Terror Among the Tomatoes

Happy Halloween! One way to strike terror into this night of goblins and ghosts is to think of the fears that plants have generated over the centuries. Deadly nightshade was rightly understood to be a poison, but other members of the family, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers were less deadly and more delicious. The large pale flower of datura, another member of the family, is beautiful but equally deadly.

Not all peas (Lathyrus sativus) are benign, or all members of the corn family. Elderberry wine is good, but don’t put raw elderberries on your cereal, or you’ll be ingesting cyanide.

Amy Stewart’s book WICKED PLANTS: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities will keep you awake nights with its full catalog of Deadly, Dangerous, Destructive, Painful and Offensive plants, many of which  could be right in your own garden.  Boo!

Still time to plant

            While at the Shelburne Farm and Garden shop the other day, a woman stopped me to ask if it was too late to plant tulips.  Absolutely not! I had gone into the shop myself to pick up a package of Angelique tulip bulbs, a beautiful pink double tulip that is one of the most popular bulbs sold.

            Fall is bulb planting season and it will last pretty much until the ground is frozen. However, it is best however to get bulbs in the ground when there is still time for the roots to develop.

There are so many spring blooming bulbs to choose from beginning with very early blooming snowdrops and winter aconite to the whole narcissus family (daffodils), tulips, and the summer blooming lilies. Each has somewhat different requirements, but all need sun.

I have planted the small bulbs, snowdrops, winter aconite, scillas, glory of the snow and grape hyacinths in the lawn, and in beds with no extra soil preparation. Because these bulbs are so small they need only be planted three or four inches deep. All will multiply nicely. Since I have planted these in the lawn I like to make sure the lawn gets a late final mowing so they are not totally hidden long dead grass in early spring.  Of course, the grass cannot be mowed again in the spring until the bulb foliage has ripened and given new strength to the bulb.

The family of narcissus which includes all daffodils is huge, with early, mid, and late season bloomers. There are elegant single varieties and varieties that produce several blossoms on a single stem. There are white, yellow, bi color and pink varieties. Some are petite with small blossoms, while others are tall, and some have ruffled double blossoms.

Many daffodils naturalize easily. They will increase in number and need little care. Planting directions often suggest planting with bone meal. Bone meal supplies phosphorous, and since I almost always have a bag of rock phosphate around I use this when I am planting bulbs. Sufficient phosphorous is essential for good root development.

One of the nice things about growing narcissus, is that rodents will not eat the bulbs, allowing them to increase.

One of the things that daffodil gardeners find hardest to manage is that the foliage must be allowed to ripen for at least six weeks after blooming before being cut back.  I have handled, or mishandled, this issue myself. I planted many daffodils in the lawn, imagining a sea of sunshine in the spring. I did not calculate that I couldn’t mow that section of lawn until just about a week before the Annual Rose Viewing at the End of June. This does not make for a very handsome lawn. I have spent a lot of time digging up these daffodils and moving them to a spot where I can enjoy them, and where the quality of the lawn is not as important.

Some people  plant bulbs in the perennial border. If the dying foliage seems too unattractive, it can be gathered together like a pony tail and tied together. This requires some care of both the bulbs and the surrounding plants when dividing either one is called for.

Bulbs can also be planted with ground covers. The ripe foliage will eventually just disappear beneath the ground cover foliage.

Spring blooming bulbs are also lovely in deciduous woodland. They get enough sun in the spring because the trees are leafless. Many of us have a strip of trees and shrubs somewhere in our domestic landscape that be transformed into a lovely spring tableau.

Black Beauty Lily

Summer blooming lilies, whether Asiatics, Oriental, Trumpets or Orienpets, can also be planted now. Lilies like to have their heads in the sun, but their feet shaded. They need to be watered regularly, but do not like damp sites.

I have planted beautiful silver edged wine red Black Beauty lilies in my herb bed right in front of the house. They get sun, but the roots are shaded by all the other plants surrounding them. This is one bed that is really easy to water.

Other lilies are out in the Lawn Beds, where again their heads are in the sun, but other perennials shade the roots.

