Viewing Jasper Mountain: August

August

AS I rose this morning and carried a cup of English Breakfast to the east porch, I found Beloved already there, with her big mug of coffee, admiring her surroundings wistfully.
    "Fall has started," she said.
    This was a shock. The really hot weather has only just begun, and we've become full-time waterers.
    But I knew immediately what she meant.
    The air smelled differently, somehow, than the previous morning, and a golden glow on the wall behind us, the telltale September glow, which I associate with Canada geese going up the river, suffused the whole porch area with sadness.
    Where did the summer go, so soon, that we had waited so long to begin? And we have so little to show for our work, so far this year...

    The brassicas went in too late to avoid the flea beetles, which are the current plague. We only did one small bed of peas, rather than the usual four in succession. The tomatoes have barely set fruit. We've just picked the first zucchini, and there's no crookneck squash yet.
    Granted, we did get a crop off the early sweet corn, but the late variety should have tasseled by now and hasn't even reached waist high yet.
    The second-year red onions were our only real show crop, making juicy bulbs six inches across. We took most of these to the Friends Meeting House, where there is a tradition of leaving surpluses for all comers on the back porch, but that looks like it will be our only contribution for the year.
    There were no plums, and few apples; the Asian pears are too young to count, so there's just the one crop on the lone Bartlett to represent the orchard.
    One thing we have a lot of, this year -- from our point of view, anyway -- is geese.
    There are in the core flock two White Chinas, Abner and Amanda, and two beautiful gray Africans, Auntie One and Auntie Two.
    Last year there were about 140 goose eggs, with Amanda producing about as many as the other two together, albeit smaller ones. Of these we left two to be hatched, which produced a couple of fine looking White China goslings, both of whom, however, died not long after fledging, from causes unknown.
    This year, there were about 100 eggs, of which we left enough in the nest that seven hatched. These came in waves, so to speak.
    Auntie One took over the brooding early on, hissing if Amanda got anywhere near the nesting box, and hatched three goslings which she took to be her very own. She was willing for Auntie Two to babysit them, or proud papa Abner, but Amanda was not to come near. If she even tried to share in bathing and drinking at the common pools, Auntie One drove her off with hisses, snake-like threatening movements of her long neck, and beating of wings.
    
    It got so that poor Amanda was getting dehydrated, and we had to spread the various pools and "white buckets" over a large enough area that Auntie One couldn't cover the entire territory, making it possible for poor Amanda to jump off the nest, run for a drink, and run back. For Amanda had chosen to take on the remaining eggs, and stayed with them day and night.
    Eventually four new goslings appeared, which seemed to us smaller at birth than those Auntie One was rearing. Three of these were larger than the last, whom we called Junior. It was now Amanda's turn to go on the offensive. Keeping the new babies close to her, she interposed herself between them and Auntie One at every possible moment, occasionally rushing over to give Auntie One a smashing peck in the back, between the shoulder blades, whenever she seemed to threaten to come too close.
    We were impressed with Amanda's motherly courage, Auntie One having considerably more reach and strength, and about double Amanda's weight.
    The children grew apace, but came a morning last week when I counted six at feeding time. Had Junior fallen down a missed post-hole somewhere, or had there been perhaps a fox raid? I searched, and before long came across his stiffening corpse -- neck broken -- he'd been severely pecked between the shoulder blades.
    Amanda?? Oh, surely, not.
    I elected to weed the upper garden, which is close to the fowl pens, and keep an eye on goose society for a bit. Amanda and her remaining three were cropping weeds and sipping water in one pool cluster, Auntie One and everyone else, including Abner, were doing the same in the other area.
    Then Amanda, going for some stray bits of cob, was momentarily distracted. Instantly Auntie One, who had apparently been single-mindedly on the lookout, dashed across the invisible line of motherly enmity, and gave a slamming peck to the smallest remaining gosling, right at the base of his neck!
    I must intervene.
    Leaping over the fence of the duck pen (to the mild astonishment of the ducks), then over the goose fence, I chased Auntie One through the pool areas, overturning buckets, slipping in mud, rounding Auntie One in ever-tightening circles. We bowled over non-Auntie-One geese and goslings in all directions in our epic chase, which seemed to go on for a long, long time, though it was undoubtedly over in a couple of minutes. I held Auntie One's sleek, almost expressionless face close to mine, my fingers wrapped round her downy neck, and pronounced sentence: "Okay, you – in with the ducks." And dropped her over the fence.
    The ducks scattered, goggle-eyed and squawking, then went about their business, which was mostly chasing flies.
    At that moment I got the feeling one gets when one is being watched from behind. I turned. Abner, Auntie Two, Amanda, and the six goslings stood together in an amicable group, regarding me with mild curiosity. And just beyond them, our neighbors Mr. and Mrs. T. leaned on the fence. They had thoroughly enjoyed the chase.
    Auntie One began treading up and down along the fence across from her three darlings and the rest of the flock, calling to them, and trying the wire at every possible point. The others, after getting over the discovery that the madwoman was not planning to kill them all, simply went back to grazing.
   Auntie Two was the perfect aunt, spelling Amanda as needed in raising the six goslings, who from that moment looked to Amanda for all orders.
      Beloved was away at a family reunion during all this. On her return from the Midwest, she got my report on goose events of the preceding week, then went out to survey the crime scene. I made tea, and brought it out to the shady side of the "veranda." Beloved returned, took two quiet sips, and said, "You know what? Every one of those babies is a White China!"
      The three that Auntie One had fought so hard for, and been willing to kill for, were all Amanda's.

,,,

    You may be interested knowing in what to do with a hundred goose eggs.
     Last year, Beloved kept them in the refrigerator for, oh, all the way to this year. I asked about that.
    "Well, we are going to blow them out and make holiday decorations out of them and things like that...and sell them."
    We?
    "Sure, it's easy; you'll just punch a little bitty hole in each end with a little bitty nail and blow it out into a little bitty cup or something."
    Me.
    I tried the technique as described, and after about five minutes of blowing, had one egg in the cup and a severe headache.
    A hundred and thirty-nine more eggs waited quietly on the table. I sat and thought for a bit, then went to get the high-speed mini-drill, and stopped by the sixteen-year-old's room.
    "Got a pump and a basketball needle?"
    "Uh, yeah, but what do you want 'em for?"
    "Trust me, you don't want to know."
    I selected an egg, and, using a cone-shaped grinder bit, opened one end and soften the other (the skinny end). I punched the needle in ever so gently, then pushed down the plunger, slowly, so as to avert an explosion, while holding the needle-inserted egg in the other hand above the cup.
    The egg emptied itself in about three seconds.
    Visions of a cottage industry danced in my head. I made quick work of the pile of eggs, emptying the cup after each one into a mixing bowl (this is in case you find a bad egg), in which the eggs would be later blended and moved into freezer bags -- when thawed, the batches are good in baking recipes that call for eggs.
    But as far as cottage industry goes, well, we've never sold one yet. But after two years of this our Christmas tree looks splendid, and so do those of just about all of our friends....

(To be continued)

Viewing Jasper Mountain: July

 July

AS THE winter rains subside slowly across the coastal and inland valley landscape, and days are sunny but nights still cool, my neighbors pile up accumulated garden and yard debris, leaving it for a few weeks, perhaps under a plastic tarp. As soon as it's dry enough out, but not dry enough to get them in trouble with the fire warden, they torch off the lot. From a mountain top nearby, one can see this activity as a kind of Civil War reenactment, with the smoke of the guns drifting from various parts of the field. Filbert farmers are prone to set off a lot of piles at once, so that their places look like some corner of Shiloh.
     When we first began to accumulate such material here, we started to build such a pile, but then remembered reading a book by a maverick Japanese organic farmer. He said that he had no way to fertilize a hillside orchard until he hit upon the idea of gathering wood and spreading it around on the slopes to rot. His trees thrived. We've begun to emulate that basic idea.

    Since we still use wood heat, we do try to saw up larger branches for the woodpile. The natives are ash and oak, so their smaller branches are useful for the small barbecue pit we inherited with the place. Finger-sized trimmings of oak, ash, bigleaf maple, blackcherry, and cottonwood go into low places on the land, to help build soil. When there is a lamb, much of this goes to stock feed -- cottonwood is a favorite -- as does the abundant Japanese knotweed festooned with morning glories.
    Himalaya blackberry, our region's equivalent of kudzu, we leave where it drops when cut. The lawnmower will eventually chip up the drying stems. Some of them we may use for bushing peas.
    We have let too much mint grow in too many of the beds, and what we can't use we pull -- and pile around the feet of the fruit trees for mulch. Old squash vines, sunflower stems, hollyhocks, zinnias, cornstalks, "mother" strawberries, and old-growth chard or broccoli plants we chop up with a machete and leave in place to be mowed and perhaps eventually forked in. Of course all the kitchen waste goes straight to the garden.
    We save our dishwater, add it to some other choice "household wastewater," and feed this to fruit trees, grape vines, and flower beds. After we've done the woodcutting for the year, the driveway accumulates a layer of sawdust and chips too small for gathering up for the woodstove. This material is gathered up with a square point shovel and wheelbarrow, and added to the blueberry row.
    With all this activity, we find there's nothing left over that belongs in a bonfire, so we've never had to have one. In fact, we import whatever we can find. We buy tremendous bales of straw at a few dollars apiece, each weighing about the same as the Titanic, and huff them up to the barn to spread around under the bottoms of the ducks and rabbits. The resulting fertilizer is highly prized for projects all over the farm.

