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Friend of the world
“If you’re a friend of The World, you’re an enemy of God”, my Grandma Trapp used to say. She was a frighteningly intense woman of strong belief and an unforgiving nature. I feared her like little else but was also attracted to her strange intensity for the spiritual that I found lacking in my own nuclear family. We were frequent visitors to her home and when I was 9 my dad had a big ranch house built next to the family farm and we were neighbors.
As idle hands are the devil’s workshop I largely tried to steer clear of her or I’d easily get pulled into some serious chores or at least a serious scolding for my sins were multitude. I wore shorts and was disrespectful of the Sabbath. My work effort was less than salutary and I was wasteful in many things. I had not lived through the Great Depression where the rag men came looking for scraps of cloth for their mysterious purposes. My life was one of leisure that surely was spoiling my immortal soul.
I didn’t attend church but for some reason was drawn to Camp Meetings and Revivals, probably for the road trip. Grandma would drive and preach on the wondrousness of The Lord, hands frequently leaving the wheel for halleluiahs and hosannas, God be praised. The family joke was that the fact she hadn’t wrapped the old Buick around a tree proved the existence of a watchful and caring Savior.
The sermons always delivered by intense and scary old white men with drawls and the occasional shooting of spittle were awe inspiring and terrifying. They were all on sin and Godlessness and apostasy and other cool sounding words that I stepped cautiously around if not understanding. At almost everyone I walked my sinful little self to the altar to beg for forgiveness and promise to do better. Promises forgotten before I finished the walk from her house to mine.
Grandma lived in an old farm house, dusty from the coal furnace. The entire upstairs was filled floor to ceiling with clutter with only walkways. She was incapable of throwing anything away. She didn’t pay for the rural trash service we did but would bring over her trash once a month or so, a coffee can of bottle lids and such. Everything else was saved, re-used, recycled, or burned in the coal furnace.
Grandma also was a devoted organic gardener, though she never used that term. She just gardened as she’d been taught. Her big money maker was the asparagus patch. She left some to go to seed and it seemed like such an easy piece of work. The Popster says their was metal wreckage, can’s old car frames and the like, buried under the patch. That asparagus does best in poor rocky soils and that was their way of duplicating such in the rich black soils of my childhood.
Grandma also read Organic Gardening magazine, and because I have been a literary addict since the age of 4, I did too. Wasn’t aught else to read at Grandma’s excepting the Bible. I became intrigued by double digging even though I wasn’t able to put it into practice until my teen years when we moved into town and I got charge of the garden.
After we lost the house in Ida and the 9 acres of the family farm to the twin destroyers of rising diesel and deregulated shipping rates we moved into town. Ultimately we settled on Roeder Street and I put in the little garden bed behind the garage, mostly for tomatoes. The first year their was 4-6 inches of top soil but after close to 20 years of double digging the top soil went down two feet. I wish Grandma had lived longer, she died in my early 20s, when I was too young to look past the fire and brimstone and see the wealth of knowledge of days gone by. Nonetheless I learned a trick or two and for that I am thankful.
spring has sprung
so spring has been off to a great start. my friends jillian and mark have been visiting for a long weekend from maryland and st louis respectively and it has been nice hanging out. eric had a great birthday party on the equinox itself. we had a campfire and some pretty funny banter. today i went to brazito to a wild flower nursery and laid down a chunk of change. i got some paw paw trees and a bunch of wild flowers. i am trying to rehabitate the flower bed in the south east corner that is super shady from the neighbors privacy fence. today i shoveled in about 6 gallons of compost and planted some wild ginger, spider wort, and jacob’s ladder. i also planted some bachelor buttons and marigold seeds around them to fill in the space for this year so i could plant the perennials further apart and give them room to expand. the compost seems to have come out pretty good, though there is a bit of a smell. i still have almost 2 full flats to get in plus some research to do. i am also hoping to get in some onions and perhaps some cabbage and brocoli fairly shortly. what about you? how does your garden grow?
daylight stealings time
Tonight the government will be taking an hour of our time, from our sleep time and not our work time of course. They will give it back in the fall but without interest. i like the idea of an extra hours sleep but its the principle of the thing. Its a great example of unintended consequences though. they pushed it up by 3 weeks as part of the energy bill and lo and behold people take the extra hour of daylight and go driving so it uses more energy. its stimulative though, those folks are driving to the mall so they’re not going to change it back.
I got some nice gardening action in, even though i woke up with a headache (sinus turned migraine that ate up better than half the day). i turned up about a quarter of one of the beds. i have been double digging it and it was so much easier than last year when i was busting it out of sod. I shoveled in 100 pounds of sand as my only amelioration. I added a layer of leaves and covered that with 1/4 inch or so of coffee grounds (thank you starshmucks) in the fall and figured that would be fine, since the compost isn’t ready yet and i used up the last of my lama manure over the winter.
