King Corn in My Garden

Posted on April 28, 2008 by cmf

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.

Hands in the Dirt

Posted on April 27, 2008 by cmf

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.

How Not to be Useful …

Posted on April 24, 2008 by cmf

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.

What Lies Beneath …

Posted on April 23, 2008 by cmf

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:

Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate

Posted on April 21, 2008 by cmf

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!).

Home Sweet Home

Posted on April 19, 2008 by cmf

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 …

The Birds are Back

Posted on April 9, 2008 by cmf

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.

Back to Boring Normal Life

Posted on April 7, 2008 by cmf

Well, the dogs are on the mend — Ray’s stitches come out on Friday and I took Owen off to have his dressings changed today. I wish I’d had my camera with me — that external fixature is quite something. My little FrankenPuppy. His Fenatyl patch is also off, which is making him a little less groggy — thank goodness we have the mysterious “anaglesic elixir” because he’s still intermittently uncomfortable.
In other news — the tomatoes are getting their true leaves down in the basement, although I didn’t have the germination rates with the pepper seedlings that I’d hoped for –there are still plenty of peppers, but somehow, when nothing pops up in a cell I just can’t help but feel a tiny disapointment. This weekend I’m going to start some cabbages and greens — chard, maybe some frissee, things I can pop in once (if ever) it stops snowing.

I’m finally seeing the bulbs start to poke up out of the mostly-frozen ground, and if it’s warm I might transplant those roses that currently live where the new fence is going to go. The birds are finally back at my feeder — chickadees and finches for the most part. And the past few days we’ve started hearing birdsong –oh! and I saw a migrating swan yesterday when we were walking the dogs. They’re so beautiful and so mean …

Dopey Dog …

Posted on April 5, 2008 by cmf

This better work, because while my boy was really happy to see me when I picked him up this afternoon, he’s not a happy camper. That big square thing on his leg is the external fixature — pins sunk into his bones, and connected to rods to immobilize the whole lower leg joint. Here’s a close up. He also came home with a bottle of “analgesic elixir” — narcotics — and thank goodness. I got him home, and set up in his little bed (which normally lives under the kitchen table, but the cone kept getting hung up so I pulled him out into the room), and he started to make this very sad panting/crying kind of noise. So he got a prompt 2ccs of elixir (I’m thinking of him as my own little Lily Bart — with a better ending, of course) and they must have given him some of this at the vet, because he was very happy to lap it right up. He’d been pretty restless and uncomfortable, so I did what any loving pet owner would do — I drugged him. And now he’s sleeping in his little bed. I took the cone off for now — while I’ve got an eye on him and can keep him from chewing at his bandages, he doesn’t need it, but if I have to leave the house, it’s going back on.

At the end of the day, I was very happy to see my boy sitting up and grinning at me in the back of my car, silly cone and all. I just hope this works, because if we’ve put him through all this for nothing, I’m going to feel very very guilty.

Humpty Dumpty

Posted on April 3, 2008 by cmf

Yesterday I took poor Gimpy Dog over to Billings to the veterinary orthopedist. Even typing that makes me feel slightly ashamed of myself — we live in a nation in which an enormous percentage of our population doesn’t even have human health care, and I’m spending how much money on orthopedic surgery for my dog? So anyhow, I was really hesitant about this whole thing — not just because of the money, but because the effect of the first surgery, which was supposed to increase his mobility had exactly the opposite effect — he fell apart entirely. But this guy is a specialist, and does a lot of orthopedic work on animals, and I figured he could give me a reasoned idea about what we were facing.

I left Owen there for about an hour or so while they took another set of xrays, and it turns out that he didn’t have the structural problems I had feared he did. His back is fine, his hips are good (one of the other docs thought his hips were arthritic), and his other knee is sound. His achilles tendon on the leg that had the knee operation is almost totally blown, and both hocks are pretty arthritic. But the vet was confident that he could fix the achilles, and that we could medicate the inflammation and pain in the hocks.

All of which was very good news. And so, I left the poor boy there and we’ll know by late this afternoon how the achilles operation went. He’ll come home with a whole external fixature device on (think the kinds of halos they use for broken necks) and we’ll go through another round of recovery and we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed that he doesn’t blow the other achilles tendon (statistically, there’s a 50% chance).

While I’m enormously relieved that I didn’t have to put my sweet boy to sleep, I’m still not convinced that performing this kind of medical intervention on a pet is entirely warranted. Luckily, I have the money, and with any luck, this vet is a good judge of his own skills — but I wonder how fair is it to do this to an animal? I can’t explain to him what’s going on, or why we keep hurting him. All he knows is that we keep knocking him out and he wakes up with an incision, on drugs, and in this case he’ll have a device attached to his leg.

But on the other hand, I don’t have much faith in medical intervention for human beings either. I grew up in a cancer cluster in the 70s and 80s — we watched 2 kids and 2 moms in our immediate circle die long slow painful deaths, and there were probably another 6-8 peripheral people we knew who also died. When my cousin Dede was diagnosed last fall with breast cancer, her first impulse was to refuse the chemo — from what we’d seen, what good would that do? We had a long long talk on the phone, about how it was better now, how chemo actually works these days. Neither of us come from a place where our default emotional reaction is that doctors can make it better, that medical intervention actually works. I feel a little bit the same about the dog, that’s why I agreed to the operation — as I said to my mother, I can’t just kill my dog because I have no faith in medicine.

I came home from Billings absolutely exhausted yesterday. I was enormously relieved that this vet thinks he can help, and that I’ve got the money to pay for it. I was enormously relieved that I didn’t have to drive back with a crippled dog I was going to have to put down. But as emotional as this decision has been, and as much as I love my dog — I couldn’t help thinking about my one friend whose girlfriend is waging a heroic and drawn-out battle with cancer, or my other friend whose husband is currently sitting at his ex-wife’s deathbed (both, strangely enough, have pancreatic cancer) — and my heart was sore for both of them. I love my dog, and it would be a big sorrow to put him down, but it is not the same as losing a person. As tired as I was from all this, I can only imagine what they’re all going through — it’s a sad way to keep it all in perspective, but it does.

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Monthly Archives: April 2008