her able hands

Phew. That was a waste of two days off. Except for the trip I made to the farmers’ market, I didn’t get much of anything else accomplished. The heat (80s) coupled with the humidity (80%) just sucked the ever-loving life out of me and I moved around here like a little old lady, wishing I had an oxygen tank to carry with me.

But the market trip was a wild success, so let’s just talk about that, shall we?

I decided to leave Lila at home to play with her big brother so I could bring my notebook and interview the vendors who hadn’t returned my Q & A yet. Thank goodness I did, because there were several new folks selling. We had 23 vendors and a guy playing live music! This is a whole new energy at the market, the place was positively hopping!

I filled four canvas shopping bags as I moved from table to table, chatting people up, taking notes, listening to a lot of stories. The old guy selling maple syrup and maple products? His family farm has been in business since 1825! They also do intensive pasture raised dairy and are looking into getting certified for organic production. I bought a jar of maple BBQ sauce from him and he said his wife (who writes a column about local goings on for the paper) quick-sautés summer squash and then drizzles a little of the sauce on top. Hmmm.

Several people stopped me to ask if I’m the same woman who was there a couple of years ago selling homemade pizzas and those rustic tart things with the greens (chard tarts). Why yes! Yes, I am! Will I be doing it again? Not sure, but maybe I’ll do a couple of Saturdays in the fall. Nobody’s selling anything lunch-y.

So check out my haul (sorry it’s a little out of focus):

From the left: shallots (large and small), Music garlic, whole wheat bread made with homegrown wheat, sunflower sourdough bread, zucchini bread, organic springerle cookies, ginger snaps, Costata Romanesca and regular zucchini, honey, maple BBQ sauce, yellow pattypan, onions, slicing cukes, 2 huge bunches of basil (!! I made pesto !!) yellow wax and french green beans, 2 big bunches of parsley (also for pesto), kale, 2 red leaf lettuce, 2 bunches beets with lovely greens, 2 baseball bat zuchinnis (2 varieties, for fritters, and bread), 2 tomatoes, 2 natural sodas, and in the sink out of view, 2 bunches of arugula.

We had a late dinner invite from Cheril & Greg on Saturday. I used the lettuce to make a big green salad, and whipped up some pesto for pasta and brought along the sunflower bread. They did fried perch and we pigged out and drank 2 bottles of dry rose.

So it’s Monday and I need to step away from the computer to go finish cleaning the kitchen from our late dinner last night, make lunches and then get into the shower. I may have to take one of my vacation days towards the end of the week just so I can get my fall planting done and the potatoes harvested.

Now tell me what you all knocked down this weekend!

Technorati Tags: eat local, farmers’ market, organic, farmers, weekend

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My feet are still wet from my little morning walkabout with the camera. Everything is sodden and dripping and rich with the sound of crickets. I got up before Lila and had my first cup of Love Buzz coffee, breezed through my feed reader and then answered the call of the foggy, still morning.

I love how looking through the little woods makes it feel as if we live in the wilderness, when just on the other side of that 40 foot wide tract of trees, the neighborhood unfolds like a patchwork quilt of backyards. Let’s not think about how weedy that perennial bed has become, okay? Those are the thoughts that can ruin a girl’s good mood.

This is my favorite kind of summer morning, especially on a weekend, slow and quiet. The air is heavy, so much moisture in it that the four balls of play-dough Lila left out of their containers, flattened into pancakes on the dining room table last night were still as fresh and pliable as brand new. She’s up now and enjoying the pop-up princess castle play tent I scored from work yesterday. Hanging out in it, singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow in her warble-y little voice.

The plan is a trip to the farmers’ market with Cheril after she gets back from her yoga class. She’ll hang with Lila while I get a few more quickie interviews done with the folks who don’t have email. Then a run to the grocery store for a few essentials. After that, home to clean. The garden is much to wet too work in, so I’m going to enjoy the forced break by taking care of some of the basics that I’ve let slide in recent weeks. It’s incredible to me how fast the piles grow, how laundry breeds itself, how out of my control it all gets with just a few days of inattention.

I have some editing to finish for my friend’s website, but I did the main of it on paper last night while sipping a cold Corona, and now I just have to edit the actual file. Hopefully Nancy and Richard, the amazing second-career garlic farmers will be able to meet to go over the logo work I’m doing for them. We’re close to a final, and I’d love to get that one project crossed off my mental list by the end of the weekend. Will be so cool to see the logo on t-shirts around town! They should also consider tote-bags.

