viewing jasper mountain a gardener's year risa stephanie bear Copyright © 1997, 2006 stony run press January |
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January
I have a handful of
garden
chairs stacked in the porch area of my country home, and from time to
time lift the topmost from the stack, dust it off, and carry it
through
dew-spangled grass to a point below the fruit trees and above
the
garden,
where a vista opens across the neighbor's field to a bluff, or ridge,
locally
called Jasper Mountain, in the distance. To
get to these homesites, roads several miles long were added to the
existing
network of what were originally logging access roads, removing still
more
forest cover from the steep slopes, and adding to the burden of silt in
the numerous rivulets working their way down from the ridgeline to the
river below, which I cannot see from my seat by the garden, but which
makes
its presence felt by the line of tall black cottonwoods and Oregon ash
that runs along the base of the ridge. I
can
also see changes in the massive promontory that gives the mountain its
name. The rock there is
relatively high quality, a greenish basalt that
makes good gravel for roads and construction sites. A quarry has been
built
into the face of the mountain, and a road, discreetly hidden among firs
and big-leaf maples, provides access for huge dump trucks and
wide-bladed
dozers with gigantic diesel engines. These I cannot see or hear from my
place, but from time to time an explosion gently rocks the valley, and
for a few minutes the mountain resembles a small volcano, as the
powdered
stone drifts along the ridge and down to the long line of cottonwoods. The quarry does not much
spoil the looks of the promontory, because
from
this distance -- or even up close -- it looks like nothing so much as a
natural scree slope somewhere in the high Cascades just east of here.
But
this, too, with its road and its heavy equipment, adds to the burden of
silt, with trace hydrocarbons and heavy metals as well, in the
watershed. And yet I'm feeling remarkably cheerful. That cheer, I recognize, is harldy justifiable. I'm the privileged, an American in a not-poor neighborhood, which makes me part of the most massively consumptive minority in history. Nevertheless, the beauty in the scene before me, of sky, clouds, trees, stone, and the neighbor's ewes and lambs, costs nothing; the price of viewing Jasper Mountain, which, with all that has happened to it, is well worth looking at, is zero. Now, on the one hand, I have "bought" the right to look; the ad said, "country house with view." On the other hand, when I was younger, and had no land, no car, no family to support, and was living out of a backpack and my feet were my transportation, I saw just such views, and they were just as beautiful to me. So I do think that ownership is perhaps the most overrated concept in Westernism. By sitting here, there are several things that I'm not doing that perhaps I should give myself a little credit for not doing. I'm not, at the moment, driving to the mall, not shopping, not eating a hamburger, or watching a car commercial. I'm certainly not tooling around in an outboard runabout, or on a jet-ski or snowmobile. I'm not attending a football game, auto race, or rock concert in some distant city. I could build quite a list here of "nots," but -- not to worry -- you can think of more of these, and never mind that yes, sometimes I do choose to do some of these things; attend a conference in Portland, say. But I am actively choosing to do fewer things, and less consumptive things, not as avoidance, as in "oh, mustn't do that," but as seeking out activities that have the inestimable value that viewing Jasper Mountain has -- partaking of the quality of being that, because it has no price in consumerism, barely has a name, but which every person in the "third world" who is habitually freer and happier than I -- and there are many -- would immediately recognize. Disengaging from the error of capitalized gratification by thinking of it as error, by focusing on the negative, is a project fraught with stresses, pitfalls, failures and depression. We're too deeply enmeshed, many of us, to take the bravest positive approaches, exemplified, in recent history, by so few: Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Peace Pilgrim, Jane Goodall, Mother Teresa. These challenge us with their total commitment, and it's easy to focus on their commitment, conclude it is somehow unachievable for us, and drift back to our potato chips and our cable news, feeling vaguely depressed, wallowing in a grey fog of discontent with ourselves and our little self-defeating ways. The good news is that none of them
would condemn us for starting
small.
