LivingSmall

My Milk Lady has returned! The cows calved and had a nice rest, and once again I’m getting my recycled gallon jar of milk every week. She had to raise her prices because the price of hay and fuel have gone up so much, and although I assured her it was fine, I understood, I still found a surprise present of a dozen duck eggs in my box last week.

I don’t know if all the health claims for raw milk are true, but I do know that it’s worth what I pay for a real food product, produced and delivered by someone whose animal husbandry and food preparation protocols I can trust. There’s a specific pleasure in helping to support a local farmer and knowing that by doing so we’re helping to keep that land in farming and not subdivided or turned into a gravel pit (as her neighbor is doing). And I know the milk tastes great, that the yoghurt I make from it is not like any yoghurt I’ve ever bought in a store, and that my allergies and digestive system do seem a little better when I’m eating a local food product that comes with all it’s original bacteria. Same goes for my own sourdough bread.

As for the duck eggs — I used them in the funeral cupcakes earlier this week. I’m not wild about duck eggs — even for me, a dedicated egg lover, they’re just a little too eggy — but they’re fabulous for baking. They whip up unbelievably, and they’re very rich. So, now I have a nice little stash of duck eggs as well.

I’ve also got half a local lamb on order … spring is here … there’s local food again. And it’s been raining, that’s rain, NOT snow (knock on wood) for two days now. A nice, soft, soaking spring rain which is encouraging the arugula, spinach, broccoli rabe, mustard and turnip greens, and peas that I planted last week to start poking up out of the raised beds. Teeny little green sprouts.

They finally came yesterday and finished my new fence. Every time I’ve gotten a fence put in, it’s the hardest part — living through the three or four days when the posts are in, but the fence isn’t in — last weekend was like that. I could see how the fence was going to be, but it wasn’t a fence yet — until yesterday. Now both sides of my backyard match, and it’s peaceful and private out there.

After yesterday’s funeral, which was as lovely as a funeral for someone who died too soon and too suddenly can be, it was so pleasant to come home to my quiet, private garden. Six hundred people packed into a church that held four hundred, and then a reception afterwards at the Elks club. It was a long day and as sad as it was, it was good to have a chance to repay some of the enormous kindness that came my way four years ago.

But I was exhausted by the time it was all over, and it was such a relief to come home to my lovely garden, and to sit on the little couch our there with the dogs, and read a magazine in the peace and quiet for a couple of hours.

Here at LivingSmall we just flat-out ran out of gas last week.

A friend was killed in a wreck last Monday night — a heartbreaking event. So it’s been a week of phone calls and organizing the funeral (tomorrow) and I’ve got several batches of cupcakes to bake this afternoon.Yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting — in yellow-and-purple polka-dotted cupcake papers, and sprinkled with the brightest, multi-colored sugar hearts I found at Fancy Flours. I was in the bathtub the other day when I heard very clearly from the other side that someone wanted cupcakes. Linnea was a great big athletic woman, she was loud, and funny and loved bright colors. She had a heart as big as the state. She’s going to be missed. So no matter how mad I am at her for getting in that car, I’ll bake some cupcakes for her funeral.

But even before that phone call I was planning to take a couple of days off. I sort of hate to take vacation days when I don’t have a trip planned, but I was absolutely burned out. I took Friday off, and I’ve got today and tomorrow and it wasn’t until this morning that I even felt I could begin to think about writing anything. It’s been a long winter, and my job at the Big Corporation has been really intense. Not bad, just unrelentingly busy. And I’ve recast my book project yet again — as a novel — back to writing fiction. It’s been a great switch, and I had been having a great time writing it in the early mornings before work, but since I went to California a couple of weeks ago I just haven’t been able to get back in the saddle again.

Sometimes you just need to take a couple of days off, dink around the house, putter in the garden, read a novel or two, and just recharge the batteries. The sun has come out and although I wish this break was longer, after a couple of days, I’m starting to feel my energy come back.

