Not here in Georgia, at any rate. It’ll be pissing down rain today “[bathing] every veine in swich licour/Of which vertu engendered is the flowr” – which will probably be killed by yet another April frost, if the experiences of the last two years are anything to go by…
If not, I reckon I’ll just shoot up cough syrup, drink some jimsonweed tea, and snort Metamucil until the cows come home – with their shields or on them.
Sorry. That probably made no sense whatsoever.
Having found myself confined to quarters by the weather, I’ve found myself in rather an odd frame of mind: at times, morose (I hope to God I don’t have Seasonal Affective Disorder, in addition to everything else…); at times, bored; and at times, philosophical.
In his Meditations, the Roman Emperor/philosopher known as Marcus Aurelius expresses a truth well known to many martial artists: The distinction between left- and right-handedness is as much one of habit and preference as of cerebral organization or hemispheric dominance. Citing the left hand’s primary role in horsemanship (it controls the animal, via the bridle, whilst the right wields the weapon) Aurelius notes that the “inferior” left hand must be trained to use the bridle, even as the right must be trained to use a sword.
It was with this in mind (and considerable profanity on my lips, as usual) that I began excavating the new homes of Maggie’s and my hazelnut trees. Having planted four trees on Wednesday, I had a very good idea of what to expect, on Thursday. Needless to say, my expectations were met, and then some.
These particular hazelnut trees are of a dwarf species that grows to a height of twelve to fifteen feet. According to the write-up in the catalog, they’re more large shrubs than they are trees-proper, so we couldn’t plant them with the other trees: They’d be shaded out.
After putting our heads together, Maggie and I went to fetch Advil and bruise liniment (our depth perception is nothing to write home about). We then discussed the placement of the hazels, and decided to plant them amongst the dwarf apple trees. In so doing, we’ll be affording them sufficient sunlight, planting the beginnings of a privacy hedge -- Mags is apparently worried about me “losing it” someday, having a Pictish-themed ancestral memory trip, and running around the yard, wearing nothing but a crazed grin and few streaks (no pun intended, of course) of woad -- and creating yet another “no-mow zone” when we create a single island from mulch or groundcover.
I’m toying with the notion of planting a combination island -- triangular, its center planted with periwinkle, snow-on-the-mountain, or creeping wintergreen -- but am still undecided.
The exact loation of the hazels, on the other hand, has definitely been decided – and I spent the better part of Thursday afternoon digging the holes in which to plant them. As in the case of the pawpaws and apricots, I decided to dig them 2’ deep and slightly over 2’ wide.
Unfortunately, digging them was as far as I got, and even that required near-Herculean effort on my part.
The soil in that part of the yard is much worse than that near the western property line. The hardpan level lies much closer to the surface, and has many large rocks embedded in it. This translated into quite a bit of time on my hands and knees, hacking away at it with a hand-mattock. Fortunately, most of the rocks are sedimentary (judging by the color and texture, I’d say they’re composed largely of calcium compounds, iron oxide, flakes of mica and traces sulfur), soft and fairly crumbly. A large mass, though, still requires considerable effort to break up and/or dislodge, and owing to the confined space in which I was working, the hand-mattock was the only tool suited to the job.
This is where Marcus Aurelius comes in. For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading a copy of his Meditations, on my lunch break at work. Ergo his observation on the left and right hands came immediately to mind as I hacked away at the hole.
Contrary to another of the good emperor’s observations, though, nature is anything but orderly. The various chunks of rock I encountered, far from being lain out in neat strata, were embedded in the hardpan at random -- and at angles that would have sent H.P. Lovecraft or Frank Belknap Long screaming into the night, as likely as not.
As I swung the mattock into the “non-Euclidian geometry” of this terrestrial “R’lyeh” in microcosm, I could almost feel one of the “Hounds of Tindalos” sniffing my butt… (Or p’raps it was my neighbors’ Alsatian – apparently, the words “leash law” don’t mean much to them…)
At any rate, the chaotic positioning of the rocks, combined with the fact that I was digging a circular hole, meant that at times, using my left hand was more efficient (and effective) than using my right. To be sure, it was awkward at first, but after an hour or so, it had nearly become second nature.
Yep. An hour to dig two holes, 2’d. X 2’ deep. (And fuck πr², by the way – I neither know nor care how many cubic inches of dirt I ultimately removed. Suffice to say that it was an ass-busting task, and let’s leave it at that, shall we?)
By the time I’d dug ‘em, I was damn near spent. But then again, Da always assured me that attending to unpleasant tasks builds character – and there were other tasks to be done.
