Rowe

Planning that Garden Years in Advance

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131013 Garlic Planting

 

Sunday morning I was able to till the soil on the south side of the garage and plant my garlic. This was pretty much my entire crop from this year. It’s a hard necked variety called Music that performed very well. When all was said and done I planted 70 bulbs. Next year we should have enough to eat for the winter and spring plus the same amount to plant the following year.

Gardening is such a long term process. You always have to think years down the line and plan, plan, plan. “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray” is every farmer’s adage so we plan for the unexpected as well.

My garden has begun to expand with more permanent plantings. Raspberries and asparagus are the newest members. Blueberries, rhubarb and pears have been there awhile. I still have another year before I will be eating the asparagus but once the patch comes in it will be amazing. My raspberries have had two years of not doing so well and I am beginning to think I should move them to another spot, maybe in the back forty. They will have just as much sun but the soil won’t dry out as much. It’s worth a shot, they certainly aren’t happy where they are.

Growing your own food is both wonderful and anxiety producing. You worry about your plants. You wonder if your timing is right for planting, for harvesting.  Every year is different. I used to think that once I had 10 years under my belt I would be able to relax but that is not the case. Too warm, too cold, too wet, too dry, sheesh. I keep records from year to year – garden layout, planting time, harvest time. I review it during the winter and try to plan but you never know. So all we can do is hope for the best.

Calling My Name

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131005 Maltese Cross

 

Weaving has become an obsession with me.  I warped my loom in Rowe last week.  I was proud to say after 430 ends only one was threaded wrong and I was able to fix it with a string heddle.  I love having an instructor who knows the craft so well she can teach you the tricks that get you out of a jam.

I wound an extra long warp so I could weave three of these throws in succession with different colors.  This is the traditional blue and white.  The next will be with a variegated green/brown combination and the last will be anyone’s guess.  Christmas is coming.  I figure I can have these off of the loom by Halloween and move on to other gifts.

Although I weave during the week at the studio in Brimfield we are weaving cotton.  Cotton is what I started with when I began learning to weave, it gives a beautiful definition to the structure.  For that reason I like weaving with it, especially when I am doing something new.  My last project for the class this past spring was the red and white wool throw and it was revelation.

I love the feel of wool.  I love the way it feels going through my hands. Winding the warp seemed effortless, it had a calming effect. That’s really the reason I love having something in wool always going somewhere.  It’s not just the counting and meditative repetition of the act of weaving, it is also the feel.  This throw is warped in Jaggerspun Maineline 2/8 yarn, it is soft and wonderful to work with.  The weft on this section is Bartlettyarn Maine Wool  which is a beautiful worsted weight yarn.

The other aspect of weaving with wool is the smell – I’m thinking it’s only fiber people that will understand that statement.  It smells like it came from an animal, it’s wonderful.  Don’t get me wrong – it doesn’t smell while you’re weaving but you can take a hank of wool and breathe it in, ahhhh.  It’s in the finishing that some of these remaining oils are washed out and that’s what makes the fiber “bloom”.  There are so many times when I look at the weaving on the loom and think it doesn’t look as good as it should.  Once it is washed and dried a miracle happens and it often looks better than anticipated.

That’s the thing I’ve found with weaving – every aspect of it is equally important to the finished project.  People tell me they love to weave but hate to warp.  To me that is the most important part, otherwise nothing else works.  It is time consuming, yes, but I take it as a challenge.  I try to beam my warp so the tension is even, thread my heddles so there are no mistakes, slay the reed without skipping a space all the first time.  It becomes tedious when I don’t pay attention and have to take it all out and start over.  Throwing the shuttle is the easy part most of the time.  Finishing can be tedious as well but when you do it it’s magic.  What looked just okay on the loom becomes a masterpiece once it is washed.  All aspects of the process come together.

Little Gifts

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131007 Mill Pond

 

The leaves this year are spectacular.  The past few years have been less so, a muddled brown mess, a disappointment to the people who travel hours to gawk at them.

Yesterday was a rainy, cold day.  I looked out the window often, the color in the back forty at its peak.  The grasses have all turned a golden brown with the rust colored ferns mixed in.  The maples are wearing their scarlet jackets now, more brilliant with each passing day.  The birches a bright yellow.  Another week and it will all be gone for the most part, especially if the rain keeps up.

