I transplanted the pepper plants yesterday — it’s been warm and sunny, and I was losing a few of them in the cold frame because they were in the little 4-packs, and sometimes I forget to water.

So, into the new 8 x 3.5 foot bed at the end of the new garden. It’s a sunny spot, and the fence bounces a fair amount of heat, so I’m hoping it will be a good microclime for peppers.

Every gardener has his or her obsession, and mine is peppers. This year, I have the usual assortment of oddball herilooms — most of which I’ve never grown before. The trick here is not letting them burn up during the day, and keeping them warm enough at night. Last year, I used plastic over my hoops, and those first few hot days fried a bunch of them. Also, using plastic meant they missed what little natural rain we get here — I’m convinced that real rain makes plants happier than chlorinated water from the hose (and I don’t even want to think about what chemicals are leaching through the hose material).

So this year, I’m experimenting with floating row cover. It diffuses the light some, which is good for tiny transplants, and lets the rain through. Also, provides some frost cover … we’ll see. I just ordered a bolt of the stuff for the tomatoes too — they have a tendency to fry with that fence behind them, and I’ve also had huge problems with flea beetles — both problems I’m hoping to solve with some row cover.

It’s one of the biggest reasons I wanted to rebuild the garden as a series of rectangles, so I could use hoops more effectively. We’ll see. Supposed to be 82 tomorrow, then cool and rainy the rest of the week.

Spring means morels, and morels mean the return of hiking. We’d both had sort of an intense week, so when yesterday dawned cool and sort of rainy after a week of unseasonable and unwelcome temps in the high 80s, Himself suggested we go out in the afternoon and look for morels.

Now I haven’t quite hit the big half century mark, but I’m getting close enough that one notices certain changes during an afternoon in the woods. For one thing, there’s the vision issue. I’ve gotten into the habit of wearing my bifocals most of the time (since most of what I do is read and write). They’re fine for that. What they’re not so fine for is trying to see your footing when, say, crossing a boggy little creek. Forgetting to swap out into one’s progressives can, for instance, result in tripping while crossing the boggy little creek while not able to actually see your feet and falling flat on your face in 6 inches of mud, algae, moss and muck. (However, when you shout in frustration at your hiking companion that yes you’re pissed because you can’t f*cking SEE you do take care of some of the bear danger.)

On the other hand, it was a cool wet day, and the browse was all wet anyhow, and we don’t hike on the trail, so there’s a certain relaxation to having gotten wet. Once you’re wet, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. And it wasn’t cold. So, wet feet, wet to the elbows, wet and muddy to the knees, I was set for the rest of what was a really pleasant afternoon.

The other issue I’m discovering is what I call my “Frankenstein ankles.” I’ve always had bad ankles. I’ve twisted my ankles so many times over the years that I doubt there are any tendons at all in there. I am a champ at twisting an ankle, doing the “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” dance for five minutes or so, then pretty much carrying on. However, the last year or so, the floppy ankles have decided to rebel. They sort of just stop bending. There’s a weird angle (say, when one is hiking up or side hill) where they fight back. Its very odd. Disconcerting more than anything else, but a sign, I guess, that although I feel 15 most of the time, I guess I’m not. But as my 101 year old grandmother says “just don’t stop doing things,” so I’ll keep stumping blindly around in the woods as long as I’m able.

It was a great afternoon. We followed game trails. We saw a lot of moose and bear sign. Found a few mushrooms and wondered, as always, why they only seemed to grow in that one spot when that spot didn’t look significantly different than the entire rest of the forest we wandered through. We got wet, and muddy, and bushwacked through deadfall and climbed out of the creek bottom when it went into a little canyon and walked through lovely open glades of lichen-covered pine up high.

And then I stumped back to the car on my Frankenstein ankles, and we came home, had a beer and a yummy dinner of pork chops with morels.

This is what we woke up to at the cabin this morning (that’s the motel building and the shed behind it. If any of you good readers would like to rent this property for a vacation, the listing is here: http://bit.ly/wCoIWE).

Anyhow, things got exciting last night. For the first time this season, it looked like we’d be able to build a fire in the firepit and cook outside. And for a while, it was beautiful. Then I went inside to saute the morels, and by the time the sausages were grilled, the wind had picked up and it was spitting rain. Ten minutes later, Himself, who was still outside, said he saw three bolts of lightning hit down valley, and then the lights went out. The whole valley was dark. It was actually really cool — the only lights we could see were headlights on highway 89. And rain! It lashed rain all night. The lights came back on about three, and about five it got quiet. We thought the rain had just stopped, until we woke up to a white world and big, silver-dollar sized snowflakes.

Luckily I brought leggings and some socks (and yes, I dress like an eight year old girl. Sigh.) but it was a little chilly out there brushing the snow off my car in my Chucks.

Yesterday it was seventy degrees and sunny. The snow had me worried because the apple, cherry and plum trees are all blooming — snow is fatal to summer fruit. Also, I’d just taken the plastic off the hoop houses yesterday. Sitting in bed, drinking coffee and looking at the snow, I wondered if those lovely baby bok choi I’d transplanted were all dead. The mustard greens, spinach, broccoli rabe and arugula I figured were okay — they’re pretty hardy. But those baby bok choi, I was a tiny bit sick at the thought that they’d be frozen and ruined. They looked so promising. In about a week, they’re going to be perfect.

As I drove down into the valley, the snow disappeared. On East River road, the trees were just looking all happy and green and like they’d had a nice rain all night. By the time I got back to town, it was clear that the storm hadn’t turned icy here (and if the non-blinking nature of my household appliance clocks is any indication, the electricity didn’t go out either).

Here are my baby bok choi — don’t they look nice? All cozy in their bed of hay. I’m deeply relieved.

And kind of looking forward to a nice rainy day. I have a lot of writing and reading to get done, and I’m not very good at staying inside if the weather is pretty ….

Because this photo didn’t get into the last post — here are the raspberries, including 5 new bare-root canes, in three or four inches of straw mulch.

They seem happy. They’re leafing out. They like this corner of the yard better than the other corner, where it was too hot, and where the previous raspberries went to die. The leafy ones were 2 year old plants I bought in pots last year. Since they did so well, I took a flyer on some bare root starts this year. We’ll see, like I said, I’ve killed raspberries before.

My dream is a thick tangle of raspberry bushes like the ones that grew wild in the woods by my childhood farm. It’s a long way from a thick tangle, but it’s a start …

All the signs are pointing to a long, hot, dry summer this year. For one thing, it’s currently almost 80 degrees outside. In April. In Montana.

Stick a finger in the dirt in my raised beds, and it’s powder dry just below the surface. Powdery. In April.

All of this has me worried. I don’t like to water much, but since our average annual rainfall is 17 inches, one has to irrigate if you’re going to grow much of anything here. My other inspiration was a rapidly-sprouting crop of weeds. I filled the new beds with semi-composted chicken shitty straw from the compost pile when I built them a month or so ago, and there are a lot of weeds coming up. My composting cycle has sped up enormously since I got chickens, but it still takes a long time for stuff to break down around here, and I’ve never gotten a hot pile going of the type that will kill weed seeds.

So I decided to smother them. In the long beds I use for tomatoes, I used the fancy “green” paper mulch I bought at the nursery. For the veggie beds I used wet newspapers. It’s the same theory. You put down a barrier to keep out the light, and the weed seeds never germinate. But especially around here, where it’s so windy, you can’t just leave paper to dry and disintegrate.

So I cover the paper layer with a good inch or two of hay. Ruth Stout is generally credited with proselytizing for hay mulch — and I tried it last year in these beds where it was really successful. I didn’t have any weeds, and the tomatoes did much better with a thick layer of mulch to keep in some moisture. Looking at the bare dirt in my new beds has been really bugging me this spring, so I decided to give it a go on the whole shebang.

Now, there’s an ongoing argument out there about straw vs. hay for mulch. I’ve used both. I like straw mulch for areas like the pathway between beds (as you see in the photo above) or for perennial beds or fruit bushes. But I find that the straw I can buy around here is too sharp to use in my vegetable beds. It tears holes in leafy plants, and gives me splinters. People who advocate for straw claim you get fewer weed seeds from it, but the straw I buy here still has a fair amount of wheat seed attached, seed that will indeed sprout in the garden. Hay is essentially grass and/or alfalfa baled up, and people who argue against hay claim that it will infest your garden with weeds. I didn’t have an issue last year with these long beds, in part I think because of the weed barrier. What I liked about the hay is that the grasses are softer than the wheat straw, and this makes it easier to plant through and easier on the plants. It also holds water really nicely.

So we’ll see how it works out. I had a couple of patches of bed where I’d started seed, so I tucked hay in around the seedlings. For everything else, I soaked the bed, then put down a thick layer of wet newspaper, then covered it with an inch or so of hay. I then wet down the hay thoroughly. My goal is to only have to water a couple of times a week in the summer — do a thorough soaking, and hope that all this mulch will hold in the water.

Spring arrived this weekend –real spring — sunny and 60 one minute, cloudy and 40 and raining the next. I broke out the clothesline again (does anything smell as good as sheets dried on the line?)

But this is not one of my many paens to the clothesline — this is a post about berry bushes.

Because this weekend I planted berry bushes. I planted three gooseberries, four red lake currants and five bare-root raspberries (sticks, basically). I also planted a grapevine in the hot stony place off my porch where I’m hoping it will grow up the trellis eventually.

I’m dreaming of Summer Pudding, and Gooseberry Fool — although with the rate at which things grow here in the high desert, those are probably two or three years off.

But a girl can dream ….

Re-Designed Raised Beds

Well — that was a project!

This weekend was gorgeous — sixty, sixty-five degrees both days, although the wind kicked back in yesterday afternoon (along with the clouds that made this photo a little gloomy).

Thank goodness it was gorgeous, because this was a real project. I am sore. Even my fingers are sore.

Where to start? First thing I did was to pull the screws all along the right side of the garden, and pull the boards up. Then I recycled the wood, trimmed the edges, and used scrap lumber to fill the gaps for the long bed on the right hand side. It’s 25 feet by 3.5 feet, which means that now I’ll be able to reach all the way to the back of the bed, something that was impossible before.

End of day one

Here’s what it looked like at the end of day one. So Day Two, I pulled the rest of the lumber, and then spent an hour or two clearing out the herb bed. It was not only overgrown by lovage — which had taproots many feet deep and as thick as my forearm (I’m sure I’m not done trying to kill the lovage) but was infested with crabgrass. Luckily for me, if unfortunate for plants, the ground was really dry, so I could pull up clumps, shake out the dirt, and get rid of the roots. We’ll see. There’s a reason that “grassroots” is synonymous with “insidious.”

Eventually, I got the second long bed built — which was much easier this time since the boards were in better shape and I didn’t have to trim so much to get straight ends. Hence, I didn’t have to patch quite so much. Then I patched an eight foot section across the back to complete the U shape.

The last task was building the two six-by-three beds in the center. When I drew it out on paper I thought I’d do one long bed down the middle, but it turned out that I had a pile of six-foot boards. So I recycled into two beds. I call them “the graves” since that’s what they look like at the moment. I moved dirt from the old beds into the new, which was a chore, especially since a couple of beds were still frozen. I was chucking lumps of frozen dirt from one place to another.

I’m really pleased. The garden is much easier to get around in, and I think most of it will be much more accessible (those back corners along the U will be a tiny bit problematic, we’ll see). I flipped as many of the boards back to front as I could, so they should weather from the other side now. I used old chicken-feed sacks for weedcloth in new beds that were built over old paths — I wasn’t quite as anal as I probably should have been, so I’ll probably be pulling grass at some point. Next step is to empty the chicken coop compost piles into the beds, and turn everything over once again, but that’s going to have to wait a few days until my sad-ass middle-aged sore muscles heal up. Really, I should have done more over the winter. Yikes.

LivingSmall finally took the most obvious money-saving, small-living step, and got rid of cable TV!

Woo! Hoo!

Cable/Satellite has been a thorn in my side for ages. It’s so unnecessarily expensive — and for what? garbage mostly.

But we do like sports. So about a year ago, I got an AppleTV, in part because I liked Netflix streaming and the little pop-up wireless doohickey for my TiVo was slow. AppleTV was pretty awesome, and, we discovered, you could buy a subscription to MLB.com. Himself is from Boston, and we don’t get very many Red Sox games on tv out here — they seem to think we want to watch the Mariners (really? sorry Seattlites, but they suck). So, MLB.com and you can watch all the RedSox games, and you don’t even need a Tivo, because the system stores the broadcast so, if you’re like us, and don’t like coming indoors in the summer until it’s dark, you can watch the game later. The other great thing about baseball on the internet tv, is that you don’t get commercials (you get this restful blue screen that says “Commercial Break in Progress” with no extra noise!), and, as a bonus, you get the local broadcasts, which are also pretty swell. I just bought the NBA version, which looks to have more blackout games, probably because it’s impossible for any other sport to play as many games as baseball does. Football is going to be an issue, but we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there.

But AppleTV is problematic in that Steve wanted us all to live in Steve’s World and only Steve’s World. So, no Hulu — because you’re supposed to buy regular TV shows by the episode through the Apple store. Which annoyed me. So, when I was contemplating cutting off cable I ordered a Roku box – essentially, it’s the other internet TV interface. It has Hulu, and Hulu plus, which for $7.95 a month gives you access to most network shows and some news. Also, Netflix streaming and a good interface inside the Amazon prime universe, where there’s a lot of other programming available. The interface is quick and easy to set up, and so far, so good. I can watch about 90% of what I want to — if there’s something else I want to watch, I’ll wait for Hulu or Netflix to pick it up by the season. Really, if I can’t get it, I probably don’t need it. Weirdly, the Apple TV has an interface to YouTube, which is in the process of instituting channels like the ones Hulu uses, while the Roku box doesn’t link to YouTube. I’m happy with both boxes — especially since they’re sunk costs and don’t carry subscriptions. I can just switch between them if I need to — or if I don’t watch them both, I figure I can just move one to one of Himself’s properties so we can watch baseball there. What I would like eventually is a link to the actual internet from the TV. I don’t understand why you can’t get to a real browser from your TV — it’s just a monitor like any other monitor, but I expect someone will bridge that gap in fairly short order.

The last part of my no-cable tv package was that I bought this slick digital antenna called a Mohu Leaf – it’s a piece of flat laminated plastic about the size of a piece of notebook paper, and you tape it to the wall. I now get two regular networks beautifully clear, and about six PBS stations (I had no idea there were so many). The only down-side is that while the signal comes in great on my TV, it doesn’t seem quite strong enough to work through the TiVo box. The upside to this is that I don’t have to pay TiVo anymore. The downside is that I loved Tivo. I loved not watching shows in real time. I loved fast-forwarding through commercials. So, that’s sort of a bummer, but on the other hand, it will save me the equivalent amount of money as the MLB.com package, so I’m okay with it.

I can’t quite explain the giddy joy that getting rid of cable/satellite inspired in me. It’s probably been 25 years that I’ve been paying cable companies — and the prices have gone up and up and up and up. And the usefulness of the service has gone down and down. Himself just got satellite at the cabin, because it’s a vacation rental, and people apparently can’t live without tv, even on vacation. The interface is impossible. There are hundreds of channels listed, about 2/3s of which he doesn’t subscribe to. And yes, I know you can customize the interface — but you shouldn’t have to — it takes forever and if you’re not computer-y, it’s impossible. And who needs most of that crap anyway? I think I watch way too much tv and even when I had basic cable I skipped over the stuff on most of those channels.

So we’ll see. I’m pretty psyched about the world of broadband TV. I can watch what I want when I want it. I’m not bombarded by a lot of crap I don’t want. And while sports are an issue, they’re not that big an issue.

Woo hoo! cut the cable!

photo by John Zumpano

So I did a little reading last week, a benefit for our local food bank, and I read My Inner Child,  the piece that Culinate submitted to the Best Food Writing 2010. I was a wreck. Well, I was fine until about two days before the reading when I realize that the piece was all about that first Christmas after Patrick died, and that most of the people who ate the Croquembouche That Wouldn’t Die would be there — oh, and to add to the sad-memories factor — Bill and Maryanne’s beloved dead dog Moja was in the piece.

What was I thinking?

Argh! I went into full panic-tailspin mode for a day or two, especially when I realized I hadn’t done a reading since before Patrick died, which meant that he wasn’t going to be standing in the back of the room with that look of simultaneous pride and boredom that I rely on during readings. Most of the time I’m used to Patrick being dead, but every once in a while some new milestone sneaks up on you and you find yourself crying in the bathtub again. Plus, it’s not like my moribund writing career doesn’t also fill me with some … dismay, shame, horror, despair? There must be a German word for what I want, one of those great portmanteau words that encompass a whole spectrum of middle-aged failure issues. At any rate, off I went, filled with melodramatic feelings of doom … and yeah, it went really well. People liked the piece. The world didn’t crack open. I didn’t cry. I actually remembered that I like reading — like the performance aspect of it (once I’m safely on stage that is).

And the next day it occurred to me that perhaps I haven’t actually wasted the past ten years after all. It’s not like I haven’t been writing, I just haven’t managed to pull together a new book. So I started cutting and pasting. Between this blog, my Culinate and Ethicurean essays, and my Bookslut columns — well, there’s something like 300 pages of raw material to start working with — perhaps there’s a book lurking in there someplace? I’ve spent the past few days printing pages, and sorting them into categories, and thinking about what it is that I find interesting in this pile of raw material.

Which is where the crowdsourcing comes in. I know what I think I’ve been up to these past few years, but what is it that you all like? While I quail at the prospect of seeming to solicit compliments, it would be useful to have some feedback from what I think of as my 12 Trusty Readers out there in cyberspace. If there was to be some sort of LivingSmall book, what would you all like to find there?

Nest of Dinosaur Babies

From the outside, the Wyoming Dinosaur Museum doesn’t look like much, in fact, it looks like a barn for long-haul trucks, but don’t let that fool you, inside are many many beautiful and amazing fossils.

Many of the fossils are arranged in life-like poses like this nest of dinosaur babies. The collection is probably most notable for the huge Supersaurus that stretches the length of the big hall, but I didn’t think my iPhone camera would do it justice. If you click their link, you can see what it looks like. The collection also contains the only Archaeopteryx in North America, as well as a 35-foot T-Rex and several Triceratops (which happens to be the Wyoming state dinosaur). There are more than 30 skeletons of the Allosaurus, a fossil fish from Scotland, as well as flying reptiles from Brazil, dinosaurs from China and marine reptiles from several continents.

While the big dinosaurs were truly impressive, what I liked best were the little ones like these two, posed as they might have been in life. For one thing, these aren’t casts, these are real fossilized bones. The Supersaurus is a cast, mostly because it’s so big that it would be impossible to support the weight of all those fossilized bones. What we both really liked was that in the cases below the Supersaurus were some of the actual fossilized bones, with great signage pointing out the lines that signaled growth plates.

The collection is really impressive. As much as I loved the fossils that appeared to be like live beings, I think my favorites were the many beautiful graphic fossils like this one: