The big blow

As Hurricane Sandy crawls up the eastern seaboard, menacing the Northeast like Irene of a year ago, I’m reminded less of that statewide disaster than of the microburst that karate-chopped my neighbors just a few weeks back.

That event came from a line of thunderstorms which rolled in late afternoon, perfectly normal for the season. Here at our end of the mile-long, dead-end road, the cell arrived with a big whoosh! that rattled the deck furniture then subsided into a steady rain.

The following morning, my friend at the other end of the road called and said, “You haven’t driven out today, have you.”

Her ominous pause clued me in. “No . . . what happened?”

Out came the story, of coming home not only to the road blocked by downed trees but also an exploded environment.

Her house, unlike the rest of the neighborhood, sits close to the place next door. We all have good-sized parcels, but the rest of us are spread apart by our land, out of sight of each other, whereas these two houses stand cheek by jowl and their barnyards share a fenceline.

My friend’s spread is semi-open, overlooking fields and hilly vistas, and framed around the back by trees. Her neighbor’s place hunkers down under a large stand of pines. Both properties comprise home, barn, and outbuilding(s) clustered in sight of each other, and both families have livestock: my friend, two horses; her neighbor, multiple rescue llamas, donkeys, goats, pigs, and ponies, all out all day.

Far as we can tell, they got walloped by a microburst. Per Wikipedia: “A microburst is a very localized column of sinking air, producing damaging divergent and straight-line winds at the surface that are similar to, but distinguishable from, tornadoes . . . A microburst often has high winds that can knock over fully grown trees. They usually last for a duration of a couple of seconds to several minutes.”

Yep, that about describes it. In a few seconds, my friend lost 7 trees and her neighbor lost 32!

What’s really impressive is that this wind shear threaded the needle, completely missing every structure. Okay, one limb bounced off a roof, and others crunched some fencing. But somehow the wind found the only unimpeded path available through a compact maze. It peeled the maple in my friend’s front yard like a banana upon landfall, then split or dropped the rest in a line.

Nobody was home when it happened—except a few dozen terrified animals. Even they were spared what must have been a blizzard of flying branches and splintering trees. One donkey, I’m told, sproinged over a fence taller than he was. All the critters were mincing around with saucer-size eyes when the astounded homeowners returned.

Some investigation shows that the wind sliced down the wooded hill behind the properties but pretty much petered out by the time it reached the main road. It appears that only these two neighbors got attacked by the sky.

What a difference a few thousand feet makes! We carried on as normal, clueless; they were suddenly up to their armpits in cleanup and insurance claims and rearranging their operations. What caused that burst to zero in on their homesteads? Only the gods know.

But it’s proof positive that you can’t take life for granted as long as Mother Nature is running the show.

Where did all the apples go?

No end to the natural mysteries we encounter in our yard.

Last year, right after Tropical Storm Irene, the birds vamooshed -- the most abrupt and total disappearance I'd ever seen at the end of a summer. Back then, we had the storm as an excuse; this year, they all seem to have disappeared with the same abruptness, but now no excuse. It's been a gentle progression from late summer into early fall, mostly fair weather, yet now they're all gone. Only the year-round species to be seen. Huh? It used to be a more gradual process. What gives?

In the same vein, we had disappearing fruit this year, as well. Our three ancient blueberry bushes put out an immense crop, to the point where I couldn't keep up with it. Fortunately, blueberries last longer, both on the bush and in the fridge, than the more tender fruits like raspberries, so I picked at my convenience.

Assorted events caused me to miss a week, but I wasn't worried. Pounds still remained on the bush. But when I went back to get them, every last one was gone, not even a berry on the ground. Presumably birds were the culprits, although that didn't feel right. In the preceding weeks I had seen only a few birds dipping into and out of the bushes, even when it was well loaded with ripe berries. So what made them suddenly descend like a plague of locusts and strip the branches bare?

The same thing happened with apples. Last year was the bonanza year on our tree; more apples than I could pick, process, give away, throw away. An insanely huge crop! So this year I didn't expect much; it's rare to have huge fruit or mast crops in succession.

