Which Tree is That?



Are you taking the kids to Grandma’s over the holidays?  There’s nothing like a good car game to keep them happy on a long drive.  When I was little we tried to spot passing objects that started with the letters of the alphabet – Airplane, Beard, Cow.  If my Dad got to the Q he’d claim he’d seen a Quaker coming out of church.

When we were older Dad taught us to play cribbage using license plates from passing cards.  Letters on a plate counted as 10s, a zero was a flush, so 243M would add up as 15-2 and a run of 3 makes 5. If you’re not a cribbage player, forget it, but 233SR would win that round with 15-2,4,6,8 and a pair makes 10. 

Hank’s family played more educational games.  His favorite was “House Dates,” guessing the period when a house was built by its architecture.  I was hopeless at that, and when we traveled with our own kids we played a game called “Tree ID.”

Identifying roadside trees when you’re whipping by them at 55 miles an hour can be pretty tricky, but they’re far easier to label in winter than summer.  Leaf shapes are just a blur from a passing car, but when they’ve been shed, the tree’s skeleton is revealed, providing helpful clues.

It’s a bit like people. A man in uniform makes a certain impression, but strip him down to his BVDs and you get an entirely different picture.  Lest I appear sexist, I might add that a fat woman in a girdle and a slimming dress often manages to disguise what’s underneath.

Tree ID is a fun game even for children, but give beginners a break.  Let the kids use broad categories – fruit tree, conifer, maple.  When they say a tree which still has its leaves like the one pictured above is an oak, don’t ask “a pin oak? A black or white oak? ” Actually the one above is a red oak.  

You’d be surprised how many trees are so distinctive that once learned they’re easily identified.  A weeping willow’s pendulous branches or an avenue of Lombardy poplars, straight and tall as a column of soldiers, are unique.  How about the soft green needles of a white pine or the distinctive white bark of a paper birch?

Many trees have distinguishing bark. A very common tree found in New England has the very shaggy bark pictured below, so once you’ve learned it’s a shagbark hickory you’ll never have trouble identifying it.  Those ragged strips which curl out from the trunk in such an unkempt fashion are certainly shaggy.

Nothing else looks like the bark of a sycamore.  Its thick limbs are mottled with splotches of white, and if you’re lucky, a few “buttonballs” will be dangling from its branches. The popple and quaking aspen have conspicuously yellowish bark and usually die young.  Beech trees have extremely smooth bark of silvery gray, and hang onto their pale yellow leaves well into winter.

The winter silhouette of the black locust has such twisted, crooked limbs it belongs in one of Chas Adams’s spooky cartoons.  I saw these trees for the first time when we were house hunting and drove up Locust Hill Road on a bleak November day.  I thought they were really ugly, but when spring came I changed my mind.  A blizzard of blossoms filled the air with perfume and turned the road white as they dropped their petals.

Where a tree is growing can be another helpful clue in Tree ID.  At this time of year a small graceful tree with red berries in a front yard usually can be spotted as a dogwood. A row of large, heavy-limbed trees with rough, corrugated bark along a country road must surely be the sugar maples some farmer planted 100 years ago. Staghorn sumacs like to clutter up roadsides, their candelabras of velvety red seedpods still conspicuous as winter arrives.   

Gnarled, fat-trunked trees by a river, sprouting burls and bristling suckers are probably black willows.  Marshes usually contain swamp maples whose leaves turn a brilliant scarlet each fall.  Once you learn that the conifer whose green needles turn teddybear brown as winter arrives is a tamarack, you’ll never have trouble identifying it.  

A forest tree rarely resembles an open-grown tree of the same species, the same way a scrawny orange barn cat living on mice won’t look like his fluffy cousin living in the house and enjoying liver bits and cream.  A maple tree hemmed in by a crowd of white pines will be very different than one that has stretched out luxuriously in an open meadow.

Try playing Tree ID. Maybe next summer we’ll take a woodland walk and try identifying the trees by their leaves.   Have a Merry Christmas.

