A Gardener's Page

A journal by Richard Bear, author of Lettuce in Winter. Home Page: Stony Run. Email: rbear@oregon.uoregon.edu. This text is copyright © 1997 Richard Bear and Stony Run Press.

Contents: January  February March April May June July August September October November December   Links to Other Gardening Pages

January

 THere is a small mountain about two miles from Stony Run Farm that is covered with a network of trails, and is the centerpiece of an attractive county park. The mountain's south slope is a steep meadowland, interspersed with copses of black oak, and dotted with wild plum trees; the north slope is forested with second growth Douglas fir and carpeted with an understory of sword ferns, viney maples, and filberts gone wild. I like to hike to the top, though each year I find the going a little harder, and look about me. Below, two rivers come together after dodging round the mountain toward each other. With binoculars I can find, in season, fishermen seeking steelhead (winter) and brown trout (summer). To the north there is considerable urbanization; I can see at one glance the second largest metropolitan area in my state, but it is not unattractive as cities go, and I can forgive its noise and bustle for its not being any worse (yet) than it is. To the south and east is the valley of one of the rivers, opening out of the foothills of a substantial and still very wild mountain range. In winter the eastern peaks are dusted white with snow, and present a dramatic and lovely scene; but my interest is generally drawn to the near view.
      At my feet are a succession of habitats: the eastern ridge of the mountain, with Douglas fir forest to the left and oaks to the right, with perhaps a herd of deer placidly browsing in plain view; the meadowland within the park boundary, with a few pear trees left over from some farm venture in the previous century; the wetlands with its dark patches of sedge and the occasional blue heron. Beyond are pastures, woodlots, filbert orchards, and fields used mostly for corn, hay, and grass seed farming. Threading among these, I see, are narrow roads along which are some two hundred houses, on properties of anywhere from one to two hundred acres, with their barns, outbuildings, and accumulated belongings left to the winter rains and summer sun: trucks, tractors, harrows, drift boats, and an occasional stove or washing machine. Most of us in this valley are not especially poor, but we are a thrifty people, many only two or three generations descended from pioneers, and we make but few trips to the county dump.
      Almost no one here can earn a living from farming now. We are an amalgam of loggers, retirees, and commuters: gentlemen farmers of two classes, the professionals -- doctors, dentists, and the like -- and the rest. These are mostly school teachers, store clerks, and office workers. I am in this last group. Regardless of category, almost every one of us has a garden. I can see them from the mountaintop: at every house, a brown patch within easy access of the kitchen door. Some of us have enough pasture for a horse or two, or a few steers; I have room for a flock of ducks and geese; but if there is nothing else, there is a garden. Gardens here have a priority over lawns. This is a thing that I greatly admire in my neighbors.
      If, like the people in my valley, you want to grow things, it can be a good idea to try to get an eagle's eye view. If no mountain is handy, try a map. Most gardeners know the dates of frost in their "zone," but there is much more to know. Find out the direction of the prevailing winds, the angle of winter sun, the temperature of June nights. Know the depth of the water table in August.
      From the mountaintop I can see that the valley runs east and west, and that the river is nestled against the northern hills. My own little piece of land is in the middle distance, on the long glide of slope from the south hills to the river. There is a seasonal creek through the property, dry in summer and a raging torrent in winter. This means that I'm in a low-lying spot, subject to the movement of air. In winter the wind comes from the southwest generally, in the form of Pacific storms laden with incessant rain. These winds chill the soil, and the water that drops from them saturates it and renders it clammy. Pools lie on the surface in winter with no place to drain away to, as the water table is even with the surface. Dig a post-hole anywhere and it fills to overflowing. So gardens tend to be planted late, well after the dates recommended on seed packets.
      In summer the water table drops to ten, twenty, or even thirty feet, while the winds are continual, shifting daily from north to south. This is because of our mountain ranges. The sun heats the slopes, and air rises, drawing air away from the river bottom. At night, this air cools and sinks back down along draws and creek valleys toward the river. Gardens in this drainage must be almost continually watered, as the tender plants are subject to drying out. Watering is more frequent than the books recommend; corn begins wilting within a day of its last soaking. At night the wind stops, but heat radiates away quickly among the glitterings of the stars, and temperatures can drop into the forties (fahrenheit) by morning, even if it's been close to a hundred degrees during the day. Gives tomato lovers fits.
      The wiser among us build wooden fences, or hedge their gardens about with shrubbery or even hay bales, to combat the winds and the heat loss. A heavy mulch would help, but the main mulching material is straw. The straw available locally contains a lot of weed seeds, and it invites tremendous armies of slugs and snails of all sizes. No one seems to care for black plastic, which takes a lot of fiddling with in the shifting winds, or newspaper, so most of the gardeners keep their soil bare and cultivated. The majority use herbicide to control grass, which is the primary weed; I have reason to believe herbicide is the greater evil in this case, and use the straw mulch, trying to stay just ahead of the weeds by piling on more, and I bait the slugs when necessary, trusting perhaps more than I should to the manufacturer's soothing reassurances.
      Right now, it's January. Most of us have not had much chance to think about gardening. We have had record rains, with some manual guages registering 93 (!!) inches. That other river, the one you can see to the southwest from the mountaintop, recently jumped its banks and flooded two hundred homes, making the national news. The creek on our place, which doesn't even exist half the year, rose to the foundation of the house and flooded the potting shed, which I'd thought of as standing on high ground. Three fences were destroyed, and tons of earth moved in the general direction of the Pacific. But the garden was spared. The vetch that I planted last fall for green manure is intact, as are the piles of leaves and the compost bin. The wintered-over red chard is still useable, and our Detroit Red beets are superb. Meanwhile, our first harbingers of spring -- elephant garlic, growing from those tiny cloves that stay in the soil when we pull the crop -- have sprung from the cold, heavy soil, dotting the view from our kitchen window like randomly dibbled irises. And on the rainy nights, between the gusts of Pacific wind, we can hear the first chirruping choruses of the green tree frogs. I found one once in high summer, napping as it were, on the shore of a pond of water in the angle of a sunflower leaf. Their sound is, to me, a promise of sunflowers yet to come. I fall asleep to their frantic cheeping, and dream of green things growing in the sun.

****

This is a good month for clearing the potting shed for action. Ours is the remnant of a particularly decrepit lean-to, which the previous owner constructed out of whatever was handy, and used mainly to store trash and to indulge, with the use of a perilously derelict woodstove, in melting lead for a lifetime's supply of sinkers and split shot. As I stood looking at this structure, which had helped by its presence to bring down the asking price on the property, the neighbor, a stout and cheery farm woman who had befriended us in our first week with a gift of raspberry starts, fetched up on the other side of the boundary fence. "You are going to rip down that eyesore, aren't you?" she asked. "First thing?"
      So I felt I had an obligation, but once inside, I found that my predecessor had used beams, taken up from the floors of some defunct lumbermill, each eight inches square and sixteen feet long, for framing the roof. I am no longer young, and the prospect of dismantling those massive rafters dismayed me. I immediately began to think of the "eyesore" as the "barn and potting shed," and within days began installing walls, windows, and doors. A coat of red fence stain on the barn boards of the walls, and cheery green trim on the window frames, produced a pleasing enough effect that my neighbor has never called me to account on our unspoken contract. At least, that's my interpretation!
      One side of the building, about two-thirds, is given over to my Duck Lady's ducks and her retired show rabbits. We put down straw bedding over the bare earth, and change it periodically; this becomes our favorite mulch and top dressing, as it is rich in duck and rabbit manure but not enough so to burn plants noticeably. It is pleasant, every morning, to go hunting for eggs in the tiny barn. The ducks, Khaki Campbells, produce almost an egg a day each, which they never look at again, but they do like to build their communal nest in a different spot each night. The other side is the potting shed, which we also call the greenhouse, but that's stretching things a bit.
      To construct this space, so necessary to the garden, I began by removing the south wall and framing in rafters for three sliding glass doors, which had been donated by a friend. These lean against the building and form a kind of large greenhouse window. The east wall, against the duck room, is for tools. Before I did anything else, I gathered the tools, old friends that had gardened with me on four sites in Oregon and one in Pennsylvania, and hung them along the weathered grey boards: two round-point shovels, one square-point, one d-ring spade, a garden fork, a hay fork, two toothed rakes, one mattock, two stirrup hoes, a pry bar, a splitting maul, a bow saw, machete, lopping shears. A comforting sight, these, lined up, waiting for orders. Even in the dead of winter I sometimes go out to look at them and touch each one.
      The floor was a matter of concern. My predecessor had laid out some of the precious beams directly on the soil and covered them with 1/2 inch plywood. Dry rot and carpenter ants had made of this area a serious ankle trap. I asked my oldest boy and his friend if they wanted exercise. With the pry bar and the maul, they made a joyful noise and large chunks of erstwhile flooring flew out the door for about half an hour. I considered using the bare earth, but as I knew I would be watering plants inside, I looked about for something more suitable. Bricks were what I wanted, but used bricks go for a dollar apiece hereabouts. I mentioned this, in a woebegone manner, to a friend.
      "Well, I might have just the thing. There is a dangerous chimney on the house I use for an office building, which would cost me a fortune to have taken down by masons. If you can do the job I'll pay you and you can keep the bricks." I thought this was a godsend and took the truck and a rented forty foot ladder to the site; horrors! A two-story house with a sixty-degree pitch. I'd need the whole length of the ladder to get at the thing -- forty feet doesn't sound like much but just try it sometime -- but the bricks, the bricks! Greed overcame good sense, and there I was, a million miles above the earth as it seemed to me, plucking bricks from midair (the mortar was completely shot) and tossing them at random over my shoulder into space. They made a lovely truckload, though, and with the aid of my nine-year-old daughter, the next day, I laid them in a herringbone pattern, just like in the garden books, and they made exactly the length and width of the room.
      In the west wall I installed wood-framed windows in a row at bench height, then dragged a suitable bench from the garage and painted it green ( for good luck? Why do we insist on green potting benches?). Using roofing nails, I covered the top of the bench with linoleum. The bench had been a kitchen cabinet once, but had long since lost its doors and hinges. I installed it along the west wall beneath the windows, and filled its shelves with clay pots, green plastic pots of all sizes, and tomato cans. With the addition of a watering can, two trowels, and a couple of bags of potting soil, the shed was done! I envisioned opening the door through the years, admiring the herringbone pattern of the bricks, the row of waiting tools, the sun shining in through the greenhouse window on ranks of flats bursting with lettuce, broccoli, chard...ahhh.
      "Hello!" said, the Duck Lady. "I need to put the duck feed, the rabbit feed, and the geese's cob in here." Excuse me? Three large-size garbage cans? But there's no arguing with fate. Soon other items, large and small, came marching in, like animals into the ark. Boxes, lengths of hose, "white buckets" (even the green ones are called "white"), old pillows (she uses these to kneel on while working in the earth), you name it....
      So now, in January, when it's as dark as an eclipse all day anyway, is the time to clean out. Find out which things can go in the garage instead. Find all the broken plastic pots and move 'em out. Sort and stack the ones that are left. Take the edged tools, one by one, to the garage to be wire-brushed, filed, oiled, and have their handles linseed-oiled. Slowly the shed will begin to look useful. Even some of the beautiful floor begins to appear. But I don't think I'll ever get rid of those huge trash cans. They have made themselves At Home.

---

February

 Today the sun came out for the first time since I don't know when. The ground rises to the east of the house, and a morning-coffee glance through the living room window revealed a jewelled world -- heavy dew on the rumpled grass, which has grown during the last month, and on the leafless lilac bushes, and the neighbor's apple orchard. Rainbow hues glinted from the drops, and the glow suffused the house like a dream of a better world.
      These lilacs, when they bloom, are of a purple-hued variety, and all the lilacs around all the houses hereabouts are of the same kind. The originals were planted by the first family to arrive here, not long after the original pioneers in our end of the valley. They built a post-and-beam two-story house in the midst of three hundred and twenty acres of Douglas fir forest. Not old growth, interestingly enough: the Calapooya Indians, who had lived here for centuries, periodically burned over the valley floor, to keep it open for game and for defense. But these trees were certainly large, and there were a lot of them; their shade was dense, and it would be a while before this could be farm land. The men, taking stock of their situation, immediately contracted to provide firewood for all the one-room schoolhouses in the area, and fell to work with axe and crosscut. As the clearing around the house grew, the women installed plants they had brought with them: lilacs, periwinkle vinca (a ground cover), daffodils.
      The original house, and the forest that sustained it, have been gone for decades. But the plants remain; the original lilacs form a semicircle around a pile of foundation stones which were used to fill in the cellar, and the vinca and daffodils cover the area. It's part of my neighbor's pasture now. My house was built in the year I was born, 1949, by one of the descendants of the woodcutting family, and his wife grew the lilacs that are by my front door from cuttings from the pioneer plants. All her neighbors appear to have been invited to do the same. The family across the road have a thick, healthy-looking hedge of them.
      When we arrived here, the dooryard lilacs were much in need of pruning back, as the winds were scraping them against the house. I went after them with the pruners, taking out dead wood, crossed branches and the like, and noticed that suckers had formed around the root collars of the ancient bushes. These had been cut back, and had resprouted, innumerable times, and the root collars had thickened considerably, providing room for yet more suckers to form. I was about to cut the latest ones away, when an idea came to me -- would they form roots if I hilled up earth around them? I brought a barrow-load of dirt and piled it round the bases of the lilacs, and went on to other tasks.
      Weeks -- or it must have been months -- later, I remembered my experiment and went to the lilacs with a trowel to see how the suckers were coming along. Sure enough, they had formed roots. Cutting the main stems away from the parent, I was able to replant a number of them into number ten tomato cans in the potting shed/greenhouse, where they stayed until dormancy the following winter. I remembered them just in time, before bud break, and set them out at the corners of the house. They have all done well, and I am filled with admiration at the hardiness and adaptability of these pioneers of the valley. I hope our own transplanting here will be as successful.
      The lilac has long been hybridized and there are now well over 500 varieties. For best results, plant them in fall, or no later than February, with some compost and bone meal in the hole, which should be spacious enough not to crowd the roots. Top dress biannually with compost, but remember to add some pine or fir needles, or other acid material, from time to time. If you feel that the acidity isn't benefiting the plant enough, you can use a trick that works well for rhododendrons and azaleas: add apple parings to the top dressing and stick a few rusty nails (not galvanized) underneath. The iron seems to react with the apple skins in some way the shrubs find appealing. Pay attention to watering for the first year. After that, the lilac should be fairly hardy, and you should avoid letting the ground around an established lilac get too soggy. A vigorous plant can sustain plenty of blooms. If it seems poorly, pick them off so that more of the strength can go to building new roots. The bloom season is relatively short, but while it lasts, the scent carried on the breeze to you as you dig in the herb border will become one of your favorites, and provide a strong argument that in Heaven it is always early spring.