Lisa and I were chatting yesterday about lists, priorities and overwhelm. It helped. I mean, the overwhelm is still strong, but I’m just going to approach it all from the point of what I can do right now. She also pointed me to this amazing essay by Greil Marcus. Reading it? It was like an explosion of connection. I’ve been so stuck in my other writing. The YA novel hit a wall. The essays. The private journaling. All because I have been unable to draw correlations or let myself explore my own past.

Whenever I sit down with the intention to write something other than a work project or this blog, I’m immediately faced with this mile-wide lake of the past. I stand at the edge, my toes digging into the sand, but the black depth gives me serious willies. That alone tells me there’s something important there, but I get frozen. It’s not the right time. I won’t have enough quiet to get in there and really do the work. I worry that I remember it all wrong. Putting it down in words would mean finding the details that float below the surface, ghostly, bloated and probably inaccurate. But reading Greil’s essay clicked a piece into place. I need to fit the details into a context wider than my own little life.

You’re thinking, well duh. And I knew this intellectually, but when I’m stuck, the things I know to be true tend to jump ship. I tend to not trust myself. I dig in deeper and hold onto nothing.

So last night and this morning, I’ve had to run for my notebook fifty times so I could jot down a few words, vapors of my past that have risen up like tendrils of mist on the surface of that big, dark lake. Tonight I’d like to strip down and dive in, write for a few hours, alone in my room with the laptop. Well…metaphorically speaking. I won’t be sitting up there at my desk, naked.

Who knows what blossoms await.

Technorati Tags: summer, morning, rain, weekend, work, writing

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I’m sitting here at my extremely cluttered computer desk, listening to the rain (rain again!) and the birds and the rolling thunder. In about ten minutes I have to get up and make lunches, shower, wake the bean up and get her dressed and then head to work. It’s all I can do to not call in sick today. But I’m not sick in a physical way. I’m just sick of it. Sick and tired. Sick to death. Work is pretty awful right now while we’re all in limbo, waiting to be told if we still have a job or not, and everyone in my department is having a very tough time getting it up. Do they make Viagra for attitudes?

Here’s my fantasy day and weekend: I stay home and clean all day today, enlisting the help of my lovely but incredibly messy and lazy teenager and tropical storm Lila. In the past few weeks my house has gotten away from me in a big way, and I know that’s feeding and nurturing my anxiety/depression/frozen inaction—and not in a good way.

So the house gets cleaned, then I pack up a bag and drive somewhere a little bit remote. I don’t know, a hotel in the Allegheny Mountains? Something not too far, but a little bit wild. I have a laptop, my Moleskine, a bottle of wine and my favorite pillow. I’m alone with my thoughts. No kids. No husband. No neighbors. No garden to take care of. No dishes to wash. I take a few hikes over the weekend, nothing too strenuous, not too far into the woods, just enough to get the synapses firing to the beat of some wide open spaces.

I sit down and write. Lists. Make a game plan. Find the big picture and then break it down into manageable pieces. Prioritize those pieces.

Why do I need to go away to do that? I don’t, I guess. But I want to, very much. I’m in a place of heavy overwhelm right now, feeling pulled in too many directions. I have 5 freelance projects that are half-finished, and a freelance business I’m trying to get off the ground before I lose my employment. The idea of having to find another corporate gig makes me want to poke myself in the eye with blunt pencils.

So there’s a lot to organize in my head and out here in the world. I haven’t finished a thought in weeks, it’s constant interruption. Yes, some of those interruptions are my own thoughts clamoring for attention in the chaos of the days, but a lot of them are things like the phone, the kids and their constant needs, the neighbor kids popping in to play, meal prep, laundry, errands. Life. So I’m a cliché. Calgon. Take me away.

Okay, here comes my cheesy gardening analogy:

See that lovely carrot forming there in the rich, dark soil, with the sun warming the green fronds and feeding the plant? That’s what I hope to be—thriving, nurtured, in balance, with plenty of space around me so I can grow. But right now I’m more like that carrot the week before, when I had yet to thin the plants. I’m crowded, trying to drink up the nutrients I need before everyone around me gets to them first. We’re all depleted, me and my carrot family, friends and neighbors.

Here’s the rub: it’s my job to thin.

Technorati Tags: personal growth, work, money, mental health, retreat

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This weekend is filling up with hefty to-dos, so I decided to get my OLS meal made last night before I escaped out the door of my messy house to the harmony singing group I joined. That was probably a mistake. So was setting about the project without a plan, a recipe or the necessary enthusiasm for the project. People, I was on faulty auto pilot and the meal reflected that sorry state of being.