Mrs. Eddison's Other Suggestions



In case you haven’t read my last column, Mrs. Eddison is the gardener whose book “Gardening for a Lifetime” offers some great suggestions on how to simplify a large garden when it becomes just too much to manage.  Besides her most sensible advice, “Get a helper,” she has many other good ideas.

Use mulch.  We all know that a heavy mulch in the garden can save hours of weeding, helps retain moisture and provides nutrients for the soil as it decomposes.  Mrs. Eddison uses shredded leaves and claims they are by far the best mulch.  Shredded leaves? I liked that idea, but shredding leaves turns out to be a little complicated as you need something like a brush hog to do the job.

In the fall you rake the leaves into a pile, drive the raised brush hog over the pile and set it down on it.  Voila!  Shredded leaves.  I haven’t tried this yet, since I find dealing with the tractor’s brush hog difficult. Maybe a lawn mower would do the trick, but I wonder if once you’ve managed the shredding, are the leaves scattered all over and require another raking? I mulch my border with unshredded leaves.

If you have a perennial border like mine, it probably contains many plants that require constant work such as dead-heading, staking, or pruning.  Some plants like to sprawl into the territory of other perennials and need to be kept in their place. Others self-seed so readily that new ones pop up every year.  And there are some plants that stop looking attractive once they’ve finished blooming.

You may not want to give up your favorite delphiniums which always need staking or your handsome iris that wants constant dead-heading to look well, but if you’re trying to cut down on the upkeep of a garden, eliminating plants that cause extra work is one way to do it. 

There are many easy-care plants that make good substitutes for those that have some of the faults listed above.  For instance, the white, pink or maroon spires of the tidy perennial Astilbe look good all summer. The sedum Autumn Joy with its thick green leaves that become a rich burgundy each fall is another well-behaved perennial.   Hostas, which I’ve always considered rather dull when planted in a row, can be attractive used as a single plant intermingled with other perennials. There are dozens of varieties to choose from and all require little work by the gardener.  To replace tall plants, try some of the attractive ornamental grasses.

Small, slow-growing shrubs that may only need a little pruning offer another idea for the perennial bed.  When I read that suggestion I immediately was reminded of my quince bushes, blooming in the top photo.  I planted these prickly early bloomers years ago to compliment the daffodils that also bring color to the spring garden. 

Those quinces were just little well-rooted suckers I’d dug up from around a friend’s bush way back when I knew very little about their habits.  It was a big mistake.  The quince is designed to be a large shrub and needs pruning at least twice a summer to keep its shape, a very thorny job.  And what’s worse, all that pruning encourages endless new shoots to sprout up around the mother plant.

I loved the idea of replacing these difficult shrubs with some less troublesome species.  Potentillas immediately came to mind.  I have these low-growing shrubs on the bank below the pond. They bloom for almost the entire summer and I’ve never had to prune them.  Or one of my favorite shrubs, the variegated euonymus.  The one pictured below grew by leaps and bounds this summer, but so did everything in New England.  It’s at least 35 years old and I’ve never pruned it, except to take branches here and there to use in flower arrangements. 

So many different shrubs – hydrangeas, syringas, all the slow-growing evergreens such as laurels or cotoneasters.   I was so excited thinking about all these choices that last weekend I talked Piper, my only grandchild who likes gardening, into helping me tackle one of the quince bushes when she was here.  What an enormous job!  Cutting its branches down to stubs was a breeze, but the rest was agony.  It took close to 3 hours to uproot  and release that quince, clipping and lopping a zillion roots, which I know will send up a zillion suckers next spring.

And I still must face the other two quince bushes.  How ironic, when I think of the work involved to make my perennial border require less work!  

Too Old to Garden?



                                        

A few weeks ago when my friend Leslie and I were discussing the incredible amount of work our gardens had required this past summer, she suggested I read “Gardening for a Lifetime,” a book on “How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older.”  The author, Sydney Eddison,  a lady I suspect is only a few years older than I am,  has enjoyed a life very similar to mine.  She has designed and created her own gardens,  gives lectures, writes books, and even became a widow in 2005, the same year I did. 

