At Last, A NEW DOG!

This is Coco, my new beagle.  Thank you! Thank you! So many dog-loving readers responded with helpful suggestions that the result ended my long search to find a really sweet companion for Clover. I’m afraid I’m still so wrapped up in canines that I couldn't think about anything else to write about today, but I promise  we’ll get back to gardening soon.  

I just counted them up, and Coco is the 12^th dog to come live on Locust Hill. Some were smart, a few a bit dumb, and one we will never forget, Rasta, an American water spaniel named for the glorious Rastafarian dreadlocks that covered her from head to clicking toenails.  I couldn’t find a photo of her, so I used a drawing  I did years ago. 

You may not be familiar with this breed – fat, short legged, oily brown dogs with oversized heads, but Hank considered Rasta 

                                       The Perfect Dog.  

I was solely responsible for acquiring Rasta, a surprise birthday present for Hank’s 50^th.  Greater love hath no man for a wife who buys him an absurdly expensive six-week-old puppy, shipped all the way from Wisconsin, and eager to be housebroken during the winter months.

When we met Rasta’s plane at Bradley, the overpowering reek of her crate resembled an uncleaned lion’s cage at the zoo. And the poor sick puppy who crawled out of it was a wet, watery-eyed ball of kinky curls. I’m still not sure how it was possible, but Hank fell in love with her at first sight. He prepared her three meals of cooked rice each day for the next month until her intestinal  problems were cured.

The thought of house-breaking during this period was a joke, provided you had a sense of humor, but eventually Rasta learned to go on the lawn just beyond the front door.  She also learned to sit and stay, sometimes as long as 10 seconds. She never chewed shoes, gloves, baskets, houseplants or library books, so long as they were out of reach.  She rarely dug holes in the lawn, only in the gardens where the digging was easy.

Being no greedier than Henry VIII, she grew into what I called a bloated blob while Hank affectionately considered  her  a beautiful butterball.  She was neither.  She was pregnant! That November she produced 11 offspring  resembling at least four different fathers.  They were cute, but not one of our fourteen Thanksgiving guests could be talked into taking one home.

Becoming an unwed mother subdued Rasta a bit, but even being spayed didn’t dampen her greeting which was not just a wagging tail but a grotesquely wagging body of violent  s-curves of ecstasy.  When she slept, usually in a packing box in Hank’s shop, her pink tongue always hung out of her mouth, and she’d wake up with it  so dry she’d be unable to get it unglued for several minutes, so she’d waddle around with this strange pink appendage stuck to her lip, sort of like a young lady unaware of the lipstick on her front teeth.

Coco is as energetic as Rasta was, but I doubt if she will be as entertaining. Obviously her previous owner allowed her to sit in her lap, so every time I sit down she tries to sit in mine.  Not entertaining! 

Coco is very affectionate, but poor Clover's nose is a bit out of joint.  Getting a decent photo of the two of them together was so difficult I had to have Bridget come over to take these.  

Thanksgiving Thoughts



I bet I’ve written at least 20 columns about Thanksgiving over the past 30 years .  Their subjects included turkeys, Indian pudding, gourds, Indian corn, desserts and decorations, so I hope you’ll excuse me if today’s column on bittersweet sounds a bit familiar as an earlier version of it was included in my first book.

 Unlike most holiday decorations, bittersweet can be had for free.  Just drive along a country road and you’ll have no trouble spotting this vine, its stems twining over shrubs and tree branches and laden with clusters of bright red berries with orange caps.  That was how I got my Thanksgiving decorations for many years.

When we moved to Locust Hill however, I was sure I would find lots of bittersweet on the property, and I did, but only after much searching.  The vine I finaly found was very far from the house, so I decided to transplant some , thinking it would make a good screen in front of the ugly propane tank. 

I dug up a small piece of the bright orange root and planted it, unaware of its bad habits.  That vine grew faster than the national debt, but instead of hiding the unattractive propane tank,  it clambered over the fence into the sheep pasture. What was even more disappointing, it never produced any berries.

