Pumped

Shiny new heat pump

Heat pumped that is! Oh friends, I have been so busy with the garden and all the things. Two weeks ago we had a heat pump installed. It was a good time to do it because the contractor wasn’t busy, it was neither cold nor hot outside, and our 25-year-old central air conditioner unit and just as old gas furnace were close to end-of-life but hadn’t died yet so we had time to shop and choose. We are now efficient and all electric. The heat pump will both cool and heat our house through the existing duct system. In Minnesota we are required to have backup heating because when temperatures get close to zero fahrenheit, the heat pump probably won’t be able to keep the house warm enough, so we had an electric furnace installed. Expensive, but we also got a significant discount between power company rebates, city rebates, and federal tax credits (won’t get the tax credit until we file next year, but it will be awesome).

The weather has been so mild the heat pump has yet to turn on to cool the house. There is a whole-house fan as part of the install and we have that running, recirculating the air throughout the house. Which means the cooler basement air gets redistributed. We are looking at a brief heat wave, however. Today through Wednesday we are expecting temperatures close to 90F/32C. So at some point the house will warm up enough for the heat pump to turn on. It will be so much quieter than our giant air conditioner roaring away.

Mmmm breakfast

Friday was the huge Friends School Plant Sale. James and I make an annual event of it. We were out the door around 6:30 in the morning to bike over to the State Fair Grandstand in St Paul and pick up our wristbands for entry. We got group 15. I think last year we were group 11. After we got our wristbands, we biked back across the Mississippi River to Minneapolis to have breakfast at one of our favorite places—Seward Cafe. We hadn’t been there since before the pandemic. They are cooperatively owned and they closed during the pandemic and didn’t re-open until last year with limited hours and menu. So for the past several years we’ve been enjoying plant sale breakfast at Hard Times Cafe, also really good. But it was great to be bak at Seward enjoying a super green tofu earth breakfast with a bottomless cup of coffee.

Fueled and overly caffeinated, we biked back to the fairgrounds to await our group entry. We found a shady place to sit and enjoyed watching rabid gardeners and the wheeled contraptions they had put together. A lot of just plain wagons, but others had DIY carts with multiple shelves on which to put flats of plants. Then there was the person who just had two of those giant blue Ikea bags. James and I each had a box that fit inside the crate baskets on our bikes. My list was only a page long—quite short compared to years past.

We waited about an hour and a half before our group was called in. It only took us about 30 minutes to get what we wanted and another 10 minutes to get through the checkout line. Then we carefully packed the taller plants in my side pannier, and the rest went into James’ rear basket and my front basket. Here is what we got:

• Jostaberry (fruit bush, gooseberry-black currant cross)
• Serviceberry, variety Honeywood (fruit tree)
• Rosy sedge (native perennial)
• English thyme (culinary herb)
• Wild boneset (perennial medicinal herb)
• Lady fern (native perennial)
• Wild lion’s foot (native perennial)
• Wild pearly everlasting (native perennial)
• Betony (perennial medicinal herb)
• Black cohosh (native perennial, also medicinal)
• Wood poppy (native perennial)
• Adam’s needle yucca (native perennial)
• Jalapeño pepper 4-pack (since my seeds didn’t germinate)
• Tomatillo, variety tomate verde (never grown them before so trying it out)

Plant sale treasures

Everything except for the peppers and tomatillo are planted and those two will go in next weekend if it doesn’t suddenly turn cold on the other side of this heatwave, which it totally could!

Meanwhile, I’m working at hardening off all the indoor seedlings. We had an unfortunate gusty wind day last week and the row cover fabric I was using to protect all the squash starts partially blew off and four of the squashes were burned to a crisp. So, starting those over again. I don’t technically need to start the winter squash indoors, but I do to keep the critters from digging up and eating the seeds from the ground.

