Farewell to the Joys of Summer

Weather is such a safe topic of discussion in New England.  I sometimes wonder what people talk about in sunny California.  We have infinite variety here in the East – dramatic thunderstorms, heart-stopping rainbows, exhausting heat waves, exhilarating blizzards.

Even our change of seasons offers good conversation -  the first heady days of spring as the earth turns green; the lazy, languid days of summer; the precious days of autumn when we soak up the turning of the leaves and the last harvests of fresh vegetables and flowers.

You can’t really argue about the weather, just rejoice or complain.  Mother Nature goes right on about her business.  Even discussing a coming hurricane or a winter blizzard is pleasant compared to talking about the candidates in the coming election.

I have to admit that knowing Jack Frost will soon return from his summer vacation is a bit of a downer. Seeing a flock of sparrows gather in the locust trees to discuss the best route south or watching the last golden maple leaf float to earth make me feel as melancholy as the cricket’s sad lament.  How much I will miss the sweet smell of new-mown hay, the fun of picking bouquets for the house and vegetables for the table, playing exhausting but delightful tennis games.

This may sound silly, but one of the things I will miss the most will be fresh corn on the cob.  Oh, I freeze plenty for the winter, but it doesn’t compare.  I don’t grow corn since the Fords who rent my pastures and hay fields let me pick mine straight from the vast acres of corn behind their farm stand. 

I can’t remember eating corn as a kid.  What I do remember is hiding under the branches of a bridal wreath bush in the backyard and pulling the dried silk from a few ears with my cousin, stuffing them into a corncob pipe and puffing and coughing.  Do you know what corn silk’s real purpose is?  Each of those pale yellow threads is the style of a female flower.  If you think back to your school days you may remember that the female flower is called the pistil and consists of an ovary, a style and a stigma.  Deep within the immature husk, each filament of silk is attached to an ovary, which will grow into a kernel of corn when fertilized.

At the other end of each silk is the sticky stigma, waiting to catch a grain of pollen.  Under a microscope the thin strands look like feathers, each one covered with tiny hairs.  Since there are close to a thousand kernels on an ear of corn, there are also a thousand silks, which anyone who’s husked corn well knows.

The male flower is the tassel that blooms at the tip of the corn stalk.  It is made up of hundreds of pairs of spikelets, each pair containing six anthers, each anther producing about 2500 grains of pollen.  When a grain slides down each silk it fertilizes an ovary, turning it into a kernel. 

That plethora of pollen is spread by the wind and can travel hundreds of miles. It isn’t fussy about where it lands, but happily most varieties of hybrid corn will not accept pollen from a different variety. The one exception is pop corn.

 My sheep love eating all the husks as I strip them from the ears.  Mmmm.  Almost dinner time.  Guess I’ll drive down and get two or three ears for my dinner.

The Greensward



One of the few improvements man has been able to make in Mother Nature’s landscape is a well-mowed lawn.  Her prairies and mountain meadows may look smooth and beautiful from a distance, as do pastures that have been grazed, but they’re not much fun to walk over in bare feet.

This summer as the price of gas nearly doubled I didn’t see that anyone had stopped cutting their lawn to save a few pennies. Even this parsimonious old lady mows the weedy lawns on Locust Hill pictured above each Friday. They always look just fine on the weekend. 

There is just no real substitute for the incredibly green green of freshly mowed grass in spring, or the deep blue-green of a maple-shaded summer lawn, or even the pristine white blanket that stretches beyond the window in unbroken splendor after a winter snow.

Do you remember back in 1972 when the Arabs treated us to an oil embargo?  Environmentalists urged everyone to turn his or her lawn into a meadow full of wildflowers.  That idea may sound appealing, and would certainly eliminate the weekly chore of cutting the grass, but I wouldn’t call it an adequate substitute of the greensward.

When I was growing up in West Hartford, one of our more prosperous neighbors put in a six hole golf course in his front yard.  A few years later the Second World War’s gas rationing forced him to let it turn into an unmowed field. My friends and I played far more delightful games than golf in that luxurious meadow, matting down secret tunnels and serpentine paths that led to incredibly soft nests on the overgrown putting greens.

Most country clubs kept their golf courses mowed during the war by using their members’ pooled gas coupons.  But I can remember one in Vermont that found a better way.  I don’t play golf so maybe “different” would be a more appropriate adjective.  That golf course was fenced and grazed by sheep.  Each ewe was outfitted with a football helmet to protect  her from the flying golf balls.

