wideeyedfunk

Category: Garden

Stuff grows out of the dirt like magic.

  • …time is passing at an accelerated rate –

    I looked out my office window this morning and saw yellow maple leaves scattered all over the yard. The borage in the garden is barely clinging to abundant life. The bees are a little less busy in the blooms. It isn’t summer anymore.

    Time is passing.

    Normally I don’t think much about the seasons changing, except to contemplate on the untidy lack of straightness in our planet’s axis relative to the orbital plane. That bothers me kind of a lot. Things should be straight, not at weird angles making everything all tilty and awkward and winter and summer.

    But I keep noticing – time is passing.

    Yesterday was trash day. Our junky old dishwasher didn’t last even an hour out on the curb. And that’s fine, except that I would be willing to swear that it just was trash day the day before that. It only comes once a week so if every day is trash day in my mind, what is happening to the days in between?

    Time is passing in a blur of researching and writing and analyzing ancient tools and remnants of dinners eaten thousands of years past. There’s joy in the accelerated time phase. I’m confused a lot and rely on daily lists written in a little purple Moleskine. When the lists fail to direct my actions, I stand and pat my pockets, “where am I going?” I ask WideEyedResearchAssistant B. “Upstairs to the talk,” she tells me. I stagger out of the lab to find the seminar room.

    I sort of wonder how long this superquick passage of time will last.

    What day is this?

  • Trash picking for winter lettuce.

    It’s more complicated than that title makes it seem. With some in-between formative steps.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I walk the Useless Little Black Dog and the Corgi for several blocks through the neighborhood every evening. This is terrible in the winter, mostly. It is nice in the summer, generally. It is ALWAYS great on trash day.

    Because we live in a neighborhood of historic homes filled with epic volumes of historic junk, someone is always prying something out of the basement or off of the house. I scored a china cabinet that reeked of basement mildew two years ago. It is now my garden tool shack in the garage. Elegant, efficient, free. From Spode to Spades. (I know, right?)

    The trick is to get there quick. Super quick because as I’ve noted before, Buffalo has an active trash picking culture. My amateur attempts are pathetic compared to the experts.

    We moved into this house and set up the garden four summers ago. I’ve been waiting for someone in the neighborhood to replace their generously sized divided light windows for all of that time. I’m going to make a cold frame for winter lettuces. Sure, there have been windows out to the trash, lots of times. They were too small, not divided, broken, or the pickers got to them before me because they were so obviously awesome and worth something to someone. And sure, I can buy greenhouse panels to make a cold frame but why when there’s all this free stuff going out to the trash?

    This was the week my friends. Up on Summit, where the houses are big and the windows are wide, someone tore out their near perfect condition divided light sashes and put them out to the curb in a tidy unbroken stack. Hamish and I approached them first and I chased him away from his obvious intent to pee on the stack. “Cut it out,” I told him, “some of those are ours.” He looked at me like, “that was exactly my point.” The Spouse and Miss Tibbit came up. “What are you doing?” The Spouse asked in his suspicious, high toned query voice. He knew full well what I was doing and wanted nothing to do with it. “Score,” I said, “I’m coming back for these.” I think the Spouse rolled his eyes but if he did he made sure his back was to me a little bit.

    Hamish and I stepped smart for the rest of the walk. We made a veggie lasagna and tossed it in the oven for an hour. I didn’t even care, all I could think about was my windows laying all unprotected on the street. I was heading for the car when I noticed that the grass was sort of really, really long. I mowed it super quick. I yelled down to the basement where the Spouse was doing something with the fitness gear, “I’m going to get my windows!”

    The Pathfinder and I hove to the curb next to the window stack. “Yeah,” I muttered to myself, “but don’t be greedy.” Afraid I wouldn’t listen to myself, I grabbed the first two on the stack and fled.

    My new cold frame lids.
    My new cold frame lids. The white ones. The brown ones I got at a salvage reuse STORE before I understood. Besides, they don’t have windows in them. And they are the garden fence not cold frame parts.