I was eager to learn about Mrs. Eddison’s ideas on how to cope when one no longer has the physical stamina to maintain a large garden.  I wasn’t surprised to find that hiring a variety of helpers was her first solution.  My kids have been telling me to do just that for the past five years. 

I  have a wonderful yard man who comes for an hour or so each week to do the “man jobs” I can’t do. He mows the steep banks around the pond, moves rocks too heavy for me to move, fixes machines that don’t work.   But I want to do all those other garden jobs. 

Unfortunately I’m in the same predicament as Mrs. Eddison, getting too cripped up to continue maintaining a landscape that I’ve spent more than 50 years creating. But I’ve gardened all these years for very different reasons than this erudite lady has.

I acquired all my garden knowledge through gardening, learning from my many mistakes.  I had no background or education in gardening, never took courses in horticulture, never went to nurseries to find new and different plants. I’ve never even bothered to learn the Latin names of the perennials in my gardens. As a result I am always uncomfortable talking to educated gardeners.

When I began to write gardening columns for the local newspapers it was only because I couldn’t find a publisher for the 3 “Great American Novels” I’d written. It always makes sense to write about what you’re familiar with, and by then I had a bushel basket of gardening experiences and was even giving my wildflower programs to garden clubs.   

When my readers ask gardening questions, I look up the answers in books if I’ve never dealt personally with the problems they encounter.   “I’m not a horticulturist, just an entertainer” has been my stock apology.   It still is. My first love is writing. And there’s the vast difference between this very knowledgeable gardener and myself. 

I have delighted in the challenge of turning an abandoned farm into a beautiful property.  I revel in caring for this landscape Hank and I created, getting my hands in the dirt, nestling little seedlings in their new home, pulling up all those ferocious weeds.  I love it when my grandchildren want to get out the photo albums and look back at the early years when Locust Hill didn’t even have a lawn, just burdocks and poison ivy and falling down fences.

My head is full of wonderful memories of how we struggling to tame this muddled tangle of vegetation, building retaining walls, fencing the sheep pastures, starting my first vegetable garden.  One of my oldest memories from Locust Hill occurred way back in 1965 when my new friend Bunny Foster brought me a dozen iris rhizomes. I didn’t even know what they were. 

Where to put them?  Those plants were the beginning of my perennial border, a flower bed that grew like Topsy.  My friend Janette brought me feverfew, Betsy gave me Monarda, Henny divided and gave me peony roots, my mother offered me lemon lilies. Eventually the border extended the entire length of sheep pasture fence, over 100 feet.

I love remembering the morning I went out to the compost pile with the morning’s coffee grounds and saw that one of our ewes had produced three lambs.  What a sight! 

Or the day I was lucky enough to have my camera when a total of 8 pintails splashed down into the pond, ducking and diving for twenty minutes before flapping back up into the blue sky.

What fun to recall the excitement as we prepared for the first wedding on Locust Hill; how I scalloped the perennial border’s boring straight edge and bought lupines and peonies and annuals so we’d have blooms in June; how our naughtiest dog, Rosta, stepped on Trum’s train as she and her Dad walked across the lawn toward the waiting groom.

 Oh, dear, I could easily spend another hour or two reminiscing about Locust Hill! 

Mrs. Eddison had many other good suggestions in her book besides hiring help, but I will save them (and I suspect a few more memories) for my next column.

Anatomy of a Carrot?



                                   
Snow in October, and no killing frost has got to be a record.  I didn’t wait for Jack to blacken my vegetable garden.  I pulled up the pepper plants, the tomato vines and my pathetic Brussels sprouts.  Everyone I’ve talked to who grew sprouts had the same problem I did - sprouts no bigger than peas.

The one vegetable I left in the garden was the carrots.  If you  mulch the carrot row heavily you can continue harvesting them well into December.  Wouldn’t it be nice if carrots made your hair curl and your eyes capable of seeing in the dark?  Unfortunately the vitamin A purported to bring about these delightful attributes is apparently not released unless carrots are cooked or juiced. I’m a rabbit food freak and eat few cooked carrots, and No juice. 