A positive approach is not less positive for lasting for only a few years, or days, or even seconds. It is never a matter of scale. Every moment of viewing Jasper Mountain is its own eternity of getting it right, and no one can ever take that away from you. :::
I like to hike to the top, though each year I find the going a little harder, and look about me. Below, two rivers come together after dodging round the mountain toward each other. With binoculars I can find, in season, fishermen seeking steelhead and salmon. To the north there is considerable urbanization; I can see at one glance the second largest metropolitan area in my state, but it is not unattractive as cities go, and I can forgive its noise and bustle for its not being any worse (yet) than it is. To the south and east is the valley of one of the rivers, opening out of the foothills of a substantial and still very wild mountain range. In winter the eastern peaks are dusted white with snow, and present a dramatic and lovely scene; but my interest is generally drawn to the near view. At my feet are a succession of habitats: the eastern ridge of the mountain, with Douglas fir forest to the left and oaks to the right, with perhaps a herd of deer placidly browsing in plain view; the meadowland within the park boundary, with a few pear trees left over from some farm venture in the previous century; the wetlands with its dark patches of sedge and the occasional blue heron. Beyond are pastures, woodlots, filbert orchards, and fields used mostly for corn, hay, and grass seed farming. Threading among these, I see, are narrow roads along which are some two hundred houses, on properties of anywhere from one to two hundred acres, with their barns, outbuildings, and accumulated belongings left to the winter rains and summer sun: trucks, tractors, harrows, drift boats, and an occasional stove or washing machine. Most of us in this valley are not especially poor, but we are a thrifty people, many only two or three generations descended from pioneers, and we make but few trips to the county dump. Almost no one here can earn a living from farming now. We are an
amalgam
of loggers, retirees, and commuters. The commuters are of two classes:
the professionals -- doctors, dentists, and the like -- and the rest.
These
are mostly school teachers, store clerks, and office workers. I am in
this
last group. Regardless of category,
almost every one of us has a
garden.
I can see the gardens from the mountaintop: at every house, a brown
patch
within
easy access of the kitchen door. Some of us have enough pasture for a
horse
or two, or a few steers; I have room for a flock of ducks and geese;
but
if there is nothing else, there is a garden. Gardens here have a
priority
over lawns. This is a thing that I greatly admire in my neighbors. If, like the people in
my valley, you want to grow things, it can be a
good idea to try to get an eagle's eye view. If no mountain is handy,
try
a map. Most gardeners know the dates of frost in their "zone," but
there
is much more to know. Find out the direction of the prevailing winds,
the
angle of winter sun, the temperature of June nights. Know the depth of
the water table in August.
From the mountaintop I can see that the valley runs east and west, and that the river is nestled against the northern hills; among these is Jasper Mountain, which looks much smaller than from here than from my garden. My own little piece of land is in the middle distance, on the long glide of slope from the south hills to the river. There is a seasonal creek through the property, dry in summer and a raging torrent in winter. This means that I'm in a low-lying spot, subject to the movement of air. In winter the wind comes from the southwest generally, in the form of Pacific storms laden with incessant rain. These winds chill the soil, and the water that drops from them saturates it and renders it clammy. Pools lie on the surface in winter with no place to drain away to, as the water table is even with the surface. Dig a post-hole anywhere and it fills to overflowing. So gardens tend to be planted late, well after the dates recommended on seed packets. In summer the water table drops to ten, twenty, or even thirty feet, while the winds are continual, shifting daily from north to south. This is because of our mountain ranges. The sun heats the slopes, and air rises, drawing air away from the river bottom. At night, this air cools and sinks back down along draws and creek valleys toward the river. Gardens in this drainage must be almost continually watered, as the tender plants are subject to drying out. Watering is more frequent than the books recommend; corn begins wilting within a day of its last soaking. At night the wind stops, but heat radiates away quickly among the glitterings of the stars, and temperatures can drop into the forties (fahrenheit) by morning, even if it's been close to a hundred degrees during the day. All this gives tomato lovers fits. But we persist. The wiser among us build wooden fences, or hedge their gardens about with shrubbery or even hay bales, to combat the winds and the heat loss. A heavy mulch would help, but the main mulching material is straw. The straw available locally contains a lot of weed seeds, and it invites tremendous armies of slugs and snails of all sizes. No one seems to care for black plastic, which takes a lot of fiddling with in the shifting winds, or newspaper, so most of the gardeners keep their soil bare and cultivated. The majority use herbicide to control grass, which is the primary weed; I have reason to believe herbicide is the greater evil in this case, and use the straw mulch, trying to stay just ahead of the weeds by piling on more.
It's January.