A big weekend of gardening — I dug the crabgrass and feral mint (I love my mint, but it was taking over everything) from the perennial beds. It was hard. There was digging, and pulling, and tugging, and sprays of dirt. I have an entire trash receptacle full of roots out there on the parkway waiting for the first yard waste pickup of the year.

My perennial beds have moments of gorgeousness, followed by long periods of bedragglement, caused in part by the weeds. My lawn too, is plagued by weeds — not dandelions so much, I don’t mind dandelions, but by big patches of black medic, which because it does not remain green (or green-ish) falls outside of my very large list of lawn weeds that are okay.

I considered applying a commercial weed-and-feed type product, but every time I tried to buy one I found myself looking at the list of chemicals and well, I just couldn’t do it. The dogs were a worry, for one thing. It was no surprise to me when reports surfaced last week that our pets are picking up alarming amounts of toxins from our environment.

We have a terrific shop over in Bozeman, Planet Natural, and a couple of years ago I read about corn gluten as an organic emergent herbicide and fertilizer. It’s a by-product of the cornstarch production process. When applied to lawns and gardens it inhibits the germination of seeds, and because it’s also very high in nitrogen, it fertilizes as it breaks down. I went to the Planet Natural website but they’re out of corn gluten and said it was on order from the manufactuer. Because it inhibits germination, you want to get it applied before things start to germinate, so time was something of the essence. I stopped at Lowes when I was in Billings last week with the gimpy dog, and scored the last four bags they had. So yesterday, after the great crabgrass-and-mint purge, I used the handy shaker-bag to apply a generous dose of the yellow pellets to the perennial beds, and then dumped a couple of bags in my little push-spreader (which makes me feel like the most suburban person ever) and did the shrinking-but-extant patches of lawn. We’ll see how it works. Luckily it’s nontoxic, since the dogs seem to find it somewhat irresistable …

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, it is an organic substance, even if it is a byproduct of America’s love affair with Big Corn. On the other hand, my grandmother and aunt support our family farm by growning corn, so there’s a kind of completing the circle effect. Mostly though, I hope it helps — if it can do anything about the crabgrass problem in my front perennial bed, I will be a very happy girl.

Finally! A day of real progress in the garden. I was very surly yesterday morning — it was cold. Too cold and icy to get any garden work done. I was taking it personally — storming around doing my errands, grumping about the damp wind. Then, finally, about one, it warmed up and I managed to get my compost corner cleaned up.

My composting system has been a frustration for a couple of years. I had three different backyard composters — one square one that came apart in layers that the waste district in California sold me for cheap years ago, another square one with a little door at the bottom where you’re supposed to remove compost (with what? a trowel?) and another totally crappy round one where the top layer fell off if you just looked at it cross-eyed. Again, with a little door at the bottom where you were supposed to remove your compost. These might have been okay for someone who just wanted to use up kitchen scraps, and maybe fill a few flowerpots. But they were too small, and you couldn’t get in to turn the compost, and they were nearly impossible to get the compost out of when it was ready. Because they were so small, I have a ginormous pile of old leaves and sunflower stalks and garden waste piled up out there. Last year I had to send leaves and other stuff to the town compost heap.

My dream is a self-sufficient system in which I compost all my yard and garden waste and then return it to my many vegetable and perennial beds. So yesterday I dismantled the crappy composters, put all the compost I’d actually made into the vegetable beds, and started building the new compost system. A two-bin system that uses scavenged pallets. I need to go find one more pallet today, but it looks like it’s going to fit into the space really nicely, and it will solve several of my problems. I’ll be able to get in there to turn the compost. They’re big, there’s a lot of room for the volumes of stuff I’ve got. And since I kept the one plastic composter that worked well, and moved it closer to the house for kitchen waste, I won’t have to worry too much about keeping the dogs out of the new heaps. I need to drive out to my friend Joan’s house and get some manure, because one of my garden goals this year is to get a good hot compost heap going. And so I need something to start the cooking …