Last week a friend sent me an article claiming a sliced carrot looks like the human eye. “The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye... And science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to the function of the eyes.”

Since there was no one listed as the author of the article, I went on the Internet to see how authentic it might be.  When I googled “Food-Body Parts” I was directed to a site called “Truth or Fiction.”  The site said the article was “a very creative piece, but is very weak on substantiation.  We have not found any strong documentation correlating foods with the parts of the body that they resemble.”

OK, maybe it’s just a joke, but I found it really interesting and thought you might too, so here it is.

It's been said that God first separated the salt water from the fresh, made dry land, planted a garden, made animals and fish... All before making a human. He made and provided what we'd need before we were born. These are best & more powerful when eaten raw.

God left us a great clue as to what foods help what part of our body!
God's Pharmacy! Amazing!

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye... And YES, science now shows carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart has four chambers and is red. All of the research shows tomatoes are loaded with lycopine and are indeed pure heart and blood food.  Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.

A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds on the nut are just like the neo-cortex. We now know walnuts help develop more than three (3) dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys. Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and many more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don't have enough sodium in your diet, the body pulls it from the bones, thus making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.  

Avocados,  Eggplant and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female - they look just like these organs. Today's research shows that when a woman eats one avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight, and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this? It takes exactly nine (9) months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods. Modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them.

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the mobility of male sperm and increase the numbers of Sperm as well to overcome male sterility. Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics. Oranges, Grapefruits, and other Citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.

Onions look like the body's cells. Today's research shows onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells. They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes. A working companion, Garlic, also helps eliminate waste materials and dangerous free radicals from the body.

Sorry, I don't have any photos of vegetable body parts.  True or False, you’ve got to admit the anatomy lesson was fun.  

The Easiest Fruit to Grow




 I’ve just come back from picking the last of my Fall Gold raspberries.  Are you familiar with these melt-in-your-mouth berries? They are so much sweeter than red raspberries. They are yellow, with a blush of pink when fully ripe, and taste like pure sugar.

Long before I discovered this scrumptious variety of raspberry, Hank and I put in a large bed of a red variety called Latham.  That bed was the inspiration for submitting a column to the local newspaper and started my writing career when it was accepted.   It began this way –

“Growing raspberries is about as tricky as growing a beard. I speak from second-hand experience, I hasten to add.  Beginning a beard or a raspberry bed can be tedious, but once established, both require little pruning and much pleasure.  I assume not having to scrape one’s face every morning must be as delightful as having fresh raspberries on one’s breakfast cereal.”

Raspberries are definitely one of the most rewarding fruits to grow.  Fruit trees - apples, peaches, plums, etc. - all require spraying to produce good fruit, an expensive proposition unless you do it yourself, which is a major job.  Grapes require fancy supports and several years before the vines produce their handsome clusters of grapes.   

Before we had a raspberry bed I picked wild blackberries to make my jam, a very thorny ordeal, and a very seedy jam.  Raspberries have neither problem.  Both their thorns and their seeds are inoffensive.  The plants don’t need to be sprayed and most varieties don’t require staking. 

Raspberry plants reproduce by sending out underground stolens to make new plants.  We made our second raspberry bed by using these healthy children that pop up each year, sometimes in undesirable places.  The year I bought a dozen Fall Gold plants I made the mistake of planting them in a newly prepared bed about six feet away from the beds of reds. 

The next spring many red children invaded my planting of Fall Gold and within a few years had overpowered them, taking  firm possession of their bed.  I needed to find a new home for the gold, far away from the reds.

I tied colored yarn around the stems of the Fall Gold so I’d be able to tell them from the interlopers, and in the spring transplanted them to their new home along the south side of Hank’s shop.  It wasn’t an ideal place, a quarter mile down the hill from the house, and had limited sunlight, but it was the best I could do.

