Rusty Mint

Rusty Mint

Posted by Heather Harris

This has been one wacky season for vegetable gardening. First, we had  an April and May with high temperatures ranging from 57 to 88 degrees, a June that started off at around 99 degrees and then plunged into the 60's for most of the rest of the month, and a July that had more days under 80 degrees than over. This has led to a very strange climate that I like to blame for all bad things going on in my garden, whether it has anything to with it or not. I have impeached it for no zucchini, disappearing cucumbers,  thousands of hard, green tomatoes, rotten potatoes, rust on my bumper mint crop, and slug infested collard greens. Naturally my gardening prowess is responsible for the mammoth pumpkin, indefatigable kale plants, and masses of peas and beans.

        

Sadly, like a day of parenting, the entire garden can never be totally successful all at once.  That's why the word is gardener, not planter. Birds, squirrels, and preschoolers can plant. Gardeners have to figure out how to grow, despite the less than ideal circumstances that come every summer for one plant or another. I am admittedly closer to a planter than a gardener.That's why I throw a little of everything out there because something, much like someone, is bound to like the weather. For example, I prefer to lay out in the blazing sun like a lizard. My dad likes to creep out with the vampires when the sky is overcast. Same for plants. The tomatoes want a party in Cancun, the lettuce would prefer a  foggy afternoon in San Francisco. Every now and then though, I attempt to coax something along that should be hating life. Is this cruel or helpful? Again, like parenting, hard to say. I have decided to tackle sassy eye-rolling, I mean, mint rust.

Here is the abridged cure I just read for mint rust (Well, the second cure I read. The first one was about 20 steps long and involved digging up plants, boiling roots at 111 degrees, transplanting blah, blah, blah)

Here's the plan I like and am likely to execute:




1. Cut everything down to the ground.

2. Set a straw fire on top of the roots and burn the fungus up!

Doesn't that sound fun?! Wonder if it works for sass too?

Let's Talk Turkey

Let's Talk Turkey

Posted by Heather Harris

Wild Turkeys in Autumn

I flew to Austin last week for my cousin's wedding, without my husband or children. The ease of my travel was evident as  I watched a harried mother dragging an evil tempered three-year-old by the arm while her over-sized infant dangled precariously, screaming from a hastily snapped front pack. I pitied the parents I saw lined up criss-cross on the floor by the windows, trying to coax toddlers into eating vegetables from their salads while desperately attempting to distract them with the excitement of watching bags get loaded into the cargo hold of the slowly prepping airplane. I watched them, that is, from the nice pleather grown-up seats with my phone plugged in and my Kindle in hand like all of the other classy adults flying without kids. Ah, sweet solitude.

That is, until someone sits next to you on the plane and wants to talk. The parents, while tortured with the annoyances of traveling with children, are not subjected to stranger chit-chat. In fact, strangers avoid sitting next to children in much the same way they'd pass over the seat with a puddle in the middle of it. I watched it happen. On the other hand, I, a reasonably sane looking, smiling, small, quiet, neutral smelling, modestly clothed,white female, politely tucked into the seat by the window, am the first choice of everyone on a Southwest, choose-your- own-seat flight who have run out of empty rows to pick from. An Indian woman in a sari took the aisle seat.

I attempted to look busy and quickly picked up my Martha Stewart Living magazine. It was the Thanksgiving issue, my favorite! And right as I was blissfully engrossed in an article about raising heritage turkeys, ambling in my mind through one of Martha's dreamland farms, a Nigerian man wedged himself and his two bulging backpacks into the middle seat. On cue, the flight attendant announced that all of the overhead bins were full. And that's when I made the critical, "I don't want to talk to you" mistake: I offered the space under my seat for one of his bags. Game on.

What ensued was an hour and a half of ...pure delight! He was immensely interesting and entertaining. I had so many stories from our conversation, that during the weekend my family started to mimic me saying, "My Nigerian friend said..." The best part of the conversation was when he talked about gardening and raising animals in Nigeria. Apparently, like our community gardens in the U.S., they have community "ranches" where you can board your farm animals and have someone else take care of them.(Actually, I'm pretty sure that's what Martha does.)You can come and visit it or take it out for awhile, or eat it, whatever you need! Mark my words, that will be the next Portland trend. And then, unbelievably, he started talking about raising turkeys! I swear I did not in any way indicated that I had just been reading about them. He was talking so loudly and I was laughing so hard at his story about a turkey chasing a university chancellor, his dad's boss, around his fancy car that the woman in the sari told us to be quiet because she was trying to sleep. I've been told to be quiet one other time in my entire life. But that put an end to the conversation because, it turns out, we are both nice people.

