It's the Simple Things: 2009

Monday, November 9, 2009

Procrastination... It Pays!

Carrots in love!

Sometimes, being a procrastinator is a bad thing...bills don't get paid on time, or someone runs out of clean underwear. But, other times, being a procrastinator is a very good thing!

Take, for instance, gardening and carrots. A "proper" gardener plants carrot seed in a row, then diligently thins the seedlings, ensuring that the carrots left have the proper space to grow long and straight. I, on the other hand, start out with good intentions and fairly straight rows, but then get waylaid by other things. So, some carrots get thinned; others, not so much!

This fall, again because I'm a procrastinator, I decided to mulch the carrots with a thick layer of straw instead of "having" to pull them all and process/use them. Enter, Patches, our number-one dog. When fed leftover stews or soups, she always ignores the carrots, pushing them off to one side, or sometimes completely out, of her bowl. There must be something enticing about carrots growing in the ground, though, because, every few days, she started pulling one out and eating it (or at least mauling it!).

Don saw bite marks on the top of a carrot in the bed and pulled it out to save it from a dog attack. This picture shows what came up...not one carrot, but two...two carrots, obviously in love! (Hmm...might we have had baby carrots in the spring if we had left them in the ground?) If we gently pull near their tips, they come apart, like a vegetable puzzle. Laid side-by-side, they are nearly identical, but look twisted and odd apart. Like all true lovers, they seem most complete when fitted together.

The point is, had I been a more proper gardener, this wouldn't have happened. I would have had one straight carrot; the other having been sacrificed in a thinning frenzy.I would have pulled the surviving carrot and used it in a stew, or soup, or on top of a salad, without giving it a second thought. The miracle of growing something from seed would have still existed, but not the magic of what could be!

It's a reminder that Mother Nature works in us, through us and, most magically, beyond us!

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Harvest

It was 18 degrees outside when I got up this morning, so it's safe to say that the growing season, for this year, is over! There are a few spaghetti squash waiting to be picked in the greenhouse, but everything else is harvested, processed and either dried, frozen, or tucked-away safely in the basement!

I am amazed by the goodness the earth can bring forth with a minimal amount of TLC each year. We are enjoying the plethera of potatoes we dug up in August. I chose to grow small, fancy varieties this year. After all, I reasoned to myself, standing in front of a dozen bins of exotic potatoes at my local seed/garden store, russets are cheap and found year-round in the grocery store! But how often will I be able to find (much less afford) a potato called a "french fingerling"? Besides, the little guys don't take as long to grow, which means they don't use as much water as other potatoes might, and with a low-producing well, I'm always looking for ways to save on water! So we continue to enjoy our harvest of funny-shaped, funny-colored potatoes. I sent Liz to the basement to get some spuds for mashed potatoes the other night...she inadvertently brought up purple-fleshed potatoes, which, it turns out, make great mashed potatoes and really liven up a plate with their color!

Then there are the tomatoes...oh my goodness...lots and lots of tomatoes! I don't know how many pounds of tomatoes I processed this year, but it was plenty! I boiled them, dipped them in ice-water, peeled them and then cooked pot after pot of spaghetti/marinara/pizza sauce! What we didn't use right away, I froze for this winter. Liz made small pouches from the food-saver bags and filled them with pizza sauce to use later for emergency snacks,like after-school, english-muffin pizzas.

Speaking of the sauces, they are delicious, but would be nothing if it weren't for the herbs that came out of the garden earlier in the summer! I was shocked to see what grocery stores are charging for a small bottle of herbs these days! Gadzooks, most of them are so easy to grow at home! If you aren't an herb-gardener yet, you should try some next season! My staples are perennial herbs like thyme, lemon balm, sage, savory and oregano. I also grow herbs that won't survive our winters, like basil and rosemary,all summer long in the greenhouse and/or in pots on the back deck. These herbs season sauces, soups, stews and breads all year long and I can't imagine my life without them! There was a time when Don felt I was growing too many herbs and not enough "real food". I reminded him that I was growing the things that made our meals taste great...so he should quit his whining! He did.

Gardening is my thing. Nurturing plants nurtures me. I'm amazed every year when one seed, planted and watered, blesses us with beauty and/or food, and I hope I'll always be amazed at this miracle. Don keeps telling me that we need to put automated sprinklers in the garden, but I keep putting him off. I like to spend summer mornings watering, watching the plants grow, the flowers bloom and the birds and the bees do their thing! Paradise really is a garden!

Monday, June 8, 2009

Bee Cause

One of the girls on our lavender.