Pruning your raspberries is done in the fall.  The plants are perennials, continuing to live for years and years, but their canes are biennials. In their first year all they do is grow.  In their second year they branch, put out flowers, produce fruit, and exhausted by all that heroic effort, they die.

Each fall when the new canes are still green, the old canes look and are dead. If you don’t remove them you will end up with a briar patch even Br’er Rabbit can’t get in. Of the five or six  new canes, you should choose the best two or three and remove the rest.  The weird photo below, a back to back double view,  shows the few little piles that I removed this fall, hardly an exhausting task.

Mulching to keep down the weeds is also done in the fall.  I used to mulch our beds with left over haybales, easy to spread and full of nutrients as they decompose.  They’re also full of hay seeds, however, and after twenty years the beds were a hopeless mess of grass.  Last year I redid one bed and mulched it with wood chips, free from the town dump.  It was such a major job that I eliminated the second bed, giving away many of the plants to friends.

Some raspberries produce fruit just once a summer, usually in July, but other varieties have berries from late July until frost and are called “everbearing.”  These varieties are pruned differently since the first year’s cane produces the fruit and at the end of the season can be cut as the following spring a new cane will grow up to replace it. 

My Fall Gold are supposedly the everbearing type, but they don’t behave that way. They only start offering me ripe berries in mid-September, probably because they get so little sunlight.    Unlike most red varieties their canes grow very tall and need staking, but because “Out of sight” is “Out of mind,” I never got around to pruning or staking mine until this year when I needed a good photo for this column. 

Raspberries get moldy very quickly after a rain and need to be picked as soon as possible.  My reds did fine as they are harvested in July, but there was just too much rain this fall and so most of those sweet yellow berries got too moldy to eat. 

I recommend this variety, however.  And I’ve just gone on the Internet and read about a Fall Gold BUSH that sounds much easier to maintain.  It’s everbearing, providing fruit from June until frost.    



My Report Card has a "D"



I know there are far more weeds than wisdom in my columns, and unfortunately this summer the weeds totally dominated my life.  As a consequence, the annual Report Card on my garden’s successes and failures is mostly on that subject.  The photo above, a small bed in the vegetable garden bordered by railroad ties where I’ve always planted melons, gives you an idea of the weed problem.   

Having been sick for most of May and June, my stamina was limited so I decided I’d just weed the bed and scatter all my leftover flower seeds there, letting them do their thing without any fuss from me.  Well, that’s what I did.  The new crop of weeds that quickly appeared allowed exactly 2 brave zinnias to fight their way up into the sunlight.

Daughter Trum, who always has new and helpful garden ideas, has handled this sort of problem with rugs.  Last year she laid them down right on top of an area of lawn she wanted to use for a raspberry bed and didn’t remove them until this past June.  It worked beautifully, so I thought I’d try it.  My weeds were so easy to pull, I did that first, a total of 8 buckets’ worth and then laid down my old rugs.  I’ll let you know next June how well it worked.  

I’m not happy using poisons, but finding a large bucket labeled Round-Up in the cellar this summer I used it to kill the thistles and nettles in the sheep pasture.  Hank loved to buy things in quantity, but he’d bought that Round-up so long ago it had lost its power.  Nothing died. When I priced a 25 gal. container at Lindell’s, I found it costs $84.95. 

I do use poison on the driveway. It’s called Ground Clear, and prevents anything from growing for up to a year. The driveway was turning into a field of weeds, since I hadn’t used the 2 gal jug of Ground Clear since Hank died in 2005.  I filled the sprayer with the proper mix of water and poison and sprayed a large area of driveway.  Nothing died.  Obviously that poison was as old and tired as the Round-up, but I then tried using more without mixing it with water and had a bit more success.     

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson after using those two ancient  products, but it never occurred to me that the large bag of grass seed in the shed could be equally dead. I think I told you about all the roots in the lawn that were being chewed by the mower.  I’d spread a lot of beautiful compost over the roots, sprinkled each area heavily with the seed and even bothered to water each area. 