    And there they are. Resting against the garage, the tops of my cold frames. Now. Now I am on the lookout for junky old bookcases to act as the frame of the cold frames. They always show up around this time of year when the college students move in and out. I just have to be patient. And quick.

    The garden today. Notice the grapeless vines, the pear-less trees, the unripe tomatoes. Frederico the Falcon is NOT deterring the pest.
    The garden today. Notice the grapeless vines, the pear-less trees, the unripe tomatoes. Frederico the Falcon on the Pergola is NOT deterring the pests.

  • Responsibility avoidance, Or, There are two kinds of spurs my friend.

    The grass in the back yard is long. Mowing has become critical.

    IMG_2093

    The new back stoop remains unfinished. The parts are in the garage, some assembly required. The new house colors, still undecided. Stripping the old paint, urgent.

    Stoop

    But it’s raining. 47 hundredths of an inch today so far in a long slow endless shower. Well now, that’s just too bad. All of the day’s chores were outside chores. Howsoever will I pass the time?

    RainGauge

    I’ll tell you how, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and a lace knitting project. 178 minutes of men of poor moral character. Italian made cotton Tahki yarn in a peaceable spring leaf green, bamboo needles, and a simple leaf lace scarf pattern. A match made in work avoidance heaven.

    knitting

    I knit three, and watched Blondie shoot Tuco down from the gallows for the second time… “I’ll keep the money and you can have the rope”. Slipped one purlwise, knit two and passed slip stitch over while Tuco caught Blondie in his hotel room… “There are two kinds of spurs my friend. Those that come in by the door, and those that come in by the window.” Slip slip knit while Angel Eyes’ thug Wallace beat the name of the cemetery out of Tuco and the prison camp orchestra played.

    40 minutes of the movie to go, Tuco and Blondie are just about the blow the bridge, and I figure I can knit another 20 or 30 rows if I don’t get too caught up in the three way standoff over the grave.

  • Sunday morning in the rain.

    We rented a 2005 Dodge Ram 4×4, grey with a red capper top, from a guy who doesn’t like over taxation and who is concerned that the WideEyedSpouse’s new hologram infused New York state driver’s license will be remarkably difficult to counterfeit. The rental rates were hundreds cheaper than one of the chain operations. The truck is sticky with years of mysterious stains. The side panels are dense with underbrush scrapes. “I buy ‘em prescratched and pass the savings on to you,” the guy told us. For once I feel no fear that I’m going to be fiscally punished for a minor rental car infraction. I didn’t even use a cup holder for my iced latte yesterday. Madness I know.

    We stayed the first night in an airport Marriott. The toilet overflowed for no reason. The light switches had grime encrustations. The floor corners desperately cried out for a solid vacuuming with a crevice tool. Other guests were also given our room so that the door slapped against the security lock five minutes after I crawled my head-colded, jet-lagged, dehydrated self into bed. “Is someone in there?” they called in to us.

    This morning I am lounging in a soft featherbedded mattress looking out over a rain drenched perennial garden to a misty Kachemak Bay.

    IMG_4335

    All night the rain pattered on the metal roof and the birch trees fluttered in a small wind. I’m in a treehouse, I’d think. Then, no, I’m on a boat, an old boat with a wooden railed gangway between me and the open sea.

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    For the same price as the begrimed city Marriott we slept in someone’s mad dream –  a self-built compound of small outbuildings and gardens with cats and hens scurrying through the blooms.

    IMG_1736

    There are rules here, no shoes inside, no cats inside, park at the end of the compound…I had to sneak over to an earlier breakfast seating to score some coffee. But so clean. So calm. No anxiety pheromones leached into the walls. No thunderous Chinese and Korean air cargo jets landing on the roof. Just windows and flowers and a rooster crowing now and again.

  • Curse Not the Green Tomatoes, Make Chutney.

