GARDEN GUILT

I’m having a hard time with my conscience these days.

It’s not that I’ve robbed a bank, or murdered anyone, or even so much as shop-lifted a package of gum.  No, it’s much more pervasive than that; I have garden guilt.  I get it every year.

I don’t know why I put myself through this; I do recognize that I am responsible for my own suffering.  If I didn’t plant a garden I wouldn’t have to deal with its over production.  It wouldn’t be my problem to deal with beets the size of footballs, or 2396 carrots, or cucumbers that have a harvest window of three days between too-small-to-see and ginormous-overripe-seed-pods.  I wait all summer for my first cucumber and then four days into their ‘season’ I find myself asking why I thought I needed more than one plant.  Every.  Single.  Year.

It all seems so innocent and Mother Earth-ish in May when I plant my garden.  The sun is shining.  The grass is green.  The freshly tilled earth is warm and welcoming.  I envision garden lettuce salads and crisp, crunchy radishes, and snitching fresh peas and carrots with the grandchildren.  In my mind there is never too much of anything.  It’s always just the right amount.  They say that ‘experience is the best teacher’; obviously this is only true when you pay attention in her class.

We have gone from a family of six down to just the two of us.  Correspondingly I have made an honest effort to shrink the garden area, with only limited success.  Yes, my veggie garden is much smaller, but now we have a huge space that we call our orchard which has morphed into extra space to put the bigger things … like corn and potatoes and pumpkins and cucumbers and onions and watermelon.  This year it even got an extra row of peas because I had extra seed.  The pretense of downsizing my actual garden space has been completely canceled out by having orchard overflow.  I am my own worst enemy.

Maybe it would help if I sat down and documented my struggle.  Would I actually pay attention to warnings like “Yes, Jocelyn, one row of carrots will be plenty!”  or “No, Jocelyn, throw that two year old package of string beans away!  Do NOT put them in the ground just to ‘see what happens’!”?  I’ve learned my lesson on zucchini, but I keep repeating the carrot and beet mistakes.   Don’t even get me started on the countless bean fiascos I have faced.

This summer, due to dry conditions, a less than perfect germination and a hungry family of gophers, the over production problem hasn’t been as bad as normal years.  I managed to use almost all of my beets before they got tough and stringy, I ended up only having to wash and store one bag of carrots and they fit nicely into my fridge.  There were only enough peas to eat fresh.  This year my guilt was all about beans (I pulled them up and hauled them away – also known as hiding the evidence), and cucumbers (I continually chucked the oversized, overripe ones into the trees.  The dog eventually tired of bringing them back). 

My third antagonist is an epic tomato harvest.  It’s going to be the undoing of me.

I know tomatoes are a versatile fruit and can be used in many ways but there is still only so much pasta sauce and salsa a two person household can use.  The next batch will be stewed tomatoes but there’s a limit to how much of that we can use too.  Right now the boxes of ‘pending’ are out in the unheated garage so they ripen more slowly, which only means that I am prolonging my agony.  Every time I go out there the guilt about doing something useful with them hits me: they shame me with their pungent scent.

We have been known to go to exceptional lengths to use up unneeded garden produce (a crazy excess of pumpkins for target practice one sunny Thanksgiving afternoon comes to mind), but the smart thing to do, as I am reminded of often, would be to have a pig or two to feed the extra too.  I have many problems with this … building a pen that will hold pigs in, having to deal with the fly problem they create, being tied down to having animals to care for when we want to go away, and (and this is a big ‘and’) my guilt burden over under-utilized garden vegetables is already too high … do you know what eventually happens to big, healthy pigs?

I prefer my protein to be anonymous, thank you very much.  The last thing my conscience needs is pork chop guilt.

                                         A PEACEFUL, EASY FEELING

Harvest is stalled out at the moment.  The rain that we so needed six weeks ago has settled in for an extended stay now that the crops have ripened and can no longer use it.  There are a few farmers done harvest but most have a good portion still out in the field; every rainy, wet, or foggy morning is met with a groan of impatience.  They just want t 2018’s crop in the bin.

I understand their frustration, this is a whole year’s livelihood we’re talking about, and so I keep my thoughts to myself.  Things like “This will do my perennials the world of good for next year” and “I love the scent of damp leaves composting – it’s such a rich, tangy aroma.  I think of it as Mother Nature’s autumn perfume.” are best left unsaid around people who have huge money on the line and nothing to keep themselves busy while they wait for the weather to clear up.