We are so lucky in New England compared to the West and South where drought so often turns everyone’s lawn into ugly dry dust.  We usually have just enough rain to prevent such discouraging landscapes.  The last drought  I can remember that was serious enough to turn the lawns on Locust Hill brown was in 1999.

Plants sweat in hot weather, just the same way we do, but it’s called transpiration, not perspiration.  We sweat to cool our bodies, but plants do it to get rid of excess water.  Their roots need that water to carry minerals up from the soil to all parts of the plant, but once it’s been released, the plant gets rid of the water through its leaves in transpiration.

When temperatures soar into the 90s as they tend to do more frequently every summer, a maple tree can lose several hundred gallons of water in a day; an acre of pasture grass can release up to 400,000 gallons during a growing season.  So next time your tennis game gets washed out in a summer storm or all the shirts drying on the clothesline get drenched, don’t complain.  Be thankful. 

On September 24^th two years ago,  Golda Meier, our 25 year old goldfish, died.  I thought it would be nice to put her picture up for those of you who didn’t read the column I wrote about this remarkable old lady. 

Many readers have asked about the new fish I bought to replace Goldie. A tiny Comet, silvery white instead of orange, whose name, Ben Hur, I chose from among many suggested by my readers.   Shortly after I released him into the pond, we had a tremendous rain storm, so drenching that the pond overflowed the dam.

You know that song “…and he swam and he swam, right over the dam!”  I’m afraid that is exactly what little Ben did as I haven’t seen him since.  If I don’t see him by next spring, I guess I’ll get another little fish who will hopefully be strong enough by the autumn hurricanes to survive. 

Sweet Songs of Summer



So many summer songs! Sit on the porch in the evening and listen to the grand variety of insect sounds – sweet or shrill, soft or metallic, melodic or droning.  Unlike good children who are seen but not heard, summer insects are usually heard but not seen. 

 It all begins with the sweet piping of the spring peepers.  As the soft gray pussy willows turn to yellow catkins, the volume of this cheerful chorus grows almost deafening until the skunk cabbage leaves rise to fill the marsh when it peters out.

When April slips into May another frog choir made up of the greens and the leopards tunes up at the edges of the pond as dusk falls.  These fellows (girl frogs hardly ever speak, much less talk back) are followed by the belching “chuggarums” of the bullfrogs.

Soon the tree toads start, a happy trilling from the treetops. And by July the evening is filled with the rasp of the katydids.  As the days grow hot and sultry we hear the scratchy buzz of the cicadas, constant and monotonous.

Then all too soon we hear the cricket’s serenade, the finale of summer’s sounds.  As the days grow shorter and woodland green turns to scarlet and gold, this black instrumentalist appears from wherever he’s been hiding, tunes up his squeaky violin and offers us a plaintive requiem.  When those sweet notes are gone, autumn has buried the gardener’s season under a blanket of fallen leaves.

The joyful chorus of the peepers each April tells us spring has arrived.  These tiny creatures are less than an inch in size, but their “pee-eep,” two notes between B and E two octaves above middle C, can travel over open meadows for more than a mile.  They get their Latin name, Hyla crucifer, because of the small black cross on their brown backs.  Like bigger frogs their tiny throats balloon out just like bubble gum with each peep.

Tree frogs, Hyla versicolor, are not much bigger than peepers, and as you might guess from their Latin name, can be brown, gray, green or mottled.  They start life as minute tadpoles, but as soon as they replace their gills and tails with lungs and feet, these little frogs hop to land and head for the trees.  They have large disks on both their fingers and toes to make climbing easy.  Their enthusiastic trill is at least an octave below the peeper’s song.

One rarely sees the tree frog, but one year there was such a  stupendous trilling in our front yard that we went out to look.  Apparently dozens of tadpoles had suddenly turned into tree frogs all at the same time.  Hopping up the bank from the pond, they’d mistaken Bridget’s bike for a tree.  The handlebars and seat were solid tiny frogs, squished together and trilling with all their might.  What a sight!

The cicadas,  from the 17-year variety, which remains underground for that length of time, to the annual, dog-day cicada, which is the primary food of the digger wasp, all emerge from the soil in August and live in the treetops, enjoying the hot weather and making their atonal buzzing both day and night.  But they live for only a few short weeks before returning to the ground to lay their eggs and die.

The great green katydid is a long-horned grasshopper, who makes his summer noise by scraping the toothed file on his left wing with the “scraper” on his right wing.  Normally he picks his tuneless banjo only twice, “ka-ty” but sometimes three times, “ka-ty-did.” He’s likely to repeat one or the other 30,000,000 times a summer.