Eventually I learned why.  Bittersweet vines are like humans, they’re either male or female , and you need both a mama and a poppa to get any berries. The female vine may blush and bloom each spring, but if there isn’t a male flower around to provide her with pollen, it won’t do her a bit of good.

By studying the blossoms on my vine with a magnifying glass as if I were Sherlock Holmes, I learned they were boys, not girls.  By that time my plant had gone berzerk, tearing up the pasture fence and climbing the walls of the sheep barn until he had managed to get in a window.  What sort of sex-starved monster had I brought into my yard?

That summer I cut the stems down to the ground and painted each one with brush killer, but by fall a dozen new sprouts had appeared.  It took two more years before I finally managed to kill that bittersweet.  I kept looking for an appropriate spot where I could plant a new bittersweet, and eventually I did.  The town had just cut down a sick locust tree that was too close to the road, leaving behind a stump almost 8 feet tall. 

It was the perfect place to plant a new bittersweet vine, a spot where it could do no damage, and only a minute or two from the house.  As you can see from the photo above, it has enveloped the stump so thoroughly I can cut large clumps of it each Thanksgiving.     

Unless you have an equally safe place to plant some bittersweet,  I highly recommend that you don’t try growing this hungry plant.   Take a nice drive along a back country road until you spot those bright orange-capped berries clambering up a tree and cut some for your  Thanksgiving decorations.  Or get some nice colorful gourds and Indian corn to decorate your table.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Request

Just Photographs

Did you all have as pathetic a gardening summer as I did?  This is what Ogden Nash wrote after a long hot season is his vegetable patch.

Say not that Eve needed Adam’s pardon

For their eviction from the garden.

I only hope some power divine

Gets round to ousting me from mine.

Since Locust Hill’s vegetables were a disaster this summer, I came close to feeling like Mr. Nash, and couldn’t think of a thing to write a column about, so instead of pulling up all the frost blackened plants so I could spread well-rotted manure on the garden, I took my camera and snapped a bunch of pictures of the summer’s trials and tribulations. 

I can’t remember which thunderstorm managed to break off the apple tree limb that supported Hank’s grandfather’s beautiful swing, but as you can see, there couldn’t have been much strength left in the hollowed trunk of that ancient tree to support it. The really sad thing is that there is not a single  other tree near the house with an appropriate limb  for that swing on. 

My next picture shows a small section of the backside of the perennial border’s fence.  That fence  originally bordered the meadow in front of the house when we bought Locust Hill, but since it was no longer needed there,  we dug it up and “replanted” it to be part of the sheep pasture.  Eventually the perennial border filled the area in front of it. 

Of course  pasture grasses loved to creep into the nice dirt of the border, so Hank laid sections of sheet metal down to discourage them.  Unfortunately this was a total failure, and after years of constantly uprooting these weeds, I decided this past summer it was time to fix the problem.

It was a mammoth job,  Just getting rid of the weeds and finding the  buried sections of sheet metal was a challenge.  Digging a  trench, then burying the sheets as uprights, lugging stones and buckets of well-rotted  dirt from the compost pile to firm them up was all such hard work that I could only manage to do a single section a day,

In fact when I took the picture above, I  saw that I still had a single section of fence not done.  How could I resist finally finishing the job?  I put down the camera, found the shovel, gloves and buckets and got to work.

You can see my reward in the next photo. The previous week I'd finally come up with a place to hang Hank's grandfather's swing. By standing on the seat of the tractor  I was able to reach up and loop rope around two beams of the long shed, and in  half an hour I'd hung the swing.  

I went up and collapsed on it when I'd finished fixing the last section of fence. Daughter Trum happened to arrive as I was rocking gently in the sun and snapped a photo with her cell phone.  

And since she also took a perfect photo of the sheep eating the remains of a Brussels sprout plant,  I will end with it.  Pilot is the big one in the center, my only male. On his left is Wimpy, a shy, elderly ewe who must be eight or nine.  My two newly acquired girls, are facing each other.  They came already named, Valiant on the left and Intrepid on the right.