Sure enough, this year the crop was light, but it was definitely there, and started to drop in August. Each morning I arose to half a dozen to a dozen on the ground, all sizes and degrees of ripeness, usually no good to eat owing to a worm or a fungus or a bird, rodent, or raccoon bite. But I salvaged a few for us.

Then, again, I had to leave town for almost a week. Upon departure, there were still plenty of apples up in the tree. Way up, where I would need a ladder to pick them. But no worries: Based on previous years, they would all come down.

So I was astonished to find the tree absolutely bare of fruit when I returned. None on the ground, either. How the heck did that happen? Deer are the obvious explanation, but hey, they don't climb ladders -- how could they reach the top ones? And birds don't carry away fruit of that size, and raccoons leave a bunch of broken stems and twigs when they shimmy up and grab, and squirrels leave a lot of half-eaten ones around. No sign, however, that anything had been there. No sign that any apples had existed.

I guess there's a black hole passing through the neighborhood that's sucking all the birds, berries, and apples into it. Can't think of any better explanation for the collective vanishing act!

R.I.P. Garden Elf

In the wee morning hours of August 16, my mother passed away in her bed. She was 85 years old, and from what we can figure her heart just wore out, giving her an ending that’s becoming rare in the western world: a natural death.

I mention this here because she was a key player in my yard and garden life -- my personal “garden elf” -- and it’s fitting that we can use the word “natural” when discussing her demise. She was an ardent lover of the natural world, particularly plants and birds, and devoted much of her life to enjoying and supporting it.

As a birder, she ventured all over North America with folks who became her lifelong friends. As a mother, she exposed her family to the magnificence of our country through a trip across the United States featuring the national parks, and gave us a chance to know nature on a small scale in our suburban backyard and annual vacations to Cape Cod.

As a woman who lived her beliefs, she donated time and money to organizations that support the great outdoors -- The Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society, and a local preserve, Roaring Brook Nature Center. And as a gardener, she grew flowers and cultivated habitat wherever she lived.

Her biggest canvas was our home in south-central Vermont. This offered 11 acres of abandoned perennial gardens, new annual beds, retired hayfields, rock piles and walls, third-growth deciduous forest, a pond, and acres of irregular lawn. The whole has always been more than my husband and I can manage, so each spring, summer, and fall since we moved here -- 15 years -- Mom drove up from Connecticut every few weeks to spend a few days helping.

This is why I considered her my garden elf. While my husband manned the machines and did all the heavy work, and I did all the medium work and hand maintance, Mom did all the finish work: trimming edges of the lawn that the mower can’t reach, weeding spaces between terrace pavers and pots and garden borders, raking up mountains of pine needles, pruning neglected shrubs, making everything tidy and lovely.

Throughout, she listened to and watched the birds. Our location offers mixed habitats that attract 20-40 species according to season. Several of these species don’t frequent her neighborhood 150 road-miles south and gave her much joy. Their arrival each spring warranted a phone call or e-mail. Fox sparrows, rose-breasted grosbeaks, ravens, and the kestrel topped the list. Ditto the first daffodils, peonies, and black-eyed Susans.

We kept a species list whenever she visited; which, combined with the varying forms of journal I’ve tried over the years, built up a reliable record of wildlife in our neck of the woods. While I mainly bird out the window, Mom often would wander down the road in the early mornings and catch species that don’t come to the feeder. She taught me to identify many of them by song.

At the end of a gardening day, we would draw up chairs, pour ourselves a drink, and kick back to watch the feeders. Some of our best conversations took place during that ritual. After dinner, we would walk the property to admire our work and the view, along with the wildflowers, then turn in early -- country style -- to start again the next day.

Many of my friends envied me having a personal garden elf and offered to hire her. She turned them down, wanting just to do what she loved with her family in a beautiful place. Her devotion gave me an opportunity to develop a good relationship with my mother -- another thing that many people envy, for not all are so lucky.