****

The rare sunshine at this time of year always sends our Garden Lady tearing out to the garden to put in peas. We have two gardens, actually: mine is the big one in heavy clay down in the cold gloomy bottoms north of the kitchen window; hers is the small one in sandy loam on the high sunny south side of the house, next to the duck barn. Peas planted in her garden in February will not rot, as they will in "my" garden. (Or maybe it's just that she can grow things I can't. ) She climbs into her overalls, ties a bandana over her hair, grabs a "retired" pillow from the greenhouse, plunks it on the ground in front of the row, and goes to work.
      The neighbor, a tidy retired man who gardens from June to August religiously, finds this behavior distinctly odd. So he comes out to investigate. Not wanting to be obvious about this, he begins on the far side of the pasture, and inspects his fence around into the apple orchard, then, after what he deems to be a decent interval, stops right by the little garden.
      "What the devil are you doing out here in the dead of winter?" he asks politely.
      "Peas! Aren't they lovely?" she extends a grubby palm, with a dozen wrinkled seeds.
      "You don't expect them to come up, do you?" He peers down at the strange-looking, to him, thick straw mulch that has been pulled back to reveal the brown earth.
      "No, I never expect them to come up, but I always hope they will; and I get some nice surprises. Sometimes." She grins, and picks up her trowel.
      "Huh! well, good luck to you! I see Mary; I better get inside or she'll think I'm out here courting'!" He ambles off, shaking his head at the improvidence of the Bear clan.
      We buy a lot of our seeds at the end of summer, from racks of remaindered packets that are made available by our local hardware stores for five to ten cents a packet. A dime is not too much to spend on enjoying a brief spell of winter sun, or what Oregonians call a "blue hole." Some of these year-old seeds, especially of flowers, seem to lose a bit of vitality and planting them can be like doing your thinning in advance; but regardless of what she says, the Garden Lady's peas always come up.
      Peas are legumes. We much prefer them to beans, as the whole family has a sweet tooth. We like the climbing varieties more than bush, and prefer sugar snap to the shell-out varieties. When the season is at its height, relatively little food preparation goes on, as we are all to be found at all hours simply sitting by the pea vines stuffing ourselves. Those that we pick and bring in are not as good after about two hours, though we use them in salads and stir fries, and freeze the rest. If it does threaten to rain too much on the rows or beds soon after planting, cover with a plastic tarp for two days, then pull it off for a day, etc. as needed. As soon as the plants are up, pull the mulch up around them close, and renew it throughout the life of the plants, to keep the roots cool. I stake them out by making tripods of cuttings from ash, willow, and hazel. They hate to be planted in the same spot two years in a row, so think rotation. After the crop is gone, I feed the vines to the ducks, geese, and rabbits, who think highly of them.
      I see in garden magazines much talk of varieties: endless list-making and discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of all the latest hybrids or oldest heirlooms. I know that by going to the hardware store I'm taking whatever they have to offer, and missing a shot at the "best" of this or the "best" of that; and I greatly admire the work of seed-saver exchanges and heirloom nurseries. One of the country's finest seedsmen is just down the road about twenty miles, too, and we in the valley are very proud of their product. But the Garden Lady and I both work full time, and we have a strict budget to meet. The garden must pay for its share; we can put a little work into it but not much money. We plant whatever comes to hand, and some years we say, "Well, this is not as good as what we had last year," or "Whoa! Now this is better than what we had last time!" There is an element of surprise. And it's all relative. This is organically grown, home-grown, fresh produce; all of it is better than anything we can get in the stores. That's why, even though our lives are busier than Broadway, we make time to get out there and plant, even in February. And these seeds, if no one will buy them, will be thrown away. I can relate; I'm middle-aged and trying to build a second career. I have hope that, with a little care, I'll bear fruit yet. A lot to think about while putting a few peas in the ground.

March

 I didn't care for gardening when I was growing up. I much preferred to spend my Saturdays lounging around the house with a book, or exploring the small wilderness across the creek that bounded the suburban lot we called home. From a hill across a meadow in the wild area, I could look back over the creek valley and see the backs of the row of new houses, set down in pastureland during the explosive growth of Atlanta after World War II, and in the large back yards the men could be seen, each in his own realm, restoring order to the landscape the bulldozers had crushed and tumbled. Some planted a few pines, all planted grass. My father, almost alone among them, planted fruit trees, grapes, figs, and row upon row of vegetables. He owned a walking tractor, the remote ancestor of today's tillers, and I could hear it singing to him, dinka-dinka-dink, as he plowed. He made the earth yield tenfold, twentyfold, an hundredfold, all of which he brought to my despairing mother in brimming bushel baskets. She had neither the time nor the inclination for canning, drying, and freezing, and would surreptitiously slip the produce, as much as she could reasonably expect would go unnoticed, into the trash. Frankly, I shared her point of view. I didn't like squash or spinach fresh, let alone reconstituted in the dead of winter, so why bother?
      He failed to make a convert of her, and had worse luck with me. I was enlisted to barrow ripe manure from place to place, to hold trees upright while he mixed compost, water and earth gently round the roots, to unroll bare-root tomato plants from their damp newspaper wrapping in my own shade, safe from the sun, while he dug, and poured, and tamped, talking and explaining the whole while. But my mind stayed resolutely elsewhere, on the bloody plain of Troy, or visiting the Egyptians with Herodotus and hearing with him their strange tales of a civilization already old when his Greece was young. My father sensed the futility of his efforts, and with a sigh released me to my own world, taking up the tomatoes from his shade with one hand and pouring water into the holes with the other, alone.
      Years later, needing to earn a living on my arrival in Oregon at the height of an unemployment crisis, I signed on to a tree planting crew. The foreman showed the new hands the basics in setting out a two-year-old Douglas fir seedling:
      "Y'open the hole with the hoedad at the bottom by pulling up on the handle, see? Then the top by pulling down. Now yuh've got a hole twelve inches deep and four across all the way down. Right? Now take yer tree and dangle the roots down; give 'em a shake so they'll hang loose and won't get caught upside down, see? 'Cuz roots upside down don't work -- they'll die on yuh; if all the roots are upside down the whole tree'll die. They only work one way. Keep it out of the sun, too, and don't hold it out in the wind too long. All that sun and air'll kill yer tree. Now yuh pack the dirt around the tree with yer hoedad blade, once, twice, like this, so there's no air pocket in the ground -- that air will kill a tree in the ground just like it will in yer hand. Now press down with yer foot, but not too close to the stem and not too hard. There's hair roots, yuh can't see 'em, on every root yuh can see, and if yuh get rough you'll strip those off at the base, and they'll die, and there goes yer tree. O.K.? now on to the next spot."
      About halfway through the lecture I realized I already knew all this; it was the tomato lecture! Shade, air, and hair roots. This foreman might not know Homer, but his rough sophistication in physical geography and botany struck me as something admirable, and at that moment with a flash of insight I understood my father's enthusiasm for gardening not as a weird masochistic hobby but as a vital branch of knowledge. I suddenly took an interest in tree planting, which in a way was unfortunate for me, as I lasted twelve years at an occupation which no one has any business doing for more than three. (sigh)
      Hand planting of tree seedlings is carried on in the winter hereabouts, beginning when the rains have penetrated about ten inches into the soil. Our crews worked in the Coast Range until March, then fanned out across the Cascades and the Rockies, finishing up usually about the end of May in Montana or Colorado. Summer was the off season. Having nothing else to do that first summer, I took up gardening. After tilling a suitable patch of ground, I went out with a round-pointed shovel, a bucket of compost, a bucket of water, and a flat of tomatoes in two-inch pots (I have never seen those bare-root "field-growed" plants since my childhood). With the shovel, I dug a hole about the depth of the blade, threw in some nice wormy compost, turned up a tomato plant and gently lifted off the pot, set the root ball quickly into the earth (working in my own shade), slopped in some water, and backfilled soil up to just above the root collar, tamped gently with the heel of my palm, and measured to the next spot by simply laying down the shovel and noting the place where the end of its handle reached to. I didn't think about it at the time, but later realized, while admiring the nicely laid out grid of fresh greenery, that I had absorbed, albeit unknown to me at the time, every move of my father's method. The conversion was complete.
      When my parents eventually made their way west to visit, they caught us at the end of a pretty good harvest. My father looked over the rows of corn, the squash patch, the bean trellises, and the fall bed with its broccoli, lettuce, chard, and kale seedlings, and shook his head.
      "Where'd you learn how to do all this, you rascal? " But he knew the answer as well as I did, and I could tell the old man was mightily pleased.

****

The long rains are back, with the occasional snowflake. In March we do most of our gardening sitting around the table playing with pretty packets as if there were a game called Seed Poker. To the Duck Lady a pair of Sugar Snap Peas and and pair of Broccoli is a really good hand; but I prefer a full house of two Blue Lake Pole Beans and three Candy Corns. Peas can be set out but often rot in the long rains; though there is a trick to this if you have the time to fool around with it: plant your peas and pull some two-mil clear plastic over them, weighted down at the corners with stones (of which we have more than plenty), whenever it looks like raining too hard. Once they're up they'll be fine. The other stuff, though, might just as well stay in the packets. That ground out there is COLD.
      One wants something to do, though, even if it calls for a full suit of rain gear and gum boots. So at about this time of year I usually do the garlic roundup. The previous occupant of our place enjoyed garlic, which I never liked, but luckily his choice was elephant garlic, which has made me a convert. This stuff grows six feet tall, produces interesting flowers that are fun to have around and also great scissored off for salads, and develops a bulb the size of a softball, with great, soft cloves that are a cook's delight. These can be diced and tossed into the pan with whatever's doing, from stir-fried vegetables to roast lamb, adding a much subtler and pleasanter aroma and flavor than the smaller, more common varieties. When you lift the plants, though, there are a myriad of filbert-shaped bulblets, like small potatoes, that get left behind in the soil, sometimes eight or ten inches deep. These become first-year plants of what appears to be a biennial. Because of the depth from which they often grow, the bulblet plants make a fair substitute for leeks, which I'd love to try but don't feel I'd have the time to devote to them. Or if you leave them alone, they come back the second year as the highly productive six-foot beasties.
      The garlic bed that was in place upon our arrival was an unfortunate business constructed of old boards full of termites, and overrun with blackberries. We decided the location was better for an orchard, and harvested all the garlic, keeping a few of the large cloves for use in the Summer Garden the next year. But in March I discovered about a hundred small plants where some fifteen had been before, on the old bed site, coming up through the new grass. Well, I can't stand to see anything wasted, so out came the fork and a bucket with about five inches of water in it, and I gingerly lifted out the long white stems, with their narrow bulbs and strands of succulent white rootlets, till the bucket was quite full. I then took an ash pole, sharpened at the end, which had been part of a bean trellis, and dibbled the little darlings into the new garden. None of them died; none of them even showed any signs of wilt. Nor did they amount to much that first year, and I almost forgot they were there, in amongst the tomatoes and pumpkins. But the second year they were a forest of long, lithe stems and purple blossoms, as apt to draw the eye from a distance as any sunflower.
      We soon were giving away cloves at a great rate. We bagged them up and handed them out almost as a kind of volunteer cottage industry, working feverishly through our birthday and holiday lists. The supply was inexhaustible. Heaps of them lay about in bowls on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile March came around again, and I went out to the new orchard (dwarf: two Santa Rosa plums, two prune plums, two Asian pears, two Fuji apples, a Bing and a Royal Anne, cherries) and -- gasp! -- one hundred more baby garlics, crying out to be lifted. I suppose I could go into garlic farming, but one thing tells me this would be a futile endeavor: along the road, all the way into town, there are signs: Elephant Garlic For Sale. From this I suspect we have here the rain country's equivalent of -- yep, you guessed it -- zucchini!