As for the compost I made — there was about six wheelbarrow loads of compost. Not all of it was entirely digested — there were some sticks, and some straw, and some chunks, but I turned them all in anyhow. What I wanted as much as anything was some vegetative matter to aerate and lighten the soil in my veggie beds. I spent the last couple of years enamoured of the no-dig theory, but last year I saw a real drop-off in productivity. My soil was hard, and there was a crust on top from watering, and my carrots were not a success. The dirt had gotten compacted. It was hard. So yesterday, I took all that compost I’ve made, and I turned over the dirt in each of my raised beds. I smacked apart clods with my turning fork. It was hard work, particularly if like me, you’ve spent all winter typing and knitting and sitting on the couch because you hate hate hate the gym. But spring is here and there’s some actual work to do. And after a nice warm afternoon of digging, I have eight raised beds full of fluffy beautiful soil. I think I’m going to plant carrots and spinach and early greens and fava beans today. Fava beans! Last year was the first time I grew them and they were so so so wonderful. Peas. Maybe I’ll put in some peas today as well.

So, it’s snowing again this morning — and although I’m quite tired of snow, it’s a lovely soft morning — bit fat snowflakes, no wind, not too cold. So off for our morning dog walk I went — I’m babysitting the MH’s dog while he’s gone to Arizona for a couple of days and it was good to have 2 dogs with me again.

So we get to the dog park and we’re coming around the edge of the bluff and there’s another couple coming toward us. She’s on the phone, and he barely nods hello. I don’t recognize them, and they have that sheen of self-importance that we can all get. Whatever, we all pass and I can hear her loudly talking on her phone for a ways. But it’s a lovely morning and the dogs are romping in the snow and I just sort of wonder idly who the yuppies are. But as I come around toward the parking lot, there’s an SUV sitting there with the engine running. Again, it’s a car I don’t recognize, and as we pass one another on the backside I ask them if that’s their car that’s running. They tell me it is. I ask why. The woman tells me “because we were freezing.”

Now, here’s where I failed in this exchange. “Totally uncool,” I told them. “Thanks for polluting our dog park.” The man made some crack about his car being the least of the dog park’s problems and I sort of stomped away feeling all angry and stupid about the whole thing. But it made me mad. It’s bad enough to drive a big vehicle like that, but to just leave it running? Now those people knew better, I saw it in her eyes when I asked her why her car was running. But where I failed in the whole exchange was that I was annoyed by them in general. My inner Thoreau was outraged. I wanted to say that maybe if she put down the phone and looked at the lovely morning, maybe if she put down the phone and took two laps around the dog park that would warm her up, maybe if she put down the phone and turned off her car and was actually present that maybe we wouldn’t be in this fix we’re in, but no, I just made a snotty comment to the annoying yuppie types and missed the whole moment. Henry David was spouting bromides in my ear about chopping wood warming one twice and the false economies by which men value success, and frankly, my knee-jerk reaction was that I didn’t like these people and what were they doing in my park when they clearly didn’t know how to behave?

And so I got snotty. Not useful. But I do worry. These are the kinds of people who are supposed to know better than to leave their car running. These are people sort of like me — well educated, well off, professional. These are the kind of people who are supposed to be a part of the solution. And if as a society we can’t get over our own sense of self-importance to make even that kind of small change, to turn the car off, to pay attention, then what hope is there?

Michael Pollan asked exactly these quesitons in last week’s NY Times Magazine, in a piece called “Why Bother?”

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

That’s sort of how I felt when I saw that car running this morning. On the one hand, it was just one car, it was only a few minutes, really? how much damage was it doing? Why bother saying anything? Why bother worrying about it? But in the article Pollan makes a good argument that yes, individual effort is worth the bother, and that even small gestures, when aggregated, can make a difference.

But I don’t think that was my motivation. I was just pissy. Somehow, the combination of the running car, and those two people who were so not present on a beautiful snowy morning beside the Yellowstone River really got to me. They filled me with despair. They annoyed me. I probably saw something of myself in them. And instead of reaching out, and perhaps effecting some change, I failed by indulging in self-righteousness and anger, which allowed them in turn to retreat to defensiveness and to dismiss me as some weirdo hippie (sort of funny, actually). Which does make me wonder how we’re ever going to manage to reach across these divides and effect some change if we can’t even have a civil conversation about a running car at the dog park on a snowy morning. Sigh.