Lilies come in a variety of forms as well. Black Beauty bears many of the turks cap flowers that I like so much, with their recurved petals and prominent stamens. Mine have only gotten about five feet tall, but they can be taller. They are very hardy and sturdy. The dreaded lily beetles don’t even affect them.

The rubrum lily is another really tough hardy lily with that unforgettable rich lily fragrance. These can be a bit much when brought into the house, but when the perfume wafts through the garden I feel I have a true paradise garden.

Casa Blanca Lily

I am proud to tell you that my fragrant, pristine white Casa Blanca lily won first prize in its class at the Heath Fair, although my husband insists I confess that it was the only lily entered in its class. It is considered the best white lily ever created and mine deserved all the ooohs and ahhhs it elicited from fairgoers. It deserved the blue ribbon, too.

Whether you like the simple pure flowers of the snowdrop, or the glamour of Casa Blanca, you still have time to add these bulbs to your garden for glorious bloom next year.

Between the Rows   October 24, 2009

Technicolored Dream Trees

In my youth I only admired brightly colored maples. I don’t think I am alone. When people talk about the New England fall and set off leaf peeping, it is the brilliance of the maples that they are looking for.

But even maples cannot be counted on to be consistently scarlet. Now that I am older, and spend so much time driving up and down Route 8A which winds through woodlands and along a stream, then onto Route 2, the famous scenic Mohawk Trail, I have become more appreciative and admiring of the other trees that are so common.  

Golden poplar trees line the last bit of road leading to our house.

White barked birches scatter gold across the cerulean sky.

Dense burnished leaves of the young oaks glow in the afternoon sun along the roadside.

Right in my own backyard I have brilliant blueberry foliage to enjoy

in its myriad shades.

Our woods are full of beech trees, but I’ve never hear anyone write an ode to the beech.

I have come to a special admiration of the beech and the progression of fall color. The summer green becomes striped with a sunny yellow. Then it seems those colors change places and the yellow leaves are touched with green. Soon the yellow is tinged with a lively brown before it turns a dry rustling brown. These two beeches growing right next to each other show how unpredictably the color changes.

An interesting aspect of the beech, especially young beech trees is that the leaves are not abscissed in the fall, which is to say, the leaves do not fall off the tree. In the spring the new leaf buds finally push the dead leaf off the branch. If you want to add a new word to your horticultural vocabulary, the term for this process ismarcescense.

Soon the trees will be bare, all the colors dimmed and blown away. Only the dreams of autumn will be left to me. Until next year.

Cleaning Up and Digging In

Old House Gardens delivery

When I called Old House Gardens to order some bulbs last week I feared I might have missed their shipping season, but they reassured me  and on this perfect morning I found my order in the mailbox. It took only a few minutes before I  was out in the garden. I knew just where to plant the ivory Beersheba daffodils – right under the Miss Willmott, a white flowered lilac Jerry Sternstein gave me last year. To say under the bush is a slight mis-statement. The bush has come through one winter, but it is still so small that is hardly any under there. It will come in time, though.

Miss Willmott lilac underplanted with daffodils

I had already planted some bulbs under Miss Willmott and I think this whole area will be quite lovely in the spring. You can see there is a mammoth clump of purple Siberian irises (they could definitley use some dividing) and on the other side of the irises is a pink Miss Canada lilac that blooms later than my other lilacs.

Foxy Lady Dahlias

The dahlias gave a good show this year. Since I had such good luck overwintering them last year I went out to dig them up to keep for next spring.

The main trick to digging dahlias is to avoid cutting the tubers. With just a little luck the one tuber planted will have turned into a substantial bunch. I dug a least a foot away from the stem and loosened the soil and dug around with my hand to  get a sense of where the tubers were before actually lifting them.

After lifting the tubers and shaking off what dirt I can, I do clip off the stems. According to my Wyman’s Encyclopedia you can divide the tubers in fall or spring. I opted for spring and I will store these in a clump. I left the trimmed clumps of tubers outside to dry off, but brought them in before evening. I’ll let them dry out in the house for just a day or two before  storing them in barely damp peat moss in our basement, which  worked well last winter.