We have four hives of honeybees this season. In years past, we've had as few as two and as many as ten. But this year it's four, and four is enough.

Life has been hard for the honeybee for a long time. Mites and viruses threaten the hives every year. Now, recently, we've added "Colony Collapse Disorder" to the mix...a mysterious condition in which the beekeeper opens the hive one day and finds the bees gone. Not dead...just gone. There are all sorts of theories as to what causes CCD, but no definitive answer yet. As a slightly-seasoned beekeeper (this is our eleventh year), I've given it my share of thought. And since I am not a "bee whisperer" (nor do I know one), this is nothing more than my best guess, based on my personal knowledge of the ways of the bees.

I think CCD will eventually be attributed to chemical buildup in the hive. In a healthy hive, worker bees become foragers (looking for nectar) in the last third of their short lives. The first two-thirds of their time is spent in the hive, taking care of the young and keeping the hive clean and comfortable. So, if CCD were some sort of disorienting virus/disease that affects the radar of the bees, it would not explain the sudden, complete, abandonment of the hive because only a third of the hive is flying at any given time. But, what might explain the complete, sudden, abandonment of the hive is chemical residue building up to a point that the bees find it intolerable.

The two main boxes in a hive are called the "hive bodies". This is where most hive activity takes place...the laying of eggs, tending the young, bringing in of nectar and pollen. As a general rule, beekeepers stay out of these boxes when it comes to harvesting honey and/or beeswax. Honey and beeswax are taken from boxes placed on top of the hive bodies…smaller boxes separated from the main hive by a queen excluder, which prevents the queen from laying eggs in these upper boxes.

Over the years, the beeswax in the lower, busy, boxes becomes darkened with use. The impurities in this wax build up with each cycle of life and each cycle of nectar flow…and some of the impurities are most certainly residue from the bees visiting plants that have been chemically treated.

It seems logical to me that, at some point, the bees can’t stand the smell, taste, or feel of it any more, or it disorients the entire hive. They leave and soon die out, either due to starvation or another illness.

For years, we believed the chemical companies when they told us the sprays on our food were harmless. Now we know that’s not true, and we are suffering the consequences of years of exposure. If the exposure is harmful to us, imagine what it might do to a tiny, defenseless honeybee!

So, to test my theory, we eliminated many “old” frames of beeswax in our hives this year. The bees worked hard to build new wax honeycombs this spring and that will mean a significant decrease in the amount of extra honey we can pull off the hives (to create beeswax, the bees gorge themselves on honey, which activates their wax glands…they must eat eight pounds of honey to create just one pound of beeswax!). But the loss in honey this year might just mean robust health for the hive for years to come.

Next year we will replace more old wax and we’ll start a schedule to ensure that, in the future, the wax in the busy hive bodies isn’t allowed to build up to, what might be, a harmful home for the bees.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Concrete Birdbath

Maybe it's a sign of the times...maybe it's just a sign of getting older! Either way, I am driven by a yearning to live more simply. On this journey, by choice, is my loving husband, Don. Also along, but mostly just for the ride, is our teenage daughter, Elizabeth.

I think that "living more simply" goes hand in hand with "being more creative". For example, for years I used a wonderful, concrete, hand-me-down-from-my-Aunt-Sandy birdbath in one of the front-yard flowerbeds. I loved the way it looked, nestled in some tall grasses, under the birch tree. And I loved watching the birds drink and bathe from it. Then one year it just decided to quit holding water!

So it sat, empty. I couldn't afford to replace it, didn't know if it could be "fixed", and desperately wanted to continue offering water to the birds that visit our yard. Fast-forward a bit to my visit, this spring, to a gardening friend's house. I admired the simple, concrete birdbaths she had made herself, just by heaping some dirt into a pile, mixing up a bag of concrete, and (as she put it) "slopping it on and letting it dry". I could do that!

It all came together that day...the old birdbath would look great, moved to a different flowerbed and filled with plants that could tolerate heat and a home in concrete (the slow-leaking water made it a perfect place for succulents). Then I bought a couple $3.00 bags of concrete at the hardware store, weeded out a place to form my dirt birdbath molds, and, for very little money and just a little time, had multiple birdbaths for my fine-feathered friends! I cut a leaf from my horseradish plant, formed the dirt mold to fit the leaf, put the leaf face-down on the mold and then "slopped" the concrete on and let it dry; I raided the pumpkin leaves to form another. The next day, I flipped my birdbaths over and peeled the leaves off. Functional, creative, simple birdbaths...I love it (and so did the birds and the bees!).