Category Archives: nature

From the archives:  our daughter at 2

Yesterday was a downright chilly day with a high of 40*F., and rainy too.  Our lone resident frog in our pond still sang his lovely tune, albeit much more slowly.  I took our daughter outside to hear it and to see if she had noticed the difference.

“It’s cold out here, so the frog is slowing down.  It means he’s not putting so much energy into his calls,” I told her.  “He’s got to save his energy because he’s cold-blooded, baby.”

“No, Mama, he’s not cold-blooded.  He’s ectothermic.”

Dang, but you gotta love Montessori!  She’s five, and I had to go and look up the word to see if she was correct.  (She was.)

Happy Earth Day.

Crocuses in snow is a phenophase of spring’s arrival

Friday is the best day on public radio in my humble opinion.  We get Diane Rehm’s weekly wrap-up in national and international news, and we get Science Friday.  This last Friday didn’t disappoint:  one topic was back-yard climatology.

I thought of this show on Tuesday when, while on trip to the greenhouse for dinner’s onions and carrots, I heard the year’s first frogs.  This is neither early nor late as far as my limited experience tells me, and I did feel a twinge for them because of course the daily high on Wednesday was 25 chilly degrees.

“Phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate. The word is derived from the Greek phainomai (φαινομαι)- to appear, come into view, and indicates that phenology has been principally concerned with the dates of first occurrence of biological events in their annual cycle,” according to Wikipedia.

Some of you, I’m sure, are such great record-keepers that the emergence of the first forsythia blooms or the arrival of the first robin has made it into your garden notes.  Well!  You want to help figure out the effects of global warming on these events, at least as it relates to your piece of the planet?  You can sign up and actually make these recordings known.  Check out the USA National Phenology Network:  they’re looking for volunteers to record just these very same observations.

Luckily she doesn’t need to get by on her smarts

“She’s not going to be a Rhodes scholar,” I told Tom this morning when I came in from doing my chores.

“Oh no.  What did she do?”

Nope; I wasn’t talking about our daughter.  I found the hen turkey (our farmyard favorite) attacking her image in the dressing mirror that Tom broke this weekend.  It took me a bit of effort to pull her away from the mirror, to put the mirror in the garbage can (where it should’ve been to begin with but let’s not mention that, shall we) and to console her that she’d done a great job.

Poor girl.  And I was singing her praises recently about how smart she was, too….

On Thursday the child and I had to be somewhere around sunset.  We do not normally see this daily event for two reasons.  One, I (and by extension she) am normally never anywhere at sunset but at home:  me usually logging miles around the floorspace in the kitchen, she usually joining me or doing her own thing.  And two, there’s a forest across the street that prohibits our seeing this daily occurrence.  Anyway, this Thursday sun as it set was HUGE.  Like, light-up-the-sky-and-think-it’s-on-fire enormous.  Has anyone else noticed this?

“It must be perihelion,” I told her.  “We’re as close to the sun as we’re going to get this year.”

“But why is it so cold if it’s so close?” she asked.  (Seeing the sun set in the lake in the heat of Summer, that sun is tiny.)

“I don’t know,” I said.  “But you should find out,” I told her.

On the way home that evening she saw the moon.  “I see the wolf moon!” she said.  I’ve taught her the names of all 13 full moons.  (The full moon is actually tonight but I certainly wasn’t going to rain on her parade.)  Because we live in the country and the sky is unobstructed and light-pollution free, I figured we all need to be a bit more aware of the heavens above.  This was something we all used to know, to be aware of, just like canning and cheesemaking and gardening…

The nine of us (three humans, three geese, two turkeys and a dog) went tree-hunting on Saturday.

We always get the most Charley Brown-ish of trees.  We don’t exactly grow the Christmas kind:  ours are white pines, which are quite pretty, but rather bough-spare.

Everyone had fun running around out in the cold.  Except the tree, perhaps!

I’ve decided it’s Farm Critters Week here at Old Vines.

Little Edie, our barn kitty, has the life of Riley.  Other than my screaming at her for climbing the greenhouses, she’s got a fairly posh life for a working animal.  Tom built her the most sound little cat house in the tractor shed out of many bales of straw and a down-filled sleeping bag.  It even has a windproof flap.  We lock her up every night as we worry for her safety at night…that, and we expect her to kill all the mice in my adjacent potting shed.  She is not the most terribly thick-furred cat, but life outside seems not to bother her.

