her able hands

I know I said I wasn’t going to order any seeds for this year because I have such a glut from my over-purchasing last winter when I thought I would continue doing the market. But then I remembered that I want to start an asparagus bed. Of course, I wanted to get a jump start on the 3 years it takes to get the first harvest, so I looked into ordering asparagus crowns. Gurneys was having a big sale and I got a little overzealous with my mouse hand. They had a buy one get one free on red raspberries, 6 in each, and I have the perfect spot for them tucked into the edge of the woods, south facing. Then the word tuber popped into my mind and I thought of my grandfather and his dahlias, so I added a few of those to my shopping cart. Fortunately these are all items that once they arrive, I can keep in a cool place until I get the soil prepared.

Raspberry Red 1 YR/12 plants
Dahlia Dinnerplate/Red/1 tuber
Dahlia Dinnerplate/Lavender/1 tuber
Dahlia Unwin’s Dwarf/3 tubers
Asparagus Purple Passion 1YR/10 crowns
Asparagus Jersey Knight 1YR/10 crowns
Asparagus Mary Washington Improved 1YR/10 crowns

I also made a small order at Fedco. My lettuce and salad greens are mostly gone, or too old and I’m deseprate to get some good salads this summer, and hopeful that the one bed that we made with the chicken tractor last year will be relatively weed-free and a good place for growing greens well into summer. It’s tucked into the woods, but will get plenty of sunshine in the early months, the partial shade as summer rolls along-hopefully extending the season for salad just a bit.

Les Orielles du Diable OG
Lollo Rossa Lettuce
Tom Thumb Lettuce
Rouge dHiver Lettuce
Mesclun
Broad-Leaved Batavian Endive
Full-Heart Batavian Endive

I also wanted some carrots and parsnips for the same reasons, but added a few other root vegetables to the mix because I’ve been reading myself to sleep at night with the book Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables and I’m going to attempt a small fruit cellar in the basement corner away from the heating ducts this year. I have a bunch of empty bins and will get some sand and sawdust to store in, and with any luck have carrots, parsnips, turnips, rutebega, beets, celeraic and potatoes through winter. Maybe even some winter squash, onions and celery. All of this of course depends on how successful I am with getting my soil imbalances corrected.

Red Cored Chantenay Carrot
Shin Kuroda Carrot
Golden Detroit Beet OG
Harris Model Parsnip
Laurentian Rutabaga
Diamante Celeriac

So I went to check out and pay for my order and saw that I was being charged $4 for having less than $25—I was at $19. Well, I always wanted to try to grow Fava and Lima beans, and I’ve only got a few seeds of my favorite zucchini left, and my in-laws love yellow crookneck squash.

Windsor Fava Bean
Jackson Wonder Lima Bean
Costata Romanesca Zucchini
Early Summer Yellow Crookneck Summer Squash OG

Still had a couple bucks to go, so I figured what the heck, let’s try a couple of different paste tomato varieties. I have more than enough already to last a couple more years, but what would a garden be without something new? I went with paste because I always plant extra for making sauce, and I have a dozen slicing tomato varieties already. That didn’t stop me from wasting an hour reading through the descriptions of every tomato I haven’t tried before. Oh, how I love reading about the tomato seed histories.

Speckled Roman Paste Tomato OG

Near the top in our 2005 sauce test for its rich tomatoey sweetness and good texture. Red cylindrical fruits covered with orange-yellow striations, something like an Amish Paste with stripes from an Orange Banana. The actual parents are said to be Antique Roman and Banana Legs, and the fruits have the distinctive nipple of the latter. Plants bear an early abundance of meaty 4-5 oz. fruits. Roberta’s highest yielder in 2005. An underground favorite of many seed savers, Roman is just beginning to find its way into commerce.

Hog Heart Paste Tomato OG

Hog Heart has won many fans since Susan Eastman and Ed Lacy of Gray, ME, brought it to the Exhibition Hall at the 1988 Common Ground Fair. They got it from a woman in northern Massachusetts who got it from a man who had emigrated from Italy, probably between 1910 and 1920. So-named because of its tendency to produce heart-shaped double fruits, Hog Heart is a meaty 6-8 oz. (some larger) paste tomato shaped like a banana pepper, noted for its sparse seed cavity, good solids and excellent flavor fresh, canned or frozen. Martha Gottlieb was instrumental in distributing seed samples and provoking interest all around the state. It is late for extreme northern areas and some fruits catface. A Fedco introduction. “For my money, the best paste tomato going,” says Amy LeBlanc.

I tell you, the Fedco seed catalog is worth ordering, just for the reading material.

So now I wait for my orders to arrive, watch the rain pour down, the tulips and daffodils push up through the dark mulch around the yard and revel in the chorus of birdsong that greets me as I step out the door each morning. The sound calls to my heavy winter arms to take a day or two off and get out the digging fork, but the ground is soaked yet, I must not rush the process. Besides, there’s indoor work to continue, and we haven’t made time to set up the light stand still. Too late to start the onions, I suspect, but I’ll give the leeks a try. Oh, so much to do! I think next week if we have warm and dry weather, I’m going to pick up dinner on my way home, or order pizza every night so I can spend that extra hour and a half of daylight outside working. This working full time’s starting to cramp my style.