Martha Stewart might have rare, heritage turkeys, tended by a staff of 20 poulterers, but this guy has stories! I will now be taking this entire episode as a sign that talking to strangers might really not be that bad, and that I must raise my own turkey for Thanksgiving next year, and the unlucky tom shall be called The Chancellor. Stay tuned...

From the Icy Lake into the Hot Tub

From the Icy Lake into the Hot Tub

Posted by Heather Harris

Warning: This post is only very tangentially related to gardening. Authorial privilege.

This year's pumpkin haul. Not bad for not planting pumpkins...

I almost burned my house down today. Somehow I managed to go out the door with a teapot at full, whistling blast in the kitchen despite the fact that I had to walk through the kitchen to leave. Luckily, when I got to work and reached for my tea, the warning bells finally went off and I remembered the pot was now boiling dry on my power gas burner, full flames blazing. I'm a moron. And I have no excuse because I could not have possibly been distracted by thinking about work. I have the easiest class of students this year that I have ever dreamed of teaching. I hear they are the worst behaved group to menace the halls of this, my new school, in many many years. I have no idea what they are talking about. I have spent the last and only twelve years of my career teaching in Title 1 schools.

 I have seen a misbehaved group of children make a grown man quit mid-day, leaving his colleagues to wonder where he'd gone. I have seen a misbehaved group of children rip a dead bird to pieces. I have seen a misbehaved group of children tear class charts off of walls and dump a pound of glitter in the sink. I have seen many a misbehaved group, and this one doesn't even make the list, much less rank. And yet I look at my teaching partner's face and she looks nearly as distraught as I did the day a severely mistreated student bit me and clawed at my arm, while another one kicked chairs over in the room because math was hard and a third dumped hand-sanitizer over the uni-fix cubes that we were using despite the fact that he had a one-on-one aid with him.

I'm very tempted to say, "Hard?! You haven't seen anything! You should try teaching in a high poverty school and get some perspective!" But that is utterly useless advice. I'm positive that many teachers have worse stories than I do. That does not change the fact that I felt utterly defeated in my own circumstance, and that my teaching partner feels challenged in hers. All it means is that I've jumped from the icy waters of lake poverty into the warm, cozy bubbles of hot tub middle class, and I'm very concerned that jumping back into the lake later will be most unpleasant. Therefore, I must keep myself strong for that inevitable return, but how?

1, I will set things on fire at home so that I have something to worry about at work.
2. I will hike up 500 hundred feet after I drop the kids off at school and run back down the hill despite shin splints.

Rolo, one of the 4 roosters

3. I will push fifty pounds of pumpkins up the hill in the wheelbarrow with the flat tire just for the challenge.
4. I will plan a new addition to the yard that will require shoveling 5,000 tons of gravel and moving large boulders.
5. I will raise four roosters so that my neighbors will hate me and yell at me regularly.
6. I will listen to my husband's stories about his day in a high poverty school and pretend it was my day (not working)
7. I will thank God for this peaceful blessing, go down the river on my paddle board, take in the beauty around me and soak in the glory of the easiest year of teaching in my life (without a wet suit, in January...)

The Chief Manager of Fear

The Chief Manager of Fear

Posted by Heather Harris

Last weekend I bought a new car. Correction. My husband bought a new car. I was at home with the kids watching a YouTube video of a car salesman showing all the great new features of the mini van we were going to buy. I definitely got the better end of the deal. My salesman could be fast forwarded, skipped, paused, or ignored. Greg's was crammed in a cubicle with him, sweating through his cheap, ill-fitting suit, four boxes scrawled with hieroglyphics spread out on the tiny table,while ridiculous comments were spewing out of him like, "You can afford this! You only really need two meals a day!" (a car salesmen really said that to us once).

Flea Beetle Damage on my Tomato

I wasn't called down to the dealership until my signature was required, so I packed up the two kids and showed up with pen in hand hoping to spend a total of two minutes in there. But I forgot about that little room you're sent to at the end to get all of your paperwork from the weasliest guy of all, who's job it is to try and get you to buy the extended warranty after you already said you didn't want one. His job title is probably, "Chief Manager of Fear". Oddly, after you've just sat through hours of talk on how awesome your car is, his job is to explain what a piece of crap you just bought and how it's likely to fall apart moments after you drive off the lot. He had a silicone replica of a Styrofoam cup dumping coffee all over his desk. The kids couldn't take their eyes off it, spilled drinks being one of the most egregious sins in the world of childhood. He droned on and on about the three thousand computers in the car made by, "probably the lowest bidder in Taiwan" that were going to all die as soon as they were set out in the damp, Oregon air. Humidity is a killer. Don't you have medical insurance? It's the same thing! My family comes from a long line of teachers too.  Bla, bla, bla.