Mom’s legacy is what I see and walk through every day, giving year-round reminder of all that was good between us. It’s comforting to know that once my turn comes to move on, the gardens we nurtured together will still be there for the next folks who come along.

Her formal obituary is at http://hosting-1512.tributes.com/show/marjorie-marie-haley-94286803

 Birding at Cape Cod, early 1970s

At home in Unionville, CT, early 2000s

Our pond

Just about a year ago, Tropical Storm Irene gave us way too much water. Irene’s floods were followed by a dry winter, then an abnormally dry spring and summer. Previous posts have reported on our misadventures with flooding and starting a well replacement. The latest episode in this water feast/famine story is our pond springing a leak.

At first, we thought the drought was drawing the water down. The level drops most every summer, and this dry year we weren’t surprised to see a creeping exposure of shore. But when the drought broke and we got seven inches of rain inside a week -- the water level kept dropping. And dropping, to the point of threatening the fish, frogs, clams and everything that lives there. How the heck do you deal with that?

This pond is no ornamental lily pond. It’s an acre-size ecosystem, built 50 years ago by previous owners. They put a concrete “chimney” in the deep end as an outgate that controls the water level. Our wellspring feeds the pond, and when it’s full the water spills into an opening at the top of the chimney, to flow out into a woody marsh via a pipe from the bottom of the chimney. The water height can be adjusted by adding or removing wooden boards embedded in the chimney’s front face, which originally were sealed with tar. Those boards have been rotting over the years, now causing the leaks.

The whole chimney stands 12-15 feet from its base in the muck to a dock supported on top. Even with the pond half empty, the base was still 6+ feet below the surface. The worst leaks through the boards were way down below the water level.

So hubby put on his engineer hat and fabricated a replacement insert from a plywood-type material called Advantech and encased it in rubber. By devising a way to block the outflow through the pipe at the bottom, he was able to remove the old wood as far down as possible and slide in the new insert without draining the pond.

This worked well but didn’t finish the job: As expected, the new “gate” leaked in spots along the sides, with a larger leak at the bottom. Plugging those required underwater work.

At first he and a friend free-dived with just a mask and sealed most of the edges. But the main leak, down in the muck and rubble, persisted.

Thank goodness for friends who have friends with diving gear! It took three multi-hour sessions involving two men in wetsuits taking turns with scuba tanks and weights, using a ladder, multiple ropes, a can of tar, lots of disposable gloves, various scrapers, a garden trowel, and long rubber strips to fully seal the edges and that bottom section. Yours truly manned the “barge” (a 16-foot Grumman aluminum canoe) used as a support platform for the tools and supplies.

The men worked blind in silt that stirred the minute they entered the water. The fish watched, not sure if we were friend or foe, but unknowingly grateful we were saving their home.

We finished the job and the air in the scuba tanks at the same time. A trickle leak remains, which is disappointing but way better than the torrent we started with. Within a few hours it was clear that the water level had stopped dropping -- indeed, is starting back up! Now it’s a waiting game, to see if the trickle will hold or get worse as the rains return. Hubby knows he will be back down there to fully seal that trickle, but when is the question

Volunteers

I didn't plant anything on these steps and terrace, save for the red lettuce in the green planter. (Oh yes, and the orange glove on the traffic cone.  : )

Garden envy

What a difference a half-mile makes!

Here in microclimate land, I live in one of the more micro climates. Hence this blog title -- our yard behaves like Zone 3 even though we live, according to the map, in Zone 4. It's all because of one hill and a curve in the road.

Two of my neighbors are my gardening buddies. We get together in late winter and swap seeds, discuss crop successes and failures, and arrange who will start what for whom. Then we plant about the same time in May, each of us varying each year in what sort of early-season and pest protection gizmos we employ. We live approximately a half-mile apart, with me at one end of the road and them across the way from each other at the opposite end.

Regardless of timing and fertilizing and protection variables, by this time each season the difference in our private landscapes becomes obvious. My transplants are always smaller; I get lower rates of seed germination; and everything in general is less fecund. Originally I believed this reflected my inadequacies, but now I realize it's all about sunlight and soil.

