A to Z "W"

W is for wild juneberries.

In the garden of my youth, my grandmother had various things planted around the border, just inside the garden fence.  The garden was big. Have I mentioned that? At least an acre, I'd guess.

While doing time in the garden of weedin' , we occasionally took breaks, especially early in the summer, to visit the things planted along the border. There was rhubarb, a long row of gooseberries, and then a juneberry bush. The juneberry bush was a shrubby kind of plant. Lots of small trunks rising form the earth, a clump of suckers.  And we'd fill up its branches (as they bent down beneath our weight) like a flock of hungry birds.  And then, Grandma would discover us and cuss at us in German-because just like the hungry birds, we'd beat her to the berries every summer, just before they were ripe to her liking. Her anger didn't last long.

That's all gone now, the juneberry bush, the rhubarb and gooseberries, the garden, and even grandma.  What remains are the memories.  An they flood back each spring when I see, near to the 21st day of April, the cousins of that garden juneberry bush come into bloom.

A genus of the Rosaceae (Rose) family, the wild juneberries, Amelanchier  ssp, known as service berries-- among other common names,  are scattered along the hills and hollows of my neck of the woods.

They announce the arrival of spring just as constant as the return of robins or the spring peepers' song.

A few pics I took yesterday from my part of the world. Enjoy. And thanks for visiting.  To see other "W" posts from A to Z participants, click Here.

A to Z "V"

V is for vegetable.

If you live on a farm, even live in the country, you've probably grown a few vegetables.  And you understand that zucchinis are the most shared vegetable ever, green peas are the biggest bargain in the supermarket, carrots really grow funny if you live in rocky soil, and tomatoes are the most aggressive vegetable in the garden.

Ahh...memories of summer days. The list on the refrigerator door always included "Hoe a row in the garden." I won't fess up to what passed for hoeing a row, but if we'd had a lawn mower, it would have been tempting.

At some point, hoeing became futile. Yep. Impossible.  The cucumbers and the beans and the tomatoes sprawled across the landscape, threatening to obliterate any view remaining of actual garden dirt.  Now, that was a good thing, but that was a bad thing too.

Because when  you're done hoeing for the year, it was because it was time to start picking for the year. It started early enough, and continued until the cows came home--or as was more often the case, until the frost came.

Tomatoes used to be like that, you know. They just grew and grew and grew, "indeterminate" space-raiders that they were. And the thing about tomatoes is that every so far along a tomato vine, it will set a whorl of leaves and stems AND blossoms--which turn into fruit. Starting at the oldest part of the plant (the bottom near the ground) and then it continues in this manner until it's autumnal demise.

So, if you planted a tomato, it would provide fresh, ripe tomatoes for a couple of months.  Here is where necessity (by canneries) bred a whole new type of tomato plant.  Canneries with farms had a very labor-intensive crop in their fields. They had workers picking a few tomatoes from the same plants day after day, weeeek after week...you get the idea.

But...what if they had a tomato plant that produced all of its tomatoes at the same time? And they all ripened at the same time?  And then...drum roll...they would be efficient. You could harvest an entire field, turn it over and be done with it. You could apply treatments aimed at a specific stage of plant maturity--to a whole field and not worry about damaging a later crop on the same plants. Maybe...why stop with the tomato. How about pole beans and those sprawling cucumbers. Maybe---you could even utilize machinery to help you pick.

Thus the "determinate" "bush" tomato variety was born. And pole beans fell out of style, were relegated to the title of heirloom, and replaced by bush beans. Same with the cucumbers.

What the researchers and canneries won't tell you is that while in breeding out the propensity to sprawl--to grow endlessly, they also bred out a great deal of the flavor.

Those "heirloom" varieties are incredible. Try one if you get the chance.

And, those bush varieties promoted by the few, mega-conglomerates that own the major seed companies, are leading us toward an agricultural disaster. Diversity is key to survival.

It's getting awfully shallow in the seed gene pool.  If you plant...grow an heirloom or two.