We got up early this morning and drove over to Billings to see the orthopedic vet. He said it looks like the tendon is healing up quite nicely, which was an enormous relief. Then he knocked my poor Owie out and re-adjusted the pins so that he’s putting a little bit of weight on the tendon. The pins and rods will stabilize it for another three weeks or so, and then he’ll be freed from the aparatus and will get a soft cast for a few more weeks.

And here’s what poor FrankenPuppy looks like beneath those bandages: 

I have a lot of gardening books — I’m one of those people who learns how to do things from books, so the first couple of years I had this garden, I bought a lot of different things (especially if they were in the bargain bin at Borders).

But there’s a very short list of books I go back to again and again: Second Nature by Michael Pollan  and This Organic Life by Joan Dye Grussow. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal’s River Cottage Cookbook is also probably in this category (except that every time I look at it I have such livestock-envy that I forget how close to being paid off my house is, and have to remind myself that if I bought enough land to have livestock, I’d have to start a new garden, and a new morgage).

And now there’s Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate. I love this book. I’m going to have to read this book a second time because I’m reading it so fast this first time through. I’m reading it like a novel — to find out what happens, and I know I’m going to want to go back to specific sections and pay closer attention to the content. But right now, I’m smitten. I’m like a little kid reading with a flashlight under the bedcovers. Wendy Johnson has been gardening at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center for over twenty years, and this book is a description not only of the physical act of gardening, but how the garden is a part of, and a challenge to, her Buddhist practice.

One thing I’ve been turning over in my head for the past couple of years is the way that my relationship with nature has shifted its focus. Throughout my teens, twenties and thirties my primary relationship with the natural world was with wild nature — whether that was through canoe camping in the BWCA/Quetico region of the Minnesota/Canada border, or through raft guiding in North Carolina or ski bumming in Colorado, or even through my graduate work in English which focused on wildness in American literature and the history of the novel. Since I moved to Montana my primary relationship with nature has been through my garden and my dogs — that my interest has become so domestic just as I moved to a region which encompasses so many of North America’s last intact chunks of wilderness has been something of a mystery to me. Why do I find an afternoon in my garden so fascinating that I’d rather stay home than take a long hike in the mountains?

In Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate Johnson describes twenty years of trying to negotiate a truce between what she wants from her garden as a human being from what is due to the  natural world of which the garden is a part. If one is deeply engaged in a spiritual practice which challenges one to live without discriminating between human and non-human needs, a practice which challenges one to honor all beings, then what does one do about pest control? selective breeding? the whole history of domestication throughout human history?
There are no answers, of course, but the depth of the discussion, accompanied as it is in this book with a wealth of practical information about actual hands-on gardening, has been my only solace for this weekend’s snow and cold temperatures (19 degrees! it’s the end of April! enough already!).

Sorry for the dearth of posts — I had to go to California for a week at the Big Corporation. It was a good trip — met the three new people we’ve hired since my last trip (including two lovely women working in our Galway, Ireland office), ate too much food, and in general felt like a hick in the big city. The longer I live here, the more strange that whole urban-sprawl lifestyle seems to me. It’s somehow too much and too little all at the same time.
So it was with great relief that I came home late last night to my little house where, thanks to the MightyHunter, my Raymond-dog was waiting for me. This morning I sprung Owen from the vet’s office where he boarded all week — and so it’s been a quiet day of catching up, reading mail, walking dogs, riding my bike to the grocery store, and just getting back into the swing of my sweet little life here.

Tomorrow I need to plant onions, and start some cabbages and chard and other greens in the basement …

I’ve been wondering all winter what was up with the birds — I’ve had a feeder up, and a suet block, and there haven’t been any birds at all. I was getting curious — last winter I had woodpeckers and finches and chickadees starting right after Christmas. Of course, last winter we had no snow and the spring thaw came very early, so perhaps the birds came early too.

But the birds are back. Rosy finches, chickadees, and a couple of crows who seemed quite interested in the suet block. So perhaps spring will come again this year after all.