I amend the soil; they amend the soil; though who's to say which combo is better. I fertilize; they fertilize; but who's to say which fertilizer and frequency has what effect.

The bottom line is: They have tons of sun and I don't. Even though my new garden location gets tons of sun since we cut down the pine trees, it's still not as much as they get. In fact, they have environmental problems I don't: wind in one case, overheating in another. I get a little of both but to a lesser degree, because our end of the road gets clouds more often. That extra 10-30 feet of altitude, combined with the hill, combined with directional orientation (they have open southern exposures), makes a huge difference.

The hill (aptly called Hateful Hill) trips clouds and drops moisture more than on the other end of the road. There are many days when the weather radar shows perfectly clear skies throughout the region, yet it's either cloudy or precipitating at our place. One neighbor and I both have rain gauges; after each rain, we measure different amounts, with usually more at my place. Could be a calibration difference -- neither of us has Official Weather Stations -- but the trend is consistent.

I envy my neighbors' burgeoning crops, and am glad I don't rely upon my garden to feed us. How anyone who lived here in the 1800s and had to live off the land survived, I can't imagine. Well, there was a large evacuation when the midwest opened up, with its unrestricted light and rich, dark soil . . .

Whatever. The upside is: Every year my garden produces food, no matter the sun, rain, insect, predator, pest problems. The perennials that have survived here are decades old. It's a wonder that bedazzles me every year.

But there's no mystery why I don't plant a bigger vegetable garden and can/freeze/pickle for the larder every fall!
 

Wishing well

One of the not-so-quaint features that came with our old farmhouse is a surface well (a.k.a. spring well), which comprises a wooden frame about the size of a casket sunk into the mud around a spring, and capped with a plywood lid. It lies a few feet from the road in the low point of our dooryard.

The spring is reliable and the water good, but the well case gets silty so we’ve had to install two fabric filters for dirt plus one UV filter for germs, all of which must be changed multiple times a year—or multiple times a month during heavy spring runoffs.

The time has come to rebuild the casket and cover for this well, but before investing the effort and materials, we decided to see if we could find a better location. Drilling is not an option; ergo, we must dig the old-fashioned way.

The backyard has two subterranean streams running through it that ooze up to the surface during periods of high water. If we could trace one of those streams to where it emerges from bedrock, and thus sink a collector uphill of the silty spring, then we’d be way ahead of the game in terms of water cleanliness and pressure.

So hubby made himself some dowsing rods and crisscrossed the backyard. At the appropriate spots, he revved up his backhoe and commenced digging. Before long, the backyard looked like a landmine had exploded!

Yes, we found lots of water. We also found the deconstruction debris from when the barn was torn down in the 1970s and the ell of our house built onto its footprint. One of those holes exposed a vigorous water source, but between the debris and the fact we’d have to mow around the casing, we let that option slide.

As well, we found an interesting and diverse combination of strata: muck, sand, topsoil, clay. Few rocks, and as yet no bedrock. The goal is to find a water source below the clay, but to date we’ve only found water running on top of it. One source was vigorous enough to undermine the clay bands as we watched.

Exploration stopped when one heavy load of clay bent the tractor bucket, thereby postponing other yard projects until that can be repaired.

So we’re still wishing for a well, and haven’t decided whether to keep digging until we hit the sweet spot or just head to the lumberyard and buy materials to rebuild the existing well case. Meanwhile, we’ve inadvertently created more sinkholes, since the water we disrupted a few feet down has sucked in the dirt, so that what was dug out no longer refills the hole(s) to the top. In fact, one almost consumed our plow truck as hubby attempted to shove the dirt piles back into place. Later, it grabbed a trailer being relocated in the yard.

The backyard has always been a bumpy place to ride a lawnmower, usually needing a visit to the chiropractor after a full mowing session. Now it’s a veritable obstacle course, with not much to show for the effort. But . . . nothing ventured, nothing gained, so we’ll probably press on until a solution presents itself.