A River of My Own

I once owned a smaller river, but it was like some cats I've had; it didn't respect my home.

It took many years, but I finally found a bigger, wilder river. This time, I made sure the house was well above the 500-year flood plain.

This new and improved river meanders in huge curves through farmland. Along the banks are tall sycamore, silver maple and hickory trees. All the while, the river is trying to get at their roots and sweep them away.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

High above the water a little ways downriver is an impressive bridge, built in 1988. During the infamous All-Rivers Uprising in 1993, logs jammed between the steel girders. They are still there, mute testimony to a staggering amount of water.

In the spring floods since I moved here in 2007, the roiling brown water has not gotten anywhere near that high. The spring thaw sends huge uprooted trees floating past. It's exciting for me to stand on the bridge and feel the shudder as debris hits the massive cement supports. The railing is altogether too short, about two feet, but I can never resist looking over to see the moment of impact.

From my shore, I see the collision but must wait for over two seconds for the report of the thud to reach me.

This river flows into the Missouri River. Each mile downriver from here, it gets bigger and more impressive, deserving the name Grand River. Where I am, there are shifting sandbars that keep it from being navigable. That's all to the good, keeping noisy boats from my domain.

On Thin Ice

These last few bitterly cold nights have frozen the river along the shore. My coon hound, Beau, made me uneasy by venturing out on the thin ice and crossing to the other side. He must be smarter than I thought, because he crossed down by the bridge, where it is the most shallow. When the river is low like it is now, water flows over the rocks there and makes a pleasant waterfall sound. Somewhat like a dormant volcano, the river is waiting for a little more temperature to do something dramatic.

My Starter River

When I lived on my first river, it was during those record-breaking cold winters of the seventies and eighties. In springtime, the break-up of the river was spectacular. I would take a lunch and sit on the rip-rap in the mild spring air.

The ice had frozen to a thickness of over a foot. There was a bridge downriver there, too, a smaller one, closer to the water. The ice and debris would get bottlenecked there and back up around the bend to where I sat waiting for the drama. From upriver, entire trees floated down to my vantage point. They hit the jumbled brown ice, dove under it and shot up into the air like breaching whales.

It was an unforgetable spectacle, with the sound made by the ice and trees slamming together. One of those times when the earth really shook.

Although those few days of break-up were the high point of my river-watching year, I could never coax anyone into experiencing it with me.

When I mentioned it to my farmer neighbor, who'd lived down by the bridge for decades, he told me that he also spent hours looking on as the ice broke up. He laughed, then said, "But if you tell anyone, they think you're crazy!"

The Grasslands War

The Envelope, Please

This year, my big seed order goes to Pinetree Garden Seeds. They have the most complete selection of my favorite seeds, low prices and reasonable shipping. I know I'll have good results with the vegetables, but it's going to be a war with the grasses to succeed with the flowers. I need to bust some sod first.

Diamonds Are Not Forever

It got down to twenty-four degrees last night. The morning sun showed the brown grass wearing diamonds in its hair. Sparkles of reds, blues, greens and gold winked at me. It was beautiful, but rather like a tiarra on a wild hog.

It's the look of the brown grass that spurs me on to think I will be able to get past it to the dirt to plant the flowers. The grass isn't dead, it's dormant, biding its time like the Wicked Witch. When warmer days arrive, it will choke out everything but dandilions and chicory.

Fescue-Wrestling

In my book of weeds, fescue is the biggest thug of all. It's a non-native grass started by cattlemen. The cows across the road love it. I hate it. Fescue actually favors clay soil. It survives our cold winters and hot, humid summers. Cows, those big lardos, can walk all over it and it cares not.

A recurring daydream I have is me using a giant flame thrower to prepare the soil for the flower beds. It's a very theraputic image, until I remember that fescue comes back even better after a fire.

Fescue and other grasses do serve a useful purpose in controlling erosion. But to the gardener wanting to plant anything on its turf, it is The Enemy.

Fescue forms an impenetrable carpet of thick clumps. Even jumping on the shovel, I can barely slice into it. It can be mowed down to the ground, but then tillers buck at the thick roots and clay combo.

Battle Strategies

Since I'm an organic gardener, toxic herbicides are out of the question. The only thing that has worked for me has been smothering it. Even so, it's so tough that it took most of the growing season without light to kill it. I've had good results with a tarp in the garden and bits of plywood elsewhere.

