Severe Weather Alert

There are currently four hummingbirds fighting over some sugar water inside of an upside down plastic bottle.
It's cute baby squash season, and the farm is swimming in dough. I'm up early to pick - the embryonic squash still have the blossoms attached and I like to get them in before the sun hits. It's just me and the squash out there - occasionally an early honey bee - and the sun comes up over the mountain east of Harold's farm. The little squashes are arranged head/toe/head/toe in the smallest produce boxes I can find, which are then stacked up in the cooler.
All goes on the bamboo tray - the special bamboo baby squash tray - in the center of the table at market.
That's when the hordes descend. I'd never been next to the epicenter of a descending horde. Then I started to grow cute baby squash.

Madness (Updated)

What a difference, as they say.
(Or, perhaps, this is just one more deja vu.)
A day later, and the long greenhouse is purlined and has side rails ready to anchor a giant plastic sheet.
It all went (back) together quite well. I drilled a few new holes in places where the pipes did not quite want to line up, and bent a few pipes that seemed to be asking for it. I ended up cutting a few that seemed too long, and wished that a few were a few inches longer. Nonetheless, if you just glance at it, from far away, it looks like a greenhouse. When you get closer, it still looks like a greenhouse, just kinda wavy and curvy. When you get up real close to it, and look it up and down, it looks like a third hand greenhouse that got squashed in a blizzard, but you can find no reason why it would not grow vegetables.
I, in fact, walked away from it as night fell with a tremendous amount of confidence.
We've done it again.

Madness

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
-Someone

I first thought I would save myself the trouble of posting by reprinting something from a previous winter.
Then I decided: No. Let's have one more go 'round!
It's winter and I'm (re)building a greenhouse.
This is the long one near the road, the one that got squashed in the Christmas blizzard year before last. The deja vus in rebuilding a greenhouse are too many to keep track of.
Lining up these two pipes. Again.
Clearing the weeds from this area. Again.
Wiggling the pipe and hearing water slosh around underground. Again.
Running out of the right size bolt and needing to go all the way to town. Familiar.
Wondering who's gonna help me stretch plastic and if it's gonna be a windy day. I have been lucky but I have also been very very unlucky on this count.
Nonetheless I have not the time for such reflections, for I must start seeds soon and thus the greenhouse must be built.
The nice thing about building things out of scrap is that you don't really expect it to last. You just want it to get you through a season or two.

Elixers For Sale. Cheap.

Dare I?
Dare I order lavender plugs, say, from a quaint little herb nursery on the Olympic Peninsula or the Oregon Coast or outside of Brattleboro? Tiny little sprigs packed twenty or fifty to a tray, their little roots just forming and their whole lives ahead of them? I could have my choice of varieties: mysterious hybrids from the Mediterranean coast, native varieties enjoyed by Pliny himself, medicinal varieties guaranteed to mend a thousand ailments, and, alas, varieties that do not come true to seed.
They are replicated only from cuttings, cutting that trace a lineage through mother plant after mother plant straight back to the old country.
I've grown English lavenders from seed. Wonderful varieties like Munstead, Hidcote, Vera. Perfectly wonderful little plants covered in sweet smelling blossoms. Happy little plants that do everything a person would want of a lavender. They are varieties that are perfect in every way save one: their pedigree.
Namely, they are not Provence.
Provence is the name dropper's lavender.
It is believed to be higher in essential oils. More healthful. More therapeutic.
It is the prized varietal of the cognizenti, the must-have for those knowing themselves to be in the know, and is certain to create a favorable impression on plant vendors when it is asked for in hushed, knowing tones. Every year I have my Provence requesters. Less than once a week. More than once a month. Always answered with a negative. I sweep my hand over the plants I have and list the varieties. Which are always described as "nice" and left unpurchased on the table.
Provence garnered for itself the reputation of being the traditional variety, and is prized by those seeking to buy, for the price of a 4" perennial, an alternate identity. It is the variety for those who wish to believe that the very same plant growing outside their home is the same growing outside homes in France, great bouquets of which are scooped up by elderly peasant woman in kerchiefs and placed into wicker baskets on the front of bicycles. I, sadly, am able to provide my customers with neither the plant nor the costume drama. I'm wondering if I should change.
The backstory of flowers and herbs makes for a large part of their essence, as presentation does the meal. Today's lavender, alas, does not originate in the colorful settings we might wish it did. Plenty comes from the French countryside, but the lavender in your salve or soap or cookie is more likely to have originated in Texas, or Holland, or Japan. It's grown by the acre. Hundreds of acres. The commercially popular varieties change every few years, but the varieties chosen for today's herb farms are not those recommended by medieval herbals or village elders. They are the varieties that are most disease resistant in today's monoculture farming operations. They may not have the richest oil content or the most soothing aroma; they will stand up to mechanical cultivation.
I'm leaning toward growing on a few trays of Provence. They'll be a nice addition to the mix. I don't want to use them as a time machine, though. I don't exactly want a magic herb that will transport me back to the past. I just don't want to live in the present.