I planted carrots (from the Ferry Morse Company) and sowed in radishes right there with them (Ferry Morse ‘champion’ to the south and Livingston’s ‘Crimson Giant’ to the north). The Ferry Morse’s were left over from last year and they did pretty so-so. The carrots didn’t produce much and the radishes both underproduced and got woody. I doubled the amount of sand and it just can’t rain as much as it did last year which i think was the biggest problem. Plus rabbits i presume ate of the carrots at one point. I use hair and beard trimmings to scare off rabbits and i’ll try to be more aggressive on that this year, now that i know rabbits like carrots.
I switched my rows from west to east to north to south and when i got to the south end where i had my carrots and radishes last year i put in more Perry Morse ‘grand rapids’ leaf lettuce, which is doing real well in the cold frame. i am going to have some more thinnings with supper tonight. i read on the seed package you can do the same thing with radishes. oh, its a family tradition to plant radishes and carrots together. the radishes come up quick so you can see where the rows are and they are done by the time the carrots are needing the space. I like to grow things intensively because double digging everything by hand is a hell of a lot of work so i like to pile in as much stuff as possible. Plus i’d like to push the envelope on what you can produce in a backyard. Theres just so many reasons to do so: the cost of organics, producing it in the most local fashion, getting connected with the earth and with the food, a cushion against economic and social turmoil, its pretty, and its a lot of fun.
how does your garden grow? anyone doing anything yet?
meteorological spring
i am so thankful spring is finally here. it was just gorgeous today, sunny in the high 60s. i have been at a convening of the cadre for co-occurring excellence (how’s that for a moniker) for the last 2 days, which was pretty boring but at least got me out of the daily grind and with the nice weather finally broke out of this funk i have been in.
played a game of horse shoes after work and eked out a victory in a back and forth struggle with the popster. he has been a little down himself of late having learned his BP was high again and his new pill spun him. i haven’t been able to be super supportive myself and a bit ago just walked away while he was talking to me. he had followed me outside when i was taking out the compost and was smoking and i am just too fragile to be around it at home where i am vulnerable. on the good side its been 3 1/2 weeks w/o a smoke. i am med and nicotine free and feeling pretty on it. i got my third gift certificate for a pair of shoes for finishing the class. i’m getting quite a collection.
on the gardening front, i thinned out my lettuce and spinach in the cold frame again. they are both doing great and i got enough to top of my store bought lettuce into a pretty nice salad tomorrow night. a few of my crocuses are up so i guess the squirrels didn’t eat them all. a row of the garlic is looking pretty good and there are a handful of spinach coming up from where i winter sown them.
tomorrow and the next day i hope to turn over some soil and get in some more lettuce and spinach and perhaps the carrots and radishes. i have 200 pounds of sand i was weighing the truck down with i am going to split between the root crops and the horse shoe pits and might do that this weekend as well. the compost is not done, looks like at least another month. hopefully it’ll at least be done by may for the main spring planting. a client gave me a box of chemical fertilizer. i think i am going to use it on the shrubs in the front of the house since i don’t have any food crops going out there (except the rhubarb which i think got fried by the sun anyway). no since sending it to the landfill.
Winter Gardening
After sub-zero temperatures sunny and in the 30s seems like a pretty good day. I celebrated it with taking my brush pile and christmas tree to the mulch site. I ran into my buddy Scout scavenging for firewood. We pulled on a good sized branch but never did break it lose from the pile. I did learn i had ripped out the seat of my corduroys, not on the seam at least, but as Scout pointed out i can’t wear them to work anymore. Serves me right for playing in my school clothes, a lifelong habit i’m afraid.
I’ve also been raking and may finish off my second pass since Fall tomorrow. Early in the winter i put in a second compost bin and so am trying to get my first one to finish, hopefully in March, but i would even be happy with May. I had prepped my initial bin for winter by breaking the consistently brown/green mix at 50/50 and topped it off with all the leaves i could stuff in so i would have a place to stick kitchen waste all winter. Also after leaf fall i had to get rid of leaves and had started a leaf pile under the bush honeysuckle. Then i found a half off bin at Westlakes after season and wish i’d kept the really nice mix i had going. Plus i buried the compost so deep i couldn’t really shovel some in to help get the second one going. Even now it is really a bin of leaves with some garbage mixed in then a rea compost pile.