It’s getting close to twenty years since we downsized our farm and planted hay and pasture, but that harvest feeling never leaves you.  The days shorten.  The bright greens of summer fade to yellows and golds.  I don’t know if a stranger to this land would detect it, but by mid August there is a sense of ripeness - maybe better described as completeness - in the air.  The anticipation builds.  Swathers begin to appear, pulling into vast stands of canola and leaving miles of windrows to finish ripening when they leave.  Each crop has its own color of perfection – wheat is a reddish gold, barley is more a dusty yellow, oats a creamy yellow, and flax is a dark reddish brown.  Fields of corn look all dried up and scraggly – kind of Hallowe’en-ish.  The field peas are the first to come off, the corn and faba beans, the last.

As is often the case with semi retired farmers, we lease our land to a neighbor who then hires Glen to help during the growing season.  It’s best all worlds – Glen’s years of experience are put to use, and it keeps him active letting him do what he has always loved, working the land.  Even better than that, he gets to do all of this while simply collecting a pay check.  Gone are the days of gambling with huge sums of money – the machinery costs, fertilizer, chemical weed killers – now it is simply doing the work he loves on the land he loves.  Probably only the people who walk in the same shoes would appreciate how putting in 12 hour, dusty, itchy, back-aching days could feel like a blessing, but this is a true thing; it does.

My role these days is only a peripheral one.  I pack his lunch in the morning and then carry on with my own day.  Once in a while I get a call to drive him back to his truck or pick up a part in town while I’m there, but mostly I don’t see him again until well after dark. 

The other day, though, something special happened.  The canola they were combining needed aeration so he was hauling it back to the bins in our yard.  Late in the afternoon, just as the autumn chill was claiming the day, Glen called me over to help him top up the bin.  It’s kind of a team job with him at the top of the bin watching that we didn’t overflow it and me standing ready to shut off the grain flow when he called it was full.  It went without a hitch and we moved on to the next step – moving the auger over to the next bin.  He went about his tasks and I did what I could to streamline the process.

 Again, everything went smooth.  All the good parts of our farming history, even though it was at least 20 years ago, wrapped around us.  The whole scene had the feeling of enchantment.

The real life, day-to-day farming memories of that long ago time are not all so sweet.  They were times of high stress and exhaustion and short tempers.  The financial burden of farming is huge and making enough money to support your farm, let alone your family, takes its toll during harvest when every day, good or bad, counts.  We haven’t had a lot of monumental fights in our marriage, but the ones we did have all took place during harvest. 

And yet, there we were, the clattering noise of the auger, the rumble of the tractor’s engine, the rich, earthy aroma of the canola pouring from the grain tank, the last of the day’s sunshine on our shoulders,  all seemed to cast a spell around us.

With all of the negative stresses of farming wiped from our slate the blessings shone through … satisfaction … accomplishment … completion.  A peaceful, easy feeling: we both felt it as we went about our work, acting as a team.

As he got ready to pull out of the yard he grinned at me and said out loud what I had been thinking to myself.

 “Isn’t this nice?”

I wish there was a better word than magical.

                         THE BUTTER MOON

Life is full of struggles – the big ones like the one between good and evil, and the smaller, day-to-day things like avoiding laundry or what to do with the yoghurt that’s past its best before date – but the one that reared its ugly head on me this morning was zipping up my favorite blue jeans.  It’s not that I couldn’t get them done up - we’re not that far gone yet – but sitting in them is getting to be uncomfortable.  Obviously Karma is trying to tell me that the opposite of sitting is what I should be doing.

But I wasn’t thinking about Karma at the time; she always wants me to take responsibility for my own actions.  The thought that went through my head this morning was “Darned Butter Moon!”

Let me explain.

Back in the days of pre history when humans were all hunter-gatherers their way of keeping the passage of time was different than what we do today.  Increments as small as minutes and hours were of no importance, but in order to feed themselves throughout a whole year they had to know the seasons.  It was of utmost importance to know when the hunting was best, when certain plants would be ready to harvest, when the migrations would take place.  They watched the moon and named each full moon as it pertained to their livelihood.

For instance March was the Sap Moon because that’s when the sap would begin to rise.  April the Egg Moon, May the Milk Moon and June was the Strawberry Moon.  The moons of the waning year claimed the names of Harvest Moon, Hunter’s Moon, and Frost Moon.  Maybe it’s the farmer in me but I’ve always liked the idea of observing the season’s passage in this natural way.  Since I ‘live out on the land’ this natural calendar makes so much more sense than using the names of the Roman Emperors or Greek goddesses.