I am so grateful for these few mild days. We needed last week’s rain, more than 2 inches, but I also needed some mild days to try and catch up on the fall cleaning. There is less time than you might think because I have other delightful chores to do, like helping to make a gingerbread house for Holiday Village at the Charlemont Federated Church on November 14. There will be many other beautiful gifts, gift certificates, Treasures, crafts and food on offer – along with the gingerbread house, and kits to make your own.

A Toast to the Honey Bee

Langstroth Memorial in Greenfield

“The Creator may be seen in all the works of his hands; but in few more directly than in the wise economy of the Honey-Bee.” Lorenzo L. Langstroth  1853

            Lorenzo L. Langstroth was Pastor of the Second Congregational Church in Greenfield between 1843 and 1848. His memorial on Bank Row, placed in 1948, includes an image of the hive with moveable frames that he invented. For the first time beekeepers, who had been gathering honey since 3500 BCE, could collect honey without destroying the beehive.

            Langstroth makes an appearance several times in A Short History of the Honey Bee: Humans, Flowers, and Bees in the Eternal Chase for Honey by E. Readicker-Henderson with Images by Ilona (Timber Press $19.95), although his connection to Greenfield is never mentioned.

A Short History of the Honey Bee

            Still, in just 163 pages Readicker-Henderson, with the help of Ilona’s beautiful photographs of bees, flowers, many colored pollens and honey, traces the history of the honey bee from the ancient Egyptians who believed honey bees were formed from the tears of the god Ra, and propitiated the gods with offerings of honey, to the ways bees are handled, and threatened by disease and the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in our day. I also emphasize, as he does, that we can help threatened bees by not using unnecessary pesticides on our lawns or in our gardens.

            There are fascinating eras in the study of the bee. For centuries the hive was thought to have a king. It was not until 1788 that the nuptial flight of the queen was documented and understood.

            The great mystery of how bees knew where to find good flowers for nectar and pollen was a mystery right up until Karl von Frisch studied bees in the 1960s, closely observing their reactions when he set out bowls of sugar water (which bees like very much) at different distances and different directions. He determined that bees tell the rest of the hive where to find a good nectar source by dancing. “Intensity, angle, sound, and scent. The bees have their own complex language and grammar, all hidden inside a dance not more different than doing the hokey-pokey,” Readicker-Harrison says.

            The Short History of the Honey Bee wanders through centuries of history, myth, science, poetry, and his own experience as a beekeeper beginning when his father brought home a fully populated hive one summer night when the air was sweet with the fragrance of orange blossoms. He was dubious, but after checking his Boy Scout Handbook and seeing that there was a badge to be earned, he softened. When he tasted his first honey that fall, he was totally won over.

            Of the more than 16,000 species of bees that evolved at the same time that flowers appeared on the earth, about 100 million years ago, only seven make honey. Of these, only one, Apis mellifera, is the bee we call the honey bee.  It originated in the Mediterranean area, but was transported to our continent by Spanish explorers in the 17^th century. Apparently once you have tasted honey, you cannot be without it for long.

            Certainly our diet cannot be without honey bees. Two-thirds of edible plants, and about one third of the American diet would not exist except for the hard work of the honey bee pollinating the plants we love to eat.  Other pollinators include various insects including wasps, and many bats, so we must be thankful to them as well.

            The life cycle of the bee is described from the moment the queen bee lays an egg in the hexagonal cell made of beeswax to its hatching in 21 days, to take on a sequence of duties, in the hive at first, and finally as a foraging bee, bringing nectar and pollen back to the hive. I think most of us are familiar with the three categories of bees in a hive. There is the queen who will live for a couple of years, laying up to 2000 eggs a day. Every day. The workers care for and feed the queen as well as the brood, and perform all the other tasks involved in maintaining the hive. They will also create a new queen by feeding a few of the larval bees the special royal jelly when there is a need. There are a few drones, whose only function is to mate with the queen on her single nuptial flight; they will be killed or booted out of the hive when their job is done.