When no tender blades of grass appeared, eventually the compost washed away.  I have now bought fresh grass seed and re-done the areas and am happy to report the roots are fully  protected.

Remember the bed of day lilies just beyond the pond that I planted back in 2003?  I tried to enlarge this photo and I'm afraid it got terribly fuzzy., but it still shows how when the lilies bloom each summer they are reflected in the pond’s mirror of still water.   Below is what the lily bed looked like last spring, such a mess of weeds I couldn’t even find the lilies. 

I just didn’t have the energy to tackle those weeds, and sadly facing the fact that I have too many flower beds,  I decided I must give that one up.   Well, day lilies are one of the easiest and hardiest plants to grow, barely giving any sort of trouble to the gardener, and all those determined day lilies buried beneath a mess of weeds popped up and bloomed anyway. 

Probably half the reason I garden is so I’ll have something to write about in Weeds and Wisdom, but this column wasn’t much fun to write.  I hope you got a laugh out of all my stupid mistakes.  I also hope your summer was more rewarding than mine.  

Preparing for Jack Frost



It’s been such a weird summer weather-wise that there’s no way anyone can predict how soon Jack Frost will return from his summer vacation.  I’ve known him to arrive as early as August and as late as mid-October.  A frost, unlike a freeze, doesn’t necessarily reach every nook and cranny of a property, so smart gardeners pay attention to which areas of the yard are prone to a rime of white in the early morning and try to plant their vegetable garden in a protected spot unlikely to be plagued by those early undeserved frosts.

One night last week frost was predicted so I got out the old sheets and bedspreads to cover my tomatoes and peppers, the only vegetables worth saving.  With global warming, it really makes sense to cover things since early frosts are often followed by weeks of warm weather. My spider plants were still blooming, but I'd used all the pink and white ones and the purple were too tall to cover up.  As it turned out we didn't get a frost that night anyway.

Keeping track of the dewpoint is a good way to be forewarned about the possibility of frost. Frankly, I find the whys and wherefores of the evening dews and damps very confusing, so I’ve been reading up on the dewpoint.  I’m still confused, but here’s what I’ve learned. Dew is the result of water condensation.  The earth absorbs heat during the day and loses it through radiation at night. Over 80 percent of this lost heat is taken in by water vapor and carbon dioxide in the air. If the air is dry, the drop in temperature is increased through evaporation, which has a cooling effect the same way sweat does.

As air cools, it is able to hold less and less water vapor.  When it can hold no more, it condenses, forming dew, and the temperature at that moment is the dewpoint.  So?  What’s that got to do with frost??

When dew forms it releases energy and that energy allows the temperature near the ground to remain at the same level as the dew point. Therefore if the dewpoint is hovering in the low 30s, one should prepare for frost.  If the humidity is high, so is the dewpoint, and the chance of frost will be minimal.

A night of dry air with clear skies and no wind indicates a low dewpoint.  That’s when we should scurry around with the old sheets and bedspreads, bushel baskets and anything else we can find to cover up tender vegetables - bush beans, tomato vines, pepper plants, melons. I doubt if many gardeners bother to protect their zucchini, having had enough. 

I have very few vegetables left in my garden, except the Brussels sprouts which are no bigger than peas and are just waiting for Jack to arrive.  My tomatoes, the golf ball-sized ones, are still producing, so I plan to go out today and gently uproot their vines and hang them upside down in the garden shed where they will continue ripening. 

I hope Jack Frost hasn’t blown his cold breath across your gardens before I post this column.  When I look across the meadow at the forest’s edge I only see a single maple tree making a splash of orange, but quite a few trees with leaves that have turned a dreary brown, as if we’d suffered a severe drought.  With all the water Irene drenched us with, that doesn’t seem possible. 

As it turns out  those brown leaves have actually been caused by Irene.  The vast amount of water she dumped on New England has produced horrible fungus and mold, sickening the leaves. Poor Vermont!  Let’s hope the leaf peeping tourists don't find that state's autumn colors a dismall beige and brown instead of a rainbow of gold and scarlet.  Irene has given Vermonters enough trouble.