Most of us have not had much chance to think about gardening. We have had record rains, with some manual guages registering 93 (!!) inches. That other river, the one you can see to the southwest from the mountaintop, recently jumped its banks and flooded two hundred homes, making the national news. The creek on our place, which doesn't even exist half the year, rose to the foundation of the house and flooded the potting shed, which I'd thought of as standing on high ground. Three fences were destroyed, and tons of earth moved in the general direction of the Pacific. But the garden was spared. The vetch that I planted last fall for green manure is intact, as are the piles of leaves and the compost bin. The wintered-over red chard is still useable, and our Detroit Red beets are superb. Meanwhile, our first harbingers of spring -- elephant garlic, growing from those tiny cloves that stay in the soil when we pull the crop -- have sprung from the cold, heavy soil, dotting the view from our kitchen window like randomly dibbled irises. And on the rainy nights, between the gusts of Pacific wind, we can hear the first chirruping choruses of the green tree frogs. I found one once in high summer, napping as it were, on the shore of a pond of water in the angle of a sunflower leaf. Their sound is, to me, a promise of sunflowers yet to come. I fall asleep to their frantic cheeping, and dream of green things growing in the sun. ::: Ours is the remnant of a particularly decrepit lean-to, which the previous owner constructed out of whatever was handy, and used mainly to store trash and to indulge, with the use of a perilously derelict woodstove, in melting lead for a lifetime's supply of sinkers and split shot. As I stood looking at this structure, which had helped by its presence to bring down the asking price on the property, the neighbor, a stout and cheery farm woman who had befriended us in our first week with a gift of raspberry starts, fetched up on the other side of the boundary fence. "You are going to rip down that eyesore, aren't you?" she asked. "First thing?" So I felt I had an obligation, but once inside, I found that my predecessor had used beams, taken up from the floors of some defunct lumbermill, each eight inches square and sixteen feet long, for framing the roof. I am no longer young, and the prospect of dismantling those massive rafters dismayed me. I immediately began to think of the "eyesore" as the "barn and potting shed," and within days began installing walls, windows, and doors. A coat of red fence stain on the barn boards of the walls, and cheery green trim on the window frames, produced a pleasing enough effect that my neighbor has never called me to account on our unspoken contract. At least, that's my interpretation! One side of the
building, about two-thirds, is given over to Beloved's
ducks and her retired show rabbits. We put down straw bedding over the
bare earth, and change it periodically; this becomes our favorite mulch
and top dressing, as it is rich in duck and rabbit manure but not
enough
so to burn plants noticeably.
It is pleasant, every morning, to go hunting for eggs in the tiny barn. The ducks, Khaki Campbells, produce almost an egg a day each, which they never look at again, but they do like to build their communal nest in a different spot each night. The other half of the building is the potting shed, which we also call the greenhouse, but that's stretching things a bit. To construct this space, so necessary to the garden, I began by removing the south wall and framing in rafters for three sliding glass doors, which had been donated by a friend. These lean against the building and form a kind of large greenhouse window. The east wall, against the duck room, is for tools. Before I did anything else, I gathered the tools, old friends that had gardened with me on four sites in Oregon and one in Pennsylvania, and hung them along the weathered grey boards: two round-point shovels, one square-point, one d-ring spade, a garden fork, a hay fork, two toothed rakes, one mattock, two stirrup hoes, a pry bar, a splitting maul, a bow saw, machete, lopping shears. A comforting sight, these, lined up, waiting for orders. Even in the dead of winter I sometimes go out to look at them and touch each one. The floor was a matter of concern. My predecessor had laid out some of the precious beams directly on the soil and covered them with 1/2 inch plywood. Dry rot and carpenter ants had made of this area a serious ankle trap. I asked my oldest boy and his friend if they wanted exercise. With the pry bar and the maul, they made a joyful noise and large chunks of erstwhile flooring flew out the door for about half an hour. I considered using the bare earth, but as I knew I would be watering plants inside, I looked about for something more suitable. Bricks were what I wanted, but used bricks go for a dollar apiece hereabouts. I mentioned this, in a woebegone manner, to a friend. "Well, I might have just the thing. There is a dangerous chimney on the house I use for an office building, which would cost me a fortune to have taken down by masons. If you can do the job I'll pay you and you can keep the bricks." I thought this was a godsend and took our pickup truck and a rented forty foot ladder to the site. This turned out to be, to my horror, a two-story house with a sixty-degree pitch. I'd need the whole length of the ladder to get at the thing -- forty feet doesn't sound like much but just try it sometime -- but the bricks, the bricks! Greed overcame good sense, and there I was, a million miles above the earth it seemed to me, plucking bricks from midair (the mortar was completely shot) and tossing them at random over my shoulder into space. They made a lovely truckload, though, and with the aid of my nine-year-old daughter, the next day, I laid them in a herringbone pattern, just like the ones pictured in garden books, and they made exactly the length and width of the room. In the west wall I installed wood-framed windows in a row at table height, then dragged a suitable "bench" from the garage and painted it green ( for good luck? Why do we insist on green potting benches?). Using roofing nails, I covered the top of the bench with linoleum. The bench had been a kitchen cabinet once, but had long since lost its doors and hinges. I installed it along the west wall beneath the windows, and filled its shelves with clay pots, green plastic pots of all sizes, and tomato cans. With the addition of a watering can, two trowels, and a couple of bags of potting soil, the shed was done! I envisioned opening the door through the years, admiring the herringbone pattern of the bricks, the row of waiting tools, the sun shining in through the greenhouse window on ranks of flats bursting with lettuce, broccoli, chard...ahhh. "Hello!" said Beloved. "I need to put the duck feed, the rabbit feed, and the geese's cob in here." Excuse me? Three large-size garbage cans? But there's no arguing with fate. Soon other items, large and small, came marching in, like animals into the ark. Boxes, lengths of hose, "white buckets" (even the green ones are called "white"), old pillows (she uses these to kneel on while working in the earth), you name it.... So now, in midwinter,
when it's as dark as an eclipse all day anyway, is
the time to clean out. Find out which things can go in the garage
instead.