    In November of every year, I scout around for bags of leaves left curbside. Last year I brought home some twenty-five of these.
    Some of the bags were big-leaf maple, which is said to be a no-no in the vegetable garden, but they're fine for the "low spots" and around rhododendrons and the like. Some were oak, which can be sweetened with rock lime and used wherever you like. Some were more of a beechy-sweetgum kind of thing, and these were sheet-composted on the garden.
    This seems to work so well that we question the usefulness of a compost heap. By the time the pile, of whatever humongous size at first, cooks down, there's so little of it that it has to be rationed to the neediest (usually tomatoes), and the rest go hungry.
    At a Hutterite commune where I was a baker, I set up a bin behind the bakery, made of three sheets of metal roofing, and while waiting for the seventy-five pound lump of bread to rise indoors, shoveled whatever I could find into a big chipper. Sawdust, mule (yes, mule) manure, kitchen wastes, grass clippings, and whole piles of cleared vegetation, including a half-acre of high-nitrogen kudzu, went into the machine, in alternating batches, so that there'd be an even mix in the bin. As soon as the bin was full, I added another one, and when that one was full, I added another. The half-acre garden, which had been in ryegrass over the winter, we tilled in, and after the crops got high enough to mulch, we sheeted the whole area with the contents of the bins. The chippings served as compost, mulch, and pathway alike.
    We would show visitors the garden, and on learning that it was organic, they would invariably ask where the compost heap was. "You're looking at it." We never bought fertilizer, except for some organic mixes for the nursery, where a more controlled acidity was called for.

    I remember the nurseryman, now a famous organic truck farmer who lives in this area, did sometimes have to fight white flies, the bane of greenhouse operations whether organic or not. He set off pungent smoke bombs that were very effective. I asked what was in them. He grinned. "Nicotine. The stuff's an organic insecticide, invented by tobacco plants to kill any bugs that try to eat the leaves."
    This gave me an idea. I bought a pouch of chewing tobacco (which raised a few eyebrows in the store), and make a pomade of chewing tobacco, chips left over from old soap bars, and rabbit manure, all tied up in a cheesecloth, and left the "teabag" in the watering can overnight. The resulting tea could be used in the greenhouse, on flower beds, and throughout the young garden, and fed plants yet insulted bugs effectively.
    You can put a similar mix into a hose-end sprayer, but it doesn't seem to me that the resulting dilution, even at the highest ratio, has enough kick. Just keep the solution making daily in the watering can, and use it wherever it's needed most. I leave the can in the greenhouse, where the heat from the sun during the day and radiating back from the brick floor at night can "solarize" the tea. The warmth seems to be preferred by the plants over cold water, and I would do this routine of leaving the water in the can overnight even if didn't have the teabag in it. 

    Once you've made yourself responsible to a lot of plants, every good habit helps.

,,,

    We have always been admirers of Ruth Stout, a rural Connecticut gardener who one day decided to plant without plowing. Her method was to put down hay of such thickness that weeds could not come through (this is 8 to 12 inches, my dears) and pull back the hay to work, in hills or rows, in what amounts to sheltered trenches with walls of hay. She triumphed over the dubious agricultural scientists by showing off her crops, often no more spectacular than those of her more conventional neighbors, but no less, and achieved with minimal watering and no fertilizing at all. The hay rots and/or feeds worms at the bottom, creating, she felt, a balanced diet for her plants).
    We used to mention Ms. Stout to our friends, and they would respond: "Yes, but that was back East. Here the soil stays too cold when you do that, too many slugs live in the straw, it sprouts a lot of grass, and the plants tend to go yellow on you from lack of nitrogen, etc."
    As time went on, we found that there was something to these objections.
    Rows of beans or whatever cannot be planted as early in deep mulch as in bare earth, as there will be poor germination due to the clammy conditions. Slugs move in, in huge numbers, as they dislike crawling over bare earth but love hay. Our "hay" is straw, but weed seeds do live in it, and they do sprout, especially if you run low on straw for a year. And, sure enough, give the plants only a straw diet and they do seem starvish, especially if it's the first year.
    We found, though, that we could modify the system and get some benefit.
    We do turn over the garden with a fork, and then cover it with black plastic for six to eight weeks. This gives sod (which can form here even in winter) a chance to die, even in the rainy season, and kills a lot of weed seeds. It also raises the temperature of the soil. Then we strip off the plastic and immediately throw on the fresh straw. If it's over six inches deep there seems to be little to fear from compaction, so we've abandoned trying to maintain raised beds and paths -- with the straw, it's all one raised bed.
    Meanwhile, the whole garden, except for peas, which can be direct sown, and white radishes ditto, is sprouting in two-inch pots in the greenhouse.
    Along about Memorial Day, if we've managed to wait that long, we move the whole garden out to the garden, so to speak -- annuals to the beds, veggies to the round garden -- even the corn is grown in pots or flats to about five inches high, then moved out. Pick a spot, trowel down through the straw, pop in the plug, tamp, grab another pot and move on. The relatively cool earth is good for the roots, the straw protects the root collar and supports the stem, so there's little need for hardening off or even of flooding the transplants. There's very little shock, and the high reflectivity of the fresh straw provides plenty of strong light to the leaves from above and below, for good growth. The plants will still need nitrogen, though, so our next move is to top dress around them with rabbit or duck bedding, and provide a drink of one of our watering-can teas. After a week or two of this, the garden will be virtually maintenance-free right through harvest, just as Ruth Stout said it would be.
    Oh, slugs. Yes, lots and lots. We have big brown leopard slugs, five to six inches long, medium-sized orange thingeys, and little tiny gray ones. There are also snails in stunning numbers, a mottled variety of very pretty appearance and quite large when full grown, as much as two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Of all these only the tiny grays do any harm, but they do enough for all -- more than the spotted cucumber beetles, which are numerous yet only a nuisance.
    Beloved says the grays are babies of the orange ones, but I don't know how she knows that. Both turn up by fork or spade, from as deep as eight inches in the ground, in distressingly large numbers. And both are very, very fond of the straw.

    I have tried the beer trick, and, yes, they like beer, but it's a tiring sort of work.
    And the slugs don't care to travel far for their night of carousing, maybe because the ones on the far side of the garden haven't arrived yet when the dawn patrol kicks in. I have had success with slug bait, but it only seems to be potent for a day or so, so it's addictive, and not especially cheap.
    And I suspect the stuff. What's in it? Aluminum sulphate? If I wouldn't eat it from a spoon, should I be spooning it over the garden? 
    I hate to admit it, but it took us a long time to notice that we have the ultimate answer to slugs right here. I was rooting around the foundation of the house a while back, and came up with one of those giant brown mottled snails, which I suspected of munching the flowers, and in a fit of pique threw the little beast over the duck fence.
    The commotion that ensued was alarming.
    The ducks were chasing one another in circles, with one duck in front trying to gobble the snail down while five other nipped and bashed at her in an effort to get her to drop the morsel. Aha! I ran into the house and did a bit of research. Yep. The preferred duck food above all foods, snails – and slugs. Another good reason to keep ducks. I immediately herded them to the garden, where they, hardly believing their good fortune, stayed busy for the next half hour. I would have kept them there longer, but they began eying the plants. There I drew the line.


,,,

    For years, we were bamboozled by the term "fall planting." It conjured up an image of late September afternoons, dew on orb-weaver spiders' webs, and pumpkins taking on that golden sheen. The problem with putting in seeds for winter harvests in the fall is, of course, that the days are already too short for proper growth.
Eventually, perhaps in our reading, or just stumbling around in the garden, we caught on. Fall planting is done in high summer. Everything should put on height and weight before the short days. The trick is not to let the heat "bolt" things -- cause them to run to flower and try to set seed.
    We've hung a shade over a bed, made from re-purposed burlap bags, and we'll hope that helps some.
    I cut through the newspaper/straw mulch in one of the beds with a right-angled trowel. I'll make an opening in the mulch about seven inches in diameter. She spreads a handful of compost/potting soil mix on the spot, shake out a mix of seeds from my shaker -- beets, spinach, kale, chard, lettuce, kohlrabi, radishes, turnips, bok choi -- and spread a bit more potting soil over them, lightly, before moving on to the next spot. Later, I'll bring the watering can and soak each hill gently, with the rose of the can at ground level. With luck, in a month or so I'll get to thin the hills.
 
   This isn't a perfect procedure. Lettuce, for example, really likes a bit more sunlight than this for sprouting. But we find that splitting the difference works okay, and gives us fewer things to have to think about. One size almost fits all, so to speak.
 
   The resulting bed, as a rule, after thinning, has enough variety of plant life to confuse plant predators and to share space with different root systems going after different nutrients. The word for this is polyculture and we are trying it more and more.

    92 in the shade ... head for the house.

