Adventures in Zone 3

Like greased lightning . . .

2011-12-20T17:31:00.016-05:00

. . . That's how fast a flying squirrel runs when chased through the living room by two cats.

And it's as hard to catch as a greased pig, as the kitties learned after romping through the house after it all night long -- and as we learned the next evening when the chase resumed during dinner.

It took a day to figure out what the thing was. Mice are common, especially in winter, but this guy was too big. We kept seeing it streak across the floor between furniture, too fast to identify. Finally my husband got a glimpse that told him it was bigger than a chipmunk with a similar tail, but not russety brown, no stripes down the back; gray or beige, smaller than a squirrel. Definitely not a rat.

Once hubby joined the fray, which moved into the basement workshop, he got close enough to look the critter in the face, up in the rafters -- big black button eyes looked back -- and to get a hand on its hindquarters before it squirted free and sailed past his head about ten feet to the floor, disappearing again under the machine tools and engine parts.

A flying rodent! That was the big clue. A year ago summer, we found a flying squirrel climbing up the basement wall in broad daylight. Until then, we'd been unaware that flying squirrels lived this far north. But we had been aware of critters living in the roof gambrels and the walls, scurrying around between floors now and then, and driving the cats nutty. We'd always thought the noisemakers were chipmunks or mice.

Neither critter is as bold (or tame? or tired?) as this one, which kept sticking its face out right in front of the cats, allowing us to get sooooo close before it shot away. I finally donned gloves and followed the cats around until they had the little guy cornered. Then I pounced! -- and caught him before the cats could and scuttled him outside. He fit with room to spare between my cupped-together hands.

End of excitement. We hope he found a warm place to crawl into, plus some food. Most likely, he's back in the gambrel through that hole we can't find, and the scurrying we next hear will be him running his usual route.

As long as he stays up there, we'll live and let live. And the cats will keep sitting on top of the refrigerator, staring at the ceiling.

The switcheroo

2011-12-10T18:06:00.006-05:00

12/10/11

The switcheroo

Twenty-four hours after my last post discussing season change, the season changed. Thump, just like that.

We're accustomed to early snows that don't amount to much and disappear quickly. This one was only 4-5 inches, but it was heavy and wet, and bowed over all the trees from the weight of white coating. We worried about power outages -- some leaves were still up, and this is the condition that snaps branches and karate-chops wires -- but nothing happened. What a relief! The longest power outage we've ever suffered was an October storm some years ago that left us juice-free for five days.

This time, it melted away within twenty-four hours.

Same thing happened a few days later. Another 4 inches of wet snow, no biggy for us but it walloped southern New England, which was still in full foliage. Tore down trees by the acre and left that heavily populated urban/suburban area out of power for a week or more! We felt for them, having recently endured the effects of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. But our life went on as normal, for which we were grateful.

And then it melted off yet again, restoring clement conditions that allowed a final race against the calendar to get outdoor work done before getting snowed in for good. That finally happened with an 8-inch snow dump this week -- again, wet and heavy -- but this time not melting off. Sun came back strong but temperatures didn't follow. What's underneath the snow now will stay there until April. Or May . . . however long it lasts.

I suppose that's appropriate, given that we're now into December. It's rare to go snow-free this late into the year. We're now in full heating season and the longest hours of darkness, wearing parkas and boots and hats and gloves, mounting snow tires, scraping off cars.

It's the time of year when I begin my countdown. Only eleven more days 'til solstice, when the sun resumes its northward path and light starts returning to the land.

Can't wait!

Down to brown

2011-10-26T20:18:00.000-04:00

Something that surprises me every year, no matter how often I experience it, is the speed of the season change. You see and feel it coming . . . you watch for it, record the signs . . . but then overnight the switch occurs, and you’ve jumped from summer to fall. Or fall to winter and so forth, as the case may be.

It just happened this week, the flip from foliage to stick season. The foliage change came late this year, and peak was short. A few days of wind and rain finished it off, and the cold rolled in. But there’s a lingering blend of colors that belies the seeming onset of winter. Grass is still green -- bright emerald in some places -- while the fields have turned beige and mustard, and the late-dropping trees glow with every variation between gold and brown.

Beeches, oaks, and birches paint the landscape around the naked trunks of maple, ash, and others. At the tippy top of the canopy, vivid yellows, almost lemon, stand out like blonde afro hairdos above the russets, coppers, ochres, siennas, and terra-cottas of the mid-story hardwoods. The understory features maroons and clarets and burgundies of burning-bush and sumac. All these are set against the somber purples and grays of the hills patched with dark evergreens, interrupted in sharp slashes, like exclamation points, by the bright amber larches.

Such colors become almost neon on the gloomy days of hanging moisture, then gain a celestial dazzle when the sun breaks through in columnar beams. The nice thing is, even when the last of the yellow leaves finally fall and the grasses wither, the midstory browns hang on, often through spring. This gives the landscape color and texture even during winter’s starkest months.

It all happens in reverse at the other end of the calendar. Then the bleakness suddenly gets fuzzy with incipient color, and next thing you know, the world is green and vibrant again.

A favorite seasonal poem

2011-10-03T08:12:00.000-04:00

I’m not a big poetry fan, but there are a few simple, lovely poems I learned when young that have stayed with me. This is one of them. Was reminded of it this morning when I heard Canada geese gathering overhead.

Enjoy.

**************************

Something told the wild geese

It was time to go.

Though the fields lay golden

Something whispered, "Snow."

Leaves were green and stirring,

Berries luster-glossed,

But beneath warm feathers

Something cautioned, "Frost."

All the sagging orchards

Steamed with amber spice,

But each wild breast stiffened

At remembered ice.

Something told the wild geese

It was time to fly.

Summer sun was on their wings,

Winter in their cry.

--Rachel Field

“Something Told the Wild Geese”

Where did all the birds go?

2011-09-25T08:09:00.002-04:00

An unexpected by-product of Tropical Storm Irene is the disappearance of many songbirds from our corner of Vermont.

We were so distracted by the storm’s messy aftermath that it took a while to realize that things had gotten really quiet. I saw birds as soon as the storm was over—the usual blue jays, mourning doves, and chickadees, plus a flock of (presumably) migrating flickers, as well as the pileated woodpecker, who made his first appearance in years although we hear him often—but the sparrows and finches and thrushes went AWOL. My bird feeders stopped needing refills, and the mornings and evenings grew eerily quiet. What happened to the other birds?

Yes, it’s migration time, which normally changes the backyard equation. But the numbers are way down, too abruptly. I keep note all year, and any time my mom visits we do a formal checklist. So we know, from past years’ records, who should be in the neighborhood.

Our range for any year is 35-42 species at peak of spring/summer, down to 15-19 in depth of winter. In the transition times, we average mid-20s. Yet two weeks after the storm we counted a mere 16 species over 4 days of good weather, with the wildflowers, fruits, and foliage still in full bloom and insects aplenty.

Huh?

It’s a well-known phenomenon that big storms displace birds, sometimes well outside their normal range. Birdwatchers take advantage of this to expand their life-lists. Indeed, an online search for information showed many reports of southern seabirds blown inland by Irene. There was no mention, however, of land birds blown out to sea.

Of course, only sailors and fishermen would notice, and they probably aren’t plugged into the bird-sighting network. So we will likely never know. It’s worrisome, though, because despite Irene’s catastrophic rains, the storm wasn’t particularly violent in these parts. The wind portion of the event was short and within the scope of ordinary weather. Habitat damage was localized; in our area, just spot road destruction and a few downed trees. There’s nothing to suggest that our birds lost food or shelter, or gained predators, or were simply blasted away.

So where did they go?

All I can think of is the storm mass was larger and more powerful than I understand, and sucked many migrants way off track, and they kept going from wherever they landed. Birds that I recognize as migrants, such as goldfinches, hummingbirds, and phoebes, have been popping up in onesies and twosies but just passing through. The other day we saw a kettle of hawks circling high, with a skein of geese even higher above them. But the normal routine of waterfowl gathering and honking has not occurred at all.

We haven’t seen one song sparrow, which is usually the first to arrive and last to leave and can be utterly relied upon for a daily appearance. The juncos, which started coming a month ago, disappeared again overnight. A house wren, one of which had been ubiquitous and constantly singing before the storm, showed up for one day a few weeks after. And the wood thrush and veery, who normally stay until a killing frost, are long gone. Even the robins are missing. Ordinarily, we see or hear several a day, but I’ve only noticed three in the weeks since the storm.

We’re down to resident winter birds already. Ravens and barred owls, who live here year round, tend to be noisy and visible after the migrants have shipped out. Yep, there they are, almost every day now. The woodpeckers, chickadees, and nuthatches never depart, and they too are increasing activity. Just this morning, though, I spotted two chipping sparrows in the garden after many days of conspicuous absence. They are probably migrating, like the hummingbirds glimpsed last week, so that’s I suspect that’s it for them.

It will be interesting to see who comes back in the spring. I hope there were no big population wipeouts, and all the birds currently absent are happily in transit somewhere else.

A One-Two Punch for the East Coast: Punch #2, the Hurricane

2011-09-06T17:41:00.008-04:00

So how many times in history has the United States experienced both an earthquake and a hurricane within 5 days of each other, affecting the entire eastern seaboard?

None that I know of! (Though I confess: I haven’t taken the time to research it. If anyone is aware of such a combo, let me know.)

On August 28, while many of us were still twittering about the earthquake, Hurricane Irene rolled into town. She was aimed at the major population centers, which wisely evacuated or at least geared up, understanding the consequences better than in previous years since modern media have educated us about just how devastating such a storm can be.

Even in Vermont, we were ready, though all we expected was a day of high winds and heavy rain -- a common enough mixture that nobody was particularly worried. Perhaps we buttoned down tighter than usual.

Irene surprised everyone by devastating the inland northern mountains instead of the metropolitan coastline. Vermont topped the national headlines in the scope of its disaster.

At our place, it was a near miss: almost lost the pond, did lose a large hunk of the road and one tree in the dooryard, three elsewhere on the property, which both blocked the road and chopped off power. This sort of thing happened to many people, with scattered pockets of complete wipe-out. But in disaster terms, very few people were catastrophically affected for an event of this scale. Yes, a few deaths; yes, some ruin-your-life property loss and destruction, but nothing compared to having a hurricane wiping out a complete region or a tornado erasing a whole town. The damage here is mainly infrastructural, and causing one hell of a statewide headache.

In fact, it's a very weird disaster. You can drive around for a while with everything just fine, then turn a corner and whammo! Road gone. Or bridge gone, farm gone, house gone, whatever. Turn the next corner and everything's fine again. Over and over again.

What blind-sided us was the mountain flooding. You think of "flooding" as a valley / lowland / coastline / watershed thing, right? Here, every damn feeder stream, dry streambed, or path of least resistance flash-flooded into a nightmare torrent PLUS every river broke flood height records, all at the same time. The deluge came fast with near tsunami power and just ate through everything in its path. Even places like Killington Ski area, which is nowhere near a river and sits at 2000+ feet altitude, lost a hunk of one of its lodges, just to downslope runoff!

Another thing contributing to the scope of damage is how few roads this state has. Those of us who moved here from other areas often gripe about the lack of alternate routes to get anywhere. So when something like this happens, well, suddenly you can't get in, or out. Neither can the utility trucks or supply services. A statistic we've heard but not confirmed (but readily believe) is that every road in the state took damage somewhere along its course, whether a small washout around a storm drain, or a skinny slice across the road bed, or complete removal of surface and bed for full width and 4-20 feet down. Lots of bridges are gone; but, strangely, lots of bridges remain standing in perfect shape in the middle of a river with the approaches destroyed around them. As well, railroad beds have been undermined or damaged all over the place.

After the rain stopped, the winds began and it started raining trees, leading to situations like on our 0.9-mile dead-end dirt road: a just-passable washout caused by a seasonal stream bed flow overwhelming a culvert, followed a few dozen yards later by a massive boundary maple down across the road, followed a few dozen yards later by another massive boundary maple down across the road, followed a half-mile later by a deep washout of one-half the road width caused by a small creek overwhelming a big culvert, followed a few dozen yards later by a deep two-thirds-road-width washout caused by downhill current. Many citizens rolled up their sleeves and cut their way out, plugged holes, jury-rigged bridges, etc., while waiting for aid. Most everyone who could got out of their corner as soon as they could by whatever means was available and started reconnoitering to take stock, check on neighbors, and get started on putting things back together.