Find all the broken plastic pots and move them out. Sort and stack the
ones
that are left. Take the edged tools, one by one, to the garage to be
wire-brushed,
filed, oiled, and have their handles linseed-oiled. Slowly the shed
will
begin to look useful. Even some of the beautiful floor begins to
appear.
But I don't think I'll ever get rid of those huge trash cans. They have
made themselves At Home.
:::
In January, here, it can
be grey and rainy for weeks, as in December, but often it will clear up
and be sunny and almost warm for several days, a condition known as a
Blue Hole.
On such days I sometimes take out my little green kayak and drive over to the nearby reservoir for exercise. Unlike large motorboats and sailboats, kayaks tend to enforce a bit of solitude, which can be a good thing, I think. Mine is a remarkably small craft, built by a family business in Kentucky; it's a rigid shell of nylon/fiberglass, seven feet nine inches long, with a beam of thirty-eight inches. It weighs seventeen pounds empty. Lacking a keel, and drawing a mere two inches, it's subject to wind drift, tracks badly, and is a very slow boat relative to the effort that goes into paddling it, but it's extremely stable, turns on the proverbial dime, and is a superb platform for wildlife viewing. At this time of year the lake hosts from hundreds to thousands of Canada geese, mallards, mergansers, and coots. The black coots, with their stubby beaks, are fun to watch, especially while landing on the water. They crash-land, skittering along on the surface tension of the water with their wings folded, until they stall out in their own bow wave and seem about to flip forward just as they come to a stop. A few days ago, I came across a dying mallard. I realized, as if I had never thought of it before, that every wild duck, as do all of us, must die sometime. She had been paddling, a bit lamely, in the same general direction as I had, but as I came up to her, several hundred yards from shore, she seemed to give it up. I thought at first she might be settling in for a nap. But napping, for a mallard, involves turning one's head about on that long neck and using one's back for a downy pillow. She had her head extended before her, and her face in the water, blowing bubbles, lifting weakly from time to time to inhale. I waited with her, about ten feet away; she showed no reaction to my presence and eventually her head sagged beneath the surface film a last time and the bubbling stopped. :::
Dogen tells the story of Great Master Zhenji, who met with a newly arrived monk. "Have you been here
before?"
