Oh Brave and Faithful Plant

 

In late spring the baby basil plants were mostly sold, leaving only leggy and fragile ones. On the way home, the healthiest plant fell over and the stem broke. One shoot remained in that pot and two, undersized, in the other. The survivors all went into one planter because I expected to lose one.

 

I'm a good transplanter. No one else will ever know that except you and I. It is love. I love my basil annuals. Told them so and blessed them. Brought them indoors on cool nights. Moved them twice daily into the strongest summer light when the trees leafed out and cast shadows. A creature (squirrel?) always upsets and paws through the pot, but only once per season, usually soon after planting, as if to dash my hopes and grieve me. The basil always survives this. Looked up Saint Basil. Looked up Basil as a baby name. Breathed deeply. Scissored the leaves for cooking. Picked the flowering heads off so they'd keep leafing.

Today when frost is only days away I filled the chopper with garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and lemon, for pesto-making, and boiled clean a jar that held the store-bought pesto I buy when I must settle for less. (I've tried freezing, drying, and microwaving my basil harvest. Nothing but pesto works.) I thanked my plant for its beauty and fortitude as I picked off every leaf and the room filled with its sacred fragrance. This year I told it, "You are one of the great joys of my life."

Bee That As It May

The sage bush blooms generously and with so much spirit that multiple bees bounce like pinballs through its jungle of flowers, feasting -- and when creatures sip nectar, the flowers they sip from actually re-fill their nectar so the bees, butterflies and sipping birds return for seconds.

In May the sage bush -- still expanding, now chest-high -- when flowering is a center of industry, as they used to say about certain cities in the U.S. with robust manufacturing economies. In winter I trim back its dried-up, surprisingly woody branches. The rest of the year I do nothing but have fresh sage in overabundance. People in the South will fry sage leaves. I don't. I bundle cuttings in twine and hang them upside down to dry; the leaves also dry in one minute in the microwave. Dry leaves are then crumbled for packaging and use. Oh, I admit it: I sage-smudge the Divine Cabin on occasion. To sanctify it. To restore its flawless natural vibe. I also cut sage bunches for my woo-woo witch-and-Tarot signs-and-omens friends -- of whom I have an unusual number. A mystic is just someone who believes there are things we can't see.

The Little Bodies of the Pears

Uncared-for, unpruned pear tree in the yard that by all odds should not be thriving is doing fine, thanks, and for a few days in June I get to see its pears, growing butt-side upward, or twinned, shapely but always bite-sized, and just as they blush yellow and need one more day to look edible I wake up to find every one of them gone. As if I had dreamed them! Not a core left beneath the tree -- not a clue as to which species ate all the pears, or when. So this year after admiring them I took some pictures and then picked a few, that I might prove I did not dream them, because by all rights, on top of a cliff with one inch of soil and six inches of clay on top of sandstone, a pear tree should not be growing here. But it doesn't care if it should or not.

Neither should prickly pears, as in prickly-pear cactus, be growing a mere 15 feet away in a tiny, stony south-facing, two-foot-square micro-climate next to the pumphouse, but so it is, and when it's time it has those spiny crimson pears with little puckers growing whisker-like thorns. Given the right micro-climate, like hot sandstone, cactus in the Ozarks isn't unusual.

Yet two kinds of pears -- almost within arms' length of each other? That proves they're divine. Surely I live on the border of the imaginary and the real. On top of that, I can never forget what a man said to me one day, "Pears are sexy."

So Long, Suckers

I  could have a vine-covered cottage, but there's plants enough around here, and invasive vines shouldn't receive encouragement, so I set about pulling down the several vines growing roofward on the south-facing wall. I don't know what they are, but they have the neatest little feet--suckers--they use to climb the wall and hold on. They cling so tightly that when ripped from the siding it sounds like Velcro, and they take the paint off. For good measure I tore the roots out when I could and cut them when I couldn't.