1/12/11

The snow is deeper than a stack of seed catalogs.

That’s the lede.

It handily disposed of two obvious subjects: the current winter storm and the annual task of ordering seeds. I am fortunate this year in that the two are synchronized; the deeper the snow gets the more engrossed I become in the seed order.

The list is a general replication of last year’s – but for the higher prices – with a handful of additions and even fewer subtractions. Even so, it takes a few days to go over every item and then a few more to write everything down on an order sheet. (That takes a lot more time than you would think: filling out forms.)

The scene before me as I work is a long sheet of white from my back window rising up to the highest point in the fields. Blank. Utterly empty. Clean.

The same space is represented on a long piece of butcher paper, equally stark and clean to begin with but soon filled with obvious landmarks, field measurements, and then lists of cultivars, noted with planned seeding dates and row lengths.

I look from the paper to the field, from the field to the paper. From the paper to the field.

The catalogs are stocked with nifty images of vegetables. Perfect glossy representations of flawless vegetables.

I look from the catalogs to the fields. From the fields to the catalogs. From the catalogs ….

Hope is a snow covered field. An undisturbed white canvas. A frozen tabla rasa upon which we project our own idea of glossy perfection.

The forecast says it won’t melt for a while.

More Thought Provoking Q & A From the University of Illinois

Q. What is a "potomato?

A. Although both potato and tomato plants can be integrated, the "potomato" (sometimes called "topato") commonly advertised is simply a tomato seed inserted into a potato tuber and planted together, producing both a tomato plant and a potato plant in the same hill. The results are not likely to be particularly successful.

Blackberries

Standing as it does for coercion by the State versus the freedom of the individual, Toryism remains Toryism, whether it extends this coercion for selfish or unselfish reasons. As certainly as the despot is still a despot, whether his motives for arbitrary rule are good or bad; so certainly is the Tory still a Tory, whether he has egoistic or altruistic motives for using State-power to restrict the liberty of the citizen, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liberties of other citizens.
Herbert Spencer
The Man Versus the State, 1884




This isn't about blackberries.
It's about organization, conformity and anarchy.
I have in my position a very detailed plan on the proper planting of strawberries. I have an itemized budget for all materials needed. I have a timeline - a schedule of tasks organized in bullet point fashion.
I have goals.
And I must admit to myself that though this is all of my own doing, it is a result not of my own exemplary work skills but of government intervention. Though I can humor myself into believing that I am, if left to my own devices, capable of such professionalism, the truth is I did this only because I was forced to do so by the state.
I have received an Agricultural Options Grant.
I filled out all the forms and impressed all the important people and wowed all the appropriate committees. I dotted all the i s and crossed all the t s. I tricked them into thinking that I know what I'm doing.
I embark now on a blackberry journey, better prepared for what lies ahead than I have ever been before. I am motivated less by the thought of eventual blackberry pies than I am by the need to complete my stated goals. I'm not excited by the thought of rows of healthy blackberries. I'm afraid of letting down the bureaucracy.
I have to do this. I already filled out the forms.

...the State is but an agency entitled to use power and coercion, and made up of experts or specialists in public order and welfare, an instrument in the service of man. Putting man at the service of that instrument is political perversion. The human person as an individual is for the body politic and the body politic is for the human person as a person. But man is by no means for the State. The State is for man.
Jacques Maritain
Man and the State, 1951

Where Does Your Food Come From? Updated.

Thirsty?
Read this.