A Vine for Beer Drinkers



        New England is such a jungle of wild vines at this time of year I find it almost scary.  Just look at that bindweed (I refuse to call it a morning glory!) It is positively strangling my bank of flowering shrubs. The lacy cucumber vine that makes beautiful ladders was too delicate to withstand Hurricane Irene, but the woodbine is still walking the tightrope of telephone lines overhead, and the grape vines are covering roadside trees and shrubs in  heavy shrouds of greenery.

Many years ago one of my readers, Mrs. Thomen, called to ask if I was familiar with the hop vine.  She described it as “a prickly, rambunctious rambler,” and invited me to come and dig up a section of her plant so I could learn firsthand about its growth habits.  She also warned me that it could grow 30 feet in one summer.

Locust Hill has many vines – clematis, euonymus, ivy, akebia, and a silver lace vine hiding the propane tank.  They are all well-behaved. The one that behaved badly, a bittersweet vine, I got rid of. Did I really want such a poorly behaved vine hopping all around like a rabbit? Well, yes, if it could provide me with a new garden column.

Mrs. T’s plant was a member of the hemp family, Humulus lupulus, a perennial.  Two other varieties, the Japanese hop and the one with variegated leaves, are both annuals.  After much thought I planted the vine at the foot of the deck at the back of the guest house where it wouldn’t matter if it misbehaved.

Despite poor soil and only morning sun, the hop vine climbed up the netting I’d hung down from the second story deck and clambered right over the railing.  In its second year it produced flowers.  They weren’t very pretty, resembling small burdock burrs, and were soon followed by the hops, papery pale yellow cones with a pinkish tinge that soon turn brown.  They have a very distinctive smell.

Because I’m not a beer drinker, I didn’t realize until I began reading about hops, that beer contains a very important ingredient from this vine.   “Magic and Medicine of Plants,” published by Reader’s Digest, informed me that the glands in the female fruits are what give beer its “pleasantly bitter taste.”

“The Complete Book of Fruits and Vegetables” by F. Bianchini and F. Corbetta, published in 1975, offered me some even better quotes. “Hops have an estrogenic action, feminizing and anaphrodisiac, so that besides serving as a sedative, it is believed by some to be the cause of disorders afflicting hard beer drinkers.”

They went on to say,“Beer drinkers suffer from obesity, sterility and hepatic degeneration, or more simply put, a corroding liver.” Wow, you never know what tidbits you can dig up when you start researching a plant.

The young shoots of the hop vine can be boiled in a little salted water and lemon juice and eaten as a vegetable.  I’ve never tried them, but supposedly they have a taste similar to asparagus.  The spent hops (I’m assuming that means the ones from which the feminizing qualities have been extracted) can be used as a mulch, and when mixed with dried blood encourage phenomenal tree growth.

The leaves of the hop vine are three-lobed, bright green and do not turn color in the fall.  The stems contain almost microscopic prickles that help to hold the plant in place as it climbs.  It makes an excellent summer screen, and the distinctive odor of the cones might just mask that pail of unemptied garbage on the back porch.

The new shoots climb by twining, continually revolving clockwise.   Darwin actually measured the speed at which the hop shoot twines. It makes a complete revolution every 2 hours and 8 minutes.  Think of that!  Do you suppose Darwin sat and watched a hop shoot twining for 2 hours and 8 minutes?

One April daughter Trum took home to Oregon a piece of my hop vine and planted it to shade her south porch.  I flew out to visit in late June and saw that just one shoot had begun climbing the string Trum had provided.  Each day we measured its growth.  Phenomenal! In that one week it grew so high we could no longer reach high enough to measure it. 

Well, I guess by now you know more than you wanted to about the hop vine.  Except where to buy one.

Hurricane Irene



I hope all of you survived Irene better than I did.  Because Locust Hill Road was totally blocked by live wires, I was stuck at the top of the hill. No power, no water, except in the cellar where there was enough to float my freezer full of freshly frozen vegetables from the garden and about fifty pounds of beef, part of the Fords’ “rent” for hay fields and pastures.  