April

 This year we felt we should reduce our "acreage" in the main garden, so I took an iron rod, set it up in the approximate middle, and with a rope attached to the rod, made a circle about sixty feet across, planting garlic to mark the edge as I went. The garlic is up now, and one can see the size of the garden-to-be. The Garden Lady came out to see what I had done.
      "Whoa! That's way too small!" She folded her arms and gave me "the look." "Where do the brassicas go?"
      "Right here."
      "Uh-huh. And the squash?"
      "Sort of over here."
      "Right. And the cucumbers, -- and -- and -- where does the pumpkin patch go?" Her chin began to tremble a bit at this point.
      "Right back here...no problem, really! Honest!"
      "And your corn, beans, tomatoes and potatoes?"
      "Uh, well, I thought I'd revive my little beds up in the orchard."
      "I thought we were going to have a 'smaller' garden!"
      "Well, that's what I remember us both saying, so I've cut this one in half. But if you need it all, I can always go back there. And the trees will need watering anyway, so I might as well..."
      Etc., etc.
      I figure, with all the quart jars of tomato sauce still in the pantry, I can get by on only four tomato plants this year. YEAH, RIGHT. I've already got a flat of two-inch pots. If they all make it, that's 32 plants. Who's going to kill 28 of those little lovelies? ME? But let me tell you about our first year here.
      I had a bigger tiller at the time, and dug up not one but three gardens. The Garden Lady got the well-draining little one for spring and fall brassicas and peas, I got the orchard one, and we both got the big one. I decided to put out four kinds of tomatoes: Romas, Better Boys, Sweet 100's and some vining cherries. So I did a flat of each, figuring on some die-off. Nope. All healthy little beasties. This was early in February, as I was having some kind of light-deprivation fit and had to grow something. So I spent the spring mostly repotting and repotting until the tomatoes were shoving the lids off the cold frames. After ruthlessly giving away all the plants that anyone who knew me would take, I still had 72 tomato plants. So I put them all in the ground. I had forgotten to lime, so there was some blossom-end rot, but not much, as it had fallowed a few years. There were tomatoes, tomatoes, and tomatoes. Big ones, little ones, round ones, pointy ones. I gathered all the pointy ones and sauced till I dropped. The pantry shelves groaned. I chased the kids through the cherries and Sweet 100's and told them that was their dinner for tonight -- and all month, same menu. I sliced the big round ones and added them to every conceivable dish. But more kept coming.
      One day, late in August, I picked a perfect one-pound Better Boy and looked at it in misery and disgust. A surfeit of your favorite things will, sooner or later, turn you against them, and with a kind of strangled cry I pitched the tomato as high in the air as it would go. It came down in the middle of the duck pen with a satisfying splapp! of water-balloonish disintegration.
      One of the ducks ambled over to see what the fuss was all about. Idly, almost absentmindedly, she nipped at the remnants of the once-proud Better Boy. I could almost see, from across the creek, her small eyes widen. "Eureka!" she burbled to the others in Duckish, which was a mistake, as the others came boiling out of the shade to take the rest of the prize from her.
      Ah, said I to myself. Duck food! I threw bombs into the sky with abandon, and as three were coming down among the ducks, three more were launching into the air. At about this moment the neighbor, a tradition-minded stalwart citizen of some seventy-two years, decided he had better investigate.
      "So, uh, what are we doing today?" came his voice, from right behind the merry bomber's back.
      "Oh, hi, Mr. Trueblood! Feeding the ducks!" I launched three more missiles. The ducks, who by now had gorged themselves, showed no further sign of appetite and were mostly just dodging the incoming shells.
      "Right. Feeding the ducks. Well, nice weather, huh?" He watched me closely for signs of more erratic behavior, but none was forthcoming; my arms were tired.
      Every day until frost, though, I fed the ducks. It was good for my pitching arm, they clearly liked tomatoes a great deal, and were good for about fifteen Better Boys a day.
      The next year, I put in thirty-two plants.
      The year after that, sixteen.
      This year, four for sure. Well, maybe eight.

****

I used to despair of ever getting the garden tilled. Here in western Oregon it generally rains, rains, and rains until about the fifth of July. Throughout this time, if you pick up a handful of "dirt" and drop it, like the tilling manuals say, it will hit the surface with a wet splapp!! -- yep -- just like a Better Boy tomato -- thus failing the ready-to-till test. So, what's a gardener to do? We have weeds like nobody has weeds. You can hear them growing at night, like something out of the sci-fi plant thriller Day of the Triffids. Neighbors like to lean on the fence, shake their heads, and say, "Oh, my. Need some herbicide in there!" Well, thanks but no thanks; we had a serious run of birth defects among tree planters' families back in the seventies, including mine, and it turned out to have something to do with the herbicides that were used to keep the clear-cuts free of brush. I figure the big chemical companies owe me about forty thousand dollars so far, but let's just say for now, no herbicides on this place. Savvy?
      So, ok, what to do? I learned, some years ago, by trial and error, that with a long. handled potato fork I could "spade" wet ground: the tines don't seem to compress the soil the way an actual spade does. I turned the clumps upside down, and the roots of sod and weeds, ripped by the fork rather than cut off cleanly by a spade, stood upside down naked in the sunlight, rapidly drying up, a satisfying scene of mayhem. But the earth itself remained stubbornly too cold and damp even for peas. Something more was needed.
      During one hot, dry summer not too long ago, I tried to water my plants from little irrigation ditches, as I had seen done in a garden book somewhere, but the plants were drying up anyway, because the rows were too far apart for the ditches to have any effect. A little exploration with a spade taught me what most of you old-time gardeners already knew: most of the water goes straight down. You have to water the roots of a plant to do it any good, because if the watering is hitting the ground just a little outside the reach of the plant, it will miss the roots entirely as it goes by on its way to the aquifer. Hmm. If I can water only straight down, said I to myself, then I can also DRY straight down. As with sun and shade, you can manipulate water levels by opening up or blocking paths for water -- or rain!
      The next winter I bought some stuff I had been avoiding: sheet plastic. 4-mil black and clear. I experimented with both, spreading them over various areas of the garden, and found that the clear plastic seemed to actually encourage weed growth, though it did dry out the soil enough to till. The black plastic seemed far superior. Every green thing underneath it died, and stayed dead, though worms did not seem to be at all discouraged, and moved about underneath quite freely. I've since heard that the clear does work, but it has to be tucked under the earth around all the edges -- absolutely all -- in order to deny air to the weeds and get enough temperature to kill them and their seeds. The black plastic seems much less effort. When I don't have enough to do the whole surface of the garden (which is always), I spread out what I've got, and three weeks later, go back, pull all the the plastic away, till the dry spot, and spread the plastic over the next space for the next three weeks. Thus there is always some earth dry enough to work, even in constant rain.
      Meanwhile the clear plastic comes in handy after all. In the freshly prepared ground, I can plant whatever rows of seeds interest me at the time, let it rain on them one night for sprouting, then cover the rows with a sheet of clear plastic for three to six days so the seeds won't drown, then remove. And voilá! A garden up and running, even as the cold rainwater keeps up its endless running from the downspouts round the house. Where there is a will, I suppose, there is almost always a way. Now if I could just find a way to keep my boots from loading up ten pounds of clay every time I go outside....

May

 The tomatoes didn't pan out. I hovered over them with the mister till they keeled over, no doubt with damping-off. I shall have to go to the garden store and surreptitiously acquire replacements. I put out peas and then got sick and couldn't cover them during the heavy rains, and they rotted. I put out corn -- I know, it's early, some people never learn -- and it's been snowing up at the pass all day and hailing and pouring half-frozen rain here, and I'm sick again and didn't go out and cover the corn beds, and now I can hear the seeds drowning even as I write. Gardeners are a masochistic lot -- or sadistic, depending on whether you consider their feelings or those of their seeds and transplants. I looked out the window at the already tall grass that would be choking the irises if it hadn't been lodged by the constant wind and rain, and howled, or rather croaked: "my seeds are rotting! My garden is drowning!" The Garden Lady looked up from her easy chair, smiled beneficently, and replied ever so sweetly. "My garden is in the greenhouse, safe and snug." It's true; that's where her whole garden is, including the pumpkin patch and the sunflowers, waiting for the real spring, which as any Oregonian knows, starts sometime between June 1 and the 4th of July. She can do this because she's mastered the art of repotting.
      Even in this weather, the greenhouse, which is nothing more than three sliding glass door panels mounted on frame lumber along the south side of the potting shed, is cozy during the day. She kneels on her feedsack-pillow, trowel in hand, and repots from two-inch pots to four-inch, from four to eight, as needed, while her garden grows. I always manage to wait too late to do this; eventually I'll unpot a veggie only to find that the roots have grown about sixty feet long, or maybe a mile and a half, winding round-and-round the soil plug like thread on a spool. The effect on the growth of the plant is not unlike that of creating a bonsai tree by removing its taproot. I can produce little teeny tomato plants and little teeny zinnias this way, and probably should enter them in the County Fair -- in the contest about how not to garden. Take a tip from the Garden Lady and repot early.
      She takes up, say, a flat of broccoli, thirty-two of them in two-inch pots, and makes sure she has nearby not two but four (try the math!) unoccupied flats and thirty-two four inch pots. A sack of potting mix rests close by, that has been mixed in a wheelbarrow at the rate of three sacks potting soil to one of steer manure and a bit of powdered limestone, and resting on the soil there is a number ten tomato can, which makes a fine cheap scoop. She scoops up a canful of mix, slurps some into the bottom of the first four-inch pot, turns a broccoli upside down, taps two sides of the two-inch pot, lifts it gently off the soil plug, rights the plant into the four-inch pot, shakes mix in on all four sides, tamps it down a bit for a snug fit (roots abhor two things: air and light) so that the top of the soil meets the root collar of the broccoli and is between 1/4 and 1/2 inch from the top edge of the pot, sets it in the new flat, and on to the next one. This is much faster and simpler, really than the description, and the rhythm of it all is quite relaxing. I prefer doing this with Mozart or Bach in the background (or even the foreground). She's a Golden Oldies person, but I've never heard Herman and the Hermits in the greenhouse; only the chuffing of the tomato can hitting the rich brown surface of the mix.
      Abner, our White Chinese gander, watches her angrily through the "lights" as she works, and when she reaches for the pots nearest him, tries to nip her through the glass, with a thump that's kind of pleasing to hear if you've ever been bitten by a goose. The glass is stout enough to resist anything that Abner might contemplate, but there are situations that it was not built for. George, a sheep that lived with us for awhile, made this point very clear by escaping from his pasture one fine day. We got him surrounded, and he retreated into the greenhouse, from whence we thought to lead him on a bit of rope -- he had other ideas, and sailed through the double-paned safety glass as if it wasn't there, scattering rainbow shards twenty feet in all directions. Not a scratch on him, either. And all this time the greenhouse had faced into the pasture. Made me think long and hard about which animals to put where. (The freezer, for example, turned out to be the best place for George.)
      Working in the greenhouse pays dividends, though, in opportunities to watch the critters that we own and some we don't own. I've looked up from potting to see a mallard drake and his mate looking in on me from the goose pen, and I enjoy watching the swallows zipping up under the eaves to their nests not three feet from my head. And beyond, in the yard full of dandelions, there are the goldfinches.
      Many people in our area prefer the word "lawn" to "yard" and every year they wallop the dandelions with a herbicide-laced fertilizer. So we're a kind of dandelion island in a sea of miniature golf courses. Goldfinches seem to love dandelion seeds above all else at this time of year, so we get all the goldfinches. They descend upon the yard in troops of twenty, fifty, a hundred, eating, arguing, making love. A goldfinch will land on the seed stalk of a dandelion, barely bending it, and sweep the head clean of the tiny white parasol seeds in moments, then on to the next one. The males are dazzling, and I find myself moving from window to window to get a view of their plumage from a few feet away, empty pot in one hand, a naked plug of soil with a chard seedling held forgotten in the other. It's a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon, it really is.

