Saving for a Rainy Day -- This Winter

Summer begins with an anticipatory austerity.  After springtime’s exuberant flush of greens and yellows, the garden rows split and envelop seeds and seedlings, nestling and coaxing them with rich soil and compost and protective mulch.  And then we wait. 

I don’t mean that there is nothing to do.  In a matter of days the weeds appear, requiring a cultivating hand.  There is moisture to consider, and watchfulness against marauding bugs and care for errant vines.  We keep busy; but payoffs are yet remote.  A garden, I have concluded, is the quintessential exercise in delayed gratification.  There are, of course, tantalizing foretastes.  Lettuces come quickly, along with spinach and radishes.  But the bread and butter of the effort – the meat and, well, potatoes of the extended investment – involve waiting.  Indeed, I can get so caught up in the undulating labors of the long season – hypnotized by the weeding, the watering, the trellising – that I allow the first fruits to rot on the stem, unnoticed.

But eventually that all changes.  By this time of year the garden has shaken loose an avalanche of fruit, burying those earlier pessimisms about low and disappointing yields.  The rooster’s morning crow is drowned out daily by the cacophonous cry from the garden, “Pick me!  Pick me!  My arms are breaking from the weight.”

Menus amp up with the harvest.  Every meal represents an agricultural celebration.  But still there is more.  There is the frequent lament over the cucumber newly discovered that, in its hiddenness, has swelled to such dirigible dimensions

as to be beyond the table.  And the suffocating kale begging to be thinned.  And the stew pot full of tomatoes – at least those not reserved for the now-repetitive BLT’s. And still there is more.  No matter how heavily I harvest the okra, tomorrow the bushes are ornamented with more.  And the peppers, clustered and swelling, are just now coloring and waiting there turn.  And still there is more.

And…it is all too much to gather and consume. 

And then we remember the stealthy, inexorable approach of winter, when all thoughts of harvest are distant memories coupled with fanciful anticipation.  Winter, when we harvest out of freezers and canning jars and containers of dehydrated treasures.  If, that is, we have made conscientious use of abundance

It’s an age old problem, this abundance/scarcity alternation; which is why our ancestors learned to make cheese to preserve excess milk, cure meat to extend protein consumption beyond the slaughter, and ferment vegetables to stretch the garden’s goodness beyond summer.  Etc.

And so it is that this weekend we began preserving in earnest.  The dehydrators have long-since been fired up repeatedly in response to the deluge of tomatoes, but recent days have been animated by root vegetables roasting and pickling – beets and turnips and daikons – and kimchi fermenting.  Freezer shelves are groaning under the weight of okra bags, and greens won’t be far behind – the kale and collards and chard – with peppers quickly following.

All because winter is approaching, and we intend to be happily healthy then, too…

…while we browse through the seed catalogues, dreaming of spring.

Taking the Time to Find the Treasure in the Trash

The black walnuts are back.  Last year's sparse crop lulled me away from the memory of prior seasons' black/green carpet.  Several ankle-twisting strolls through the yard in recent days have offered a PhD level refresher course.  The golf ball sized nuisances are everywhere -- at least everywhere I need to be; the driveway, the flower beds, the shortcuts through the lawn.   This morning, then, after the early morning chicken-releasing, potted plant and new seedling watering chores were completed I thought to make a first foray into nuisance clearing.  With an empty five-gallon bucket in one hand and the ingenious long-handled "picker-upper" tool I found at the garden center a few years ago, I went to work under the nearest tree.

 It doesn't take long to fill the wire basket of the tool, nor does it ultimately take long to fill a five-gallon bucket.

This, after clearing about a quarter of the space beneath a single tree.
This, with the nuts still falling.
This, with other tasks still to do today.

Perhaps a new perspective is called for.  Like dandelions, those edible "weeds" that prolifically populate a lawn that turn out to be one of nature's tools for breaking up compacted soil; like purslane, that edible "weed" I learned about earlier this summer, that is one of nature's tools for covering naked soil so as to protect it from erosion, perhaps I should walk around this pile of nuts and find a way to see them as a boon instead of a bother.

