The Daily: 15 May 2024

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I like fixing things. I taught myself to darn and can repair knits in my sleep. I am quite useless at following a pattern, but I like to take seams apart and alter clothes to fit the way I like. I like hemming things while I watch movies. I have favorite shirts or pants that I have repaired so many times, the material reads like a map of my life.

I like fixing things around the house also, though I am not as good at many of those repairs. However, I love smoothing plaster over drywall and making a seamless patch on a hole. I don’t like painting so much — except to cover spots and make the new paint blend into the old. I enjoy the challenge of making a hole disappear.

I love Lev Grossman’s, Magicians series. (OK, really, I love everything he writes…) I can see myself in his books. I feel at home. Maybe even seen.

In this series of books about magicians, the protagonist, Quentin, can do magic, but he really doesn’t know what his specialty is until fairly far into the story. He is proficient at most things, but doesn’t have that one thing that defines his work like everybody else in his world. But when Lev finally allowed Quentin to find his path, I almost died laughing.

If you haven’t read the books, stop now… because I am about to spoil things.

You see, Quentin’s specialty is minor mendings. He doesn’t move mountains or control weather or influence global politics. He fixes things. Usually small things. And he fixes them seamlessly and beautifully. In fact, he is so good at fixing small things, he becomes the God of Minor Mendings.

I don’t know if anyone else had this reaction, but I read that and thought “That’s me!” If I were a magician, I would be the one that fixes all the holes, repairs the broken teacups, smoothes the superficial ruptures between friends. I would be the Djinn of Minor Mendings.

In fact, I have spent so much time making holes vanish, I might already be a magician in a certain slant of light. In any case, fixing a hole is certainly one of the small daily joys in my life, always something to look forward to. And that’s the genius of being a god of minor mendings. There is always something to fix. Though you may be overlooked, maybe even forgotten, you will always be needed to fix the holes.

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The sun sets at 8pm today for the first time this growing season. That subtle change, sunset after 8pm, is somehow the divide between spring and summer for me. It feels like summer when the sun sets after 8pm. There is light for hours every evening now. So much more time in the garden. Except for me, summer feels like lethargy.

Because this is also when the lengthening days slow. We are coming into the solstice season where day length hardly changes. In May, the daylight gains an hour, mostly in the first two weeks. But between May 31 and the solstice, three weeks later, the gain is less than fifteen minutes. Time always drags around the solstices, but in the summer it is a hot and heavy drag.

However, for now there are so many things to do with the growing sunlight. It is finally warm enough to plant potatoes — the dandelions are all a-bloom — so my potato beds are all lumpy with newly buried spuds. The peas are finally showing green, but they’re not yet fully up. However, that’s fine because the row cover I intend to put around that bed is also not up. I may not get there. I may go with living barriers instead. I moved volunteer garlic to the ends of the pea cage to hopefully discourage the rodents through sheer stink… and wow! do these garlic volunteers smell! They’re either going to be indigestible with sulfur or they’ll taste divine. Maybe both. Garlic should keep the marmot out of the pea cage. But I’m also going to plant summer squash around the cage. I figure the spiny, bitter leaves will dampen the groundhog’s desire to work too hard at penetrating the pea defenses.

But I can’t plant summer squash yet. It’s not that warm. We only had our first day with temperatures above 70°F yesterday. But the soil needs to be that warm to germinate squash… and one day of warm air is not going to sufficiently raise the ground temperature. Also the sun might be in the sky for over almost fifteen hours now, but it’s still May. It could still snow. It did last year. Our official frost-free date is not until June 10th or so, and my weather journal shows that even though it is warming overall, it is still too cool for most seeds in May.

There are many traditions in the Northern Hemisphere from as far south as Greece that predict cold weather in May. Cold Sophie comes to visit around today, May 15th. The Ice Saints claim three days in the middle of May. St Dunstan is known to bring cold weather on the 19th. And this doesn’t seem to be changing much even as the atmosphere of this planet is being cooked. Much of the warming is happening in the oceans and at the poles. So while it is warmer — and weather is more energetic — there is still a good chance that a May cold snap will come along and kill your tender garden plants and freeze all the apple buds. Or just make peas and potatoes slow starters and most other seeds non-starters.

Now, I do have rhubarb up. However, I am not a fan. I grow it mostly because it’s an outrageous Little Shop of Horrors plant that could be food if I get desperate in spring (and if it doesn’t eat me first). This is also one of those years that the asparagus went from thumb-sized sprouts to three feet tall in less than an eye-blink. So I have asparagus… but I sort of missed eating it. This is probably better anyway because it seems like the plants might need another growing season before they will endure me breaking off the stems.

Still, I did get some planting done this week. I turned the hügelkultur mound into an allium and herb bed. I have leeks and shallots planted in with a couple dozen culinary and medicinal herbs. I will also plant the chiles in here. The back side of the mound now has dwarf fruit trees and hops, and this is where the winter squash will trail down into the jungle… which is being viciously pruned. Though it feels like I’m not making much progress. A quarter acre doesn’t sound that big… until it’s filled with blackthorn, wild clematis, and crap sumac. Then it looks like a vast ocean of impossibility. I guess I’ll be working on that for the rest of my life…

To feel a bit more accomplished, I built a couple new raised beds. A 4 square foot pyramid will hold my summer greens. It is replacing a disintegrated bed that was in the shadiest part of the veg patch. Nothing much besides garlic would grow there. But greens should be happy. The other new bed is over two feet deep and filled with fresh compost — so no road pollution! I have seeded it with beets, carrots, rutabaga and radishes. I also put in a small corner of raab, my favorite brassica! It doesn’t store well, so you need to eat it quickly. So I sow small patches and gorge on it for a week or two in August. I have ladders in the middle of these beds and will grow small-fruited melons up them when it is warm enough for melon seed. It is not there yet. Not many of even the cool-season seeds have germinated yet.

And on that… Seems that it takes a LOOOOOONNNNNNGGGG time to germinate nightshades in my basement, even with 24-7 grow-lights and space heating. But they are finally all up and coming along, the tomatoes better than the chiles, and the small-fruiting tomatoes most of all. Too much of those actually… but that’s how those things roll. Cherry tomatoes are too much from sprout to vine exuberance to their very late fall finish. You can always count on a summer of cursing the glut of cherry tomatoes…

Until suddenly the sun is setting at 6pm again…

Which is possibly the best thing about coming into solstice season: after this lethargic pause, the energy shifts in the opposite direction, a welcome change after six months, a comforting novelty right when you just can’t tolerate any more of the somnolent sameness.

But there will be a lot of cherry tomatoes between now and then! And it’s only just beginning!

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Wednesday Word

for 15 May 2024

sowing

If you want to ramble on about planting, well, anything, you can respond in the comments below or go visit the All Poetry contest for May. Your response can be anything made from words. I love poetry, but anything can be poetic and you needn’t even be limited to poetics. An observation, a story, a thought. Might even be an image — however, I am not a visual person, so it has to work harder to convey meaning. In the spirit of word prompts, it’s best if you use the word; but I’m not even a stickler about that. Especially if you can convey the meaning without ever touching the word.

Even if you don’t choose to scribble, at least I’ve made you think about… sowing.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024