My year goes more like this: January is the Dark Moon because even though daylight hours are beginning to stretch out, it’s really hard to tell yet.  February is the Mexico Moon – or anywhere south and warm.  If we get away to find sunshine it will be then.  March is my Mud Moon.  I don’t dislike it as much as I did when the house was full of kids, but it’s still pretty muddy.  April is the Impatient Moon – the snow doesn’t go fast enough, the grass isn’t green yet, and I just want to plant things!  May is the Planting Moon, June is the Dandelion Moon, and my name for July is one borrowed from my hunter-gatherer ancestors - the Thunder Moon.  They were also right about September being the Harvest Moon, and October being the Hunter’s Moon, as well as November being the Snow Moon and December the Cold Moon.

But August?  My August?  This is the one I call the Butter moon.  Not because of the moon’s pale yellow appearance, nor is it because cows produce more cream at this time of year.  No, it’s completely, entirely, and inarguably because with all the fresh vegetables coming in from the garden the butter consumption doubles in this house in August.  Butter on new potatoes.  Butter on corn on the cob.  Butter on peas and carrots and beets, on beans and steamed Swiss Chard.  Not to mention all the extra butter that goes into cucumber sandwiches.  All of these things would taste good on their own, but it’s like they say … everything’s better with butter!

I’ve been sitting for the better part of a morning as I wrote this.  Karma wasn’t kidding about the “this is going to be uncomfortable” warning she gave me this morning.  It’s a darned good thing that the Butter Moon is almost over, and maybe I should spend the up-coming Harvest Moon commemorating my hunter-gatherer ancestors by walking everywhere I go and consuming only what I harvest on my own.

                                                (SLOW) DOWN TIME

It’s been a summer of nonstop activity.  I know it wasn’t last week that I was still waiting for the snow to melt but the time has gone by in such a blur that it seems like it. 

Summer is always busy but in the five years since I retired I have managed to get myself on the local tourism board: this kind of multiplies the busy factor of the season.  I really don’t mind.  I enjoy being part of a positive influence in my community, and the people I share board duties with are all great to work with.  It’s just that from the long weekend in May until Labour Day there is a lot to do.

This year was extra crazy.  Our group always plans and hosts the Canada Day celebrations but we really upped the ante this summer striving to draw a bigger crowd with live music and a steak supper.  Mother Nature treated us to a rain/hail storm to make things even more challenging but the day was a success in spite of her efforts.

Our other big event was our first ever garden tour in mid July.  In order to get something new like this up and running we needed an assortment of local gardens to show off.  It was much more challenging to get people to commit than I had anticipated so I ended up including mine as one of the rural yards.  My selling point when asking others to show their gardens was “You keep your yard and garden anyway.  It will be no extra work.”  While I believed this to be true when I said it, turns out only the first part is.  When you know you have people coming expressly to see your yard and garden, you are much more critical of grass height and visible weeds.  I can’t thank the folks enough who did offer their gardens for the 2018 tour, and I hope we can find some more for next year.  It really was a lovely day.

Besides those two events – and all the work that went into keeping ahead of grass and weeds – I also spent a few weeks in the spring clearing out deadfall in the shelterbelt which we later wood chipped piles of mulch for our fruit trees.  As well, we hosted several different visitors, entertained grandchildren a couple times, and as the days got hotter and hotter, took up hauling water to keep everything alive. 

In July the garden kept me busy with peas and beans to pick and process, now it’s cucumbers I can’t keep up with and soon it will be corn.  Then there will be potatoes to dig and I literally have a forest of tomatoes I will have to deal with.  But right now, strangely, I have nothing to do.

I have wandered around the yard.  The grass crunches to powder under my shoes; it is so dry.  I took a pail of water to a few new trees, but watering on a larger scale is out of the question.  We just can’t take our well for granted.  We haven’t had measurable rain in ages and there is no guarantee there will be lots of snow for runoff to replenish our water supply in the spring.  As depressing as the scorched earth is out there, I really like to take showers and wash dishes on a regular basis.

So with the one thing that needs done out there off limits I found myself wandering aimlessly this morning; all my accumulated work ethic spinning its wheels in the sand.  Time to turn my mind to other things … I will be ending August off with a short camping trip with a smattering of family and grandchildren … I should pack.  And later on, as I wait for my farmer to come home for supper, I will pour myself a glass of wine, sit on the deck, and watch the hummingbirds do battle over sugar water.  We can celebrate the end of summer together in the twilight.

                                       IT’S AN EMOTIONAL PROCESS

The blast furnace temperatures went away for a couple days so I made the best of my gardening time while I could.  On those hot hot days I stood at my laundry room window and tortured myself with what a tangled, neglected mess my garden had become.  The lettuce was two feet high and about to flower.  The Swiss chard had collapsed under its own weight.  The peas, in their effort to climb above the jungle, had pulled the dill down. 

