Kathy's Cool Vegetables

Here's my KEB planting the last of her garlic over the weekend.  She is by nature a careful planner and planter, a designer of spaces indoors and out, a lover of proper containers for everything, including screenplays, stories, and sentences.  She likes to think about the structure of things as they are and as they might be.  I am in awe of how her intelligence works.

 The device you see lying on the dirt used to be the "dog door" that kept Lola out of the cat's room (our office) in our former home in University City.  The door is her planting guide and the little flags hold it in place until she needs to move it, and they mark what has already been planted.

Kathy had worked out an intensive planting "map" of each garden bed.  The map showed plant spacing and the overall allocation of space so that peas of one variety were in a different bed from peas of another.  All we are saying is give peas a chance!

Garlic must have its day, too.  In addition to choice varieties from our friend, Richard Mock, we have other garlic that came in the mail.  The box was so full of aromas!  Just like our kitchen yesterday with I made a new batch of Balsamic vinaigrette with three or four cloves of crushed garlic and almost a tablespoon of Dijon mustard.

Here's the bed closest to our birdbath and deck.  I think of it as the bean bed only because they provide the most green at the moment, but the peas on the other end will soon surpass them in color.

There is no wasted space.  Raising the beds slightly spared us the futile task of trying to spade or till the thick clay in the back.  We just lined up bricks and blocks and filled in with a topsoil and compost mixture from Daniel's Farm and Nursery down Jungermann Road.  I can't imagine a better or more helpful family-run nursery than Daniel's.  And he probably can't think of a better residential customer than us!  We are almost customers-in-residence there!

One more bed to show...this one next to the bean bed.  Here goes:

That white stuff on the side is a porous cover.  If a light frost comes along some night, this will provide a few degrees of protection.  Kathy covered the seed bed with it (loosely) and as the seeds germinated and plants appeared, they just pushed the cover up like a tent being raised.  It lets light and rainfall through to the plants and keeps insects out.

Here's the longer view of the area taken from the patio under our deck, which I'm about to go out and stain this morning.  You see my big "retirement present" wind chimes.  They make comforting deep tones much of the time.

When I looked at this image I recalled part of a poem by James Stephens set to music by the American composer, Samuel Barber.  The poem is titled "Mary Hynes," and the last part of it goes

Lovely and airy the view from the hill
That looks down Ballylea;
But no good sight is good until
By great good luck you see
The Blossom of Branches walking towards you
Airily.

Duckworthy Days

Yesterday morning the ducks of Hidden Lake assembled on our piece of shoreline and reminded me of why I so love where we live, and why I named our place "The Duckworthy Estate" on the day we moved into the house in 2010.  When I was a wee lad my family lived on the shore of what was called a "lake."  It was actually a dammed up stream that flowed through New Egypt, New Jersey.  My younger sister and I were not allowed to walk across the dam on the way to visit my grandparents.  We had to go an extra block into town and play it safe.

The "lake" was wide enough for small power boats to cruise short distances back and forth from the dam up to a narrow place where boating wasn't fun or possible.  My dad owned a canoe, so canoe rides through patches of lily pads on the lake are part of my memory of boyhood.  We passed an old "ice house" and my mom explained the old-time practice of harvesting blocks of ice in winter and packing the blocks with sawdust inside an ice house so there would be ice in warm months.

We fished with bamboo poles over the wire fence that surrounded our small yard.  This was catch-and-release style, catfish and some "sunnies."  Sometimes after supper Mom gave us pieces of bread to toss to the lake ducks.

I feel enchanted by the view of waterfowl cruising our small lake.

We usually have the sound of alto wind chimes in our life.  Here's the set I bought myself as a retirement present two years ago.  It hangs over our patio.

While I took this picture a pair of swallows flitted overhead.  I turned around to see what they were up to and noticed the nest they've built on a deck beam.

Out in the yard the clumps of blue Siberian irises we brought from Vermont have come into bloom.

The daylily season began for real on May first, when little yellow BITSY came into bloom.  That plant was a Father's Day gift almost twenty years ago.  Three other daylilies were in bloom in the back yard yesterday, all new arrivals a month ago.  Here is Jane Trimmer's DRAGONFLY DAWN.  It has been blooming on "Florida scapes" for several weeks.  Lately the appearance of the flowers has picked up as the roots have begun to establish themselves.

The eyezone is composed of several bands of color.  The Trimmers highly recommend this cultivar for breeding patterns.

Here is Jamie Gossard's PHANTOM WARRIOR, part of a small collection of Tet. spiders and unusual forms I assembled so that Kathy Bouman can explore the fun of hybridizing.

And here is Jane Trimmer's LAVENDER ECHOES, a large flower with a gray blue eye surrounding an applique pattern in the throat.  Very complex and quite pretty!

Yesterday Kathy learned how to collect pollen and freeze it in gel caps for future use.  If not exposed to prolonged heat or moisture, a gel cap of frozen pollen can be refrozen for subsequent use.  I have some frozen pollen that I've used for more than five years.  On the other hand, I've spoiled a gel cap of pollen in less than a minute by dropping it onto wet grass!

Gradus Ad Parnassum

How-To books in the Olden Dayes had the elevated title, "Gradus ad Parnassum," meaning steps to Parnassus.  In 1970s slang lingo, that would mean "Be all that you can be!"  I use it to express the state of incompletion of our expertly-built deck and paver patio beneath it.

We are so close, but yet so far!  Here's a picture of the crew leader, Steve Brandt, attaching a header for the second set of stairs yesterday before lunch.

When they quit the previous afternoon, I stained the three "stringers," the header boards, and as many step boards as Steve thought he'd need (all of them in the garage).  As Steve and Tim Yanko got to building the steps in the afternoon, Steve realized he hadn't bought enough cedar for the steps and would come up three steps short.

Steve's father, Carl Brandt, came in the afternoon to take over what Steve had been doing and got the job to this point by quitting time.

Construction is held up while the lumber yard awaits delivery of some new, non-warped, cedar railings for both sets of stairs.  Steve will bring those on Friday, I hope, with the extra boards for the steps, and they will complete the deck in another two or three days' work.

The new sod on the right of the picture was laid down two weeks ago today, before a series of good soaking rains.  The sod crew was all over themselves complimenting me on Steve's 5-star job of laying the patio pavers.  We'll have to put a bit of furniture down there, as the area is no longer "just a simple walk-out."

If you look through the stairs, you can make out the big set of wind chimes I hung up to celebrate the completion of that area.  The chimes were a retirement present to myself in 2010 and had hung on the old deck here until Steve tore it down in August.  Now we can enjoy them again.  I enjoyed them last night as I drifted off to sleep.  They weren't loud enough to keep me awake, nor so silent as to have no presence.