Muttering the immortal words: “Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað,” (it’s from The Battle of Maldon, ya philistines. Just read it.), and a few choice curses under my breath, I set off to do battle with whatever hydrae that fickle bitch, Dame Fortuna, next saw fit to shove into my path -- in this case, firing up the tiller. And thereby was Mediterranean stoicism married (even if she brought little or nothing by way of a dowry, and even if it was a “shotgun wedding” of sorts) to the sheer, stubborn orneriness of the “Long-haired sons of the northern world.”
So much for Hegel, “Anglo-Norman Psychology 101,” and tossing “Dill’s Atlantic Giant” pumpkins from freeway overpasses…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
While I was (to all appearances, at any rate) searching for the Piltdown Man’s long-lost cousin, Mags took my late father’s Mantis™ tiller to the raised beds.
As we’d turned the soil with spade and spading fork some weeks ago, she had a right easy time of it – until (and against my courteous and ever-so-diplomatic advice, I might add) she attempted to cut up a particularly nasty spot, in hopes of transplanting our crucifers into said. If, by now, the Gentle Reader has guessed that it worked as well as does a typical TSA goon, he’d be absolutely correct.
When Mags moved in with me, she brought her tiller from North Carolina with her. As the Mantis wasn’t up to the task of cutting the clay, she decided to bring hers out and use it, instead. Unfortunately, something was wrong with the damned thing, so try as we might, we couldn’t get it started. As it happens, though, her tiller and mine take exactly the same spark plug (getting one for the Mantis was a nightmare, but that’s another story entirely), so we switched ‘em and wheeled it out.
Now my tiller is a Lazy Boy™ that I bought when first I began gardening seriously, back in ‘90. One of the wheels is falling off, the belts will need to be replaced soon, the dust-cover has long since disappeared, and the sheath surrounding the cable that engages the tines cracked ages ago, and has been duct taped more times than I can recall. In short: It ain’t much to look at.
Looks, however, ain’t anything. Sure, it’s nearly twenty years old, and somewhat worse for wear, but it still works like a charm. And that’s all that matters. Old and battered or not, it started up on the first or second pull, and, within minutes, was cutting through the clay like shit through a tin horn.
Alas and alack, we’d spent so much time screwing around with the Mantis and Maggie’s tiller; we were running out of daylight. With nightfall fast approaching, and a buttload of work yet to be done, I decided to knock off the tilling shortly after cutting up enough ground to plant our cabbages. (They should have gone in weeks ago, for the record. The weather, though, hasn’t seen fit to cooperate with us, and it’s been pissing down rain two or three days a week. As this leaves the clay too wet to work, I’m just gonna have to put ‘em in this week and hope they don’t bolt.)
Since Mags has commandeered three of my raised beds for her strawberries and onions, I decided to use the remaining two for another of my companion-planting experiments. First, I sowed this spring’s root vegetables: parsnips; petrouchkas; salsify; two turnip cultivars (the old stand-by, “Purple Top White Globe,” and my favorite, “Tokyo Market”); rutabagas; beets; two kinds of carrots (“Atomic Red,” and “Short’n’Sweet”); and a dozen or so kinds of radishes.
Root crops, in order to develop properly, need cool, moist soil. As this can be a problem in Georgia, I over-sowed them with mizuna, arugula, chicory, and various lettuces, in hopes of shading them – thereby conserving soil moisture.
If too much nitrogen is present in the soil, the root crops are at risk of forking, becoming knobby or otherwise deformed, or being “all tops,” with no root to speak of. Since greens love nitrogen, I’ll be killing two birds with one stone – if the experiment works.
While I sowed the early veggies, Mags put in half of her strawberry plants – 25 of an ever-bearing cultivar. (I have no idea what it’s called, by the way. R.H. Shumway’s was running a special: 25 June-bearing and 25 ever-bearing, for fifteen bucks. The exact strains weren’t mentioned, but who cares? At that price, they could be called “W.C. Fields Early Gin Blossom,” and I’d still buy ‘em.)
We finished exactly at nightfall – but still had a million things to do.
I attended to a few of ‘em on Sunday -- all by my lonesome.
Mags and I had a bit of a tiff, and she – being both a woman (read: more emotional than rational) and unaccustomed to growing food as a necessity, rather than a hobby – doesn’t yet understand that weather, lunar phases and other conditions don’t wait until we’re in the “mood” to plow, plant, or clear. In this case, our choices were: strike while the iron was hot, or do without certain vegetables until September.
The fight was a fairly stupid affair. We need to get our second planting of tomatoes started, but Mags got a wire crossed somewhere along the line.
