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!

Digging In The Dirt and Telling The Truth

I haven’t talked gardening in a while. Now that it’s taking up the majority of my time, I might as well write about it too! Digging in the dirt is therapeutic and sometimes characters and ideas surface along with the roots of the quack grass.  So I can dig and hum and make up stories all at the same time. Humming and singing to oneself run in my family. You should hear us when we all get together.

My asparagus came up too early because of the sustained warmth in March. Then the April frosts set in and the spears were killed. My new asparagus patch was nothing but drooped heads bowed to earth, depressing as a line of penitents. I waited, thinking there might be enough life left in them to fern out, as asparagus will, making a beautiful frond forest. But there wasn’t, so yesterday I took a sharp knife and crawled up and down the rows on my hands and knees and cut off the brown spears and pulled weeds at the same time and threw the mix into the wheelbarrow to be carted away.  (I confess I once wrote a short story called The Wheelbarrow about dead things being carted away.) You don’t want to leave any debris in the patch that will attract the dreaded asparagus beetle. I do have new spears coming up so all is not lost and now that the dead stuff is cleaned out, that end of the garden looks healthier. I also planted parsnips for the first time yesterday. I like to try a least one new vegetable every year.   

If it doesn’t rain today, I’ll plant kale and broccoli next to the parsnips and then we’ll set out the cabbage plants I started in the greenhouse on March 16^th.  I did notice my fingers are a little stiff this morning. Funny…I can sit at my laptop all day writing lies and creating havoc and my hands never bother me. But one full day of pulling weeds makes them ache. Maybe my hands are telling me something!

Summer Solstice and a Writer's Stew

We farmers are always stewing over something. Right now it's lack of rain. We await the rain with the patience of fishermen. While we wait, we water the fledgling asparagus ferns with a hose in hopes that one day we'll have a beautiful asparagus bed. We water the tomatoes and the rest of the nightshades, we douse the broccoli, melons and lettuce.

We do our best, but well water is not rain water and irrigated vegetables do not have the flavor and nutrients of those watered from heaven. Something about the rain and the nitrogen and ozone it picks up on its way through the atmosphere makes all the difference. Ever do a taste test between a Michigan strawberry and a California one grown and irrigated in the Central Valley? Such a poor imposter that. But we've run the soaker hoses because the promised rain has alluded us for two weeks running. It goes around Deanville Mountain to the north. It goes off into Lake Huron to the east. It rains to the south of us and to the west of us. Enough, you say! Enough. OK.

I'm keeping this short, though my June contributions have been paltry. I'm saving my energy for a slam dunk Festival of the Trees at the end of the month. You have until June 28th to post your entry and send me the link. I'd like to thank Tricia O'Brien for this captivating teaser and mention of the Festival. Also, thanks, Tricia, for the Pertinent Posts Award!


I have not been very prolific of late so it's very consoling to be told I'm pertinent! Not to be confused with impertinent. Isn't it interesting how two words can be so similar in spelling and pronunciation yet so dissimilar in meaning?

(Warning.... I feel a tangent coming on.)

I think it is impertinent of agents to say they are too busy to reply to everyone who queries, that they can only be bothered to reply to those queries that interest them. Of course we writers are supposed to be patient and understanding. Am I being contrary to call that impolite? How do we know our email was ever received if we never hear back? So I have something else to stew about too. Enough, you say. Go to bed, Yvonne, and you’ll feel better in the morning.

OK. But first I'm stepping out on the porch to watch the fireflys as they try to attract a mate. Good night, happy hunting and a soulful Summer Solstice to all.

Asparagus, Rhubarb, and Trees

Let's talk trees and food and intertwinings.


The Festival of the Trees is a monthly blog carnival devoted to all things arboreal. June's festival is being hosted by Casey Harn, and he is accepting submissions through the end of May. His theme is the relationship between trees and animals and birds. Check out the festival for guidelines on how to participate. Don't just hug a tree. Go write about one or paint a picture or capture a bird on a leaf with your camera and then enter the festival.

I planted an asparagus bed this weekend which entails digging trenches a foot wide and a foot deep in a well-drained, weed-free area of your garden. Once dug to straight and deep perfection, you fill the trench with 4-5 inches of compost or other clean organic material, snuggle in the asparagus crowns with their snaggly roots and then fill in the trench with the loosened soil. My crowns were already starting to sprout (a snafu with the grower) so they needed to get underground asap! Planting an asparagus bed is a labor of hope. Harvest won't begin in earnest for three years but then the bed will produce for years to come. When mature and ferned out, the fronds form a beautiful asparagus forest. It is my gift to the farm.

The rhubarb is at it's prime and thanks to a healthy dressing of compost last fall, it is bursting forth like untrimmed shrubbery, forming a miniture jungle canopy. Rhubarb pie and rhubarb cake. Rhubarb for digestion and limbs and joints and brains. Can you tell I love rhubarb? Rhubarb sauce for breakfast, thanks to my mum, with a nice cup of coffee, thanks to some young girl in a faraway land picking beans all day for pennies a pound. One thing leads to another.

And thanks to Wendy at W.M. Morrell's ....... I also have an awesome sauce award!


Thanks Wendy. You have inspired me on my query trail. I will pass the sauce along shortly.

I've accomplished nothing else lately, no agent on my side, demanding edits to which I would ever-so-politely oblige with a hammer in my heart. I did, however, receive my copy of Steam Ticket, a Third Coast Review, with my little poem tucked inside.
It's a beautiful little magazine compiled by students at the University of Wisconsin, affording them experience as readers and editors. Why not pick one up?

I've digressed a bit from my original intent and I'm sure there's a name for that, an indentified disorder for that. Do you do that? Wander all over the place like a honey bee in search of necter? I'm afraid it spills over into my writing...characters off on mad jaunts and reckless endeavors, defying the genre I was supposed to identify upon typing THE END. And on that happy note... I salute Mr. Bailey at the Literary Lab for putting genre definition in it's place.

Peace out.