar of spaghetti sauce off of the shelf it contains grass fed beef and vegatables that I have grown.  I am blessed to have that ability and am willing to teach anyone how to do anything from gardening to canning to handwork. They just have to want to learn it.

 

 

Going, going, gone.

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130411 (1)Sue messaged me on Tuesday to say I wouldn’t believe how much of the snow was gone.  Sunday when we left there was just one bare spot next to the patio.  This morning all of the gardens are exposed.  Things are popping out of the earth everywhere.  God I love this time of year.  The birds were all singing.  The back forty was very, very wet but walkable.  The water is rushing through the little brook that exits Hoover Damn (I guess I should write about Hoover Damn sometime).

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The garlic is up!  That’s very exciting.

130411 (2)And this looks like what will be on the agenda this weekend – burning brush.  It seems like this is a never ending chore.  It piles up all year waiting for burn season to open in January.  Of course in January there is usually too much snow and half the pile is buried so we have to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.  Burn season ends on May 1st so we just finish sugaring and it’s a mad couple of weekends trying to get everything burned.  There is also a large pile of logs that needs to be cut and split.  And of course Chester has photo bombed another shot.  That’s his purpose in life.

 

 

Happy First Day of Spring

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Spring

 

I photographed this as I went out the door to work this morning.  It’s a little deceptive because these bulbs are under a cedar tree so the snow didn’t really accumulate there.  It’s nice to see they don’t care.

I could do without the snow now.  I’m over it.  I know there won’t be another snowshoeing day until next year.  We will just have to contend with cold, slush and ice until it finally warms enough for it all to go.  I love spring, the warming of the earth, going through the perennial beds to see what coming up and where.  The spring bulbs are the first to poke their heads up.

These daffodils are everywhere.  The photograph was taken in Enfield but there are hundreds in Rowe.  They started out as a pot of 12 bulbs that Mabel gave my sister when she was in the hospital for surgery during the blizzard of ’78.  Sue planted them in a flower bed around the patio in Rowe.  Over the years they’ve been dug up, divided and moved everywhere.  There are hundreds that bloom around the patio and now in other gardens.  They are over the bank going to the back forty because that was my mother’s mulch pile years ago.  I’ve given the bulbs to people all over New England and moved some to Enfield.

I think that’s my favorite part about perennial gardening – giving plants away and getting plants from other gardeners.  We have peonies that came from my third grade teacher’s garden, irises from my mother’s best friend.  I have a gas plant that came from an abandoned garden center in Enfield that has moved with me three times.  They are all beautiful in bloom but for me the true beauty is the reminder of gardeners that I loved that are no longer here.

Seeds Ordered

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I did it. I ordered my seeds yesterday.  A commitment has been made.  Now all that’s left is the layout.

My favorite gardens have been potagers.  They are functional and beautiful.  They are interesting enough so I want to weed them and keep them clean (alright, sorta weeded and clean).  One of the real reasons I love potagers so much is the look on Russell’s face when he sees it.  He’s a straight row kind of guy and he always looks at my garden with scepticism.  It makes me laugh. My garden has rows, just not all rows.  I like things to have a certain whimsy about them yet be functional at the same time.  I always plant things for the birds, bees and butterflies.  I like color. Consequently I plant things that other people don’t.  I love Scarlet Runner Beans.  They are beautiful to grow.  Hummingbirds and butterflies love them.  I love picking the beans at the end of the season and marveling at their bright purple and pink spots. I can’t say that I like eating them so I plant them with another pole bean that I will eat and put up.

Each year I look through my past garden plans to see where the potatoes or tomatoes were planted in the past few years so I can rotate them around.  The potatoes are always planted in rows because of the ease in hilling but I plant the tomatoes in all different configurations.  This year I may plant blocks or circles of separate varieties instead of  in rows.  I also will be planting fewer varieties, but maybe more yellows. My new seed for the year will be Tom Thumb popcorn.  I always try something totally different.  Corn isn’t a do or die for me so when I plant it I do it totally out of curiosity.  I figure it’ll probably turn into fodder for raccoons but you don’t know until you try.

Things to remember this year is to add a lot of compost before I till.  Stake the tomatoes early (so they don’t get away from me).  Get more caution tape for fencing – yes, works better than anything I’ve found although it isn’t all that pretty. Sharpen the weeding tools.

Best of all I will be cleaning off the Adirondack chairs in preparation for relaxing and enjoying the view.

Dreaming

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I’m dreaming of warm weather. Of tilling the earth, the smell of it. Of a vegetable gardens surrounded by caution tape. The smell of fresh mowed grass. Fresh lettuce. Radishes. Chard. Beans. Longer days. It’s coming. A few short months away.