Who cut the hearts into the cottage's nonfunctional shutters I don't know, but at different times they please me and other times make me ill. I used to know, way back when, an old man, German immigrant, a former Nazi Youth. He had heart cutouts in his shutters just like this. He apologized to me for the Nazis who imprisoned my dad for four years. He didn't know any better, he said, back then. I believe him. I'm seeing how politics can sweep people up. But now I have difficulties loving the heart cutouts and often don't even see them.

Hope

Our worm farm was a failure. We did everything by the book. But when we dug into it, no worms, although we'd put lively squirming ones in with our bare hands. Lovingly. We loved worms; good for the garden. I said to Demetrius, "Some of them must have been male, some female." He said, "I guess they never met." Later I learned that worms are hermaphroditic, male and female both, but all the same they have to meet another worm or it's no dice.

Hope springs eternal. Lately I've wanted to feel more hopeful. Nothing serious, just a little down, despite trying everything to cheer myself at this best time of year, before it's buggy or hot, when all is potential. Owls call to each other. Hawks call to each other. Bluebird pairs hang around in the twin oaks for a day or so, but none have settled in my bluebird house as of yet. All perennial. All go on with or without me. I went to my favorite grocery store, quite a distance, to distract myself with produce, and there my eyes met a rack of seed packets. This was the answer. It was like pulling a lucky card from a deck.

So I weeded and dug up and turned a patch of earth 3 feet by 3, meeting some lively or indignant wiggler worms along the way, and finding perennial spring onions I'd forgotten about, and uprooting a whole aromatic handful to slice and throw into dinner. I raked furrows into the earth, and planted arugula seeds. It's the right time to plant, according to the packet: "two weeks before the last frost." Bunnies and deer don't eat arugula, because it's peppery. That's why I like it. There is no pleasure like seeing seeds you planted sprout. They do so no matter how moody we are.

Then I looked around some more and saw rebel grape hyacinths I didn't plant, I never planted, completely wild, blooming in the leaf-covered gravel apron, in very poor, rocky circumstances.

Now I'm Not Complaining, You Understand. . .

. . .but on my mind right now with Missouri wind-chill in the teens and wintry mix predicted soon, is the grapefruit tree in my parents' Arizona backyard, lovingly tended by my stepfather these last 25 years, and there's no pleasure like going outside in one's pajamas and picking one's breakfast grapefruit from the tree as Adam and Eve did, except maybe the pleasure of having one's 95-year-old stepfather pick some and bring them into the kitchen to save me the trouble.

December's Garden

Temperatures have been in the 60s and 70s most of the fall, including last week, meaning that the fall vegetables my neighbor and I planted in September haven't frozen yet, and today I plucked up and scissored four scarlet radishes, and small lettuce, spinach, and kale leaves, holiday colors, enough for a full salad bowl. Not only that, but while I was at the store I saw and bought 1/4 of a watermelon because I have so missed the taste of it. Except for tomatoes and hummingbirds I can still pretend it's summer. First snow predicted in a few days.

The sunsets now are pretty, too, but the best thing about mid-December-- it's only two weeks until the days begin to lengthen.

Out This Way, Please. . .

After 11 years of seeing these crossing my flooring like they owned the place, mostly during autumn, these two- to three-inch-long semi-glossy mahogany brown creatures segmented like worms finally got looked up and identified. This is an American millipede (Narceus americanus). They never have1000 legs, although they might have 750. A giant African millipede can be kept as a pet by other people, whom I hope are strangers living very far away from me. The millipedes' legs operate elegantly, in waves, and they move so swiftly it's been hard to get a clear-ish photo; but these harmless things really belong outside in the soil dining on the decaying plant matter they enjoy and helping gardeners. If after I show them the egress they don't take the hint, I humanely pick them up (they curl into perfect little spirals) and drop them outside; indoors they quickly dehydrate. 

Tomato Growing: Six Tips for Success

1. Gardener or guest, don't ever caress, pluck, fondle, feel up, or otherwise play with a tomato plant's foliage so you can inhale its gorgeous tomato scent. That's how animals locate tomato plants: by scent. Hands off.
2. When staking, wash and dry the stakes first and then use twine, organic preferred. Don't tie it tightly and avoid twist-ties, rope, thread, cloth, clamps or rubber bands which can scar the stem or hold water and cause rot.