A celler full of water                   And a floating freezer

I was the only house on the road without a generator, busy mopping up leaks, pulling spoiled food from the freezer and lugging water to the bathrooms from the pond. Missing the entire first week of the U.S.Open was painful for this tennis enthusiast, but trying to read by flashlight at my age was even more painful.  Irene dropped enough large limbs from my dying sugar maple to keep the wood stove going for a month, and I picked up so much bark and dead branches that I'll have enough kindling  for the entire winter. 

 I can remember being without electricity off and on over the years when a night or two without light  was an adventure  – getting out the kerosene lanterns and the candles, playing games with the kids,  naming all the things we couldn’t use -  the TV, the toaster, and the telephone, just to name the T's.   And with a gas stove to cook on, it was almost fun. Irene's devastation was  not fun, but I'm not complaining.  Compared to all the folks whose houses Irene destroyed, I was lucky. I got power back in six days, and water in seven when the drowned water pump in the cellar got repaired.

Without a working computer, writing to keep busy meant the pencil and that big yellow pad of paper, which didn't appeal, so I never gave a thought about a subject for my next column.  So here I am, with nothing but my thoughts on Irene.  I trust I'll come up with a garden topic by the weekend.  In the meantime, I wish you all luck in whatever clean-up you're facing. 

A Weekend Treat



                                                                The Norfolk Library

 

In just three days the Norfolk Library will hold its Book Sale Weekend. I have been so busy sorting the donated books I haven’t had time to even think about writing a column, so instead I’d like to tell you about this grand event.

It will begin on Friday the 26th at 6pm with “The Hidden Treasure Evening” Admission Fee - $25.00.  The  Litchfield County Auctions will be appraising your treasures at no charge, so bring that crazy lamp that’s been in your attic gathering dust or that beautiful clock your grandmother gave you or whatever treasure you’d like appraised so you can find out what it’s worth.

There will be a Wine Bar featuring a special drink of the evening, plus extensive hors-d’oeuvres and finger food. All the Books of Special Value, usually sold at the book sale, will be on display to be previewed and purchased. There will also be tables displaying about thirty different items ready to be bid on at a silent auction – jewelry, wine, dining certificates, movie tickets, pottery, even massages.

       So please join us -  eat, drink and be merry on a beautiful summer evening.



I absolutely love my job sorting books into the various categories in preparation for the book sale.  Sorting goes fast when I can pick up a book and see the word “Novel” or “Memoir” right on the cover, or read a title like “Earth Science”  so I know right away what category to put it in, but this year there were constant puzzles to solve. I couldn’t have done it all with daughter Bridget, my assistant, pictured below. 

Very few of this year’s donated books were easy to pin down.  Which category would you pick for a title like “The Bottom Line Year Book of 2001” or “The Nothing Book – Want to Make Something of it?”  How about this title – “Tractatus Logico – Philosphicus”? 

Besides puzzling over categories I have to admit I got waylaid whenever I picked up an unfamiliar garden book.  The Garden category has 8 large boxes this year.  It not only has books on flowers and vegetables, trees and shrub and vines.  It also includes books on the Environment, Land matters and Farming,

As always the Children’s category has boxes and boxes of beautiful books, many of them selling for as little as $.50.  There’s a large selection of Health and Medicine, and an even larger one of Social Science, which contains books on Philosophy, parenting, marriage, etc.  

As usual, the Fiction category is the biggest, with 210 boxes.  History, including politics and war is the next biggest with 56 boxes.  Art, music, theatre and film, has some really beautiful books. 

Then there’s Literature, Biography, Travel, Sports, Science and a big category of Videos, CDs, Cassettes, etc.  and two new categories, Religion, which includes witchcraft and myths as well as God,  and Education, which is loaded with books on writing, teaching, schools, etc. 

Book prices will range from $.50 cents for paperbacks to handsome “Cocktail books” for $5.00.  So hop in your car and drive through the countryside to this delightful small town in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut and feast on all this good reading.