Garden And Herbs | the magic of hands

September Breeze, August Peaches

23 August 2010

A September breeze waltzed through this August afternoon. I recognized it immediately. I was working in my outdoor kitchen, slicing peach after peach, thumbing out the pits with a satisfying slurp, dipping the flesh in a strawberry vinegar solution. The breeze had a certain swish, a lift that August breezes don’t have unless a storm is coming. But there was no storm coming, and this breeze was playing with the flame on my stove, threatening to blow it out, promising to bring more of the same in just a few weeks.

And so it is that summer really has come to an end, and we are in those in between days, when the leaves begin to thin and last day of swimming is nigh.

After I canned another batch of peaches I took care of a few assorted tasks, all the while hearing the call of the garden. So down I went to dig up potatoes. As I did I sang “Erin’s Lovely Home”–an Irish ballad that tells one man’s woes of crossing the Atlantic during a time of famine: “there were thousands more left upon the shore/ all anxious for to roam and/ leave the land where they were born/called Erin’s lovely home.“ The humble potato, so weighty in the hand, such a blessing to poor farmers, such a loss if the crop were to fail.

Now the Moon rises above the ridge, full and round and gleaming yellow against the thickening blue sky. Katydids chant in the shadows, and the cool of evening deepens. Dinner is late, but we will be having our first meal from the finished cob oven tonight. There is no famine here, and this meal will be worth the wait.

By stephanie thomas berry | Posted in Garden and Herbs, Joyful Sustainability | Tagged cob oven, Garden and Herbs, sustainability | Comments (0)

How the Rain Fell Perfectly on my Skin

19 August 2010

This album contains 2 items.

It is evening. Dinner has been eaten, and the children are cleaning up, or so we hope, in the kitchen. The katydids fill the forest with their pulsing chatter. I’m listening to them, and to Eva Cassidy singing “Kathy’s Song.” I can’t decide which is more beautiful. I’ll take both.
Yesterday I picked peaches. I [...]

The Fullness of Summer, the Welcome Bed

28 June 2010

On Sunday I went to the Useful Plants Nursery Summer Plant Sale and bought a marvelous assortment of trees and shrubs. While I was gone, Jay pulled up the old floor downstairs, which was a hodge-podge of hardwood flooring, parquet, linoleum, and tile. Now it is down to a bare slab. Later in the day when the Sun’s heat began to fade I went into the garden and picked five quarts of blueberries. The bushes were falling over themselves with blueberries. I ate a bunch, froze a bunch, and there’s still a bounty of blueberries to harvest. So begins the last week before our annual beach vacation.

There is much to do. I can’t think about the floor, and I won’t even try to put my new trees and shrubs in the ground until I get back, but I certainly can wax euphoric about my nursery purchases. I think I’m most excited about the Hybrid American Chestnut. The American Chestnut was the crown jewel of the Southern Appalachian forests, but a foreign blight wiped them out by the 1930’s. Well, not entirely. There are still chestnut stumps that produce shoots, but the shoots are killed off by the blight before they ever mature. The two chestnuts I purchased are American chestnuts crossed back with Japanese and Chinese Chestnuts to produce something close to the original tree.

I also purchased some American hazelnuts. If I had done more research before my purchase I might have bought the European hazelnut, which produces a larger nut more suitable for the home orchard, but now I’m excited that I will be able to produce nuts for our family, and for the wildlife. American hazelnuts are vigorous plants with a tendency to colonize an area, so I’ll have extra plants within a few years that I can plant back in the forest for the deer, bear, grouse, and squirrels on my mountain. By the way, it’s your mountain, too, as nearly all of it is National Forest Land.

There’s nine new blueberry bushes, which means I have now about twenty-five blueberry bushes, though not all are producing berries yet. To go along with the blueberries, I now have two Aronia bushes. These are a native berry extremely rich in athocyanins and antioxidants. Don’t even begin to think that’s enough berries for me! I purchased two female sea berry plants, which have slender silver leaves. When they are loaded down with their bright orange berries, they will be a marvelous sight.