(To be continued)

Viewing Jasper Mountain: June

June

WHEN YOUNG, I went west, and made my life in the woods with two dozen good friends who were always on the move, part of syndicalist forestry labor cooperative, the Hoedads. 
    We followed the melting snow from west to east, making the grand spring tour from range to range. Winters we worked within sight of the gray Pacific, or anyway in its rains, which bent the dark firs and cedars left and right, and tossed their heavy branches down, sometimes, at our feet. Rocks and logs rolled anytime, bounding and bumbling among us, and we hid behind stumps, cursing and praying our gods.
    By March the Olympics opened, and in April the Cascades. May brought the Wallowas, and June the high Bitterroots.
    We traveled in strange caravans of old trucks and buses, tipi poles tied to our roofs, and rolls of canvas. Arriving at Shelton, or Big Creek, or the Clearwater River, we circled our wagons and set up our poles, and tipis, and yurts, and trailers, and campers, and spread out seeking for firewood, or springs of good running water.
    By the light of a lantern, and warmth of the glowing camp stove, we swilled weak coffee, and told the same old stories, bending the truth a little, but only enough for enjoyment; the truth in our lives was better meat than fiction, and anyone could say: hey, remember the time at Alsea...
    ...when the rain was running sidehill, and the government hid in their truck, and it seemed like the end of the world? And then the sun came out, and right in the hole in the clouds there were seven bald eagles swirling around in the light? You remember that?
    ...yeah, and when we forded the creek down at Coos Bay, and the creek was all salmon from bank to bank, and Trooper caught one, and put it in Steffi's's tree bag, and along came the government, and asked had we seen any fish? And we said yes! We had! Hadda line on both sides of her with that tree bag flappin'.
    ...or when the Three Stooges did acid and went down to Shelton to talk to the government, and Len demanded more money because of the swamps? "Gators! Alligators in them swamps!"
    ...uh huh, and that night when they got back to camp, it was no camp, but six feet of river, and we'd moved off to high ground! Had to put up the yurt by our headlamps, and the wind picked it up with nine people attached, and set it back down.
    ...or the time when it sleeted all morning, and hailed us into the crew rig and down hill to Mapleton, and we sat in the shop eating four dollar sandwiches and drinking hot cocoa, and the government all thought we'd call it a done day, but we rode up to Grayback and worked in that blizzard till evening? Two hundred and twenty-two dollars each one of us got for that day.
    ...Yep, yep. And remember the heat up at Pierce, and the work done by moonlight, the sleeping all day and working again in the evening?
    And we'd tell these stories like old-timers, not one us thirty, yet each knew of death, of pain beyond bearing.
    This was the work: each carried a sack of gray canvas, rubberized well to hold moisture, and hung from a web belt and buckle. The sack held young trees. Fir seedlings, most often, Douglas, or nobles, or grands, or pines such as yellow or lodgepole. Depending on age of the trees, one person might carry a hundred, two-fifty, five hundred, at a single bag-up. Some lifted the bags with a grunt, and buckled the belts on, while others might lie on the bag, buckle on, and lie helpless, turned turtle, and wait for a hand up. Those tree bags were heavy!
    Each of us carried a hoedad, or dag, with a three-foot handle smoothed by years of gloved handling, and a curved blade of four inches' width of steel, fifteen inches long, at right angle to the handle, a cross between shovel and hoe, and sharp as an axe.
    The "goverment" came for us in clean clothes, in their green pickup, and led us in darkness or dawn to some high place, always high up, where the sunrise might catch fire to a wide plain of white cloud tops, or the mists might divide to show frost burning in sunlight below us, deep in the draws of an east face, glittering danger.
    With our hoes we scattered along the steep roadside, and stepped off in line, talking, or singing, swinging our tools first broadside, to swipe the soil clean, then straight down to open the hole for the tree roots. Buried in earth to its first branch, each tree would be packed in with boot heel, and tugged once to check for looseness, then on to the next spot and repeat.
    Each day, five hundred to a thousand or more times, each one of those planters did this, without boredom. The weathers, the dangers, the beauty, the friendship, the honor we saw in restoring some green to the mountains, where mile upon mile of stumps stood mutely in mourning of glory, all kept us returning to this work from elsewhere, like salmon returning upriver, or wild geese to their wide silver wetlands. Our homes were our camps in strange valleys, with the nights and the stories.
    We had a way to hold meetings: one would sit with a clipboard and take names, crossing us off as it came our time to speak. By the clock, we would say our piece, and with a stern warning from the clipboard: "Ten more minutes on this, and we will call the question." There would be a motion, amendment, vote on the amendment, vote on the motion. At the end, criticism-self criticism. A good orator would know how to wave a half-greased boot for emphasis, or throw a log into the red-hot yurt stove for punctuation. For some the yurt was home: they might spread a sleeping bag before the fire, and their dreams would dodge our arguments as we stepped over their heads, brushing crumbs and hay from our shirts and braids.
    My own house was a flatbed truck with dual wheels, floored with smooth maple, and hip-roofed with cedar all hand-shaked, with a stove and stove-pipe, and a lantern, and books, and a bunk, and bacon. 
    I had also a dulcimer of four strings, tear-drop shaped, of birch wood, and a harp with twelve chords, which I carried to campfires, where the guitars and mouth-harps were playing, and the singers kept up the bright fire and their voices from sunset to midnight, and the sparks from the firebrands rose up with the music and were lost amid thousands of stars.
    I once woke before dawn, and walked with a friend to a high cliff for the sunrise, and we brought a drum we had made, and drummed there and sang the sun up, and really we half thought we had made the world.

    I would go, now, to the woods, with a few things, and go walking with my pack, and my cup, and my rain gear, and go thinking of all the green bones I had found when I worked in the woods. Deer are not buried in boxes, you know; they drop where they stand when the running is over.
    The coyotes come, and the others, a cougar, perhaps, or a bobcat, and last come the ravens.
    The bones are scattered about where the tree-roots spread and the sword-ferns silently bend in the long rains.
    I like to find the bones, green like the ferns, but still hard, still looking as though they have lots of time, which they do. I set them on stumps so they can see better.
    
    I will walk to a place with a high cliff, and camp by the lake there at evening, and study the grand firs and the nobles reflected in the water made still by the evening. I will sit by the fire and consider, and lie down to count stars, and sleep, and in sleep dream dreams of green bones.
    When the morning arrives, gray and cold, I will rise and walk to the high place, bringing with me a drum I have made, and a song for my scattered people. 

,,,

     When we survey the acre of land with which we have surrounded ourselves, the oak and ash trees, rhododendron, hollyhock beds, barn, and house, we turn upon all these things a critic's eye, and keep ready to hand the pruning knife, fence hammer, and trim brush.
    We shape the trees to our own pleasure. But so do children, for whom trees are for climbing. So do birds, whose need is nesting; so also carpenter ants, who must bring nectar to that vast colony somewhere in our eaves.
    We knew, long ago, that we would come to such a place, with its diverse longings, so we called for a document to mark the beginning of our life together. Such a thing could be bought, but we both said, " oh, no, it must be hand made." We could see it as clearly as if it were already done.
    Each could describe it to the other, and to the other it was the describing of a thing already seen. The young student who volunteered, who shaped our wedding scroll, our fractur, with its brave words, was commissioned also to frame it with a house and trees, flowers, birds, a sense of place in a clearing amid woods.
    I think she understood this commission, this designing of a dream, that it was our weaving of a spell to catch our future, to make a future. And all who signed that Quaker wedding certificate, thirty-nine in number, understood: hope made visible. This is what art is, though we are living a time when it is not fashionable (at least among the intelligentsia) to say so.
    We get, occasionally, a visitor who signed that document twenty years ago. There is a pause as we come, in the "tour," to the wedding certificate in its place above the mantel, and there is an almost invariable recognition. The trees, the house in a clearing, an unimpeded view of a mountain, a circling raptor. They smile.
    "You were headed for this place the whole time, weren't you?"

    Such a dream is a lot to put one's name to, so we owe our thirty-nine witnesses much.

    I didn't know then, and maybe I don't know now, what the painting meant to those gathered round to hear our vows and sign their names. But it's enough to know they liked it, and still do, and so easily make the connection from it to our present life. Their approval leads me to believe, a little, in my own and Beloved's wisdom: that we could see a way forward, and say so; then having said, follow through. This is prophecy, the oldest art, which also called simply the art of living.


    Every gardener is an artist in this most ancient sense.

    The seeds and starts, balled trees, piles of rocks, and bags of soil amendment are pieces of a vision already seen, to be brought together with a willing toil and persistence.
    Even when the planting and placing of the elements of this vision is done, the vision is not yet attained: what was once seen is still a future glory, which the reality must yet grow into. My hollyhocks just now are two to three feet high, and my vision of them towers over me; in my mind's eye they are seven to eight feet, dropping blooms like small ladies-in-waiting among the clumps of spearmint at their feet. These hollyhocks-to-be, hovering in the air above the current scene, are in a sense the real garden, the garden of the mind toward which the outward garden is progressing.
    The two gardens will not come together without labor. We intervene by fighting slugs and removing grass and dandelions, and by watering.

    Watering is a different ritual with every gardener-artist.
    Some set up their summer sprinklers right away and leave it all to a timer and the available water pressure; those who can afford the initial outlay may invest in a drip system, with the tiny tubes running along every bed, stopping to weep only at a hill of zucchini or at the feet of each of the rhodies.
    We're a low-budget outfit, so our tools, especially early in the garden year, tend to be labor-intensive. At each end of the house is a spigot, low to the ground to prevent freezing in winter, and to these we have attached enough lengths of cheap garden hose to reach the ducks, the geese, the upper garden, the lower garden, the orchard garden, and the various fruit trees and flower beds.
    Beloved does the animals, the upper garden with her lettuces and brassicas and strawberries, and the Front Beds, which are mostly poppies and marigolds this year -- wherever she can tear out enough mint and oregano.
    I do the rest.
    This involves a constant war over nozzles.
    She really only likes one, a greenish fan-shaped thing that hits exactly the right width at four feet to sweep a garden row in one slow pass. She bought it over twenty years, ago and it has spent enough of that time sunning itself on its coils of hose to have faded in color, and it even seems to have lost weight, as though the years of water rushing through have eroded the plastic from within till we handle it like a blown egg. I dread the day that it falls from some unheeding hand and cracks.
    I like the sweep nozzle, too, for the first two minutes, but then I get restive. It hasn't enough reach, and I'm one of those who stands in one spot dispensing favors near and far. So I generally wind up removing the sweep and hanging it in the crook of the nearest lilac, and put in its place an old-fashioned brass nozzle. Antique ones are well made; get one of these. With the brass nozzle you can produce a fine mist eight feet across, or a brave fire-fighter's blast that fans out, forty feet away, just enough to water a distant tree without accidentally digging it up. There's really no better tool for demonstrating the phrase "all-purpose." The only disadvantage to the old brass nozzle that I can discover, but it is a very real one, is that if one removes it to switch to another attachment, and lays just about any old place, with luck one may find it – years later. 

