Mind-Numbing Weather

Like the inhabitants of a castle preparing against an attack, my spouse and I have shut every window, drawn down the shades, opened the basement door, and hefted the room air-conditioner onto one of the upstairs windowsills.  Hot weather is on the way.

It's the weather that I moved to Vermont to escape, the kind of heat and humidity that reduce me to molluscan status.  Every summer the heat gets stronger and stays longer. If and when the kudzu vines and the cave crickets arrive from the lower latitudes, I'm moving north.

Meanwhile, all I want to do is hibernate or rather, estivate ("a state of dormancy or torpor during summer").  This is unfortunate because, now that the ridiculously long spell of cool weather is over, the garden is exploding.

Instead of writing, I should be out there picking kale to make into pesto.  I should be picking and freezing chard, pulling up the bolted lettuces and planting something else in their space.  Straightening the tomato cages that the daily storms have felled. Weeding the front flower beds, the back flower beds, the vegetable beds.   And pruning the four big lilacs before the job gets too big for me to handle.

But these days the only job I like is picking lavender.  In the morning, after the dew has dried but before the sun unleashes its full fury, I go out with my basket and cut the spears where a single cobalt bud has opened.  It hasn't been a good year for lavender, for although the winter was cold there wasn't enough snow cover.  I lost a couple of bushes, and the survivors aren't flowering well.  But I'll take whatever they give me.

I leave the lavender in its basket on the dining room table, where it releases clouds of scent into the humid air.  I should be tying it into bunches and hanging it up to dry, but that seems like a big effort right now.

Instead, I go and sit blankly by the indoor pond and watch the goldfish play in the fountain stream. Don't ask me to lift a finger, express an opinion, or make any sense.  I'm estivating.

Morning At The Stove

It seems that I spend my life either taking things out of the freezer (fall and winter) or putting things into the freezer (spring and summer). The putting-into-the-freezer season is here, and I'd better get busy, if we want to eat next winter.

I harvested a big armful of rhubarb this morning.  I love those huge leaves, as big as elephant ears, and stack them on some wild rosebush sprouts that I'm trying to suffocate to death (it's almost impossible to kill a wild rosebush without using herbicides).  I chopped up the rhubarb stems and filled three one-gallon bags, each of which--with the addition of eggs, flour, oil and pecans--will make  a batch of six rhubarb bread loaves on some snowy afternoon.  When the chopping was done I was left with the trademark black fingernails that result from some weird reaction between the rhubarb juice and my skin and will take about a week to disappear.

I also picked a basketful of kale, which I tore into pieces and threw, stems and all, into the big vat of dog food that I cook every month.  In case you're wondering, this mixture of rice, veggies, eggs, oil, garlic and powdered milk does not constitute my dogs' entire diet--only about a quarter of it, the rest being a decent kind of kibble.  Wolfie and Bisou love it, though, and I feel that I'm ensuring that they will live forever....

The lavender has just started blooming, so I picked that, hoping to encourage the plants to produce more.  It's not been a good lavender year so far--lavender wants hot, dry weather instead of this chilly damp. I lost a couple of plants over the winter, and the survivors are putting out feeble little blooms.  I hung today's harvest in a bunch from the light fixture above the dining room table.  It doesn't look like much, but I can smell it every time I walk by.

I've been meaning to make arugula soup while the arugula, which does like chilly damp weather, holds out.  Also, my spinach crop has been negligible, but I should do something with it before the weather changes and it bolts.  Meanwhile, it's started raining again.  My green Vermont is so green these days that when I look out the window I almost feel like I'm swimming underwater in some woodland pond.

Slouching Towards Winter

There was frost on the grass this morning, and Wolfie, stimulated by the chill, raced around and skidded and slipped and almost fell.  Good practice for icy mornings to come.

I thought the cold night might have done in the beans, but no such luck.  By noon they were looking as perky as they did in August.  The eggplants and banana peppers are still bearing, and the chard and kale, needless to say, are chugging along as if The Killing Frost weren't around the corner.

Because it was a nice day in which to do the job, I brought in my two zonal geraniums and put them by a south-facing window.  They will stop blooming for a while, but when the snow covers the ground outside, the reflected light will stimulate them to bloom again.

I gave the scented geraniums in their heavy pots a good pruning and dragged them inside for the winter.  I did the same for the big rosemary bush.  Please understand that I mean "big" by Vermont standards.  Rosemary cannot survive our winters and has to be brought indoors, which means it has to be kept in a pot, which keeps it from reaching its full splendor.