I work at home three days a week.  Mostly, I work on the back porch:  it’s close to the critters, and has a great view.  But it’s not insulated so I commute to the front porch to work during the winter (I did winterize this porch).  It didn’t take Edie long to figure out the front porch is a fun place to be, too.  In the morning she’ll come to the front door and ask to be let in.

Then she’ll nap most of the day away.  (The porch faces southwest so the light here is quite nice.)

And then, if she wants to go outside, she stands by the door and lets me know.

The indoor cats are not too happy with this treatment.  Echo simply wants to kill Edie, and Nixie is sad she’s denied the front porch daybed.  Ah well.  Unlike our worthless indoor cats, Edie works for her kibble, after all, so she’s due a bit of compensation.  She’s still finding a vole or a mouse every day or two.  (Good kitty.)

Pic from last winter.  I thought it would be a nice point of contrast to show lovely greenhouse greenery against the snow and new igloo.  I didn’t expect her to eat it!

We’re often asked what tricks we employ to get our daughter to eat.  Everywhere we go, people are normally pretty amazed at her un-finicky eating habits.  I wouldn’t say she eats everything with extreme relish.  And she (and her parents, frankly) is a rather skinny kid: always falling around 5-20% of the national average for her age, she’s not bony but just slim.  But put a plate of frisee in front of her, or some sushi?  It will be eaten.

I’m not 100% sure what to point to.  We never gave her baby food.  She breastfed for(ever) a long time; she only got her first experience with real food when she was around 14 months.  I’m a from-scratch cook, and she’s always had a place in the kitchen.  Of course she’s had an extended upbringing within the garden itself.  She loves her chickens’ eggs.

I guess we do kind of hold the line at the table, too:  we don’t have much tolerance for pickiness.  Even with her least favorite things (sauerkraut, turnips) there’s usually something else to eat that she loves.  Tom is a picky eater (extremely so) and I try very hard for the girl to never see this or notice this.  (He’s not allowed to complain, for one, within her earshot.)  And we do play certain games with our food.  Take salad, for example.  As you well know, we eat a lot of salad around here.  She can tell you what’s what in her bowl because she’s planted it or picked it.  “That’s Brune d’Hiver, and that’s my favorite, Freckles,” she’ll say, “and that’s your favorite Amish stuff Mama, and that’s Nana’s arugula.”

Maybe she eats so well because her parents love to eat?  Each dinner is a celebration, really.  The warmth and happiness of the dinner table is my favorite time of day.  I guess it’s rubbing off on her, too.

Brune d’Hiver lettuce seedling

I have three chairs, one bench, and two stumps in the veg gardens and greenhouses and I never use them for sitting.  Indeed, as I have mentioned before, they tend to be clutter-catchers and nothing more.

But this morning, rapidly cooling coffee in hand and touche-pas kitty in my lap, I sat on the bench.  I sat on the bench and thought, and listened, and tried to simply live in the moment.  The birdsong is changing:  it’s migration time, and we have new visitors.  The sun is changing:  at this early hour, it’s barely over the cottonwood at the corner of the property.  The weather is changing:  we are near peak with leaf color.

Maybe I need to do this more often.

“Hey!” says kitty. “Come here so I can poison you!”

Ugh.  Our new barn kitty, Little Edie, has given both Tom and me poison ivy.

Yes indeed.  Outdoor pets are quite able to pick up the urushiol oil from poison ivy, and carry it around on their fur.  And Edie is such a sweet cat:  unlike our two indoor (lazy, totally standoffish) cats, Edie is a complete attention slut, jumping on you when she sees you and rubbing her little self, and all that poison ivy oil, all over you.

We have learned our lesson, my shirtless husband especially.

The uniform’s getting a little shabby. So’s the gardener but let’s just not go there.

I have a friend, let’s call him Joe because that’s actually his name, upon whose routines I could invariably set my watch. It gave me comfort, knowing that even though I was in Minneapolis hours away from him, at 8:15 in the morning he was in a certain cafe, tearing his paper apart (sports first) and eating his bagel in a particular way. All that of course was thrown out the window once he married and became a father, but routines are kind of a good way to rule your day.