A to Z "O"

O...  Onions came to mind when I thought of the letter O with respect to growing up on a farm. Onions, for anyone who has never grown them, is a root crop in the lily family. I'm a fan of onions. Growing up on a farm with a tight budget, there was ample opportunity to meet different foods--and to eat what was fixed for supper. It was a long time until breakfast--should I have chosen otherwise. I digress.

Back to the onions. They are pretty easy to grow, too. Root crops, in general, are an easy group to grow. We grew a ton of root crops when I was a kid. Turnips--which I still like to eat.  It was pretty common for us to have mashed potatoes/turnips in about a 50/50 blend. Probably healthier too than just plain potatoes.

Potatoes... now that brings to mind picking potatoes. Of course, when I say "picking", it's not like you can pick a potato off of a plant like you pick a pepper or a tomato (which are, oddly enough, in the same plant family--the nightshades).  Since potatoes are tubers that form along the root system of the plant, the roots must be dug up from the ground before we can pick potatoes.

Dad had a potato digger. He pulled it behind the Farmall H and it dug into the ground much like a plow does.  Then we had to carry buckets into the field and loosen the clods of dirt to knock the potatoes loose. I've read it compared to searching for treasure from the earth. Hmm...maybe now I'd say that, when I grow a couple of Yukon Gold potato plants, and a few blue potato plants. But when I was a kid and stood looking at a two acre field of potatoes being turned over, it was anything but treasure. It was work.

I suppose I was grumpy--I must have been all of 5 or 6 years old--the memory is quite hazy. My grumpiness, I suppose, made it quite easy for my older brother Pete to torment me to the point that I picked up a potato and threw it at him with a wind up that would've made Cy Young envious. And I suppose it was just as easy for Pete to duck and watch the potato sail right past him and wallop my aunt Mary in the head just as she lifted her face to yell at us for bickering.

I've digressed once again. This is the "O" post.

What I wanted to share today is the reason we cry when we peel and slice and chop onions.

Onions have sulfur compounds in them. When they are sliced, those compounds mix with other compounds and become airborne. That meets the water that lubricates our eyes and forms a very mild but highly irritating sulfuric acid.  Then our eyes begin to tear, trying to wash away the irritant.

Whew, that was a two dollar story just to give you a ten cent explanation. ;-)

Happy O day. :-)

A to Z "G"