    Our current compromise is the "pistol-grip." You can get a quite good visible one, bright yellow, American-made, too, for only three dollars. Be absolutely sure to get the one that is garden-hose threaded for attachments. The thing is highly functional as is, but once you learn what the threading is there for you'll be pleased.
    There is another gadget in this category, and that is a water wand, the kind that is about three feet long with a valve at one end and a nice aluminum rose at the other, on a slender crooked neck. I like the wand very much, at least when working with young plants, because of the so-tiny droplets it produces without choking back the volume of water the way the brass nozzles do.
    The secret to the wand is to hold it "upside down"; the rose should tip up like a flower (a rose), facing the sun, and its drops should rise into the air and fall by force of gravity alone, gently washing the mulch at the feet of your seedlings. The idea is to imitate, not rain, but a long-necked watering can of the English type, with its brass rose. I drape the hose over my shoulder and wander along, visiting plants and offering them the wash of life at their feet, where it's wanted. It's very meditative, using the wand, because there is no backpressure in the hose.
    There are times when you want the rain effect of the sweep or the mist of the wand, without losing the flow control offered by the pistol grip mechanism. Because you've bought the one with the threaded barrel, you can simply attach the other nozzles as needed, creating the right tool for the job at hand. I've become fond of attaching just the rose from the wand to the pistol grip nozzle; this results in a gadget that seems exactly what's wanted for perennial herbs and berries.
    When I walk about, watering with these various implements, it is generally evening. Direct sun will evaporate much of any water offered at mid-day, and in the mornings I'm off to work. Evenings are good for water economy and good for me. I fall into the routine, still noticing weeds that will need attention, or transplants that have stayed overlong in shock, but mostly I'm able to relax and look around.

    Beloved tucks a bit more straw around her newly transplanted lettuce. Canada geese pass overhead here any time of year, though they are at their most spectacular in autumn; we have also mallards who travel in pairs, one green and one brown, and put down in our goose pen to steal cob and talk to our Khaki Campbells across the fence. A swallow sits on the clothesline in his green dinner jacket and scolds me for getting too close to the birdhouse on the potting shed wall. The moon rises, sullen and red-faced at first, then brightens as night comes on, and the last of the sun sweeps up the face of Jasper Mountain and disappears where there will soon be stars. It is altogether restful to water a garden by hand if you have the time.
    Take your garden's advice: forget the evening news and the sitcoms. Make the time.



(To be continued)

Viewing Jasper Mountain: May

 May

IF WE pick up a pebble and look at it, we see one thing. If we pick up another pebble, and look at it, we see one thing. Without an observer, these things would lie there, until moved by wind or water, or diminished by these, and by the action of sunshine, until they become sand. They are not appreciable as two things of the same kind unless observed by an entity capable of categorizing.
    Plants, and relatively simple animals such as hydras, do seem to be capable of categorizing, though we don't tend to think of this (when they do it) as intellectual activity.
    Plants, and animals lacking a central nervous system, categorize by means of immanent statistics.
    Some survive, some don't, and those that survive may pass on their genes, with the result that the continued existence of those genes is in itself a record, passively, of there being sets of circumstances favorable to such passings on.
    It's not that the fittest survive. It's that those whose circumstances did not happen to finish them off survive. You may not be the fittest, but if you're still here, well, cool.
    But a common denominator for a lot of survivors is the utilization, whether accidentally or purposively, of something like set theory: the successful organism found or avoided "like" things, such as a certain species of predator or annual temperature extreme.
    The next stage beyond passive information gathering is active information gathering. A trout can experiment with sensory data: the object fluttering on the surface of the water, refracting light as it goes, may be a protein-rich insect. If, however, the object, in a number of instances, proves to be a small wad of chicken neck feathers wrapped on a sharp-tipped bit of wire with thread and glue, the trout, if it successfully shakes these off, may in time come to be an old and wise trout.
    So, as I am a creature with active information-gathering systems, and the ability to compare, I look at the pebbles and see them as two pebbles.
    I categorize.
    I note differences, which is what senses are for, and if the differences are sufficiently minor I take the intellectual leap of concluding that for my purposes the pebbles are "the same."
    I can gather like pebbles, bore holes in them, and string them on rawhide to make a necklace. I can draw a face in the sand, put the pebbles in the face on either side, and mean them to be taken, by another observer, as a representation of eyes. I can count them: "one, two." These are complex activities, not easily described in all their implications.
    Without this capability to recognize, no complex animal would live long enough to pass on its genes. There would be no language, no speech, no writing, no art, no political process, and none of what we call spirituality.
    And yet, at its root, recognition embodies a bit of falsehood.
    This pebble, after all, isn't that pebble.
    "There are no 'generals'," asserted William Blake in the margins of a copy of Reynolds' book: "only particulars!" The leap of metaphor is a momentary fiction, which is the fiction that makes possible for us all the discovery of what we call truth.

    As I sit for a moment, watching the mists (which I "recognize" as mists) clearing away in the light of a rare sunrise from Jasper Mountain, I wonder where this speculation leads. Many conclusions are possible. One of them is that I could probably stand to be a little more tolerant of the fictions others live by, having so thoroughly rummaged through my own myths, and discovered their so tenuous hold on verifiability.

,,,

    The eight tomatoes didn't pan out. I hovered over them with the mister till they keeled over, no doubt with damping-off. I shall have to go to the garden store and surreptitiously acquire replacements.
    I put out peas and then got sick and couldn't cover them during the heavy rains, and they rotted.
    I put out corn -- I know, it's early -- some people never learn -- and it's been snowing in the mountains and hailing here, and I'm sick again and didn't go out and cover the corn beds, and now I can hear the seeds drowning even as I write.
    Gardeners are a masochistic lot -- or sadistic, depending on whether you consider their feelings or those of their seeds and transplants.
    I stood by the window and howled, or rather croaked: "my seeds are rotting! My garden is drowning!"
    Beloved looked up from her easy chair, smiled beneficently, and replied ever so sweetly. "My garden is in the greenhouse, safe and snug."
    It's true; that's where her whole garden is, including the pumpkin patch and the sunflowers, waiting for real spring, which as anyone around here knows, starts sometime between June 1 and the 4th of July. She can do this because she's mastered the art of repotting.
    Even in this weather, the greenhouse, which is nothing more than three sliding glass door panels mounted on frame lumber along the south side of the potting shed, is cozy during the day.
    She kneels on her feed sack pillow, trowel in hand, and repots from two-inch pots to four-inch, from four-inch to eight-inch as needed, while her garden grows. I always manage to wait too late to do this; eventually I'll unpot a veggie only to find that the roots have grown about sixty feet long, or maybe a mile and a half, winding round-and-round the soil plug like thread on a spool. The effect on the growth of the plant is not unlike that of creating a bonsai tree by removing its taproot. I can produce little teeny tomato plants and little teeny zinnias this way, and probably should enter them in the County Fair -- in the contest about how not to garden.
    Take a tip from Beloved and repot early.
    She takes up, say, a flat of broccoli, thirty-two of them in two-inch pots, and makes sure she has nearby not two but four (try the math!) unoccupied flats and thirty-two four inch pots. A sack of potting mix rests close at hand. It has been mixed in a wheelbarrow at the rate of three sacks potting soil to one of steer manure and a bit of powdered limestone. A number ten tomato can makes a fine cheap scoop.
    She takes up a canful of mix, slings some into the bottom of the first four-inch pot, turns a broccoli upside down, taps two sides of the two-inch pot, lifts it gently off the soil plug, rights the plant into the four-inch pot, shakes mix in on all four sides, and tamps it down a bit for a snug fit. (Roots abhor two things: air and light.) The top of the soil meets the root collar of the broccoli and is bear a quarter inch from the top edge of the pot. She sets it in the new flat, and on to the next one.
    This is much faster and simpler, really than the description, and the rhythm of it all is quite relaxing. I prefer doing this with Mozart or Bach in the background. She's more a Golden Oldies girl, but I've never heard Herman and the Hermits in the greenhouse; only the chuffing of the tomato can as it bites into the rich brown surface of the mix.

    Abner, our White China gander, watches her angrily through the "lights" as she works, and when she reaches for the pots nearest him, tries to nip her through the glass, with a thump that's kind of pleasing to hear if you've ever been bitten by a goose.
    The glass is stout enough to resist anything that Abner might contemplate, but there are situations that it was not built for. George, a sheep that lived with us for a while, made this point very clear by escaping from his pasture one fine day. We got him surrounded, and he retreated into the greenhouse, from whence we thought to lead him on a bit of rope. He had other ideas, and sailed through the double-paned safety glass as if it wasn't there, scattering rainbow shards twenty feet in all directions.
    Not a scratch on him, either.
    And all this time the greenhouse had faced into the pasture. Made us think long and hard about which animals to put where. (The freezer, for example, turned out to be the best place for George.)
    Working in the greenhouse pays dividends, though, in opportunities to watch the critters that we own and some we don't own. I've looked up from potting to see a mallard drake and his mate looking in on me from the goose pen, and I enjoy watching the swallows zipping up under the eaves to their nests not three feet from my head. And beyond, in the yard full of dandelions, there are the goldfinches.

