The Daily: 14 August 2023

It’s getting to that point of the year when I would really like to have a four-day workweek, especially since I spend so much of my workday doing not much of anything productive. Okay, so maybe it’s all my workday that is not productive. I’m fairly sure that if everything I do all day would suddenly vanish, nothing at all would be affected except my checking account. But that’s true of nearly all jobs, and the more remunerative the job, the less the work would be missed. Will be missed. Because I’m also fairly sure all of this will vanish, maybe even in my working lifetime.

I am behind in my real life. There’s been all this weather, you see, and then I lost the last ten days or so. I can lose workdays and not suffer repercussions, but if I lose those days that I’m ‘not working’ it takes weeks to get back on track. This weekend was lost, meaning I did not get the cleaning or laundry done. I did not get the sourdough baked, though I did refresh the starter before leaving town. I did not make my weekly yogurt, my hummus, or a pot of something to keep my belly full in the coming work week. And, as I don’t have someone else to cook for me, this means I’ll be eating sandwiches or maybe just sliced cheese, tomato and cucumber as there is no bread.

I can’t afford to eat out much, and since the flood destroyed downtown, there isn’t much to eat but fast food, which is not food and would probably make me sick if I tried to eat it after all these decades of avoidance. My favorite restaurants were all flooded. Most have not reopened. The pizza place I haunt will not be opening at all. They’ve suffered through three floods and COVID, and they’ve had enough. They are retiring. This is particularly unfortunate because the other pizza place in my town does not seem to understand what veggie pizza means… You mean you want NO meat on that? What about the sauce?

I have garden produce, but what is growing out there this late in the season largely requires processing. There are the tomatoes and cucumbers, but the greens are done. In any case, most of my garden is roots and other things that need cooking at a bare minimum. Most of the garden beds are dedicated to growing things that will feed me through the cold months. That’s not going to happen if I eat it now. It’s also not going to happen if I don’t have several hours in the kitchen. Which I don’t have on weeknights.

I also have to spend substantial parts of those weeknights in keeping the garden alive so that there is food coming out of it. I used to be fine with gardening in the rain, but that was when it was a novelty, even a relief from the heat. When it is every day, after I’ve already spent much of the day at work and am tired and grumpy, being wet and muddy and hounded by mosquitoes and midges is just not alluring. It is hard to force myself to change clothes and then head outside when all I want is to eat dinner and go to sleep. Or at least get off my feet. Ergo, gardening has not been done with any level of rigor. 

I have weeds growing everywhere, mostly quack grass, but also some nastier things like pigweed, ragweed and bindweed. There’s bloody and curly dock in the perennial bed and Queen Anne’s lace taking over the asparagus. These are weeds only in that they are badly located. If they were anywhere else but where I’d like to be growing my own needs, they’re quite nice. But with deep taproots and a supernatural ability to regenerate entire plants from any green fragment, they’re very difficult to remove once they work themselves into that bad location. Then there’s the cleavers that the former folks planted on the front bank. This, too, is a plant that has its uses — chickens love it — as long as it is grown far from all fabric and any creature with fur. As its name implies, it sticks to everything at the slightest contact, and the seed heads bind fur into painful knots. There are several hairy dogs that walk by my house. It seems rather unneighborly to allow that plant to ramble down into the sidewalk. But that’s what happens if I’m not pulling it once or twice a week in the growing season. Especially this year. All the water has put it into overproduction. 

Another mess the former folks left me also needs addressing right now. They must have thought that having raspberries right by the house was pragmatic, because they planted canes on the fence in the front yard. But this just means that the canes take over the front yard about this time in the growing season. And this year, I haven’t even been able to prune the fruited canes. So I have the new year’s growth rambling over the spent canes and both are spilling into the grass and over the fence. I don’t like raspberry pruning on a good day. There is blood. Always. No matter how thoroughly I armor my arms. In fact, I’ve had the thorns draw blood across my abdomen through one or more layers of denim. But these particular varieties are exceptionally thorny, and those thorns all find ways to my skin. Moreover, with them planted on the fence at the top of the bank, I have to force my way deep into the bushes to reach the stuff growing on the outside of the fence. So that’s another looming task that has not been done.