On our survey outings, we would find everything perfect for a couple miles, until coming upon a low spot in a village flooded by its river overrunning its bank -- and the bridge -- though when the water went down there was no damage aside from silt and debris. Often, when we sought out low areas that we expected to be devastated, based on springtime recurrences extrapolated to flash-flood level, things were just fine a day or two later -- while up high, roads were not just gouged out, but utterly destroyed, either in one gash or for hundreds of yards. Many of the worst hit were villages with in-town rivers, or hamlets where two streams converged. Every area in south-central Vermont, as well as scattered spots all over, saw these scenarios to one degree or another, some to the nth degree. I understand it was the same in the Adirondacks, Catskills, and other regions.

Several Vermont towns were headline-makers, where people were simply stuck on a wooded hill like an island. They’ve had to walk out, and it will be a long time before things are repaired enough to resume normal life. In our case, the partial washouts allowed us to come and go in cars, but large utility trucks couldn’t get in to repair the snapped wires and damaged poles until the road had been repaired. As a little back road with 8 houses, we were pretty darn low on the priority totem pole, so we expected to be at least a week without power. Thank goodness for generators!

Little did we know how resourceful power companies can be. After only three days without juice in our neighborhood, workers showed up in a small platoon, parked their big rigs outside the damaged area, hauled 9 guys in via pickup truck, and fixed the broken line and skewed pole by hand, whistling while they worked.

As in all disasters, people have been coming together and doing wonderful things. Neighbors who otherwise mind their own business went out and about talking and helping each other. Communities, particularly the hard-hit ones, banded together to solve their own problems while waiting for help, and organized themselves into productive coping. Generous business owners threw open their doors for community aid.

For instance, two towns over, in the ski resort town of Ludlow, whose main street was a deep river on Sunday afternoon and evening, and many of whose people suffered great property damage, there's a restaurant with a pub-style bar where spouse and I socialize once a week. The company is good, the drinks are huge and reasonably priced, and the food is comforting and tasty and also reasonably priced. The long-time owner, after watching the water lick at his doorstep, and who depends on both locals and tourists to keep him in gravy, opened early the first day after and set up a free, all-you-can-eat buffet, charging only for drinks. Didn't jack the drinks price, either, and all tips went to the town fund.

We went there both nights -- the first, for aftershock company and to avoid opening the refrigerator, the second by intent because the first had been so much fun and such a good resource for information. That night a cheer went up in town when a convoy of 20+ camouflage-painted heavy-duty vehicles hauling heavy-duty equipment drove through town (presumably National Guard but who knows). Road repair a-comin' soon! Then, when we arrived home, the power company called to get up-to-date info on what they needed to do to fix our service. Both responses were much quicker than anticipated, and heartening. In the week since the hurricane, we’ve seen awesome responses by all towns, services, and citizens, putting things back together faster than expected.

While waiting, we organized our life around the generator. Made sure it stayed running. Made sure we had enough fuel for a long haul. Figured out how long we needed to run it, how many times per day, to keep the refrigerator and freezer alive. Coordinated computer time, and using lights and plumbing, during generator runs. Then, in off times, going back outside and dealing with things -- cutting, hauling, talking with people locally or via phone (as holdouts with a landline, which is underground, we always have phone [until, that is, zealous reconstruction crews started cutting lines!]), resupplying, reconaissance, repairing equipment that broke just when we needed it, and so forth. I even managed to get a bit of paying work done, but hubby was shut down completely, since we haven’t kitted up to run his machine shop off the generator.

In all, for a disaster we fared pretty well, and our problems could be categorized as "major inconvenience causing lifestyle disruption and setback of income, but not unrecoverable loss." For which I am VERY GRATEFUL! We gained better perspective, once the power came back, by watching videos on the Internet about the Japan tsunami. Oh My God. In comparison to that, Hurricane Irene was a flea bite.

A One-Two Punch for the East Coast: Punch #1, the Earthquake

2011-09-06T16:47:00.004-04:00

On August 23, as most people heard, there was a hefty but not catastrophic earthquake centered in Virginia, felt all the way up and down the eastern seaboard. Here in Vermont, many hundreds of miles north, we had the odd experience of hearing it.

Hubby and I were a couple hours into a paddling trip down a 14-mile segment of the Battenkill River between Arlington, VT, and Shushan, NY, which placed us between the southern Green Mountains / Taconic Hills and the Hudson Valley, snaking through the Battenkill's own river valley. Although the river loosely follows VT/NY Route 313, there is no regular rumbling of traffic, so things in general are very quiet, with just the chuckling water providing ambient noise. Recent rains had the river cantering along at 5+ mph, but there are no big rapids or cascades, so the sound level is essentially constant. A light westerly breeze stirred the foliage but that, too, was a low-level, susurrant background noise.

Weather was bright sun with big puffy clouds, occasionally darkening as a larger, possibly threatening cloud crossed the sun, but with low humidity and no storms forecast. Now and then between the clouds we saw high silver jet contrails but no low-flying aircraft, either private or on approach to airports or air bases (none in area), making for a dramatically fair-weather summer sky.

So, given all that, we were surprised to hear what at first sounded like a distant growling thunder; but it was prolonged and got louder, stronger, sounding at first like a commercial jet flying too low for the contrails we'd seen; but then started to sound like a military jet flying way too low on afterburners, yet not moving through space; it was stationary behind us, too low altogether to be a plane, and it stopped abruptly instead of fading off like a passing craft would. Conversely, it lacked the explosive quality of either thunder or something blowing up in the distance, or violent impact like an auto or train wreck. It lasted, I don't know, somewhere in the 10-20 seconds range, enough to get us looking over our shoulders and up in the sky and suggesting then dismissing the above explanations.

Ultimately my husband quipped, "Get ready for a tsumani!" since it reminded him of earthquakes. I felt kinda the same way. Then we forgot about it as the next section of quickwater came up and required our attention.

At the time of the noise, we were on one of the "rest" sections of the river, where the surface is still lively but you don't have to maneuver, can just float along side by side and talk or gaze around.

At end of day, when we returned to the outfitter's shop (where they provide shuttle service for paddlers), the owner greeted us at the door with "Did you hear the earthquake?" Perhaps she said, "Did you hear about the earthquake" -- unclear in the excited babble among us that followed. For all the rest of the day we looked up information about it online, talked about it with everyone, trying to understand how something so far away could have been audible.

We did not take a time note of when we heard the noise, but in reconstructing the incident realized it was near the time of the reported quake in Virginia. Could we have heard an air release through an existing fissure? An earth burp?

That's my guess. There's a phenomenon in Connecticut called the "Moodus noises" where the earth makes rumbling sounds and occasionally eerie ones in response to minor seismic activity. Since the eastern seaboard, especially the Appalachian chain, is networked with small, constantly busy movement at the micro level, it seems credible to me that we could have heard the quake as its tremors zipped all the way to Quebec.

At least, it's the only explanation that fits the nature and approximate timing of the noise.

The closest similar experience was two years ago, when a high-altitude beaver dam gave way after big rains and dumped a gazillion gallons of water down 600 feet, to carve a new canyon in the mountainside and wipe out the main road in our area. We live perhaps 2-3 miles away as the crow flies, and at the same time the deluge occurred (unbenownst to us), we suddenly heard a strange, not-quite-thunder roar out of a perfectly clear sky that lasted too many seconds. Turns out it was the sound of many tons of rock, water, and broken trees hurtling down the other side of the hill.

A bit creepy, on one hand, but fascinating and exciting, on the other.

A berry good year

2011-08-21T06:47:00.004-04:00

Why some garden crops come in well and others don’t remains a mystery to me. Twelve years into gardening now, I feel that I’ve learned nothing, since every year is completely different. The obvious factors are varieties planted and a season’s worth of weather. Aside from that, it’s the same routine in the same ground year after year, with crapshoot results.

This year started with yet another cold, wet spring, but apparently which days that combo hits makes a huge difference. One year, it interfered with pollination so the wild mast crop (nuts and berries) was a disaster, which was reflected in our domestic berry patch. Another year, there was a shortage of bees. This year, the mushy start must have given plants what they needed, especially since hot dry weather soon followed—so dry, I used up both rain barrels in April just from watering the newly planted annuals and vegetables. Usually that doesn’t happen until August.

For the rest of the season, we had more hot and dry than wet, with rain coming just in the nick of time to keep the garden watered. And boy, did it grow! Weak and stunted veggy transplants turned into lush producers. I expect too many tomatoes this year, after a successive years of losing them to disease, pests, and wrong variety/wrong soil mixtures. But the award winner was the berry patch, which produced so extravagantly, we had to buy a stand-alone freezer to accommodate the abundance.

We got a good load of strawberries, too, and blueberries are still coming, though I’ve dropped the ball in getting them picked. This year we focused on keeping pace with the raspberries, and for once caught the entire crop. Briefly, we considered selling the extra, but after doing the math decided not to. The extra cash we might earn would be canceled by purchasing containers suitable for transporting and selling them to the public (we don’t have road frontage so can’t set up a little farmstand), plus fuel for getting back and forth to farmers markets, and paying for vendor space therein. This equation doesn’t factor in our time: 1-2 hours per person per day for 3-4 weeks. As well, it’s one thing to have 30 pounds of berries; it’s another to salvage 10-15 pounds of perfect ones to present to the world, and keeping them undamaged during handling.

That calculating exercise gave me an idea of what farmers must go through, year in and year out, to stay afloat. It also highlighted the different meanings of “assets.” Here we are, afloat in food, for which we spend more than we save in order to grow, and must spend much more in order to generate income from it. What’s wrong with that picture?

What’s right for us is that the rapsberries and blueberries are free. The bushes were planted decades ago by some previous homeowner and thrived from neglect. There’s also an apple tree, normally a scraggly remnant, but this year because of the just-right conditions it set fruit so heavily that I now have an apple problem, because after fruiting things turned so dry that it’s been shedding apples since May, several dozen a day, to the point of making the ground hazardous to walk across. So far I have picked up two wheelbarrows’ worth of apples to compost and a bushel’s worth of keepers. Guess it’s time to learn how to make applesauce, or to bake a slew of apple pies.

At least we now have a freezer to store the extra in, and will be enjoying fresh-grown, pesticide-free fruit all year.

Backyard butchery

2011-07-06T08:45:00.009-04:00

Every time I mow the lawn, I feel like a mass murderer. Because we don't do the poison thing to create a greensward as perfect as a golf course, our lawn is chock-full of plants other than grass, many of which bloom -- and many of which I recognize as traditional edible and medicinal wildflowers. All of which feed bees, butterflies, and bugs, if not ourselves, and give shelter to snakes and toads.

For reasons I don't understand, most of those critters don't hear or feel the racket of the approaching mower and fail to get out of the way before it ravages through. I avoid anything I see but am often too late. It breaks my heart and pounds my environmental conscience every time.

You'd think that if I had an environmental conscience I either wouldn't mow at all or would use something besides fossil-fuel-consuming, air-polluting power mowers (one lawn tractor, one walk-behind). But country living has its own rules, and we live in a continual thrust and parry with nature that nobody wins. At best, we maintain an armed truce.

"Lawn" at our place means 2+ acres of open or oddly configured space surrounding a large house with four entrances and three driveways that must be kept open; two outbuildings, three gardens, massive woodpiles, parts vehicles, and materials storage that all must remain accessible by foot or vehicle. It's not the sort of space you putter through with a hand pushmower. (Believe me, I tried!)

Sure, we could wade around up to our armpits in growth and become tick magnets and be pestered intolerably by mosquitoes and biting flies. The moat of lawn keeps them to manageable levels in our living area, and also constrains predators: the cats can't ambush the birds from cover, and neither can the the foxes, coyotes, and fishers ambush the cats.

Then there's the neighborhood factor. Though nowhere near as bad here as in suburban areas, social or zoning pressure escalates when you leave the visible portion of your homestead in scruffy shape. This may change over time but remains an issue, because ungroomed yards make one's place look unoccupied or impoverished or just low-class. Most of us don't want to give that impression to the world.

We compromise by leaving lots of edges, and beyond the utility part of the property let everything run wild. This location backs up to other large parcels so a wildlife corridor remains, including diverse habitat for mammals, birds, and insects. So we feel free to maintain our piece of habitat within it.

When the day comes that disposable income allows replacing the mowers with more energy-efficient or alternative models, using "green" lubricants, and the like, we'll switch to less environmentally harsh tools. Until then, we mow high, not often enough, and cut interesting swaths around stands of wildflowers as they spring up -- and hit the brakes when we see small critters in the grass.