    Many people in our area prefer the word "lawn" to "yard" and every year they wallop their dandelions with a herbicide-laced fertilizer. So we're a kind of dandelion island in a sea of miniature golf courses. Goldfinches seem to love dandelion seeds above all else at this time of year, so we get to have all the goldfinches as our guests.
    They descend upon the yard in troops of twenty, fifty, a hundred, eating, arguing, making love. A goldfinch will land on the seed stalk of a dandelion, barely bending it, and sweep the head clean of the tiny white parasol seeds in moments, then on to the next one. The males are dazzling, and I find myself moving from window to window to get a view of their plumage from a few feet away, empty pot in one hand, chard seedling held forgotten in the other.
    It's a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon, it really is.

,,,

    Dad's "tiller" was a big machine like the front end of an Allis-Chalmers tractor; it had water-filled tractor-tread wheels that were as tall as I was, and pulled a small but quite real single-share moldboard plow. It lasted for two decades.
    Our first tiller, bought from a hardware store in 1977, lasted just two years shy of two decades. We practically farmed with these machines, as none of us seemed to know when we have enough ground in cultivation.
    Our second tiller, however, we used for about twenty hours, and then it died of a heart attac. I know the sound of a piston rod giving up the ghost, but I'm old enough to remember that I should be hearing that sound after three or four hundred hours or more, not twenty.
    Our old chain saw, a 1979 Husky, gave good service for over twenty years.
    The new saw, on the other hand, lasted two weeks.
    We think we see a pattern here, and it's one that encourages us to rethink our original reaction to Wendell Berry's advocacy of farm horses and scythes. 
    There comes a time when plunking down good money for gadgets that look like labor-savers but ain't -- because they are going to refuse to do said labor -- begins to look like money spent foolishly.
    Pick up a garden magazine and the bright ads rave at you about the labor you will save with this machine or that machine, but in the end, Thoreau was right.
    He said: "...I start now on foot, and get there before night....You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime tomorrow...if you are lucky enough to get a job in season."
    If you have to work for two days, or, ten, or twenty, to earn a tool and it lasts you two, ten, or twenty days under normal conditions, well, you really ought to have investigated the corresponding hand tool and saved half your time!
    Yes, yes, the woman's new tiller is busted and she has taken to philosophizing as she turns over the garden with a hay fork and blisters her soft hands: sour grapes we used to call it, per Aesop and his fox.
    But the blisters heal, the hands toughen, the body begins to slim down a bit, and if there's any sunshine to be had, some vitamin D into the bargain. Hopefully, she begins to look like one who one understands work
    Meanwhile we're beginning to see articles hither and yon about the disproportionate share that tillers, lawnmowers, chainsaws, edgers and the like have in the despoiling of the air we breathe.      
    Perhaps -- just perhaps -- we're onto something.
    We live inverted sods resprout at the first hint of rain whether tilled or spaded; the rain comes almost daily this time of year. So we took to spreading black plastic to kill sods. And leately we use carboard with straw piled on top, which really seems to bring on the worms and their rich castings.
    Technology shouldn't be regarded as either our savior or our nemesis; the key is to use as much of it as necessary to get done what needs to be done, and no more. Now would be the time to rant about skimobiles and power boating, but I'm going to presume that the gentle reader would regard this as preaching to the converted -- take it as a compliment to your good sense. 

    As our power tools fail us, one by one, we become more appreciative of our hand tools, and abuse them less and less. We have several hammers, a straight 22 oz., a curved 16 oz., a tack hammer, a ball peen, a masonry hammer, and a couple of sledge/maul monsters. We've become aware that these are not all interchangeable, and discovering why a tool is shaped a particular way is very pleasing.
    Our brace-and-bit, plane, bench vise and bench grinder are all over fifty years old and going strong. The grinder is electric, but it's an old electric, sealed, never needs oiling, perfectly balanced. It can heat up an edged tool very quickly, and we've learned to keep a can full of water handy to sizzle things in, so they won't turn into butter.
    The bench vise and grinder are rather large. As women, this was a deliberate choice. Not having the same upper body strength as the guys, we needed bigger stuff because the equipment's strength or weight made up for what we lacked in personal leverage. We keep pipes of varying size and length to slip over handles like the one on our vise so as to give the handle that little bit of extra torque that the he-men provide with their shoulders.
     As time passes, we use the grinder less frequently, instead locking tools into the vise and leaning over them with a sharp bastard file, knocking the file against the bench from time to time to shed filings. A file takes a little longer, but it won't destroy temper and we can keep a clean eye on the angle of the cut.
    We keep five shovels. There's a round-pointed long-handled shovel for digging and ditching, a square-point for scooping up loose material from a flat hard surface, a d-ring-handled tree planting shovel with plates welded to the step for heavy-booted work, a more delicate d-ring shovel with an eighteen-inch blade, suitable for bulb work, and a British spade -- a cheap imitation actually -- but useful for light sod-cutting and for mixing things in the wheelbarrow.
    One finds, after time, the point of balance with which a shovel can be wielded all day without undue fatigue. After more time, one becomes aware of the subtleties, such as when it's time to file the blade, or how one can put more pressure on a handle that has been linseed-oiled in the last year than can be put on one that hasn't. One begins to take the trouble to carry a shovel to the shade when not in use, on discovering that sun damages the handle faster than rain.
    Different people have different tool preferences for different techniques.
    Beloved carries around a feed sack with a pillow in it, upon which she kneels to work in the garden with her ever-present trowel. I use the bulb spade and a t-handled dibble stick, which I made from the pearwood handles of a defunct pair of grass shears.
    She marks her rows and hills with little stakes and yards and yards of string, and sows by hand. I do beds without rows, dropping seeds down a four-foot length of PVC pipe, from a standing position.
    I get a lot of use out of a pair of pruning shears, thirty years old -- a cheap brand, too -- and a heavy duty pair of limb loppers that have outlasted their wooden handles. I drove the tangs into two three-foot-long three-quarter-inch galvanized pipes, and on these iron legs they have walked with me over the land many times.
    To draw out the rolls of stock fencing that have languished for fifty years in the blackberry patch, we use a pair of double block pulleys over a hundred years old, with a hundred foot length of rope looped back and forth from block to block, giving us our own strength four times over. This thing beats a modern "come-along" for speed and distance, if power is not all that's wanted. The rope is new, but that other rope lasted until this year; a mysterious thing, made in a rope-walk, of true hemp fibers, then soaked in creosote by hands long vanished from the earth.
    Though it was no doubt toxic, we hated to give it up.
    There are two footbridges on the place, as a seasonal creek divides it right down the middle, end to end. Across these we go, summer and winter, with the wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow is an amazing device that can hardly be improved upon. It will negotiate tiny gaps while carrying hundreds of pounds with ease. We bring straw from the barn a bale at a time with them, feeling our way with our feet, unable to see round the vast loads.
    A wheelbarrow imposes a stately gait that adds dignity to any laborer's demeanor.
    We bought a five-cubic-foot model at the same time as our old tiller, in 1977, for forty dollars. It has done far more hours of work than the tiller did, and looks fair to outlast us.
    The other one came with the place.
    Well, actually, we didn't know it was here at the time, and the former owner probably didn't either -- it was deep in the blackberries. We dug it out, bound up its wounds with bailing wire, and found a wheel for it. The thing has handmade handles built for a grip larger than ours, and it wobbles a bit as it goes, but it's still a wheelbarrow, and it does honest labor daily. 


    Every family should have two wheelbarrows. We pass, sometimes, Beloved and I, like ships in the night, laden with our disparate treasures.


(To be continued)

Viewing Jasper Mountain: April

 April

A FEW years ago, we felt we should reduce our "acreage" in the main garden, so we took an iron rod, set it up in the approximate middle, and with a rope attached to the rod, made a circle about sixty feet across, planting garlic to mark the edge as we went. The garlic is up now, and we can see the size of the garden-to-be.   
     Beloved looked over the circle.
    "Whoa! That's way too small! ... where do the brassicas go?"
    "Right here."
    "Uh-huh. And the squash?"
    "Sort of over here."
    "Right. And the cucumbers, -- and -- and -- where does the pumpkin patch go?" Her voice seemed a bit stressed at this point.
    "Right back here...no problem, really! Honest!"
    "And your corn, beans, tomatoes and potatoes?"
    "Uh, well, I thought I'd revive my old beds up in the orchard."

    "I thought we were going to have a 'smaller' garden!"
    "Well, that's what I remember us both saying, so I've cut this one in half. Bu I can always go back there. And the trees will need watering anyway, so I might as well..."
    Etc., etc. Gardening can be complicated.
    I figured, with all the quart jars of tomato sauce still in the pantry, I can get by on only four tomato plants this year. But I've already got a flat of two-inch pots. 
    If they all make it, that's ... thirty-two plants.
    Who's going to kill twenty-eight of those little lovelies?

    But let me tell you about our first year here.

