Mesclun Mix and Pterodactyls

"The Organic Writer" has been woefully neglected.

With spring, garden planning, seeding, and prepping always takes precedence over blogging, but before I knew it, near three months had elapsed without paying a visit.

Oh! The frozen lake! Shudder. Time to move those pictures down the page. Today a picture of our pond in spring:

From end to end, a good place to cool off in the heat of summer after bailing hay or weeding rows of beets and chard and garlic....

It isn't all idyllic around here. I've been dodging pterodactyls, planting onions, chasing chickens, and weeding the rhubarb and the asparagus, the first tips of which are emerging. Spring has been slow arriving but the tulips are opening and grass will soon need to be cut. And it won't be long before we'll be jumping off that dock.

Yesterday, as I watered our seedlings and salad mix inside the greenhouse a large winged shadow suddenly flapped around the outside of the doomed roof, up and over, flap, flap, across and over, trying to find a way in. From inside it looked huge, like a pterodactyl brushing against the plastic, looking for entry. The plastic amplifies everything. If it is sprinkling outside, it sounds like a steady rain inside. If it’s a steady rain outside, it sounds like a downpour inside. I darted outside to see what the shadow was, but only a common crow flew off towards the chicken coop, and I went back inside. Crows can’t cart off a chicken like a hawk will. 

Back to the mesclun mix....

Doesn't it look yummy? Spicy and ass-kicking! Now for the picking. The farmers' market season opens Saturday and it seems the only writing I have time for then is the weekly CSA newsletter. But I hope to post more updates here about things of interest, and I think everyone has an interest in food and how it's grown on an organic farm. 

Oh, and a swim in the pond and a writing session on the dock.

Let's not be strangers!

Where Did It Go?

Yesterday, we pulled the soaker hoses and the tomato cages. I cleaned the greenhouse and mounded dirt around the pepper plants. They need a lot of tender care and we dropped the sides and shut the doors and watered them properly so we will have peppers at Christmas time. Red and green and yellow and orange. Like a Mexican Christmas, but we are here in Michigan, and the night approaches,

and the sun doesn't set where it used to. At the height of day, it is no longer where it should be. It doesn’t touch the front of the house, it doesn’t touch the mums in full dress. No wonder they stretch and stretch and turn leggy, reaching for the sun which slips further and further down the sky. It slips towards Detroit and the Detroit River. It’s falling into Lake Erie and over Ohio. It's falling towards Mexico where they can grow peppers in winter. Falling falling falling like the leaves from the maple and the oak we named after his parents. Strong and resilient, planted to survive and thrive long after we’re gone. Like the oak that was big when my father was small. Planting a tree is an unselfish gesture. It’s one of the best things we can do.

Hazel and The Mousehole

This morning there was ice on top of the 5-gallon pails of water in the hoophouse-my backup to running hose across the yard to the frost-free hydrant. But lugging 5-gallon buckets across the snow drifts isn't much of a backup. I need a hydrant in my greenhouse or a better back. Greens don't need as much water in winter, but a little helps them in their struggle with these temperatures. Even though we have double layer frost covers on the spinach, mizuna, arugula, and komatsuna (an Asian mustard green with a sweet/tangy flavor), when it's zero outside, it'll get below freezing in the hoop house. We swept a foot of snow off the top of the roof yesterday. The weight of snow cannot be underestimated.

There was ice on the water in the chicken coop too. We have a base heater that the water container sits on, so it doesn't freeze completely and the hens are able to drink out of the trough. They sip and tilt their heads and peck at the snow on my boots. The rooster lords over them all, such a guy.

My sister had a calamity this morning with her chickens. She has a feeder attached to the wall and when she was dumping grain into it, somehow it broke loose and fell, and a wire impaled a feeding hen through the beak. Sissy got ahold of her and with a wire cutters tried to pry the wire out, but the chicken jerked away and tore the top of her beak off. My sister called us in a panic feeling woozy. It would be like losing a thumb. How will it eat?

One of our hens has recently taken to hiding in the corner behind a nesting box.