Yesterday evening when the sun was out of the garden, we started planting the onion seedlings. I don’t know what I was thinking back in February, but dang, I have a lot of onions! Well, I do know what I was thinking. I sowed the pots with fewer seeds than the year before and also planned on thinning them, which I did, to make them easier to remove from the pot and plant, which they are. But, to make up for fewer plants in a pot, I planted more pots. I’ve not counted, but we’ve probably planted close to 50 red summer onions and twice as many sweet yellow storage onions. Even if only half of all of them produce onions we can eat, that is still a lot of onions. Good thing we love onions in this house.

The garden peas for shelling are all sprouting up strong as are the purple snap peas. The collards, radishes, non-heading broccoli, parsley, chard, cilantro, and leafy greens are also at various points of sprouting. The carrots haven’t come up yet, but they take longer to germinate. Nonetheless, I’ll be seeding more carrots this evening along with more radish, some borage and non-bulbing fennel, and sunflowers.

Stevie, our North Star cherry tree, had a rough go of it their first year in the garden. They got a little rabbit chewed, and then last summer a fat squirrel decided to climb the spindly little branches and broke them. Poor Stevie went into last winter looking pretty much like a 6-foot tall stick. I was not confident that Stevie would survive, but they did! And they even bloomed, not a lot, but there were flowers. Yay!

Blooming bush cherries and plum tree

The bush cherries had a gorgeous bloom. They are currently thigh high and will eventually be about two meters tall. The thing I like about the bush cherries is that their fruit tends to be inside the bush, hiding beneath leaves, making it more difficult for birds and squirrels to get at, which means I get most of them.

Professor Plum also put on a gorgeous display and is still going, though clearly winding down. The Professor was covered in blossoms last year too but didn’t produce a single plum. But I think is was a weird plum year because the plum tress I usually forage from blossomed extravagantly and didn’t produce any plums either. Hopefully this will be a plum year and I will taste the first ever plum from the Professor.

The clove currant is currently covered in yellow flowers. The red currant, who joined the garden last year, is not flowering, but I am not surprised since they aren’t even as tall as my knee. The aronia is covered in white flowers and my mouth is already anticipating their earthy fruit in oatmeal and pancakes. The honeyberries are looking lovely and will hopefully find it within themselves to produce more than four berries this year.

One of the two gooseberries partially died over the winter and will need to be pruned and spend the next year recovering, but the other gooseberry is flowering. The black raspberries are leafing out and looking fantastic.

The highbush cranberry, who joined the garden last spring, is almost knee high, too small yet to flower, but is looking healthy. The mulberry tree is just over knee high and leafing out nicely. The three goji berries I started last year from seeds all survived the winter to my surprise and delight. They, like all the others, are about knee high. And Marlon, the peach is about two meters tall and leafing out nicely. Will they blossom? I’ll let you know!

The rhubarb is huge and I have a full freezer bag already. The second rhubarb, planted two years ago, is doing well and has decided to flower. I’m going to try and save some seeds and see if I can get them to germinate. One can never have too much rhubarb.

Oh, and the peony has flower buds on it! This is actually a big deal. I moved them from their previous location last spring because they hadn’t flowered in a couple of years and now it appears I am going to be rewarded for finding them a happier location. I’m also itching to try peony flower jelly. We’ll see if I get to do that this year.

We’ve been enjoying early spring greens—sochan, violets, curly dock, and feral arugula/rocket, as well as green onions. Also, sunchokes. So many sunchokes. I have not been aggressive enough digging them up these past couple of years and they have taken advantage. I have dug up enough to fill a 5-gallon bucket and they are still coming up in unwanted places! James has been adding sunchokes to meals when he can. He even made sunchoke soup, which was so delicious! He also made a sunchoke and lentil dal, also delicious. We are going to be tired of sunchokes before we manage to eat a 5-gallon bucket’s worth, so we are looking at ways to preserve them to enjoy through the summer.

Non-gardening related. Last weekend James and I volunteered at a fundraiser for Interfaith Coalition on Immigration (ICOM). It was a dinner fundraiser held at the multi-faith building where the Buddhist sangha James and I attend meets. The building is home to Buddhists, United Church of Christ, a Catholic congregation, a Lutheran congregation, and a Baptist congregation. ICOM is a separate organization not affiliated with any of the congregations, but I believe they were invited to use our space for their fundraiser and we all provided the volunteers to help run it. I spent three hours bussing tables while James got to wash dishes. We were exhausted when we were done, but we had a good time, and ICOM raised more than their $20,000 goal to help asylum seekers and immigrants.