I knew I had to use the grass-fed ground bison from the farm in Mahoning County because it had already been out of the freezer for two days. I browned it up in the skillet, then added some onion and carrot (from the farmers’ market) to the drippings, and then some kale (market). Now what? Rice is CA, so that’s out. We could just eat it plain. Ew. I dug through the cabinet and saw that I had a box of spinach whole wheat spaghetti from about 400 miles away. OK, I can deal with that. I wasn’t about to start making noodles even though my coop order arrived and I now have 15# of organic flours from under 100 miles away (grown and milled). That’s next week’s project, and not on a day I have to get out the door and try to carry a tune.

So OK, I boiled the pasta, under-cooking it because it was looking kind of gloppy right from the minute it hit the hot water. Yeah, that didn’t really help. I don’t know about you, but a huge part of my ability to enjoy eating anything has to do with the texture, and this meal was dead to me before I even tasted it. When I dumped the noodles on top of the meat and veggie mixture, I felt a little gaggy. This was going to be dry and mushy at the same time. I spooned in half a container of Ohio sour cream, praying it might help it go down—but doubting it had that kind of power. It’s only sour cream, after all.

Just in case you were wondering, it’s never a good thing to call the family to the table with the disclaimer that “dinner’s ready and it’s nasty. you’ve been warned.” Just try to get a four year old to eat a meal she’s just heard called nasty by the cook. She sure enjoyed that big bowl of Gorilla Munch and milk.

The pasta flavor was beyond bitter. The mix might have been just fine atop a bed of buttered rice, but these noodles were utterly and completely disgusting. I’m thinking the chickens are going to turn their beaks up at the leftovers. I know I sure as hell won’t be taking it for lunch today, and I noticed Chris didn’t touch the container for his lunch either.

Better luck next week?

The breakdown:

Pasta: 400-ish miles
Ground Bison: 35 miles
Onion, Carrot, Kale: 30 miles
Sour Cream: 50 miles
EVOO, Paprika, Salt & Pepper: away
My pride: away

After reading that, you might be wondering where the success in my headline comes from. Well, I didn’t have any main ingredients from CA, which is a huge improvement. Also? I managed to sing harmony to several songs last night, even the final round of Amazing Grace. That was so cool.

Technorati Tags: one local summer, locavore, eat local

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I’m coming up on the end of July here, and haven’t manged to get many of my late crops planted. I did get beets, kale and collards in, and they’re in need of some thinning. I’m hoping I can transplant a bunch of the seedlings into my greens boxes for winter. My favorite shell beans, Vermont Cranberry, are ripening to perfection now, and I plan to pick more this evening. My first little harvest two nights ago just yielded a small hand full, but there are at least fifty more pods that are just about ready to pluck from the plants.

I had intended to plant enough to get a good five pounds for winter, but that never happened. Yet. I have enough seed to do it, I just need to take the time. Maybe tonight if it’s not raining. But I’m certainly not wishing for clear skies, not when we need the moisture so much. Monday night, a massive, thick, humid cloud cover moved in over Northeast Ohio, totally unpredicted. Even the weather guys were stumped, “Where did that come from? We called for clear, sunny skies until Wednesday!” I just love it when the weather dudes are stumped and outraged by Mother Nature. “Hey! That wasn’t on my radar!”

I checked the forecast against the sky out my window and decided to go ahead and water the garden anyway, because I tend towards the superstitious idea that spending an extra $5 on my water bill will surely cause the skies to open up. Hey, you know what? It worked. It rained all through the early hours of the morning, and then the sun came out for a few hours and got it good and hot yesterday afternoon, and then several lightning-thick thunderstorms came through with heavy rains. My plants had a head start and were able to really drink deep. Now we’re looking at the possibility of rain straight through till Saturday night!

But I would like to run out between the rain drops to get some more seed in the ground. I’m hoping it’s not too late to plant a fat patch of basil so I can get at least a few small containers of Sunflower Pesto in the freezer. So here’s the list of what I want to get in the ground yet:

Basil
Vermont Cranberry Beans
Haricot Verts
Winter Hardy Endive
Summerhead Lettuce
Cilantro
Dill

If I get it all done by the end of this weekend, it should be okay. Maybe the greens won’t get so big, but they’ll be edible. Then I can focus my energies on building a few more lasagna beds in the yard (order another load of manure) and getting the greens boxes and maybe one row next door set up for row covers. I’m ready to have a 3-season garden. Next year…four.

Technorati Tags: fall planting, organic gardening, drought, rain, Vermont Cranberry Beans

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