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
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Gardening with trepidation
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
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
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Counting chickadees
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
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
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The relativity of hardness
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
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
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Winter salad
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
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
Monday, December 21, 2009
The true holiday
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”!
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.
Open Your Heart with Gardens (nonfiction, DreamTime Publishing)
First-year blog archives at www.dreamtimepublishing.com
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Winter finally arrives
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/
See http://northernwoodlands.org/editors_blog/article/first-snow/
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