3. Spraying or dousing the plant with water encourages fungus and leaf yellowing. Water at the soil level, splashing as little as possible.

Big Boys, July 4th

4. Use freshly-cleaned scissors to clip away "suckers" (upstart leafy growths in the "Vs" of the tomato branches) and THEN use the scissors to clip yellowed leaves from around the bottom of the plant. Clip away only the leaves that are majority-yellow. Do this in the morning so that the scars (and resulting tomato scent) can heal by nightfall, when the raccoons and skunks prowl. Gather the cut foliage and dispose of it far away from the garden.

5. Every other day, water until the bed has standing water.

6. To rid the leaves of "tiny white winged bugs" (thrips), Method 1: Boil a pinch of tobacco in two cups of water  (it stinks) and when cooled, pour this in a circle around the affected plant. Boiling this mixture hard kills any tobacco mosaic virus the tobacco might be harboring. Method 2:  Blast the bugs off the leaves with a brief spray of water. Spray sidewise, not downward toward the soil. Once should do it. This is the only time you break Rule 3.

The tomato is ripe if it's evenly colored and releases easily from the plant. Resist the urge to leave it hanging hoping it'll be growin' a little redder or bigger; that's just asking a critter to come and get it.

Tommy Toes II

The Tommy Toe tomato seeds planted last Thursday looked this way on Monday. I'm thrilled. New life! Summer tomatoes!

Ye Shall Know Them

I plant arugula, a peppery little salad green, always, because it's easy to grow -- like a weed, the more you ignore it the better -- and because it's expensive at the store. The seeds resemble poppy seeds. In March I poked a pencil tip into the cold ground, dropped a seed in the hole, and after 30 days, ruffly healthy plants. Clip the larger leaves to eat and the plant will generously make some more.

The most helpful quotation I know comes from gardening: "By their fruits ye shall know them." (Matthew 7:20). It reminds me that we are what we do, not what we say. You can gauge moral character by the results of people's actions, by the grace or disorder they leave in their wake. Just sayin'.

Tommy Toes

 "Tommy Toes" is a real Ozark heirloom tomato, a bush that pumps 'em out til the last week of October unbothered by heat, droughts, frosts, and the soil around here. Demetrius grew and fed us heirloom tomatoes named Boxcar Willie, Mister Stripey, and Mortgage Lifter, but only Tommy Toes grow like mad. I got it from the catalog Totally Tomatoes, which sells only seed packets, not plants. Demetrius grew all his vegetables from seeds but this is my first time, and I did what I had watched him do, and felt the same holy love.

One tiny ivory seed per pocket

Grape-sized tomatoes means squirrels and hornworms don't wreck them before we get some, and we can pop 'em into our mouths anytime we're nearby. So the Tommy Toe is the right tomato in the right place.

How to germinate: Poke holes in all 12 pockets of an egg carton, fill each with organic potting soil, set in each one tiny ivory seed, cover 'em up with soil, water, and set in warm sunshine 70 to 80 degrees. Cartons are easier than flats to carry and manage. Our frost-free date is May 15 so seedlings won't be planted til then. I'll have extra for the neighbor's garden. Happy Earth Day.

All Thingz Must Pass

Ten years ago Demetrius built a wooden cold frame for raising greens. Twelve feet long by four feet wide, it had four separate glass lids made out of old windows and hinges. Thanks to this we had lettuce at Christmas. But one day the landlord said "no more gardening," and later Demetrius was gone ("no more gardening" certainly a factor). The untreated wooden frame was so heavy and well braced I couldn't dismantle it except to remove the windows, which had broken, and after a few years I never really saw it anymore, even as it rotted and fell apart and became an eyesore--a Whole Foods version of a car up on blocks in the front yard. Instead of vegetables I planted in the frame native coneflowers, and they thrived in the soil originally mixed for growing organic vegetables. Winters, it filled with oak leaves; good for the soil. Once in a while I'd dig in here get myself some night crawlers for fishing.