The monk said, "Yes, I have been here." The master said, "Have some tea.." Again, he asked another monk, "Have you been here before?" The monk said, "No, I haven't been here." The master said, "Have some tea." The temple director then asked the master, "Why do you say, 'Have some tea,' to someone who has been here and 'Have some tea,' to someone who has not?" The master said, "Director." When the director responded, the master said, "Have some tea." Dogen concludes that "the everyday activity of buddha ancestors is nothing but having rice and tea." Here in the West, when we, or at any rate some of us, read this sort of thing, we tend to get very excited by it, and to visualize becoming Buddhas ourselves by trying out this kind of everydayness -- sounds easier than sitting with our legs painfully crossed. But, of course, there's a trick to it, as one might suspect from reading of the long years Dogen put in, sitting crosslegged, before he felt himself to be, and was certified by his own master as, qualified to say something on the subject. On the one hand, it's very hard to come to one-pointedness of mind (everyone says so), and on the other, nothing could be easier (everyone says that too -- as one master commented, "here I've been all these years selling water right by the river."). Dogen's genius, though, is that he doesn't try to mystify us by embracing either the difficulties and complexities of practice nor the easiness and simplicity of practice. He demystifies, by telling us to relax and simply do what's next. If you want to be a Zen monk, shave your head and wear a robe; that's a start, nothing to be ashamed of. Little steps. Come, he says, patting the tatami and the seat cushion. Sit. :::
I made a soup in the crock pot and baked some bread. The soup is rice, tofu diced small, diced onion from the winter garden, some green vegetables, peas, tomatoes, water chestnuts, thyme, basil, rosemary, some spring onion greens, garlic greens. Threw half the tofu and onions and garlic into the soup, the other half into the mixing bowl. To which I added a dollop of oil, tablespoon of salt, sixteen ounces of warm water, 1/4 cup of honey, a small handful each of miso, bran, and oatmeal, teaspoon of yeast, stirred, then added a cup of white flour, and several cups of whole wheat flour, stirring until too thick to stir, then floured up my hands a bit and kneaded, adding flour occasionally, until the dough "felt right." Covered the bowl and set it on top of the crock pot to stay warm and rise. Looked out: it was raining heavily. Jasper Mountain completely obscured. Went over the supply of seed left over from last year's garden. I have thought that this year I might try to get some greens going earlier than the soggy garden will permit, and so last month cleaned up the potting shed/greenhouse. There's an old radio, tuned to the classical station, and the brick floor with that herringbone pattern. A soothing place to work. Put on a coat, hat, and rubber boots, slithered out to the shed, fired up the music (Mendelsohn's violin concerto, I think), picked six old, cracked flats, loaded them up with potting soil, and spread seeds: Romaine lettuce, Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, kale, bunching onions, Detroit Red beets (for the greens, really), spinach. Each packet I broadcast round the flat, then covered all the seeds with peat, set all the flats in the window and went over them lightly with a dose of rain water from the watering can. Music off, close door, back to the house, boots, etc. off, check the dough, get out two (not one -- two together helps prevent burning the bottom of the loaf) cookie sheets, oil the top one, shape the loaf, set the "pan" (two cookie sheets, one round loaf) on top of the crock pot. Jasper Mountain is somewhere beyond the window. External fog, internal fog. Wind, rain, and typos. When the bread has risen, bake (in this oven) 40 minutes at 350 degrees. Have we been here before? Have some tea. 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 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 twentypenny nails long ago driven
into the rafters nearest the greenhouse window, sorted pots for a
while,
then swept the herringbone-patterned floor. I also brought in last
year's
planter of lavendar and trimmed its dead growth; perhaps there's still
something doing in the roots. 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 of mine 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 and cedar shakes, 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 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 who 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. So perhaps Reps' view is the long view after all?
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?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.And now not only our health but that of neighboring peoples has been compromised: And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?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, to judge by talk radio at least. 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. We have two gardens, actually: mine is the big one in heavy clay down in the cold gloomy bottoms north of the kitchen window; hers is the small one in sandy loam on the high sunny south side of the house, next to the duck barn. Peas planted in her garden in February will not rot, as they will in "my" garden. (Or maybe it's just that she can grow things I can't.) 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 the little garden. "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 some nice surprises. Sometimes." She grins, and picks up her trowel. "Huh! well, good luck to you! I see Mary; I better get inside or she'll think I'm out here courting'!" He ambles off, shaking his head at the improvidence of the Bear clan. We 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. A dime is not too much to spend on enjoying a brief spell of winter sun. Some of these year-old seeds, especially of flowers, seem to lose a bit of vitality and planting them can be like doing your thinning in advance; but regardless of what she says, Beloved's peas seem to always 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 food preparation goes on hereabouts, as we are all 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, etc. 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. They hate to be planted in the same spot two years in a row, so think rotation. After the crop is gone, I feed the vines to the ducks, geese, and rabbits, who think highly of them. I see in garden magazines much talk of varieties: endless list-making and discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of all the latest hybrids or oldest heirlooms. I know that by going to the hardware store I'm taking whatever they have to offer, and missing a shot at the "best" of this or the "best" of that; and I greatly admire the work of seed-saver exchanges and heirloom nurseries. One of the country's finest seedsmen is just down the road about twenty miles, too, and we in the valley are very proud of their product. But Beloved and I both work full time, and we have a strict budget to meet. The garden must pay for its share; we can put a little work into it but not much money. We plant whatever comes to hand, and some years we say, "Well, this is not as good as what we had last year," or "Whoa! Now this is better than what we had last time!" There is an element of surprise. And it's all relative. This is organically grown, home-grown, fresh produce; all of it is better than anything we can get in the stores. That's why, even though our lives are busier than Broadway, we make time to get out there and plant, even in February. These seeds, if no one will buy them, will be thrown away. I can relate; I'm middle-aged and trying to build a second career. I have hope that, with a little care, I'll bear fruit yet. A lot to think about while putting a few peas in the ground. :::
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 jewelled world -- heavy dew on the
rumpled
grass, which has grown during the last month, and on the leafless lilac
bushes, and the neighbor's apple orchard. Rainbow hues glinted from the
drops, and the glow suffused the house like a dream of a better world. 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.