****

My father's "tiller" was a big machine like the front end of an Allis-Chalmers tractor; it had water-filled tractor-tread wheels that were as tall as I was, and pulled a small but quite real single-moldboard plow. It lasted for two decades. My own first tiller, bought from a hardware store in 1977, lasted until two years ago, or just two years shy of two decades. We practically farmed with these machines, as neither of us seems to know when we have enough ground in cultivation. My most recent tiller, however, I used for about twenty hours last year, and in its second hour this year, it died of a heart attack -- clunk!! I know the sound of a piston rod giving up the ghost, but I'm old enough to remember that I should be hearing that sound after three or four hundred hours or more, not twenty. My old chain saw, a 1979 Husky, will still cut wood if I get around to putting a new sprocket on it, and that was my professional work saw in the Oregon woods; it fought the Memorial Day fire in Sweet Home, in '82, I think. My new saw, on the other hand, one of those black-and-yellow things you can buy in a box at discount stores, lasted two weeks.
      I think I see a pattern here, and it's one that encourages me to rethink my original reaction to Wendell Berry's advocacy of horse-drawn equipment and scythes. I thought then that he was being a romantic, too much of a purist, a professor playing at farming with a professor's income to fall back on, but I think now that his views will eventually make the most economic sense. Not to a salesman, to be sure, but to someone who wants to live in the country, not go there every night to sleep and back into town every morning, mind you, but to live in the country. There comes a time when plunking down good money for gadgets that look like labor-savers but ain't -- because they are going to refuse to do the labor -- begins to look like money spent foolishly.
      Pick up a garden magazine and the bright ads rave at you about the labor you will save with this machine or that machine, but in the end, Thoreau was right. He said: "...I start now on foot, and get there before night....You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime tomorrow...if you are lucky enough to get a job in season." If you have to work for two days, or, ten, or twenty, to earn a tool and it lasts you two, ten, or twenty days under normal conditions, well, you really ought to have investigated the corresponding hand tool and saved half your time!
      Yes, yes, the man's new tiller is busted and he has taken to philosophizing as he turns over the garden with a hay fork and blisters his soft hands: sour grapes we used to call it, per Aesop and his fox. But the blisters heal, the hands toughen, the body begins to slim down a bit, and if there's any sunshine to be had, some vitamin D into the bargain. One begins to look like one who one understands work. And no one will smirk at the ineptitude with which you yank, over and over again, at the starter cord of an intractable machine if, instead, you reach into the toolshed for a fork or spade. Meanwhile I'm beginning to see articles hither and yon about the disproportionate share that tillers, lawnmowers, chainsaws, edgers, and the like have in the despoiling of the air we breathe. Perhaps -- just perhaps -- I'm onto something.
      On the other hand, this is Oregon, where hand-inverted sods resprout at the first hint of rain, which comes almost daily this time of year. So I've taken, as I said last month, to spreading black plastic to kill sods. It's very effective, if kept on for five weeks or more. Technology shouldn't be regarded as either our savior or our nemesis; the key is to use as much of it as necessary to get done what needs to be done, and no more. Now would be the time to rant about skimobiles and power boating, but I'm going to presume that the gentle reader would regard this as preaching to the converted -- take it as a compliment to your good sense.
      As my power tools fail me, one by one, I become more appreciative of my hand tools, and abuse them less and less. I have several hammers, a straight 22 oz., a curved 16 oz., a tack hammer, a ball peen, a masonry hammer, and a couple of sledge/maul combos. I've become aware that these are not all interchangeable, and discovering why a tool is shaped a particular way pleases me mightily. My brace-and-bit, plane, bench vise and bench grinder are all over fifty years old and going strong. The grinder is electric, but it's an old electric, sealed, never needs oiling, perfectly balanced. It can heat up an edged tool very quickly, and I've learned to keep a can full of water handy to sizzle things in, so they they won't turn into butter. As time passes, I use the grinder less frequently, instead locking tools into the vise and leaning over them with a sharp bastard file, knocking the file against the bench from time to time to shed the filings. A file takes a little longer, but it won't destroy temper and you can keep a clean eye on the angle of the cut.
      I keep five shovels. There's a round pointed long-handled shovel for digging and ditching, a square-point for scooping up loose material from a flat hard surface, a d-ring handled tree planting shovel with plates welded to the step for heavy-booted work, a more delicate d-ring shovel with an eighteen inch blade, suitable for bulb work, and a british-spade type thing, a cheap imitation, but useful for light sod-cutting and mixing things in the wheelbarrow. One finds, after time, the point of balance with which a shovel can be wielded all day without undue fatigue. After more time, one becomes aware of the subtleties, such as when it's time to file the blade, or how one can put more pressure on a handle that has been linseed-oiled in the last year than can be put on one that hasn't. One begins to take the trouble to carry a shovel to the shade when not in use, on discovering that sun damages the handle faster than rain.
      Different people have different tool preferences for different techniques. My spouse of twenty years, the Garden Lady, carries around a feed sack with a pillow in it, upon which she kneels to work in the garden with her ever-present trowel. I use the bulb spade and a t-handled dibble stick, which I made from the pearwood handles of a defunct pair of grass shears. She marks her rows and hills with little stakes and yards of string, and sows by hand. I do beds without rows, dropping seeds down a four-foot length of PVC pipe, from a standing position. She seems to use rakes more than I do, and gets beautiful results where I would simply lose patience. I use hoes more, and have come to appreciate the efficiency of stirrup hoes, which she regards as outlandish things, and I believe she has never touched one. I have three -- but it's not that I'm a collector; they came with the place.
      I get a lot of use out of a pair of pruning shears, thirty years old -- a cheap brand, too -- and a heavy duty pair of limb loppers that have outlasted their wooden handles. I drove the tangs into two three-foot-long three-quarter-inch galvanized pipes, and on these iron legs they have walked with me over the land many times. When attacking the ever-growing blackberries I use these; and to draw out the rolls of stock fencing that have languished for fifty years in the blackberry patch, I use a pair of double block pulleys almost a hundred years old, with a two-hundred foot length of rope looped back and forth from block to block, giving me my own strength four times over across a distance of fifty feet. This thing beats a modern come-along for speed and distance if power is not all that's wanted. The rope is new, but that other rope lasted until this year; a mysterious thing of true hemp, soaked in creosote by hands long vanished from the earth. I hated to give it up.
      There are two footbridges on Stony Run Farm, as a seasonal creek divides it right down the middle, end to end. Across these we go, summer and winter, with the wheelbarrows. A wheelbarrow is an amazing device that can hardly be improved upon. It will negotiate tiny gaps while carrying hundreds of pounds with ease. We bring straw to the barn three or four bales at a time from the driveway, feeling our way with our feet, unable to see round the vast load. A wheelbarrow imposes a stately gait that adds dignity to any laborer's demeanor. I bought a five-cubic-foot model at the same time as my old tiller, in 1977, for forty dollars. It has done far more hours of work than the tiller did, and looks fair to outlast me. The other one came with the place. Well, actually, we didn't know it was here at the time, and the former owner probably didn't either -- it was deep in the blackberries. I dug it out, bound up its wounds with baling wire, and found a wheel for it. The thing has handmade handles built for a grip wider than mine, and it wobbles a bit as it goes, but it's still a wheelbarrow, from Hannah knows how far back in the dim past, and it does honest labor almost daily. Every family should have two wheelbarrows. We pass, sometimes, the Garden Lady and I, like ships in the night, laden with our separate but equal treasures.

June

 When I survey the acre of land with which I have surrounded myself, the oak and ash trees, rhododendron, hollyhock beds, barn, and house, I turn upon all these things a critic's eye, and keep ready to hand the pruning knife, fence hammer, and trim brush. They do not yet appear to me as I see them in my mental eye, and I shape them toward an end which I acknowledge as mine, though I sometimes remember they serve other ends as well. I shape the trees to my own pleasure. But so do the children, for whom trees are for climbing. So do the birds, whose need is nesting; so also the carpenter ants, who must bring nectar to that vast colony somewhere in my eaves. We knew, long ago, that we would come to such a place, with its diverse longings, so we called for a document to mark the beginning of our life together. Such a thing could be bought, but we both said, " oh, no, it must be hand made." We could see it as clearly as if it were already done. Each could describe it to the other, and to the other it was the describing of a thing already seen. The young student who volunteered, who shaped our wedding scroll, our fractur, with its brave words, was commissioned also to frame it with a house and trees, flowers, birds, a sense of place in a clearing amid woods. I think she understood this commission, this designing of a dream, that it was our weaving of a spell to catch our future, to make a future. And all who signed that Quaker wedding certificate, thirty-nine in number, understood: hope made visible. This is what art is, though we are living a time when it is not fashionable (at least among the intelligentsia) to say so.
      We get, occasionally, a visitor who signed that document twenty years ago. There is a pause as we come, in the "tour," to the wedding certificate in its place overlooking the bed that I have made, and there is an almost invariable recognition. The trees, the house in a clearing, an unimpeded view of a mountain, a circling raptor. They smile: "you were headed for this place the whole time, weren't you?" Such a dream is a lot to put one's name to, so we owe our thirty-nine witnesses much. I didn't know then, and maybe I don't know now, what the painting meant to those gathered round to hear our vows and sign their names. But it's enough to know they liked it, and still do, and so easily make the connection from it to our present life. Their approval leads me to believe, a little, in my own and my Garden Lady's wisdom: that we could see a way forward, and say so; then having said, follow through. This is prophecy, the oldest art, which also called simply the art of living.
      Every gardener is an artist in this most ancient sense. The seeds and starts, balled trees, piles of rocks, and bags of soil amendment are pieces of a vision already seen, to be brought together with a willing toil and persistence. Even when the planting and placing of the elements of this vision is done, the vision is not yet attained: what was once seen is still a future glory, which the reality must yet grow into. My hollyhocks just now are two to three feet high, and my vision of them towers over me; in my mind's eye they are seven to eight feet, dropping blooms like small ladies-in-waiting among the clumps of spearmint at their feet. These hollyhocks-to-be, hovering in the air above the current scene, are in a sense the real garden, the garden of the mind toward which the outward garden is progressing. The two gardens will not come together without labor. I intervene by fighting slugs and removing grass and dandelions, and by watering.
      Spring watering is a different ritual with every gardener-artist. Some set up their summer sprinklers right away and leave it all to a timer and the available water pressure; those who can afford the initial outlay very wisely invest in a drip system, with the tiny tubes running along every bed, stopping to weep only at a hill of zucchini or at the feet of each of the rhodies. We're a low-budget outfit, so our tools, especially early in the garden year, tend to be labor-intensive. At each end of the house is a spigot, low to the ground to prevent freezing in winter, and to these we have attached enough lengths of cheap garden hose to reach the ducks and geese, the upper garden, the lower garden, the orchard garden, and the various fruit trees and flower beds. The Garden Lady does the animals, the upper garden with her lettuces and brassicas and strawberries, and the Front Beds, which are mostly poppies and marigolds this year, wherever she can tear out enough mint and oregano. I do the rest. This involves a constant war over nozzles. She really only likes one, a greenish fan-shaped thing that hits exactly the right width at four feet to sweep a garden row in one slow pass. She bought it over fifteen years, ago and it has spent enough of that time sunning itself on its coils of hose to have faded in color, and it even seems to have lost weight, as though the years of water rushing through have eroded the plastic from within till we handle it like a blown egg. I dread the day that it falls from some unheeding hand and cracks. We see similar-looking ones marketed nowadays, but they are made in a far and populous country where manufacturing for the American market is all the rage and manufacturing for an appreciation of quality (at least as regards export) most definitely is not. So we baby along the one that we have.
      I like the sweep nozzle, too, for the first five minutes, but then I get restive. It hasn't enough reach, and I'm one of those who stands in one spot dispensing favors near and far. So I generally wind up removing the sweep and hanging it in the crook of the nearest lilac, and put in its place an old fashioned brass nozzle. Antique ones are well made; get one of these. Those in the stores come from that afore-mentioned far-away land that is gulling the poorer sort of shoppers here, and are to be avoided. With the brass nozzle you can produce a fine mist eight feet across, or a brave fireman's blast that fans out, forty feet away, just enough to water a distant tree without accidentally digging it up. There's really no better tool for demonstrating the phrase "all-purpose." The only disadvantage to these old brass nozzles that I can discover, but it is a very real one, is that the Garden Lady removes them to re-install her favored sweep, and puts them down wherever she happens to be. This can be anywhere on the acre, and I have very bad eyes nowadays.
      My current compromise is the "pistol-grip." You can get a quite good visible one, bright yellow, American-made, too, for only three dollars. Be absolutely sure to get the one that is garden-hose threaded for attachments on the barrel. You need never discover why, as the thing is highly functional as is, but once you learn what the threading is there for you'll be pleased. We'll come back to this in a moment.
      There is one other gadget in this category that we own, and that is a water wand, the kind that is about three feet long with a valve at one end and a nice aluminum rose at the other, on a slender crooked neck. The Garden Lady finds it unsatisfactory, but then she holds it like a shower head, above the plants; held this way its water pressure shoves seedlings about like a hurricane and throws dirt onto the bruised leaves. She gets far better results from her faded green sweep because the pressure tends to get lost amid the many large holes in its face, producing a better imitation of rain. But I like the wand very much, at least when working with young plants, because of the so-tiny droplets it produces without choking back the volume of water the way the brass nozzles do. The secret to the wand is to hold it "upside down"; the rose should tip up like a flower (a rose), facing the sun, and its drops should rise into the air and fall by force of gravity alone, gently washing the mulch at the feet of your seedlings. The idea is to imitate, not rain, but a long-necked watering can of the English type, with its brass rose. I drape the hose over my shoulder and wander along, visiting plants and offering them the wash of life at their feet, where it's wanted. It's very meditative, using the wand, because there's no back pressure in the hose. Brass nozzles, by throttling the water, vibrate the hose and always seem a bit hurrisome.
      Now, back to our pistol grip. There are times when you want the rain effect of the sweep or the mist of the wand, without losing the flow control offered by the pistol grip mechanism. No problem. Because you've bought the one with the threaded barrel, you can simply attach these other gizmos as needed, creating the right tool for the job at hand. I've become fond of attaching just the rose from the wand to the pistol grip nozzle; this results in a gadget that seems exactly what's wanted for perennial herbs and berries.
      When I walk about, watering with these various implements, it is generally evening. Direct sun will evaporate much of any water offered at mid-day, and in the mornings I'm generally off to work. Evenings are good for water economy and good for me. I fall into the routine, still noticing weeds that will need attention, or transplants that have stayed overlong in shock, but mostly I'm able to relax and look around. The Garden Lady tucks a bit more straw around her newly transplanted lettuce. Canada geese pass overhead here any time of year, though they are at their most spectacular in autumn; we have also mallards who travel in pairs, one green and one brown, and put down in our goose pen to steal cob and talk to our Khaki Campbells across the fence. A swallow sits on the clothesline in his green dinner jacket and scolds me for getting too close to the birdhouse on the potting shed. The moon rises, sullen and red-faced at first, then brightens as night comes on, and the last of the sun sweeps up the face of Jasper Mountain and disappears where there will soon be stars. It is altogether restful to water a garden by hand if you have the time. Take your garden's advice: forget the evening news and the sitcoms. Make the time.

