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.

Appreciating Poetry and Electricity and Planting Trees

The gravel road we live on is always dark at night, and never more so than when the moon is new and not illuminated. But as we drove down the road under the new moon, returning home from a night out, the absence of any lights whatsoever began to register a warning. Even the scattered, always-on vapor lights of the neighboring farmsteads were extinguished, and the road grew ominous.

When we pulled in the driveway, we knew the power was out.

You wouldn't think that darkness would instill quiet, but it does. Maybe it's just the absence of visual stimulation that amplifies stillness to the human ear, the way ringing in the ear is more pronounced in the still of the night. We turned off the car and stepped outside. It was as quiet as a chicken coop after dark. When chickens roost they go into a semi-comatose state, like your computer on sleep mode. You can rest your hand on their backs when they're roosting and they won't budge. That's why chickens are easy prey for predators should they be stranded without cover at night. My mother says that when she was a little girl she would sit at the kitchen window after sunset and watch the chickens fly up into a tree to roost. She vividly remembers how they would ruffle their feathers and settle on a branch for the night. After raising a flock of our own, I know where the term “chicken” (meaning afraid) comes from. They are defenseless and very timid creatures. The fox would only have to stick his nose under the door and they would all die of heart attacks.

So the chicken coop dark and quiet was the norm, but the surrounding farmland dark and quiet . . . not so much. We found our way into the house and tried a light. It came on dimly. What we had was a “brown-out,” a low-power event which is extremely dangerous for appliances. Luckily a family member from down the road had thought to pull the plugs on everything, including my laptop or I would not be speaking to you now. I would be balled up in a corner as distressed as Blanche, Stella’s disturbed sister in A Streetcar Called Desire. If you haven’t seen that classic, go quickly and rent it! We watched it via Netflix because I wanted to see the young Marlon Brando in his sweat-stained T-shirt. Oh my God! He invented that entire James Dean look—the muscled, conflicted, brooding male. The film is in black and white, which makes it even more dramatic. It is definitely character-driven and dialogue rich, a literary extravaganza for the senses. But back to our dilemma.

Why is it that when you really need a candle you can’t find one, and when you only want one for atmosphere, they’re everywhere? Desperate, we stuck a couple of stick candles in empty beer bottles, like college days. All I needed was incense and The Moody Blues. But we went to bed early like pioneers not college kids. The next morning candle wax was dripped across the countertop, evidence of our fumbling.

OK, so April is the month for violent storms and watching classics. It is also poetry month and I plan to highlight more poetry on this blog starting Friday. I just got some good news from Steam Ticket a Third Coast Review, published out of the University of Wisconsin. A piece I submitted will be published in their 13th edition which is due out in May!

One more thing. April is also the month for planting trees and kissing the earth. This is a white pine. I kissed the earth with my shovel and watched another storm blow in. 

Are you planting a tree this month? If so, what kind?