Last year, I created a cottage garden in one corner of the vegetable plot, the low end with all the topsoil. Even though the dirt has been tilled repeatedly, bits of grass roots are still in the soil. They are always ready to lurch to life like an almost-dead villian in a scary movie.

I Will Never Be Defeated

Glancing up from my nearly-completed seed order, I see the grass out there, lying low. I believe it is saying, "Sure, you can plant all those seeds, over my dead body." It is sullen and intractable. "Just you try and get rid of me, you fool," it snarls.

However, I will be victorious. In last summer's skirmishes, I gained valuable ground, over twelve square feet, at least.

Nothing So Rare as a Day in January

Here in the Midwest, we occasionally get an unseasonably warm day at this time of year. Talk about a mid-winter break. It's been sixty this week. Usually in January the temperature struggles to get above freezing, with lots of snow thrown in to make spring seem light years away.

Any day when the ground is not frozen is a day for some sort of gardening activity. So for the last two days I've been digging up dirt and spreading it on my whimsical garden.

I think about dirt a lot. Now referred to as soil, it is a subject of endless fascination and struggle for me.

Clay is soil but it isn't really dirt. Dirt is loam.

Since taking possession of the badly-eroded garden plot, I have become a scavenger of topsoil. When the river went down after the spring flood, it left behind a deep layer of mud. Somebody else's topsoil then dried to a very fine silt that was easy to shovel into two buckets. Not so easy was staggering up the bank with them to Rosie and the garden cart. Many buckets were required to fill the cart; my arms felt longer.

Making Amends to Mistreated Soil
I did a lot of research about techniques for clay soil. Some suggestions were unacceptable, like moving to someplace else.

I was annoyed to read about a man who transformed some hard clay into luscious loam with the help of a cadre of volunteers. Who couldn't?

Similarly, the French Intensive method with all that horse manure would not work for me here. I have no pickup truck. Paying for someone to deliver horse manure is not in my budget.

Raising earthworms for their castings was another option, but there was something about getting started with them that sounded like opening a can of worms.

I had to get realistic and work on a few square feet at a time. Therefore, what I did was slip through the barbed wire fence and snitch some dried cow pies from the neighboring field. I didn't think they would be missed.

On My Way to the River
With the current spell of sunny warm weather, I was off to get more instant topsoil down at the river. Passing a big oak not far from the house, I stopped to check the undergrowth. There was lots of brushy stuff that had held leaves in place for years. All I had to do was hack out the grape vines, buckbrush and poison ivy roots. I emerged in two days with four Rosie carts of friable soil that smelled wonderfully woodsy.

Up at the garden, I dumped the bucket of kitchen compost materials, formerly known as stinky garbage, onto the clay. Then I spread the buckets of dirt on top.

I am having such satisfaction rebuilding the soil that sometimes I fear I will never plant any veggies. I'll merely keep adding amendments and mixing them in with Tillie, my Mantis tiller.

I believe it was better when we called our home Earth instead of the current The Planet. Earth is close at hand, underfoot, and is synonymous with soil. The Planet is viewed from outer space. We don't live in the blue part.

How I Came to Have a Whimsical Garden

Formerly, I was a farmer-type gardener, putting in long wide rows. There was no whimsy about it. Nothing cute.

Then I moved to this hilly place. The previous owners had a garden on the one relatively flat spot. There was plenty of slope, allowing most of the topsoil to wash off, leaving clay subsoil on the top end. I suspect they ran the tiller to maximize runoff.

Stuck with the stupid slope, I had to build some terraces or give up having fresh vegetables. Money was a non-existant object, so I had to use what was on hand. Those folks, whom I will call The Foulers, left plenty of stuff behind. Most was trash, but there was a pile down behind one of the outbuildings that I call My Home Depot, an endless source of iffy but free building materials.

I dragged out some long pieces of aluminum soffit and galvanized chain link fence top railing poles. Cutting the poles with a hacksaw was not the work of an instant. I also found some short lengths of rebar and other rusy metal rods that might work.

The best location to stop the topsoil exodus was diagonal to the garden fence I'd put up earlier. Along a stretched-out string, I pounded the assorted posts at two foot intervals. I installed the aluminum barrier on the uphill side and wired it to the posts. Some of the posts stuck up quite a ways, though. They had the look of Meanies that would poke me in the backside the first chance my back was turned.

