Rants from the Hollow

The valley in front of Heiser Hollow has always been farmed, but in our time, the family across the valley has always planted corn or soybeans. Whatever the relative economic merits of the different crops, from an aesthetic point of view, a scraggly looking field of hairy little soy plants can’t compare with a golden field of ripe golden wheat.

The field, which hasn’t been planted with wheat since the 60s, was harvested over a period of several days, mostly with a late model Deere combine. It trundled up and down the field, raising huge clouds of dust, leaving behind neat rows of golden straw, more than filling up a semi-trailer.

The Moore family has farmed this valley for generations, and they’ve still got some of their original farming equipment. Sporting a new coat of orange paint and Allis-Chalmers decals, this pre-war AC tractor took a nostalgia tour across the wheat field, pulling an equally old, and equally authentic AC combine.

Summer, which came unusually early this year, represents a shifting of gears in the vegetable garden. The delicate tastes of spring greens are replaced by the more robust impact of hot weather reds and yellows. Both through more carefully planning and the accidents of weather, this year’s garden managed to simultaneously provide lettuce and tomatoes.  I composted the last of the lettuce and spinach this week.

Although my wall of peas continued to flourish, June saw a significant reduction in sweetness and flavor. I pulled them down before they’d completely finished flowering, and planted Waltham Butternut and Green Striped Cushaw winter squash in their place.  Those have sprouted, and I’ll put up a couple trellis for them tomorrow.

I’ve been surprised by how some plants have flourished, while others have struggled. Before summer had even started, it had become clear that I’d ended up with a tomato thicket.  On the left of Kirk, you see the tomatoes I planted in early April, 2 weeks earlier than normal. The set of tomatoes on the right side of the photo were also started from seed in early March, but I planted them 2 weeks later.

The Early Girl, which Elizabeth bought for me at Merrifield, has done phenomenally well, with the first tomato arriving during the 2nd week of June. At this point, its providing a couple tasty fruit every day. Glacier has started fruiting, but I don’t think they have much taste. Both Dr Carolyn’s have started providing a small but steady supply of delicate yellow cherries with an almost lemony overtone.  The Brandywine on the left should have had ripe fruit by now, but they all suffer from some sort of end rot. The other Brandywine looks to be in good shape, but its 2 weeks later, so its hard to tell. Radiator Charley is still a week or two from ripeness, and the two Old Germans have pretty flowers, but I’m not sure if they’ve even set fruit, yet.   Its been so hot lately that all of them stopped setting fruit, which doesn’t usually happen until a couple months later in the season.

I’ve got 2 kinds of lima one of which is well over the top of the trellis, with the more delicate Willow Leaf tentatively topping it a couple days ago.  A hybrid bush lima and a bush green bean are both doing well now, after withstanding a couple weeks of grazing.  The Cornfield green beans have turned into a leguminous green wall, but unlike the Christmas limas, show no signs of flowering.

I’m mostly finished with my first attempt at potatoes, an exercise that was mostly successful.   Digging up taters is like finding Easter eggs, a form of mystery lacking with most other vegetables.  I plan on starting a fall crop next month, but the left over seed potatoes, moldering in a cool dark corner of the basement, are looking tired.  Some of the potato tubers I dug this week were trying to start new plants, so I just stuck them back into the ground, and maybe they’ll do better than the well-sprouted seed potatoes I’ve been saving downstairs for the second planting.

I’ve had mostly positive experiences so far with the squash family.  We’ve picked about 6 pounds of yellow crookneck, a favorite courgette of ours that we never found in Europe.  The vine borers have been out in force, though, and I’ve had to pull out several squash plants, and perform surgery on some of my pumpkins.  Pumpkin patch #1, taking over the former mulch pile in a clearing where a pine tree was downed, is mostly thriving, in spite of the occasional groundhog attack and some insects.  Big max has set several of its distinctively pale and ugly fruit, and one of the others, I’m not sure if it’s Jack O’Lantern or the pie pumpkin, has multiple dark green orbs that are approaching the size of bowling balls.  Patch #2, a pair of Big Maxes, is struggling, and has only set one pathetic little pumpkin. I try to remain organic, but a neighbor gave me a bottle of some sort of insecticide powder that I’ve liberally sprayed all over the base of the pumpkins.

