“Way back here, where no one will look, I’ll sign my name to close this book.”

This week, my ex-husband, Neil, passed away. He had not had an easy life the last few years– he had had a series of strokes that left him with less and less brain power, less of who had once been, less patience for the world he was reduced to. He was difficult to deal with and stubborn and insistent on getting his way. He was no longer “Neil”, but someone else in Neil’s body.

This week has been interesting for me as I came to support my sons, cook some meals, wash some dishes, play with my grandson, offer a little advice. I’ve introduced myself as Neil’s first wife a couple of times, but will try harder now to introduce myself as the boys’ mother. I find that I don’t want to be known as an ex-wife — first one or not — as the years I spent as Mrs. Neil were a tad more painful to remember than a 30 year separation should have provided.

Yesterday I was asking Neil’s old friends to help at the funeral– be ushers, pour coffee — and remembering that these people turned their backs on me 30 years ago and chose the abuser’s version instead. There was a note on the newspaper obits page from the very woman who was instrumental in breaking up my marriage– sweetly written, but dang it! I know that the service tomorrow will also be difficult and I’m not looking forward to it. (Well, one doesn’t look forward to funeral services anyway, does one?) hmmmm…

Back at the farm, my kitchen is getting painted without me, the gardens are burning up in 100 degree heat, Kip and my dogs and cats are missing me. I’ll be sorry to go home because it means I won’t see my youngest and his wife and baby for many months. I’ll also be sorry to leave this lushly green state with reasonable summer temperatures. But I also find that this place, which was my home for a third of my life, doesn’t need me any more and I’m thinking that home isn’t so much where you hang your hat, but more where you’re needed. I’m missing home-home.

The final word is to anyone wandering around without a will. DO IT TODAY. This isn’t about you, Bucky, this is so the people you’re leaving behind can get everything sorted out with minimal cost and strain. People do not reason well when they’re mourning. Leave another piece of paper with a list of your accounts — even telephone and cable — and what banks you do business with. Who is your best friend — the one that would come and help your family? And, as Neil did, write a brief history of your life. What would you like to be remembered for? What events made a difference in your life?

Yes, this man made a huge difference in my life — actually two differences — my sons. And for these, I will say goodbye with grace and gratitude.

– Burlington, VT. July 13, 2011

Late? You mean the magic garden and its errant gardener are LATE this year? Egad. Oh my. Whatever are we going to do. Geegollygosh.

Well, I can’t say as the weather has been very helpful. I could also say that I’ve been up to my elbows transplanting plants. I could tell you about the loss of a gardener, cutting us back to just two.  I could also add that with nearly no rain this year, what’s the point. There are lots of reasons and excuses and whyfors and wherehows, but the simple truth is that by the calendar, I’m late getting my peppers and tomatoes in.

Yesterday I planted the second batch of peppers – 240 plus – with the bells planted last week, I’m at 360ish. Only 900 to go! Progress. Tomorrow I’ll try to get another row installed after picking for the Co-op delivery. I’m pretty sure where my limited number of tomatoes are going to go, but I can see it’ll be another week before they’re in. This is the END of May and they should have been in by the first of the month. Dang it.

Well, maybe I’ll plant more in the hoophouses and keep them growing until Thanksgiving or Christmas? Hmmmm…. maybe I’m not as “late” as I think today…

What is it about being a farmer?  This is not my first career, nor my second or third. I’ve actually had several careers in my life: graphic designer/typesetter, newspaper publisher, professional secretary, office manager, as well as sheep farming, cab driving, office temping.  I’ve worked in groceries, restaurants, radio stations, engineering firms, banks, retail stores, warehouses, brokerage firms, law offices, law and business schools — really, Harvard no less. One summer, I even drove the little clown car at the race track. Yes, in a clown suit.

I’ve called this current phase my retirement job, and I guess it is.  Kip is now retired from his 35 year career and we’re growing vegetables not just for ourselves, but for two farmers’ markets each week, for the Oklahoma Food Co-op, for sales to small markets and restaurants. Last summer we also supplied vegetables to a CSA with 30 members. We call ourselves “market gardeners” which means that we sell what we grow. But we could as easily be called truck farmers or veg growers. The label doesn’t really matter, I guess, just the output.

