Morels!

Posted on May 30, 2005 by cmf

It’s mushroom season here in Montana and I’ve spent much of the weekend obsessively wandering the bottomlands along the Yellowstone in pursuit of the beautiful, fragrant, and elusive morel. It started on Saturday morning, when Maryanne’s friend Tice took us down to the sweet spot by the sewage treatment plant where her family has been hunting morels for years. A little backstory here, Maryanne and I have any number of friends who hunt mushrooms — big men, some of whom are known as famous outdoorsmen. Would they share their spots with us? Would they take us out so we could at least see what the morel looks like in it’s native habitat? No — they wouldn’t. Not one of them. Made a big deal about it, like it’s part of their secret guys-club handshake. No telling the girls where the morels are.

So, take that. Tice took us out and we found a whole buncha morels. We now know what they look like growing out there, and what kind of terrain they like. It’s not rocket science, after all — but I do find that having someone take you out the first time with any new mushroom species is pretty crucial. Or maybe it’s just because I’m a really visual person, and so I need that image in my head. At any rate, I have wee pile of morels drying in my kitchen, and yesterday I also found a couple of nice big clusters of oyster mushrooms. I also found some young horse mushrooms that I thought might be okay, but turns out they were full of bugs, and I’m still not confident enough to key out white mushrooms on my own. My rule with wild mushrooms is that I only harvest species that don’t look like anything poisonous — which brings my “life list” of mushrooms I feel comfortable harvesting to four — chanterelles, boletes, oysters, and now, morels.

It’s the little things …

Posted on May 27, 2005 by cmf

Yesterday morning I got the bug to fix my living room windows. I had nearly all the other windows in this house replaced when I moved in three years ago, but the living room has lovely old wood moldings and the windows have that old glass with bubbles and waves in it, and vinyl windows would have looked terrible. So they stayed the way they were — old, double-hung, and permanently shut and gummed up with caulk.

Until yesterday. Yesterday I decided they needed to open. Despite the last six weeks of snow and rain, I have a hunch it’s going to be a very hot summer and the stuck windows have been a real drag the past couple of years. So I started in on them with a chisel and a hammer and rather quickly I got to the end of my knowledge about windows.

So I called my local window place — the one that put in all those insulated windows for me a couple of years ago. They sent a couple of guys over in the afternoon and they looked at the windows and it was clear that it was really the sort of job they didn’t want to do — it wasn’t very big. So they jimmied open the windows for me, pulled the trim off and showed me how to sand the windows and the sashes and put it all back together. And then they measured for screens and measured the glass in the back door window that’s been broken for … well, almost 2 years (I left the wrong set of keys when I went out of town and Bob and Robin had to break the window to make sure Patsy Cat hadnt’ expired). This morning they dropped the screens off — nice, new, modern screens — not those old, grotty, oh-so-dirty screens that were in the shed. I am now sitting in my ventilated living room, enjoying the morning breeze and looking through the clean new screens. Ah.

Like Little Soldiers All In a Row

Posted on May 23, 2005 by cmf

Look what I did with my week off! Those would be fourteen tomatoes planted all in a row. Fourteen! I’ll probably regret planting so many, but last fall when I was in France, I saw tomatoes trellised like this (not with copper plumbing pipe, which I like because it’s sturdy, easy to put together, and weathers to that pretty green color — but with much more rustic and charmant bamboo) and it seemed to me like a good solution for our short-season tomato issues. This time of year, I can start them with the wall-o-waters, about which I cannot say enough good things. They keep the tomato seedlings warm, and provide excellent protection against hail, which is an omnipresent danger this time of year. Then in the fall, when the days get short, I can sling plastic over the trellis and pin it down against the edges of the raised beds for a semi-greenhouse effect. I’m also planning to prune my tomatoes this year for the first time — I’ve gone for the wild and untamed effect in the past — but the trellised tomatoes I saw in France had lovely bunches of tomatoes hanging off them and they’d been pruned quite severely. So, that’s the plan this year. I envision lovely bunches of tomatoes ripening in my backyard by September.

I also transplanted the beans, which are, once again, being skeletonized by some bug in my backyard. I sprayed them this morning with rotenone, and even a little bug-eaten, the scarlet runners look like they might come through for me. Hence the new trellis on the house side of the garden — I’m hoping that if the beans grow up the trellises, then I’ll have a lovely green “fence” around the garden. We’ll see.

Planted chard, some carrots, beets and harvested the first leaves of arugula and spinach. The garlic didn’t do as well as I’d hoped, but as always, the onions are going great guns. The potatoes are starting to come up out back, and I have my first sprout off the raspberry canes that I planted bare-root and that have looked like popsicle sticks out there. Also harvested the first of the rhubarb, which I baked off last night and we ate over ice cream.

It was a fun week off, but I have to admit, as much as I liked having all that time and space to write and garden and putter around, I did sort of miss the structure of my far-away day job. It’s nice to have people out there to check in with during the week …

Working Vacation

Posted on May 19, 2005 by cmf

Seattle was great fun — we went to the Cheese Festival at Pike’s Place Market, where we tasted many fine fine cheeses despite the crowds of corpulent tourists who could just as well have been at the free sample booths at Costco for all they cared about beautiful cheese — but who’s to complain? I tasted some lovely goats cheese camenbert, and any number of lovely bleus. I think my stepmother was a tiny bit shocked at what a cheese head I have actually become (that Wisconsin college education must be paying off). I kept saying things like “Point Reyes Bleu — have you tried this? Mt. Tam? Here — eat this!” Then we took the ferry to Bellingham and went to a great yarn store (I know, we’re big nerds) — a really beautiful yarn store where there were so many yummy yarns that I wanted to start a whole bunch of new projects.