Still, I'm quite pleased with my rosemary, which made it through last winter and is the first rosemary plant that hasn't given up the ghost within two weeks of being brought into my house.  I owe this success to my herbalist friend Dona, who told me that rosemary hates to be moved.  I paid attention to her advice and kept the pot anchored next to a south-facing window, refusing to move it even to make room for the Christmas tree.

Also, remembering that the name "rosemary" comes from the Latin ros marinus, meaning sea-dew, and that it grows in the semi-arid hills near the Mediterranean, I kept the soil fairly dry but misted the needles after feeding the dogs every morning.  The plant rewarded me by covering itself with lavender-colored blooms and hanging on until late spring, when it could go back outside.

The rosemary and scented geranium clippings are now drying on woven-straw trays in the dining room.  Does this herb business never stop?  I had finally finished stripping the oregano, thyme and lavender (three whole cups of lavender blossoms, of which I am inordinately proud), and now here are these handfuls of heavenly-smelling leaves that I cannot possibly throw away....

Meanwhile Bisou is mourning the disappearance of her frogs, which have abandoned the warm stones of the patio and dived into the depths of the pond, there to slumber cozily until the spring frenzy wakes them up, a long, long time from now.

Sun Squirreling

These days I'm storing up sunshine like a squirrel stores nuts.  I don't know that I can really store sunshine (maybe in the form of Vitamin D?), but at least I can store up the memory of it.  On second thought, forget that.  I know that it is impossible, on a sleety January day, to recall how it feels to sit in the warm sun.

Regardless, I sat outside on the sunny patio stripping lavender for a while this morning.  I have quite a harvest this year.  My plants, which I placed up against the stone wall in front of the house, made it through their first Vermont winter, thanks no doubt to being snuggled under a thick duvet of snow, their backs against the sun-warmed stones.

Normally, I don't strip lavender, but roughly chop the stems and throw the whole thing into potpourri.  This year, however, I want to make lavender-filled eye pillows, and the stems might feel a little rough against the eyelids of my loved ones--not to mention my own eyelids--so I'm having to separate the blossoms from the stems.  It's a slow, repetitive task, but if you're olfactorily fixated like me, you don't mind it.

While I worked, Wolfie and Bisou passed the stick du jour back and forth to each other.  The bird feeder was right behind me, so I could hear the flutterings of the chickadees as they landed and took off, and also the bulletins they sent out (i.e., tweets) as to their location and activities.  "Just arrived at feeder for lunch," "Dropped a seed!" "Stopped on chicken-house roof to check dog locations," and on and on. 

Replace the flaming maples with gnarled olive trees and the chickadees with hoopoes  (you can see them here) but keep the sun, the cobalt sky and the scent of lavender, and I could have been somewhere on the foothills of the Pyrenees. 
  
Then a chilly breeze came up, and I came back to Vermont.  I gathered up my lavender, called the dogs, and went inside.

Deep Blue, Dull Green

If it doesn't rain soon I'll have to change the name of this blog to My Brown Vermont.

We're having a terrific heat wave (highs of 94F) and it hasn't rained in quite a while.  The usual values of earth and sky around here (bright green vegetation, muted sky) are now reversed:  we havedeep blue skies and dull green vegetation.  It looks like the Mediterranean.  Speaking of which, the last time I was in Spain it was a very wet summer, and gardeners complained that it was ruining their gardens, where everything is planned with an eye to drought resistance.

But that is not the case in Vermont, and even my intensively planted garden is showing signs of stress, and betraying my aversion to watering.  The tomato vines have been dead for a while, but they're full of ripening tomatoes that I must remember to harvest tomorrow morning before it gets hot.  I broke down and watered the beans yesterday, because even though the plants looked fine they weren't setting fruit as fast as they should be at this time of year.  While I was at it I gave the zucchini some water too, in case it still had some life in it.  Amazingly, the kale, chard, eggplants and peppers are unaffected, though I may have to give them a drink in the next couple of days.

Why do I dislike watering so much?  Part of it has to do with dragging the hose around, trying to keep it from knocking down plants, and getting water and mud all over myself.  Part of it is that I get antsy just standing there holding the hose, wondering if I've watered enough yet.  But the main reason is that I'm always afraid that our well will run out of water.

I experienced the waywardness of wells at an impressionable age (30 or so) when we bought our first house in the country.  That well was forever running dry and having to "recover" for long periods, like some 19th century neurasthenic. I could not wash more than one load of laundry a day.  Watering the garden was out of the question.  And if company came to stay, it was axiomatic that we would run out of water in the first 48 hours.

Unlike that one, our present well is faithful and true.  In the five years we have lived here, with sometimes ten people in the house for days at a time, it has never failed us.  It gives delicious-tasting water, so cold that in hot weather we have to put special trays under the toilet tanks so the condensation won't rot the floors.

Still, you never know.  Better safe than sorry.  A stitch in time, and all that.  With these precepts in mind, yesterday I went into water-conservation mode.  I persuaded my husband to adjust the water level in the toilet tanks so they don't use three gallons of water with every flush.  I saved the water from freezing some beans--between the boiling and the cooling baths this came to almost a couple of gallons--and gave it to the hostas in front of the house.  These are the big-leaved kind of hostas that look like something from outer space.  They are super-mulched but were looking dry, so they got the bean water.

Of course hostas look kind of dry at the end of even a wet summer, but how am I to know the difference between a hosta that is dying of thirst and one that is merely tired of summer and wishing for fall?  I have the same dilemma with my two little apple trees.  They each have a number of fat apples ripening nicely, but the foliage looks rather dull.  Should I water them?  I can't bear the thought of them languishing before my very eyes, so I guess I'll put the hose at their feet tonight, and let it drip for an hour.

The only thing that is prospering right now is the lavender, which thinks it's been transplanted to a tawny hillside between an olive grove and the wine-dark sea, and from sheer joy has burst into a mass of late-season blooms.

Home-Made Perfume: Report #1

When the perfume-making bug bit me a couple of weeks ago, I filled a baby food jar with lavender flowers, poured in vodka up to the rim, screwed the lid on tightly and put the jar in the pantry, where I gave it a good shake once a day.

According to the schedule given in the recipe, today was the day to filter out the flowers and pour the resulting eau de lavande into a bottle.

I got out my faithful piece of cheesecloth and draped it over my smallest funnel--and ran into trouble right away. The neck of the funnel was the same diameter as the neck of the bottle, which meant that I had to hold the funnel tightly against the mouth of the bottle with one hand while pouring the contents of the baby food jar with the other. As a result, a good bit of the eau leaked out onto the counter top.

One handed, I nevertheless managed to give the lavender flowers--which were looking pale and wan, having lost all their color to the vodka--a good wringing-out. Then came the moment of truth: I brought the bottle to my nose, inhaled--and all I could smell was alcohol, with perhaps the vaguest tinge of lavender. I gave the bottle a good shaking, sniffed again, and this time I could smell...nothing at all.

I looked at the purplish puddles on the counter and, instead of wiping them off with a sponge, I swept my hands and forearms over them until my skin had absorbed all the liquid and the counter was dry. Surely now, I thought, my skin will smell like lavender. I put my forearm to my nose and, by concentrating really hard, thought I could detect maybe a hint of l.

Not wanting to waste the fruit of my labors, I abandoned my principles and poured some store- bought lavender oil into the bottle and shook it well. Then I sprayed myself with that, and yes, the oil made a little difference, though not much.

I have read that sandalwood oil acts as a fixative in perfume, so next I'll get some of that and see if I can get my perfume to smell like...well, just to smell, period.

But don't hold your breath.

The Nose Report

Blame it on my Mediterranean origins, but to me a garden, to be a garden, has to smell good, and it has to smell strong. Wild marjoram, lavender, rosemary--the hardy, humble-looking plants that cling to the rocky hillsides above the sea and give off their pungent resins in the heat of the sun are the very essence of "garden" to me.

There is nothing like an arid climate to concentrate smell and flavor. In the relatively water-logged eastern U.S., plant life is more visually flamboyant, but pales in the smell department. And that's o.k. with me. I don't envy Mediterranean gardeners their need to water constantly. And at this time of year, a walk through my own slapdash garden makes me feel olfactorily satisfied.

Take the peonies, for example, which are at their peak right now. The previous owners of our house had planted them in a shady spot. Although they bloomed well, they had no smell, and I assumed they belonged to an unscented variety, possibly developed to avoid attracting ants. But I like the look of peony plants, even after the blooms have gone, and when I had to fill some space in a sunny flower bed, I transplanted those bushes. In this, their first spring in the new spot, not only are they loaded with blooms, but they have developed that divine peony scent. All they needed was a little sun.

In the back garden, the mints--apple, spear, orange, and melissa--are knee- and chest-high. I have to step on them to get to the water spigot, and the dogs are forever crushing them in their pursuit of the chipmunk who lives under the stone steps. But the mints forgive these maulings, caress us with their lovely cool smell, and keep on going. Thanks to them, there are no weeds (or much of anything else) in the back garden.