All too soon we’ll be hearing the cricket’s requiem that ends the summer’s symphony.  Enjoy it while it lasts. 

Teaching Kids a Love of Nature



I became a great grandmother on March 16^th, but it was only this past week that I finally met my first great grandson.  I feel very flattered that Twain (no relation to Mark.) has my middle name, Evans, as his middle name.  Such a smiley baby! I’ve yet to see him cry. 

Having a new small child sitting in the garden on Locust Hill has reminded me of all the years I spent educating children about the joys of Mother Nature. I guess I was too busy to teach my girls much except how to weed and pick the beans, but I had a grand time teaching my grandchildren.

I have six, but sad to say, Trum’s two girls grew up far away in Oregon, and Tam’s girl and boy far away in New Orleans.

Fortunately Bridget’s two boys spent summers on Locust Hill in their early years, and were constantly helping me in the garden.  

Eli, pictured above, was particularly enthusiastic, even as a toddler.  Both he and Reed learned a lot about what grew on Locust Hill, and when they were seven and nine I sent them on a treasure hunt together to see how much knowledge of the farm they’d acquired.

I wrote out my clues on white cardboard and tucked them in a variety of places. “Look behind the biggest pumpkin for your next clue.” “Where are the sunflowers?”  “Your next clue is hiding under a delphinium.”  “Tired?  Have a rest on great grandfather’s big swing.” The two boys raced around Locust Hill and had no trouble finding the clues, galloping up to the manure pile behind the barn to check out the pumpkin patch and remembering the sunflowers I’d planted way down by Hank’s shop. 

The treasure hunt was such a success that the next summer I designed a scavenger hunt, giving each grandchild a basket and a list of things to find.  The list included items such as a birch tree catkin, a stinging nettle, a poppy seed capsule, a feather, some frog eggs, a ripe raspberry, and a pachysandra leaf. They had a real struggle to figure out that long word!

Reed was smart enough to hold onto an old rag when he pulled his stinging nettle, knowing how to avoid the awful itch.  Eli knew about the itch, too, and explained that he'd picked a beautiful blue lobelia as a substitute. 

The last thing on each list was “the most beautiful thing and the ugliest thing you can find.”  Reed’s choices were a perfect lemon lily bloom and a festering, moldy apple that had been floating in the pond for a week. Eli’s choices were a bird’s pale blue broken egg shell and some scummy green algae vegetating in a neglected birdbath.

It was very satisfying to discover how much knowledge of flora and fauna my grandchildren had absorbed in their short lives.  I hope in a few years that baby Twain will be as much fun to teach. 

I’d like to remind everyone that the Norfolk Library’s fabulous book sale will be held on August 25^th and 26^th from 11 to 3PM.  There have been many more books donated than in past years.  From the first of June until the deadline on July 31^st, the 40 foot long ramp that slides the donations down to my sorting table was solidly full of boxes day after day. 

Obviously dozens of people have switched to “E-books” and decided to give the library what I call their “Real Books.” As a result over 100 hard-cover novels in mint condition have been donated this year.   And as usual, there are beautiful books in all the other categories,  from History and Biography to Gardening and Cooking, Sports and Science and of course hundreds of children's books.  There are 14 categories in all, so do come browse and buy. 

Poison Ivy



 

Can you spot the poison ivy in this photo? Anyone who lives in the country or spends time communing with nature learns to recognize the three shiny leaves of poison ivy in the spring when they're the color and sheen of mahogany veneer, but come summer, this menace can be hard to identify.

Poison ivy is a member of the sumac family which also includes poison sumac and poison oak.  It grows in most parts of the United States and can also be found in China, but does not grow in Europe.  By summer the oval, pointed leaflets (only the middle one contains a stem) are a bright, smooth green, slightly hairy underneath.  Mature plants have small greenish flowers in loose clusters, followed by grayish fruits when the leaves turn a dull red in the fall.

The plant grows in a variety of ways. It can keep its stems underground and just send up short erect branches to form a green mat of leaves, often mixed with other vegetation as in the top photo. In other areas it sometimes has long stems above ground, trailing over rocks or scrambling up tree trunks. When it climbs trees, its hairy stems look dead, but those hairs are actually aerial rootlets that help feed the plant.

I suspect most people could tell a horror story or two about this ubiquitous plant – the brother who ate it, the neighbor who ended up in the hospital after burning a pile of pulled plants, the friend who picked it to use in her first flower arrangement for the garden club.