And then there is my Vitex tree. I thought it was Vitex agnus-castus, of which I already have two small plants, but it’s actually something I’ve never heard of before: VItex negundo. Regardless, this small tree absolutely called to me. She has a supple, curvaceous trunk rising to nearly six feet with lacy leaves and delicate lavender flowers. She really does have a lovely shape. This is the information they had about her: A veritable medicine cabinet of a plant. The leaves are anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and analgesic and are applied externally for rheumatic conditions, bruises, injuries, sprains, sores, and skin infections. The seeds and leaves contain valuable medicinal compounds are used internally for chronic bronchitis, all emaciating conditions, to improve memory and eyesight, rejuvenate hair, alleviate loss of appetite, and to manage skin diseases and excessive bleeding during menstruation. The young stems are used for basketmaking. The leaves are insecticidal and used to repel insects in grain stores. The fresh leaves are burned with grass to repel mosquitoes.

While I dream about blueberry pie with a hazelnut crust , or chestnut stuffing for Thanksgiving in two or three years, right now I have Narrowleaf Echinacea, Golden Sage, Passionflower, Valerian, and Bloodflower that need to go in the garden, as in yesterday. Fortunately the hot and dry weather has broken with a thunderific rainstorm. I’ll pull my bolting lettuces and feed them to my rabbits tomorrow, making way for a bed of herbal delights. But for now, my soft bed of pillows calls, and I will answer, for I have much to do tomorrow—putting straw around the potatoes (and purchasing said straw), taking artwork to the frame shop, setting up a trellis for my poor beans, and some other things I’m quite certain I’ve forgotten about, but will remember at some juncture.

By stephanie thomas berry | Posted in Garden and Herbs, Joyful Sustainability | Tagged Garden and Herbs, herbs, house, hubbie, sustainability | Comments (0)

Of Poisons and Peaches

4 June 2010

This Spring I made it a few times to our local Farmer’s Market, which for me is a major accomplishment since I usually do a lot of nothing on Saturday mornings. But I’m so glad I made it, because I met Wilma, a fascinating mountain woman, and bought some currant bushes from her. Now the currants are starting to turn red. Renee checks on them daily, hunting the red jewels for her own pleasure. I’ll be lucky to get any!

When we brought the currant bushes home, my husband told me they looked like the berry bushes that used to grow in his backyard when he was a kid. His mother caught him eating them one time and scolded him fiercely, telling him they were poison. Poison! Poison! Poison! The other day he plucked a crisp red berry from the bush and popped it into his mouth. “Yep, those were the ones that were in my backyard,” he said. “I loved them. They were so tartly delicious. I’m so glad we have some now!”

It’s easy to think that his mom was being a bit harsh, but the truth is, she just didn’t know. Better safe than sorry is not a bad motto, though are there are better ones. Seek and find out, for one, though that’s a little easier now than in the 70s, I’d say.

Consider if my husband, as a child, had been attracted to this plant instead of red berries:

poison hemlock

He would not be with us. This plant is Poison Hemlock, and I found it last week growing by my chicken coop. Though it looks like many other innocuous plants–Queen Anne’s Lace in particular–it is deadly poisonous. I read that it can kill you even if you are just handling the root, if you have a cut on your hands. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that it’s poisonous enough that I washed my hands after breaking off a leaf to smell. I thought it might be dill, which is in the same family (Apiaceae) as hemlock, but I wasn’t looking closely enough.