I hope your garden is growing and flowers blooming and you are finding time, energy, and strength to get out in the world and do good work. Until next week!

Reading

• Book: Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya. This is the dark side of loving books, when you wrap yourself in books in order to avoid facing up to severe depression, your entire identity is in books because you are hoping that you find the one that will eventually save you. A short, fascinating memoir about mental illness.
• Essay: Urban Legend: The Harebrained Myth of Urban Sustainability and Why You Should Bet on the Country Tortoise by Jason Bradford. Small is beautiful, the future is rural.
• Poem: As a Kid I Was Told, “Don’t Step on a Crack or You’ll Break Your Momma’s Back” by Karla Cordero
• Interview: How Manosphere Content Placates Disenfranchised Men, Meagan Day interviews Kristin R. Ghodsee. Boys and men are lost, but thankfully this article does not once imply that women are responsible for their being lost, nor are they responsible for saving them.
• Article: Worsening allergies aren’t your imagination. Didn’t need an article to tell me my allergies have gotten worse, but it’s nice to have confirmation about why.

Quote

“I was more and more fixated on the idea of life as narrative structure, and narrative structure as control. Both my belief in the immovable genre of my life—the suicide plot—and my belief in the fantastical possibility of being saved by the right book—the reading plot—were further enabled by the idea that I myself had become nothing but a text. It felt so important to be able to give a clear account of what was happening in it—to show up to a meeting with a colleague, or a drinks date with a friend, ready to deliver a neatly organized book report. I alternated between being someone who was forever at the mercy of plots I had no control over, and being someone who believed they knew exactly how those plots worked: in other words, between being a character and being a critic. Nowhere did I take responsibility for being my own author.”

~Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia, p195

#cherries #currants #FriendsSchoolPlantSale #gojiBerries #gooseberry #HardTimesCafe #heatPump #peachTree #ProfessorPlum #rhubarb #SewardCafe #sunchokes

Bee on hyssop

Last week at 4 a.m. on Tuesday—or was it Wednesday? it’s all a sleep deprived blur—the raccoon came back for more apples. 

Thud! Roll! Splat!

James and I both woke up and held our breathe.

Thud! Roll! Splat!

We groaned. James swore, got out of bed, grabbed the cake pans, turned on the porch light and went out to scare away Rocket Raccoon. While another apple hit the roof from high in the tree, he found himself staring eye-to-eye with a big pudgy raccoon in the lower branches. Rocket had brought a friend!

He banged the cake pans together. I heard him from inside and heard Rocket jump out of the tree and scramble across the roof. 

James came back indoors and told me about Pudge, who didn’t budge when James banged the pans together. Thankfully, the apples that are left on the tree are high up on spindly branches and Pudge is too fat to join Rocket. If Rocket keeps eating apples, he too will soon be too pudgy to get the rest.

Of course, thinking Rocket and Pudge would be happy with just the apples was a mistake. They visited the veg garden too. They had fun playing in the water dishes on the deck. They thought the jalapeños looked interesting, but found out they were spicy and didn’t actually eat them, just removed several of them from the plants and scattered them around. Most of them were full size, but we were planning on leaving them on to ripen to red so they’d be spicier. The raccoons were kind enough to not pick all the peppers or destroy the plants, so we still have a chance at some red ones.

The raccoons were not defeated by the cherry bushes, however, which still had quite a few ripening cherries on them. The bushes are only about knee high (they should eventually grow to about 5 feet tall) after having been eaten down to nubs from Fat Rabbit two winters ago. The great thing about the cherry bushes is that the fruit hides beneath the leaves towards the center of the bush, making it hard for birds to get at them and they are sour so squirrels don’t really bother them either. 

The raccoons didn’t care. By the squashed look of the bushes, they climbed right into the middle of them and chowed down. 