At any given time, I have the seed for 30+ different cultivars on hand, ranging from 58- day “cherry” to 100-day “beefsteak” varieties. I choose ‘em for a number of reasons: days to harvest, cold/heat/drought tolerance, disease resistance, etc. As I’m not the kind of guy who puts all his eggs – er, tomatoes – in one basket, I prefer large, staggered plantings of proven “success stories,” with a few test varieties added each year.
As she knew none of this, she went ahead and sowed sixty of the same cultivar (a so-called “experimental” variety yclept “Early Big Red,” or something to that effect) in a tray filled with Jiffy Strips – which are what I use to start especially delicate melons and squash…
I nearly shat a brick when I found out (in all honesty, I came closer to shitting the entire Great Wall of China), and things deteriorated thereafter. Therefore I had no choice but to roll up my sleeves and belly up to the metaphoric anvil and strike the proverbial iron -- alone.
By this time, she’d decided that; not only was she not speaking to me, but that the spat was of such magnitude; the rain we’re now experiencing would delay itself for a few days, the moon would temporarily cease waxing, and the weather would remain cool for a few more days, that our cabbages might head instead of bolting.
Suppressing the urge to play Bluebeard, I went to the local home and garden center, replaced the Jiffy strips, bought a few more peat pellets, and a few bags of commercial topsoil.
Upon returning home, I put 120 lbs of it into one of the nastier bare patches, seeded it with Ladino clover, and then put a light mulch of straw over it. I used the rest of the clover to seed a significant portion of the “back forty,” and I can’t wait until it germinates. Clover, as the Gentle Reader probably knows, attracts bees like Hip-Hop does fucktards. The more bees I can get near the garden, the better, for obvious reasons.
Looking at some of the lawns around here, I’m amazed that people apparently prefer spending money to planting sensibly. It’s as if they select groundcovers, trees, shrubs, etc., solely for their perceived ornamental value, rather than for function.
To these bloodshot eyes, nothing more closely resembles Death eating shit in a truckstop men’s room than a sorry clump of discolored, drought-stricken nandinas, in a sea of burnt, over-mowed fescue, so I really don’t understand it.
Certainly, I could have opted for a lawn of fescue, centipede, Bermuda, etc, but why? The dead, compacted areas on the lawn are the result of poor Ma Bean mowing it while it’s wet, in the first place – and that’s exactly what I want to discourage. As the two varieties of clover we chose for the front lawn don’t grow any higher than 3-4” there’s really no need to mow. Ergo, the poor lawn will get a bit of recovery time. Clover also teaches compacted soils how to “behave,” attracts bees, serves as a “green manure” when plowed under, chokes out many weeds, and shades the soil, thereby conserving moisture. Kind of a “selling feature” in a drought-prone state…
I’ll allow that it looks a little unorthodox, but “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as the saying goes.
When I’d finished that, I finally got around to planting the two, tiny hazel saplings. That leaves only the pair of chestnut trees, and I’ll be done with this particular shipment – just as the next arrives, as likely as not…
I sincerely hope the hazels do well, as filberts are my favorite tree-nuts, bar none. It’ll be fun dipping them in chocolate, adding them to cookies and quick breads, using them to flavor salad oils or just eating them right out of the shell. And it’ll be fun watching them grow.
Planting trees, as I’ve mentioned before, is something new to me. This isn’t the first time I’ve done it, but it’s the first time I’ve done it in the interest of growing food. In the past, my efforts have been devoted to garden vegetables, nearly all of which (artichokes and asparagus are two notable exceptions) are annuals or biennials grown and harvested as annuals.
Plant, harvest, put in a succession planting, and then do it all over again next season.
This year, things are going to be a little different. Unlike garden vegetables, which are ready to harvest in a matter of weeks or months, there’s no short-term payoff with fruit and nut trees. Realistically speaking, even the fastest growing of them won’t bear for 2-5 years, so this is definitely a long-term investment.
In the cases of the chestnuts and the hickories I’ve ordered, I won’t live to see them reach full size. Once again, Conal Gillespie’s column in the January, 2008 issue of The Ulster Scot comes to mind: “Fer fowk at set oaks ir ither hardwud trees ken richtly hoo hit’ll bae thair gran’ weans at’ll get the guid o’ thae trees, fer thaim at set thaim wul bae lang deid afore the trees ir baag.”
(“For folks who set oaks or other hardwood trees know very well that it’ll be their grandchildren who benefit from the trees, for those who set them will be long dead before the trees are big.”)
As I’ve “nae weans o’ mae ain,” and am unlikely ever to have any, “A dinnae ken wha’ll get the guid o’ thaim” (Hopefully, I’ve written that correctly. The dialect’s not at all difficult to read, provided that one is reasonably familiar with Lallans-proper, but writing it is a wee smidgen tricky), and don’t particularly care – as long as someone does.