Pagan holiday

2011-06-22T06:55:00.001-04:00

It saddens me that the old nature-based holidays have been replaced by institutional ones, at least in this country in this era. I would much rather celebrate the seasons than gods or anniversaries of people and events, because those seasons are intensely real and current, whereas those people and events are long past or, in the case of gods, debatable.

Four holidays exist on my personal calendar: two solstices and two equinoxes, which divide the year into birth, growth, maturity, and decline -- just like life. This cycle is universal, unlike institutional holidays. The important people, gods, and events in, say, China, have nothing to do with same in the United States. How can we ever hope for universal peace if we have nothing in common to celebrate?

Regardless, right now is the three-day window that comprises my personal high holy day, the summer solstice. Fifteen-and-a-half official hours of daylight at this location; unofficially, more like 17 hours -- 4:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. -- if you count being able to see while outdoors. I’ve often been tempted to move farther north to enjoy the spectacularly long days that go with higher latitudes; however, those are balanced by spectacularly long nights, so I remain in place. For someone who measures hours of light and darkness all year long, it would be the wrong plan to seek out more darkness!

Lacking the ancient rituals that went with pagan holidays, I don’t do anything specific for this one. It would be nice to have a big bonfire or a bacchanal or some sort of celebration with fellow light-worshipers. There aren’t too many around here, so I satisfy myself by just being as awake and aware as possible, spending as much time outdoors or looking out the windows as possible, and startling people by wishing them Happy Solstice. It won’t come around for another year; meanwhile, we begin the long slide back toward 9 hours of daylight.

The decrease will become noticeable by August. The plants seem to know this, timing their birth, growth, maturity, and decline around the equinoxes and solstices. It wasn’t until we moved to Vermont that I caught a real sense solstice-as-climax. Garden perennials that grow in my home turf of Connecticut break out 1-3 weeks later here but have caught up by this date in a spurt that makes the air crackle with energy, as if the solstice is the target they all share. Up north, it’s probably so accelerated that you can see the growth if you sit still and watch. Here, you notice it the next morning, when something you observed 24 hours ago is suddenly 2 inches taller.

Then there are the birds, the sky, the colors, the position of sun and moon, and all the different indicators of the season. This year we’ve been fortunate in having good weather concurrent with the holiday, making it doubly special. I’ve been making sure to be up at 4:30 and not in bed before 9:30 so I can enjoy every minute of it!

Shut the heck up, will ya?

2011-06-02T18:13:00.013-04:00

Yellow-bellied sapsuckers normally summer in our region, though we don't get them in the yard every year. Usually they will blow in like a brass band (belying their quiet and retiring description in the field guides), well after the other migratory birds have settled in for the season; then disappear. Occasionally we'll see holes they leave behind, drilled precisely into a live tree trunk in parallel rows, from whence they get sap.

This year, the sapsuckers arrived earlier than usual, but they sneaked in instead of announcing themselves, blending in with our year-round fleet of downy and hairy woodpeckers. For the past week, however, two males have been disputing territory, first by chasing each other around and around tree trunks or through the canopy, chattering and shrieking, then by staging a hammering competition on our metal roof.

One of them figured out that the roof over the open shed attached to the house outside the kitchen gives reverberates excellently (which we learned years ago from falling pinecones). The other one -- or is it the same one switching off? -- likes a panel on the diagonally opposite corner, right outside the bedroom. He starts there between 4:45 and 5:15 a.m.

Yikes! That wakes you up with a jolt with no hope of returning to sleep. Good thing we normally get up early!

The hammering goes on at intervals all day like spurts from a machine gun against a hollow metal target, so loud it drowns out conversation anywhere near. It was a hot week so we had the windows open, and while working could hear his claws screeching down the metal like fingernails on the blackboard as gravity interrupted his show. It was starting to get reeeeeeeally annoying -- then, abruptly, the contest was over and the birds vanished. I'm hoping he/they found a mate and they're off making baby sapsuckers.

Meanwhile, our normal backyard percussionist, the ruffed grouse, hasn't been seen nor heard from this year. He used to sit on the rock wall bounding the back yard in plain sight and drum away with his wings. (My spouse used to think it was somebody in the area unable to get a lawn mower started who refused to give up.) This went on every spring for 12 of our 13 years here. This year I heard it faintly in the distance once at the beginning of the season, and flushed a grouse from the roadside bushes a few weeks later when taking a walk, but nothing else.

Why the change?

We'll never know, just as we'll never know why the sapsucker chose this year to beat his head against our roof, or why a robin attacked his reflection in the living room window for weeks, 2 or 3 successive years, then went away.

Things should be getting quiet soon as all the seasonal guests hunker down to brood eggs and raise fledglings. Then it will get busy again when an assortment of half-finished birds emerges to try out their wings and their voices before the season turns again.

Book review: Whole Earth Discipline

2011-05-26T20:42:00.002-04:00

Outside, the yard and garden are burgeoning. Inside, reading and writing go on. I just read a book about the planet that thrilled me -- Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, by Stewart Brand -- and reviewed it on the New York Journal of Books. Here is the link:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/review/whole-earth-discipline-ecopragmatist-manifesto

Book review: Vegetable Gardening in the North

2011-05-03T18:53:00.002-04:00

At last—a gardening book germane to my reality!

And just in time for planting season here in the Northeast USA. Author Doug Green hails from Canada, our climatic neighbor, and presents in one concise e-book everything northerners need to know about growing vegetables. I read the book in one sitting and couldn’t wait to get started. But, true to our location, the weather disagreed with the calendar, so all I could do was prepare.

Doug maintains the popular Doug Green’s Garden website, newsletter, and blog (www.douggreensgarden.com), and publishes a steady stream of articles and e-books. Like most gardening gurus, he espouses certain horticultural techniques; but unlike most gurus, he also has a “whatever works” philosophy that encourages experimentation and enjoyment. In fact, his only two rules are (1) gardening is supposed to be fun and (2) it isn’t rocket science.

The feature I most appreciate in the book is his Rules of Thumb. I’m an unscientific gardener, and extremely lazy, so I look for basics and sloppily follow them. Doug provides useful, reliable guidelines that allow individual approaches while still leading to good results. He’s also one of the few pros who share my attitude about Zone Maps, which so many take as gospel, and which for so many years led me to planting the wrong things at the wrong times and thinking that gardening really is rocket science.

“A zone map is a guideline,” says Doug. “It isn’t a ‘rule’ to be carved in stone. That pretty much sums it up. These areas are more relevant to growing perennials and woody plants than they are to growing vegetables. . . . The important thing to understand is that the colder your zone (the lower your number), the shorter your growing season”—followed by information I’ve been seeking for 13 years: “For every zone colder than 4, wait a week [for planting]. For every zone warmer than 5, advance the date by a week.”

Thank you!

Doug also understands and addresses the ultimate gardening bugbear: microclimates. “Gardeners have more micro-zones than we have politicians,” he remarks, tongue in cheek, then provides tips on how to maximize microclimates to your (and the plants’) benefit.

The book emphasizes common sense and adaptability, general in the first half and specific in the second, with useful details about cultivating a broad range of vegetables. He writes it all in a friendly, shoot-from-the-hip voice that covers all bases without drowning you in data. Again, this is the right style for me, who just wants a few reliable guidelines to follow, plus a fingertip resource when I need particulars about my vegetables of choice.

Vegetable Gardening in the North includes tricks for dealing with insect and animal pests, as well as a straightforward glossary. In sum, I can throw away the library of gardening books I’ve amassed (and given up on), and just refer to this one for the rest of my northern life.

Sounds of spring

2011-04-26T07:38:00.006-04:00

The transition from winter to spring around here is a sputtering business -- a few steps forward, a few steps back, with a few steps sideways thrown in for good measure. You know spring has truly arrived, however, when suddenly the world gets loud.

Especially at dawn and dusk, opening the door presents a wall of sound. Peepers trilling at the ponds, accompanied by quacking frogs. (Yes, it's a quacking sound -- I keep thinking they're a flock of distant ducks.) The mallard ducks arrive with a splash and announce themselves with a real quacking, almost a honking, which in fact is made by Canada geese flying overhead. Wood ducks make a little stifled scream.

Meanwhile, robins are singing, sparrows are chittering, chickadees are dee-deeing and peeping, nuthatches are beeping, woodpeckers are drumming. The woodcock first peents in the underbrush then hurls himself into the air for a whistling spiral in hopes of attracting a mate.

Phoebes call their own name in a raspy voice while tree swallows squabble. Mourning doves emit their haunting cry, seeming almost owl-like until you hear the barred and great horned owls hoot in measured patterns. Crows caw, ravens squawk, hawks kree, blue jays blare. And always, underneath it all, the water roars.

It's a muffled roar of the hills emptying themselves of almost daily rain and the last of winter's snow, galloping down through well-established channels and into full ponds and rivers. Eventually these channels dry out, refilling briefly after summer downpours. We're a long way from that still, though the promise of the next season lies in the first thunderstorms flaring and booming during the night.

It's a happy cacaphony I look forward to all year long.

Taking down the wreath

2011-04-12T19:28:00.005-04:00

When it happens, it happens fast -- one day to the next, the season changes. The harbingers that have been trickling in one at a time suddenly achieve critical mass, so that I draw up short and realize: The Season Has Turned. Today, it is spring. HOORAY!

I used to define spring as when the grass turns green and flowers bloom. After more than a decade in Vermont, however, I consider spring a fleeting transition between winter and summer. "Winter's back is broken," my elders used to say, which runs through my mind when the sun becomes strong enough to vaporize the snow and rot the ice, even if the air temperature stays below freezing. But more often and for longer intervals, the temp stays above 32. Dry stream beds on the hillsides start to gurgle, then flood, and the rivers below begin to gallop. The first migratory birds arrive: robins, red-winged blackbirds, the woodcock, the fox sparrow. And the first bulbs protrude through the first patches soil.

Up north (in the real north -- Alaska, Yukon, etc., not here in the middle north) they call it "breakup" -- a term used to describe the ice letting go, and people going a little crazy. Here it's similar though less dramatic, and it constitutes a few weeks of messy change. Once it gets underway, I know the time has come to take down my Christmas wreath.

The wreath goes up in November, when the leaves have fallen and the snow begins -- and Holiday Season consumes consumers. Some of us display our wreaths for the entire winter, seeing them more as an icon for the cold season than the holidays. I was unaware that this might be a regional custom until a relative visiting from the southwest asked why my wreath was still up in February. She had noticed on her way here that many homes in the area still sported holiday decorations. I had failed to observe this, feeling that it was a perfectly normal practice and as much a part of the scenery as snow and trees.

I keep my holiday wreath up for the winter because, well, why not? It's the only splashy color in a world of black, white, and neutrals; and winter includes most of the major holidays, of which Christmas is the biggy. Ergo, a Christmas wreath seems the perfect symbol for the whole season. Only when I know for sure that the season has changed do I take it down.

Then it becomes a spring-summer-fall wreath, for I hang it around the fence post near the garden until next year's wreath comes down to replace it. The balsam circle browns as the rest of the world greens, reminding us of the never-ending cycle.

The archaeology of snow

2011-03-18T18:46:00.012-04:00

When the land has been covered by deep snow for one-third of the year, you start to forget what lies underneath. Reminders emerge during this transition season, when winter begins decaying under the strong sun that holds temperatures above freezing for a few hours, then a few days, finally evaporating the snowpack an inch -- or a foot -- at a time.

And so the discoveries begin. Oh my, there's the pile of lumber we ripped out of the house during remodeling, and didn't have time to de-nail and stack under cover before the snow came! And there's the jumbled stack of pine boughs, hastily picked up during a blowdown between big snow dumps #1 and #2.

Why, there's the corner of a big planter I shoved clear of the anticipated plow path, now protruding from the pushed pile that just days ago was impenetrable to shovels and ice picks, and long since immovable by the plow.

Oh wow, that lump is actually a parked car! And here's the layer of turds that accumulated when the turkey flock came through a month ago, along with a layer of saturated niger seed below the finch feeder. Over there, summer tires we didn't get stowed in time after rushing to mount snow tires on the cars.

Around the countryside, white depressions are turning milky blue as softening ice defines ponds, and runoff channels are carving through to the snow surface, churning and brown and filling the air with damp noise.

Now, and for days or weeks onward, snow-and-ice underfoot changes to ice-and-mud and back again, making for challenging walking and sometimes driving. The infamous "mud season" turns frost-heaved roads into quagmires that, instead of busting vehicle suspensions, suck vehicles down to their belly pans to the point they can't move.

Spring may be sloppy, but the excitement of rediscovery cancels out the hassle. We're all crossing our fingers against the chance of a late-season blizzard -- the biggest snow we've ever experienced occurred the last week of March some years ago, burying us in 5+ feet (on top of 3+ already on the ground) in 10 days.