So, back to the title of this piece– “It happened again…”  someone assumed that because I’m a farmer that I’m an uneducated, impolite boob. He thought it was perfectly awful of me to insist that our farm name be removed from an advertising piece he was displaying on his website. We had never given our consent for the use of our farm name and I asked that it be removed. Yes, I was forceful.  I asked that it be removed immediately. So, now I’m an ignorant farmer who doesn’t know how to compose a business letter, forceful or not. :::sigh::::

Good thing they didn’t know that at Harvard Business School, eh?

I just sent my tomato list to the Tomatomania Yahoo group and it hit me how nuts this list really is.  I need to scale it back, I know…

Maybe next year?

Here it is:

Amish Paste, Amish Salad, Amy’s Sugar Gem, Arkansas Traveller, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Baxter’s Bush Cherry, Beefsteak, Better Boy, Black Cherry, Black Mauri, Black Plum, Blush, Bolseno F1, Box Car Willie, Brandywine Pink, Burbank Red Slicing, Camp Joy/ Chadwick, Campbell’s 1327, Celebrity, Cherokee Purple, Chocolate Cherry, Chocolate Stripes, Costoluto Fiorentino, Costoluto Genovese, Crimson Cushion/Beefsteak, Cuor de Bue, Debarao, Dr. Carolyn, Early Girl, Early Red Chief, Early Wonder, Evergreen, Fox Cherry, Ghost Cherry, Golden Jubilee, Green Doctors, Green Grape, Green Zebra, Hartman’s Gooseberry, Henderson’s Pink Ponderosa, Homestead, Isis Candy, Ivory Egg, Juliet, Large Red (not cherry), Large Red Cherry, Legend, Lemon Boy, Lime Green Salad, Maglia Rosa Cherry, Margot, Mini Orange, Mortgage Lifter, Mr. Stripey, Mule Team, Orange & Green Zebra, Orange Strawberry, Pantano Romanesco, Pearly Pink Cherry, Pearson, Pierce’s Pride, Prairie Fire, Principe de Borgese, Prize of the Trials, Purple Calabash, Red Pear Cherry, Red Target, Red Zebra, Reif Red Heart, Rio Grande, Roma VF, Rouge d’Irak, Rutger’s Select, Rutgers, San Marzano, Silvery Fir Tree, Sioux, Snow White Cherry, Snowberry, Solar Fire, Sophie’s Choice, Success, Sun Gold, Sungella, Super Suncherry, Sweet Chelsea, Tangella, Taxi/ Yellow Taxi, TC Jones, Thai Pink Cherry, Thai Pink Round, Thai Yellow Egg, Tigerella, Topaz/ Huan U, Unas Yellow Cherry, Violet Jasper/ Tzi Bi U, Virginia Sweets, White Cherry, Wickline Cherry, Window Box Roma, Yellow Pear, Zapotec

My favorites?  Black Plum for sauce and freezing, Cherokee Purple for fresh eating, Sungold for snacking in the garden.

Dev

My name is Dev and I’m a seedaholic.

I love that nature put everything a new plant needs into a tiny little package that can be dropped nearly anywhere, and will only pop open if all the conditions are right for the plant to survive. Engineering and art and biology and meteorology and sex and magic all in one package. Wow.

By Wednesday, all the pepper seeds will be planted in little plastic cells, kept moist and warm, awaiting their germination. When the plants are 2″ tall, they graduate to their own pots and begin the greenhouse phase of their growth. By April 15th they’ll be ready to plant in the garden.  On Friday, we start planting tomato seeds… hundreds and hundreds of tomato seeds. Every year I vow, “Never again,” and every year I plant more.

Seed catalogs are addictive.  Even companies I don’t buy from — and have never bought from — will send me glossy, full-color books in an attempt to sell me packages or pounds of seeds.  The latest from Johnny’s Seeds is 208 pages, and they send me two of each one, so I’m betting they’re glad I spend some of the seed budget in Maine. My stack of 2011 catalogs is about 12″ high, but that doesn’t include the ones in the living room, bathroom, greenhouse, and scattered across my desk. Right around 40 pounds of paper would be a good guess.

