Into the Woods – Page 206 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

David 0, Nature 962

Nature abhors a vacuum. I suspect that nature also abhors farmers. I have thrown massive amounts of labor, fertilizer, lime and seed at the acre I cleared of old pine trees back in February. I was desperate for ground cover. Though some of what I planted took root and grew some, once the rain begins to fall, nature proves that she is way better at this than I am. Some people would be ashamed to have so many weeds. I am proud of every last one of them. As rebellious children often do, the weeds have succeeded where I have failed. Above: a common weed.

A common weed

Baby mimosa. It’s a weed here.

I planted this! Peppermint.

A common weed

A young morning glory. I have lots of them. I have no idea how they got here. They could not possibly have been here before, because they’re growing in what was formerly deep, and deeply shaded, pine mulch.

A young scrub pine. There are lots of these. I’m sorry to say that, like the sawbriars, they won’t be permitted to stay. Their day is over, at least while I live here.

A common weed

Surprise surprise. The baby clover likes the compost that I put out for the squash.

The corn struggles in still-poor soil. I’m starting to understand what the soil needs, so next year it will be richer.

A squash bloom

A cucumber bloom (I think)

My first baby watermelon

A common weed

Flowers in the ditch

The ditch has been transformed. Back in March it was an ugly gash left by the bull dozer. The logging operation had ruined the ditch, so it had to be opened again to drain the roadway. For reasons I don’t completely understand, the ditch has healed much more quickly than any other area after I took out the pine trees.

Flowers in the ditch. Actually, this is a common briar. This year, us likes briars.

Runners from a bold briar sneak out of the ditch and try to take over the roadway. I say go for it.

The jungle in the ditch

For something like 50 pounds of clover seed, so far I have seen something like two clover blossoms. Two! But the rain has caused the clover to make another stand, so who knows what the future holds.

The clover tries again in July, having not done too well in April.

I believe this is a wild strawberry. It volunteered on the bare bank above the newly made driveway, the area that I have found most difficult to get anything to grow.

Baby peas. I planted these.

I’m not sure what this is. It’s in an area where I put a variety of heirloom seed, but for all I know it’s a volunteer weed of some sort. I guess I’ll find out after I see whether it produces anything I can eat. [Update: I have it from two experts — my sister and my friend Gavin — that this is okra. So it’s an heirloom variety of okra that I’d forgotten I planted.]

Looking down into the same bloom as in the photo above

A baby poplar tree makes a stand near the new pumphouse. Around here, poplars and maples are the first hardwoods to appear in the succession of species that leads to the recovery of a hardwood forest. This poor baby has relatives all around, and it probably came back from an old root rather than from a new seed.

Fried green tomatoes…

… for when you just can’t wait any longer for the tomatoes to get ripe. These tomatoes are fried in a simple batter of whole wheat flour, water, a little baking powder, and a little salt. A generous portion of coconut oil went into the frying pan.

Hurricane season begins

Weather Underground

The Atlantic hurricane season is off and running. Tropical Storm Bertha is now forming in the South Atlantic. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground, whose excellent blog follows these storms and gives good descriptions of the meteorology behind them, says that Bertha has already set a record. It’s the farthest east a tropical storm has ever formed this early in the season. Masters thinks that this may mean that the 2008 hurricane season may be more active than average.

Here in Northwest North Carolina, up against the mountains, a strong hurricane season is good news rather than bad news. Hurricanes rarely do much damage this far inland, but they often bring excellent rains and interesting tropical weather.

Vegan pesto

Vegan pesto with homegrown basil and homegrown garlic

If you’ve got fresh basil (and I do — apparently the deer don’t like it and left it for me), then you’ve got to make pesto. No pine nuts? Use walnuts. No parmesan? Use … brewer’s yeast. Living in an RV and no proper chopping instruments? Just lazily mince the basil as best you can. Pesto is very flexible and very forgiving. Macaroni (whole wheat, at least) works just fine.

I’m not a vegan, but I love good vegan cookery. Brewer’s yeast is a staple that I always keep on hand. During the winter I used it as a binder in salmon cakes. I’m finding that it makes a nice, nutty substitute for grated parmesan. It helps if you’ve ever been to the Red Vic Movie House on Haight Street in San Francisco. Having their brewer’s yeast popcorn is a good lesson in not being afraid of brewer’s yeast.