Gardeners and Ghosts

Writing about country life naturally lent itself to making my "G" post about gardens. But something pulled me just to the left of a straight up gardening tale. Anyone can tell you how to garden. There are thousands of sites devoted to showing you what to plant, and when and where to plant it.  But, I want you to know that there is more to gardening than that. There are ghosts.
     I gardened alongside my grandma and siblings as a child. We lived out of the garden during the winter, from Mason jars packed full of vegetables, fruit, sunshine , laughter and warmer days. But I didn't like to garden. As a child, I found it to be more slave labor than joyous pursuit in harmony with nature.
     Grandma was the overseer, and she did her job well. She dished out healthy doses of gardening instructions, tales about family--about our ancestors, and religion--oh, and she cussed at us in German. I don't know how she knew it all. There wasn't a single gardening book in the house, and her seeds were all saved from year to year in the notorious Mason Jars. There weren't even seeds packages with instructions on the back.
     I'd watch her bending over, picking tomatoes or green beans, checking gooseberries and current-berries, and watching the bats when they came out in the evening. She'd tell me how good the bats were for us, how many bugs they ate. She'd watch the sky, and often she'd look down across the rhubarb and the Juneberry bush, at lower pasture fields toward Rough Run. I always thought she was looking for something--in retrospect, she was, but it wasn't anything I was wise enough to see.  Then she'd hold my hand and we'd walk to the house, stopping along the way to pray--always the 90th Psalm, and finally the house. I wondered what drove her to garden. Was I missing something?
     It all escaped me. And I swore I'd never garden as an adult. If my roots had begun to settle in the soil, I'd cut them off with a quick thought about pulling weeds, loading them in the old wheelbarrow, and hauling them to the pigpen.
     Then, in adulthood, along came children. What followed was a bizarre urge to garden. I don't recall exactly the first time I heard the call, but once it started, it was strong. I might be crazy, but the voice in my head sounded suspiciously like my grandma's. Was it her ghost come visiting? I couldn't help but set some seeds to earth, with little hands helping me cover them.
     The voice of the gardener was relentless. I tried to answer the call by growing a bigger garden every year, buying the Ball Bluebook and filling those Mason jars. I dreamed gardening. I read gardening. I went to classes. I shared gardening with every soul who expressed interest or asked a question. And all the while, that voice kept whispering to me. Okay, sometimes it shouted. Why wouldn't it stop? I was a textbook gardener.
         And one evening, weary from hoeing and weeding, I was sitting beside my little  garden shed looking down across the pastures and woods, toward Rough Run, listening to the sounds of the approaching night.  It really hit home. I was my grandma, fifty years later and I wasn't looking for anything--but I was finally wise enough to see what she saw back then.  That gardening is a gentle human gesture, shared between a man and the earth. It's a soul dancing amid sweat and dirt.
       Humbling... Gardening is more than textbook. It's more than "as labeled", it's more than yield per plant...and most of all, it's more than any set of how-to instructions. It sunk in how much I craved the sunshine and the rain. I enjoyed the doing--there was joy in the act of gardening. There was a simple peace in the evenings, walking back to the house with as much dirt under my nails as was rubbed into the knees of my jeans.
     My shoulders were damp with dew, and fireflies flashed in the meadow beyond rows of tomatoes and marigolds.  Frogs croaked in the little pond down in the woods, and the dying wind rattled the leaves of the broom corn. This was it--this was gardening, and I was finally a gardener. I'd moved beyond words about gardening-- and allowed my roots to sink in, and to run deep and wide.
     The compelling urgency to garden has since died, and the voice inside my head? Well, it's quiet now. I like to think that it was the ghost of grandma, and that she's content.  She sees the garden that I tend these years, and I sense that she's comfortable with the "No Bitching" stepping stone at the garden entrance, and that it's right fine with her that we grow a lot more flowers than vegetables. It wasn't really ever about the yield--we never would have starved. It was about the lessons and the journey, though.

Please click on the A to Z badge on the right to visit others participating in the blogging from A to Z 2013. And thanks for visiting and reading. :-)

    

Life: A lesson in Futility

A lesson in futility? Well, that came right from the garden this evening.  I've been thinking a lot about it lately-about futility, and about the transient nature of all things.  Somehow those two words--transient and futility, have become all garbled up in my mind.  And I blame it on the garden, mostly.

It started last week, one evening, walking up the lane to watch the sunset. Where the hedgerow dividing two properties comes to an end, the world opened up before me.  Off to the west, the vista is wide and far.  Off to the south, there is a hilltop where dwells the remaining twisted and gnarled old apple trees my grandmother planted--probably eighty years ago.

It was a large orchard, and by my best estimate of size and tree spacing of the remnants, there must have been nearly fifty fruit trees there. Then, big business, government, specifically West Penn Power, arrived and taught my poor old grandmother the meaning of eminent domain.  They cut down half of the trees to make way for progress.

And I thought about how nearly 37 years since her passing, the handful remain, scarred, bent, twisted and diseased. Oh my, such character they have.

My mind wandered as it often does, to how heartbroken grandma would be if she were alive to see what is left of her prized orchard. But, even in their dying gasps of splintered trunks, deformed fruit, and dead branches bleached a ghostly white, the beautiful part of that old orchard is that the robins still build nests in them.  And beneath them, each fall, the white tail deer still eat the  misshapen fruit that drops to the frosted ground.

When I was going to Master Gardeners' class, one of the teachers said, "I'm often asked by some well-meaning person who has inherited a piece of ground, 'I have this old apple tree.  My grandfather planted it seventy-five years ago.  Where should I start pruning it?'  And I always tell them, 'At the ground'."

I sat in that classroom, knowing that I could easily have been one of those well-meaning people.  But I was forced to learn something that day: everything has a time.