What was required was a protective cap of some sort. My son had picked up a big box of clay pots for me at an auction. Upside-down, the pots made great caps, along with some old glass insulators and china bed knobs.

What had started out as a safety precaution took on a life of its own and became a theme. More clay pots went on the tops of the mismatched fence posts. Thus, the various types of fencing that I had used on the periphery of the garden changed from junky to eclectic creations.

Too cute!

The Chain Saw and the Crock-Pot

It's essential for me to plan dinner when I'm going to be doing lumberjack work in the woods. It is a certainty that I'll return to the house with a ferocious appetite. I won't be able to wait while I prepare anything more elaborate than a peanut butter and honey sandwich. The P.B. and H. Sammy isn't the hearty hot meal that I need.

Therefore, before setting out, I fill my trusty Crock-Pot with ingredients for something special. One of my favorites is Arroz con Queso, page 106 in Rival Crock-Pot Cooking.

Returning from my labors, I lift the lid on the slow cooker. As I inhale the delicious aroma, I gratefully ask, "And what has the Little Woman fixed for my supper?"

Chain Saw Grandma

There seems to be some novelty in a woman running a chain saw.  When I bought the current formidable tool, the girl at the farm store checkout said most women were afraid to even touch one.  The people there were staring at me as if I were riding a unicycle.

I didn't mention to her that this was my third chain saw, having worn out the previous ones over the years.  I select one that will not be too heavy for my back.

Why everyone thinks chain saws are guy things is that they are noisy, powerful and dangerous.

In the kitchen, using the electric mixer requires that you not try and lick the beaters while they are running. You just have to be mindful of what you're doing.  If you can make brownies, you can run a chain saw.

My earlier problem with the chain saws was I had a terrible struggle in starting them.  Then my son Chris, who cuts most of the wood for me with his bigger, more powerful saw, showed me how to slip a two by four into the handle and step on it while pulling the cord.  After that, the worst hurdle was over; I could spend many happy hours cutting firewood.

                                                   I am Not a Feller
Although I have cut down small trees with my little chain saw, I'm not a good feller of trees.  I prefer to cut limbs that are already down.  I love to watch Chris, from a safe distance, as he brings down a huge tree.  He cuts up the big parts and I drive them up to the electric log splitter.

                                           Whistler's Mother in the Morning
To ease into an afternoon of running the saw, I eat brunch and knit for at least an hour.  The light is good by the front window then.  I imagine the mailman notices me sitting there in my rocker.  Perhaps he has an image of me as a somewhat sedentary little old lady. 

My granddaughter Carolyn, who is fourteen, loves to tell people that her Grammie knits socks and runs a chain saw.

The Inertia Kid

A body at rest tends to stay at rest, which is why it is so hard for me to get outside and do non-gardening chores like cutting wood with my chain saw.

Consequently, I have to think of the job in such a way that the first step appears easy.  Thus it is that I fill the saw with gas and chain bar oil before putting it away.  I air up the tires on the cart and Rosie, my lawn tractor.

I have to have in mind specific wood to cut.  Usually, it's a promising find that I discovered on a long walk around my ten acres.

Hickory Acres is the name I gave to my place, for all the mature nut trees growing here.  I should have called it Hillside Hills, on account of there is hardly a flat spot on the property.

There are several huge sycamore trees growing in the stream beds between the hilly fields.  They occasionally drop a nice limb, my current goal.  The limb was caught up in some grape vines until I pulled it down a couple of days ago.  All was in readiness.

These limbs are a favorite of mine, with their interesting knobby growth that turns pink in places after they die.  Sycamores are beautiful trees, with their white bark and little balls of seeds that shower down in early spring.

I am not a tree-hugger, on account of poison ivy, but I do talk with them and give them a little pat with my leather gloves.  I believe they know how I appreciate these limbs for my wood stove fire.  I always say thank you.

The plan was to zip up the hill to the next field, get the limb cut up, put it in the cart and bring it back, sort of an assault tactic, the way I shop.  Get it and get out. 

I had mowed this spot between the fields before, but I didn't keep it up last fall.  Now, Rosie's wheels spun on the thick clumps of fescue.  After several unsuccessful runs, I disconnected the cart.  That let me mow the path to above the sycamore, then back down to fetch the cart.

After that, it was merely a matter of fighting my way through the greenbriar, blackcap and rose thorns to cut up the prize limb.  Carrying the wood back uphill to the cart gave me some healthy exercise.  My hefty steel-toed boots added to the workout, as did the sneaky grape vines that clutched at my ankles.

