November Gardening Month

November gardening month is almost here. Checking my calendar, I noticed last November was a very busy month in the garden, and it paid off come Spring. Ditto, I think, for this year.

As a prelude, yesterday I finally created a doorstep to the greenhouse, so air doesn't rush through the opening under the sliding doors.

See, under the doors?

And here, a doorstop.

"Oh, vapors," says Virginia, "you're making me dizzy."

Right. What color should I paint it? Porchy gray?

"I heard a racket out back." Virginia's talkative today.

Yes, I diced a hickory, I think, and an ironwood into chunks of future firewood. That's another project for November, should have been done in April or May.

Halloween

"Who was that masked girl?" said Virginia.

Liquid Gold

"What's the tower in the middle of that picture?" says Virginia. "It looks like you're drilling for oil."

Not oil. Something even more valuable, considering where Earth is headed.

If you click on the picture, perhaps you can see that the welldriller appears almost suspended in air, its four wheels up and off the ground. After digging 140 feet, the watermen went home to get some more equipment. Maybe they'll finish on Monday.

Happenings in the Field

I always thought it'd be cool to travel by tunnel.

"I don't think that's deep enough," says Virginia, eyes rolling.

Gotta start somewhere.

Our new water pipeline for feeding animals and campers now lies in the bottom of this ditch.

Here's a view from the corner of our new fence.

And from the center fence that divides the field roughly in half.

Someday maybe we'll stage an Elk Cliff 5K or a donkey pulling a cart around the outside edge.

Fall Shopping Spree

"So you've closed down the garden for winter, right?" says Virginia, who seems to be on the mend but doesn't get out much.

Hardly. Would you like to go shopping? How about a salad? Lettuces, spinach and beet greens.

Maybe add some bok choy or chinese cabbage.

Let's toss in a few leaves of kale and broccoli raab (in memory of my friend, Peggy).

Of course, we need carrots, maybe some nips (turnips and parsnips), and dill, too.

Chives, basil and sage add flavor.

Maybe fennel and rosemary.

We almost forgot parsley, radishes and New Zealand spinach.

Adam and I missed an eggplant the other day when Mr. Frost stayed away.  He still hasn't arrived.

For more substance, we might add potatoes, green tomatoes or kohlrabi.

Now, before you go, how about a good cry? We'll dig up and grind some horseradish.

Greenhouse Happenings

Last night, Susan asked what's happening in our greenhouse.

You may remember my tomato grower's post, filed after a friend from Mississippi visited while interning at Polyface Farms, home of Joel Salatin. I've been following his instructions.

"Those aren't tomatoes," Virginia croaks from her sickbed.

Did I say they were? He suggested applying the same rules to cucumbers, so I have. Check out these little guys. Maybe they'll flavor our salads in a couple weeks. Oh, I should mention, their vines have been growing about 2 inches each day.

Here's a tomato plant.

Yes, over to the left, that's basil.

Not so Grumpy Old Men

Back in Ohio for a visit with my mother and sister, my mother fed me to the wolves. On Saturday mornings at 10 she likes to attend a "coffee klatsch" in the dining room of her retirement living center. When she invited me, I said, sure, I'll come with you even though I don't drink coffee. Upon our arrival, she led me to a nearly full table of men. Wondering where she was going to sit, I looked for another chair to bring to the table. Oh no, I'll be over there, she said, pointing at a larger table filled with women (and one man).


Gulp. Well, maybe it'll be okay, I thought, as I identified myself to Russell, one of my mother's double first cousins, the result of two sisters marrying two brothers so as to deprive their offspring of a set of cousins. Slimming down may be a good idea when you come from a heritage as big as mine that includes a set of great-great-great-grandparents (Christian and Maria) who had 16 children and 165 grandchildren. Rumor has it they once appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records for this feat. Imagine having 16 children! Then, imagine each of them averaging more than 10 children! Ouch!


My double first cousin, once removed, was my first boss, actually co-boss because I worked for him and his brother, Gene, on their "truck" farm. No, we didn't grow trucks, we grew strawberries, corn and melons. Gene and Russell probably deserve much of the credit, or blame, for the fact that my wife and I now "farm" (using the word loosely and generously) a few acres.


Before long, one of my college math professors squeezed into our group, helping to keep my armpits dry. What do elderly men talk about? Russell passed around a puzzle he had made several years ago. Like the proverbial ship in a bottle, the question for the day was how he had managed to get the little wooden sculpture into a very small-mouthed medicine bottle. Maybe that's what men of their generation have in common, an interest in puzzles. 