    The Fedco seeds Cosmonaut tomato variety yielded fine, heavy fruits in my garden this summer. They failed to ripen. I may have had words about that in past times. I take them all back.

    The knife wielding WideEyedSpouse and I picked, washed, chopped pounds of green tomatoes to make six pints of chutney, six pints of green tomato gold. Five are left. Yesterday, on hearing that I had chutney stored in the basement, WidedEyedFriend W made unsubtle overtures toward getting some of it. I pretended not to understand. There are only five pints left to last an entire year. I am already planning a 2014 green tomato garden.

    I combined two recipes (1, 2) I found on other sites to make my own concoction based on what they said and what I had around:

    • 12 cups seeded, cored, and diced green tomatoes, 5-7 pounds
    • 1 cup raisins (paid no attention to light, dark, whatever)
    • 1 cup Craisins
    • 2 cups mixed chopped onions, shallots, 2 garlic cloves (in exponentially decreasing volume order)
    • 3 cups brown sugar (paid no attention to light, dark, used whatever dregs I had around)
    • 2 teaspoons salt (fine-ground French sea salt, Penzeys Spices)
    • 2 ½ cups cider vinegar (cheap, store brand that I keep in gallons for cleaning)
    • 2 tablespoons pickling spice (grocery store bought)
    • 2 teaspoons chili powder (Penzey Spices)
    • 2 generous tablespoons of old, crusty dried, sugared ginger lurking in the back of the cupboard

    We started with big, green, healthy but unripe tomatoes.clean tomatoes

    The WideEyedSpouse cored and seeded the tomatoes because of the sheer volume of seeds and interior bits that would have possibly impacted the texture and taste.green tomato chopped

    All of the ingredients went into the non-reactive Le Creuset oval dutch oven. Once they boiled, I set them to simmer for an hour and a half while I heated the waterbath and sterilized the pint jars in the boiling water. The lids boiled in a smaller sauce pan for 15 minutes (or so, I sort of forgot about them for a while).boilingchutney

    The chutney was dark and thicker but still liquidy when we spooned it into the jars. The stuff is napalm so if you do this, be careful. I wore a nice new pair of thick kitchen scrubbing gloves so I could handle the hot stuff. We left about ¼ inch of headroom, wiped the extra yuck off and hand tightened the lids down with the bands. The chutney jars boiled away for 15 minutes or so with an inch or more above their lids in our giant scary pot of boiling water. boiling chutney

    Now, except for the one I couldn’t resist opening and eating in the space of a week (squandered!), they are resting quietly on a dark shelf in a cool root cellar part of my basement. I look at them most days. I imagine the chutney on pork chops, on egg and cheese sandwiches, on cream cheese toast…if I ration it, if I guard it from friends, there will be one pint every two months. I need more green tomatoes.FinishedChutney

  • Green tomatoes all over the place.

    Hoist with my own petard. That’s my tomato situation. Although to be fair and correct I wasn’t intending to harm anyone with my tomatoes. Ok, I might maybe have considered throwing the nibbled ones at squirrels and urban skunks so maybe I can use the petard thing. You know, I’m just going to.

    The healthy tomato garden.
    The healthy tomato garden.

    Last summer I planted five heirloom tomato plants: the garden peach and some kind of giant lumpy variety. They grew fast, blossomed well, and produced just a few incredibly aromatic, pleasantly textured tomatoes. The WideEyedSpouse and I made an event of each one because they were so few.

    This summer I decided on a tomato blitz. I tortured myself with descriptions of heirloom and organic varieties in the Fedco catalog. I agonized over which seeds to buy. I settled on a cherry variety, a dense purpley Cosmonaut, and the succulent yellow Garden Peach. I nurtured those seedlings under a grow light in my dressing room for months. It was inconvenient, sure, but we all dreamed of a tomato bounty. Baskets full. Frozen. Sauced. Canned. Salsaed tomatoes.