From there, it was easy to find other limbs to cut.

For me, a late start is essential.  The other side of inertia, the body in motion part, is also true.  Once I'm outdoors, I never want to come back inside until the light starts to fade.  In winter, the sun sets around five, so a start at one in the afternoon and finishing up at four o'clock is perfect for the Inertia Kid.

An Odd Christmas Tradition

Years ago, when my children were young, a peculiar Christmas tradition was started.  After the presents were all opened and things quieted down, my older daughter Isabelle and I opened the new seed catalogs.  We lived on a farm then, a farm that was lost in the flood of 1993.  Let's not speak of that heartbreak.

We gathered all our seed packets around us, in front of the wood stove, and made gardening plans.  We checked our notebooks for previous planting successes, if any.  With a 90 by 90 foot garden of fabulous loam enriched by goat manure and straw bedding, it was hard to be restrained.  It was slightly more than a grandiose idea, which resulted in canning and freezing enough to feed many families for a couple of years.

One year, we were especially profligate with the tomato starts, speaking of a dozen of this and that variety, until we wound up putting in eighty plants for our family of five. 

We were to learn that being comfortable in front of the fire turned out to be a lot different than weeding in the blazing summer sun.  This lesson is forgotten annually.

Izzy  is a mom now and we each have our gardens.  She was the only one of my three children to inherit the unfortunate addictive gardening gene.  My other daughter, Lissa,  and my son Chris cannot stand the smell of cooking tomatoes. 

The seed catalog project starts for me on Christmas Day and continues unabated for an indefinite time, during which I fill out orders and stick  Post-Its on pages.  Even though I won't start any seeds until February at the earliest, it is a very important time for me.  I must not be alone, because that's when they send the catalogs.

This is Where I Came In

My earliest memories are of living with my mom at my grandparents' house.  I later learned that it was during the War.

Today, we are bombarded with every known or imagined risk to children, and yet we hear nothing about the dangers of exposing the very young to greenhouses.

So it was that I was allowed to go next door to Mr. G's greenhouse, where I believe I was exposed to greenhouse microbes, some the size of BB's, that were to infect me all of my life.

Mr. and Mrs. Glascock were our elderly neighbors.  He made his living growing things.  I don't remember much about her, because she was indoors a lot, perhaps cooking.  She was nice, too.

Years later, my Grandma Belle told me that she would come to fetch me and find me quite naked, a little blue-eyed, towheaded Child of Nature playing in the greenhouse.  It was warm in there, with the moist air smelling of peat and sawdust.  Clothes served no function at all.

Perhaps Mr. G regarded me like a stray cat that followed him around.  He busied himself with filling little pots with soil, his old brown hands sounding dry against the clay.

This was no hobby greenhouse.  It was magnificent.  There were long cement tables for the pots of flowers.  The sawdust aisles felt so good on my bare feet.

I don't remember the naked episodes, but I do recall, when I must have been a bit older, he let me turn the huge wheel to crank the roof glass vents open.

Sitting on a stool in the small cellar adjoining the house, I watched him make sprays of roses.  He wrapped them with wires and green tape, while he smoked his pipe.  We didn't speak much.  Then he put the exquisite floral arrangements in his old gray panel truck, probably to deliver them to funeral homes.

After such a childhood, all hope fled for me to accept a normal, greenhouseless life.

Oh, sure, I grow plants under lights, but the longing won't leave me for a tropical shelter where I can go in February and start the growing season.  It's an incurable condition.  Those blessed microbes!

Winter Solstice

Tonight's the night!  I'm sure all gardeners feel this inexorable pull toward springtime.  Back to Life and Living!  Yay.

This is where denial is such a handy tool.  To say that it is the first day of winter is to miss the point entirely.  The earth, after some hesitation, will slowly start to tilt back towards the sun for us in the northern hemisphere.  Too bad for people in the southern hemisphere; they've had their turn.

Every day is a day closer to spring, that most marvelous time of year.

How wonderful that some astronomer or scientist somewhere knows the exact time this will happen tonight.  It's a mathematical certainty, along with when the moon will rise and set.  I leave it to those guys.

Having checked the Old Farmer's Almanac, I am counting down the hours.  The wine is chilling.

I am saving the rest of the celebration for Christmas Day, when I break out the new seed catalogs.