Vale of Tiers

Sometimes, a person has to accept less than ideal land.  Since I especially wanted a river of my own, one that would stay out of my house, I had to compromise with a hilly place.  Okay, it's steep.  The front yard is level but shallow.  The gravel road is so close I'd surely choke on road dust if I tried to have a vegetable garden there.

There was a fairly level spot that I planted with tomatoes, but this was not the right year for carrying water up there.  See A Remote Possibility.  Next summer promises to have lots of Sun activity, so I'm back to terracing the garden close to the water faucet.

Down at one of the intermittent stream beds, I found these odd cement cylinders.  Four a day was my limit for carrying them individually up the steep hill to Rosie, the garden tractor. I trust I burned plenty of calories.

Apparently, the cement was poured into plastic forms, which I found I could cut off.  Not a clue as to what they were originally used for, but I had an idea for another short tier at the end of the garden. It didn't seem like much of a slope there, but the precious dirt was slip-sliding away.

Yesterday, the soil was once again, after months of waiting, workable.  Yay!  Tillie seemed to suffer from lethargy, though.  The air filter was clean.  I thought if it was water in the gas, the little tiller would pass it, but it was dogging out.  Guiltily, I admitted that the gas/oil mixture was not the freshest.  Once I swapped it for a new batch, Tillie roared to life and tilled in some of those fabulous cow pies.

Always dictated to by the weather, I had to get the tier in place before rains forecast for tomorrow arrive.  Too much heat and sun made me wary of the enterprise, since I am a shade tree gardener.

The answer was this shade gizmo I rigged up.  The frame was from a Compost Tumbler that had rusted out. The gears that turned the tumbler are now the wheels for this portable shade unit.  A piece of steel siding is the top.

Although I started out doing precision work, leveling the cylinders in all directions, I soon lowered my standards.  Tight together and the same level as the preceding one seemed more than adequate.

There are more of these cement plugs to carry up and put in place, when the heat tapers off a bit. For now, it's a powerful  thirteen-cylinder barricade.  These foot-tall guys look like the tiny offspring of the enormous cement grain bins awaiting barges above the Missouri River in Kansas City.  Here, they look like they are in the garden nursery until they reach transplanting size.

Tonight, when it gets shady, I'll level the soil with Tillie and plant a cover crop for the fall and winter.  The cow pies under the tub can be worked in on the adjacent level, too.

I'm really proud of this dirt.  It started out with topsoil thin on the ground. I added manure, compost, bits of charcoal from the wood stove, egg shells, limestone granules, leaves, topsoil from down at the river and kitchen scraps to achieve this incredible loam.  It's beautiful, which explains why I don't want any of it washing away in the rain. It's mine now and I intend to keep it.

This spring, before the drought kicked in, this little 4x8 foot plot produced some delicious veggies. I got a nice harvest of snow peas, carrots, radishes and turnips.  Later in the summer, it had a bumper crop of deep cracks, but I've removed all traces of  the drought disaster, at least in this one little spot.  Now if it will only rain.

Cow Pies

When we finally got a few days with temperatures under ninety degrees, my spirits revived.  We gardeners have to be outside doing something besides measuring the depth of the cracks in the garden.  I did slide the steel tape measure down a few and got a reading of two feet deep, surely a record.  It looked like some of the cracks might go on to become crevasses.

The soil  was hard as a rock, so no digging, weeding or cultivating was possible.  For every season there is a purpose, so I decided the time was ripe for assembling soil enrichment materials.  However, the drought removed any growing vegetation.

                       The grass everywhere was in this state, gray and dismal.

All summer, I'd been looking at the vacated cow pasture, with an eye to slipping through the barbed wire fence and swiping some of the cow pies.  So when the weather turned from unbearably hot, over a hundred degrees, to just hot, I set out with my big rope tub and turning fork.  Finding a really big dried cow plop, I realized that if you are the sort of person who considers such a thing a treasure, you must accept it about yourself.  I have.

If questioned, I was prepared to argue that I was taking it in trade for all the huge tracks the cows left when they got out and wandered through my place.  I could show them exhibits.  Anyway, no one seemed to notice.  Over several days, I got rather a lot and spread it over the garden in anticipation of fall rains.

Who knows, maybe this dried cow stuff has lost all its nutrients, but it was lightweight and should provide some organic material to be tilled in.

In my gardening life, I've shoveled a lot of manure.  When I had the dairy goats, I could load the big manure spreader with goat droppings and straw bedding in a few hours.  Later, when I lost the farm, I gardened in the small town where I lived before finding this place.  I was not above begging horse manure, even llama toidies.

A few days ago, this area was blessed with two inches of rain, the most we'd had at once in a long while. I was actually able to pull a few weeds in the iris bed.  Soon, I'll be able to till in the cow pies.  Life is good.

Heard Through the Grapevine

Checking for ripe grapes, I tried to look nonchalant while actually hanging around, listening.

Summer sounds are so different from those in springtime, when all nature is the first blush of youth. Gone is all the twittering between the birds, perhaps for fear of litigation.

A field sparrow trilled its beautiful song, but gave out with only the first few bars and ignored the repeat sign. In springtime, it was the sound track of my life.  Gone now, like good radio stations.

Where are the robins? With the heat and drought, worms have vanished from their menu.  I believe the robins all met for iced tea at Denney's and decided to take advantage of the off-season migration specials. While I was hiding out in the AC, they slipped out of town.  Even now, they are having coffee in cool Newfoundland.  They do that disappearing act every year at this time.  We don't notice because they leave in small groups and fly under the radar.

Some mockingbirds are seen, but they, too, have stopped serenading for mates.  They used up their huge repertoire and are waiting for other songs to imitate. They do not fear copyright infringement litigation.

                                                        A Shriek in the Night
When I was out stargazing, the stillness was broken by an unidentified bird, not  a whippoorwill.  It sounded as if it had completely lost its mind.  Perhaps it was a form of heatstroke or heat-induced hysteria.  A person so rarely has the opportunity to hear a bird have a nervous breakdown.  Okay, it could have been a screech owl.

                                                                Spanish Frogs

Not being a nature photographer, this was the best shot I could get of a frog hopping over the milweed-covered pond.  The frogs only jump when I walk along the shore and it is hard for me to take the picture while walking, because then the camera would be moving.  I guess they are Spanish frogs because they sound like they are using castanets.

One evening at dusk, there was such a doleful sound coming from down by the pond that I almost rushed down to help someone in distress.  Then I heard it again.  Now I understand where the expression "croaked" came into being. It was pretty scary.

                                                   Shrill Voices
Then there are the insects that make me think my ears are ringing.  Or maybe they leave my ears ringing. These are the locusts and other emitters of high-pitched sounds.  The noise is just within the range of human hearing, unfortunately.  It seems I can hear them even after they've stopped piercing the air with all that shrill droning.

                                                Back to the Grapevine
I got to thinking about what they say about eavesdroppers, that they never hear anything good about themselves. I imagined a locust leading the chorus, saying, "You cicadas and crickets need to come in more on that last bit.  Louder!  I can still hear her playing Santa Lucia on her infernal accordion."