Down By the Riverside

At last, there was a break in the bitter cold. Lissa and I played Lewis and Clark. Beau wandered across the mostly frozen river to the far shore. We did not, since a serviceable bridge was in sight.

While it was cold, I went out a couple of times a day to feed the chickens and fill the bird feeders. Alarmist warnings on the weather radio would have people believe that venturing out would result in instant frozen faces. I explained to a friend that it would only result if a person was immobile, say stuck in a snowbank.

Folks in the northern states and Canada get out all the time in the winter, much more than we do here in Missouri, and they seem to not only survive but thrive.

I did stay inside on a particularly cold day when grandchildren Molly and Jason went sledding. I had a cough and the snow wasn't really great. Izzy and I sat by the fire and drank coffee like wimps..

When Izzy was a baby, in 1967,we lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, a place that was really cold, sixty below zero. We went outside lots. When we went to watch the dogsled races on the always uncleared main street, we had to step into the stores occasionally to warm up not ourselves but the camera batteries. That day, it probably was only thirty below zero. Our faces didn't freeze. I learned to make mukluks (footwear seen above left) but was glad to leave such an inhospitable climate. It was not a gardeners' paradise.

Back to the present, Lis spotted some clear bags of leaves dumped alongside the exit ramp on her way here. We drove there, backed down the never-congested ramp and got them for my garden.

"Another fun Mother-Daughter outing," she said, assuring me that the worms would be very happy to have the leaves for dessert after I gave them a rich meal of chicken poop seasoned with wood ashes.

It's That Time Again

Anyone who has been reading my blog for years knows what I do in January. Nothing new here. I think about gardens. I make plans. I dream of having a greenhouse. I find myself singing, "It's the most wonderful time of the year."

Many seed catalogs came before Christmas, but a self-imposed rule is I save them for the boring days of January. Any month that follows such feasting and fun family gatherings would seem flat. I count on the seed catalogs to cheer me up. I believe the print on those pages is treated with a contact chemical that forces readers to make grandiose garden plans. Once again, I forgot to don surgical gloves before handling them.

This is where I check my hopes for years past, in order to plan on crop rotations (never exactly right) and varieties that I must have. It's good to have a plan, even if many of the plants and seeds didn't wind up where I put them on paper. I blame that on factors of soil condition and hazy memory.

Graph paper with big squares have introduced a touch of reality to my plans. One square equals one square foot. My garden is tiny by comparison to I when had a farm with a 90 x 90 foot garden. In those days, I had a family of helpers/eaters, so I don't need that much space now.

Next, I got out all my big shoe boxes of saved seeds. I'll compare them to the seed viability charts and decide what I can use this year. This mental exercise will either keep my brain functioning like a well-oiled machine or cause me to lose my mind completely.

It doesn't help that seed companies change their offerings from year to year. I had a note to self to get Sorbet Violas from Stokes this year, but didn't find it listed as one of the many varieties available. Wah!

Then there are the seed orders themselves. There's no rushing them, because it will be March at the earliest for starting seeds indoors. I wouldn't mind having plants be nearly full grown by the time I set them out, but I don't have much room under lights, horizontally or vertically, and potting soil is rather dear. My young granddaughter Molly actually started corn under lights just for the heck of it last year. We gardeners get a little desperate, a little crazy, waiting for spring.

Now is the time for me to go through all my digital pictures of last spring and summer. I took lots of shots of things growing and in bloom then just so I could have hope in bleak midwinter. Also, pics show where I actually planted things instead of where I planned to plant them.

This picture revealed a few square feet of grasses that I could get rid of and plant to perennials. I am ready once again to do battle with the established and fiercely determined grasses.

Rushing outside to check the area, I rubbed my gloved hands with glee at the prospect of a bit more room to grow flowers. The ground in question had traces of the last snow, but the clumps of grass still had green bases. "Just try and get rid of us, " they seemed to threaten, sinking their awful roots deeper into the frozen dirt beneath them.

So, the Grassland War continues for the tenth year here. The catalogs showed a flame weeder as a possible weapon to carry out my scorched earth campaign. It  looked appealing until I had a mental picture of lands where the grasses were burned off in early spring. A few weeks after the burning, the grasses appeared like green whiskers on the blackened ground. Burning did them a world of good. Also, my place is on the edge of miles of riparian woods, inaccessible to fire trucks.

My daughter Izzy is a chemist who used to work for the EPA. She has warned me against many appealing grass-killers in the catalogs. One that claimed to be organic caught my eye, as an orange life raft might appear to a person treading water in the mid-Pacific. However, a Google search revealed the product in question had a few toxic effects on skin, eyes and breathing.

My daughter Lissa's cardboard cure seems to be something that has worked for me in the past, so I'll use that again, to smother the grass in its sleep.

With all the colorful flower and veggie pictures, mine and the catalogs, hope springs eternal. This will be the year I keep the marauding grasses from taking over, don't kill the rhubarb, get my mulching act together, give things enough room and have no bugs competing for my dinner. It will not be unbearably hot and humid, either.