July

 AS the winter rains subside slowly across the coastal and inland valley landscape, and days are sunny but nights still cool, my neighbors pile up accumulated garden and yard debris, leaving it for a few weeks, perhaps under a plastic tarp. As soon as it's dry enough out, but not dry enough to get them in trouble with the fire warden, they torch off the lot. From a mountain top nearby, one can see this activity as a a kind of Civil War reenactment, with the smoke of the guns drifting from various parts of the field. Filbert farmers are prone to set off a lot of piles at once, so that their places look like some corner of Shiloh.
      When I first began to accumulate such material here at Stony Run, I started to build such a pile, but then remembered reading a book by a maverick Japanese organic farmer. He said that he had no way to fertilize a hillside orchard until he hit upon the idea of gathering wood and spreading it around on the slopes to rot. His trees thrived. I've begun to emulate that basic idea. Since we still use wood heat, I do try to saw up larger branches for the woodpile. The natives are ash and oak, so the smaller branches are useful for the small barbecue pit we inherited with the place. Trimmings of oak, ash, bigleaf maple, blackcherry, and cottonwood go into low places on the land, to help build soil. When there is a lamb, much of this goes to stock feed -- cottonwood is a favorite -- as does the abundant Japanese knotweed festooned with morning glories. Himalaya blackberry, our region's equivalent of kudzu, I leave where it drops when cut. The lawnmower will eventually chip up the drying stems. Some of them I use for bushing peas, which works surprisingly well.
      We have let too much mint grow in too many of the beds, and what we can't use we pull -- and stack around the feet of the fruit trees for mulch. Old squash vines, sunflower stems, hollyhocks, zinnias, cornstalks, "mother" strawberries, and old-growth chard or broccoli plants I carry to the compost bin in the front garden and chop up with a machete. Sods pulled up from the garden, along with what I call wild daisies and the Garden Lady calls "screaming yellow composites," I also throw into the bin, if they haven't gone to seed, and of course all the kitchen stuff goes there. We save our dish water, add it to some other choice "household wastewater," and feed this to fruit trees, grape vines, and flower beds. After I've done the woodcutting for the year, the driveway accumulates a layer of sawdust and chips too small for gathering up for the woodstove and too acid for the garden. This material is gathered up with a square point shovel and wheelbarrow, and added to the "low spots."
      With all this activity, we find there's nothing left over that belongs in a bonfire, so we've never had to have one. In fact, we import whatever we can get. The Garden Lady, who is also the Duck Lady, buys tremendous bales of straw for two bucks apiece, each weighing about the same as the Titanic, and huffs them up to the barn to spread around under the bottoms of the ducks and rabbits. We fight over the resulting mulch/fertilizer, but I generally lose as I haven't the moral advantage of having hauled the bales. In November of every year, I scout around for bags of leaves left curbside. Last year I brought home some twenty-five of these. Some of the bags were big-leaf maple, which is said to be a no-no in the vegetable garden, but they're fine for the "low spots" and around rhododendrons and the like. Some were oak, which can be sweetened with rock lime and used wherever you like. Some were more of a beechy-sweetgum kind of thing, and these were sheet-composted right out onto the garden (way too much to put in the bin) and turned under with the hay-fork "rototiller" in the spring. This seems to work so well that I question the usefulness of a heap. By the time the pile, of whatever humongous size at first, cooks down, there's so little of it that it has to be rationed to the neediest (usually tomatoes), and the rest go hungry.
      If I could afford to, I'd get a chipper. This produces a very democratic product which can be spread around evenly, promoting soil health and microorganism and worm activity (which is the same thing, roughly) throughout the whole area -- can be put on anytime, anywhere, in plant pots, on raised beds, around azaleas, fruit trees, or even the lawn. At Hidden Springs Farm in Georgia, where I was the truck farmer and bakeryman, I set up a bin behind the bakery, made of three sheets of metal roofing, and while waiting for the seventy-five pound lump of bread to rise indoors, shoveled whatever I could find into a Kemp shredder outdoors. Sawdust, mule manure, kitchen wastes, grass clippings, and whole piles of cleared vegetation, including a half-acre of high-nitrogen kudzu, went into the machine, in alternating batches, so that there'd be an even mix in the bin. As soon as the bin was full, I added another one, and when that one was full, I added another. The half-acre garden, which had been in ryegrass over the winter, I tilled in, and after the crops got high enough to mulch, I sheeted the whole area with the contents of the bins. The chippings served as compost, mulch, and pathway. We would show visitors the garden, and on learning that it was organic, they would invariably ask where the compost heap was. "You're looking at it." We never bought fertilizer, except for some organic mixes for the nursery, where a more controlled acidity was called for.
      I remember the nurseryman, David Via (now a famous organic truck farmer who lives in this area) did sometimes have to fight white flies, the bane of greenhouse operations whether organic or not. He set off pungent smoke bombs that were very effective. I asked what was in them. He grinned. "Nicotine. The stuff's an organic insecticide, invented by tobacco plants to kill any bugs that try to eat the leaves." I gave up chewing tobacco that very afternoon. Nasty habit anyway...but I picked up an insight that I've tried to use in gardening ever since, which is that there is generally a cheaper way than the storebought way to do things, and still get results. I make a pomade of chewing tobacco, chips left over from old soap bars, and rabbit manure, all tied up in a cheesecloth, and leave this "teabag" in the watering can overnight. The resulting tea feeds plants and insults bugs effectively, and can be used in the greenhouse, on flower beds, and throughout the young garden, though you might want to avoid the foliage of lettuce and the like slated to be brought in to the kitchen. You can put a similar mix into a hose-end sprayer, but it doesn't seem to me that the resulting dilution, even at the highest ratio, has enough kick. Just keep the solution making daily in the watering can, and use it wherever it's needed most. I leave the can in the greenhouse, where the heat from the sun during the day and radiating back from the brick floor at night can"solarize" the tea. The warmth seems to be preferred by the plants over cold water, and I would do this routine of leaving the water in the can overnight even if didn't have the teabag in it. Once you've made yourself responsible to a lot of plants, every good habit helps.

****

THe Garden Lady and I have always been admirers of Ruth Stout, a Garden Lady of rural Connecticut who one day decided to plant without plowing. Her method was to put down hay of such thickness that weeds could not come through (this is 8 to 12 inches, folks) and pull back the hay to work, in hills or rows, in what amounts to sheltered trenches with walls of hay. She triumphed over the dubious agricultural scientists by showing off her crops, often no more spectacular than those of her more conventional neighbors, but no less, and achieved with minimal watering and no fertilizing at all (the hay rots and/or feeds worms at the bottom, creating, she felt, a balanced diet for her plants). We used to mention her to our friends, and the response was always the same: Yes, but that was back East. This is Oregon, the soil stays too cold when you do that, there are too many slugs that live in the hay, it sprouts a lot of grass, and the plants tend to go yellow on you from lack of nitrogen, etc. As time went on, we found that there was something to these objections. Rows of beans or whatever cannot be planted as early as in bare earth, as there will be poor germination due to the clammy conditions. Slugs do move in, in huge numbers, as they dislike crawling over bare earth but love hay. Our "hay" is straw, but weed seeds do live in it, and they do sprout, especially if you run low on straw for a year. And, sure enough, give the plants only a straw diet and they do seem starvish, especially if it's the first year.
      We found, though, that we could modify the system and get some benefit. We do turn over the garden with a fork, and then cover it with black plastic for six to eight weeks. This gives sod (which can form here over the course of a winter) a chance to die, even in the rainy season, and kills a lot of weed seeds. It also raises the temperature of the soil. Then we strip off the plastic and immediately throw on the fresh straw. If it's over six inches deep there seems to be little to fear from compaction, so we've abandoned trying to maintain raised beds and paths -- with the straw, it's all one raised bed. Meanwhile, the whole garden, except for peas, which can be direct sown, and white radishes ditto, is sprouting in two-inch pots in the greenhouse. By "greenhouse" I mean a kind of lean-to made of salvaged sliding glass doors and used lumber, with a floor of recycled bricks. It cost nothing but labor to build, so it's relatively cost-effective. We've used our plastic pots and flats for eighteen years, so they've depreciated by now, too.
      Along about Memorial Day, if we've managed to wait that long, we move the whole garden out to the garden, so to speak -- annuals to the beds, veggies to the ring garden -- even the corn is grown in pots or flats to about five inches high, then moved out. There are almost no rows. Pick a spot, trowel down through the straw, pop in the plug, tamp, grab another pot and move on. The relatively cool earth is good for the roots, the straw protects the root collar and supports the stem, so there's little need for hardening off or even of flooding the transplants (water 'em good the day before the move, though). There's so little shock that there's almost no wilt or slowdown in growth, and the high reflectivity of the fresh straw provides plenty of strong light to the leaves, above and below, for good growth. The plants will still need nitrogen, though, so our next move is to top dress around them with rich rabbit or duck bedding, and provide a drink of one of our watering-can teas. After a week or two, the garden is virtually maintenance-free right through harvest, just as Ruth Stout said it would be.
      Oh, slugs. Yes, lots and lots. We have big brown leopard slugs, five to six inches long, medium-sized orange thingeys, and little tiny gray ones. There are also snails in stunning numbers, a mottled variety of very pretty appearance and quite large when full grown, as much as two-and-a-half inches in diameter. I'm told these last are actually an import, escargot snails from France, but whatever, I don't eat 'em. Of all these only the tiny grays do any harm, but they do enough for all -- more than the spotted cucumber beetles, which are numerous yet only a nuisance. The Garden Lady says the grays are babies of the orange ones, but I don't know how she knows that. Both turn up by fork or spade, from as deep as eight inches in the ground, in distressingly large numbers. And both are very, very fond of the straw.
      I have tried the beer trick, and, yes, they like beer, but it's a tiring sort of detail, and I like my own beers so few and far between that I go for the better grade of local microbrew and don't wish to share. (!!) And the slugs don't care to travel far for their night of carousing, maybe because the ones on the far side of the garden haven't arrived yet when the dawn patrol kicks in. I have had success with slug bait, but it only seems to be potent for a day or so, so it's addictive, and not especially cheap. And I suspect the stuff. What's in it? Aluminum sulphate? Good for blueberries but not for tomatoes, and tomatoes is where I need it. I could spread lime to fight it, but that takes thinking ahead -- it takes maybe six months for the lime to weather down enough to feed plants.
      I hate to admit it, but I'm enough of a townie not to have known from the start that I have the ultimate answer to slugs right here. I was rooting around the foundation of the house a while back, and came up with one of those giant French snails, which I suspected of munching the flowers, and in a fit of pique threw the little beast over the duck fence. The commotion that ensued was alarming. The ducks were chasing one another in circles, with one duck in front trying to gobble the snail down while five other nipped and bashed at her in an effort to get her to drop the morsel. Aha! I ran into the house and did a bit of research. Yep. The preferred food above all foods, slugs included. Now I had heard that slugs are reasonably migratory, so that if you can keep them out of an area that surrounds an area long enough, you won't find them in the interior. So I've started building a duck pen that has two fences, an outer one and and inner one, with the vegetable garden in the center. We'll let ya know how it goes.
      Must stop typing soon, as a Cascade storm has bred somewhere up around Diamond Lake and is bearing down on us from the southeast, a scenario that almost always includes lightning. It's very dark out, an hour early. Luckily I've already fed the ducks, rabbits and geese. These last hissed at me like a nest of snakes; they have four new yellow goslings and they're sitting on six more eggs, a grueling business for the moms, but they seem to get a lot of satisfaction out of it. I'll take a glass of water and sit out front, admiring the daisies, which somehow glow even in the dark...