Then there’s the jungle. One year of cutting was not going to be sufficient. I knew that I’d be cutting it back for several years. However, I was not prepared for just how thick blackthorn and sumac and alder can come back after coppicing. If any of these trees made good firewood, I could probably cut a year’s worth of heating every other season. But they don’t burn well. This is related to the growth, actually. They are so wet, they will spit and spark in the fireplace even after several years of drying, and they are so wet because they suck up water so they can grow wood as fast as annual weeds. So I have a jungle for real, and it needs to be cut again. But I’ve been reluctant to wade into that mess while the ticks are so thick. There are quite a lot of itchy rodents over there, you know…

And speaking of rodents… that situation is just totally out of control. The squirrels are destroying things just for fun. They even knocked down the ladders I had set up for small-fruiting winter squash supports, smashing the delicatas and breaking off large chunks of the nearby potted tomatoes. The groundhogs are in their August eating frenzy. They have but a few weeks before they bed down for the winter, and being true hibernators, they do not eat until they come back out of the den in mud season. Understandably, they are ingesting every possible calorie within reach. Fortunately for the garden, ‘within reach’ is very narrowly defined at this stage in their life cycle. They are ingesting all calories, but they are also carefully retaining those calories. So they don’t move much, sticking to a small area around the burrow. 

It is also time for the annual mouse invasion, made rather worse by the saturated ground. Those that have survived the flood are seeking dryer terrain, which is mostly limited to the interiors of human habitations. I came home from a shopping trip the other evening and watched a fat vole amble across a beam in the garage, totally undisturbed by the opening of the garage door, the large vehicle pulling in, nor my loud salsa music. I have seen some evidence that they are in the house also. My cat has caught two (ugh… but that is her job…), and I found leavings under the kitchen sink around the compost bucket. I cleaned it up thoroughly and hopefully made the space as inhospitable to mice as possible (this involved adding liberal amounts of tea tree and lavender and cedar essential oils to the alcohol cleaner I use).

I can tolerate a number of garden pests, but mice are expensive. They aren’t as flashy as squirrels so you don’t notice the extent of the damage until it’s too late. And they are every bit as destructive as squirrels, if not more so. They eat through roots just to try them out and can annihilate a bed of beets or carrots overnight. They even eat the alliums that nobody else likes. Or, rather, they will nibble at a bulb of onion or garlic until they decide they actually don’t like this taste, leaving behind scars that invite all sorts of infection and rot. Then the idiots go on to the next bulb and repeat the destruction right on down the row. But they are the worst in winter. They tunnel under snow and leaf mould and gnaw the bark off of whatever is within reach. They can girdle a young fruit tree in minutes — inviting yet more infection or simply killing the tree — and you will never know until the snow has melted. Mice do become less active in the winter, but they do not hibernate, so there is never a reprieve for the garden.

So I think the semi-feral neighborhood cats, that leave their fur all over my porch and lounge in the sun on top of the potatoes, need to step up their game. The foxes seem to have moved on. I haven’t seen them since the flood. This is probably why I am seeing mice now. I also haven’t seen much of the peregrines. I think the nestlings fledged in July and they have largely cleared out. And I have heard no owls this year at all. This is very concerning, not just because of the mice. Owls and coyotes are the main squirrel predators in my part of the world. I’ve not seen much evidence of neighborhood coyotes since moving to Vermont. But the owls were prevalent for the first year, less so for the second — and now they are gone. It is not surprising that the squirrel population has exploded.

In any case, the garden needs love. The produce needs processing. There is the usual cooking and cleaning. And there are any number of extra tasks — like cleaning up mouse droppings — that crop up and need addressing immediately. And all this has to be packed into two days and perhaps an hour each weeknight evening.

And that’s not even considering all this scribbling and the reading that goes into it.

It is frustrating that all this real work, all the work necessary to keep my body alive and well, is shoved aside for the sake of wage work, much of which does nothing for any body, never mind mine. In fact, mine suffers because of this time given over to wage earning. I am exhausted all the time. I can’t sleep on the schedule my body prefers, so I don’t sleep much at all far too frequently. I don’t get the exercise I need, nor the meditation time. And when I lose a weekend, I don’t get to eat all that well either, though because I refuse to eat crap I don’t have a diet that is as bad as an average American’s. Still, it tends to be bread-heavy when that is all I have time to fix on the weekend (because I have to keep the sourdough culture alive…).

It is also frustrating to come home after a nine and a half hour day of tending to other people’s needs in a mentally demanding fashion and have to try to drum up the energy to tend to my own. All the more so at this time of the year, because the dark is growing. It is hard enough to muster the energy to overcome the natural end-of-workday exhaustion when there is plenty of evening time. In the summer, I can take an hour or so for dinner — and recharge — and have daylight enough to go back out and work until bedtime. But at this time of the year in my part of the world, it is dusk by seven. And not only is it getting too dim to see well, but the biting bugs are out thick. One hand is constantly waving them away from my face, and my concentration is on avoiding bites and bugs flying up my nose rather than on what I’m actually supposed to be doing. And it is very hard to muster the energy to go out and face that!

But we’ve passed the last day of more than 14 hours of daylight and less than 10 hours of night in each day. This is the stimulus for many plants to start preparing for death and dormancy. Maples begin to pull in their chloroplasts now, top down. The leaves that have the most exposure to what sunlight is left in the autumn are the first to be closed for business. It is surprising how much my own body responds to this change of leaf color. I suppose, this is just the visual cue to the shortening of the days. But I see that wash of red and orange on the woods and my impulse is to nest and sleep. Certainly not go out after work and work harder at weeding and tending and planting. And I’m not sure the plants are down with the project of growing this time of year either. They want to set seed and be done with this growth business already. 

Still, it is planting time again. This is when cabbages grow the best. They need a warm soil for germination, but they also need cool air temperatures. Or at least, they don’t like hot. If I lived a bit further north or maybe in one of the more coastal communities that never gets too warm, I would plant cabbage in the spring after the soil warms up and I would be harvesting it about now. But it just bolts when the temperatures stay above 85°F for many days. The irony this year is that it hasn’t been that warm. I could have planted in June after that May freeze and there would be cabbages now. Unfortunately, you can’t plan on weird weather…

So I’m sticking to a planting schedule that works most years, and this is when the leafy and floral brassicas like cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower get started. Usually, I direct seed in August, though I have used starts begun earlier. I don’t like starting in pots though. I don’t like the mess, and I have never had a good place for seed trays. There is also a good deal of waste involved even when you reuse the trays because they break down so fast. Or just break. I’ve tossed too many seed pots and trays after they’ve cracked open down the middle after only one or two growing seasons. And it is largely trash. I don’t imagine that any of those thin and flimsy plastic trays carefully placed in the recycling bin actually got recycled.

I’m also not convinced that plants like pots. Not even as a starting place. (I am rather convinced that potted plants exist primarily to make it easier to sell things.) For starters, it is devilishly difficult to maintain proper soil moisture — either it’s dry within hours or the pots are sitting in standing water. But even if you master the water problem with various toolkits, you still have to deal with many other fundamental dilemmas. Few plants like to be transplanted; none like the root confinement of a walled pot; and, most importantly, there is no way to create the nurturing soil communities of microbes, fungi, and critters in a pot. I used to be a fan of pot gardens, but over time I’ve learned that those pots take too many expensive inputs, many of which are not exactly toxin-free, to produce plants that are never as healthy as plants growing in real soil. 

So I plant in the soil these days. The only starts I plant are those tender plants that need a long growing season, largely the nightshades. Though I have had the best tomato success with plants that have seeded themselves in the raised beds and overwintered under straw. This works even in Massachusetts. Oddly, it doesn’t work as well to direct seed in the spring garden. There must be some element of winter scarification or just a long soaking period in a community of soil that is necessary to producing a healthy plant from a seedling.

This time of the year, I plant overwintering parsnips, carrots and leeks. I plant cabbages to be eaten and preserved in the late autumn and some kales that will be eaten all winter long directly out of the garden. Kale tastes so much better if it is allowed to freeze a couple times. I think the freezing removes the bitters and softens the tough lignin. I have already seeded my cold frame with salad greens and a few black radishes. This might be too early, but I want more greens to eat with my tomato sandwiches. I’ll probably get another round of black seeded simpson and winterbor in the ground before the end of the growing season — which is not the first freeze, but the end of the 9-10 hour days.

I have a packet of Brussel’s sprouts seeds, but I’m not sure I will plant them. They are so much bigger than I think they should be, and I don’t have an abundance of space even in the autumn garden. Also, I don’t like them unless they are buttered and blackened, and I’m not entirely sure my body needs that these days. I am planting more of the beets, rutabagas, and slicing turnips that I’ve been seeding more or less continuously every other week since April. Some will overwinter; some will go into autumn stews; some will be roasted, cubed, and frozen for later meals.

I also usually buy a few perennials over the summer to address holes and weak places where the weeds are taking over. These get planted in the fall after the stressful heat lets up. This year, I have a number of echinaceas on order. I don’t know why I haven’t bought any for this garden yet. Maybe I have and they’ve all died thus far. In any case, I’ve got some coming for the perennial bed which has a strong early summer round of blooming and then turns weedy and green after the solstice. It’s not particularly attractive to any tastes, mine nor any of the insects I want to see in the garden. I also bought some herbs for a new mound. I haven’t planted many mints yet here either. This was more intentional because I have a small space and I don’t want it to be a monoculture. But if I make a mound in the middle of the grass, I can keep the mints contained. And I love mint! I have chocolate mint, orange mint, spearmint, peppermint and a mojito mint on order. I will also grow the bulk chamomile and spring onions and cilantro in this mound next year.

So all that needs to be done on top of the weekly cooking and cleaning and gardening tasks and the summer garden harvest processing and the random emergencies that pop up with irritating regularity these days… all within two days a week and maybe an hour or so in the evenings. If someone were to offer me a job with benefits and at least Vermont minimum wage doing just about anything, but only doing it for 30-32 hours a week, I would jump at it. Sadly… no such offers are forthcoming… So I am grumpy and tired and perpetually behind…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023