Last weekend i finished putting in a cold frame i think its called. I put four wire hoops up and stretched across plastic held down with rocks and brick. I planted spinach and leaf lettuce. I also planted more tulips and some irises alongside the neighbors giant privacy fence that i got for a dollar. The gardening lady who writes a column for the Tribune had said she had planted some she had gotten on sale and thought it was worth a shot. She was also right in saying even if nothing comes of it its nice to get your hands in the dirt in winter.
tracking snow
i collect weather wisdom. today i heard a new one. on the first day it snows enough where you can see your tracks whatever the day thats how many snowfalls you get that winter. here in como its 30, oh for a day of delay and that one on christmas. personally i look at the squirrels. if there skinny and frisky and not to concerned with impending winter i try not to as well. if they chunk up and stay busy stocking it away i look for a bad one. this year they started out skinny and lazy and i predicted a light one. they’ve chunked up some this fall so i’m changing it to a moderate winter with hopefully more snow than ice. most folks have been calling for a bad winter because we had a mild summer. these folks i think just feel we have to suffer sometime. myrtle, the popster’s dog i share a home with, had her first snow. she liked it. i shouldn’t have been surprised, she’s a skinny little dog with big grizzly bear feet and little beady eyes, she’s made for the snow. it was fun watching her play. i was also relieved she liked the snow. i was afraid she just might prefer to shit in the house until spring. but the fall crops are in, garlic and spinach, and most of the leaves are raked, so let it snow. thats what 1000 piece puzzles were invented four.
a good american
Since I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks i feel an update is in order. It has been a pretty hairy couple of weeks and my down time has shrunk to virtually nil. I’m barely reading, even, and thats usually the last thing to go no matter how busy things get. Mostly I’ve been reading comic books of late. I bought a whole box of them for a dollar and i’ve been working my way through them slowly but surely. I am also reading Summerland by Michael Chabon which is a little disapointing. His The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is one of my favorite books. Its about the early days of comic books, coincidentally enough, and two Jewish cousins who are comics artists and how they deal with Nazis and stuff. Its really great and has some interesting metaphysics talking about Superman (Kane & Schuster’s not Neitchze’s) as a golem. I also really like his newest The Yiddish Policeman’s Union a sort of alternative history where Jewish refugees had been settled in Alaska rather than denied sanctuary and left to the holocaust and a hard boiled Jewish detective is trying to solve the mystery of the murdered messiah. Also metaphysically interesting. Summerland, not so much. There’s too much baseball and the fantasy is a bit cheezy. I’d recommend comic books. Besides not reading and not blogging I’ve been spending a lot of time at the house. I am starting to settle in though I am ashamed to say i haven’t finished even some of the basics of a move in cleaning. I’ve been doing a lot of lawn stuff. Bought a push reel mower which is fun but a lot of work. i also bought a weed whip for the annoying tall grasses the push reel leaves behind. Its not as pretty as the manicured golf green types that surround the place but its better than most hippy lawns and the carbon foot print is a sight better. I have also been steadily turning over ground, the less to mow. I planted lilac bushes (struggling but normal i hear), a persimmon tree, some lillies (looking real sharp), plus a vegetable plot with cucumbers (I opened the last jar of bread & butter pickles to celebrate, when i was a kid we would plant some corn in the center of the hill for shade but this year i am going to try Cosmos), tomatoes (beef steaks – a hybrid), basil, marigolds (repels bugs from the tomatoes) and two rows of carrots and radishes (the radishes come up quick to mark the rows). Tomorrow i hope to put in some okra and i also have summer squash (2 kinds) and something else. I have been real pleased with the soil, its a little clayey but there is some definite topsoil action going on. I also got my compost bin up & running. Its been mostly fun hanging out with dad. It has been a huge struggle with smoking being around it all the time. I had a bad spell and went back on the chantix and am back on track which makes me feel good. It was really work that pushed me over the edge, coming back from Michigan and my cousin’s wedding to driving out at 9:30 at night to see a suicidal client was just too much. I’m becoming a little frayed. Last night i got a call our homeless client getting out of jail, 9:30 at night no place to take him. i let him crash on the floor of the guest room. It was too much to pick up his gear i was storing in the garage and take him out and put him out to camp in the wet somewhere. So had a client here when i went to bed and when i woke. Saw two other’s today, taking them to Oxford House (self run recovery cooperative houses) interviews. One got accepted which will make my life easier as i won’t have to run out to the sticks (styx?) to pick him up every other day. I think i am going to take a comp day on Thursday to make up for it. Working on the house and hanging with dad has made me realize how much energy i put into work (way too much). Nonetheless i am a good american, working in my yard, spending money i don’t have, enjoying the luxuries of 3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a 2 car garage. Last weekend i couldn’t help but think the honored war dead would be proud, for if i can’t buy top of the line appliances just because i don’t have the money than the terrorists will have won.
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