I’ve educated my kids about hemlock, starting with two years ago when I saw it flowering down the road by the creek. Last year it was blooming on our river land, right by the path, and every time I walked by it with them I’d say, “There it is, the poison hemlock! Be careful! That plant can kill you, quick!” Now they are afraid of yarrow, Queen Anne’s Lace, and any other plant producing clusters of white flowers. I have pointed out hemlock’s smooth stalk and compared it with the fuzzy stalk of Queen Anne’s Lace, but I think for kids these things can get all mixed up in their heads. Learning the difference between what is poison, and what is not, is knowledge that develops over many, many seasons. Be respectful of each plant, I tell them. Some are so poisonous they can kill you, some are so rich in medicine they can heal you. No plant ever poisoned someone that was just looking at it, so learn to use your eyes. I’m still learning that. And trying to figure out how I want to destroy this plant before it goes to seed.

Meanwhile, the peonies in my garden are tumbling over themselves like girls just become women, tossing their beauty about recklessly, littering the path with a carpet of pink petals. I feel like peonies are the ultimate flower, the way they burst open with frills and scent and color, and then just can’t stop, falling over with the heavy delight of being a flower.

The valerian is flowering, and one plant has a stalk over six feet tall! Looks kind of like hemlock, oddly enough. The root of valerian, where it’s medicine dwells, has a powerful stink-foot smell, but the flowers are sweet and clear. I’ll be gathering the seed this year, and planting more valerian this fall. Do you have any seeds from your garden you’d like to trade for some valerian seeds?

Soon the flowers of May will be gone, and the lilies and bee balm and elecampane will begin flowering. I have really enjoyed my native columbine, which was a volunteer in the pot of another plant I purchased last year. It has bloomed profusely, and its blooms are smaller than the more domesticated columbine. I’ll be passing some seeds from this plant along to a friend of mine, who gave me some of the volunteer columbine plants from her garden. They were so cute–little deep purple doubles! I’m wondering if the native will cross with these unusual samples from her garden to make even more interesting varieties of columbine.

And last, but certainly not least, is a branch from one of my peach trees. It’s going to be a peachy summer, I’d say!

By stephanie thomas berry | Posted in Garden and Herbs, Joyful Sustainability | Tagged Garden and Herbs, herbs | Comments (0)

Pitch for a Shift

2 June 2010

Yesterday afternoon Jay and I sat at the table stripping mint leaves from their stalks, arranging them in assorted patterns on the dehydrator trays. We were both a bit worn with the day, and so I had made some mate latte tea. I had mine with honey, and that, along with the crisp scent of mint, seemed to be lifting the tired fog that engulfed me.

We talked a bit about his work, and then I made my pitch.

“Let’s try something new,” I suggested. “Let’s make our midday meal our main meal of the day. Before then, we can all work together, in the garden, on your carcycle, whatever. After the meal, you can go to your shop, I can go to my studio, and the kids can have free time.”

I had this idea that morning, as my children fought downstairs with a vengeance. I was trying to get a small task done, and had left them to their own devices. Of course this was a recipe for disaster, but only a minor disaster, the type to which I am somewhat immune. I need some sort of shift, I thought, as Renee screamed at McKinley at the top of her lungs downstairs. There has to be a way for us to move more into the life we desire with less stress and more beauty. There just has to be a way!

As it has been, our life very loosely resembles a traditional set-up, whereby Jay goes to work in the morning, albeit just next door, and usually around 10 am, and I stay at home with the kids. That is about where the resemblance ends, since “staying home with the kids” might mean swimming in the river, or it might mean discussing the current crisis in Gaza, as we did yesterday. Still, being the only one with the kids for most of the day means that when I can break away to the studio, I usually don’t have the energy. Making dinner at the end of the day usually takes what last bit of energy I might have had.

So in our constant quest–sometimes joyful, sometimes not–to do everything, we are attempting a shift change. We’ll try it for a week and see how it works. Today was the first day, and oh, today!