And yet: When it finally went, it happened in less than a week. Through melting, sublimation, rain, and fog, winter's snow gives way in a wondrous hurry when Nature signals "It's time." Already, the bird population is changing, and I can almost hear bulbs stirring below ground. A week from now, the landscape is certain to look completely different. Will it be buried beneath a fresh white blanket? Or be a green-and-brown mess with shoots poking through?

Break-up

2011-03-06T16:49:00.000-05:00

This afternoon we saw the coolest thing. We live near a river that runs alongside the main road then turns 90 degrees to plunge down a steep gorge, over which hangs a suspension footbridge on the Appalachian Trail and Long Trail where they run jointly throughVermont.

In previous years, during spring thaw, we’ve visited this site and seen massive ice jumbles at the turn before the bridge, and wished we could see the power that creates it.

Today we finally did! Conditions have been right -- we’ve been scoping the river for days -- and this morning we went down to check progress. No, not ready yet, but break-up felt imminent. We decided to return after lunch.

At that point we donned our hardiest weather gear and went out into the rain. Temperatures were falling through the 30s. Crossing the bridge out of our village, we saw that we were too late: What had been an ice sheet with a channel snaking through it was now a bank-to-bank raging brown torrent. Damn!

Yet we continued the few miles to the gorge, thinking the spectacle would be worth it. En route, when the river came back into view, we noticed it was still iced over. Wait a minute -- we weren’t too late after all -- rather, we were running just ahead of the flood. Yes!

Within ten minutes, we were in position at the suspension bridge. Local people began arriving, saying their friends who live alongside the river had phoned. “It just passed the Ford dealership!” “It’s at the second Cuttingsville bridge!” And about 15 minutes later, a five-foot wall of ice-choked water roared into view and swung around the corner, packing the cove solid within seconds as it decimated the ice before us then raced under the bridge, filling the gorge to river height. The roar was so loud, punctuated by clunks, cracks, and rumbles, that we had to shout to hear each other standing shoulder to shoulder.

It reminded me of pyroclastic flows from volcanoes, and made us understand how people can be overtaken by flash floods and mudslides. For long minutes after the wall swept through, the river hurled ice floes into the air and busted them apart against boulders. Trees tore by like matchsticks. Gradually the ice chunks became smaller, the water browner, and its level sank back to seasonal norm, leaving scars and ice packs against and above the banks. On the drive home, we saw floes up to the shoulder of the roadway.

From door to door we spent a chilly and soggy hour. Arrived home just as the precipitation turned to freezing rain. Hubby got pictures plus a mini-movie, so we can relive the excitement and share with friends and family. It was a wonderful, surprising way to spend a winter afternoon!

Winter blue

2011-02-20T08:23:00.001-05:00

Whenever I'm overtaken by the winter blues, I turn my attention to blue -- my favorite color, which appears in unique shades only during the winter and gives my heart a lift.

The most magically beautiful blue: Full moon on snow. This is like a bright, sunny day with an indigo filter over it, etching long, sharp shadows and crisp details into a blue-and-white world.

Its opposite: The day after a fresh snowfall. The sky, as my spouse calls it, is "severe clear," giving sheets of azure above sheets of dazzling white.

In between: Pastel tints of bluish lavender outlining the contours of the land beneath the snow and crossing it with shadows. Reflected above in cloud striations that promise more snow to come.

Then there's ice: Frozen waterfalls down escarpments, where groundwater is captured in the act of succumbing to gravity, its minerals glowing teal through silvery masses.

Local people harness the same flow into free-form ice sculptures by sticking a hose into a spring and letting its pressure spray the surrounding landscape. These accumulate into huge, sea-blue mounds that can last until May! I guess that's their way of dealing with winter blues.

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

Remember our feathered friends

2011-02-12T18:12:00.007-05:00

February is National Bird-Feeding Month, did you know? I'm happy to learn that this activity rates the attention of people who decide such things!

For me, every month is bird-feeding month. I invite wild birds into my yard for two reasons:

(1) I love having them around, easy to see from the window or while puttering in the yard. Also, my mom is an avid bird-watcher and enjoys the show when she visits. Birds are my neighbors; my companions; my entertainment; my reminder of what's going on out there in the natural world.

(2) Birds are also a gardener's friend, feasting on bugs that might otherwise feast on my vegetables. As well, they spread seeds around, resulting in delightful surprises.

A third reason, which I don't like to think about, is habitat destruction and climate change, which are making it harder for birds and other critters to survive. So I feel obligated to provide an additional food source for them.

Mostly, though, birds are part of the whole garden equation: soil, plants, bugs, birds, bees, butterflies, mammals, water, sun, and the eternal cycle of birth-growth-death. And this time of year, the tail end of a hard winter, food is particularly scarce for wild things. No matter where you live, there are birds that could use some extra seed or suet to help them along.

Here at (approx.) latitude 43N, longitude 72W, and altitude 1300 ft., our midwinter bird population comprises a dozen chickadees; one or two each of titmouse, red- and white-breasted nuthatch, and downy and hairy woodpeckers; the recently arrived red-bellied woodpecker; a family of crows and at least one pair of ravens; wild turkeys in male (5) and female (15) groups; intermittent mourning doves and ruffed grouse; around ten noisy blue jays; invisible but occasionally heard barred owls; and every few years (this is one of them), visiting flocks of redpolls. Most of these feathered friends await my arrival with freshly filled sunflower and thistle seed tubes, along with a brick of suet, every morning.

If you don't already feed the birds at your place, brighten up your February and start!

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

Snow diamonds

2011-01-16T11:31:00.007-05:00

With the exception of New Year's weekend, the temperature here has held below freezing for weeks and weeks, during which we've had multiple snow dumps adding up to 3+ feet. Most of that time has been overcast and often windy -- making, altogether, for a some serious winter.

It also makes for the best of winter, for two reasons.

First, the snow is powder, which is light to shovel and easy to plow (and a dream if you're a skier). One appreciates this after many winters spent scraping up the equivalent of wet cement, or skidding on ice as impenetrable as concrete.

Second, the snow remains crystalline, and that makes for breathtaking beauty when the sun -- and moon -- finally come out.

Two nights ago, the clouds parted to allow a half moon to bathe the white-robed landscape in silver gleam that thousands of snow bits caught and reflected like summer fireflies. The following morning, below cloudless blue, the sunrise caught more diamond points and lit the day with sparkle. When wind came up and lifted the powder, the very air glittered.

Conditions are right only a few days each winter, if at all. So it's hard to mind the season when it turns the world into a visual wonderland.

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

Here comes the sun

2011-01-08T08:12:00.003-05:00

A new year is born -- both on the calendar and in the natural world. The dates fall about ten days apart but announce the same change.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, and especially in the northerly climes, it's hard to think of birth in the middle of winter. But this is the point where gardens begin each year. As day length increases, plants and creatures begin to stir, or at least change their behavior in subtle ways. Under the ground, roots, corms, and bulbs are processing themselves for the upcoming growth season. Aboveground, birds change their songs -- for example, by New Year's Day I'd heard the chickadee's spring call for which it is named ("dee-deeee") -- and early breeders have started courtship. Meanwhile, the seed catalogues are rolling in, allowing humans to start planning this year's garden.

I am a daylight junkie, so I count the returning minutes of light after the solstice. It creeps in asymmetrically: for a week or two, daybreak comes later while sunset seems to stay the same. But then we start to see more light on both ends of the day, and its pace of return accelerates.

On the official winter solstice, we had 8 hours and 51 minutes of daylight. Since then, we've gained 10+ minutes. So few, yet already perceptible at dawn and dusk. This starts and ends each day with joy, and helps keep my chin up during the three months of cold, snow, and ice still to come.

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

Silent night

2010-12-22T05:53:00.000-05:00

Two aspects of living in the rural north give special poignancy to the winter holidays.

(1) Silence.
On the rare occasions when we have big snow -- just snow, no wind or sleet or any other variations of winter storm -- the world is embraced in a white velvet silence. It's a true silence, an utter silence; the only sounds come from your own clothes when you move. The surface of the world is smoothed into innocent beauty while life sleeps beneath. We get the silence for a few minutes or hours a year, maybe once every several years; two years ago, it came as a gift on the winter solstice.

(2) Darkness.
No streetlights. No neighbor's porch lights. Mostly, no headlights except your own, winding along the roads back from town. Then, suddenly, a star of Bethlehem floating in the blackness! Oh, it's somebody's holiday lights on a barn across the valley. Around a curve, a perfect Christmas tree illuminated in red, green, and white. Or perhaps a blue one. Then darkness. Around another bend, a deciduous tree's bare branches outlined in gold. Another mile of darkness, until the world leaps into blinding, blinking glow from an extravaganza of Santas and reindeers and trees and stars and snowmen and sleighs, all packed into somebody's tiny yard and so fully lit that you can almost hear the electric meter spinning. Then, back into darkness -- the opposite of snowfall, a rich, deep, inky blue that showcases every star in the heavens.

With this combination, it's hard to resist singing, "Silent night, holy night / All is calm, all is bright . . ."

Happy holidays!

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

Mammals R Us

2010-12-09T20:10:00.000-05:00

This time of year, I become acutely conscious of being a diurnal mammal. As winter descends, so do my energy and curiosity, so that all I want to do is eat large amounts of fatty foods and sleep. My cats do basically that, and I envy them the luxury. The rest of the year, they want to be outside all the time; now, they only bestir themselves for a brief change of scenery or a trip to the outdoor restroom. I content myself with looking out the windows and using indoor plumbing.

The happiest moment of every day is when I crawl beneath the electric blanket. The unhappiest moment of every day is when I wake up in the morning and it's still dark.

Some lucky critters get to bury themselves in the mud or a den, or migrate, or in other ways escape the season. The unlucky ones are out still there rooting desperately for food and shelter. I often wonder how our forebears endured life without houses and furnaces and electric blankets and supermarket-bought food stored in refrigerators, with electric lights and entertainment to beat back the darkness while wearing warm, comfy clothes and driving environmentally sealed cars. How brutal life must have been in earlier ages! How grateful I am to never know!

Just as often, I think about the advantage of this climate. Sure, winter is a drag, but it brings important pluses. In our neck of the woods, we don't have to worry about region-demolishing catastrophes such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, mudslides, and wildfires. I'll gladly take a few months of winter for all my life to avoid experiencing any one of those, even once! Likewise, having 3-4 months of deep freeze manages insect pests in a way that spares us from plagues in garden and body, as can happen in warmer regions.

So I'll resist that primeval urge to hibernate and hang on through another winter. Spring, like a rainbow after a storm, arrives at the end. Which is worth many months of cold and darkness.

The annual giving of thanks

2010-11-24T19:17:00.000-05:00

Every year at this time, people across America ritually gather to give thanks for what they have. I try to do the same thing mentally every day, counting my blessings -- difficult to do when times are tough, but always worth the effort because it revives appreciation of life and all that is good therein.

My personal thanksgiving ritual occurs at a different time of year. I wrote about it in the introduction to my book, Open Your Heart with Gardens:

"Each year, it happens afresh:

"After months of brown and gray and white . . . cold and hard and dark . . . the day comes when I step outside and behold a tip of green protruding from the ground.

"The first daffodil!

"The sight of it drops me to my knees, mentally chanting, Thankyouthankyouthankyou! Then I leap up into The Happy Dance because there at my feet lies proof that the world has kept turning, the invisible forces of the universe have kept churning, and Mother Nature has again fulfilled her promise despite everything I doubted and feared.

"Thankyouthankyouthankyou!"

No daffodils now, but the promise of rebirth associated with them is what I most give thanks for as the year draws down and cold and darkness pervade.

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

Stick season

2010-11-05T09:07:00.000-04:00

Here in the hilly section of Vermont, there are a lot of jokes (and complaints) about the weather. They're all true, by the way. It's the most weather-dominant place I've ever lived, which doesn't help with gardening!

Nevertheless, despite my own complaints, I like the weather here. It's dramatic and primal -- an Event, almost every day. And very rich with color. I've taken to determining seasons by color, since the calendar doesn't seem to have anything to do with it. Right now, rolling into November, we've entered Stick Season.

Stick Season is primarily brown and gray. With all the leaves down (except coppery beech and rusty oak), the landscape is a mass of brown and gray vertical lines overlaying brown and gray undulations. The skies are myriad shades of gray, usually roiling, reflected back by gunmetal gray waters. This monotony is punctuated by the aptly named evergreens, and given contrast by beige and mustard grasses, plus the surprising gold of larches and even more surprising shafts of golden sunbeams slanting through holes in the gray clouds.