August

 AS I rose this morning and carried a cup of English Breakfast to the east porch, I found the Garden Lady already there, with her stein of coffee (enough to kill a horse), admiring her surroundings wistfully.
      "Fall is starting," she said.
      This was a shock. The really hot weather has only just begun, and we've become full-time waterers. But I knew immediately what she meant. The air smelled differently, somehow, than the previous morning, and a golden glow on the wall behind us, the telltale September glow, which I associate with Canada geese going up the river to the great Klamath flyway, suffused the whole porch area with something like a palpable sadness. Where did the summer go, so soon, that we had waited so long to begin? And we have so little to show for our work, so far this year...
      The brassicas went in too late to avoid the flea beetles, which are the current plague. We only did one small bed of peas, rather than the usual four in succession. The tomatoes have barely set fruit. We've just picked the first zucchini, and there's no crookneck squash yet. Granted, I did get a crop off the early sweet corn, but the late variety should have tasseled by now and hasn't even reached waist high yet. The second-year red onions were our only real show crop, making juicy bulbs six inches across. We took most of these to the Friends Meeting House, where there is a tradition of leaving surpluses for all comers on the back porch, but that looks like it will be our only contribution for the year. There were no plums, and few apples; the Asian pears are too young to count, so there's just the one crop on the lone Bartlett to represent the orchard.
      One thing we have a lot of, this year, from our point of view, anyway -- is geese.
      There are in the core flock two White Chinas, Abner and Amanda, and two beautiful grey Africans, Auntie One and Auntie Two. Last year there were about 140 goose eggs, with Amanda producing about as many as the other two together, albeit smaller ones, and of these we left two to be hatched, which produced a couple of fine looking White China goslings, both of whom, however, died not long after fledging, from causes unknown. This year, there were about 100 eggs, of which we left enough in the nest that seven hatched. These came in waves, so to speak. Auntie One took over the brooding early on, hissing if Amanda got anywhere near the nesting box, and hatched three goslings which she took to be her very own. She was willing for Auntie Two to babysit them, or proud papa Abner, but Amanda was not to come near. If she even tried to share in bathing and drinking at the common pools, Auntie One drove her off with hisses, snake-like threatening movements of her long neck, and beating of wings. It got so poor Amanda was getting dehydrated, and we had to spread the various pools and "white buckets" over a large enough area that Auntie One couldn't cover the entire territory, making it possible for poor Amanda to jump off the nest, run for a drink, and run back. For Amanda had chosen to take on the remaining eggs, and stayed with them day and night.
      Eventually four new goslings appeared, which seemed to us smaller at birth than those Auntie One was rearing. Three of these were larger than the last, whom we called Junior. It was now Amanda's turn to go on the offensive. Keeping the new babies close to her, she interposed herself between them and Auntie One at every possible moment, occasionally rushing over to give Auntie One a smashing peck in the back, between the shoulder blades, whenever she seemed to threaten to come too close. I was impressed with Amanda's motherly courage, Auntie One having considerably more reach and strength, and about double Amanda's weight.
      The children grew apace, but came a morning last week when I counted six at feeding time. Had Junior fallen down a missed post-hole somewhere, or had there been perhaps a fox raid? I searched, and before long came across his stiffening corpse -- neck broken -- he'd been severely pecked between the shoulder blades. Amanda?? Nahhh...
      I elected to weed the upper garden, which is close to the fowl pens, and keep an eye on goose society for a bit. Amanda and her remaining three were cropping weeds and sipping water in one pool cluster, Auntie One and everyone else, including Abner, were doing the same in the other area. Then Amanda, going for some stray bits of cob, was momentarily distracted. Instantly Auntie One, who had apparently been single-mindedly on the lookout, dashed across the invisible line of motherly enmity, and gave a slamming peck to the smallest remaining gosling, right at the base of his neck. What we had here was Texas Cheerleader Mom syndrome! I must intervene.
      Leaping over the fence of the duck pen (to the mild astonishment of the ducks), then over the goose fence, I chased Auntie One through the pool areas, overturning buckets, slipping in mud, rounding Auntie One in ever-tightening circles. We bowled over non-Auntie-One geese and goslings in all directions in our epic chase, which seemed to go on for a long, long time, though it was undoubtedly over in a couple of minutes. I held Auntie One's sleek, almost expressionless face close to mine, my fingers wrapped round her downy neck, and pronounced sentence: "Okay, you -- IN WITH THE DUCKS." And dropped her over the fence. The ducks scattered, goggle-eyed and squawking, then went about their business, which was mostly chasing flies.
      At that moment I got the feeling one always gets when one is being watched from behind. I turned. Abner, Auntie Two, Amanda, and the six goslings stood together in an amicable group, regarding me with mild curiosity. And just beyond them, my two neighbors to the west, a retired janitor and his wife, leaned on the fence. They had apparently concluded that there was no need to go the horse races up the valley. The action was right here.
      "Well, which one won?" he asked.
      I was almost too winded to reply.
      Auntie One began treading up and down along the fence across from her three darlings and the rest of the flock, calling to them, and trying the wire at every possible point. The others, after getting over the discovery that the madman was not planning to kill them all, simply went back to grazing; broadleafs first, then grass.
      Auntie Two was the perfect aunt, spelling Amanda as needed in raising the six goslings, who from that moment looked to Amanda for all orders. When they're old enough to defend themselves, the Cheerleader Mom will go back in with them...
      The Goose Lady was away at a family reunion during all this. On her return from Wisconsin, she got my report on goose events of the preceding week, then went out to survey the crime scene. I made tea, and brought it out to the shady side of the "veranda." The Goose Lady returned, took two quiet sips, and said, "You know what? Every one of those babies is a White China!"
      The three that Auntie One had fought so hard for, and been willing to kill for, were all Amanda's.

****

YOU may be interested knowing in what we do with a hundred goose eggs.
      Last year, the Goose Lady kept them in the refrigerator for, oh, about six centuries. I asked about that.
      "Well, we are going to blow them out and make Christmas decorations out of them and things like that...and sell them. I think I can get two bucks apiece for blown goose eggs."
      We?
      "Sure, it's easy; just punch a little bitty hole in each end with a little bitty nail and blow it out into a little bitty cup or something."
      Me.
      I tried the technique as described, and after about five minutes of blowing, had one egg in the cup and a severe headache. A hundred and thirty-nine more eggs waited quietly on the table. No wonder she'd saved me the job....I sat and thought for a bit, then went to the workshop for my high-speed mini-drill, and stopped by the sixteen-year-old's room.
      "Got one of those bicycle pumps and a basketball needle?"
      "Uh, yeah, but what do you want it for?"
      "Trust me, you don't want to know."
      I selected an egg, and, using a cone-shaped grinder bit, opened one end and soften the other (the skinny end). I punched the needle in ever so gently, then pushed down the plunger, slowly, so as to avert an explosion, while holding the needle-inserted egg in the other hand above the cup. The egg emptied itself in about three seconds. Visions of a cottage industry danced in my head. I made quick work of the pile of eggs, emptying the cup after each one into a mixing bowl (this is in case you find a bad egg), in which the eggs would be later blended and moved into freezer bags -- when thawed, the batches are good in baking recipes that call for eggs.
      But as far as cottage industry goes, well, she's never sold one yet. Can't bear to part with them. But after two years of this our Christmas tree looks splendid, and so do those of just about everyone we know....

September

 THERE is in an obscure Emblem Book by one Henry Hawkins, dated 1633, a tribute to one of the garden's great flowers:

The honour of our Gardens, and the miracle of flowers at this day, is the Heliotropion or Flower of the Sun; be it for the height of its stem, approaching to the heavens some cubits high: or beautie of the flower, being as big as a man's head, with a faire ruff on the neck; or, for the number of the leaves, or yellow, vying with the marigold, or, which is more, for al the qualities, nature, and properties of the Flower, which is to wheel about with the Sun; there being no Needle, that more punctually regards the Poles, then doth this Flower the glorious Sun.

     In the spring, the Garden Lady set aside the packets of sunflower seeds that had accumulated, and announced that she would build Sunflower Houses.
      "What are those?" asked I.
      "They are sunflowers planted in a circle, so that children can play in the middle of them in high summer, and make believe that they are houses. It's an old tradition."
      I went to my books to look this up. I didn't find any sunflower houses, but a favorite writer, the gentle Sharon Lovejoy, tells of Hollyhock Houses, which seems to be the same idea. She plants hollyhocks in a circle, and then when they are tall, ties them together to form the rafters of a kind of tipi.
      The Garden Lady took her packets to the greenhouse, filled three flats of two-inch pots with potting soil, and poked one seed down a bit over a quarter of an inch into each one, humming a song about Mistress Mary.
      The long rains went on, and my measured circle of elephant garlic came up, like a green and pungent Fairy Ring. I explained how this would work.
      "This is a circular garden; the rainbird in the middle will reach exactly to the garlic, all the way round, and this gap here is the entrance. Plant your tall things near the perimeter, and your short things, like squash vines near the middle, so that nothing is in any thing else's rain shadow."
      "Okay. And where do the sunflower houses go?"
      "What sunflower houses?"
      Patiently she explained again. I furrowed my brows. "Won't some of them keep the water off the rest? I was kind of envisioning a row, sort of all the way or half way round, then corn further in, then tomatoes, like a sort of staircase."
      "No sunflower houses, no garden." This was said firmly, but I thought I saw a bit of worry around the outer corners of the eyes, as though she thought I might come out fighting for my rows. I did consider it -- briefly.
      "Uh, okay, how about evenly spaced, though, around the perimeter?"
      "Sure, I'll put one here, and here, and here, and here..."
      It was to be the Year of the Sunflower.

For in the morning it beholdes his rising; in his journey, attends upon him; and eyeth him stil, wheresoever he goes; nor ever leaves following him, til he sink downe over head and eares in Tethis's bed, when not being able to behold him anie longer she droops and languishes, til he arise: and then followes him againe to his old lodging, as constantly as ever; with him it riseth, with him it falles, and with him riseth againe.

     The sunflowers did not appear only in the circle garden. Another sunflower house came up in the hilltop garden, menacing the lettuce and onion beds. And there were genetically engineered sunnies in all the beds around the house; tiny ones, and full sized ones that stood on short thick stems, as if someone had beheaded some giant and left the trophy by the city walls. Many of these were along the east side of the house, and followed the sun until midday, then continued staring straight up, as though wondering what had become of their lord and master. Eventually they became too heavy with seed for this myopia, and drooped daylong, no longer befriended of bees but increasingly frequented by birds. At first we admired their sunny looks among the poppies, zinnias, marigolds and such, but, later, in seed time, their ungainliness seemed to us to class with the feathery cosmos, the bachelor buttons and larkspurs, and we pretended not to see them.

Nature hath done wel in not affording it anie odour at al; for with so much beautie and admirable singularities, had there been odour infused therinto, and the sweetnesse of odoriferous flowers withal, even men, who are now half mad in adoring the same for its excellent guifts, would then have been stark mad indeed, with doting upon it.

     Sunflowers are difficult to ignore. On a hot day in August, I went to the circular garden to look (vain hope) for a reddening blush on the hundreds of green tomatoes, and as I sloped along, parting branches, ran headlong into a massive flower head, dangling on a stem bent double with the weight, and a good eighteen inches across. Such a plant demands attention, and will bludgeon you if it doesn't get it. I growled and pushed it away, and it came swinging insistently back across my path. Involuntarily my eye followed the stem into the thicket from whence it had sprung. Oh, yes! Sunflower houses. Well, there's such a thing here, I suppose, except it's awfully weedy in there; no child has had a go this year. I went looking for Emily.

But Nature, it seems, when first she framed a pattern for the rest, not being throughly resolved, what to make it, tree or flower, having brought her workmanship almost unto the top, after a litle pause perhaps, at al adventure put a flower upon it, and so for haste, forgot to put the Musks into it. Wherupon, to countervaile her neglect heerin, the benigne Sol, of meer regard and true compassion, graced her by his frequent and assiduous lookes with those golden rayes it hath. And as the Sun shewes himself to be enamoured with her, she, as reason would, is no lesse taken with his beautie, and by her wil (if by looks we may guesse of the wil) would faine be with him. But like an Estritch, with its leaves as wings, it makes unprofitable offers, to mount up unto him, and to dwel with him; but being tyed by the root, it doth but offer, and no more.

     Emily at first was dubious. She had after all, recently seen Little Shop of Horrors. But fathers are still to be humored, until one reaches a certain age. I rummaged about in the garage and came up with a couple of large scraps of carpet. By throwing one onto the grassy floor of the Sunflower House, I was able to make it instantly homey -- and she took over from there.
      "I'll be right back," she said, and before I knew it, my weeding was over for the day. Emily returned with a couple of dolls, Kirsten and Addy -- Our Addy is called Ellie, though, and has a different history than the official one the manufacturer supplies -- and, handing me Ellie, took Kirsten with her into the biggest house.
      "You and Ellie move into that one over there..." (the small one) "...and you'll be new in the neighborhood, and we'll come over and see you -- oops, not enough room -- so you come and see us, and we'll invite you in to tea." In this fashion are afternoons of Important Grownup Work lost forever.
      It is surprisingly cool in the Sunflower House, while the sun's rays are broiling the lawn only inches away, and shimmering the landscape near and far. One can play for a long time in such a space, and forget the approach of evening. When the four of us gathered our tea things to retreat to our night home, we found the shadows long, and the air golden, and a massive flock of Canada geese skimmed over us, low enough for Emily to hear the wind their wings made, and for even me to hear the talk among them, heading for the river and the gleaning of the wheat fields there.
      The Garden Lady met us at the door, and she, being the artist that she is, knew not to break our wondering silence. She only smiled to see that the web of Sunflower Houses she had woven months before had made its catch. It's thus an old tradition becomes a new one.

It is like the Scepter which the Paynims attribute to their Deitie, that beares an Eye on the top; while this flower is nothing els but an Eye, set on the point of its stem; not to regard the affayres of Mortals so much, as to eye the immortal Sunne with its whole propension; the middle of which flower, where the seed is, as the white of the eye, is like a Turkie-carpet, or some finer cloth wrought with curious needle-work, which is al she hath to entertaine her Paramour.

     Friends came, from far away, to visit. Adults sat round in the shade of the east front, stirring cups. The screen door banged. Emily and Kirsten, Maggie and Addie headed for the garden.
      We will remember the Meteor Night in winter, when the leaden clouds, heavy with Pacific rain, shut out Orion and his gleaming belt. We will remember the tomatoes, Better Boy, Cherry, Brandywine, and Golden Jubilee, when their poor cousin, the frozen tomato soup, is brought from the freezer to thaw. But most of all, as the huge seed heads are plunked, face up, on the well-house roof to gladden the hearts of the shivering juncos and chickadees, we will remember the Sunflower Houses.

October

 IN arid regions, the wise seek out plants that require very little water, the use of which is called "xeriscaping" -- whereas those who own a bit of marsh look for attractive water plants: lotuses, sedges, perhaps a bit of cress. Most gardeners in temperate zones, however, have a wide range of choices and possibilities. Accordingly, some will try everything -- from cacti to Louisiana irises -- and insist that the local setting bend to their will. Plants that have no business in northern climes are fussed over ad infinitum, wrapped against chill winds, covered, uncovered, covered again, and finally cursed for disloyally losing their green fingers to frostbite.
      On any home site, the wise will seek out plants that augment the site, not merely visually, but in ways that use what we know of sun and shade, soil, wind, and water, to enhance the lives of those living there and of lives yet to come. When they consider a tree or shrub, they look around them and think. They see not only the height of the plant and its breadth, but also the effect of its presence through time, of its youth, middle age, declining years and inevitable death. How will each affect its surroundings? Many times, the answers will be considerably less complicated to sort out if you will stick with the native species.
      Every landscape, and every homesite, has a history, and from this history, if it is known or can be discovered, we can learn something about the site's present and future requirements. Our acre, Stony Run, began in the distant past as alluvial deposits at the upper end of a vast glacial-era lake, which once lay, hundreds of feet deep, from here to what is now Portland on the Columbia River, over a hundred miles north. When the lake drained away, leaving the Willamette River and its tributaries to collect the annual runoff in its place, billions of small round stones from the surrounding mountains, mostly of slow-weathering basalt, lay packed together in a matrix of clay particles for miles in all directions. Seeds, borne in by wind, water, and animals, quickly took root, and a forest sprang up, but one adapted to extremes of wet and dry, of shallow, nitrogen-starved soil, of major disturbances by fire and flood. The dominant forest types were a mixed conifer forest of hemlock and western red cedar on the damp northern slopes, and Douglas fir along the ridges. On southern slopes, hot and dry in summer, an oak-madrone forest thrived, with an understory of poison oak at lower elevations, and of manzanita higher up. In the bottoms, a mix of cottonwood, ash, black cherry, and willow showed where the water ran along the bedrock, deep in the ground in summer, or became a surface torrent in winter.
      The valley was popular with humans from their first appearance here, as a place to live and hunt. From the very first, though, they could never resist altering it to suit their needs. Fire was the agent chiefly used; the resulting clearings increased the supply of grasses and fruiting shrubs, which led to an increase in game both small and large, as well as increasing security by providing less cover for marauders from rival tribes. Stony Run, however, remained forested -- part of a vast tract of Douglas firs that survived in the upper valley until the first Europeans arrived with their steel teeth.
      A family of settlers, late arrivals, staked out three hundred twenty acres, and dreamed of putting in, as so many others who had staked out the ancient clearings, wheat -- but didn't have the manpower to clear great swaths of the fir forest at once. So they went into the woodlot business, always whipsawing enough cordwood to meet the bills -- they contracted to provide all the fuel for the one-room schoolhouses for miles around -- but never quite enough to put in wheat. Lilacs in the dooryard bloomed, but never far from the shade. It took almost three generations for the land to be anything but a stump ranch, and by then farming had become something of a luxury occupation hereabouts. Filberts could make money, or grass seed could, but it took money to get started, and these were a people to proud, or too honest, to gamble with other people's money. Bit by bit the old home place was broken up, first into four farms, then eight, then twenty. Fences were built along boundary lines, and along the fences spread, first blackberries, then trees. Not firs; though they love sun, those do not usually travel far in open pasture land. These trees were the Oregon ash, black cherry, willow, and cottonwood of the river's edge, working their way uphill along the edges of the annual floods. Also there were, and had always been, patches of great California black oaks, bearded with moss and lichens like live oaks in the hammocks of old Florida.
      The ashes, however, predominated. There were second growth ash trees until recently over much of Stony Run, all about two feet in diameter, with the broad growth rings of open-grown timber. The last owner before me, however, fell upon hard times, and felt obliged to convert them into firewood, following the precedent of the pioneers. Upon my arrival I found all the good shade -- oak, maple, and ash -- on the north side of the house, where it would do least good. To the south and west, where shade would be needed when the summer sun reached the nineties, were mostly stumps.
      All was not lost. Oaks, when cut, like firs, will not regenerate, but ashes will, and the stumps to the west were all ash. I cleared away the blackberries and the burned cans and tire-wire loops left over from bonfires that the stumps had been subjected to, and watered the stumps. My neighbor, ever alert, was not long in stopping by.
      "Morning." He watched the water pouring over the stump. I tried to distract him.
      "Good morning, sir, lovely day, yes?"
      "Mm."
      "Have our geese been too noisy for you yet?"
      "Mm? Naahh."
      "I have noticed your roses, sir. They're coming along nicely."
      "Aaahh, I dunno." He gazed steadily at the stream of water coursing over the blackened stump. I could already envision him going back into the house, shaking his head the whole way, and telling his wife what that fool Bear was up to this time, but I was forgetting that he had been raised in the family that planted the old lilacs. He looked at me sharply.
      "Ash, huh?"
      "Yessir, ash."
      "Might work." And then he went back in.
      The stumps eventually put out shoots, though one of them waited three years. I chose the strongest shoot from each stump, and flagged it, cutting back the others with pruners. One of these shoots is now over ten feet tall. Ash is a quick wood, quick to rise but also quick to fall, as trees go. But I won't live to see the end of this.
      On the south side I would have to be more creative. But I had something going for me. The northwest corner of the property has been allowed, over time, to go native, and is the haunt of wild things: ferns, quail. Someone had planted a bigleaf maple, a generation ago, by the northwest corner of the house, and some of its seeds had helicoptered into the protected zone and flourished. There are a few silver maples around the place, which are prettier in the fall, but they aren't native and they hate the summer drought. The bigleaf (acer macrophylum) is a native and can be found all along the river and on the mountainsides, too, mostly at lower altitudes. It's also fast growing, and though short-lived compared to, say, an oak, like the ash it's an ideal tree for a short-timer like me who needs shade in his own lifetime. I flagged a few of the likelier saplings and waited for winter. On a stormy day after leaf drop, when the maples had gone to sleep, I stole into their sanctuary with a shovel and dug about beneath their feet. One by one, I lifted them, with what little soil would cling to their surprisingly skimpy roots, into a wheelbarrow, and carted them around to the south side of the house.
      You can't do this with all trees. I have awful luck moving oaks of any size; the acorn puts a taproot down to the day of Creation as soon as it awakes, and woe unto him that disturbs it at its dinner. Oaks will die if you so much as look at them while carrying a digging tool in hand. The bigleaf maple is much more generous. Make a hole, stick it in. Well, it's a good idea to keep the sod back, to add some peat, to stake it for a year or two, and to water generously the first couple of summers, but once it's established the bigleaf will make itself at home --
      -- so much so that you will want to put it twenty feet from the house, if you want the next generation not to call down curses upon your head. Not that I pay more than lip service to the idea myself; mine are twelve feet from the house. Pretty things, though. And while they aren't shading the wall yet, on a hot day I can go out and lie contentedly in their shade -- sort of.

November

 I HAVE dug up and divided the perennials, given the grass a last mow, picked and eaten the last tomato (in November!), and tasted a first frost in the steamed greens. I regret, however, that I did not manage to save seed this year. My target seeds were scarlet runners and sweet peas. Last year's scarlet runners were a big success. I had two kinds, the true runners and a bush variety, which you're supposed to mass, like salvia, for the red blooms. I built a pole tripod for the runners and planted the bush variety around its feet, resulting in a display in the vegetable garden that rapidly became the centerpiece that drew the eye of the visitor, whether human or hummingbird. Somehow I managed to save the big purple beans, in spite of a week of rain at the end of that season, and in separate lots too, though there was no difference between them to see. I put them in clay bowls for safe keeping, one kind in each pot, and gloated over them through the winter. Occasionally I would stop by, plunge a hand into each bowl, and run my fingers though the beans like a miser bathing in gold.
      On a day in May, with a week to go before planting, I went to look over the beans, only to find that one of the bowls was empty, while the other was twice as full as it had been.
      "So, um, what's HAPPENED TO MY BEANS?" I asked the Garden Lady.
      "Looks like one of the kids has been having a tactile experience," she calmly replied.
      I was so unnerved that I went out and planted the lot indiscriminately in a cold flower bed, a week ahead of schedule; only about ten came up, which were all runners. These ultimately produced beans, but my heart wasn't in it, and they are languishing now among the year's dying calendulas and zinnias.
      The sweet peas are more of a success story. We have a spectacular variety that grows here along fence rows and right-of-ways, which with patience can be captured. Three years ago, with this in mind, I rambled into a field near the university where I work, in which I remembered seeing a brilliant display of pink and lilac blooms. I looked over the available plants and their pods (there were about fifty to choose from) and selected three healthy specimens which I discreetly marked with flagging tape. Each week thereafter, on my lunch hour, I dropped by and checked the pods. These will turn brown and become dry and rattly, and they begin to twist into a corkscrew shape. You want to get them just after they dry and just before they twist. I was able to do so, and brought home about 100 pods.
      "What are those?" asked the Garden Lady.
      "Sweet peas!" I began shelling them into a bowl.
      "May I suggest you transfer them from that bowl into an envelope at your earliest possible convenience? And label it CLEARLY?"
      "Sure...uh, how come?"
      "Well, it's good practice generally, but I notice you tend to leave your experiments round the kitchen -- and these things happen to be POISONOUS."
      "Yes'm." So I've been told, and now you have too.
      Not knowing the viability or germination rates for the peas, and having a shortage of 2 inch pots, I elected to put all of the peas in the ground by the corner of the front fence, in spring.
      Nothing happened.
      My neighbor dropped by later that summer, presumably on his annual inspection of all the painting and glazing I haven't done (he built the house, after all), and during the course of a tour, I showed him my dismal fence corner.
      "Oh, those; you plant them in the fall. Takes 'em a long time to get going, too."
      Oh.
      So, more as a matter of maintaining a faint hope than anything else, I kept the little spot cleared and gave it a drink or two over the course of the summer, then eventually gave up.
      The following spring, I discoed three wimpy six-inch-tall pea vines amid the dandelions. Aha! I cleared around them, gave them sips (not much; these are supposed to do fine in our summer droughts), buried them in leaves for the winter, and crossed my fingers.
      This year, I have sweet peas. They've taken over the fence corner, and bloomed all summer long, right behind the mailbox with its wagon wheel, for all the world like a calendar photograph. There were well over a hundred seed pods, too, ready for harvesting; but life has been been cruelly busy. When I went out to collect the pods for shelling, they had done their thing. Each pod had dried, twisted into a corkscrew shape, and exploded, dumping peas near and far. If some of these come up, two years from now, perhaps I'll be able to write about transplanting them. Otherwise, I'll have to wait for next fall to write "SWEET PEAS - POISONOUS" on a manila envelope.

****

Not everything you'll steal will be natives.
      I frequent abandoned farmsteads, where I hope to find enough apples and pears not yet worm-eaten to stay ahead of our pantry requirements till the new orchard into production. It sometimes happens one comes across irresistible items, lost and forgotten in the shifting tides of homesteading. I remember coming home four years ago with a small duffel bag absolutely sulfide with roots.
      "What's all this?" asked the Garden Lady.
      "Well, I was out at this old place picking apples, and there was all this comfrey and I couldn't resist...."
      "No! NO COMFREY!" Her eyes fairly bugged out with horror.
      "Why? Doesn't everybody have comfrey?" I could remember clearly that in Deadwood, Oregon, where we had long lived, all the communes and homesteads had comfrey all over the place.
      "Comfrey tea was big in the seventies, but they found out it's carcinogenic! And it spreads like the dickens and never goes away. You grew up in Georgia, don't you remember the kudzu?"
      Horrors! Yes, I remember kudzu. But our kudzu here is the Himalaya blackberry, and we've learned to coexist with that -- just check our freezer. But I had a plan.
      "Look, I'm only going to put it in the orchard, on the other side of the creek. I'll watch to make sure none of it ever comes up over here."
      "But what do you want it for?"
      "Pigs. Gonna feed it to pigs. Heard it's high protein and doesn't bother them."
      Well, I got away with that one. The comfrey, that is. Our pig barn, in case you're wondering, is the shed up on the hill that's full of all the trash we've pulled out of the blackberries. So that's a project for another millennium. Meanwhile the comfrey is a raving success, but to keep it from spreading across the bridge and triggering a divorce, I harvest the stuff three times a year, before it goes to seed.
      Makes splendid compost.