            Honey is a main subject of this delightful book.  Readicker-Henderson makes a strong case for passing by supermarket honey and buying local honey. “Forget the wine snobs who tell you that what they drink is the essence of the country. Honey is more than that. It is the truest distillation of the landscape, as specific to a place as the way sunlight hits flowers in the morning,” he says.

            We are fortunate in our area to have several local beekeepers and apiaries. Tim Smith at Apex Orchards sells his honey, as do Bonita and Dan Conlon at Warm Colors Apiary in South Deerfield. Warm Apiaries sells specialty honeys, made from the nectar of a single plant like buckwheat, appleblossoms, raspberry blossoms and basswood. Each flower has its own color, fragrance and flavor, but all are sweet – and good for you. ####

            Between the Rows   October 17, 2009

Text on memorial marker on the lawn of the 2^nd Congregational Church in Greenfield:

Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth

December 25, 1810

October 6, 1895

Pastor of the Second Congregational Church, Greenfield, Massachusetts

1843 – 1848

Inventor of the moveable-frame bee-hive which made modern beekeeping possible, 1851

Scholar, Observer, Author, Friend of Mankind

This tablet is erected as acknowledgement of the debt of beekeepers of the world to his skills and unselfish leadership

July 18, 1948

Compost – Cold and Hot

Cold Compost

Some people curse the falling leaves. Not me. Of course, since the wind blows all the leaves off my hill, the only labor I have is to collect the bags of leaves from industrious neighbors. I can never get enough.

I learned the technique of Cold Composting from the late Larry Leitner. He collected leaves and pressed them down into fence wire frames that he made in various sizes and shapes. He prepared these cold compost piles in the fall, and in the spring, he planted seedlings right in the pile.  The leaves would have broken down substantially, and sunk down. The piles would not be as fluffy as they were in the fall. He would make a small indentation in the pile, fill it with a quart or so of garden soil and put in the seedling. Large vegetable plants worked well, like the coles, or summer squash, but herb and flower seedlings did just as well.  Since there is nothing but leaves in this compost pile it does not heat up. There is nothing to harm tender plant roots. The only thing leaf compost beds need is sufficient watering during the growing season. They will dry out quickly.

Larry liked these beds because it used the leaves for free fertilizer, and because neighborhood dogs  didn’t damage his garden.  I have planted in these beds when I didn’t have good soil. The harvest was good, and I ultimately ended up with good soil where I used these beds.

These days I mostly make cold compost in a compost bin that I got a few years ago. As the leaves break down (and they break down faster than you might imagine) I can add more leaves to the bin. You can see I have several bags of leaves waiting in the wings.

Of course, at this point in the fall I have lots of garden clean up items to put in my regular compost pile. I do not manage it in a very scientific manner, but I do add occasional layers of chicken manure to the weeds, vines, dead annuals and regular kitchen waste. It will break down eventually, and I will always need compost, early or late.

Composting gives me a sense of thrift, making fertilizer out of scraps and free leaves, and of environmental responsibility, working with the natural cycle beginning with the seed which grows, dies, rots and makes the nourishment for the next crop.

Avery’s Comes Through

Allis Chalmers and crew

The joy of living in the country is that the men get to have neat toys. Henry has a complicated relationship with his Allis Chalmers tractor, which needs constant tinkering, born as it was in 1950, but it is good for working with a grandson and taking care of big chores.

But there is that tinkering. Lately Henry has been fighting with the carbeurator and the gas tank, both of which have rusty interiors. The rust flakes off and gets in the fuel line – and the tractor stops.  On our most recent stop at Avery’s General Store Henry was explaining his most recent efforts to Dennis Avery, proprietor.

“So, then I took a chopstick to try and figure out how much gas was in the tank,” Henry said.

“That’s because a chopstick is just another word for dipstick?”

“Close enough, but the chopstick, wasn’t quite long enough so . . .”

“So you dropped it in the tank.” Dennis is very quick to understand these things.

“Yes, so now I have to get the chopstick out of the tank. What am I going to do?”