It used to be you went to the feed store and stood in front of racks of seed packages. Pretty colors, pretty pictures, glowing words on the back, impossible claims for size and production. The old stand-by varieties, like Blue Lake Beans and Honey & Cream sweet corn, were sold in bulk bins with paper bags and scoops and a sign that said, “scoop your own.” Tall cans of cucumber and radish seed on the shelves. Bags of fertilizer smelling up the aisles was also a smell that said spring was coming.  I’m lucky– there is still such a feed store within 12 miles of the farm.

Maybe that’s what it is? Maybe seeds are the promise of spring– warm sun, soft winds, spring rains, singing birds — that our bodies and minds are craving after a winter spent indoors. Even though I plant seeds year ’round in hoophouses and greenhouses, when I see those first packets with the pretty pictures, I want to take a few home. And I do. Yes, I do.

The collage in the previous post is a PDF, but there’s no preview in the post.  Just took a screen shot to upload as a graphic preview.

It looks pretty positive that we’re going to get another blast of snow this week.  More drifting across the driveway, another request to our neighbor to dig us out. We’ll have to get creative for payment (he won’t take cash) as we polished the home brew over the weekend.

I found a folder of photos from 2010 that pretty much summed up our year. How about a collage?

2010 collage

As our friend Leava says, you know it’s going to be a bad day when the forecast is for 100% blizzard…

 

Our preparations are complete except installing new latches on the hoophouse doors. There’s a little sun this morning, so we’re out to get those done.

 

Keep warm, folks!

The plan today is to install the top cover of the hoophouse.  The second roll-up side was finished yesterday and we only had to adjust it twice to get it tight. We are now experts at this and, if we had one more to do, we could have it up in about an hour. This one took two as we were trying an alternate idea for making sure it lined up. It almost worked!

Today’s install is a piece of greenhouse poly that’s about 32′ x 50′ — a huge sail if there’s any wind. Today’s forecast is for nearly windless, so we think we can do this without additional helpers. We have a plan. We have the incentive. We have the chutzpah. What more do we need?

Film at 11.

About 35 years ago, a friend did my complete horoscope. I accept that I’m a hard-headed Scorpio, but otherwise don’t pay much attention to this kind of forecasting (I mostly concentrate on weather forecasts).  But her reading said that my strongest areas were the need to teach, and to ask the questions no one else would ask.

 

When you come to visit our farm, I’ll walk you through every corner — the good, the bad, and the ugly — for as long as you keep asking questions. We are very well-versed in season extension techniques and have used almost all of the current ideas. You’ll learn a lot about how to keep plants alive through the winter.

 

If you knew me when I lived in Vermont, you wouldn’t sit next to me at the annual Town Meeting. I’d be up and down asking every question under the sun until the final vote. My first town meeting taught me to always ask why we were passing over the repairs to the town offices in favor of the shiny, new firetruck. (Need vs. want and not enough funds for both.)  Nowadays I pester the board members of the Oklahoma Food Co-op asking “why?” all the time, which doesn’t endear me, I’m sure.

 

So to the point of this post…

 

My friends Nancy and Sue at Cordero Farms ( http://corderofarms.wordpress.com/about/) have made a resolution to post something every day in their blog. I’m trying to follow suit as it’s a good idea for many, many reasons.  But we don’t have the entertainment value of lambs being born, although sprouting pepper plants will generate some excitement in early February. So yesterday while I was sending some links to Bob Waldrop for his compendium  (http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/compendium.htm), it occurred to me that some of these things I stumble across might be entertaining for other people, too.

So here are five links that I’ve “discovered” in the last four days.  I’ll try to add to this list as the year goes on and maybe we’ll all learn something!

 

A collection of videos on aquaponics

http://arcusepito.com/index.php?key=Aquaponics+System

 

An interesting Google search:        raised bed garden

 

Another interesting Google search:       Keyhole garden  (follow some of the links on African gardens for more information)

 

Bet you didn’t know anyone did this:

http://cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cucurbit/wehner/vegcult/vgclintro.html

 

A labor of love:

http://sev.lternet.edu/~jnekola/Heirloom/index.htm

So, pour another cup of coffee and go learn something!

 

Dev