We started the day with coffee, as usual, sitting at the table in our outdoor kitchen. I woke the children by reading some of “The Island of the Blue Dolphins” to them. Reading with them in the morning, rather than at night, has proven to be the trick to getting my children from sleep to wakefulness without yelling. Then we read together from “Opening Doors Within,” which is a daily meditation book by Eileen Caddy, one of the co-founders of Findhorn. Breakfast was followed by jumping on the trampoline, and then into the garden we went, weeding and planting 8 butternut squash plants. The clouds came and cooled us from the hot Sun, and then the rain began to fall upon us, big thick drops, sporadic and delicious at first, and then a torrent. We rushed to the house, wet and laughing.

For our midday meal, Jay and Renee made a stack of handmade tortillas (thirty-two to be precise), while McKinley made hummus, and I made a frittata.

I sent McKinley to the garden to take pictures of the row of butternut squash and the limbs of our peach trees, which are laden with peaches. We have so many peaches that I’ll be making peach preserves, peach chutney, and peach pie come August. Anyway, here’s the pictures he took:

Baby Butternut

Rose

Baby Peach

My Marvel of Venice beans are coming up strong, and the arugula I planted with the kids a few days ago has made a fine green appearance. We’ve been getting good rain this week, so the other beans I planted, and the sunflowers, should be showing pretty soon. The garden grows, the river warms, and summer really is upon us. With my husband joining me in the garden, I feel like anything is possible!

By stephanie thomas berry | Posted in Garden and Herbs, Joyful Sustainability, Our Unschool | Tagged Garden and Herbs, hubbie, mckinley, Our Unschool, rain, renee, studio | Comments (0)

Will Trade Virus for Stress

27 May 2010

The Strange Virus has left. I slept in a little this morning, figuring I deserved it, then shuffled the kids off to piano lessons. There was much moaning about this from McKinley, who is 9 going on 17, thanks to the influence of his older brother Bert. He wants to play guitar, and thinks his teacher is lame.

Rather, she is incredible. And McKinley isn’t so bad at the piano game, either. When he sits at her piano, which admittedly sounds angelic compared to ours, his fingers begin playing all sorts of things he’s picked up from the aforementioned brother. He does this in between actual pieces he’s playing for his lesson, and he does this whenever his teacher has momentarily paused in giving him guidance. It’s maddening for me! “Lesson manners!” I remind him, but she just smiles back at me. She understands, she tells me, she had one like this, so full of life and energy. And today she asked him the title of this one thing he’s played over and over until my ears hurt.

“You won’t like it,” he tells her.

“That’s okay, what matters is that you like it,” she smiles, ever so generously.

“It’s Death Clocks Thunderhorse,” he rambles off, then makes some heavy metal air guitar motions. I roll my eyes.

“Okay, I’ll see if I can find the music for it, so you can learn to play it CORRECTLY,” she smiles again, this time her evil-piano-teacher intentions revealed to me by the glint in her eyes. McKinley is oblivious. She’s very good.

Renee got back from her four-day trip to Washington D.C. with friends on Monday. The highlight of her trip was seeing baby ducks at the Botanical Gardens. No surprise there. She was also very impressed with the hotel, a Holiday Inn, because the kids ate free for breakfast AND dinner. There was also a pool, and she had packed three swimsuits in anticipation of this, only to be deeply disappointed that there turned out to be no time for swimming. Instead they walked all over the place looking at museums.

I had told her that when she got back I would take her to a pool so she could go pool-swimming. Poor thing, she’s grown up swimming in a mountain river. Now all that she wants is to swim in a pool. Go figure. But I came down with the dreaded Strange Virus, and was out for two days, during which not only did she have to entertain herself, but she did NOT get taken to a real swimming pool. Now that I could walk up the stairs without my head swimming, it was time for me to take her to the pool down the road.