I have seen the leaves change every year for my entire life.  Many years ago I was working as a photographer in North Carolina during foliage season and I flew home for a weekend so I wouldn’t miss it.

I have to tell you that I rarely photograph the foliage as it changes.  I observe it, soak it in but I’ve found that photographs I’ve taken just blend in year after year.  As I left the house in Rowe last evening I drove right past this.  The pond is right in the center of town (of course the center of town is just a few buildings).  There is a gazebo just to the left out of the photograph.  The light was going fast, there was a heavy mist and the fog was pretty dense.  I notice the tree right away and thought wow, how beautiful.  I kept on driving but the tree was stuck in my head.  As I continued down the road I first thought “I’ll take it during the week, next time up.”  I then realized this was it – the only moment this would look like this.  If it was still in my head a mile down the road I had to turn back.  I did.

As I walked around the green I thought about the house that was once in this spot, abutting the road.  I thought about learning to fish in that pond and doing it often from the shore with other friends all having ridden our bikes with our poles.  I remembered Helen and Ray, creators and guardians of the the Rowe Historical Society spending their retirement years in the house on the pond.

Walking back to my car, my feet completely soaked, I wondered why I never really noticed that maple before.  I think it’s just a little gift you get every once in a while.  That tree flagged me down, told me to look at the exquisite beauty all around me, stop taking it for granted.

Little gifts, you just have to slow down long enough to accept them.  The bonus is I got back into my car, scrolled through the images I had just taken and thought “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted.”  A rare feeling indeed.

Fall is Here

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130915 (1)See that weed infested mess in the foreground – it’s gone!  We pulled up the stakes and mowed it with the lawnmower.  Yes, that is how weedy it was.  As a matter of fact it looks like the rest of the lawn.  I’m sad that garden season is over but I’m not sad to see that garden gone.   Bill started building a fire pit in the middle of it for the upcoming Harvest party.  I figure if nothing else the center of the garden will be weed free next year.

Chester Swims

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Chester swimming –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln25i3bAA8A

Percy’s Point is one of our favorite spots right now.  It’s quiet, peaceful and the perfect spot for Chester to getting his swimming in.  He’s come a long way since his first swim in June.  I was afraid my water dog would be a panic swimmer forever.  Not so, he LOVES it.

Dragonflies in My Garden

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dragonfly

From Vikusik on Flickr

Sunday was a sunny, beautiful day.  I sat in a chair at the edge of my garden husking my popcorn when a huge dragonfly landed on the front of my t-shirt.  It’s rather startling when an insect of this size lands on you – especially when you hear it coming in for a landing.  It was stunningly beautiful.  It sat in a spot that allowed me close inspection.  At first I was wondering why it had little red legs under it’s chin then realized (due to the crunching) that it was eating another insect recently caught.

The property has a lot of wetlands and I look forward to seeing dragonflies every year.  There is usually a yearly swarm which is a sight to behold.  We have flying ants that take off from nests in the stone patio and it seems like the dragonflies are ready and waiting for this event.  A few years ago it looked like a dragonfly cyclone over the patio as hundreds of dragonflies swarmed over the emerging ants for dinner.  They must have been tasty.

Last spring the New York Times did an article with a few videos about dragonflies, thought I would share – Nature’s Drone, Pretty and Deadly.

I’m just glad I’m not a flying ant or mosquito.

End of Year Garden Assessment

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130915 (1)I took this photograph yesterday morning overlooking the best garden of weeds I have ever had.  I have had a vegetable garden for a good ten years now and this has to be the worst one yet. Fortunately the rest of the view is pretty nice.

For some reason in my mind it is the first week of October (I even tore off the September page of the calendar on Saturday and didn’t realize it until Sunday).  It may be the weeds or my confused state but I decided to dismantle most of the garden this past weekend.  I had Cherry Belle radishes the size of beets – over 5 feet tall and gone to seed (which was interesting since I had never done that).  I had a total of two beets the size of radishes.