    We had a big tiller at the time, and dug up not one but three gardens. Beloved got the well-draining little one for spring and fall brassicas and peas, I got the orchard one, and we both got the big one. I decided to put out four kinds of tomatoes: Romas, Better Boys, Sweet 100's and some Sungold cherries.
    So I did a flat of each, figuring on some die-off. Nope. They were all very happy. This was early in February, as I was having some kind of light-deprivation fit and had to grow something. So I spent the spring mostly repotting and repotting until the tomatoes were shoving the lids off the cold frames.
    After giving away the plants that anyone who knew me would take, I still had seventy-two tomato plants. So I put them all in the ground. I had forgotten to lime, so there was some blossom-end rot, but not much, as it had fallowed a few years. There were tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Big ones, little ones, round ones, pointy ones. I gathered the pointy ones and sauced till I dropped.
    The pantry shelves groaned.
    I chased the kids through the cherries and Sweet 100's and told them that was their dinner for tonight -- and all month, same menu. I sliced the big round ones and added them to every conceivable dish. But more kept coming.
    One day, late in August, I picked a perfect one-pound Better Boy and looked at it in misery and disgust. A surfeit of your favorite things will, sooner or later, turn you against them, and with a kind of strangled cry I pitched the tomato as high in the air as it would go. It came down in the middle of the duck pen with a satisfying splapp! of water-balloonish disintegration.
One of the ducks ambled over to see what the fuss was all about. Idly, almost absentmindedly, she nipped at the remnants of the once-proud Better Boy. I could almost see, from across the creek, her small eyes widen.
    "Eureka!" she shouted in Duckish; we know that's what she said from the way the others appeared out of nowhere to finish off the mess.
    Ah, said I to myself. Duck food! I threw tomato-balloons into the sky with abandon, and as three were coming down among the ducks, three more were launching into the air. 
    At about this moment the neighbor, a stalwart citizen of some seventy-two years, decided he had better investigate.
     "So, uh, what are we doing today?" came his voice, from right behind the merry balloonist's back.
    "Oh, hi, Mr. T.! Feeding the ducks!" I launched three more balloons. The ducks, who by now had gorged themselves, showed no further sign of appetite and were mostly just dodging the "incomings."
    "Right. Feeding the ducks. Well, nice weather, huh?" He watched me closely for signs of more erratic behavior, but none was forthcoming; my arms were tired.
    Every day until frost, though, I fed the ducks. It was good for my pitching arm, they clearly liked tomatoes a great deal, and were good for about fifteen Better Boys a day.
    The next year, I put in thirty-two plants.
    The year after that, sixteen.
    This year, four for sure. 
    Well, maybe eight?

,,,

    I used to despair of ever getting the garden tilled. Here in western Oregon it generally rains, rains, and rains until about the fifth of July. Throughout this time, if you pick up a handful of "dirt" and drop it, like the tilling manuals say, it will hit the surface with a wet splapp!! -- just like a Better Boy tomato -- thus failing the ready-to-till test.
    So, what's a gardener to do?
    We have weeds like nobody has weeds. We can hear them growing at night. Neighbors like to lean on the fence, shake their heads, and say, "Oh, my. Need some herbicide in there!" Well, thanks but no thanks; we had a serious run of birth defects among tree planters' families back in the seventies, including ours, and it turned out to have something to do with the 2,4,D that was used to keep the forest clear-cuts free of brush. I figure the big chemical companies owe our family about forty thousand dollars so far, but for now let's just say, no herbicides on this place, thank you.
    So, ok, what to do? We learned, some years ago by trial and error that with a long-handled garden fork we could "spade" wet ground: the tines don't seem to compress the soil the way an actual spade does. We turned the clumps upside down, and the roots of sod and weeds, ripped by the fork rather than cut off cleanly by a spade, stood upside down naked in the sunlight, rapidly drying up, a satisfying scene of mayhem. But the earth itself remained stubbornly cold and damp, even for peas.
    Something more was needed.
    During one hot, dry summer not too long ago, I tried to water my plants from little irrigation ditches, as I had seen done in a garden book somewhere, but the plants were drying up anyway, because the rows were too far apart for the ditches to have any effect.
    A little exploration with a spade taught me what most of you old-time gardeners already knew: most of the water goes straight down.
    You have to water the roots of a plant to do any good. If the water is hitting the ground just a little outside the reach of the plant, it may miss the roots entirely on its way to the aquifer.
    Hmm.
    If I can water only straight down, said I to myself, then I can also dry straight down. As with sun and shade, you can manipulate water levels by opening up or blocking paths for water -- or rain!
    The next winter we bought some stuff we had been avoiding: sheet plastic. 4-mil black and clear. We experimented with both, spreading them over various areas of the garden, and found that the clear plastic seemed to actually encourage weed growth, though it did dry out the soil enough to till.
    The black plastic seemed superior. Every green thing underneath it died, though worms did not seem to be at all discouraged. I've since heard that the clear does work, but it has to be tucked under the earth around all the edges -- absolutely all -- in order to deny air to the weeds and get enough temperature to kill them and their seeds. The black plastic seems much less effort.
    When we don't have enough to do the whole surface of the garden (which is always), we spread out what we've got, and three weeks later, go back, pull all the plastic away, till the dry spot, and spread the plastic over the next space for the next three weeks. Thus there is always some earth dry enough to work, even in constant rain.
    Meanwhile the clear plastic does come in handy. In  prepared ground, we can plant whatever rows or hills of seeds interest us at the time, let it rain on them one night, then cover the rows with a sheet of clear plastic for three to six days so the seeds won't drown, then remove. And voilá! A garden up and running, even as the cold rainwater keeps up its endless drumming. Where there is a will, I suppose, there is almost always a way. 

 
(To be continued)

Viewing Jasper Mountain: March

 March

ISAAC WALTON'S "Piscator," in the Complete Angler, advises his young friend thus: 

    Let me tell you, scholar, that Diogenes walked on a day, with his friend, to see a country-fair; where he saw ribbons, and looking-glasses, and nut-crackers, and fiddles, and hobby-horses, and many other gimcracks: and having observed them, and all the other finnimbruns that make a complete country-fair; he said to his friend, "Lord! How many things are there in this world, of which Diogenes hath no need!" And truly it is so, or might be so, with very many who vex and toil themselves to get what they have no need of. Can any man charge God that he hath not given him enough to make his life happy? No, doubtless; for nature is content with a little. And yet you shall hardly meet with a man that complains not of some want; though he, indeed, wants nothing but his will, it may be, nothing but his will of his poor neighbour, for not worshipping, or not flattering him: and thus, when we might be happy and quiet, we create trouble to ourselves.

    It's quite all right to garden and bake, and read, and sing, and nap, and patch clothes, and to regard all this as a life, in other words.
    The trouble comes in when we get ambitious, as Plato said, for more -- that more which sets us at odds with neighbors and neighboring countries. 
    I have gone to the greenhouse; found the two flats of lettuce satisfactory, and the peas, and found the beets acceptable, but little else has responded to what heat has come in through the fogged, rain-streaked glass. I have found some unremembered packets of -- yes, still more lettuce -- and corn salad, chard, and some white radishes, and dedicated still more space to the hopeful flats.
    Sigh.
    And swept the floor, mindful of the importance Zen nuns give to tidying up round the buildings and gardens.
     Afterwards, baking. 
    I took up an almost-empty jam jar, added warm water from the tap, a small spoonful of baker's yeast, put the lid on, shook the mix a bit, and removed the lid right away. In experiments of this kind, you don't want pressure building up under that lid. The beasties liked the jam and started multiplying right away. The jar is a sixteen-ounce size, so that's perfect for about a pound and half loaf. 
    In a large mixing bowl, I put about a tablespoonful of salt, and threw in a handful each of miso, wheat germ, and oats. Rooting through the current supply of veggies, I came across a green onion that needed using, diced it small, and added that to the bowl. A dollop of honey and another of molasses, and now, with the salt buried under all that, it didn't shock the yeast too much when the starter was thrown in.
    We keep whole-wheat flour in sacks in a thirty-gallon galvanized can, and dole it out with a hand-sized bowl.
    After three bowls, I stirred, and keep stirring steadily, adding flour, till the batch "rose up off the bowl," which is the expression we use for when the lump achieves the right consistency -- cleaning all residual flour off the bowl into one lump that's not too sticky when touched, yet not too hard and unyielding. At this point I turned the whole thing out onto a chopping block that had been lightly floured, and shaped it into a round loaf.
    No two batches turn out exactly the same.
    Earlier in the week, the "extra ingredient" was raisins; this time it was the onion. 
    I don't really do much kneading, and only have the patience to let the loaf rise once. The cookie sheet with the loaf on it rested on the corner of the dining room table nearest the wood stove, then, as I got hungrier, moved onto a trivet on the stove top, then into the oven on "warm." When the loaf was finally tall enough to bake, I simply cranked the oven to 350 and checked the clock. Back in an hour. 
    Bread this loosely defined can be used to keep a lot of food from going to waste.
    The watery whey from tofu or from draining a batch of pasta can be useful here. 
    Got soup stock? 
    Veggie stock? 
    Leftover rice? 
    Breakfast cereal? 
    I'm told, though, I should leave out the coffee grounds.


,,,

    I didn't care for gardening when I was growing up. I much preferred to spend my Saturdays lounging around the house with a book, or exploring the small wilderness across the creek that bounded the suburban lot we called home. From a hill across a meadow in the wild area, I could look back over the creek valley and see the backs of the row of new houses, set down in pastureland during the explosive growth after the second World War, and in the large back yards the men could be seen, each in his own realm, restoring order to the landscape the bulldozers had crushed and tumbled.