Many of my cousins are still very young, and one of them has a son of her own. Perhaps he’ll be the one “at’ll get the guid o’ thaim.” Perhaps – assuming that we don’t go straight from police state to radioactive, post-World War III wasteland – some kid, born in a better, more civilized age will. The exact identity of the ultimate beneficiary aside, I can go to my grave secure in the knowledge that I planted and nurtured them – that they’re my contribution to posterity.
Distant posterity, I might add. The vast majority of the kids (anyone under 30, to my mind) I meet in this sick, pathetic age of ours are someone’s posterity in the literal sense, but are more accurately described by the word “posteriors” – horses’ posteriors, to be exact. The only way in which I could imagine (or want) them benefiting from said trees is by climbing them and falling from the higher boughs – thereby breaking their necks and removing themselves from the gene pool.
However pleasant such thoughts, they bring me no closer to achieving my goal -- restoring some measure of beauty and order to the property. That’s up to Maggie and me, and we’re seeing to it, bit by bit.
The project we began in earnest during the first week of February is finally starting to pay off, which makes it all worthwhile. However heartsick I may have been over the condition of the lot when we began this project, seeing the results is the perfect medicine for said melancholy. The hill, which we seeded during late February, is now covered with a mixture of lush, young grasses. The very sight of the tiny blades – all quite healthy and of a brilliant green – peeping out from their cover of straw mulch suggests the arrival of spring to heart, as much as to the eye.
The blossoms on the trees and shrubs – many of which have been completely neglected for the last two years -- serve to amplify the suggestion, and promise (truthfully, one hopes…) more to come.
And so there was.
Maggie and I spent St. Paddy’s attending to the most daunting task to date – reseeding the remainder of the property, 1.5 acres, all told. As most commercial, pre-emergent fertilizers are too harsh for my tastes (and probably would have killed the seed), I contented myself by broadcasting Ironite (1-0-0) over the lot, and then spreading two bags of granular dolomitic limestone.
Owing to the sheer size of the property, this took nearly two hours and my arm, even two days later, is still shrieking in protest and darkly hinting that it intends to secede from my torso. While I did this bit of “grunt work,” Maggie attended to the grueling task (snicker…) of planting the rest of her strawberries. Ah, the joys of being a guy…
At any rate, shortly after noon, we were able to see to the remainder of the reseeding.
Using clover as a groundcover for poor or clay soils was my idea, but as it happens, not an original one. The planting instructions that came with the seed indicated that the notion occurred to someone else (hardly surprising – if I can think of it, so can others) long ago, and that it is, in fact, a well-established practice. Be that as it may, I’ll still be the only guy in the neighborhood with a lawn of shamrocks – planted on St. Paddy’s no less.
Even though, as stated, the use of clover was my idea in the first place, I’m catering to the aesthetic preferences of two women. It was therefore inevitable that Maggie would have some say in the exact choice of seed. With a little advice and research from Yours Truly, she selected “Mammoth Red” and “White Dutch” clover for the front lawn, and “Ladino” for the back.
We spread the Ladino together, breaking the yard up into sections and dividing them between us. When it came time to plant the front, though, I learned that Maggie had a few ideas of her own.
Digression time: This is for all you guys out there. However large one’s vocabulary, one quickly comes to realize that in such situations; only two words -- “Yes, dear” -- are appropriate. End digression.
We planted the bulk of the lawn with the “White Dutch”, but with an additional twist: Maggie opted to sow a ten-foot-wide “picture frame” of “Mammoth Red” along the edges.
It’ll be interesting to see what it looks like by midsummer.
We spent yesterday racing against time (and the oncoming rains) to get our crucifers in. We put in a total of 49 plants: various cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and Bok Choy, and are hoping that by mulching heavily, we can keep the soil cool enough to “trick” the plants into heading instead of bolting.
Since we had a few feet of tilled ground left over, I put in a couple rows of spinach, Swiss chard, beetberries, kohlrabi, radishes, turnips, rutabagas, and even a few sugar beets, just for shits and giggles. It might be a bit late in the season (especially for Georgia – I prefer to plant these particular crops in February or the first few days of March, but it’s simply been too wet so far), but we’ll see what happens. If the plantings fail, I’ll just yank ‘em out in April, replace ‘em with tomato and pepper seedlings, and grow a fall crop of each.
When Green Hell is actually green again, I’ll take a few photos, and then “post’n’boast.”
Until then, I’’ll just get back to my Chaucer, and hope “that April with his showres soote” doesn’t disappoint me…
Take care.