In all, starkly beautiful. Soon to be blanketed with white. But it's nice to see the bones of the land for a little while, and to glimpse homes and other features normally masked by dense foliage. We get Stick Season in reverse during April, when the white blanket retreats and reveals the world naked before greens reemerge to clothe it.

So Stick Season is brown and gray. Winter is white, blue, and lavender. Not-Winter is green with fiesta-colored accents. Foliage Season is just the party colors. Some folks add Mud Season to this roster, but I lump that under Stick Season. The spring and fall are always wet and yucky underfoot, and in our immediate area we don't get the dissolving, rutted roads that suck vehicles in up to their floor pans (for which Mud Season is named), so I'll stick with my nomenclature.

The only problem is, Winter is 5 months long, Not-Winter is 4, Stick Season is 3, and Foliage Season less than 1. According to the calendar, each season is supposed to be 3 months long. Hah!

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

The cycle continues

2010-10-14T19:55:00.000-04:00

Since it snowed the other day, I guess that means gardening season is over!

Starting last spring, each season has kicked in two weeks early. Summer was strange this year, perhaps because the weather was, well, summery! Sunny, hot, dry for long periods, unlike our cool and often too-wet norm. The pond got so low we could almost walk across it, and we had to ration water from the well. (Not any longer: In the past 3 weeks, we've had 14 inches of rain!)

Thanks to rain barrels, I always had enough water for the veggie garden. It performed terrifically for a change, this year giving what I've aspired to for a decade: a crop of huge, bug-free, sweet red bell peppers. Low yield but great fruits. Similar results with tomatoes, but another plague set upon them by August so I lost some at the end. As well, I planted different varieties in different locations and got correspondingly different yields and quality. Best performers grew in the lasagna garden. So far, all my vegetables have done best in that location, save for carrots, which like a deeper, more uniform bed.

I tried a new variety of cucumber and got many salads worth of big ones. Also tried a single plant of brussels sprouts, which grew straight and tall and produced abundant heads. It's still going despite a week of frost and a nor'easter.

Broccoli, always a challenge, was mixed: the Goliath variety I cultivated under bug screen indeed was gigantic, both plants and heads. The Premium Crop, in assorted planters, was smaller and didn't deliver much in the way of side shoots after the main head was cut. Oh well. Try again next year. Note that insect-barrier fabric is worth the trouble -- no green worms anywhere on the plants.

We had a great crop of strawberries and raspberries, but almost no blueberries. Why? Who the heck knows. Other dud crops were zucchini and morning glories. The first, I think, resulted from the wrong variety in the wrong soil, inadequately fed and watered; the second, I have no idea. I gave those morning glories everything they are supposed to like, yet only 7 seeds from an entire pack germinated, and of those, only 3 produced blossoms, and the vines never grew more than 4 inches high. Huh?

Just another gardening mystery. I find every season completely different; and although I learn a lot every time, I'm stumped in revolving areas year after year. Despite all the variables, I always get food and flowers. They just might not grow or produce the way they're supposed to!

Already I'm planning next year's layout. The joy of gardening is how it keeps you looking forward with new ideas and hope.

Carolyn Haley

Books at: http://carolynhaley.wordpress.com
Editing business at: www.documania.us

"Nature abhors a vacuum"

2010-09-23T15:57:00.001-04:00

This expression is attributed to Aristotle, so we know how long people have been observing zealous plant growth.

I experienced it intensely the other day, while clearing out scrub around fresh pine stumps. Back in April we had four 100-foot giants removed so they wouldn't guillotine the house when they came down in a high wind. Two of them were splitting, all were intertwined, and they stood about 15 feet from the house and were leaning in that direction.

The stumps remain in an area approx. 15x15 square composed of gritty sand that's been saturated with pine needles and fully shadowed for five decades. Scarcely anything ever grew below them -- until the ground was suddenly naked and in full sun.

Then, in four months, the most concentrated, diverse patch of wildflowers, vines, trees, and shrubs I've ever seen erupted. They occupied every square inch of the exposed wasteland, including dirt pockets collected in the stumps' bark. I recognized about two dozen by name and another dozen or two by sight; yet another dozen or more I'd never seen before, which is interesting because I study wildflowers and have laid eyes on most of what grows in the area.

Even more interesting, there were no baby pines. But there were baby ash and maple, sumac and poplar, even something that looked like apple; goldenrod and pigweed, johnny-jump-ups and Virginia creeper, wood aster, hawkweed, a metastasizing mint, a tangled mat of bedstraw, two particularly evil grasses as well as generic lawn grass, brambles, mullein, wild morning glories, assorted clovers and sorrels, violets, burdock, a clump of Siberian iris left over from a previous owner's garden, plus two sunflowers -- presumably contributed by birds.

I should have taken the time to look up each species in my field guide, but I became obsessed with finishing the clear-out by sundown. The resulting pile is so big I need the tractor bucket to remove it from the yard. I'm impressed equally by the volume and the diversity of this growth, as well as how fast and thoroughly it came. Makes garden weeds look wimpy!

We won't be getting the stumps dug out before winter, so I can count on having to repeat the exercise next year. After all, I just re-created the vacuum that Nature can't help herself from filling!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Perfection

2010-08-23T17:35:00.000-04:00

Yeah, we all know . . . nothing in life is perfect.

Well, I beg to differ. Late last week we had an Absolutely Perfect Day.

The sky was a cloudless, brilliant blue. The air was ideally comfortable for bare arms and legs and feet, with a light breeze air-conditioning your skin in the event you moved around enough to perspire. No matter what you did, you were comfortable.

And everywhere you looked, the scenery was beautiful. Lawns and trees still vivid summertime green, with color tinges creeping in to signal the pending change of season. But it's not here yet -- wildflowers and garden beds were still in full bloom, with vegetables and fruits adding bright dots of color between the foliage.

Birds and butterflies still darted about in their own color show before packing up for migration. Crickets and cicadas added music to the air.

It was a perfect day for doing anything outdoors, from hiking and boating to sitting on the porch with a book. If you couldn't get outside, it was a perfect day to look out the window, and open all the windows wide, and curtains, too, to let all the air and color and light flow through.

In our complicated and inconsistent world, it's good to know that Mother Nature can proffer up a perfect day now and then. And a joy to be alive when it happens.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

The green wave

2010-07-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

Here it comes!

Peak summer, and the garden runneth over. This time every year I regret planting more than one of a given vegetable on a given day back in spring. Now I have too many snow peas, too many broccoli heads; in a few weeks will have too many beans; and by the end of summer will have too many tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. (I've never had enough red peppers, never mind too many!) At least with lettuce I've managed to stagger the crop.

As well, raspberry and blueberry bushes that came with the house are rolling into ripeness simultaneously. Hubby made it worse by starting a strawberry patch. We can't eat them all before they spoil and have run out of room in our freezer. How lovely to have enough to give away!

Meanwhile, the grass grows faster than we can cut it, the weeds regrow as fast as we can pluck them out, and certain perennials spread faster than they can be divided and transplanted. It happens that paying work peaks this time of year, so available time for picking and processing shrinks while everything expands.

Cruel irony that the best season is the shortest and most packed with demands and excitement. No wonder we always shake our heads in the fall and wonder where summer went!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

The best week

2010-06-21T19:08:00.001-04:00

This is it! The week we spend all year waiting for. The week embracing the summer solstice. The longest days of the year -- 15 and a half hours of official daylight, an hour more than that if you count time of light in the sky, when you can still see outside -- and the most glorious weather, the most exuberant blooming of flowers, the peak of birds and critters making babies -- the best time of the northerly year.

It passes so quickly . . . so this week demands that we look and listen and feel and appreciate and know joy. Then remember it all during the darker and colder majority of the year, until it comes around again.

So comforting to know that it will come around again!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Tis the season

2010-06-04T11:41:00.001-04:00

Memorial Day is the target date for all gardeners in these parts to put in their vegetables. This year we were blessed with terrific weather for the week before and after, broken only by brief passages of rain to water it all in and refill the rain barrels. So, no problem meeting the deadline, despite having an injured foot.

As part of the annual planting marathon, I now rig up plant protectors; for instance, wire cages covered with lightweight insect barrier fabric over all the broccoli. An experiment with this setup last year worked, sparing half my crop from the little green worms that crawl out of the heads when you're preparing the harvest. This year I'm covering all the broccoli and hoping for a repeat performance.

Liking the barrier idea, I placed hardware cloth (metal mesh) over the green bean seeds so birds won't pick off the hulls when they rise to the surface ahead of the sprouts, and critters won't dig them up.

Then I put Wall-o-Waters around tomatoes and cucumbers. These gizmos, which are essentially solar teepees, are made by different manufacturers in different sizes and colors, all in a soft, durable plastic formed of tubes you fill with water. They protect tender seedlings from chill and wind, and can be pulled open or pinched shut as conditions warrant. In theory, they can extend the growing season by several weeks. I haven't used them long enough to prove this yet, but initial results are encouraging.

I always place a yogurt or butter tub, or similar plastic cup with the bottom cut out, around the base of all transplants. Originally I did this upon advice to discourage tomato hornworms; it seems to work against other undesirables as well, plus makes a contained area that holds water.

In response to last year's slug infestation, I purchased some Sluggo -- granules of iron phosphate that are toxic to slugs but, again theoretically, safe for pets and people. I'm not real sure about that, so I only sprinkled it in the areas under cover, so the birds won't pick it up and cats won't get it between their toes. I'm also leaving the bed unmulched, to make a dry and crusty surface for the slugs to suffer on while crossing, instead providing a moist haven for them to thrive in. This creates a lot of splash-up against the undersides of leaves, which can create disease conditions especially for tomatoes, so for them I put down fabric mulch. We'll see if that helps.

Where possible, I place some sort of frame around my plants at the beginning and end of season, to which I can attach plastic or fabric for frost protection. It can come as late as June 15 and as early as September 15, and it's so much easier to have frames already in place when you have to fling covers over everything. Someday I'll have cold frames and hoop houses, but until then I wing it with found materials, tie-wraps and clothespins, and a few reusable accessories.

Over time, even such simple protectors have proven their value in this chilly, erratic climate.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

The grass is always greener...

2010-05-16T07:15:00.000-04:00

"I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn."
--William Henry Hudson, author and naturalist (1841-1922)

I agree!

It's lawn-mowing season again, and this time every year I rue the fact we have 2+ acres of lawn to manage. All we have to do is mow; not for us the fertilizing and feeding and obsessive grooming that many homeowners undertake in order to achieve perfect greenswards. We think grass grows just fine by itself (especially where you don't want it!).

Simply mowing it is work and expense aplenty. It's also very un-"green" because we have to use oil and gasoline to beat back field and forest. I've considered letting parts of the yard go wild, but that invites biting creatures closer to the house. By keeping a moat of trimmed grass around us, we limit the mosquitoes, ticks, and blackflies in our main activity area, and remove hiding places for bird and pet predators. Plenty of wilderness remains for them to prowl in.

In May, grass grows so fast and lush that we need to mow twice weekly. Can't be done, though, owing to twice- or thrice-a-week rain. By the time things have dried out enough to rev up the tractor, we need machetes just to find it!

As the season advances, we end up with half a wildflower yard anyway. Islands of clover emerge; we mow around them to leave a banquet for the bees. Volunteer black-eyed Susans pop up; we mow around them because it's too callous to destroy their cheer. And so forth. Ultimately lawnmowing becomes a gymkhana, zooming and dodging around obstacles in summer sport.

Then, before you know it, the season has flashed by and it's time to stow the mower again for seven long months.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Out the window, revisited

2010-04-16T10:49:00.001-04:00

Little-known fact: Gardening can be hazardous to your health!

Some months ago, my mom stepped backward into her bucket of trimmings, went down hard, and cracked her hip. Some days ago, I stepped forward onto irregular lawn, went down hard, and severely sprained my foot. These mishaps deprived us for weeks of our favorite activities: gardening, walking, and birding.

Which renewed my awareness of why I live where I do, and why I've sacrificed so much to keep it.

We have windows. Lots and lots of them, all the way around the house. From any window I can see combinations of yardscape, fieldscape, woodscape, pondscape, gardenscape, skyscape, and mountainscape. So even if I'm stuck indoors, I can keep track of what's going on out there. And enjoy sunlight as well as starlight and moonlight, since we never bothered installing curtains.