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My dear friend Cathy has been such a terrific support to me over the past few years. She’s sort of become my human brass ring because she’s at a stage in her life where her children are out of the house and living their own wonderful lives and she no longer has to grind away at working to make money. She’s actively working on things that are meaningful to her and I suspect she’s on the path to earning plenty of money with her new writing ventures. Recently she’s started focusing on working fast and is having excellent results. I don’t know how to work fast unless it’s because I’ve got a deadline someone else imposed breathing down my neck. Self-imposed? Pshaw. I haven’t developed the self-discipline yet. I say yet because it is my hope and dream, dare I say my goal to have the discipline to put myself and my work first more often.

If you haven’t read Cathy’s blog, you really should give it a look-see. She just started a conversation with a friend of hers who lives in Penzance. Penzance! A painter who lives in Penzance! They’re sharing their letters to each other with Cathy’s readers—posting them in the category mdf, which stands for my dear friend. This makes me very happy.

I’m trying to organize my goals and find that I spend very little time working on the things that are most important to me, on the things that will top my list of regrets if I come to the end of my life without having made a dent in them. I get so sidetracked with working for money, with juggling all of the details of the kids’ day-to-day, with the house that breeds piles and messes, with collapsing into bed with a book by 9:00 every night instead of staying up for a couple of hours to work on those things. Things like my novel, the dozen essay ideas clanging around in my head, the embroidery and sewing sitting in boxes.

This recent load of work at my job has brought to light some of my major shortcomings. We’re pretty much in non-stop emergency mode right now with fires popping up on each of our desks every 3.4 seconds. The level of stress and anxiety in the building is high. Very high. We’re getting direction from too many people who don’t talk to one another and I’m spending at least 50% of my time every day re-doing what I did the day before while my work for the present day gets pushed out to tomorrow. Come Friday I have half a week’s worth of work undone and an inbox of emails loaded with contradiction.

I don’t know how to take control of that. I’m in a constant state of reaction. When I try to stop and look at the big picture so I can break it out into all of the small pieces that have to get taken care of in order for the whole thing to work, then another detail changes and I have to backtrack again. By the time I roll into the driveway at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve spent my entire day being the subject of a brain study on confusion. There’s no way I’m working on my novel now.

But then I read Cathy’s blog, or we have a chat on Sunday afternoon and I know that there’s a road through all of this, that I won’t be living this way forever. I think about my life goals some more and a tiny bit of trust in myself blooms—trust that I will find a new way.

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I find this article so hard to believe. On at least three mornings in January, I ran outside to warm up the car with wet hair and had chunks break off of my head. Our gas bill for January was almost $400, as compared to December’s $120. Now November and December, maybe those months set the curve because I had windows open in the house the week after Thanksgiving and if I hadn’t had the flu I would have taken my chances with getting my garlic in the ground then (six weeks late). It would have made it, too.

Sure, it was in the 70s earlier in the week. We woke up yesterday to a couple of inches of ice with a coating of heavy, wet snow. More snow forecast for the next several days with a total accumulation up to 8″–typical spring in Ohio. Maybe we’ll retire to the Northwest or the Southwest. But knowing us, we’ll find some good reason to move to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or Minnesota.

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I wrote the post below on Sunday and intended to publish it yesterday morning but while I was going over it one more time I got hit with a wave of stomach cramps that knocked me over. I then rode that wave to the porcelain bowl where I spent about four hours of my day turning inside out.

All my wishing for more time at home…be careful what you wish for and all that. I called in sick and can’t help but wonder if they thought I did because it was seventy degrees out. Trust me when I say I would rather have been at work feeling well than running back and forth from the toilet to the bed and to the tub to soak my poor, beleaguered bottom.

Of course, I had Lila at home with me too. She was such a champ, hung out and played with her dolls and her kitchen and her doctor kit for hours. Every now and then she’d come in and put her hand on my forehead and whisper, “Oh, my poor, sweet, dear, dear child.”

At around 2:30 in the afternoon I let her go outside and I sat slumped on the porch swing while she ran around the yard and collected sticks in her shopping cart, used a pine bough to sweep off the front walkway, and made up elaborate stories that she narrated out loud and in different voices. I brought my notebook and my Crockett’s Victory Garden book out and made some notes on planting, a half-stab at a schedule. The sun on my body felt so healing and I started to get hungry so I made some toast. Bad idea, that.

I suspect food poisoning because I had salad bar the day before and nobody else is feeling at all sick. I guess I needed a stronger nudge towards bringing my lunch from home every day. I do most of the time in my Mr. Bento but I have no idea what to bring for lunch today, my tummy still feels like it got punched, but is holding its own against the tea with honey I’m sipping now.

Anyway, the real post with photos is behind the cut.

(more…)

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We fed the girls yesterday afternoon around 4:00 and the big nested straw hole they all lay in was empty. This is what greeted Chris when he opened up the tractor lid this evening around 5:00 after work.

I counted 21 eggs in the bowl. We have 11 chickens. Somebody’s working overtime without pay.

ETA: Turns out Chris found about 8 or 9 of these under some straw next to the spot they always lay in. We had put down fresh straw the day before, so clearly they worked that batch underneath with all of their scratching. But still! All of a sudden full production—I have 4 dozen eggs in the fridge. Yum!

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