When Russell asked if we kept up with politics, John, the man who chased this once-upon-a-time grade-schooler down after he lit a cherry bomb, said something like "not now." That was the end of that, probably a good thing. We turned to sex -- polygamy in the goat world, to be precise. Perhaps a relatively large group of men, even older ones, can never escape penis envy. One fellow mentioned he'd read about a man who'd answered an ad seeking immigrants to a country that allowed polygamy. The guy discovered he should have done a bit more research, returning home disappointed and poorer. The ad had been placed because women needed men to join harems of 20 husbands. 


"Harems?" Virginia mutters from her bed.


For an interesting few minutes, Google "male harem" if you think I used that term wrong.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is -- LocalMore

Are you upset about big financial institutions and their failure to show any remorse for the way they've been behaving, after taking us to the brink of financial disaster, getting the country to bail them out, then resuming giant salaries and bonuses, messing up mortgage servicing, ignoring the Servicemembers' Civil Relief Act, while watching the unemployment rate rise?

And now, Bank of America, again perched on a cliff -- with what some analysts say includes $200 billion of bad mortgage loans it may need to write off -- announces a $5 monthly fee for debit cards, blaming the "need" to impose the fee on the financial reform bill (Dodd-Frank), the very same bill whose unimplemented provisions were supposed to come down hard on too-big-to-fail institutions.

If you're out there complaining about the big banks, get with the program. Bring your money home, to local financial institutions. Go LocalMore! First, Localvore, now LocalMore! They're FDIC-insured, too, and they're not too-big-to-fail. Retire your Bank of America debit and credit cards. You've got plenty of other options. Bring CEO Moynihan to his knees, like NetFlix chairman Hastings after 1,000,000 customers quit, who had the good sense to admit: "I slid into arrogance based upon past success."

For more, check out my February 10, 2010 blog posting: "Keep $$ Local." You can find it easily by clicking on "Banking" among the list of topics on the right side of this blog.

"Enough, enough," gasps Virginia, still struggling. Her attention span is very short these days.

All in the Family

Karen's best friends might be her animals, mine my vegetables, depending, of course, on how you define "best friends." Sometimes I think we don't spend enough time defining what we mean.

Both yesterday and today I froze spinach, New Zealand spinach. I planted New Zealand spinach seeds three years ago. No need to replant, maybe ever. If I didn't like it, I might call it a weed. Instead, it's a good friend, gradually taking over the garden bed under the special ash tree. It's a great friend to have because it's the longest standing spinach I've ever known. Unlike the "regular" varieties of spinach, it lasts three seasons, through the heat of summer into the cold of winter.

By the way, Virginia's very sick. In fact, she told me to stop writing this blog for a while. I'm thinking about taking her up on it. I get as many visitors when I don't write as when I do. Two years of blog posts can do that to you. Besides, my handwritten journals say what I want to say, probably better than this.

The latest issue of Time has an article on favorite children. I never gave that much thought until my sister talked about it ten or fifteen years ago. The article mentions a woman who blogged about her favorite child. As you might imagine, she took a lot of heat for it. It's one of those taboos good parents keep to themselves.

I've known people who live for their families. They seem to get together with their parents and siblings whenever they've got spare time. Of course, they live close together. They're so busy with their atomic family they have trouble squeezing in time for friends. At the other end of the spectrum, I've also known people who admit they rarely see their siblings and would never choose them for friends. I suppose most of us fall somewhere in between. 

Many families are like animals and plants. Animals and plants often let you know they like you, at least they seem to, but they don't talk much. That is, they don't mention the pain they suffered when an offspring went through a divorce, or the job they left because, well who knows, they quit, were fired, or laid-off. They avoid discussing why the partner of their gay son or daughter doesn't show up at albeit rare family gatherings or how they felt when their nudist uncle invited them to a club meeting, after discovering he and aunt judith have been living separate for years and finally signed divorce papers. Instead, about all you really know is what they ate for dinner. 

Good friends, the ones I see frequently, talk about those things. Who's family? 

Wheelbarrows

100,000 poets around the world celebrated their art today, including a few in nearby Lexington. We strolled around the local Kroger store, adding items to shopping carts while speaking random lines from "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. Local shoppers must be accustomed to weirdos talking to themselves. They didn't pay us much mind. When one of our group began beating his drum in the front of the store, we headed that way and gathered around him. Our leader shouted out the poem, then we began calling it out and repeating it line by line. After a few minutes we returned to our carts and checked out. For more, check out Karen's blog at http://holesinmyjeans-kpannabecker.blogspot.com/.