The chamomile has colonized the spaces between the slate slabs of the patio. At noon, when the sun heats up the stone, the chamomile oils from the hundreds of little daisy-like blooms float up to your nose. On either side of the back door, a bush of ornamental sage gives off its curious musky smell. I can't decide whether it's a good smell or not, but I pay attention to it every time I go by. Next to the sage is the huge semi-wild rose bush that I rescued from the edge of the woods and that rewards me with sweetly-scented pink blooms all summer long.

I planted two climbing roses and one rugosa rose against the wall of the chicken shed a month ago, and the rugosa--barely eighteen inches tall--is already covered in blooms. It's a Blanc Double de Coubert, and its flowers--the same morbid white of Southern magnolias--smell spicy. The two New Dawn climbers are also in their infancy, and also covered in buds. I like plants that try to earn their keep.

Finally, sheltered by the stone wall at the side of the driveway, my dozen lavender bushes have survived the winter and are coming into bloom. I'm not sure there's anything better than lavender for generosity and persistence. Pick it and not only do you have a basket full of scent, but the oils will linger on your hands for the rest of the day. Hang it in bunches to dry and it will perfume a room. Put it in your dresser drawers or in what the English so quaintly call the "airing cupboard," or stuff your eye pillow with it, and it will comfort and refresh you every day of the year.

Me, At 100, With Moon And Goat

The Nose In Winter

Took advantage of a heat wave (35F and no wind) today and went for a ramble in the woods behind the house, with Wolfie.

The snow was deep, and the woods were silent. Wolfie led me to the remains—a few orange feathers on the snow—of the hen that died in early winter. I had given her an eco-burial by leaving her under a tree and hoping that some creature would make a meal of her. The snow all around the feathers was crisscrossed with tracks, mostly fox and coyote.

While Wolfie methodically smelled the feathers, the tracks, and the tree trunks against which something had sprayed or scratched, I smelled nothing. I heard nothing. In winter the ears, but especially the nose are largely deprived of stimuli by Nature. (The human nose, that is. The canine nose is never deprived of anything.)

Inside my house, however, it's a different story. This winter's challenge is to keep alive a large rosemary bush that I brought inside in the fall. Rosemary cannot survive Vermont winters outdoors, but it is almost as difficult to get it to survive indoors.

Because my plant-guru friend Dona had admonished me that rosemary hates to be moved, at Christmas we had to jam the tree in a less-than optimal corner, because I refused to upset the rosemary by moving it. A native of the semi-arid Mediterranean, rosemary promptly gives up the ghost if it is over-watered. On the other hand, the indoor climate in winter can be Sahara-like, and rosemary's needle-thin leaves will dry up and drop off even as you fill the watering can. Every morning, in my pajamas, I can be seen spritzer in hand spritzing the rosemary, trying my best to give the effect of morning dew, and looking for signs of trouble.

I am happy to report that, after some initial pouting, the rosemary has settled in for the duration, and covered itself all over with tiny azure blooms. But the best part of the rosemary bush is that when I stroke it, or when Wolfie whacks it with his tail, it releases the smell of a Mediterranean hillside.

Next to the rosemary huddles a smaller lavender plant that I brought inside because I felt sorry for it, even though certain kinds of lavender are supposed to be able to take the winters here. It's starting to look kind of scraggly, despite careful waterings and spritzings, but I think that as the light grows stronger in the south-facing sun room in which it lives, it will cheer up. Meanwhile, it too gives off that Mediterranean smell.

Then there are the lemon/rose-scented geraniums. Unlike the rosemary and lavender, these are practically indestructible. Give them a bit of sun and they will grow as if they had been designed by Nature to live indoors. To keep their bushy shape, I periodically pinch off their top leaves, which makes my fingers smell delicious. Then I carefully dry and store the prunings for future pot-pourris. I've heard that you can pour boiling water over scented-geranium leaves and make tea, but I haven't tried that yet.

Lastly, there is the orange peel, which I save and set out to dry in a basket on the dining room table. When it's brittle I snap it into tiny pieces and store it in an old blue canning jar, where it looks nice. Orange peel works well as a fixative for pot-pourri, and smells terrific.

Rosemary, lavender, orange, geraniums.... I forgot to mention my little laurel tree! In the midst of a Vermont winter, I am surrounded by the plants and smells of a Catalan summer. A small miracle, but it will help me survive until lilac-time.