Not old growth, interestingly enough: the Calapooya Indians, who had
lived
here for centuries, periodically burned over the valley floor, to keep
it open for game and for defense. But these trees were certainly large,
and there were a lot of them; their shade was dense, and it would be a
while before this could be farm land. The men, taking stock of their
situation,
immediately contracted 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, lilacs. My house was built in
the year I was born, 1949, by one of the
descendants
of the woodcutting family, and his wife grew the lilacs that are by my
front door from cuttings from the pioneer plants. All her neighbors
appear
to have been invited to do the same. The family across the road have a
thick, healthy-looking hedge of them. I was about to cut the
latest ones away, when an
idea came to me -- would they form roots if I hilled up earth around
them?
I brought a barrow-load of dirt and piled it round the bases of the
lilacs,
and went on to other tasks. 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 all right to garden and bake, and read, and sing, and nap, and patch clothes, 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 Sato's monastery gave 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 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 won't shock
the yeast too much, so the yeast water goes in.
I keep whole-wheat flour in a five-gallon "white bucket" and dole it out with a hand-sized bowl. After three bowls, I stir, and keep stirring steadily, adding flour, till the batch "rises up off the bowl," which is the expression I always heard 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 to work. At this point I turn the whole thing out onto a chopping block that has been lightly floured, and either shape it into a round loaf, or roll it out and cut a dozen rolls out of it. 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 bread pan, which is really a large size cookie sheet, or two sheets, to insulate the bottom of the loaf, starts out on the corner of the dining room table nearest the wood stove, then, as I get hungrier, moves onto a trivet on the stove top, then into the oven on "warm." When the loaf is finally tall enough to bake, I simply crank it up to baking heat and check it in a little over half an hour. Much the same for the rolls, which are nothing but little loaves. 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? Try it. :::
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 World War II, 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 neither the time nor the 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, while he dug, and poured, and tamped, talking and explaining the whole while. But my mind stayed resolutely elsewhere; perhaps with Herodotus, or Jane 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 the new hands 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 Homer (and certainly not Jane Austen), but his rough sophistication in physical geography and botany struck me as something admirable, and at that moment with a flash of insight I understood my father's enthusiasm for gardening not as a weird masochistic hobby but as a vital branch of knowledge. I suddenly took an interest in tree planting, which in a way was unfortunate for me, as I lasted tenyears at an occupation which no one has any business doing for more than three. 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 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 never seen those bare-root "field-growed" 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 tomato plant and gently lifted off the pot, set the root ball quickly into the earth (working in my own shade), slopped in some water, and 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 as well as I did, and I could tell the old man was deeply pleased. ::: 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 and pair of Broccoli is a really good hand; but I prefer a full house of two Blue Lake Pole Beans and three Candy Corns. One wants something to do, even if it calls for a full suit 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 also great scissored off for salads, and develops a bulb the size of a softball, with great, soft cloves that are a cook's delight. These can be diced and tossed into the pan with whatever's doing, from stir-fried vegetables to roast lamb, adding a much subtler and pleasanter aroma and flavor than the smaller, more common varieties. When you lift the plants, though, there are a myriad of filbert-shaped bulblets, like small potatoes, that get 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, which I'd love to try but don't feel I'd have the time to devote to them. Or if you leave them alone, they come back the second year as the highly productive six-foot beasties. The garlic bed that was in place upon our arrival was an unfortunate business constructed of old boards full of termites, and overrun with blackberries. We decided the location was better for an orchard, and harvested all the garlic, keeping a few of the large cloves for use in the Summer Garden the next year. But in March I discovered about a hundred small plants where some fifteen had been before, on the old bed site, coming up through the new grass. Well, I can't stand to see anything wasted, so out came the fork and a bucket with about five inches of water in it, and I gingerly lifted out the long white stems, with their narrow bulbs and strands of succulent white rootlets, till the bucket was quite full. I then took an ash pole, sharpened at the end, which had been part of a bean trellis, and dibbled the little darlings into the new garden. None of them died. Nor did they amount to much that first year, and I almost forgot they were there, in amongst the tomatoes and pumpkins. But the second year they were a forest of long, lithe stems and purple blossoms, as apt to draw the eye from a distance as any sunflower. We soon were giving away cloves at a great rate. We bagged them up and handed them out almost as a kind of volunteer cottage industry, working feverishly through our birthday and holiday lists. The supply was inexhaustible. Heaps of them lay about in bowls on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile March came around again, and I went out to the new orchard (dwarf: two Santa Rosa plums, two prune plums, two Asian pears, two Fuji apples, a Bing and a Royal Anne, cherries) and -- gasp! -- one hundred