    Some planted a few pines, all planted grass.
    My father, almost alone among them, planted fruit trees, grapes, figs, and row upon row of vegetables. He owned a walking tractor, the remote ancestor of today's tillers, and I could hear it singing to him, dinka-dinka-dink, as he plowed.
    He made the earth yield tenfold, twentyfold, an hundredfold, all of which he brought to my despairing mother in brimming bushel baskets. She had no inclination for canning, drying, and freezing, and would surreptitiously slip the produce, as much as she could reasonably expect would go unnoticed, into the trash.
    Frankly, I shared her point of view.
    I didn't like squash or spinach fresh, let alone reconstituted in the dead of winter, so why bother?
    He failed to make a convert of her, and had worse luck with me. I was enlisted to barrow ripe manure from place to place, to hold trees upright while he mixed compost, water and earth gently round the roots, to unroll bare-root tomato plants from their damp newspaper wrapping in my own shade, safe from the sun, then hand them to him, one by one, while he dug and poured and tamped, talking and explaining the whole while.
    But my mind stayed resolutely elsewhere; perhaps with Dickinson or Austen. My father sensed the futility of his efforts, and with a sigh released me to my own world, taking up the tomatoes from his shade with one hand and pouring water into the holes with the other, alone.
    Years later, needing to earn a living on my arrival in Oregon at the height of an unemployment crisis, I signed on to a tree planting crew.
    The foreman showed us the basics in setting out a two-year-old Douglas fir seedling:
    "Y'open the hole with the hoedad at the bottom by pulling up on the handle, see? Then the top by pulling down. Now yuh've got a hole twelve inches deep and four across all the way down. Right? Now take yer tree and dangle the roots down; give 'em a shake so they'll hang loose and won't get caught upside down, see? 'Cuz roots upside down don't work -- they'll die on yuh; if all the roots are upside down the whole tree'll die. They only work one way. Keep it out of the sun, too, and don't hold it out in the wind too long. All that sun and air'll kill yer tree. Now yuh pack the dirt around the tree with yer hoedad blade, once, twice, like this, so there's no air pocket in the ground -- that air will kill a tree in the ground just like it will in yer hand. Now press down with yer foot, but not too close to the stem and not too hard. There's hair roots, yuh can't see 'em, on every root yuh can see, and if yuh get rough you'll strip those off at the base, and they'll die, and there goes yer tree. O.K.? now on to the next spot."
    About halfway through the lecture I realized I already knew all this; it was the tomato lecture!
    Shade, air, and hair roots. This foreman might not know his Jane Austen, but his rough approximations of physical geography and botany struck me as admirably educated, and at that moment, with a flash of insight, I understood gardening not as a weird masochistic hobby but as a vital branch of knowledge.
    Hand planting of tree seedlings is carried on in the winter hereabouts, beginning when the rains have penetrated about ten inches into the soil. Our crews worked in the Coast Range until March, then fanned out across the Cascades and the Rockies, finishing up usually about the end of May, somewhere in Montana or Colorado.
    Summer was the off season.

    Having nothing else to do that first summer, I took up gardening. After tilling a suitable patch of ground, I went out with a round-pointed shovel, a bucket of compost, a bucket of water, and a flat of tomatoes in two-inch pots (I have not seen those bare-root "field-growed" tomato plants since my childhood).

    With the shovel, I dug a hole about the depth of the blade, threw in some nice wormy compost, turned up a seedling and gently lifted off the pot, set the root ball quickly into the earth (working in my own shade), slopped in some water, backfilled soil up to just above the root collar, tamped gently with the heel of my palm, and measured to the next spot by simply laying down the shovel and noting the place where the end of its handle reached to.
    I didn't think about it at the time, but later realized, while admiring the nicely laid out grid of fresh greenery, that I had absorbed, albeit unknown to me at the time, every move of my father's method. The conversion was complete.
    When my parents eventually made their way west to visit, they caught us at the end of a pretty good harvest. My father looked over the rows of corn, the squash patch, the bean trellises, and the fall bed with its broccoli, lettuce, chard, and kale seedlings, and shook his head.
    "Where'd you learn how to do all this? " But he knew the answer, and I could tell he was deeply pleased.

,,,

    The long rains are back, with the occasional snowflake.
    In March we do most of our gardening sitting around the table playing with pretty packets as if there were a game called Seed Poker. To Beloved a pair of Sugar Snap Peas and a pair of Broccoli is a really good hand; but I prefer a full house of two Blue Lake Pole Beans and three Bodacious Corn.
    One wants something to do, even if it calls for a full suit-up of rain gear and gum boots. So at about this time of year I usually do the garlic roundup.
    The previous occupant of our place enjoyed garlic, which I never liked, but luckily his choice was elephant garlic, which has made me a convert. This stuff grows six feet tall, produces interesting flowers that are fun to have around and are also great scissored off for salads. It develops a bulb the size of a softball, with great soft cloves that are a cook's delight. These can be chopped fine and tossed into the pan with whatever's doing, from stir-fried vegetables to roast lamb, adding a subtler aroma and flavor than the more common varieties.
    When you lift the plants, there are a myriad of filbert-shaped bulblets, like small potatoes, that are easily left behind in the soil, sometimes eight or ten inches deep. These become first-year plants of what appears to be a biennial. Because of the depth from which they often grow, the bulblet plants make a fair substitute for leeks. Or if you leave them alone, they come back the second year as the highly productive six-foot beasties.

,,,

    Another sunny patch.
    We cut and stacked wood and shredded the leaves and hay that have been lying heaped about the garden. Then planted tomatoes -- in flats in the greenhouse.
   Hung Tzu-ch'eng, writing about 1600, said that "Mountains and forests are scenes of wonder. Once they are frequented by people, they are debased into market-places. Calligraphy and paintings are things of beauty. Once they are craved by people, they are degraded into merchandise." 
    The trick, unless we hope to move to a desert island (which would, as Hung could point out, immediately devalue the island), is to work primarily on one's mindfulness, to become not a merchandiser, nor a buyer of merchandise, at least where Jasper Mountain is concerned. It should simply be there, as it has practically always been, of interest to us yet not possessed by us.
    There is always the hope of extending this non-possession to a wider and wider range of experience.
      Example: a supermarket is a dreadful combination of market forces, the use of bright lights, activity, noise, and the arrangement of goods to tempt us into buying more things than we need, more expensive things than we need, and more processed things than we need. Yet we can enter and buy rice, tofu, pok choi, green onions, mung bean sprouts, a zucchini, and a bell pepper, pay for the items, and walk out again, leaving the vast array of very bad items, nutritionally speaking, un-bought and unconsumed.
    Choices. 
    Hung says: "To concur with a web of circumstances is to dismiss it, and is like the harmony between flitting butterflies and fluttering flowers. To accord with an event is to nullify it, and is like the perfection of the full moon as round as a basin of water." 
    When I had my mid-life crisis, I lived briefly in what is known around college campuses as a "quad." For my $240 a month I had the exclusive use of a breezeway, a mailbox, a porch light, a locking exterior door, a twelve by fourteen room with a sliding window, curtains and blinds, a table, two long bookshelves on the wall, a bed, two chairs, a nice vanity with a round sink, hot and cold running water, a closet, several drawers in the built-in vanity cabinet, an overhead light, a telephone jack, and three sets of electrical outlets.
    Heat, light, power, and water were included in the rent. A lockable interior door led to a corridor with three other such doors, a bathroom, and a small kitchen with four cabinets and two refrigerators, for the shared use of four residents.
    I was within walking distance from my job, groceries, laundry, entertainment, and public transportation. Add a bicycle, a few blankets, books, changes of clothes, a laptop with CD player and headset, toothbrush, soap, a clock, and a few dishes and utensils, and I was set. 
    My eating habits in this environment became so simple that I seldom met my neighbors, as I pretty much used the kitchen only for storage. On my small dining room table stood a rice steamer with a built-in timer, bought new for under $25. With one of these, you can add a few cups of water to the inner tank, and about a cup and a half to the rice dish, pour in a cup of rice, and set the timer for 35 minutes.
    After 20 minutes, snap a stem from your pok choi, trim the greens, and dice up the stem. Take about an inch off the end of your tofu and dice that up as well. Throw these, minus the greens, into the steamer. Take about three inches off the end of a small zucchini and dice that up, leaving a bit of the peeling on each chunk. Throw that in. Dice up some bell pepper and do the same.
    With five minutes to go, chop some sprouts up a bit, and throw them in along with the pok choi greens and some onion greens. Add some basil flakes from a spice jar. When the steamer's bell rings, uncover and serve.
    Have a glass of water with your dinner.
    Leftovers can go toward breakfast or lunch.
    For a vanishingly small grocery bill, this regimen will give you enough calories and nutrients to sustain you reasonably well for a long time, and you will be much the healthier for it, too.


(To be continued)

Viewing Jasper Mountain: February

February

LAST NIGHT, not content with the flats already seeded, I stepped out to the greenhouse and planted two hanging baskets with cilantro, and a gallon pot with chives. I have been running low on potting soil, so I built up the bottom layer in these containers with sphagnum moss, then a few inches of soil, then broadcast the seeds, then shook all down, then covered seed with a thin layer of peat, then watered gently. I hung the baskets on twenty-penny nails driven into the rafters, sorted pots, then swept the herringbone-patterned floor. I also brought in last year's planter of lavender and trimmed its dead growth; perhaps there's still something doing down in the roots. 
    The night is restless; there's a storm front in the area, boiling in beneath the jet stream from somewhere near Hawaii. Waves are undoubtedly smashing a little higher than usual at the cape, and in the mountains new snow is covering the tracks of the more venturesome animals. I find myself visualizing this, then the image shifts to a close-up of blood on the snow: a vole taken up by an owl, perhaps. If I hoped to find peace in the night, well, perhaps I brought my own unrest with me. There are sharp doings in the world; so many of us wishing ill upon so many others. 
    I have just finished proofreading Montaigne's essay on "Coaches," in which he strays magnificently into a critical analysis of the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, implying throughout that the Europeans had, by means of technological advances only, conquered a culture equal to or better than their own in almost every other way. He recounts the torture and death of the Inca king:

    The king, half rosted, was carried away: Not so much for pitty (for what ruth could ever enter so barbarous mindes, who upon the furnished information of some odde piece or vessell of golde they intended to get, would broyle a man before their eyes, and not a man onely, but a king, so great in fortune and so renowned in desert?), but for as much as his unmatched constancy did more and more make their inhumane cruelty ashamed, they afterwards hanged him, because he had couragiously attempted by armes to deliver himselfe out of so long captivity and miserable subjection; where he ended his wretched life, worthy an high minded and never danted Prince. At another time, in one same fire, they caused to be burned all alive foure hundred common men and threescore principall Lords of a Province, whom by the fortune of warre they had taken prisoners. These narrations we have out of their owne bookes, for they do not onely avouch, but vauntingly publish them. May it bee they doe it for a testimony of their justice or zeale toward their religion? Verily they are wayes over-different and enemies to so sacred an ende.