Thanks to these windows, I can participate in the natural world even when disabled. City people surely feel the same about their views of bustling communities. Our neighbors happen to be furred, feathered, and leafed, but their communities still bustle, and I love to observe.

In fact, I spend way too much time looking out my windows, whether lame or fit!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Backyard ecology

2010-04-05T09:42:00.000-04:00

I love birds, and feed them year-round in sight of my windows.

I love cats, have four, and let them out year-round.

I live in the country where predators that eat birds and cats, and raid bird feeders, prowl the area year-round.

How to keep everybody alive and well?

First, I cleared the shrubs away from the front of the house. That eliminated places for the cats to hide and ambush feeding birds. I also hung trellis netting over the exterior of as many windows as I could get to, which prevents birds from flying into the glass. These two acts have almost entirely eliminated bird fatalities. And bringing in the feeders every evening has eliminated raids.

Second, we trained the cats to come in at night, though it remains difficult to keep them in during the crepuscular time (dawn and dusk), which is the true danger zone. Nevertheless, we haven't had an injury or disappearance in many years.

Third, we have a lot of stuff around the property -- vehicles, construction material piles, scrap piles, tools, and equipment -- which partially serve as territorial markers that repress predator traffic (while giving prey places to hide). It's not foolproof by any means; after all, I see fox and coyote prints sometimes quite close to the house during winter, and during the year the fishers passed through, they roamed wherever they pleased. I dread the day they return.

Nevertheless, we've done what we can do to minimize opportunity for critters to kill themselves and each other. This includes using no toxic substances in the garden or yard. The rest is up to fate or vigilance. In reward, we harbor many species of resident birds, the cats are healthy and happy, and our human selves get to enjoy the whole.

If only that balance extended to the rest of the world!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

My favorite sound

2010-03-18T20:51:00.000-04:00

No, not music. Or birdsong, or waves against the beach. My favorite sound is water rushing down the hill a few hundred feet from my house.

Here in the rocky, forested hills, channels have been carved by man and nature for capturing excess water. Some of these are steep and create a muted roar when full. I see and hear them every time it rains, but the noise stops shortly after the rain does. Usually the channels are silent during the winter, except for intermittent, short-term melts.

This time of year, however, these dry beds become gushing, galloping streams for days or even weeks as mountainloads of snow succumb to temperature and gravity. It’s kind of like a bathtub emptying: water goes down the drain and land emerges.

It happens suddenly -- one day I step out the door and hear the rushing. It continues during dry weather, which is how I know the season has turned. This year, this week, I started hearing it again. It’s also the week that the daffodils broke through the ground and migrating birds started returning. These are my favorite events of the year. And so that rushing water is my favorite sound.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Signs of spring

2010-03-06T19:14:00.000-05:00

As the calendar progresses toward the vernal equinox, our landscape remains buried under two feet of snow and ice. But signs of spring are everywhere.

* We can now see out the windows at suppertime.

* Seed consumption at the bird feeders has dropped significantly.

* The cats want to go outside again.

* Everybody in the household (human and quadruped) has started shedding.

* Maple sugaring has begun.

Unlike previous years at this time, the forecast is for a long stretch of sunny weather with moderate temps. I'm hoping we get lucky and just melt into spring without further drama.

But even if a classic March blizzard comes through, those other signs of spring make it clear that the season has turned and the worst is over. Hooray!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Editing Business: DocuMania (www.documania.us)

Wacky weather

2010-02-27T18:54:00.000-05:00

The big event this week was weather. It's been a big event all over the country (and the world) this year; our turn came with a bizarre and vigorous, multi-day storm that first dumped 2+ feet of snow, then 3 inches of rain, accompanied by big winds and followed by several days in a row of 1-3 inches of snow layered on daily, with a hiatus of sun, melting temps, and a gorgeous full moon squeezed in between.

For frosting on the cake, the first round included a stick storm -- big roof-denting pine limbs raining down on the house and yard. Thankfully, my spouse was on the ball and moved all the vehicles out of range before things got serious, sparing us a week on the phone making insurance claims. Luck took care of the rest. An impressive pile of thumpers fell around or between things, or just missed by inches. All we have to deal with this time is a very messy yard.

Less than a week ago I was standing in that yard feeling spring in the air and watching the ground start to emerge. But I've lived here long enough to know . . . it was only mid-February. Historically, this area gets the bulk of its snow in March. Way too soon to hope for deliverance. And, sure enough, Mother Nature proved me right.

Last year we didn't get the late snows. That's the exception, not the rule. Our worst snow, in fact, occurred the last week of March some years ago: 5 feet in 10 days, on top of 2-3 feet already on the ground. We snowshoed over cars without knowing they were there.

What's more amazing is how fast the snow disappears once the season decides to turn. And that day is coming soon. Only 4 weeks left until official Spring; within a week of that, daffodils will be poking through and the woodcock will arrive.

I can't wait!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Gardening with trepidation

2010-02-13T09:06:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year when the catalogues come out and garden plans are sketched and seeds get started. Normally my pulse rate rises as the promise of spring draws nigh.

This year, I'm feeling hesitant and a little wary. Increasingly erratic weather has made gardening more difficult, with less-satisfactory results, caused by too much or too little rain and plagues among the pollinators and insect eaters so that the pest equation is out of whack -- along with my yard's inherent shortage of sunlight and good soil.

Now I have to add plant protection devices, not only to extend the growing season, but also to help my vegetables survive the growing season itself! Such devices cost money, take time to assemble, and add more complication to an already hit-or-miss enterprise. The prospect inspires a great big sigh.

Of course, none of this will stop me. Like most gardeners, I can't bear the idea of not trying again. And again, and again . . .

Skipping a year -- or stopping altogether -- would upset my sense of life cycle and balance far more than any crop failures. Then there's the awe generated by the strength and creativity of plants themselves.

Short of catastrophic weather that strips away the entire surface (e.g., hurricanes, century floods, wildfires, and tornadoes), plants will survive anything. In the wettest years, the driest years, the pestilence years, the coldest years, a garden will always produce something. It will survive good-old-fashioned neglect, as well. I once rented an apartment in a farmhouse where nobody had gardened for decades. Yet asparagus still grew three feet tall in the front yard!

So I've got my seed order together and the garden plan drawn. I've started rummaging through scrap piles in the yard to find materials for making supports and frames for weather shields and bug screens. Recent home renovations have donated enough scrap copper to warrant trying that slug-deterrent trick I read about. Renovations have also opened up space in the living room (whose south end is floor-to-ceiling windows) to set up more experiments in indoor gardening.

Weather and pests be damned! I'm gonna have a garden no matter what Mother Nature throws our way.

(Now, what will I be saying about all this in September?)

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Counting chickadees

2010-01-28T11:44:00.000-05:00

Next time you need a change of pace on a wintry day, position yourself in view of a bird feeder containing sunflower seed and try to count chickadees.

Betcha can't!

I know, because I keep trying and fail. The way chickadees swoop back and forth to snatch a seed, the speed at which they do it, the multiple directions they come from at the same time, and the fact that they all look the same, combine to make a dizzying, zigzag, constantly changing pattern that forces you to look straight ahead, sideways, and out the corners of your eyes simultaneously in order to keep track of them.

It's frustratingly fun, because chickadees are about the cutest birds to flit across the planet. In wintertime, they hang out with all the other adorable gray-black-white birds -- titmice, nuthatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, juncos.

All of these spread out in summer, but during the winter they concentrate around our feeders. I watch them through the window or from outside, feet or inches from the feeders. The chickadees are so bold they don't mind my presence, and make cheeps and beeps in response to my refilling their tube.

Some people get the birds to feed from their hands, but I've never succeeded in doing that. Just the other day, though, I got one to perch on the cup of seed I held out and pick one from it while looking me in the eye. Someday I'd like to configure a hat to hold seed in the crown and sit outside with a book to see if they go for it. Maybe this spring . . .

Many weeks to go before that opportunity. In the meantime, I think there are 10 chickadees in residence this year.

Or is that 8? . . . 12? . . . 6?

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

The relativity of hardness

2010-01-14T12:26:00.001-05:00

When I was a suburban youngster, "hard work" meant applying yourself to school and chores, and following through on projects, and honoring the obligations of duty.

As an adult, "hard work" meant pretty much the same thing, extended into the employment arena.

It wasn't until spouse and I purchased a homestead in rural Vermont, and I undertook gardening and house-and-yard projects -- then, later, heating with wood -- that I learned a new meaning of "hard work." That's the kind that physically exhausts you into a heap and introduces minor injury into your life.

There's no value difference between these types of work and their degrees of difficulty. Hard work is hard work, in whatever form. But working in the physical realm has educated me in how other people live, and how our forebears lived, in away that all my school and office experience failed to do. It's become difficult to take things for granted, because I now know what's required to make them happen; and I deeply respect folks who labor for a living, because now I know how hard their lives can be.

Hard physical labor does have its rewards, in a sense of job-well-done, and increased strength, and sound sleep at night. You often see the fruits of your labors more quickly and directly than from intellectual endeavors. It's still just plain hard, though, and I can't say I love it. Nevertheless, it allows you to live economically, in that you don't have to pay people do everything, and you can get fit without having to buy time at a gym!

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Winter salad

2010-01-07T06:55:00.001-05:00

The other day in the supermarket, I stood griping about the poor quality of the vegetables I was selecting. Then my better self woke up and slapped me upside the head. It's the middle of winter, and there I was bemoaning imperfection in products that only grow here in summer, while surrounded by towers of fresh fruit and vegetables from all over the world!

Think of it. January. Two feet of snow on the ground. Daytime highs in the teens, below zero overnight. And I could still have salad. How wonderful is that?

Yes, I know about the evils of pesticides and industrialized agriculture. But this is the upside: fresh, whole foods year-round. There's room for improvement in how they are produced and transported, I won't argue about that. Meanwhile, I'll consume with gratitude all that farmers and orchardists make available for our nutrition and health.

While writing Open Your Heart with Gardens, I searched for simple ways that anyone could find pleasure and comfort from the living green world. Embarrassing to think I missed the obvious -- fruits and vegetables on the table 365 days a year! It takes little research to learn what our forebears had to endure between harvests. Think of them next time you peel an orange, stir a salad, slice bananas onto your cereal, or tumble berries into your yogurt.

In fact, next time you enter a grocery store, pause and appreciate the bounty. That will help make Thanksgiving a daily ritual instead of a once-a-year event.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

The true holiday

2009-12-21T07:46:00.000-05:00

For me, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s roll into one big holiday on the winter solistice, time of the shortest day and longest night, after which days start getting longer again. In other words, “here comes the sun”!

This occurs regardless of what religion you ascribe to or calendar you follow, as it’s a phenomenon driven by the Earth’s axial tilt. Almost all cultures celebrate the solstice in one form or another and have done so since the beginning of human time.

Solstice is my Thanksgiving, when I wallow in gratitude for being warm and safe and fed and loved while winter rolls up its sleeves and gets down to business—leaving many a creature cold, endangered, starving, and alone.

Solstice is my Christmas, when I celebrate the ultimate gift—the return of light—and our creator, the universe, which is utterly reliable, relentlessly beautiful, and infinitely wondrous.

Solstice is my New Year, when I toast with loved ones the rebirth of the natural cycle, and make resolutions for the next round of seasons.

So Happy Solstice, everyone! May the new year bring peace and prosperity around the world.

Carolyn Haley

Author: The Mobius Striptease (e-novel, Club Lighthouse Publishing)
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Winter finally arrives

2009-12-15T08:10:00.000-05:00

Apropos my most recent posting about a late-arriving winter, a friend and colleague has written a lovely piece about the first snow.

See http://northernwoodlands.org/editors_blog/article/first-snow/

A late winter

2009-12-05T19:53:00.000-05:00

Living in the Northeast at 43+ degrees N latitude and 1200+ feet altitude puts us square in the snow belt. By now we usually have a layer down atop frozen ground, but this year the season has arrived late.

We got our first dusting in October, which is pretty much normal; our first measurable snow (a whopping 1 inch!) in early November; finally, today, our first shovel-able snow, just a few wet inches. This time, however, the subsequent weather will remain cold enough to keep it, and winter will finally be underway.

Its late arrival has been a blessing for some and a curse for others (such as regional ski areas, which have been unable to open and missed the Thanksgiving weekend for the first time in decades). For our household, a blessing. We have so many outdoor projects, and make such a mess all summer and fall, that it's always a race to get cleaned up and buttoned up before snowfall, which freezes everything in place for up to 6 months -- one year, even 7 months. This year is the first time we've gotten everything done.