more baby garlics, crying out to be lifted. I suppose I could go into garlic farming, but one thing tells me this would be a futile endeavor: along the road, all the way into town, there are signs: Elephant Garlic For Sale. From this I suspect we have here the rain country's equivalent of -- yep, you guessed it -- zucchini! Another sunny patch. I cut and stacked wood, all the while mindful that woodburning, which is how this family has heated its dwellings for twenty-seven years, is increasingly frowned upon. Using a noisy and polluting lawn-mowing device, I shredded the leaves and hay that have been lying heaped about the garden. Then, using seeds acquired from a company owned by a Fortune 500 conglomerate, planted michihli, more beets and kale, white radishes, and three kinds of 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 I hope to move to a desert island (which would, as Hung could point out, immediately devalue the island), is to wok primarily on one's mindfulness, to become, through re-training of my own mind, not a merchandiser nor a buyer of merchandise where Jasper Mountain is concerned. It should be simply there, as it has practically always been, of interest to this short-lived creature but not to be possessed by it. There is always the hope of extending this non-possession to a wider and wider range of experience. A life caught in the web created by the merchandizers need not be lived in vain, if one's mind accepts that there are circumstances and actions, and one can accept the one while carrying out the other mindfully. 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, unbought 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." A few years ago, I lived briefly in what is known around college campuses as a "quad." For my $240/month I had the exclusive use of a breezeway, a mailbox, a porch light, a locking exterior door, a 12X14' 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, with the pok choi greens, and chopped onion greens, throw all in. Add some basil flakes from a spice jar. When the bell rings, uncover and serve. Have a glass of water with your dinner. Leftovers can go toward breakfast (instead of oatmeal) or lunch (with or instead of an apple). This regimen will give you enough calories and nutrients to sustain you reasonably well for a long time... April
A few years ago,
we felt we should reduce our "acreage" in the main garden, so I
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 I went. The garlic is up now, and one can see the size of
the
garden-to-be. Beloved came out to see what I had done.
"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 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 little 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. But if you need it all, I can always go back there. And the trees will need watering anyway, so I might as well..." Etc., etc. 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. I f they all make it, that's 32 plants. Who's going to kill 28 of those little lovelies? But let me tell you about our first year here. I 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 vining cherries. So I did a flat of each, figuring on some die-off. Nope. All healthy little beasties. 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 ruthlessly giving away all the plants that anyone who knew me would take, I still had 72 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, and tomatoes. Big ones, little ones, round ones, pointy ones. I gathered all 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 burbled to the others in Duckish, which was a mistake, as the others came boiling out of the shade to take the rest of the prize from her. Ah, said I to myself. Duck food! I threw bombs 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 tradition-minded 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 bomber's back. "Oh, hi, Mr. Trueblood! Feeding the ducks!" I launched three more missiles. The ducks, who by now had gorged themselves, showed no further sign of appetite and were mostly just dodging the incoming shells. "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? ::: So, what's a gardener to do? We have weeds like nobody has weeds. You 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 mine, and it turned out to have something to do with the herbicides that were used to keep the clear-cuts free of brush. I figure the big chemical companies owe me about forty thousand dollars so far, but let's just say for now, no herbicides on this place, thank you. So, ok, what to do? I learned, some years ago, by trial and error, that with a long-handled potato fork I could "spade" wet ground: the tines don't seem to compress the soil the way an actual spade does. I 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 it any good, because if the watering is hitting the ground just a little outside the reach of the plant, it will miss the roots entirely as it goes by 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 I bought some stuff I had been avoiding: sheet plastic. 4-mil black and clear. I 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 far superior. Every green thing underneath it died, and stayed dead, though worms did not seem to be at all discouraged, and moved about underneath quite freely. 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 I don't have enough to do the whole surface of the garden (which is always), I spread out what I've got, and three weeks later, go back, pull all the 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 comes in handy after all. In the freshly prepared ground, I can plant whatever rows of seeds interest me at the time, let it rain on them one night for sprouting, 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 running from the downspouts round the house. Where there is a will, I suppose, there is almost always a way. Now if I could just find a way to keep my wellies from loading up ten pounds of clay every time I go outside! If I pick
up
a pebble and look at it, I see one thing. If I pick up another pebble,
and look at it, I see one thing. If there were no me, these things
would
lie there, until moved by wind or water, or diminished by these, and
the
action of sunshine, until they became sand. They are not appreciable as
two things of the same kind unless observed by an entity
capable
of categorizing. 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 passing on. It's not that the