This I did not want to do. There was so much that needed to be done, I’d missed Monday going to Charlotte to pick her up, and Tuesday and Wednesday with the Strange Virus. My day had already been set back with the rescheduled piano lessons. Since she also wanted to make some chocolate chip cookies (this girl is always planning something) I thought maybe we could do the cookies today, swimming tomorrow. Much girl-grief ensued with this suggestion, which escalated to a small argument in which I got testy and she got upset, crying, “I’m sorry, Momma,” which is really code for, “I’m sorry but will you please give me what I want anyway?” So I called the pool. They’re not even open yet. And of course she doesn’t want to go swimming in the river, which is right across the road and absolutely divine for swimming in.

So we made cookies instead. I had become stressed. I was thinking about my garden. How I’m always behind with planting. How the weeds are everywhere. She wanted to make the “Best Ever Chocolate Chip Dip Cookies” and I wasn’t even sure what she meant by that. We got out some cookbooks, reading over different recipes. This one used three sticks of butter. No, thanks. This one used ricotta cheese. Whatever. Like I just happen to have ricotta cheese in my refrigerator because I might want to whip up some homemade ravioli or lasagne or chocolate chip cookies. OK. Next recipe. Double Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies. Score! Renee LOVES mint, and we have lots growing, well, everywhere.

Renee was really into making the cookies. She did a great job, and enjoyed herself thoroughly. I enjoyed helping her. When we spread the dough onto the cookie sheet, she revealed her secret plan for what a “”Chocolate Chip Dip” cookie would be–one that had a chunk of chocolate hidden in the middle! I was impressed with her innovation.

After the cookies came out of the oven and had been appropriately devoured, she changed into a scarf wrapped about her and began singing about her cookies. They were magical cookies she had decided, and she talked with me at great length about this, peppering our conversation about belief and magic with outbursts of glorious song. “This is just the best day,” she told me. I had reverted to weeding the front flower bed while she sang to me and was now covered in wretched grass pollen that made me feel as I was on fire. “Yes, it is a beautiful day,” I told her, “and I’m going to go inside and relax for a minute or two.”

I washed off and laid down for a little while. I was not in the best of moods, regardless of my delightful daughter, regardless of how the rain came up while we were cooking in our outdoor kitchen, a sudden breeze wafting over us, regardless of the peonies, geraniums, and borage I had picked from my garden and set on the table earlier. Sometimes we are just in a foul mood, no matter what beauty befalls us.

So I went to the garden, chiding myself as I transplanted collards and basil and rhubarb, the last of which I put at the back of the garden where it could grow big and unfettered and perhaps form a sort of border against the weeds that inevitably encroach upon my garden. I checked on my lettuces, which are doing swimmingly well, and my broccoli, which is looking good. My tomatoes were stunted by a late frost but are coming back. And I still have more tomatoes to put in the garden. Also in the ground are potatoes and onions. And the beans I planted a few days ago. So maybe things aren’t so off in the garden department. And the peonies are blooming. What could be better than that for a May afternoon?

By stephanie thomas berry | Posted in Garden and Herbs, Our Unschool | Tagged Garden and Herbs, mckinley, Our Unschool, renee | Comments (0)

Garden Notes, without weedy pictures

23 May 2010

Today the Moon was in Libra, after a stint through Leo & Virgo, which are barren signs. While it would be ideal to be weeding during such barren times, such has not been the case. So today I tried to make up for lost time, weeding (because there is SO much to be done) and also planting Marvel of Venice Pole Beans and some luscious Johnny Jump-Ups I purchased at one of my local greenhouses.

Libra is “a moist, fruitful airy sign. Good for grains & root crops. Especially good for flowers,” according to The Almanack.com, whose monthly almanac I save to my desktop and check frequently. I intended to plant more potatoes today, since the Moon is in such a good sign for them, but alas, I spent a good portion of my day helping with the new floor in my outdoor kitchen. More on that tomorrow.

Even with all the weeds the garden is gorgeous. I’ll get those potatoes in the ground. Plus lots of other stuff. My white peonies are blooming, and my pink peonies are about to. I really love my peonies!

This morning I got up at six–a very strange occurrence indeed–and picked this bouquet from my garden: