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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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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Since just before the holidays I’ve been trying to trudge my way through the tome Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It’s one of those books that has sat on my reading list since college, mocking me with its big brainy brawn as I devour my Oprah’s Book Club picks.

I don’t put books down without finishing them very often, but am trying to learn how to say enough is enough in all areas of my life. I’m about 250 pages into the thicket—776 pages of fiction with over 400 characters—and I realize that I haven’t formed an attachment to one single soul. The language, yes. Pynchon’s use of the English language has made synapses explode in wonder at least a thousand times. But I haven’t fallen in love with one person in the book. That’s an important part of reading for me, feeling tangled up in someone else’s story and spirit. This novel is like wading through Purgatory, hundreds of lost souls bumping into one another but moving on so quickly that I forget about them in a page or two.

So yes, enough is enough. I’m taking it back to the library, paying my $11.40 late fees because I ran out of renewals and stubbornly refused to give up. I have to give up. The idea of reading another 526 pages of this massive web of human interaction a slothlike five pages a night makes me want to stop reading entirely.

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I’ve moved on to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Is it in bad taste to say I wouldn’t mind having this writer’s babies? It is. I’m sorry. But it’s true. And at the moment it’s the most intelligent thing I have to say (which is not at all) about the book, I’m too besotted for good words.

Then again, maybe he would sire a child like Oskar, his protagonist. I don’t know if I could love a kid like that. I love reading it because of the distance and because Safran Foer wastes so few words. The details mesmerize. The layers of family and history and emotions lock together and form walls around me so that twice today my own family came knocking and I didn’t know how to open a door and let them in. I was lost in the story.

How does he do that?

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In my fevered state Wednesday I snagged a few Young Adult novels out of the teen section at our new library. Of course, I didn’t have my list of suggestions from all of you helpful readers, so I had to wing it. Yesterday I read Saint Iggy by K. L. Going. I don’t know why I was worried about writing for teens about subjects like sex, drugs, crime and finding one’s way. I loved the fast pace of this story, and the huge challenges this 16 year-old boy has to face in his day to day life. Born addicted to drugs, father always drunk and high, mother often drunk and high and also often “gone visiting” for long weeks with no contact. Slow learner–especially in terms of common sense and how to play the game at school and how to stay under the radar. But he makes the most of what’s put in front of him when he gets it that he’s hit rock bottom.

The one thing that I kept getting hung up on was the use of the verb to be in the narrative. The story’s told in the first person, by Iggy.

I think, Oh, so terminated means over. And it is not like I didn’t see this coming, but this time I can tell it is real so my mind wanders and I start thinking how the girl wasn’t even that hot and my parents will never show up to a hearing and what will I amount to anyway?

We know Iggy struggles, that he comes from the projects in New York City, but he narrates without very many contractions. About three pages in I started to get annoyed that the kid is thinking in such perfect English, that it sounds stilted, an extra syllable where it should just spill out onto the page smoothly. Or ride across my brain seamlessly. I know, it’s a small nit, but it popped up on just about every page. I loved the story enough to make myself ignore it. I’m glad I did, it was a fulfilling read. But it’s something to think about in my own writing, in trying to make Henry’s voice believable, because really, I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’ve put K. L. Going’s other books on my TBR list.

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