Never thinking I was a routine person myself, or even one prone to patterns of any kind, I had to change my opinion once I became a pseudofarmer. I realized quite quickly that if I did not have routines and even select outfits I would merely be running around with Gardeners’ ADD all the time, not really accomplishing anything. So yes, I have routines. And yes, I have a uniform. It is with some sadness that I reveal I have completely blown out my favorite pair of boots and, even to a conspicuous non-consumer such as myself, I need to replace them. Likewise my olive Carhartt carpenter pants used for gardening: I’ve blown holes in the knees (diligently and badly patched but I fear it’s for naught).

So. I thought maybe I should mix things up this year, and I bought a pair of really large bibb overalls at the Goodwill. I had to take them in a bit and even so I swim in them: a good thing when it’s hot, but a bad thing as they keep getting bigger until I wash them and shrink them down to normal. You know, I really don’t care for the overalls, hayseed image of myself aside. I really need to get myself a new pair of Carhartts. Too bad they don’t usually show up at Goodwill.

But the boots! I’ve replaced my eight year old Blundstone 500s (architect black of course) with a more appropriate mud-colored brown pair. These things are great: I used to walk to work in them (7 miles roundtrip) and obviously they’ve withstood years of farm life. The new pair will be my walking shoes for our trip to Boston; don’t think I will wear them to Tom’s opening, though. And it will be a while before they see the garden.

Old habits die hard, you know. And there’s still some life left in the old ones. There’s lots of life left in the old gardener!

What a big category, “winged pests”!

Every July we are ambushed by Japanese beetles. Everyone thought this year might be different because of the torrential rains that hit the Midwest earlier in the season, drowning the ground-growing pupae. Well, those rains missed us and we are having a banner harvest of beetles! Ick.

They mostly leave my gardens alone: the one thing they seem to really like (runner beans) I planted late enough (planted with the Peruano beans, actually) so they’ll miss them. So I find and squish a few when I do a garden perambulation; no big deal. Organic does not mean bug-free, after all. It’s the fruit trees and grapes that see the worst of it.

What these beetles do is Swiss cheese the leaves of growing plants. The plum tree out my window here is positively lacy, they’ve done so much damage. The grapes, though, are okay, as are the pawpaws, cherries, peaches and small apple trees. Tom sprayed clay on them. The clay (kaolin clay) is actually the same stuff used in some makeup: it’s a very fine white powder that, when mixed with water, will coat leaves and make them unrecognizable to fruit- and leaf-eating pests. Its downsides are two: rains wash it off, and it does interfere slightly in photosynthesis, though the latter would be worse if the beetles ate the leaves. The clay is typically used in managing pests on apples. It is as organic as you can get, considering it’s dirt.

Tom sets a few traps for them, too. He also hand-harvests with a canning jar half filled with soapy water: go out in the early morning and scrape them into the jar. The soap keeps them from flying away. Then, he gives the trap’s and jar’s contents to the chickens. Crunchy on the outside!

The prickly wild blackberries are putting out right now. They are quite tasty and plump after all the rain we’ve had recently. I thought this photo was funny: The kid is in her purple phase, as you can see by her new glasses and choice of pjs. Her favorite color is actually orange. I am kind of glad our optometrist doesn’t sell orange glasses, though.

With blackberries comes poison ivy. This is also the time of year when bottles of rubbing alcohol and dishwashing detergent are by every sink and in the tub. Both remove the urushiol that makes poison ivy such a poison.

For about the last two months, there’s been an American toad looking for love in our pond. This guy has a call that is like a long, low, trilling whistle; one note (or near enough for my ears), somewhat insistent. People would think it was a cricket, but it’s lots louder than that. There have always been somewhat raucous chorus of green frogs in the pond too. I am not so sure if they’re looking for love or just being bellicose. Either way, they’re welcome to do their shouting.

There are still a few green frog tadpoles in that pond now. We’re slowly watching their legs sprout. There must have been two batches of tadpoles, as there are a bunch of tiny green frogs in there now too. The new froglets, including their soon-to-be-lost tails, are about 4″ long. Lose the tail and they’re about 2 1/2″. The adults are 6-7″ if you stretch their legs out.

I love the pond. It’s outside our dining room, about 12′ from the house. It’s not too big, but big enough to support quite a slice of water life. I like encouraging this little slice of biodiversity.