Here in the rural South, though, the concept of parmesan seems to be different. Ordinary grocery stores have it, but it’s coarsely grated, soft, and greasy, more like grated jack cheese than parmesan. Apparently that’s what country people like, the same way they like salad dressings so thick that they won’t pour and have to be served with a spoon. I’m finding that Southerners have even forgotten what good mayonnaise is all about. A country grocery store may have twelve different brands of mayonnaise, but every one of them will contain adulterants and inferior ingredients, and they’re not fit to eat. Another complaint, as long as I’m complaining, is that Southerners of all people don’t seem to understand buttermilk anymore. It’s almost impossible to find buttermilk that doesn’t have adulterants like tapioca. I’ve given up on buttermilk and have just switched to soy milk. But I haven’t given up on speaking to grocery store managers. If I find the manager and say politely that it sure would be nice to have buttermilk that’s just buttermilk, the manager looks at me like I’m from Mars. But I soldier on.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, people understand about good milk. Around here, that’s been forgotten. People buy whatever the local dairy sells. They don’t read the labels, and they don’t ask questions. Hormones? No problem. Preservatives? No problem. Tapioca in the buttermilk? No problem. I’m tempted to draw parallels between Southerners’ passivity and ignorance about who sells them good food to their passivity and ignorance about who sells them good government. But I’ll leave that for another day, even as I continue to ask grocery store managers if they have any better buttermilk, and where did those onions come from.

Lightning bugs

Click on the picture for higher resolution, and you might see the lightning bugs.

The photo is of my meadow, up against the edge of the woods, taken from my deck. Like a lot of wildlife, lightning bugs seem to like the boundaries between woods and meadow. I’m lucky because I have about a thousand feet of that habitat. Well, lucky except for the deer and wild turkeys that have been materializing out of the edge of the woods to conduct raids on my green tomatoes. I’m torn between grabbing the camera and taking a picture of deer and turkeys working together, or grabbing the slingshot and popping their thievin’ butts. But so far I’ve not been quick enough to do either. They run back into the woods as soon as they see me. The deer run silently and with dignity. The wild turkeys squawk and flap like melodramatic cowards. The turkeys run and flap. They don’t fly, at least not until they’re close enough to a tree to get up on a limb. The turkeys are as undignified and graceless as the deer are dignified and graceful.

But anyway, as long as I’m attempting to photograph some things that are almost impossible to photograph, here’s lightning bugs. In the photo above, the lightning bugs are just tiny dots in the blackness, the same size and luminosity as stars. Some of the lightning bugs show up as red in the photo. I have no idea why. It must be a trick of the camera, because to the eye lightning bugs are always a silvery or golden color, like stars. The photo above has not been altered or color-adjusted in any way. It’s straight from the camera, a Kodak DC-265. Lightning bugs cruise along slowly at an altitude of a few feet to 40 feet or so. They wink every few seconds. It’s an interesting game to try to guess where any particular bug will appear next. They always surprise you, though they’ve flown only a few feet between blinks. Wikipedia is quite correct when it says that lightning bugs are more crepuscular than nocturnal.

But, difficult to photograph or not, few sights can compare to the sight of lightning bugs during a summer evening in the South. There are not as many lightning bugs as there used to be. Development has reduced their habitat. But they’re really sweet bugs — beautiful, gentle, and harmless. Along with honey bees, they’re the royalty of the insect world, and they deserve to flourish.