Next project, sweet corn. I seeded many plantings of sweet corn this year. Several were miserable failures, but persistence paid off. We have more than we need at the moment. I reined in our black wheelbarrow, loaded it with ears, and rolled it over to a paddock. There, Karen and I served dessert to goats and donkeys. I continued to the outdoor kitchen, where I cut off the kernels. Finally, down in the basement kitchen, I canned and froze 20 quarts.

Here's one instance in which the best is the easiest. To freeze the corn, I put a quart of kernels in a large cereal bowl and microwaved it for 3 1/2 minutes. I immediately stuck the corn in a plastic bag and into the freezer. This has worked well for years. The only thing I worry about is the Mideastern (?) petroleum that makes the plastic bag. You tell me. Is that okay?

Canning is more complicated, as has been explained in earlier blog entries. 

"Yeah, but how about showing us what the canner's supposed to sound like?" says Virginia.

All right. Here it is.

Beanucopia

We are now harvesting my last plantings of green beans for 2011. Today we cleaned a bucketful I picked this morning, plus some guys we'd stored in the refrigerator.

Here are the jars ready to go, filled with boiling water.

"So green!" says Virginia.

Yes, it's too bad canned beans turn such an ugly -- I'm not very good at this color thing, but after looking through a color chart I'd pick -- ooze.  Oh well, they're good in soup, and soup colors are almost always far from fresh.

Ending up with 14 quarts, I decided to put two pressure canners to work, including one we found a couple years ago in a Goodwill store. Perhaps that was a risky proposition since I haven't tested its pressure gauge. I basically ran them side-by-side, overdoing the pressure and the time on the unknown canner. So far so good.

Gobbledygook and Psychobabble

Finally, in September, it's time to freeze sweet corn. Three or four ears have been favoring my lunch plate for more than a month, and now the last two plantings are ripening too rapidly for us to eat. Same with green beans. In fact, at the moment I'm behind on everything. My editors probably think I should be working on a deadline that's passed instead of writing a blog entry.

"Are you going to mention why?" says Virginia.

Why what? Maybe. Sometimes a little diversion goes a long way. I could admit that teaching a law school class has bled time from my usual pursuits, offering a captive audience for someone hungry to share tidbits after more than 17 years of fairly solitary studying. Two classes, two drops. When I left the building, it was raining. I don't know if that's a bad sign or nothing at all.

I let the writing get away from me, consume me, as if 17 years of passing persistence called for redemption. Maybe I had to be doubly sure it was real work. Are these the doubts of a possible imposter? Peel the onion. Does it stink?

Please Don't Cut Off My Nose

Our friend, Marilyn, dropped by with some bulbs this spring, gifts from gardener to gardener. I buried them here and there, marked by labels the chickens soon removed.

"Did the flower appear all of a sudden?" asks Virginia.

Like a surprise lilly, does she mean? Maybe. It "appeared" to our noses yesterday, which led us to the flower.

Some of a Man's Best Friends

Each morning I look for treats. A rich, soaking rain helped bring up some lettuce the night before last.

These little beets are several days old.

Consider the innocence of raindrops on eggplants.

New Zealand spinach volunteers every spring, then produces for three seasons. I think it may be calling us home.

Merry Christmas in September. Plant the red balls for spring asparagus, three years hence.

Here's a sweetheart.

We usually have to wait all summer for these to thicken.

"Don't forget your best friend," says Virginia.

Words, Words, Words

As rain pours, making ponds of our goat paddocks, I ponder the practicality of being proud. We met a woman the other night who insisted her husband is the only man she ever met who has no ego. That's what she said. Maybe she meant he isn't egocentric. Perhaps that's why I liked him. I don't think so.

When we lived in North Carolina, many people said, "I'm proud of you." In a way, it was like being in a non-English-speaking country. Someone who barely knew us would say, "I'm proud of you." The statement was believable, said with confidence and certainty. It was not fluff. Well, maybe it was, but it sounded sincere, not like the "love ya" that gets tossed about so easily. For me to believe that phrase, it must be said fully and completely, "I love you," with no ambiguity as to who loves whom.

Many religions view humility as a virtue and pride as a deadly sin. I understand that St. Augustine wrote that pride "is the love of one's own excellence" and in the words of Meher Baba, "Pride is the specific feeling through which egoism manifests." Some philosophers consider pride a virtue. Funny thing, in one week one can receive a compliment for humility and a suspicion of pride. Hmmm, maybe it's okay coming from someone else but not from oneself or, like ice cream, chocolate and almost everything else, in moderation.

"I thought pride was a pack of lions," says Virginia.

Of course she's right. Rrrrr.