I've appreciated having an extra month to enjoy the outdoors without hats, boots, and mittens, and to drive on dry pavement. Had I known the mild stretch was coming, I would have done more transplanting and garden prep.

Now it's time for indoor projects, and I welcome weather excuses to travel less. Winter, after all, is hibernation time for many species. I wish we could hibernate, too! But I'll settle for a chance to lie low for a while . . . even though I'm already counting down to the solstice, when the days start getting longer again.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Big, black birds

2009-11-29T07:52:00.001-05:00

Crows and ravens
Ravens and crows
What's the difference between them?
Nobody knows!

Not true, of course -- that's just a little ditty off the top of my head to express the challenge in identifying these species from afar. They look so alike, I've had to learn them by voice and behavior. The first raven I saw, out West 15 years ago, matched the picture and description (huge, coarse, shaggy) in my Eastern field guide. But our local ravens look just like the glossy, sleek crows.

Recently I got a chance to see them together. I went outside one sunny, crisp morning and heard a cacophony round back of the house, in the woods up the hill. What seemed like dozens of giant blackbirds were screaming and flapping around an area I couldn't see. Their mobbing suggested either a territorial dispute or the presence of a predator. Since normally a half-dozen crows and a pair of ravens live in amity around our neighborhood, I deduced that they had cornered a hawk.

While waiting for the cause to reveal itself, I studied the blackbirds. Clearly, some were bigger; clearly, their caws and yells differed; clearly, their wing size, tail shape, and flight maneuvers jived with voice and size per the guidebooks. And, clearly, more crows and ravens live around here than I thought!

Presently, in a rioting crescendo, the mob swung in my direction and a red-tailed hawk emerged amid them. No question about identity there: The sun lit up his fanned tail in a brilliant russet. He perched deep in a tree while the hecklers continued until satisfied they had cowed him. Then the ravens circled away in pairs while the crows flapped off in groups or solo, and the land became quiet again. The hawk didn't dare move for a while.

All this I was able to observe without binoculars. So now, thanks to an accident of timing, I know the differences between ravens and crows.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

The other November

2009-11-22T19:51:00.001-05:00

Yes, November can be blear and drear. But it also has another face, caused by the same forces that often make it bleak and depressing.

The tumultuous skies and low sun angle sometimes combine to light up the world with gold and drama. Some of the most gorgeous moments of the year occur early or late in a November day. The starkness of the landscape, when illuminated by sun flaring below the cloud cover, looks more like a painting than reality and takes my breath away. Drab colors become vivid, clothing the naked world in beauty. Sunrises and sunsets take on hues not seen any other time of year.

Though temperatures drop below freezing at night and struggle above it during the day, the air is crisp and vivifying. It's the best time of year for outdoor work and play. You can exert without overheating, so your energy stays up for hours. And because nothing is growing, yet the ground hasn't frozen, you can undertake yard and garden or construction projects that would be miserable any other time of year.

If not for these benefits, I would dread November. Each day is shorter than the last, and the annual, expensive drudgery of keeping warm dominates daily life. But the onset of holiday bustle and the race to get things done before snow make the calendar pages flip by quickly. When the month is gone, I look forward to it coming around again just to experience those fleeting, gilt-edged moments that only occur in November.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

2009-11-03T06:21:00.000-05:00

These simple words from Thomas Hood, a British poet and humorist, say it all:

"No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruit, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!"

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

The tidy bear

2009-10-24T20:08:00.000-04:00

Back in the spring, my 11-year record of feeding the birds 24/7/365 came to an abrupt end, when I awoke one morning to find my feeders ravaged. My fault: We live in bear country, though we've never seen one, and nothing, not even a raccoon, has ever touched my compost pile or garbage cans, and deer walk right by my vegetable garden.

OK, I learned. I repaired or replaced the three feeders and have brought them in at sunset every night since. Well, not quite every night . . . I forget now and then. And 5 weeks after the first incident, the same thing occurred.

That first time, the bear demolished the hanging tube of nyjer seed (leaving a big footprint in the soft soil beneath it); bunted and emptied the triple-tube feeder of sunflower seed after breaking the pole supporting it in half; and ripped the suet feeder, which hung from an iron bracket screwed to the front of the house, right off the wall and made off with the whole suet cake in its metal cage. The second time, the nyjer and suet were untouched but the triple-tube was shattered. In both instances, many pounds of seed were vacuumed up without a trace.

Thereafter, we conscientiously brought in the feeders, and when we traveled we didn't put them out at all. When one of us traveled, the one staying at home brought them in -- until this month, when I was out of town and my spouse dutifully retrieved and rehung the big feeder each day but overlooked the nyjer tube. When I got home I noticed it missing and asked where he'd put it. Last seen hanging on its usual hook on the apple tree. But now, not there.

No debris, no tracks, no sign of disturbance anywhere in the yard. Hmmm. You don't just lose a full bird feeder! I replaced it yet again, this time with a little mesh seed sock instead of a pricey feeder. Then I went out of town again. He forgot again. And the nyjer sock disappeared again.

No debris, no tracks, no sign of disturbance anywhere in the yard.

So either some human is running around rural backyards stealing nyjer feeders, or some animal is lifting mine with human-like ease. The spring bear was a smash-and-grabber; is this a different bear, a tidy one, with prehensile paws? Or one who perfected its technique over a summer of practice elsewhere? Or do we have a particularly agile raccoon?

Regardless, the raiding should end soon -- both species hibernate for the winter, and the general consensus is that bears are down by November. I should be able to relax vigilance for a while. But they also say that bears have terrific memories for food sources, and we've just proven to be a reliable seed repository. So I'd better keep up the habit of bringing in the feeders every night if I hope to still have them in the spring!

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

To pine or not to pine

2009-10-16T20:03:00.000-04:00

I have a love/hate relationship with pine trees; specifically, white pine, which grows like a weed in my yard.

Love: They offer year-round food and shelter for many bird species.

Hate: They offer year-round food and shelter for squirrels that ravage my bird feeders.

Love: They grow fast and tall, adding evergreen majesty to the landscape.

Hate: They shed vast amounts of copper pine needles twice a year.

Love: They contribute lightweight, hot-burning firewood.

Hate: They aren’t profitable enough in the marketplace for people to cut them down for you for free.

Love: They provide useful emergency survival food for humans.*

Hate: They get infested with pine borers for all the months the logs need to dry before burning.

This love/hate relationship has developed over the years I’ve been raking needles off the lawn and sweeping them off the deck, and plucking them out of my vehicles’ ventilation systems and interior. Previous owners planted a half-dozen white pines too close to the house, so that we now have 100-foot monsters tilting menacingly toward us while cracks slowly split their trunks. The clock is ticking . . . Will we find the money to have them removed before a high wind, saturating rains, or heavy snows bring them crashing through the roof?

(We can’t cut them ourselves because they’re too big and too close—a “technical” drop for which professional tools and skills are required. And I refuse—I absolutely refuse!—to spend a season cleaning up the overwhelming debris.)

The sad thing is, as much as I want those sun-blocking, needle-shedding, grass-smothering, sap-dripping trees removed, I’m already mourning the birds that will go away with them. One of my greatest pleasures is the avian traffic right outside my windows all four seasons. With the pine trees gone, those birds will not only lose great habitat but also have to fly across significant open space to reach the feeders. Many of them will move elsewhere, I suspect. So I’m hoping the trees stand indefinitely while I mutter curses below them.

Meanwhile, the clock ticks . . .

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* The new shoots, inner bark, young male cones, and needles are all edible. Needle tea, in particular, contains 25 times more vitamin C than the equivalent a mount of orange juice. Various parts have medicinal properties, too.

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Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

The survivors

2009-09-29T16:10:00.000-04:00

Gardening season in the Northeast has once again ended. This closure is usually marked by the first hard frost but also in general by the calendar. Nonetheless, certain plants hang on long after they should, providing a bonus of delight and color.

Looking back on the season, I have to say it was the worst I've experienced in 10+ years of gardening. I'm not alone -- the trouble was region wide, and I daresay many areas of the nation suffered similar disappointment, owing to extreme weather. In effect, our Vermont summer was three weeks long instead of three months!

But the late warm, sunny spell revived many tender annuals. My morning glories, for example. Back in May, I planted an entire seed pack; only 10 germinated; of these, only 5 survived to climb. By early September they had achieved waist height. I was therefore astonished when these feeble yet heroic vines one day produced a single trumpet of Heavenly Blue. Then another, one a day for two weeks. After the first frost (when I optimistically protected them with a sheet), the blossoms turned dark blue, almost purple, a color I'd never seen before. They have since survived two uncovered frosts (owing to proximity to the house), and a coronet of buds is in the queue.

Far from the house, near the now-frost-blasted vegetable garden, I planted half a dozen Mammoth Giant sunflowers. Just 4 of those germinated, and only 2 survived. I had to transplant them away from some perennials that were overtaking them. But the only free location was in poor soil. I amended it best I could, and the pair endured. Now, instead of the 12-15 feet they're supposed to grow, they have achieved chest height and each produced a big, sunny flower. The bees have been on them daily ever since.

The bees themselves staged a comeback. Early season, we saw so few of them that we worried that the bee plague we've read about had truly decimated the population. But by end-August, it seemed they were everywhere, merrily pollinating the thriving perennials and rallying annuals. The bees, too, have made it through several frosts. Although the migratory birds have moved on, the bees are still abundant in the clouds of blue and purple asters that peak about the same time the fall foliage does.

A big temperature drop is due later in the week, so this might be the last hurrah. But I'm betting something will keep blooming until the first snow.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Green can be mean

2009-09-29T15:34:00.001-04:00

With all today's hype by corporations, individuals, and governments about "going green," you wouldn't expect to get penalized for recycling cardboard, would you? But that's what happened to me: I lost $50 because I brought a box to the transfer station.

It was the box our new cell phone came in. I'll skip the story about why we wanted to return this phone during the 30-day trial period; what matters is, we couldn't, because we didn't have the box. We did have reams of all the right papers with all the necessary account numbers, dates, sources, and fine print, and were inside the 30-day window. But the box carried a bar code, without which the phone could not be returned or exchanged, and a $50 rebate could not be processed.

I nearly burst a blood vessel!

Worse, both the salesman and my spouse had told me, "Be sure to keep the box." I heard those messages, but the first got lost in the flood of TMI (Too Much Information) involved in our purchase, which made my eyes glaze over; and the second got lost in the distraction of sorting and filing all the paperwork, plus the usual troubles of getting any new electronic device to do what you want it to do. So the box landed in the recycling bin and was duly sent where it could never be retrieved the day before we decided to exchange the phone.

Worse again, everyone I told this story to became an owl of wisdom before I finished telling. "Ohhhhh..." they said sagely, knowing what was coming. Somehow they had learned about the Box Thing, unlike poor little naive me. And none of them offered their own story of making a similar mistake. After a few noises of sympathy, they retreated from the conversation to avoid commenting on my carelessness.

Pah! I remain militantly convinced that this situation proves the hypocrisy of modern consumer culture. There are a dozen ways that anyone could lose a box; yet companies rely on boxes to be retained for future customer transactions then blame the customer when boxes go astray. Can you say "s-t-u-p-i-d"?

It can't be good business to create a situation that creates angry customers. I griped my way up the food chain but even the managers just shrugged and apologized, claimed there was nothing they could do. Unfortunately, we need to have a cell phone for various reasons, so I couldn't shove this one up multiple people's orifices. Now we're stuck with the same crummy phone, plus out $50, and will have to spend at least that much to get a decent unit.

All because I was trying to be a good green citizen and reduce, reuse, recycle.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Plantly neighbors

2009-08-29T20:38:00.000-04:00

What with a crazy schedule and the crazy weather this season, I've lost the habit of my daily walk.

Finally a break came and I had opportunity to stroll the mile out our country road and back on a beautiful day. It surprised me, though it shouldn't have, to find the same plants in the same places that I've noted on previous walks over ten years.

For some reason -- perhaps the volatility of yard and garden each year -- I expect the wild woods and edges to change dramatically in a short time. They do, superficially, and most evident in the cycles of foliage. Also in what flourishes or languishes in a given year as a result of weather.

But the established trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and escaped perennials hold fast to their positions, to the point where they form signposts along the road. I almost feel like waving as I pass, as if to neighbors sunning on the porch or working in their yards. Hello, myrtle-bed in the silo ruin, and pearly-everlasting community in the clearing. How ya doin', trilliums in the shady glen, now sporting bright red berries I've not seen before, like their brethren, the jack-in-the-pulpits popping up along the way.

