Into the Woods – Page 199 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Winterscapes

The winter sky soon after sunrise on Dec. 1. A rainy front from the Gulf of Mexico is being pushed away by cooler, dryer air.

Christmas wreath with woodpile

The woods behind the house

The house, from the woods behind the house

Even though 1.3 inches of rain fell in the last two days, only a tiny trickle of water is flowing in my little stream. This is good, really. The water is clean — no runoff. Most of the rain soaked into the ground. Not until the ground has been saturated, I guess, will the stream start flowing again. The summer of 2008 was not as dry as the summer of 2007, but more rain would be nice.

A stumpscape. This is in an area below the house where I removed old pine trees but left the stumps in place. I’ll let this area return to the wild, as part of the transition from woods to meadow.

Sonnet XXXV

Clearly my ruined garden as it stood
Before the frost came on it I recall —
Stiff marigolds, and what a trunk of wood
The zinnia had, that was the first to fall;
These pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves
Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun,
Cannot gainsay me, though the spirit grieves
And wrings its hands at what the frost has done.
If in widening silence you should guess
I read the moment with recording eyes,
Taking your love and all your loveliness
Into a listening body hushed of sighs . . .

Though summer’s rife and the warm rose in season,
Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Your cauliflower is calling you…

OK, so cauliflower lacks color. But we don’t hold that against taters or chardonnay, do we?

Now that the fresh greens have died out and the garden is in winter mode, we’re back to the winter diet. One of the vegetables that even the country grocery stores have during the winter is cauliflower. Cauliflower is relatively cheap, probably because it keeps well, with a low spoilage rate for shipping and shelving. Cauliflower is nutritionally dense, with all the virtues and anti-cancer properties of its family, Brassicaceae. Here’s the Wikipedia article on cauliflower.

I eat a lot of cauliflower during the winter, but with this cauliflower, I sinned a bit and made a light cheese sauce. It would be tempting to use butter, but I used toasted sesame oil instead. The flavor of all the cabbages — cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts — is highly compatible with toasted sesame oil.

If you’re new to cauliflower, boil it until it’s just barely tender and mash it exactly as you would mash taters, with butter and hot milk.

The garlic bed

Now that the turnips and mustard are clear of the raised bed, I’ve planted the garlic. The burlap cover is to keep the cat out. After the garlic has a good start, I’ll remove the burlap. The cat, Lily, ruined a third of the turnip and mustard crop by flinging dirt before the plants were established.

This raised bed has been here only since spring, but this is the third crop to go into it. First it was tomatoes, peppers, etc. Then the mustard and turnips, and now the garlic. Before spring I have to build at least five more of these beds. It’s an incredibly easy and efficient way to garden.

The garlic bulbs came from the Garlic Store. I planted three varieties: California Early (the standard garlic of Gilroy, California); Transylvanian (for teasing vampires); and Stull (which according to the Garlic Store was discovered at a garlic festival in New York). I’m a little late planting the garlic, but I think it will be fine.

The gothic moon

The waning moon, 6:45 a.m., November 23, 2008.

Lesson learnt, turnipwise…

My pitiful turnip crop, 2008. That’s mustard on the right.

I head eaten turnip and mustard greens for weeks and weeks, but last night the poor turnips froze. I wasn’t careful enough. Turnips don’t mind frost, but they sure didn’t like the hard freeze we had last night. According to my outdoor thermometer, the low temperature last night was 17.8 degrees F. That’s unusually cold for this time of year.

I pulled all the turnips and threw away all the frozen turnip greens. The mustard greens didn’t freeze, but they’ve clearly stopped growing, so I pulled all the mustard too. Tomorrow I’ll clean up the plantbed and plant garlic in it.

I must have had 20 or more messes of fresh mustard greens from my small raised bed. I’d have had even more, had the cat not frolicked repeatedly in that pretty black dirt.

The frozen turnips will have to be cooked today instead of stored in the pumphouse for Thanksgiving.

Actually, after I cleaned them up, it appears that the turnips handled the freeze much better than the leaves.

Apple trees

An old-fashioned limbertwig

You’d think that for all the work I did planting apple trees this week that there’d be something more photogenic. But at this point there’s not really much to see. Each tree is four feet tall (with almost a foot of it underground). And each tree is heavily pruned.

I planted nine apple trees and one pear tree. The trees came from Century Farm Orchards, which specializes in old Southern apple trees. I planted nine different varieties of apples. I tried to select varieties that would extend the season from early to late (July to November or so), and apples that store well. For the record, here are the varieties:

Arkansas black (2)

Kinnaird’s choice (1)

Old fashioned limbertwig (1)

Mary Reid (1)

Smokehouse (1)

Summer banana (1)

William’s favorite (1)

Yellow June (1)

Plumblee pear (1)

Though the trees are all old-fashioned varieties, they were grown on MM.111 rootstock, a hardy rootstock.

With luck, I’ll have apples in three to six years.

So the deflationists were right

The Baltic Dry Index measures the cost of shipping by sea. All of a sudden, worldwide shipping has drastically slowed.

The cost of commodities like copper have fallen rapidly.

It has been clear for two years that an economic calamity lay ahead. What was not clear, though, was whether the bust would be accompanied by inflation or deflation. It’s now clear that, at least in the near term, the deflationists were right. People and businesses have stopped buying things, so prices are falling. Even the prices of many foods are falling. Credit has frozen, so this makes it even clearer just how much stuff was being bought with borrowed money.

Given the vast amount of government borrowing and “stimulus” that will be required to get the economy going again, it seems all too likely that, longer term, inflation will return. But for now, deflation is a fine stroke of luck. Now’s the time for people to think about what they need to get through the hard times ahead and stock up.

I’m even going to price copper gutters today. A few months ago, copper gutters would have been completely out of the question.

Another mess of greens

Of all the low-intensity gardening I did this year, the mustard greens probably were the most productive for the least effort. I just sprinkled some seeds in the raised bed, and, ka-boom, instant greens.

The rain of the last three days has rejuvenated them. I think I’ll harvest all the turnips next week.

Cat portraits

Lily in the morning light — James-Michael Gregg

A friend was visiting from California a couple of weeks ago, and he took hundreds of photos of Lily with his iPhone. Two photos, in particular, caught light and color in a wonderful way. I used Gimp to apply an “oilify” effect.

Lily in the morning shadow

Where late the sweet birds sang

Early fall has very quickly become middle fall. Though these pear trees up the road still have most of their leaves, the leaves on the trees in the woods are turning brown and falling. Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

A bare, ruin’d choir of woods below my house

A briar berry

A dried weed

That time of year thou mayst behold thriving turnips and mustard.

Something black and wicked tiptoes through the turnips. A Lily cat?

My house seen from the woods

My front door. I now have a shiny new doorkey to jingle in my pocket.

These two shots of the house show some of the angles that made the house so tricky to build.

The winter wind will whistle around these corners in a very gothic sort of way.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

— William Shakespeare