James and I had already been picking as they became ripe and have a little over half a quart jar pitted and frozen. The raccoons left a little over a dozen, which I picked. And now that’s the end of the cherries for this year. Not enough for a pie, but enough for some cherry chocolate chip cookies and maybe some pancakes.

Rabbit is still in the garden. We’ve been unable to scare them out of hiding. We are pretty sure they are hunkered down behind the compost bin next to a pile of woody branches waiting to be cut up, making them conveniently inaccessible to our scare sticks.

Rabbit seems to have tired of beans and has been eating the squash blossoms. With the rain and warmth, all the squashes are vining and flowering vigorously, but since Rabbit keeps eating the blossoms, I’m not getting any squash! I have one butternut out of five vines. No kuri squash, one tiny sweet meat squash, and so far no zucchini. Though the zucchini are just getting big enough to begin producing squash having gotten a late start because Wanker the Squirrel kept digging up and eating the seeds every time I planted more.

Surprisingly, the squirrels have not been adding to the mayhem. I suspect they are keeping an eye on the still green but just beginning to blush tomatoes and when they are getting close to ripe, they will rip them off the vine, take one bite, and leave the rest on the ground. I might have to pick tomatoes slightly early and finish ripening them indoors in order to protect them. Because, dang, they are doing great this year! 

It’s huge!

I am currently fascinated by the Hungarian Heart Tomatoes. These are a fleshy tomato great for canning. I have never grown them before. I have three plants. Two of them are normal tomato size plants with average sized tomatoes. The third is a gigantic vine that has exceeded the top of the tomato cage by almost a foot and has tomatoes bigger than my fist. The three plants are all near each other so I have no idea why this one is such a monster. I have never had tomatoes this big, or a vine this huge before. I will definitely be saving seeds from this baby! 

The cherry tomato vines are loaded, and the black slicing tomatoes are doing well, though not as amazingly as all the others. And the mystery Alley Tomato, has fruit too. They are small so must be some variety of cherry tomato. But the plant is sturdy and not even staked up, which is pretty amazing. If the resulting fruit is good, I will definitely be saving seeds. 

I planted linen flax in the garden this year, thinking of attempting to process it into yarn. Their little blue flowers are starting open, and they are tiny but pretty. Sadly, the plants did not grow very tall, and I doubt they will turn out to be good enough to make into fiber. Oh well, it was worth a try! I will stick to nettles, which have grown the tallest they have ever been with all the rain this year. 

There is still one peach on Marlon that I am nursing along. But it’s not looking great and I will be surprised if it actually gets ripe. Since I didn’t expect peaches on this tiny new tree to begin with, it is no great loss if this one peach doesn’t make it.

Sadly, though, in spite of the gorgeous flowering of Professor Plum in spring, there is not a single plum on the tree. Professor has grown about two feet this year though and is about 8 feet tall. Considering the severe pruning/coppice after Fat Rabbit girdled the tree two winters ago, the growth is astonishing. I recently inspected the wild plum trees I have foraged from the past few years and they don’t have plums either. So I suspect that so much rain is not to the liking of plums. 

Raspberries though, the number of canes has exploded this year. After three summers of drought and a big cane die off, they are making a come back. Since they fruit on second year canes, if all goes well, next summer will be a raspberry extravaganza.

Today we dug the potatoes. They are all from small potatoes I saved from last year’s harvest. They did about like they always do, more than we planted but not enough to make us believe the effort is worth it. After trying a number of different techniques and potato varieties and never getting much yield for the work, we’ve decided to not grow potatoes again and use the big space they take up for other plants instead, like giant tomatoes.

We dug up the garlic today too. It did really well. Last fall I planted a few cloves of newly purchased garlic, Music, I think it was, the cloves from a saved bulb the variety of which I have written down somewhere but don’t know where at the moment, and a bunch of seeds from garlic flowers. The Music produced several huge bulbs, one of which I’m saving to plant this fall. And the seeds all grew little bulbs that I will plant in the fall as well as some new seeds from one plant I allowed to flower. I was going to allow two plants to flower but got a little excited cutting all the scapes in spring and  came this close to not having any flowers at all.