    I suspect that we, as a culture, have not much improved upon this model.
    I remember that during Desert Storm I overheard two friends discussing their dismay at realizing how little "progress" had been made in building a civil and humane society. They described to each other the behavior of so many of their fellow citizens that had derided and even attacked dissidents in the nearby city.
    Their surprise surprised me.
    Perhaps, I thought, we ought not to expect too much from a civilization dependent upon massive consumption of oil, electricity, metals, plastics, fats; upon television and its steady bombardment of a largely captive population with promises of instant gratification of cynically inculcated wishes.
    My two friends, and Beloved and I also, had spent many years in a small valley in the mountains, among neighbors who had built homes of rough lumber with cedar shake roofs, and with recycled windows through which to view the rain falling among alders and cedars, and watch the deer grazing unharassed in the homeyard. We had had many, many days in which to make our kind of social progress by baby steps, pulling on rubber boots, walking up the gravel road to visit one another over steaming cups of home-grown herbal tea.
    The outside world, rich or poor, in pursuit of its varied manipulative or manipulated agendas, had not had, or given itself, the opportunity to discover that life. 
    There is a Paul Reps poem that goes something like: "drinking a bowl of green tea/I stop the war." I remember thinking, when I was a Vietnam War protester, that this was a naive approach. But whom did I convince, with all my activism at that time, to think differently than they already thought? An action taken that is in itself peaceful, on the other hand, is never wasted.
    At times like these I am reminded that Plato wrote the definitive critique of material modernity and its consequences, over 2300 years ago. In the second book of the Republic, Socrates upon having been asked to define justice, does so by describing his ideal of a just state, with its underpinnings of a just culture:

 Let us then consider, first of all, what will be their way of life, now that we have thus established them. Will they not produce corn, and wine, and clothes, and shoes, and build houses for themselves? And when they are housed, they will work, in summer, commonly, stripped and barefoot, but in winter substantially clothed and shod. They will feed on barley-meal and flour of wheat, baking and kneading them, making noble cakes and loaves; these they will serve up on a mat of reeds or on clean leaves, themselves reclining the while upon beds strewn with yew or myrtle. And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another. And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means ... (Jowett, tr.)   

Glaucon, who has elicited this description, however, seeks a description more like Athens.

       Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
       But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
       Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.

Socrates responds by shifting from a description of agrarian simplicity to one of what is in effect a consumer society:

     Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way. They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.
    True, he said. 
    Then we must enlarge our borders; for the original healthy State is no longer sufficient. Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of music --poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's dresses. And we shall want more servants. Will not tutors be also in request, and nurses wet and dry, tirewomen and barbers, as well as confectioners and cooks; and swineherds, too, who were not needed and therefore had no place in the former edition of our State, but are needed now? They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them. [Emphasis added.]
    Certainly.
    And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?
    Much greater.
    And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small now, and not enough?
    Quite true.
    Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?
    That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
    And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not? [Emphasis added.]

    War is, says, Plato, the inevitable consequence of consumerism. If this analysis is correct, and we do not wish war, what ought we to do? Would it not be to plan a shift in society away from consumerism?

    One of two things has to happen to Western civilization soon, or it will be superseded.
    The first choice would be to harden ourselves to defend "our way of life," which hardening is, in itself, especially as it involves giving up constitutional freedoms, a contradiction of that very way of life. Yet this has been a very popular choice of late.
    The second, and to me the more rational approach, is to adopt, to the extent possible, the simplicity practiced by Zen monks and by the society proposed by Socrates as most just because least acquisitive.
    Socrates specifically states that the families in such a society must live within their means, and here I elided, but will now add back the end of the sentence: " ...having an eye to poverty or war."
    In other words, if you are consciously doing simplicity you need not call it poverty.

,,,

    The rare sunshine at this time of year always sends Beloved tearing out to the garden to put in peas. She climbs into her overalls, ties a bandana over her hair, grabs a "retired" pillow from the greenhouse, plunks it on the ground in front of the row, and goes to work.
    The neighbor, a tidy retired man who gardens from June to August religiously, finds this behavior distinctly odd. So he comes out to investigate. Not wanting to be obvious about this, he begins on the far side of the pasture, and inspects his fence around into the apple orchard, then, after what he deems to be a decent interval, stops right by her.
     "What the devil are you at in the dead of winter?" he asks politely.
    "Peas! Aren't they lovely?" she extends a grubby palm, with a dozen wrinkled seeds.
    "You don't expect them to come up, do you?" He peers down at the strange-looking, to him, thick straw mulch that has been pulled back to reveal the brown earth.
    "No, I never expect them to come up, but I always hope they will; and I get nice surprises. Sometimes." She grins, and picks up her trowel.
    "Huh! well, good luck to you!" He ambles off, shaking his head at the improvidence of the Bear clan.
    Though we now patronize Seed Savers Exchange, we used to buy a lot of our seeds at the end of summer, from racks of remaindered packets that are made available by our local hardware stores for five to ten cents a packet. Some of these year-old seeds, especially of flowers, seemed to lose a bit of vitality and planting them was a bit like doing your thinning in advance; but the peas always seemed to come up.
    Peas are legumes. We much prefer them to beans, as the whole family has a sweet tooth. We like the climbing varieties more than bush, and prefer sugar snap to the shell-'em-out varieties.
    When the season is at its height, relatively little cooking goes on hereabouts, as we are to be found at all hours simply sitting by the pea vines stuffing ourselves.
    Those that we pick and bring in are not as good after about two hours, though we use them in salads and stir fries, and freeze the rest. If it does threaten to rain too much on the rows or beds soon after planting, cover with a plastic tarp for two days, then pull it off for a day or so as needed. As soon as the plants are up, pull the mulch up around them close, and renew it throughout the life of the plants, to keep the roots cool. I stake them out by making tripods of cuttings from ash, willow, and hazel. Peas are said to dislike being planted in the same spot two years in a row, so we try to rotate them with other crops.
    After the pea crop is gone, I feed the vines to the ducks, geese, and rabbits, who think highly of them.

,,,

    Today the sun came out for the first time since I don't know when. The ground rises to the east of the house, and a morning-coffee glance through the living room window revealed a jeweled world -- heavy dew on the rumpled grass, the leafless lilac bushes, and the apple orchard. Rainbow hues glinted from the drops, and the glow suffused the house like a dream of a better world.
    These lilacs, when they bloom, are of a purple-hued variety, and all the lilacs around all the houses hereabouts are of the same kind.
    The originals were planted by the first family to arrive here, not long after the original pioneers in our end of the valley. They built a post-and-beam two-story house in the midst of three hundred and twenty acres of Douglas fir forest. These trees were large, and there were a lot of them; their shade was dense, and it would be a while before this could be farmland. The men, taking stock of their situation, immediately took on a contract to provide firewood for all the one-room schoolhouses in the area, and fell to work with axe and crosscut. As the clearing around the house grew, the women installed plants they had brought with them: vinca, daffodils, flowering quince, lilacs.
    The original house, and the forest that sustained it, have been gone for decades. The plants remain; the original lilacs form a semicircle around a pile of foundation stones that were used to fill in the cellar, and the vinca and daffodils cover the area. It's part of our neighbors' pasture now.
    Our house was built in the year I was born, 1949, by one of the descendants of the woodcutting family, and his wife grew the  dooryard's lilacs from cuttings off the original pioneer plants. All her neighbors appear to have done the same. The family across the road has a thick, healthy-looking hedge of them.
     When we arrived here, the dooryard lilacs were much in need of pruning back; winds were scraping them against the house. We took out dead wood, crossed branches and the like, and noticed that suckers had formed around the root collars of the ancient bushes. These had been cut back and had re-sprouted innumerable times, thickening the root collars considerably, providing room for more suckers to form.
    We were about to cut the latest ones away, when an idea came to us -- would they form roots if we hilled up earth around them? We brought a barrow-load of dirt and piled it round the bases of the lilacs, and went on to other tasks.
    Weeks -- or it must have been months -- later, we remembered our experiment and went to the lilacs with a trowel to see how the suckers were coming along. Sure enough, they had formed roots. Cutting the main stems away from the parent, we were able to replant a number of them into number ten tomato cans, where they awaited dormancy the following winter. Come winter, in its turn, we remembered them just in time, before bud break. They were set out at the corners of the house. They have all done well, and we are filled with admiration at the hardiness and adaptability of these pioneers of the valley. 
    The lilac has long been hybridized and there are now well over 500 varieties. Around here we plant them in fall, or no later than February, with some compost and bone meal in the hole, which should be spacious enough not to crowd the roots. We top dress biannually with compost, then add some pine or fir needles, or other acid material. If  the acidity isn't benefiting the plant enough, there is a trick: add apple parings to the top dressing and stick a few rusty nails (not galvanized) underneath. The iron seems to react with the apple skins in some way the shrubs find appealing. 
    Watering for the first year is vital. After that, the lilac should be fairly hardy, and we avoid letting the ground around an established lilac get too soggy. A vigorous plant can sustain plenty of blooms. If it seems poorly, we pick them off so that more of the strength can go to building new roots. The bloom season is relatively short, but while it lasts, the scent on the breeze we dig in the herb bed provides a strong argument that in Heaven it is always spring.

(To be continued)