My horror story took place when I was 12.  I went off to summer camp, cried myself to sleep with homesickness the first night and woke up the next morning with my eyes glued shut with poison ivy.  I spent the next several days in the camp infirmary, a grand beginning for a kid who’d never been away from home before.  

Locust Hill had every type of poison ivy when we moved here.  We kept a good supply of calamine lotion or its equivalent in the medicine cabinet as all three small daughters managed to acquire that nightmare rash. Can you remember that first blissful lathering of pink glop on the itching, burning bubbles?  Unfortunately, I can also remember the flaking pink paint chips of calamine that soon dried up and made the itching agony worse than ever.

We spent years trying to eliminate the poison ivy on Locust Hill, but had no success until we acquired a goat.  Comfort, a beautiful Nubian with long velvet ears, adored poison ivy leaves. Like most goats, her stomach resembled a cement mixer, managing to digest tin cans, cigarette butts and stinging nettles as well as poison ivy.

Once Comfort had gobbled up all the poison ivy, we put her in the pasture with the sheep where she gambled around in untethered freedom. Unfortunately she soon discovered that the split-rail fence was a challenging “tight-rope” she could strut across with ease.  The morning I saw her leap gracefully down from the fence into the perennial border and begin eating the flowers, she ceased to be a comfort. 

Our newspaper ad offering a free goat happily found a new home for her and since then we’ve stuck with gentle, well-behaved sheep.  When my elderly flock was recently reduced to two and I asked my readers if anyone had a cheap sheep for sale, I had a delightful response.  Here’s a photo of our new young ewe, Intrepid.  Isn’t she handsome?

If you have poison ivy on your property, getting a goat is a fine solution, provided you keep her on a tether and bring her a bucket of water every day!

Teaching Kids about Mother Nature

The Elegant Iris



Have you any  iris growing in your garden?  The iris family is very large -- Japanese, Siberian, Pacific Coast -- but I’m thinking of the bearded iris that stand tall and stately in the May garden, providing a rainbow of colors as they bloom.  The three outer sepals of their flowers are called “falls” and have a fuzzy center known as a “beard.” 

July is the best time to plant or divide iris rhizomes, those knobby looking things from which the roots dangle. They’re easy to plant if you know how, but let’s  review the proper method as it’s a big unusual.     

The first step is to cut across the fan of leaves with a scissors so it’s only 3 or 4 inches high.  Then dig a hole and make a sort of hobby horse of soil for the each rhizome to sit on. Spread its roots down on either side and cover them firmly with soil   The rhizome itself is left barely covered.  It will extend itself each year, so if you’re planting a group it’s important to position them in a circle with the fans facing out.  That way they won’t get crowded for hopefully three or four years. 

Sad to say, if the rhizomes get really crowded they can cause a nasty bacterial disease called root rot, especially in a wet summer.  To avoid this problem, you should replant them when they get crowded by digging them up, breaking off the elongated rhizomes and planting them again, following the same directions. 

When I first started my perennial border my sister-in-law gave me about two dozen iris rhizomes.  I didn’t have a clue how to plant these strange knobby rhizomes, but I found easy directions in a good garden book. Molly had gushed over their brilliant colors, but had neglected to label them, so although they produced that rainbow of colors, it was spotty --  a blue one here, a deep umber there, a yellow one right next to a clump of lemon lilies. 

I think irises are far more effective when each clump contains a single color, so a few years later I decided to rearrange them. While they were in bloom  that spring I tied  colored yarn on each one to match its blossom.  Then in July I carefully dug them up, cut their fans back and set them into piles according to their colored yarns. 

By then it was almost noon, so I took a break, had some lunch and came back to replant the piles.  Much to my horror, Rosta, probably the naughtiest dog we ever owned, had been playing catch with the piles.  The lawn had rhizomes here, there and everywhere.  Not a single pile was left untouched.

I locked Rosta in the barn and faced making new piles.  Fortunately a lot of the yarn tags were still attached, and I was able to plant most of them correctly.  Rosta is long gone, but every time I look at one of my large clumps of iris, all sporting a single color, I smile as I picture what fun she had with those rhizomes. 

I wish I’d taken a photo so you could see this wooly brown Irish water spaniel tossing rhizomes into the sky, but getting the camera was far from my thoughts, so the picture above was taken one snowy winter day.  If you have a naughty dog, I suggest you lock her away when you replant iris rhizomes.