 

Sometimes just her head is burrowed in safety. We've come to understand that she is at the bottom of the pecking order and she hides to escape the abuse inflicted on her by the rest of the flock. They won't let her eat so my husband piles a little grain in behind the nest box where she likes to hide. Yesterday she was sitting on the top of the roost where the others don't seem to bother her. She's enduring, and she still has her feathers. She deserves a name. I think I'll call her Hazel. The runt, the tortured and abused. Hazel.

Sometimes I feel like Hazel, hiding in a corner to avoid critical attention, afraid to venture out of my comfortable niche, afraid to put myself and my writing out there. I dash off a few queries and then retreat back in my hole to write. But who wants to live in a hole? Like the mousehole in Notes From Underground, no writer can long stay in the hole under the floor. Oh, the writing is best done in the mousehole, but then we have to venture out, like the groundhog who did NOT see his shadow this past week. He's out and about, waiting for the brighter day he knows is near, and Hazel is perched above the rest, roosting out of reach, and the writer in me pushes the page across the space between us and says, "Will you read this?"

Ampersands and Colloquialisms

The Falling Leaf Moon is on the wan and still we haven't had our first frost. This is unusual for the Thumb of Michigan and for me yet one more symptom of unsettling climate change. Should I be happy with these extended frost-free days or concerned? I know one thing: weeds are growing faster than they did in the heart of summer, at a time when they should be dead and buried.

I hate weeds. I hate cliches and redundancies. I try to make sure I never use these nasties in my writing but once in a while one shows up, like a weed in the greenhouse. Speaking of, I'm planning to make full use of my greenhouse this winter and to date I've planted spinach, komatsuna, and mizuna. I cleaned out the weeds from around the edges for a weed-free environment. Now I need to clean the weeds out of my manuscripts, past and present.

Edittorrent has posted a list of writing pitfalls to avoid. Of course Edittorrent is quick to point out that one can break a rule if done to good effect. But can we be the judge of our own good effects? I know a weed when I see one but would I know an ampersand and recognize a colloquialism? Will my one-word sentence be of good effect or make you groan? Oh what an obsessive pastime this writing business is.

Now, how many writing rules have I broken in this post? Don't we all like to break rules? Like smoking in the bathroom and walking on rooftops and eluding the police? Like throwing in an occasional one-word sentence?

P.O.V. (the masterful experiment)

I woke in the middle of the night troubled by the weight of my unsent query letter. Is it specific? Is it succinct? I kicked my way out of bed and settled on the couch with The Sound and the Fury to take my mind off the unsent Memories of Snow. Thus it was that at two in the morning I was trying to get a handle on the confusing dialogue and brilliant but exasperating P.O.V. of the manchild, Benjy. Faulkner's narrative weaves back and forth between decades with no warning. It's no wonder I didn't understand it the first time I tried to read it. But I think I'm finally beginning to appreciate the greatness of this literary masterpiece, the risk of beginning a novel in the P.O.V. of an adult man who is mentally three years of age, and the sheer genius of pulling it off. I'm only now getting the symbolism of Benjy's castration and Caddy's soiled drawers (a symbol of her promiscuity), and the reason behind their brother, Quentin's, obsession with time and eventual suicide.

I was reminded of the recent news out of the state prison in Lucasville, Ohio about a prisoner on death row. His third execution date is set for today. He tried to commit suicide with a drug overdose before the last one, so they had to postpone it until he recovered. I wonder if he broke the hands off his watch and put them in his pocket like Quentin did? He was unconscious for some time and they nursed him back to health so he could be executed properly. He's recovered and they will execute him today by lethal injection. I expect it’s already been done.

One can only take so much Faulker at two in the morning, and I put the paperback, penciled up with dates in the margins to help me follow the shifts in time, aside (it is a tragic story, but at least it is fiction). I leafed through my Eliot Coleman gardening book, The Four Season Harvest. It, too, is wonderfully written with photos to complement the wealth of knowledge this gardener from Maine has accumulated over the years.

Earth is so kind - just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest. -Douglas Jerold

I've been tickling the earth in the green house. I dug up a worm here amongst the argula ***envision picture*** and tucked him back under the soil. Please use your imagination as I live in internet no-man's land and couldn't download my pretty photo.