fittest survive. It's that those whose circumstances did not 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 range. 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 immensely 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 a falsehood. This pebble, after all,
isn't that pebble. "There are no generals,"
asserted William Blake in the margins of a
copy of Reynold's's 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 all
this 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. People in general are
worthy of, I think, a good deal more
respect than they usually get. :::
The
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 up at the pass all day and hailing and pouring half-frozen
rain 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 looked out the
window
at the already tall grass that would be choking the irises if it hadn't
been lodged by the constant wind and rain, 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 the 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. She kneels on her
feedsack-pillow,
trowel in hand, and repots from two-inch pots to four-inch, from four
to
eight, 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 scoops 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, tamps it down a bit
for a snug fit (roots abhor two things: air and light) so that the top
of the soil meets the root collar of the broccoli and is between 1/4
and
1/2 inch from the top edge of the pot, 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 hitting the rich brown surface of
the
mix. 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 awhile, 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 me think
long and hard about which animals to put where. (The freezer, for
example,
turned out to be the best place for George.) 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, a
naked plug of soil with a chard seedling held forgotten in the other. It's a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon, it really is. ::: My
father'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-moldboard plow. It
lasted
for two decades.
I think I see a pattern
here, and it's one that encourages me to
rethink
my original reaction to Wendell Berry's advocacy of horse-drawn
equipment
and scythes. I thought then that he was being a romantic, too much of a
purist, a professor playing at farming with a professor's income to
fall
back on, but I think now that his views will eventually make the most
economic
sense. My own first tiller, bought from a hardware store in 1977, lasted just two years shy of two decades. We practically farmed with these machines, as neither of us seems to know when we have enough ground in cultivation. My most recent tiller, however, I used for about twenty hours last year, and in its second hour this year, it died of a heart attack -- clunk!! 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. My old chain saw, a 1979 Husky, will still cut wood if I get around to putting a new sprocket on it, and that was my professional work saw in the Oregon woods; it fought the Memorial Day fire in Sweet Home, in '82, I think. My new saw, on the other hand, one of those black-and-yellow things you can buy in a box at discount stores, lasted two weeks. Not to a salesman, to be sure, but to someone who wants to live in the country, not go there every night to sleep and back into town every morning, mind you, but to live in the country. 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 the 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. One begins to look like one who one understands work. And no one will smirk at the ineptitude with which you yank, over and over again, at the starter cord of an intractable machine if, instead, you reach into the toolshed for a fork or spade. Meanwhile I'm 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 -- I'm onto something. On the other hand, I live where hand-inverted sods resprout at the first hint of rain, which comes almost daily this time of year. So I've taken, as I said last month, to spreading black plastic to kill sods. It's very effective, if kept on for five weeks or more. 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 my power tools fail me, one by one, I become more appreciative of my hand tools, and abuse them less and less. I 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. I've become aware that these are not all interchangeable, and discovering why a tool is shaped a particular way pleases me greatly. My 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 I've learned to keep a can full of water handy to sizzle things in, so they they won't turn into butter. As time passes, I 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 you can keep a clean eye on the angle of the cut. I 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 type thing -- a cheap imitation -- 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 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. She seems to use rakes more than I do, and gets beautiful results where I would simply lose patience. I use hoes more, and have come to appreciate the efficiency of stirrup hoes, which she regards as outlandish things, and I believe she has never touched one. I have three -- but it's not that I'm a collector; they came with the place. 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, I use a pair of double block pulleys almost a hundred years old, with a two-hundred foot length of rope looped back and forth from block to block, giving me my own strength four times over across a distance of fifty feet. 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 of true hemp, soaked in creosote by hands long vanished from the earth. I 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 to the barn three or four bales at a time from the driveway, 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. I 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 wider than mine, and it wobbles a bit as it goes, but it's still a wheelbarrow, and it does honest labor almost daily. Every family should have two wheelbarrows. We pass, sometimes, the Garden Lady and I, like ships in the night, laden with our separate but equal treasures. June When young, I went west, and made my life in the woods with two dozen good friends who were always on the move. 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 grey 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 long 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 lant |