The beans looked lush and green from the house, but I knew under all those leaves lurked at least one large tub of over ripe beans.  They had gotten away on me … well, it all had … just like every other year.  Whether the reasons be holidays or company or weather or over production, by the middle of August it always comes to this.  It was time to start wrapping up the season.

So dressed in what seemed like winter clothes after the past week (knee length shorts and a T-shirt) I tossed back the last of my breakfast coffee, picked up my big, black garden tub, and commenced a bit of a purge.

It struck me, as I plucked bean plants from Mother Nature’s bosom, that gardening presented the same series of emotions year after year.

In the cold, dark days of January I long for anything green and growing.  I leaf through seed and nursery catalogues and dream of warm sunshine and moist earth.  By the end of February I can stand it no longer – I haul dirt in, set up shelving in the south window and plant seeds.  March and April are spent trying to keep the seedlings from dying because I planted them way too early.

At last May arrives, the earth warms; it’s time for the real thing.  To place those tiny seeds in moist soil is an exercise in anticipation.  How long will it take them to germinate?  What pests will I have to guard against?  Which will deliver their goods first – radishes? Or lettuce?  The ritual morning garden check begins.

There is joy when the rows start showing up; first tiny green specks, then discernible rows, and finally clear lines of lush sturdy plants, easily spotted from the laundry room window.

Toward the end of June satisfaction kicks in.  We are eating salads, and baby carrots, spinach and beet leaves.  The peas and beans are in bloom.  Butter sales are about to sky rocket.  All is good with the world.

And then July hits.  Well, actually, it’s a blur.  A person cannot keep up with Mother Nature’s production schedule.  Some years I last longer than others but Mother Nature always wins.  It’s exasperating.

Now, here we are in the middle of August, and the most prevalent emotion is one of relief.  Okay, I’ll be honest – it is with pure glee that I am ripping whole rows of legumes from the ground.  The mad rush is behind me.  Oh sure, I still have cucumbers coming at me and the corn is nearly ready and the potatoes will need to be dug, but the scales have tipped toward fall, my favourite season.  There is a feeling of completion in the air and the sky is the special soft blue it turns in autumn.  It doesn’t get better than this

A frost in September will finish everything else off.  In October I will put all my deck planters away.  In November it will snow. 

And somewhere in the middle of all the Christmas mail the seed catalogues will arrive, and we’ll start all this craziness all over again.

                                    GROUNDED

The past two weeks have been very busy for us.  Well, actually the whole summer has, but it’s the recent past that has me thinking today.

We live in a particular part of heaven called rural Saskatchewan.  Don’t laugh; beauty is in the senses of the beholder.  You may well consider where you live to be a slice of heaven too – I hope you do – but as for myself, there is nowhere on the planet I would rather live than here.

Even so.  Even though I feel this way.  Even as I appreciate the seasons, relish the colors, take in great deep breaths of fresh air, and watch successive sunsets bring to a close our happy, fulfilling days, sometimes my wonder at being so lucky to live here fades into complacency.  I begin to take it all for granted.

The cure for this is to look upon it with fresh eyes.  Over the past two weeks we have had visitors from far away cities, and through conversations with them I have come to hit the ‘refresh’ button on the value of living here.  It wasn’t that we sat and compared our lifestyles or argued about who had it better.  It wasn’t like that at all.  Everyone involved was quite satisfied with their lives; where they lived, and what they chose to do with their time.  It’s just that as we sat on our deck and looked out over the fields, or drove our dusty summer roads, or wandered around the yard and gardens, I was given the chance to see these treasures from a different perspective.

Things like how far away our closest neighbors live.  This is no big deal to us – it’s a mile, or two, depending which direction you’re talking about – but for each of them this is phenomenal.  Where they live the houses almost touch.  They need shades on their windows for privacy, not just to keep the sunlight out.  They lock all their doors all the time.  Their dogs are always on a leash. 

Questions like “How far away is your property line?” came up.  And when the answer was given, the next question was “What do you mean by ‘quarter section’?”  Out came the municipal map to explain that term, and then we were into things like ‘grid road system’ and ‘main farm access’.  In the very different worlds of Southern Ontario and Connecticut, USA these were alien terms.

The most alien thing for them, though, was the quiet.  No traffic noises, no machinery, no sirens, no voices other than our own and the occasional coyote.  When we lapsed into silence all there was left to hear was the whirring of hummingbird wings.

Of course, there is the other side of the coin.  Cities have such a wide variety of shops and services – how fun would it be to just wander and browse and shop on any given afternoon just because you have an hour or two?  Take in a movie on the spur of a moment?  Enjoy a choice of parks or pools or museums? 