This week I planted some more corn, fall cabbage, and, because you can never have too much zucchini, another yellow crookneck. I’m not confident that the 3 remaining plants, 1 of which has had borer removal surgery, will make it through the summer. Making up for 10 years lost time in my garden, I’ve sifted a dozen bushels of composted manure into the garden.

Apparently to no purpose, I had spread about $25 worth of imported Swedish pigs blood around my garden in the form of pellets. To be fair to the manufacturer, while they did claim to repel mice and moose (elk), the package said nothing about the American member of the Marmot family.  Hopefully, the cucurbitae and pulses will no longer have anything to fear, with today’s capture of Little Chuck in the charitably named Havahart trap.  I can’t imagine why he even wandered into the thing.  I don’t even remember when I last baited it with pear slices and peanut butter. After some debate over the most discrete way to euthanize our little weather forecaster, Elizabeth volunteered to treat him to a $25 permanent visit  to the pound, leaving with the smelly thing chattering away in the back of my Subaru.

In 2001, we moved from Vienna, Virginia to Vienna, Austria, followed in September by a move to Virginia Water, England. The result has been perpetually confused mail, and a variety of summertime experiences.

As I sit here in 91 degree weather, thankful that the humidity is only about 60% (both expected to rise this week), I can’t help missing the incredibly mild and pleasant English summers. Of course, if you want to lie down on the hammock some Saturday afternoon, reading a novel, you need a blanket.

The insects in America are very different from the ones in England. While I complain about the squash vine borers sabotaging my cucurbits, I really enjoy the fireflies. Elizabeth and I have sat on the back deck, watching the twinkling twilight show. The other American bug I’m glad to see again, and this is a taste that she does not share with me, is the cicada. I love the sound of the cicadas up in the trees, whirring away in unison, and then suddenly going silent. The evening sound of crickets is another one that feels like home to me.

Elizabeth and I are both partial to yellow crookneck squash, something we didn’t see much of in England. I know that squash plants have a tap root, and are fussy about being transplanted, but I thought I’d give it a go, starting 4 pots during the first week of March.

I planted two plants in early April, a couple of weeks before the last Spring frost date (the last spring frost this year was Feb or very early March).  Thinking it’d discourage vine borers, I draped spun-bonded polyester over both of them.  They just didn’t seem to thrive under there, and after a couple of weeks, the first plant fell over, with a strange sort of weak stem that didn’t look anything like vine borers (which wouldn’t have been active enough to kill a plant in April).

I planted some more seeds where the first plant had been, and took the Reemay off the other one.  The other plant seemed to be doing pretty well, but there was always something funny about the stem. It had funny little gray things living on it, like slug nymphs or something, and there were so many sow beetles (wood lice) that I figured something must be rotten.

The remaining squash plant seemed to have come through last week’s hail storm in pretty good shape ($3000 to repair my Subaru), but we had another storm Friday night. As the overnight guests slowly reappeared after Elizabeth’s party, I wandered out to the garden with a cup of coffee to discover a single casualty from this much milder storm. The photo above shows the stem where it broke right at the ground level. The scarring indicates that there was very little intact stem at the time, which explains why the fruit have been so small.

Cut down in the prime of life, its going to be awhile before we see a squash big enough to saute.

At this point, we’ve had a lot of lettuce, and we’ve snacked on pod peas several times. There’s a veritable wall of traditional English garden peas that should be ready soon, and my taters are in flower. Early Girl is covered with tomatoes, one of which looks like it should start coloring up any day now.  Two different varieties of corn are coming up, and I need to start trellising my lima beans this week.

After the biggest snowfall on record, and a last frost date that came at least a month early, last Friday brought the gnarliest-looking hailstones I’ve ever seen.

They were described as ‘quarter sized’ by the weather service. It’d be an exaggeration to say ‘golf ball sized’, but a number of the stones were flat and bumpy, and about the same size as sliced golf balls. The spherical stones were smaller, about the size of shooter marbles.

The storm made a huge racket, and lasted for several minutes, leaving the yard littered with ice balls and fallen debris.

Outside of a couple tomato and potato leaves, the garden came through the storm intact. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my Subaru.

We’ve seen some unusual weather since returning to the US, and the unseasonably hot & dry spring probably accounts for the failure of the lambs lettuce and spinach crops. Presuming that the mild spring would last, I planted some tomatoes and squash two weeks early, and as it turned out, I could have planted them a couple weeks earlier than that.  This being my first year back in the garden, it was too much of a mess to start planting the first week of March (my excuse is that I was waiting until the pine trees came down), but even if I’d wanted to, there was still snow on the ground.

I wonder what summer is going to bring.

On 21 May, 1978, a Thursday night, the parents of the graduating Bay High School seniors thoroughly spoofed their own kids and the school faculty in a comedy variety show.

With dads dressed as cheerleaders, and moms in hockey and football jerseys, it was a hilarious, and sometimes politically incorrect performance.

This was an annual tradition, giving the parents a chance to honor their kids’ accomplishments and activities. Guests were not invited–only the graduating seniors were there (no underclass girlfriends allowed), although some members of the Class of ’79 performed during the intermission (see the end of my photo gallery).

After Elizabeth and I finished our European adventure and moved back into our American house, we started unpacking the boxes of stuff that we’d put into storage in December 2000.  I found another box of negatives and contact prints from That 70s Show.  It included a few of my favorite shots that weren’t in the negatives I’d rescued from my parents’ crawlspace in 2006, it included some of my earliest pictures from the 60s and 70s, and it included a few surprises.  The best surprise was Parents Night.

Who remembered that instead of sitting there and enjoying the show, I actually took 5 rolls of film?  I certainly didn’t.  What did I even have in mind for these images? The contact prints are marked up a bit, suggesting that I might have done something with these pictures, but I don’t remember printing any of them. Maybe a few of my mom’s friends got some copies, but I can’t imagine that very many pictures circulated.  I’m sure that most of the parents and class of ’78 have never seen these.

There is a sort of old fashioned charm to these images, taken from an earlier and simpler time when disco reigned and men still wore neckties. For me, the turn of the generational clock adds personal poignancy to these pictures. After sitting  in a time capsule for 32 years, these memories reappear at during a life phase when most of  my peers have just seen our own children through high school. While I don’t recognize many of these parents, I do feel connected to them for multiple reasons. As we celebrate their 50th anniversaries and 80th birthdays, I know that many of these proud parents are no longer with us (indeed, some of their children are gone, too).

Somewhat uncharitably, I can’t help thinking that most of these people look old. I have to chuckle over that, because most of them were my own age, or even younger than I am now, and only a few of them would have been 10 years older than my half century. Their clothing and hair wasn’t the only aesthetic of the age–people choose to respond differently to age in different ages. Perhaps one generation has done that more gracefully than the other, but I’m not at all certain which.

32 years ago, we were naive and innocent, and many of the things that mattered to us seem foolish or trivial now.  We’d conquered over a dozen years of public school, and we were ready to conquer the world. Our parents knew that. They admired our youth and were maybe just a bit jealous of our energy. They recognized our enthusiasm, supported our passions, and sighed over our lack of ambition. They dressed up and acted foolish on stage one night to demonstrate their love for us, and to show us how proud they were.

To me, these images are a treasure, and I hope that my classmates are touched. Photographers don’t take pictures for their own pleasure–like any art, the true satisfaction comes through an emotional response in your audience.  I’m glad that I found these pictures while some of the parents are still with us, and maybe there are some grand children who will get a kick out of them also.

The complete set of just over 200 pictures can be found in the Parents Night gallery on my web site. Click on a thumbnail to view a picture, and click on that image to view an even larger version. My suggestion is that you use the slideshow feature available through a link at the bottom of the screen (click on the icon at the right of the menu bar to see it in full screen).

Now that I’ve found these negatives, scanned them, Photoshopped them, and uploaded them, I’m really curious about just who all these people are.  Please put your comments in the photo gallery.

Everything is publicly viewable, although I’ve asked Google and Bing not to search and index these images.   Enjoy!

Spring came early this year, it has been uncharacteristically hot, we are 3 inches below our normal rainfall, and now I’m wishing that I’d taken advantage of global warming a couple weeks earlier than I did.

I did plant some tomatoes a couple of weeks before what is normally considered the last Spring frost date. Most of my tomatoes are open pollinated heritage varieties, started from seed during the first week of March.  I’ve got one hybrid, an Early Girl that Elizabeth bought me in the nursery, which I aggressively planted in early April. Close to 3′ tall, she started setting fruit last week, with the first tomato about 1.5″ in diameter right now.

She’s flanked by the first of 4 of the ones I started from seed.  Under black paper ‘mulch’ and surrounded by 5′ cages, they are thriving in this hot and sunny spring, and Old German should start blooming any day now.

A pair of ground cherries can be seen on the left. I started them at the same time as the tomatoes, and their growth has been painfully slow.  I don’t know how big they will eventually get, but I’m assuming they will not become as big as a tomato, even though they are related.

Two weeks ago, which was two weeks after planting the first group of tomatoes, I decided that all danger of frost was past, and the second group of heritage tomatoes went in.  Also planted under black paper, they are currently only about half the size of the first group.  The plant density is a little bit on the high side, but with a plot of potatoes going in this year, I didn’t want to complicate rotation over the next couple of years by sprinkling nightshades all over the garden.  I also didn’t want to throw anything away, so I planted all of my indoor starts, which was 2 of everything but one of the Mortgage Lifters, which suffered an unfortunate re-potting accident.

This is the first time I’ve tried potatoes, but after what seemed like a very slow start, the 4×4 plot in the back is filling up nicely with 4 different varieties.

The plot I started the first week of March is doing well.  I’ve been snacking on 2 different kinds of radish for a couple of weeks.

The sugar snap peas have been blooming for a couple days, and I snacked on a couple of early pods yesterday.  I decided a couple of days ago to start harvesting lettuce, and now it is looking like it might bolt before I can finish it.

The adjacent plot has some arugula that has been doing great, but that hardy green is flanked by two pathetically feeble attempts to grow lambs lettuce. Rapunzel, let down your roots! Incredibly slow to germinate, neither the Vit nor Green Jade are anything to brag about.  The peas in the back are traditional English garden peas, which look healthy enough, but haven’t started to bloom yet, and I’m concerned about the heat.

My third 4×4 of greens is doing even worse.  It has been 5 weeks since I planted the first 8-10 squares, and so far, my germination rate is awful.  Unlike the early March plot above, I’d very carefully fluffed up and composted this one.  The chicken wire was in place from the beginning, keeping out the birds, and I put a cardboard shield across the top whenever it stormed.  I’ve regularly hand-watered this lovely little plot to keep the seeds moist, and there is precious little to show for all that attention. So much for trying to keep a fresh supply of lettuce throughout the Spring.  I think I’ll need to shade these plants soon.