130915 (2)I really began by pulling up all of my popcorn.  It had been raining the past week a good deal and I thought I should probably get it out of the ground.  I laid all of the stalks in my garden wagon thinking I would keep the ears on the stalks to dry further.  This was Tom Thumb popcorn, an heirloom variety developed in New Hampshire.  It was bred to do well in a short season.  It only grows 3 feet tall and is quite cute.  It did well.  Sunday I decided to pull all of the ears off of the stocks, peel back the husks and let them dry further.  They are supposed to dry to a 14% moisture content.  I’m not sure how you’re supposed to figure that out but most people just try popping a few kernels every so often during the drying period to see when they pop.  Works for me.  Did I mention that none of these ears is more than 4 inches long?  Most are in the 3 inch category – hence the name Tom Thumb. 

130915 (3)I then pulled what carrots I had.  I had planted two varieties – the old standby Danvers and Atomic Red.  Another rather disappointing harvest.  This is all I had – a total of 6 pints when it was all said and done.  When I saw them scrubbed up in the bowl I was glad I had planted both, they look great together.  I canned them with a brown sugar glaze.  I had heard a review from my sister that this was the only way to go.  Well, when you only have 6 pints you have to make a choice,  I went with sweet.

The rest of the potatoes were dug on Saturday and left out in the sun until yesterday afternoon.  Not a particularly good year for them either.  We had a lot of rain and the earth really compacted around them.  The potatoes are delicious, the yield was just not there (that and the fact that we ate fully half of them as new potatoes).

130915 (4)Then there is the matter of tomatoes.  The vines in the garden have been brown without leaves for a couple of weeks.  The yellow cherries just kept coming – we are at a loss to understand why.  This tomato is extremely prolific.  The bonus is it takes them a long, long time to rot.  Another interesting thing is they drop off of the vine as soon as they begin to turn yellow so rather than pick them off of the plant you end up picking them off of the ground.  I was pulling the stakes up that were holding the plants and these tomatoes were everywhere.  Not being one to let good food go to waste I picked them up and canned them with 4 red tomatoes that were the only ones left.  I ended the tomato season with an additional 6 pints of beautiful golden sauce.

I planted a total of seven eggplants – they produced 4 fruit.  They were delicious but I’m not sure if it was this particular year’s weather or my growing season is just too short.  The plants are blossoming like crazy right now but I know there won’t be enough time before we have a frost.  I feel a little bad pulling them up but I’m not going to weed around them.

The asparagus looks great. The bed will be cleaned out, mulched and  some edging will be put in this fall.  The rutabagas are just okay this year, they will stay in the ground until a couple of frosts hit, then I will pull them.  They are smaller than usual.  The rest of the garden will be tilled in the next week or so (because I can’t look at the crabgrass any more).

We have scoped out a new area for the garden.  This will involve outside help for excavation and some fill but it holds the promise of being a better location long term.  We have some mature maples along the south end of where the garden presently is and that is the one tree we are loathe to cut down.  I figure the way the crabgrass grew in this year it would take about a month to turn the present garden into lawn since most of the lawn is crabgrass anyway.

 

 

 

 

In Between Seasons

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130912 Morning Storm Clouds (1)The past two days have been hot and humid, the cicadas buzzing away.  I brought the dogs out at 6:30 this morning and this is what the sky looked like.  Something you normally see as the clouds build on a humid summer afternoon as the thunderstorms roll in.  It feels like July.

130912 Morning Storm Clouds ()

This kind of weather does something to my brain – I can’t quite comprehend the garden being done (yes, other than digging potatoes and rutabagas it’s done). My mind has moved onto Fall jobs.  Bringing in and stacking wood, that’s what I should be doing but not it this heat.

Then I look out over my newest garden, still ablaze with color,  everything taking on the ochre colors of autumn and my mind knows that winter is coming.

130912 Colors of Fall

 

Mr. Photobomb

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130908 Pear Tree PhotobombI just had to take a photo or two of the pear tree.  It is loaded with fruit this year and I am always amazed at how the branches bow down to the ground without breaking.  The light was harsh but it was a beautiful evening.  And guess who just happened to be in the shot.  One of many that he was in.  You’d think he was waiting to see the results.