In the garden this evening, in solitude, just me, a hoe, and a flat of flowers, I planted, weeded, sprinkled my well-researched natural pesticide, and I sweated.

I griped a little, I'm sure. Something to the effect, "Damn, it's hot this early in the season. And those weeds! Will they never stop?"

And the answer was as plain as the nose on my face. Nope. The weeds will never stop.  And wild fruit brambles that ceaselessly encroach upon a little corner of dirt we endeavor to control will never stop.  And the tall trees will continue to grow and increase the shade where I yearn to grow sun-loving flowers and vegetables.

My husband often reminds me, when I complain about the vegetables and flowers getting chewed off by the wildlife, about the trees shading the small garden,  about drought, about rain, "It's nature, Reesie."

And he patiently runs a weed-eater several times each season.  And once each spring, he runs the old rototiller, staking claim once again to what little piece of earth we are going to command, to control, to force to our will.

A lesson in futility? Yes. And a fine one, indeed. 

And we are learning to accept it. It's all temporary.  Someday, our little secret garden beyond the corner left intentionally wild, will be much like grandma's orchard. A last gasp...and gone...save only for in the memories of the living.

A to Z "H" is for horseradish: A bitter herb that runs wild.

Horseradish...love it or hate. There seems to be no middle ground.

My boss's 80 year old father gave me a "start" of it two years ago.  Midsummer. Tough time to move a plant. When their bright green leaves should be busy, photosynthesizing energy to support a comfortably established plant, these poor things were being jerked out of the ground and moved in the high heat of summer.

Don't feel too sorry for it. :-)  I didn't. I knew better.

I gave it a spot in the corner of the garden where shade prevails most days.  I tucked chucked it into the ground and told it, "Behave yourself. I'll only put up with so much. This is your corner, and when you start to explore the rest of the garden, I will drag you right out of that ground quicker than you can say cocktail sauce!"

Two years later, even with drought summers and lack of sunshine, it has prevailed and is running across the dirt like gardener's garters. You do have to admire its tenacity.

So, dig it up I will. Not only because it has (as expected) misbehaved, but its unwanted neighbor, a dock that greatly resembles it, has set up shop practically intertwined with the stuff.

I approached the garden with a sharp shovel. The afternoon was breezy and cool, and the sky was splotched with patches of blue. About "enough to make a pair of Dutchman's britches" as the old timers used to say.

Speaking of old timers...they said a lot of things.  Back around the road, at the neighbor's, where the valley seems to drop down to nowhere, some seventy years ago the local fellas used to meet to play cards.   My dad used to like to tell about one springtime evening when they were playing cards and drinking some "shine" out of water glasses.  He was just a teenager. It must have been a month that had the letter "R" in it, because you don't dig up horseradish in the other months.

Before they knew it, the dares to drink a glass of shine had turned to a dare to "drink" a glass of freshly ground horseradish.  One of the neighbors did. "Damn near killed him." my dad used to say, with a gleam in his eye.

It's also one of the "bitter herbs of spring" the old timer's ingested to "flush out winter".  A spring tonic. I suspect there might be science behind that.  The properties that make some plants bitter also inhibit bacteria from binding with protein--like that found in the urinary tract.  Dandelion and cranberries-both bitter, have been used by herbal practitioners to treat UTIs.

So, I set to work: The left is what I was facing. The horseradish is easily identifiable at this stage by the fern looking leaves in its center. The middle photo shows how it was escaping out of its corner. The photo on right shows that there is no other way to do it but dig in the dirt.

Here, the left shows horseradish roots, center is the similar dock roots, and right is dent de lion. (lion's tooth) aka dandelion. 

On left is a large, two year old root--woody and too tough to use. but it can be replanted to produce more roots.  Center is tender roots ends from a two year old plant, and on the right is the corner of the garden, weeded, replanted, looking as it should.

"Life begins the day you plant a garden."  To which I say:

Escaping begins the day you plant a horseradish. :-)


Happy spring. Happy gardening, all. :-)