December

 THIS year, Thanksgiving fell into what Oregonians call a "blue hole," that is, it was a sunny day, producing shirt-sleeve weather which I felt I might as well enjoy as not. For awhile, sitting on a bench in the sun, with the row of Douglas firs to my back, was pretty enchanting, at least as long as the tea lasted. But, as often happens, the beauty of the view consisted in part in knowing what things ought to be done. The guests hadn't arrived yet, and I had done my indoors part in preparing for them, so I set down my cup and wandered up to the barn. Lots of hay here, full of the stuff that hay fills up with when it is called "bedding." Time to get that down to the garden. I went for the wheelbarrow, found its tire flat, rooted around in the garage for a tire pump, found one, pumped up the tire, collected a hay fork, and mucked out the barn. This made nine wheelbarrow loads. These I meant to spread over the north garden, but it was still bristling with tomato cages, like a miniature set covered with electrical transmission towers, waiting for the guy in the monster suit. So I played my part, ripping towers out of the earth, smashing old tomatoes underfoot like so many miniature-set autos, and waving dead tomato vines like uprooted miniature-set trees. I improvised a few lines: "Arrhh! Rrggghh!!" Swinging the props round my head, I turned toward the driveway...
      ...and there stood the first arrivals of the Thanksgiving guests, slightly bug-eyed.
      I do enjoy putting the gardens to bed for the winter, though. There are hoses to be drained and rolled up, tomato cages to stack and file away, tools to organize, pots to sort, disposing of those too badly cracked to save another year, and passing Canada geese to be listened to as they go over their itinerary for the trip south. The flower beds I have taken to simply mowing and covering with leaves. All our perennials seem to know how to deal with the mulch, and come back in fine shape, especially the daisies, while the annuals seem to like best starting out in pots and being transplanted right through the mulch, with better results in June than in May. The warmth in our soil comes late and stays late.
      This year the warmth has stayed very late indeed. The grass is growing, and smells of spring when cut. The daisies have sent up several December blooms, and the Garden Lady's nasturtiums, calendulas, and miniature hollyhocks have done the same. We still have cosmos, though these are finally on their way out. I have gone round to check the lilacs and the trees, and the filberts are perilously close to bud-break. The green spikes of elephant garlic, which I usually see in February, are already a foot high. There are flies, and bees, and the air is full of songbird noises such as one might hear on a June morning. So much warmth is lovely but it is also disturbing.
      El Nino? Global warming? Last year at this time the creek was almost a hundred feet wide, hauling tons of my soil away to the Pacific, and shifting my well-house on its foundations. Several people in Oregon died that night in water and sliding mud. This, too, I'm told, was a sign of global warming, a type of immense storm front known as the "Pineapple Express," rolling up from the waters off Hawaii, dumping six, seven, eight inches of rain at a time in various canyons of the Cascade Range, overwhelming the might and pride of the region's vast network of flood-control dams and levees as though there were nothing there. Global warming, I've read somewhere, doesn't especially produce hot, sunny summers. It produces cloud cover, an increase in precipitation, an increase in wind, and records: record tornadoes, record hurricanes, record blizzards: spikes of hot and cold, fast and slow, all over the record books and the insurance company ledgers. News anchors will rehearse the "the most" this, and "the biggest" that. And the most and the biggest of anything to do with weather will get our attention when we're out in it, or even when it comes knocking at our door.
      I once tenanted a house built of oak, half-timbered in the Tudor style. A storm came in the night and threw a two-hundred-year-old oak tree against that house, oak bone against bones of oak. The house stood the blow, and the tree rolled down the steep pitch of the roof's edge, shredding slates and pitching them over a quarter of an acre. I awoke in time to see an enormous branch punch through the bedroom window, pass within inches of my face, and withdraw again as suddenly as it had come, leaving the empty window to fill with night and a moaning wind. If we are causing an increase in events of this kind, it's time to seriously consider our actions.
      It's my understanding that while climate swings are unavoidable, there is evidence that the current one, if not caused by human activity, is influenced by it. The principal ingredient of that influence is the increase in what are called greenhouse gases, and the major component of these is carbon in the form of carbon dioxide: one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms per molecule, to the tune of millions of tons of these molecules in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is in fact a principal ingredient of life; plants have to have it, in order get hold of their primary building block, which is carbon. They throw away the oxygen, which is how we animals get our free oxygen molecules to breathe. When plants die and rot, or when they burn, which is a normal and frequent event in nature, they release nearly all their carbon back into the atmosphere, so one might ask: how is it that carbon dioxide is a problem? How can there be too much of it if all the plants are returning it to the atmosphere all the time anyway, in a natural cycle?
      A way to understand the problem is to use a banking metaphor. We make a certain amount of money a year, and we spend most of it to maintain our lifestyle. We have a checking account. All the money in the checking account will be spent eventually; but there must be a minimum balance today or we'll start bouncing checks. Perhaps we also have a savings account, and we use its funds to cover our checks, to prevent our overdrafts from ruining our credit. If we use up the money in the savings account, we won't be able to support our current lifestyle if we've been abusing the checking account's minimum balance.
      Where the carbon went is into fossil fuels. At the bottoms of the seas and peat bogs of the world, for perhaps billions of years, carbon has been taken out of circulation that would ordinarily have been exhaled into the atmosphere in the normal rot cycle. Most of this went into limestone, but a lot of it is crude oil and natural gas, a buried and compressed soup of molecules with long names, nearly all of which contain carbon atoms. There are billions of tons of carbon in this savings account. Our checking account of energy is sunshine and the flows of energy that are directly the product of sunshine: wind, water, wood, animals, farms, gardens, alcohol, natural rubber, hydrogen. Our savings account is the stuff from beneath the earth: coal, diesel, fuel oil, gasoline, synthetic lubricants, synthetic rubbers, and plastics: vinyl, polyethylene, nylon, polyurethane. We spend this account at a furious rate, because we cannot live as we wish to live on our income from the sun. There are too many of us, with our real needs, and of us there are too many with artificially induced needs.
      We are perhaps at a point where bankruptcy is inevitable; where our tenure on earth will become untenable and we will be forced to give up the lease. Other tenants will come: perhaps the cockroaches, and perhaps this will be a good thing. But I do love my children, and I feel I should have something to offer them. This is not about their holiday wish list, it's about seeking to stabilize my finances, my planetary-bank-account finances, on their behalf. I wish to offer them a tenable hold on our lease.
      This is a project fraught with hypocrisy. I'm a middle-class American, and Americans, less than two percent of the world's people, are producing over forty per cent of the drain on the savings account. I'm going to drive in to work tomorrow, and there will be only one of me in the car. Circumstances have dictated this. But, there are things that can be done, small gestures which, multiplied by millions of slightly changed lives, will slow the pace at which we're running toward bankruptcy, and give our children a bit of time for making more satisfactory changes. None of this need involve chaining yourself to a tree and screaming at some poor logger; just a few things here and there to keep the kids alive, on the off chance that there's more to this universe with people in it than without. Now, you've heard all this before, some of it here, but let's just go down the checklist one more time:
      First, consider the automobile. What's the mileage? Carry more gas (petrol to some of us) at a time, to prevent evaporation loss, get regular tune-ups, check the tire inflation. Trade down in size to better mileage: there are vehicles that do fifty miles per gallon, and this is more significant to your kids' future than the prestige that big one gets you. Get more passengers, and carpool. Be a passenger. Leave the car home and ride the bus, the train, the subway, the ferry, the monorail, the light rail, the taxi, or the bicycle. No light rail? No bike lanes? Write and call the local planners and city fathers; lobby relentlessly. Push hybrid; push electric. Sell the $*#!!! thing. While you're at it, sell the motor home, the motorboat, the plane, the skimobile, the jet ski, the go cart, and the dirt bike. You don't need 'em; if you do find you need one once in a while, don't buy, rent. Telecommute. Lobby for a shorter work week, then spend the long weekends, the holidays, and the vacations at home (working in the garden!).
      Second, consider the home. Why have a big one when a well-planned small one will do? Insulate, turn the heat down a bit, put on a sweater and a lap blanket, get rid of the air conditioner and plant shade trees on the south side and a windbreak on the north side. Make things out of rocks or used bricks instead of concrete. Use hand tools. No time? Turn off the television, you'll have more time. Look for low-wattage entertainment. Try romance. Romance can be cheap; instead of diamonds and skyview restaurant dinners, try being a good listener. For music, play an acoustic instrument. Read. Read E. F. Schumacher. Reread E. F Schumacher. For lighting, go with sunlight through a skylight, or low-wattage fluorescent. Paint the walls white; you won't need as many watts. Replace the hot water heater, refrigerator and the freezer if they predate the energy-saving models. Install a ground cloth in the crawl space. Sort, reuse, repair, recycle, compost. For the furnishings, when possible make your own or buy locally made. Tear up the lawn and put in ground cover, fruit and nut trees, and fruiting perennials, on a schedule that will prevent your having to buy a new gasoline lawnmower when the present one gives out.
      Third, consider the food. Cigarettes? I won't even tell you, you KNOW better. Drink less alcohol and more water. Eat less meat and more fiber. Eat less prepared food and more fresh produce. Cook less, check out raw. Use double boilers and steamers and avoid frying. Don't send out for pizza; pizza sends for you, and what it wants from your arteries you should want to keep. Audrey Hepburn said the most effective diet is to share your food with the poor; clean out the cabinets and put the stuff in the food drive bin. Find out who's offering organic produce in your area. Find out if what they're offering is really organic. Find out what "organic" is first, if you don't know, and don't depend on the television to tell you. Patronize local organic cooperatives, merchants and farmers. Raise your own food. Avoid those patented hybrid seeds from large corporations; patronize farmers, merchants and cooperatives providing heirloom varieties. Use hand tools. Garden organically. Plant fruit and nut trees. Preserve your own produce. No time? We already talked about that.
      Fourth, look at your clothes (other people do!). Buy less frequently, go for longer lasting, and think cotton and wool and natural dyes. Most clothing now comes directly from the planetary savings account, and "polyester" should become an embarrassing word in your wardrobe. When possible, make your own or buy locally made.
      Fifth, think about your work. Are you working to get your kids out of planetary debt or deeper into it? What are your living expenses? If you're a couple, consider cutting them until only one of you has to work or both of you can work half time. Give the earned time to increased quality of life for the children, or, if you've wisely refrained from contributing to the disastrous population curve, to your friends and neighbors. If you're in the mining, manufacture, distribution, transportation, sales, advertising, or application of planetary-savings-account items, from autos to herbicides, re-career as soon as you feasibly can. Think small. We're not talking communism here, just common accountability, with the following: the outlawing of for-profit corporations, with retention of nonprofits, cooperatives, partnerships and sole ownerships as the only legal entities for commerce, would all by itself go a long way to fixing the drain on your kids' planetary savings. Think about that when you're looking for work. Or looking to buy, for that matter. Or about to vote.
      Sixth, and I'll stop here, what about that vote? If you don't have the vote, be careful who might be reading this over your shoulder, and start working on what it will take to get the vote. For this, your life will not be too cheap a sacrifice for your childrens' future. If you have the vote, think about what you're allowed to vote on. Is it just big political party versus big political party? Or nuclear versus solar? Roads versus light rail? Agribusiness versus sustainable farming? Clear cuts versus forest maintenance? Or to put it more simply, corporate greed versus life? If your vote can't access reality, if it isn't patching the holes in the planetary savings account, change that. Campaign finance reform will be the least of your worries. Get the vote, keep the vote, use the vote; get the real issues up for a vote; inform the electorate. Perhaps you won't see results on this in your lifetime. But consider the alternative.
      Whew! OK, I know, I haven't done maybe a hundredth of that stuff. But I chip away at it here and there. I'm aware, particularly and painfully, of the cost of the infrastructure that maintains the glorified suburb that in my neighborhood passes for country. It takes six times as much of the planetary savings account to establish a rural home as it does for a comparable urban row house. I've elected to be a creature of privilege, and I don't care to look too deeply into what the mirror says about that. But in some things I can give back something of what I have taken. One of these is to learn from the past, to gain pre-fossil-fuels skills, and to apply them, redesigning this acre of the landscape to produce food, shade, and windbreak in ways that do more good and less harm than was done here previously, and to share the knowledge gained, as best I can, with others who also care to learn.

This was a year of smaller gardens at Stony Run; much of what had been cultivated now nourishes a variety of grasses and weed species. I'm slowly cranking around to more trees and fewer vegetable beds; permaculture by default. We got an entire bucket full of nuts from the one young filbert by the driveway, and this has led to thoughts about walnuts and hardy pecans. My neighbor has a sturdy and productive kiwi, and I've been meaning to ask about that. The barn, especially the potting shed side, needs attention, and I'm hoping to move three more bigleaf maples and put in six more fruit trees this month. I'm also clearing more blackberries, with the idea that I'll have a view, from the playhouse/zendo, of the orchard in bloom in the spring. These are the projects that I hope will redeem my time as the northern hemisphere starts its swing back to face the sun; and on the door of the playhouse I've painted the Chinese characters for "Discipline Begun":

It will be a fine motto for December and should last well into January before the color fades. Sometimes it's enough of a new year's resolution simply to remember that every end is always also a beginning.

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