Black Aphids on the Fava Beans

Slugs Ravaging the Beans

We left without the warranty as he shook his head like we were surely the most foolish car buyers he had ever seen. Which brings me, finally, to gardening. Purchasing plants, thank the Lord, does not require a salesman. For if it did, the Chief Manager of Fear would have so many terrifying facts to throw at you that we would all be be buying the extended warranties. Especially in May. Every pest that can threaten your newly planted vegetable garden comes crawling out of the earth in May, right when the seedlings are most vulnerable. Slugs, snails, aphids, flea beetles, cutworms, caterpillars, grubs, deer, rabbits, moles, migratory birds; they all seem to turn their ravenous, winter-starved guts towards the tender little shoots and seeds trying to make a start at life. I have cucumber seeds that went into the ground three weeks ago and I haven't seen them since. My tomatoes look like someone sprayed buckshot at their leaves. My bean starts have ragged, slimy holes chomped out of every primary leaf. Lettuce, once six inches tall, has been razed overnight.  I have dumped three boxes of slug bait around the yard since March, yet the slugs keep coming! I sat by my tomatoes for over an hour with a sticky piece of packing tape wrapped around my hand trapping flea beetles. They were back, hopping jubilantly from leaf to leaf, the next morning.

Tomatoes Flowering

But there is hope. Because I know that my garden looked exactly like this last May. And like last year, I know that the beans' true leaves will push up past their decimated primary ones, I'll plant a few more cucumber seeds that will sprout, the tomato leaves will get too tough for the flea beetles weak little jaws, the slugs will eventually be under control, and one day soon I will be harvesting actual vegetables. It turns out, you need the extended warranty for your plants about as much as you need one for a car. Everything really will turn out all right. Doom is not waiting on the other side of the car salesman's sweaty handshake, or lurking in the moist verges of your vegetable bed. Everything will turn out exactly as it was meant too, and I tend to believe that it was meant to be good.

First Fava Bean Pod

Beans Getting true Leaves

Herb Omelette Anyone?

Herb Omelette Anyone?

Posted by Heather Harris

Before

After (but before I planted it)

Stripping the Sod

I left off way back in February with a plan for the herb garden/fire pit. Well...it's done! It went pretty fast...too fast...too easy...I'm waiting for something to go wrong. Like the one hundred pound basalt rocks to come sliding off the hill, or all of the new plants to get dug up and tossed around the yard in a midnight raccoon grub raid. All indicators are pointing to success though. With any luck I will be reclining in an Adirondack chair surrounded by a blooming hedge of edible herbs by mid-July.

Digging the Steps

Of course that takes a little imagination right now. I always forget how bleak new landscaping looks right after you finish the project. It looks out of place, like someone took a weapon to the old plot, scraped, hacked and tore up the offending turf, and then slapped down some foreign materials of rock, soil and scrawny plants to fill in the scar. A bit like an invading army setting up camp in a  hard-won battle field. It doesn't quite look permanent or particularly as victorious as you imagined, because, like everything with gardening, it takes time.

Proof of Life (for my father-in-law)

Two more eggs today!

Speaking of time, it has taken seven years and 10 chickens, but I have finally witnessed a chicken that I own lay an egg! My sad track record of unwanted roosters, vanishing chicks, hungry coyotes, villainous raccoons, and mysterious deaths is finally at an end. THE HARRIS FAMILY HAS A CHICKEN EGG! Yes, we have only had the chickens two days. Sure, they could be dead tomorrow. Yes, my five year old is so jaded that he said, "Let's not give these ones names".Yes, I cheated and procured two hens that have verifiably laid eggs in the past. No, I don't care how pathetic I am. THERE IS AN EGG IN THE %^#&* CHICKEN COOP!

The treasured ovum was carried ceremoniously into the house by my daughter and immediately whipped into pasta carbonara before anything else could happen to it. It might be the best meal I ever ate. I hope those chickens like their new secure, wire-swathed fortress because they are NEVER getting out, and with the protection of zip ties, 10 guage and the Lord God Almighty, nothing is getting in either! Here's to an omelette by Saturday!

Luke Enjoying the Fire Pit

It's Only Mid-February, It's Only Mid-February

It's Only Mid-February, It's Only Mid-February

Posted by Heather Harris

The soon to be herb garden/ fire pit

My husband is out right now getting breaks put on our van. His other accomplishments this three day weekend include building a garden box, scanning all of the tax documents, installing a water heater, talking to a man about repairing a leak in our roof, hiking to a waterfall,and attending church and  two extended family dinners.While I have done several of those things as well, I would categorize most of my time under the heading, "wandering, gazing, daydreaming."

Phase II

 The problem is that nothing can really be done in the garden yet. Sure, I can dump some compost in the vegetable beds, sweep the deck and prune the roses, but that's about it. It really doesn't help that it is 64 degrees and sunny out. I have to chant "It's only mid-February...It's only mid-February" over and over to keep myself from running wildly out to the garden with seed packets and spade clutched in my feverish hands. With all of this chanting, I find myself standing still in the center of the yard a lot, staring at the plot of ground soon to become my herb garden. I am quite certain that our retired neighbor thinks I'm insane. I rake up pine needles for a few seconds and then abruptly stop and stare out into space for ten minutes. To my neighbor it would appear I'm just looking at a lumpy, mole hill pocked  field, but if he saw the vision in my head, he might understand.  Phase II of the Grand Project is about to begin and he doesn't even know it yet. Dill, thyme, and rosemary is spilling out before me. Guests are sitting around a fire on a long summer evening, gravel crunching beneath their feet , sipping herb infused cocktails with the sent of sage and lavender wafting around them. A billowy vision of silver, blue and purple.

I looked back at the early pictures of installing the vegetable garden the other day and then through the end of the summer season. The transformation is remarkable; almost too easy. Clear some grass, bring is some gravel and boxes. Fill with dirt and poke in a few seeds. It hardly seems that this all I should have to do to create a bountiful, beautiful retreat. Gardening is so rewarding. I really can't wait to get started on the next phase. Time to resume my chanting.  It's only mid-February. It's only mid-February...

Seed Catalog: The Uncut Edition

Seed Catalog: The Uncut Edition

Posted by Heather Harris

Christmas is over, it's freezing outside, and I have successfully reorganized every cobwebby corner of my entire house until there is literally nothing left for me and my bouncing, hollering children to do this winter break except bounce and holler. My dad was over last night talking about his Norwegian ancestors that came through Ellis Island and headed west to Montana to live in a cabin smaller than my living room with thirteen of their closest family members. All I could think of was some poor mother with a half dozen kids trapped inside the cabin for six long months because their fingers would snap off if they went outside. Seriously, it is not starvation that threatened those children during those dark Montana winters ...

I sunk down on the couch, asking my Ninja-turtle shelled son to "quiet down" for the twenty-fifth time, lazily looked around the living room that would have housed an entire farm family and then I noticed it. Artfully tucked beneath one of my vegetable gardening books was the  three hundred and fifty-four page seed catalog my mother and father-in-law had given me for Christmas. Yes, this a catalog worth gifting. I had stowed it away in my cleaning frenzy and completely forgotten about it. I darted across the room, greedily snatched it from the shelf and dove back onto the couch knocking three matchbox cars and a cat out of my way.

I pried back the pages, promising myself to read the farmer's note and essays before peeking at the vegetables when two children catapulted off the back of the couch from out of nowhere and landed on either side of me beginning a long interrogation about every detail of the page in front of me. "What's that?" "A cactus"."Who's he?" "Joe". "What's he doing?" "Looking for edible plants all over the world"."Why?" "He's a botanical explorer". "What's that?" "A person who looks for plants all over the world." "Why?" "Because they want to find things no one has seen before." "No one had ever seen that cactus?" "Well the people who live by the cactus have seen it, but not us." "Oh... What's that?"  I answered the first twenty nine questions and then threatened to send them outside if they didn't find something to do. It worked!

And it's a good thing because the catalog is x-rated. It is essentially vegetable pornography. From the title, "The Whole Seed Catalog" to the whirling kernels on the cover fanned out like a french can-can dancer skirt, to the full-color glossy photographs of the most tantalizing, exotic vegetables curated from every corner of the earth, the entire book is a testament to what the herbaceous world has to offer that most likely will never cross your path, even if you plant it. Even the melon the Italians call, "Brutto ma Buono" (Ugly but good) looks somehow sexy in all its warty. leperous glory. It is a very dangerous catalog. It has me re-contemplating ideas long dead: Maybe I can grow a melon. Who says I can't start my entire garden from seed? Picking a vegetable solely because of its romantic name is perfectly sensible. I'm looking at you Noir de Carmes!

It also doesn't help that these are all heritage seeds, which like fathers, come with charming histories about how their ancestors saved them up on a shelf in a small cabin with 13 kids who managed not to break the little glass jar as they played indoor hockey every day of that crazy Montana winter in `06. It is utterly irresistible. I can't tell you how many seeds I have underlined. It's embarrassing.

Of course this can only end badly. I already know that disappointment is looming at my sliding glass door come spring time, even as I salivate over the retouched images of shishito peppers, scarlet kale, and Cambodian eggplants. But dang it, a girl can dream. And I need my own story to pass down to the generations, so maybe my accidental cross pollination of a fungo squash with a vulcan chard will create some enchanting new variety and I can make up my own romantic name like "Mr. Knightly" or "Fitzwilliam Darcy". That will definitely sell. Especially when I explain how its seed was saved from the clutches of a four foot Ninja Turtle one long, cold winter in '15.