This morning I was gifted with another sign of spring. I heard them first and dashed to the window for a look. A flock of geese were flying overhead, heading north.

Godspeed.

Laying in for Winter

My ferns huddle under a blanket and my last crop of lettuce is covered with a double layer of shade cloth. The eggplant and basil are dead and the peppers are on their last wobbly leg. I threw old flannel shirts over a couple of roses that were still covered with buds as we try to survive this spell of unusual cold, holding unto one last bloom, one last crunch of green, holding out for one more sunny day when I can hang my ferns back up on the porch and watch their fronds sway gently in the breeze. Come Indian Summer.

But this winter we will have a heated greenhouse. My father is getting an outdoor wood stove that will take big logs, tapping into his existing furnace and running a connecting pipe into my greenhouse which will sit beside it. The wood is ready to burn and I have spinach seeds left from summer for my first experiment! Maybe I can set up a little corner for myself to write, a corner where no one can find me, a corner of my own. And about my short story The Echo, while it is fiction, the problem with frogs is very real. Often this summer my husband commented how he never heard them anymore in the creek that runs behind our house. It is very worrisome. One more thing to worry about.

But look! I now have fifteen followers! Thank you all very much for reading.

What's Real and What Isn't

Greenhouse update: We added another three-tier shelf to the 6 x 8 house so I could get some of the flats off the ground and my feet inside the door. My tomatoes are 5-6inches tall, attempting to outgrow their pots. Everything is finally coming up; even the slow-germinating peppers are sticking their soggy heads through the soil. The melons are spreading, all pumped up and a lush green, and the red cabbage is a nice rosy color. The brussel sprouts look similar to white cabbage when they first start out. The eggplant is also a little slow, like the peppers, but they are starting to unfurl. On another note, it was 66 degrees when I got up this morning, warmer outside than in, so I’m off to the garden for direct sowing of cold weather crops—radishes, arugula, lettuces, broccoli and onions. The dark horizon promises an afternoon shower so we must not tarry over coffee and unfinished novels. There will be a time for that.

Seven hours later. The promised thunderstorm arrived about 4pm. The winds were so high they blew my new shelf over and dumped the contents of the flats—dirt everywhere and fledgling plants uprooted. Topsy-turvy and who is who? The eggplant and the peppers look alike at this stage of the game. Woe is me. I tried to right them as much as possible. Maybe they’ll right themselves.

So what did you do for Earth Day? I was the stooge for a tree-planting photo op. You’ve seen the staged photos; people huddled around a sapling with shovels stuck strategically in the dirt, as they pose for the camera. The main honchos are in front and put their backs to the shovel as if they'd actually risk getting dirt on their high-heeled shoes. But one must at least pretend to be an arborist on Earth Day.

Smile. Click, click. Smile.

I was bamboozled into just such a fake photo at my airport, me in my uniform providing a backdrop of authenticity for two higher-ups who would never risk breaking a nail in such a manner. Never, never, never. I was duped into being a prop.

The idea was commendable-we at TSA would all chip in money and buy a tree to plant on airport grounds for Earth Day. Who wouldn’t get on board with that? We even got two for the price of one. Who could fault that? The first whiff of trouble drifted my way when I learned they bought ornamental pear trees, in other words “fake” trees, not indigenous-to-Michigan trees. But then the airport doesn’t want messy droppings, fruit, nuts, and leaves, etc. They lean towards evergreens and/or trees with tiny leaves, not big messy maples and real Michigan fruit trees.

But back to the duping. They pulled a group of us off the floor, and anyone who works as a screener for TSA is always ready to get off the floor. We walked outside to the front mall area in short-term parking and there were our trees—90pct planted by airport groundskeepers; only lacking the top 4-5 inches of dirt to be shoveled in and tamped down. Those of us who were actually involved with the idea and the purchase were there but we had to wait for our leader to validate our efforts and grasp the shovel . . . the driving force. Click.

Finished, she dropped the shovel and rushed back inside with her hands outstretched as if up to the elbows in cow manure. As if she'd been digging through the garbage in the slums of Lahore. At the checkpoint she asked for the hand sanitizer.

“Where’s the hand sanitizer? I need hand sanitizer.”

Click, click.