I started 4 squash plants at the same time as my tomatoes. I know that squash don’t always transplant well, but I wanted to get a jump on the season with some of the yellow squash that Elizabeth and I prefer over green zukes.  I put two plants out at the same time as the first set of  tomatoes, and put Reemay over the top to keep the borers away.  I’m not sure they liked being under spunbonded poly, and the other plant died of stem failure (NOT borer damage).  This plant had some damage to the stem also, but seems to be doing much better, and has visibly grown in the 2 days since I took this picture. Today it has a very distinct female bud and a male bud that might bloom tomorrow.

I saw the first groundhog before the snow was melted, and the deer were checking out my veggie garden long before anything had actually sprouted. In the past, I’d struggled mightily against woodchucks, even going so far as installing a small electric fence (it didn’t work). I’d never seen any evidence of deer in the back yard, but they have become more plentiful during the last decade, and part of our perimeter fence is missing.

During the first week of April, I built 3 wooden frames to fit on top of my 4×4′ garden squares, and used them to support chicken wire cages. Shown above are two cages that I’m hoping will be tall enough to contain the peas that are just starting to sprout.

3 weeks later, the peas are beginning to vine, but are not close to blooming. The lettuce and arugula should be ready to harvest next week, and I’ve already been snacking on radishes (right front above). My assumption is that young pea vines and lettuce are candy to deer and groundhogs, and I don’t see any evidence of attack, so I’m guardedly optimistic about my animal shelters.

The mild spring encouraged me to risk planting some tomatoes before the last frost date. I bought an Early Girl at the nursery. planted her the 2nd week of April, and she’s been blooming for a week. A couple days after that, I planted the first group of the heritage tomatoes I started from seed in early March. They are doing well, also. The lambs lettuce is barely sprouting–I wonder what I did wrong. I didn’t really do much to improve the soil for the first lettuce bed, but I carefully used some of my limited supply of compost in a another 4×4, planting more lettuce and lambs lettuce, and putting another chicken wire cap over the top. When it rained, I put a cardboard sheet on top. Three weeks later, all this tender loving care has resulted in maybe a half dozen little lettuce plants that don’t look like they will be eating size before hot weather kicks in.

The last time I grew any veggies in my garden was 2000, and I didn’t have time to do much. That December, we packed up all our things and moved from Vienna, VA to Vienna, Austria, and for nine seasons, my garden was at the mercy of our tenants.  I’ve missed the feel of dirt in my hands, the thrill of God’s gift of life, and the taste of heritage tomatoes, fresh from the garden.  I knew that some gardening had taken place during the last 9 seasons, but I just didn’t know what I was going to find.

View from my office before cutting trees (looking north)

I didn’t really want to do any gardening this year without dealing with the trees that had always prevented the garden from having full access to the sun. Hundreds of white pines had been planted in our neighborhood in the 1980s, and three of them that were along the south edge of the vegetable garden, and what is left of the orchard, had grown into 50′ monsters. It was time to take them down.

Looking SW across the veggie garden, 1 more tree to go

The photo above shows the last, and smallest of the trees, just after it was topped. The stump of a larger one can be seen just to the left of the compost bin. Besides the shade, it was making a mess of the garden, sending big roots diagonally underneath at least 6 of my 15 garden squares.  I ended up chopping out 2 big sections of root that are about 3’ long, and 3” in diameter that were distorting a frame and hiding berry roots. I put my new mattock to the test, and it held up better than I did, although a new shovel is not.

Raspberries have been dug out, but it still needed a lot more digging

I’m a follower of Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening method.  Arguably it is not the most productive method, but I sure think it is the easiest, keeping the weeds to a dull roar and minimizing the need for digging, fertilizing, and spraying.  Someone had planted raspberry, which for very good reasons is not normally co-located with lettuce and beans, so this week saw me trying to clean the canes out of the 3 garden squares that were playing host to what was becoming a huge prickly weed that was ready to take over the rest of my garden. The photo above shows the 3 squares that needed to be cleansed of berry cane roots, which required removing the pavers between the squares.