    Green cosmonauts.
    Green cosmonauts.

    Look at your calendar. It is September. My 15 lush, health tomato plants carry hundreds of turgid, deeply green tomatoes. I counted them.

    If only they were yellow, purple, and red as they are meant to be. Cursed cold Buffalo summer nights. Cursed green tomatoes. Next year I am shoving a couple of store bought Big Boys in the ground and calling it good.

    A sorry week's harvest.
    A sorry week’s harvest.

  • Bees in my garden.

    I knelt along the grassy edge of my garden at about noon on Sunday.

    1

    The newly blooming lilies scented the air in front of me.

    Lily

    Coreopsis Moon Glow danced in a little breeze off to my left.

    2

    Bees, large and small, hairy bodied and crunchy looking, twirled with the blooms.

    3a

    The lavender, heated in the sun, wafted calm scents toward me from the right.

    4

    Bees were in the lavender, too.

    5

    The mystery lilies, planted sight unseen last fall as unassuming bulbs, are waiting to burst open.

    OtherLily

    Daisy, who lives next door except for when she is sleeping on the sunny rocks in my garden, stopped by to learn why I was kneeling in the yard.

    Daisy

    When winter comes, and I find endlessly creative language to complain about slush, ice, and the grim, damp cold of Buffalo, remind me of the bees in the summer garden.

  • The snow shovel taunts me.

    The solstice was just a few days ago and I spent most of it among a pinkening crowd on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. Yesterday, back in humid and hot Buffalo, the sun gleamed high and bright and long as I mulched the front garden and putzed in the back.

    I slumped over my grilled cheese and salad dinner last night all sun roasted and dehydrated. My chair position gives me a command view of the back yard and vegetable garden and I like to gaze out there in the evening light, especially after a day of garden toil. Everything looks so promising at this time of year.

    SnowShovel1I glanced at the garage doors and my eyes snagged on something shining yellow and glowing through the window. It was the snow shovel. It is dangling from a hook in the back of the garage and should be invisible for the summer. It isn’t your turn, I thought at it. I can wait, it told me.

  • The garden is poised for action.

    Cherry, cosmonaut, and garden peach tomatoes. Hot peppers. Sweet peppers. Leeks. Easter egg radishes and French breakfast radishes. The WideEyedHousehold is doubtful about a breakfast of radishes. Lettuces. Carrots. Borage. Grapes. Sunflowers and two pear trees. And oh, blue coco pole beans, whatever they are, time will tell.

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  • Worm Bin Chronicles: Winter

    “Good thing we have the worm bin,” I said to the Spouse the other day.

    He gave me a blank, flat eyed stare. “Why?” he asked in a tone that said he didn’t really want to talk about the worm bin, could think of no good thing related to the worm bin.

    “Because the compost heap is frozen,” I told him, feeling cheerful and content with my little WideEyedEcosystem.

    The Spouse turned in his chair and peered out the kitchen window to the back garden. I could see him noting the foot of snow draped over the garden. I could see him not making the connection. He, as you may recall (Worm Bin Chronicles: Inception), hates the worm bin. Spine-tingling, hair-raising hates the notion of hundreds or thousands of juicy, wriggling worms snacking, always munching in a bin in our house.

    “If we didn’t have the worm bin, where would we put the veggie trash?” I asked him.

    He sipped his beer and thought. “The trash?” he asked.

    I glared at him and slapped my Fedco Seeds catalog onto the counter. I flipped to page 128 and spun the catalog around, pointing about halfway down the page to the Worm Castings offering (8 quarts for $15.00). “Those worms are making money in there,” I told him. “At least they have a job,” I said, referring to our lay-about small black dog of limited wits and multiple degrees (P.K, F.C.)

    The Spouse leaned forward in his chair a bit to peer at the fine print of the catalog. “Uh huh,” he said and leaned back unconvinced, unconvincable I fear.