And where they live they are only a call or a click away from a hundred choices of takeout food or delivery to the door, a luxury I dream of often.   

Then again, if that is such a thrill, why did our visitors from Calgary make such a fuss over picking and shelling their own peas?  How much fun did they derive from ‘snitching’ new potatoes for supper?  What was the big deal over the fresh garden lettuce and sliced cucumbers.  This, apparently, is not one of the 100 menu options available to them in the big city.  Our regular summer fare was applauded as a very special treat …. Or was that the fried green tomatoes the men cooked up while we waited for the farm chicken to finish roasting?

It’s been such a busy time I’m really not sure which of our guests mentioned reading about how humans benefit from walking barefoot of the earth.  How being skin-to-grass helps us connect with the Earth.  How we all need to be more grounded and that studies had been done that showed such a physical connection improved our well being.

I spend a good portion of my summer barefoot: that may go a long way to explaining why I love where I live so much.

SOUNDS TO FALL ASLEEP BY

A month ago we were in the middle of a plague.  The ten plagues God set on Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let his people go had nothing on the mosquito population we were enduring at the end of June.  It was bad.

So bad, in fact, that I had a wish come true.

For years and years I had wanted to equip our yard, with its naturally occurring mosquito breeding ground, with a high tech remedy to destroy the hordes that Mother Nature is so generous with.

 I’m not a fan of spraying poison into the environment, so that solution wasn’t going to happen.  They say that pouring a little gas on their breeding pond will asphyxiate the nymphs, but I’m not a fan of having a flammable pond on the premises, and besides … do you know what gas costs these days?  Face book was full of testimonials about how a mix of stale beer, blue mouthwash and Epsom salts would drive the bugs away, but really?  Who lets beer go stale?  The alternative was to spray our bodies down with probably poisonous, probably flammable, and most assuredly stinky-as-stale-beer insect repellant and hope for the best.

For years my dream has been a bug zapper. 

Now, just for the record, normally I’m a fairly nice person.  I’m the live-and-let-live type.  Oh sure, I have lower tolerances for things like yappy little dogs and rude people, but I don’t derive pleasure from fantasies of their electrocution.  It’s different with mosquitoes, though: I want them all to die painful, horrible deaths.  My apologies to everyone whom I’ve offended with this hate speech.

I don’t know what tipped the scales this year.  Like I said, I’ve wanted a bug zapper for ages, but I could never sell the idea to the guy who would be expected to install it.  Maybe his change of heart came after inhaling one too many mosquitoes, but suddenly he wanted one too.  It was one of the most instant purchases I’ve ever made; there would be no backing out.

Who knew the difficulty level of installing a bug zapper would be so high?  First there was lengthy discussion on where it should go.  I said mid yard and he said closer to the house.  I won because the power source from a decommissioned well was already in place.  Secondly, a pole had to be erected.  That was the part that had held this operation off for years.  I left it completely in the man’s hands: he chose drill stem for the job and commenced fancying it up with ornamental welding and artwork.  An entire generation of mosquitoes died of old age waiting for his masterpiece to be finished.

The installation of the pole was another adventure.  He drilled his hole only to tangle the auger in wire and hose from the old well.  We unraveled that mess and moved over two feet.  The ground was so saturated we ended up with mini well, a third move was required.  Once the hole was ready we discovered how heavy twenty feet of fancy drill stem, and how inaccurate a wife’s hand signals can be when guiding pole delivering tractors.  (Ah!  More of those lovey dovey memories!)

Even after the pole was planted there were adjustments to be made … being as he had topped it off with a weathervane we thought it would be a nice touch if south actually pointed south.

By the time all this had been accomplished the yard was a mess of tractor tire ruts requiring multiple loads of topsoil to level it out.  Some folks would see this as a mess but I consider it a bonus.  I have claimed the whole area as my newest garden area, planted two shrubs, and told him to be on the lookout for a big flat rock.

But the sweetest thing is that the bug zapper works, just like I had always dreamed of.  The first couple mornings the dirt beneath the light was strewn with the carcasses of many many mosquitoes.  By day three the wire mesh that delivers the voltage was full of baked on bug bodies.  It took a few days for the wind to knock them loose, but it didn’t seem to slow down the death toll.

It’s been a month now.  The mosquito population is way down, but so is the stagnant water they deliver their babies in.  Also, their natural predators, the dragon flies, are building up their population.  There’s no way to tell which of these factors has had the most impact, all I know is that life is much more pleasant now.  And it’s not only the freedom from flying hordes of blood suckers that makes me happy, it’s also the faint bzzt bzzt that I hear as I drift off to sleep, thinking to myself “And another one bites the dust!”