I took the rest of the week off because it looks like I’ve got a new movie option deal for my novel and I’m going to be writing a screenplay on spec. Not much money unless we can manage to sell the thing, but it’s a new thing to learn, and that’s always fun. So I’m here doing a crash course in screenplay writing — it’s a sad state of affairs when writing a screenplay of my very sad novel is the fun project in my life! But it’s a fun project, especially since I get to mess with the chronology of things in a different way than I handled it in the book, and I get to play with telling the story through images, rather than through words. I’m having a gas ….

As to the garden — I built the tomato trellis this afternoon and hoed the many weeds out of my perennial bed. My potatoes are starting to come up, although the raspberries still look like popsicle sticks — we had a tiny bit of hail this afternoon, and it’s been raining steadily the last few weeks. I came home from Seattle and you could have baled hay in my yard — I actually killed the lawnmower a couple of times. Tomorrow’s project is to set up the wall-o-waters so they can start warming up, and I need to figure out where to plant the carrots, chard and beets. I’m thinking of building a couple more trellises as well, for the cucumbers and beans on the sunny side of the garden.

Mini-Vacation

Posted on May 12, 2005 by cmf

Off to Seattle for the weekend to see my beloved stepmother Susan and hear my friend Jim Fergus read from his terrific new book, The Wild Girl : The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932 I am thoroughly looking forward to a few days in a real city — I havent’ been to Seattle since the summer of 1994, when I worked my first high-tech job there. Just think — reliable shellfish, raw oysters, actual Asian food, Elliott Bay Books, and I get to see Susan’s new house.

Susan, my stepmother, is only 7 years older than I am, which for a long time was very very weird. She married my dad when she was only 21, and got us in the bargain. I was 13 and Patrick was 11 and Susan had graduated from my high school a mere four years before I moved in with them at the start of my freshman year. So in many ways, it was great — she knew the scene, knew my teachers, knew how brutal high school could be. In other ways though, it was all very odd, and I am sorry to say that Patrick and I were pretty awful to her those first few years. But she hung in there, and over the years proved to be someone who was always on our side — she went to bat for the to of us on countless occasions and so when she and Dad split up about 15 years ago, we told her that he could run off to Europe if he wanted, but that we were keeping her. Susan bought her house about the same time I bought my little house here in Montana, and we joke about being the only two homeowners in the family. I’m really looking forward to seeing her house, and especially her garden. The photos are enough to make a girl green with jealousy — in only two years her perennials are gorgeous — that’s what happens when you live someplace where it actually rains. Of course, we had another 2 inches of snow last night, and I’m enormously relieved to say that my cold frames are proving worth their weight in gold. It’s 29 degrees out there this morning, but a balmy 40 degrees inside the cold frames, which is good because it didnt’ even occur to me to bring in the tomato and pepper seedlings last night. While we desperately need the moisture these last couple of waves of storm have brought with them, I’m also looking forward to getting out of the late-spring snow zone.

Rain!

Posted on May 7, 2005 by cmf

All day long. Some hail in mid-afternoon, but for the most part it’s been one of those days characterized by low-hanging clouds in the mountains, and nice cool, slow spring rain. I planted some potatoes this morning (dark of the moon is the time to plant root crops) and the rain this afternoon is exactly what my garden needed.

Back up and Running

Posted on May 7, 2005 by cmf

Well, things have been very busy here at LivingSmall. Transferring all my info from the old computer to the new one didn’t go quite as seamlessly as one might have hoped, but nonetheless I am now up and running on my slickery new iBook — amazing what a keyboard unsullied by random pet hair and gunk feels like! Work at the Big Corporation has been busy, the garden is starting to do its thing, and then there’s a new development on the horizon which might involve a new movie option and I may be writing a screenplay of my novel. All very exciting. All very busy. All keeping me away from the blog.

Random Stuff

Posted on May 3, 2005 by cmf

Again, sorry for the slow blogging — but I’m still being plagued by computer issues. So I sucked it up and ordered a new iBook yesterday — I don’t know what it is about Macs. I love them, I’ve been a Mac person for twenty years, but it seems like there’s a little clock that goes off inside after two years and two months, and while it’s not like the whole machine breaks down, it just slowly starts to do wonky things which necessitate hours of pointless fucking around and occasional head banging in despair. All this computer craziness has thrown off my whole carefully calibrated schedule of morning surfing, followed by a shower, followed by a dive into the memoir in an attempt to eke out another page or two, before I have to sign in and spend the rest of the day chained to my desk by the Big Corporation. For the last couple of weeks all my morning time, which is supposed to be quiet, and peaceful, and conducive to writing this Very Sad Book I think I need to write, has been taken up by wandering from room to room trying to get an internet connection, opening Utilities I didn’t even know I had and pinging IP addresses and reconfiguring things and then giving up in despair and going uptown to the local coffee shop where there’s a wiFi connection but where I have to dodge people like my former cleaning lady, who is crazy, and way too cheerful, and who used to re-arrange my things into psychotic little dioramas and who wrote letters to the editor of the local paper all through the last election saying how those of us who opposed the war should be taken into the town square and shot. Sigh.

So, of course, now that I took the credit card out of its hiding place and set back my Plan to Get Out of Debt by several months, my computer is working beautifully this morning. It’s working beautifully from a room where I haven’t had internet connectivity in weeks. I think this means it’s possessed, which is why it must go ….

LivingSmall

Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Monthly Archives: May 2005