Braced inside and out

Well, recently a truck (Snow plow? Surveyor? Propane truck?) trying to turn in the narrow lane backed into the cold frame, bending the steel braces and crushing and snapping some of the wood, resulting in a genuine eyesore, meaning it's an eyesore to me. So today I picked up hammer and screwdriver and began removing and bagging all braces, hinges, nails and woodscrews so nobody throwing the wood into the firebowl would get hurt and metal wouldn't be fed into the environment (or the lawn mower). Advanced rot helps me pull apart some pieces with bare hands. I got the job half done today and here's what's left. Undoing the work of 10 years ago -- ain't nobody gonna do it for me -- I thought about the summer it was built with such high hopes, and how we couldn't have foreseen what would happen. It felt kind of like washing the body of someone who has died. You wish you didn't have to. But you have to.

My Life Among the Tree Nymphs

The pear tree in the Divine yard had pears on occasion, usually no bigger than an inch long and never edible. Planted in the yard's unfriendly soil, most of it pure clay, the tree never thrived and never grew any taller. Then two years ago my friend Ace told me to prune the suckers, meaning the branches growing vertically from established horizontal branches. I pruned the suckers I could reach. Darned if the tree didn't grow a couple of feet in a year, large enough to cast shade. Again I pruned as far as I could reach. This year, pears. They'll probably be pecked and wormy before it's time to pick, but they are beautiful and this is progress.

This is the only fruit tree on my 100 acres. The Dutch couple who lived here before me planted it. Europeans are genetically wired to plant fruit trees. My father had a plum tree and nearly threw a party when after three years the skeletal thing produced one plum. Demetrius, who lived here, planted an apple tree in the meadow where it only encouraged Oak Apple Gall Wasps and was eaten by deer. Obtaining a baby nectarine tree, like a crazy man he dug a pit for it in the clay near the house. After four years this tree maxed out at a couple of twigs about knee high. Now and then it put forth a leaf, as if shyly waving hello to a hostile and uncaring universe. I left it in the yard to remind me that Demetrius, like all gardeners, was a person of hope. Then, about two weeks ago, mowing the lawn I accidentally mowed it over and wrecked it utterly. So ended its unlucky little life. I heard Demetrius shout abuse at me from beyond the grave.

Everybody Loves Confusion

The light green hose is older and made of tough rubber that's gotten a bit stiff. It was in the garage when I moved here and nothing is wrong with it, except the car ran over and warped the brass coupling where it attaches to the dark green hose, and after that these hoses couldn't be separated.

Which was bad news, because the dark green hose, bought during hard times, is plastic, cheap and after a year developed semi-permanent kinks.

Last night I tried coiling it. I wrestled it. I pulled it to its full 30-foot length, took the twists out, and tried again. Tried to pinch the kinks open. Tried standing on the kinks to pinch them open. Then tried to coil it. It turned into knots, and kinked again -- Photo shows the best coil I could get. After struggling for an hour, it suddenly hit me: Throw this out. Buy a new one. And don't buy a cheapie!

Set a Spell

May is one of my favorite months and what better way to celebrate its first day than after cutting brush and whatnot, to "set a spell" -- beneath the twin oak trees and behind what's left of my biggest cold frame, the one too big and well-made for me to dismantle with a claw hammer like I did the three other cold frames. As I get older I understand and am fond of the need to sit down and rest during days of hard work. Chair from Walmart purchased in 1998, steel and tough thick 1/2-inch plastic, still good although left outside in all weathers. I should've bought several; then yall could sit with me and gaze at the greenery that still feels so new after that awful dark winter. I'll also sit here to have a cup of tea or coffee and just be amazed at this wonderful Missouri.

Tomato Sisters

Just an example, to share with you, of the beauty and symmetry of nature and growing things: Three tomatoes (cultivar: Balcony) on their vine.