There's the tree stump with the very low, very large hole drilled by the local pileated woodpecker (which hole a human neighbor -- a second-homer from the city -- thought was made by a bear!). And over here in the swamp is the blanket of forget-me-nots that surprises me each summer when I think it's too late for their bloom; while over there, in the heap of road scrum alongside an open field, is the strange-looking, strangely named viper's bugloss. And under there, lurking beneath one clump of foliage, is the only wild ginger in the area.

Other plants migrate but are always present during their season: various asters, black-eyed Susans, daisy fleabane -- and myriad daisies; Queen Anne's lace, milkweed galore, Joe-pye weed, goldenrod galore, and the tall spires of mullein. It's fun each year to see where these populations will spring up next.

On it goes, becoming more interesting and familiar as I learn the names of things, and their habitats. A mere mile along a country lane contains dozens of microclimates, so that many of my plantly neighbors can grow only in the pockets where I find them. Their permanence comforts me, and makes me feel plantlike in response; i.e., more rooted in my community. Simultaneously, they make me feel lonely, for I'm the only one of my species anywhere in the area who knows these plantly neighbors and where they live.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Miracles

2009-08-16T10:42:00.000-04:00

I am amazed -- nay, astonished -- that despite disease and pests; despite too much rain followed by too little, and too cool temperatures followed by too hot; and despite my perpetual mistakes and neglect, I can go out to my tiny garden every other day and come back with a bucket of food.

"Miracle" is the word that comes to mind whenever I think of this. But what is a miracle, really?

I looked it up in the dictionary:

1. an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2. an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
3. a divinely natural phenomenon experienced humanly as the fulfillment of spiritual law

Yep, I've got it right. By any of these definitions, a vegetable garden qualifies as a miracle, indeed!

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

What grows best where

2009-08-09T19:52:00.001-04:00

Each growing season is an experiment. Although I cultivate the same vegetables every year, I try different varieties in different placements to find what works best for our too-short, too-cool summers.

After 10 years I've learned that certain veggies do better in the ground or in containers of different types, regardless of weather, companion plants, or season extenders. From the tilled beds, raised beds, "lasagna" beds, large deep pots, long shallow pots, self-watering containers, hanging planters, and hay bales I've employed, I've compiled a list of which vegetables are happiest (or, at least, more reliable) in which locations:

* Lettuce = long, shallow planter on the deck or terrace.
* Bush beans = doesn't seem to matter.
* Pole beans = ditto.
* Bell peppers (red) = EarthBox self-watering planters.
* Carrots = deep planter on deck or terrace.
* Broccoli = variety seems to matter more than soil.
* Peas = doesn't seem to matter.
* Zucchini = tilled bed or lasagna garden.
* Cucumbers = deep planter or lasagna garden.
* Tomatoes = results differ so widely each year that I just put them where it's convenient, and cross my fingers!

The largest, most prolific tomato I ever grew was planted in a hay bale, but I've never been able to reproduce that feat. In fact, most years whatever I've planted in hay bales has struggled or died. One zucchini did well the same year as the monster tomato, but that was it. I've decided to discontinue that experiment.

Next year I will plant according to the above list and see if I can get similar results two years in a row. That would be an accomplishment!

But every year, the garden produces food -- for better or worse -- no matter what I do. I find this deeply comforting, and rely on that annual promise to get me through the long winters.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Storing produce

2009-08-02T13:33:00.000-04:00

This summer of wacky weather has made growing food more challenging than usual. If you're lucky enough to harvest enough to need storage before you can eat or process it all, use Debbie Meyer Green Bags.

These are translucent-green plastic bags treated with oya, a mineral related to zeolite, which is used to absorb gases. In this case, the bags absorb ethylene gas from vegetables and fruits as they ripen.

The vendor claims that produce stored in these bags stays fresh up to 30 days, or up to 10 times the normal shelf life of any particular food. While I can't verify these claims, I can say for sure that my produce lasts a heck of a lot longer in the fridge when I use these bags -- a boon when the harvest comes in all at once, and when store-bought produce must remain edible for a week or more. (Particularly helpful when you're single and need to work your way through a head of lettuce before it spoils!)

There's a catch, of course. Food must be dry before inserting. Hmm . . . that's tricky with fresh pickings or items refrigerated at point of purchase. I get around it by wrapping the food in paper towels and changing the wrap daily.

Storing produce in regular plastic bags also works (if wrapped in something absorbent) but the Green Bags give extra mileage. I use them all year but especially now, when the garden and the berry patch ripen faster than we can consume their bounty. Each Green Bag can be reused many times, and you get 20 for around $10. Given that I've bought $20 worth over 3+ years and still have half of them left, I guess we can call this a great deal!

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Revenge of the raspberries

2009-07-24T19:49:00.001-04:00

Our place came equipped with berry patches spread around the edges of several acres. Some are wild, others were once cultivated but since have run amok. Nevertheless, we have enjoyed an annual harvest of blueberries, raspberries, black raspberries, and blackberries, for better or worse depending on weather.

For a few years we pruned out the blackberry hedge bordering the backyard in hopes of improving yield. But it seemed that the more effort we put into it, the fewer berries we got. Finally we gave up and just let it go.

Meanwhile, way in the back of the "back forty," in a scrub area we ignored for 10 years, invisible things were happening. They made themselves known two summers ago, when my spouse's eye was caught by a red spot among a sea of green. Curious, he approached, and found a massive raspberry stand sporting perfect berries the size of his thumb!

Unprepared, we went on a picking frenzy. Not enough containers for them all, not enough time available every day for 3 weeks, and too many berries for the pair of us to eat, no room in the freezer, and no equipment for preserving. So there were lots left over for the birds, and bucketloads gifted to friends and neighbors.

The next summer, knowing the bonanza was coming, we did better: ate fresh raspberries in yogurt or sherbet every day, with plenty to give away and plenty to freeze. Still not enough containers or time in a day, but we harvested the lion's share and were happy. I marked the appropriate fruiting time on the next year's calendar.

So this year, we were ready. In May, I spent two afternoons cutting access paths through the awakening patch and covering them with thick bark slabs left over from wood-splitting. Cleared out everything Not Berry, including a gigantic rambling rose that had kept half the patch inaccessible with its brutal thorns. (Note: Raspberries don't have prickers; you can wade through them waist-high in shorts, and pick with short sleeves.)

I also stashed dozens of containers recycled from the winter's berries bought from the store, cleaned out half the freezer, and stocked up on Ziploc baggies. Made time in my schedule for daily picking.

And here they come! -- despite an abnormally cool and rainy season. I started picking two days ago . . . only to discover that the pathways have completely grown over, to the point we can't even find them. So much for preparations.

Picking continues to require awkward stepping and reaching and wriggling things out of the way, twisting ankles on invisible hazards, dropping the container when your balance falters so you lose half a pint to the undergrowth. The berries themselves are sassy flirts, showing perfectly colored ripe faces that mask unripe back halves, or some inedible blemish, which you don't discover until you've wrassled your way in and plucked them. It takes better part of an hour to fill a pint container -- with quarts and quarts left to go!

Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining. This is a wonderful problem to have! It's merely another example of how Mother Nature triumphs over gardeners and makes us work for her bounty.

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

End of a tomato era

2009-07-10T21:06:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I took down the tomato.

Not a tomato one would expect -- a sick or infested plant in the garden, like what happened with my beans thanks to slugs. Rather, this was a tomato I planted in the living room back in April 2008.

It began as a conventional nursery seedling, and aside from the trip home it never saw the outdoors. My aim was to learn whether my hugely windowed, south-facing living room could serve as a greenhouse; and whether tomatoes really are perennials, as I'd heard was true in their native tropical lands. (Not so here in Zone 3, with its 90-day growing season!)

After 27 months, I can claim Yes, tomatoes are perennials and they will grow year-round in my living room. There's a catch, though. From the start, the plant -- like the pair of red bell peppers that accompanied it in this experiment -- was weak and brittle, and the fruit small and sparse. Yet all three specimens grew enormous, and the peppers produced gigantic leaves.

All outgrew the space allotted to them months ago, but I persevered, until it became apparent that the plants are just plain tuckered out. Though still producing, their fruits started to grow deformed and often didn't survive to maturity. The older leaves looked dreadful. Now that new tomatoes and peppers are developing in the garden, I decided that the oldsters should move along to the compost pile.

Well, not quite. At the last moment, I decided to just cut them back to stubs. Way down low, the new-growth leaves looked healthy. So now we'll go around another year and see just how perennial these plants can be!

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

The eternal dance

2009-06-29T06:53:00.000-04:00

For the eleven years I've been gardening, I've never had a slug problem. For the same period, I never mulched.

This year, I finally decided to listen to the experts and mulch my vegetable garden. I used the scraggly hay left over from last year's haybale garden, laying it atop the lasagna garden last fall to let it start rotting in as the new top lasagna layer. At this spring's planting time, I merely scuffed it out of the way and tucked it back as needed.

Little did I know I was creating Slug Heaven! It took me weeks to recognize this, since the dastardly slimeballs only come out at night. I kept waking up to holey lettuce and bean leaves, and stripped marigolds -- too early for most of the leaf-chomping insects I'm aware of, and not the right damage for quadrupeds.

It remained a discouraging head-scratcher until a friend mentioned she's having a horrible time this year with slugs. Upon her advice, I laid out a saucer of beer overnight to lure them to destruction. All that happened was some nocturnal animal lapped up the treat. I switched to her exact technique -- catfood cans set into the soil so the beer was at ground level -- and again netted no slugs, only one empty tin and the other one, concealed from above by moth netting over my broccoli, disturbed in the soil (apparently a raccoon had reached through a split in the netting and tried to grab it).

So much for the beer plan. Prior to it, I had scraped all the hay out of the garden to re-expose the soil. Took somebody else's suggestion and placed collars coated with petroleum jelly around individual plants. This combination slowed things down a bit, but the slugs are still invisibly eating my veggies. I will keep trying other manual and/or nontoxic techniques to tackle this conundrum but suspect, at this point, I've already lost the war.

What steams me is the effect on This Year's Big Experiment. In previous years, the most challenging pest problem has been green worms in the broccoli -- a result, I've learned, of little white butterflies (the cabbage moth, I believe the species is commonly called) laying their eggs on broccoli and related crop leaves over the summer. I read about covering them early with a very light row-cover fabric to block access by the moths.

This created a lovely protective canopy for the slugs, who approach from below. And, as the broccoli grows, the canopy moves upward with them (I didn't buy a wide enough cloth so can't arch over the plants top to bottom, side to side), thereby allowing the moths to fly in from underneath. Yesterday I found 3 of them fluttering inside the netting. So I wrenched it off and released the slug-shredded leaves back to open air.

This morning I got out early enough to catch some slugs in action. Put that to an end with a satisfying squish. A few of the beans look like they might survive the onslaught, but half the broccoli looks awful, while the other half (still under cover) looks only lightly hit. Hopefully there will be some food left over for me at harvest time.

So . . . what's the moral of this story? I'm not sure, but it probably has something to do with balance, as well as environment: There's no sign of slug damage in my EarthBox planters, even though they sit adjacent to the garden, whereas the haybales on the other side have been breached. Birds frolic in the garden all day but apparently don't know where the slugs hide during daylight so they're not picking them off. I will remember all this next year winter when it comes time to design the season's plant layout.

In the meantime, if anyone knows a foolproof, nontoxic way to beat slugs, I'll be happy to hear it!

Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardense
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com

Greetings from Zone 3

2009-06-24T09:33:00.001-04:00

6/24/09

This new blog is a continuation of an old one, running since spring 2008 on another site which has since been taken down.

It began life as an addendum to my book, Open Your Heart with Gardens, and was hosted on my publisher's site as part of the publication and marketing process. Since then, it has expanded into a journal, the electronic version of the yard-and-garden diary I once kept on paper. So although the focus remains on gardening, it also embraces the critters that live in or pass through the garden, the climate that affects it, and the trials and tribulations involving all of these components. Hence the blog name: Adventures in Zone 3.

We live at 1200 feet altitude in south-central Vermont where the Green Mountains arise. It is a mishmash of microclimates that present endless challenges to making things grow. On the map, we're Zone 4 or, according to some sources, Zone 5; in reality, we have Zone 3 conditions, in which zealous and stubborn people strive each year to grow food and beauty.

Feel free to make comments or ask questions as this blog grows. I post once every few weeks, depending on what's going on.

To get a sense of what's come before, visit www.dreamtimepublishing.com, click on the Blogs header, and use the pulldown window to select "Carolyn Haley."

Thanks, and happy gardening!

--Carolyn Haley