A lightning bug, Wikipedia

The life cycle of a storm…

A storm approaches from the west. Maybe with the right kind of lenses and filters it can be done, but there are some things that I find almost impossible to photograph. Skies, for one. Impressive trees. And views inside the woods. It would be interesting to discuss these problems with photographers with more experience and better cameras than I have. In the case of views inside the woods, I think the problem is that a flat photograph does not capture the three-dimensional effect. Woods have a depth that is very hard to capture in a flat photograph. In any case, here’s a sky photograph. It’s the approach of a storm. Summer storms here in northwest North Carolina always approach from the west, with a bit of northward drift. I wish I understood the meteorology of this better, but I think it has to do with the way airflows over the Southeast (in the summer) circulate around the “Bermuda High.” The Bermuda High, which dominates the weather here during the summer, is a high pressure system that moves around in the Atlantic between Bermuda and the American coast. When the Bermuda High in the right position for rain, humid air flows in a kind of circulation motion off the Gulf of Mexico into the Southeast, creating conditions for afternoon and evening thunderstorms. This particular storm didn’t bring much rain, but I didn’t complain too much because yesterday’s storm dropped almost two inches. In the Southeast, most of the summer rain comes from thunderstorms. Long, leisurely rains almost never happen in the summer. That pattern starts to change in the fall after hurricane season is over. Then we get real rain fronts that can sometimes last for days. Sometimes we get flooding from the summer rains, but the real reservoir-fillers happen during the fall, winter, and spring.

After this storm passed this evening, it left…

… this to the east, and …

… this to the west.

Today: stalking trains, tractors and lilies

A diesel engine belonging to the Yadkin Valley Railroad stands idle on a sidetrack at Donnaha, right beside the Yadkin River. Yadkin Valley Railroad is a tiny railroad owned by Gulf and Ohio. It has two lines — one from Rural Hall to Mount Airy (48 miles), and another from Rural Hall to Elkin and North Wilkesboro (66 miles). Donnaha is on the Elkin/North Wilkesboro line. Rural Hall is in Forsyth County right on the Stokes County line.

That white Jeep gets around.

I’ve never seen a tractor I didn’t love. This one belongs to the railroad, and I have no idea what kind of work it does.

A day lily at Holden Gardens in Yadkin County. Holden Gardens raises a wide variety of day lilies. I put in an order for 300 fans of plain old roadside lilies. Holden Gardens is off Courtney-Huntsville Road about four miles from my mother’s place.

The homeplace at Holden Gardens.

The wellhouse at the Holden Gardens homeplace.

Day lilies with tractor at Holden Gardens

Day lily with beetle

One of the owner-operators at Holden Gardens

What's more localized than a thunderstorm?

Weather Underground

So what if the Dow is down 360 points today and oil is at a new high? As I was just saying to a friend in email, when you’ve relocalized, and having a decent supper depends on it, nothing is more thrilling than a good downpour of unforecast, unexpected rain. I’m joking. But it’s still thrilling. And actually there are beautiful showers all across the South right now. This probably means that neither the Bermuda High nor La Niña is exerting an evil influence on us right now.

Oh, are you a steampunk too?

http://steampunkworkshop.com/keyboard.shtml

www.castlemagic.com

Finally, at last, I have an identity. I know what I am. I am a steampunk. I discovered this through one of the New York Times’ blogs.

How do you know if you’re a steampunk? If you do your laundry (as I have been doing) with buckets and a washboard and hang it up to dry, but you also have an iMac and are tempted to get an iPhone. If you want a house (as I do) with a gothic design, but you also want it to be as green as possible. If you want a real keyboard for your iMac, something like you might have found on an IBM terminal in 1972. If you understand that analog technology can never be made obsolete by digital technology, no matter how many smarty-pants young techies think otherwise (leave a comment and bring it on, if you dare, smarty-pants young techies).

As documentation of my steampunk credentials, below is a photo of today’s laundry and my iMac.

Actually I’m going to go ahead and respond to the smarty-pants young techies who think that analog technology has been made obsolete by digital technology. Your Wifi router, and your cell phone, use digital forms of signal modulation, but the underlying transmitters and receivers are analog, since radio waves are, and will forever be, analog. Your audio system may use digital sampling and recording methods. But your amplifier is, and will remain, an analog device, because sound waves are, and will forever be, analog. Your eardrum is an analog device. Physics and engineering will forever need differential equations to calculate, say, orbits and trajectories. All those equations are analog. The universe is analog. Any digital system that wants to interface with nature must do so in an analog way.

Cherry preserves

I decided against making a pie out of the Levering Orchard cherries. As much fun as it would have been to finish off a cherry pie in a couple of days all by myself, I didn’t think that would be too good for me. So I ended up making cherry preserves. That way I can put the preserves on pone bread and stretch it out for weeks.