The goji berries I started from tiny seeds in March have finally become sizable plants ready for a place in the garden. We planted one today and surrounded them with chicken wire to keep the squirrels, rabbit, and hopefully curious raccoons away. I have two others to plant, possibly three. The possible one was attacked by a cutworm who ate all but one leaf. The plant was already the runt of the four and I don’t know whether they will be able to make a comeback. I will keep them in their pot and see what happens.

Thinking ahead to spring, I ordered some native prairie seeds today from Prairie Restorations. The yarrow I winter sowed two years ago was such a success that I figured I was ready to try some other seeds. I bought a packet each of white prairie clover (Dalea candida), showy penstemon (Penstemon grandiflorus), columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), wild lupine (Lupinus perennis), and black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta). I’ll be sowing these in containers in December or January because they need cold stratification, and then come spring I hope to have a whole mess of plants to fill in empty spaces in the front prairie garden and in a semi-shaded border in the veg garden. 

I know this gardening season isn’t over, it isn’t even winding down yet, but it’s never too early to think about next year while I can see what things look like and what would be good to fill in gaps.

This past week was hot, about 90F/32C every day with a dew point of 70F/21C or close to it, so I felt constantly sticky. We had a rollicking severe thunderstorm roll through Wednesday afternoon while James and I were both biking home from work. I made it home just as the downpour started but poor James got caught in it and arrived home soaked through. Fortunately that was just the start of the storm and we were safe indoors when the hail and high winds hit. The garden looked a bit roughed up afterwards but recovered just fine. Unfortunately, when I biked to work Thursday morning there were plenty of trees with big branches snapped off and one boulevard sapling snapped completely in half. 

We might get some big weather late tonight or tomorrow when a cool front arrives. When the storms clear out we will be left with comfortable humidity and temperatures around 75F/23C for the rest of the week. That’s pretty much perfection in my book.

Reading

• Article: Subvocalization: Why Most of Us Have a Voice in Our Heads When We Read. Do you have a voice in your head while you read? I always do. I even have a voice in my head when I am writing something. It’s not weird! The article explains the hows and whys of subvocalization. 
• Book: An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker. This is a beautiful book. I’ve always found Kara Walker’s art powerful and somehow, even in a “children’s” picture book, it still takes my breath away. And Kincaid, she tells it like it is and doesn’t sugar coat anything. 

Quote

~Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

Listening

• Podcast: First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing: Ada Limón. Host Mitzi Rapkin talks with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón about her recently published anthology You Are Here (it’s a fantastic collection, I highly recommend it!). Two of the poets with poems in the anthology make an appearance to read and briefly discuss their poem. I love Limón’s poetry and it was wonderful to hear her talk about how she put the anthology together as her Laureate project and what she originally wanted to do—drop poems on wildflower infused paper from the sky onto empty fields and lots across the country. There are, however, a number of national parks that now have engravings of poems in them that will be there permanently.

Watching

• Movie: Wicked Little Letters (2023). This was delightful. When people in Littlehampton start getting profanity laced anonymous letters, they immediately blame Rose, a rowdy Irish immigrant with a love of swearing. She’s charged with the crime and sent to prison to await trial because she hasn’t the money to afford bail. But Woman Police Officer Moss takes up her cause and gets to the bottom of things. It’s funny and sad and makes a huge statement about the patriarchy without being in your face about it.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

It was a quiet week in the kitchen as James made easy meals that didn’t need to be eaten hot—spicy peanut noodles—or didn’t require standing over a hot stove—burritos. There was also a summer garden salad with greens, peas, and beans fresh picked from the garden with spicy chick peas, fresh sweet corn, radishes, and a sprinkle of wild bergamot flowers on top. Did you know that the leaves of wild bergamot taste like oregano and can be used as a substitute for the herb? They can also be made into a relaxing tea or a syrup that helps sore throats and stomach upset.

https://astoneintheriver.net/2024/08/04/spice-of-life/

#cherries #flax #garlic #peaches #potatoes #prairiePlantSeeds #ProfessorPlum #rabbits #raccoon #squirrels #tomatoes