I'm not, let me assert, totally clueless about this matter.  Before you shake your head in bemused dismay at this city boy's blindness, let me interject that I am well aware of the culinary -- even nutritional -- value of this dubious harvest.  I know that a prudent steward would happily gather, de-husk, dry and shell this free bounty to good end.  My problem, these last few years of tending this windfall, has not been ignorance; it has been laziness.  Or perhaps more charitably assessed, triage.  "Nutting", as I might name it, takes time -- lots of it with all those multiple steps.  And I've got other, more accessible, things to do in the garden, in the chicken yard, in the orchard.  "Lower hanging fruit" so to speak.

But as we settle more comfortably into the undulations and rhythms of farmstead life, and as we anticipate the eventual harvest of nuts from trees we have actually planted, I'm rethinking this profligate waste.  After all, life is full of things difficult and superficially unattractive whose superior sweetness and beauty deep within gloriously rewards those who contribute the time and effort necessary to access it.  Think "geodes."  Think cultures that seem inscrutable and undesirable.  Think religious convictions that seem inane or bizarre or off-putting.   And think all of those people we have tripped over along the way who don't have initial "curb appeal" but who become life-long, life-supporting friends through the rich character and grace within.

Once we have taken the time to get inside.  And once they have allowed us there.

So I've started reading about how to accomplish these tedious steps for harvesting walnuts -- the erstwhile trash of the farmstead that could well become its quiet autumn treasure.

So I'll need to close for now.  I've got work to do.  Buckets of it.
If, that is, it doesn't drive me nuts.

The Music of Life, and the Power to Play It

I don't know what brought the music to mind. It had been years since I had heard it -- likely 45 of them. “Chris, Chris & Lee" was a vocal group of local popularity emanating from a college in my home town. Perhaps fantasizing about some fictional future when the group would be known as “Chris, Chris, Lee and Tim” my high school freshman self hungrily sat in the audience whenever they performed in the area; an aspirational, albeit delusional musician, I loved the harmonies, the guitar, and the banjo. Indeed, I would for a time take lessons from “Lee” on that latter instrument though I'm afraid I never progressed very far. After college Chris and Chris went on to successful careers in the music business; Lee may have as well though I'm sad to say I have no real idea. I completely lost track of him after that brief season of life.

Whatever had flared the memory of that music in recent weeks, I desperately wanted to hear it again. The only problem was I couldn't.

Long before the days of digital downloads or even CD’s, “Chris, Chris & Lee” self-produced a vinyl LP comprised of originals on the "Ours" side and covers on the “Theirs” side. The album happily found a prized place in my teenage record collection which remains largely intact in boxes stored in our basement, next to the inexpensive portable turntable I found at a store a dozen or so years ago and purchased to eke out a little residual value from all that vinyl. Or to justify keeping the boxes. Somehow, however -- perhaps through a careless move or more likely a dog’s chew -- the power cord got irreparably severed. The turntable was stilled.

The pieces of that power supply have jostled around in the floorboard of my car for weeks, ever since discovering them in a jumbled box of miscellaneous electronics that surfaced in one of those occasional basement reorganization projects that stirred us several months back. Surely I could find a replacement at Radio Shack. Oh, wait -- the Radio Shack store closed who knows how long ago?

And then this prodding compulsion to hear again that music -- those vocals, those guitars and that banjo.

Power is an essential but ephemeral phenomenon. Whether a battery in a cell phone, fuel in a car, a plug in a wall socket or nutrients in the soil we don't much think about it until it's absent -- when the flashlight dims, the car coughs to a standstill, the plants spindle and limply die, the oven stays cold, the spirit grows numb.

Or the turntable doesn't turn.

It's why I'm conscientious about soil health -- the power supply of the garden. It's why I have gas cans in the barn and fresh batteries in the drawer. It's why we installed solar panels for the house. It's why I plug in my phone every night. It's why I read. It's why, after 20 years of marriage, we still go on dates. Otherwise, the things we value, the tools on which we've come to depend, fall silent or still.

My aural craving has a happy ending. The internet, I'm continually experiencing, is amazing thing; and after a brief search I located and ordered a replacement power supply for the turntable. It arrived yesterday in the mail, prompting a subsequent, mercifully brief search through those afore-mentioned boxes. The album was found, the vinyl platter extracted, the needle was dropped, and music spilled forth...

The harmonies, the guitars, the banjo.

And I smiled -- an indulged and satisfied smile 45 years in the making.

And humming, I walked away wondering what else around and within is winding down, depleting or dimming that I need to plug in, fertilize, or nourish.