I ended up pulling one of the wooden frames out to dig the root and berries out, I took the opportunity to dig down farther on the uphill side and level it, making it into sort of a mini terrace. I pulled up all the pavers around it, and the ones on the cross path heading to the edge of the garden, and did some grading, hopefully improving the drainage.  The last tenant also had at least one dog, and had nailed wire mesh fence around most of the squares, so I spent a couple hours pulling those off, instead of taking advantage of 78 degree weather to plant.   One of the garden squares had a small bush growing in it, so I ended up disassembling the wooden frame to dig out the bush. Putting in a new frame is a project for later. Maybe I’ll grow potatoes there.  I’ve never done ‘taters before, and I’m going to plant 4 different varieties later this week. 

Raspberries have been dug out, the bush and mesh fencing is next to go

Berries and bushes and other barriers aside, I was pleased with the dirt.  Unlike the red Virginia clay a few inches underground, the plots that I dug up were filled with rich dark soil, with lots of fat earth worms.  I was more than a little worried that after a decade without me, all the organic matter would have leached out, but that seems not to be the case. Although they are well dug at this point, I decided to leave the raspberry squares for later, on the assumption that any roots left behind would sprout and be easier to find later.  I quickly and lightly fluffed up one 4×4 square and planted peas, spinach, lettuce, and radish. I decided to take a chance and went no-till on the 2nd square. I find that lots of plants do just fine without my wasting time doing preparation that they don’t need. Besides, all that digging freaks out the worms.
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Well, after almost a decade, the European adventure has come to a close. Who would have thought that High School French was actually useful, or that college German was more than an intellectual affectation?

After boxing up 9 years of intense experience, packing too much Ikea that was no longer so flat to pack, and multiple treasures from the Chertsey auction house, Elizabeth and I flew back to the States. For a couple months, we split our time between my parents in Cleveland, and our house and hopefully future home. I spent most of that time in Ohio, while Elizabeth supervised nest reno in NoVa. It snowed. Everywhere. A lot. Welcome home.

By the first week of February, enough renovation had taken place in the house, which since 2001 has been rented out to children, dogs, and people who plant invasive berry canes in the vegetable garden, that we felt confident that if we moved back in we could sleep and shower. Well, at least shower in one of the baths. And who could have thought that it would take 6 months to install granite counter tops?

It actually took the moving company two separate trips. The first one saw countless boxes of things that we’d stored in 2000 when we left for Europe. Cassette players, VHS tapes, strangely out of style curtains, incandescent light bulbs (are those still legal?), and something that has increasingly become a preoccupation, boxes of negatives, slides and prints, all screaming out “Digitize me! Digitize me! Put me on the web! Make me a slide show! Print me!”

The second truckload, containing our European furniture and effects, arrived several days later. No, it does NOT all fit into one house. It included my PC. After 9 weeks apart, I was easily able to restore to service after buying a pair of new hard drives, fully reinstalling Windows from scratch, restoring all my files, and buying replacements for half the software. If it had been more than 5 years old, I would have started from scratch.

Neatly complementing the boxes of pictures from the first load, my Coolscan is sitting beside me at this moment, chewing its way through some incredible high school memories that actually will bring joy to the class of ’78. At least the scanner is dual voltage, unlike the printer I brought back from England. New vacuum cleaner, a BestBuy TV that can pick up whatever junk Verizon is spewing at us, a new printer, a pair of used cars….well, you get the picture.

Repatriation is often more difficult than expatriation–especially for families that had such positive experiences overseas. It isn’t the same place you left, and while so much is familiar and comfortable, other things are just strangely wrong. You don’t get all the jokes on SNL, and you can’t remember which states are red and which are blue (simple trick: red=left everywhere else in the world, so the US must use the opposite system). The food is good, and there’s lots of it, but where are you supposed to walk to when you live in a ‘burb?

I think everybody understand that it takes a long time to step across a pond, but for the record, we didn’t send ANY Christmas cards last year, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t get one.