Now, Avery’s General Store sells everything we need: groceries, fabulous meats, hardware, paint, sturdy clothes, cooking gear, gardening gear, bird feeders, mops and brooms. We have tried to stump him, but he has picture hooks for moldings, pails big enough for sponge mops, old fashioned mouse traps, and the name of the paint shade on a neighbor’s admired lawn chairs. However, Dennis also has a twisted sense of humor and has suggested that he sells all kinds of other things that we had never heard of and that in fact do not exist. So I only laughed at his next response.

“Oh, that’s easy. You need a mechanic’s gripper.”

No joke. And the mechanic’s gripper was hanging right by the store’s front door. A quick purchase, a race up the hill to try out our new tool.

Business end of the gripper

The mechanic’s gripper (which I found out our car mechanic does actually own, along with various sized magnets) is about 18 inches long with a plunger device on one end, that opens and shuts the gripper on the other end.

Peering into the gas tank with a flashlight AND the gripper.

I got it! Success!  Avery’s came through again, and solved our problems.

My To-Do List

The Monday Record was intended to show what I had accomplished in the preceeding week, possibly including Monday itself. However, this week I spent a lot of time looking out the window at rain, and wind, and even snow muttering that if I were a Real Gardener I wouldn’t let poor weather stop me from attending to all the chores that needed attending to!

After five days of below freezing tempeatures, the low temperature today was 27 degrees. After the first two hard frost the dahlia foliage was killed, but I haven’t yet made it out to dig up the tubers and let them dry. Last year I packed my increased number of tubers away in barely damp peat moss and left them in the basement (a fairly constant 50 degrees. I used an unclosed plastic bag and a defunct picnic cooler as the storage unit.  I checked them a couple of times over the course of the winter and they remained firm. By the time I thought about potting them up to get a head start on the season, they were already sending out shoots. The weather this week is supposed to be fine, even warm. I hope the tubers will be sound when I dig them up. This year I am planning to mark the dug tubers with an ID, variety, or at least color name. That will make next year’s garden less haphazard.  Add ID tags to the to-do list.

The freezes that killed the dahlias made the gingko trees lose all their leaves at once. Add raking to the list.

I thought I had ripped out all the annuals, but here is whats left of the red zinnias, behind the puple asters. All dead. All needing to be ripped out or cut back for the winter.  Alma Potschke along with various other perennials, needs cutting back, too.

The peonies are dead, too. My to-do list for the past two weeks has noted the necessity to cut them back. This week for sure. My list is growing.

I haven’t been totally idle. I’ve been weeding and digging vegetable beds, adding compost and lime. I’m not done yet. Add that to the list.

The vegetable garden isn’t quite done. The deer snacked on the Brussels sprouts foliage, but most of the sprouts are intact. Some years we have picked the last sprouts for Thanksgiving dinner.

Even in the rain I could pick up bagged leaves from a neighbor for my compost piles. I put three of these huge bags in the black plastic composter, used earlier for a blighted potato planter, The other bags are on and around my regular compost piles. I have a separate compost pile for rough green struff, heavy stems, and questionalbe weed roots.  I do try not to put any weeds with dangerous roots, like quack grass or mint, or tansy, in the regular compost pile. I am looking forward to a spring with lots of available compost.

Anything else on the list?  Well, just a few things. Plant some bulbs, spread more wood chips, put away the hoses, empty, clean and put away flower pots?  What’s on your to-do list?

The Fairy 10-19-2009

Bloom is gone, EXCEPT for The Fairy. Both bushes are still blooming. A testament to their hardiness, as well as their loveliness.

I

Heath School Garden

Carin Burnes and Virginia Gary

             ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

             How does your garden grow?

            With silver bells and cockleshells,

            And pretty maids all in a row.’

            Illustrations of this familiar nursery rhyme tend to show proper young ladies in beribboned batiste holding colorful watering cans with clean hands, but while the students at the Heath Elementary School do all they can to make their garden grow, there is no sign of batiste.

            Real modern children favor denim and t-shirts and hands dirty with planting, weeding and harvesting.

            Five years ago Carin and Chris Burnes, who with their children are avid organic gardeners, started a Garden Club at the school. This was essentially an extra-curricular activity, but two years ago, Virginia Gary, a teacher, saw how gardening could be integrated into the curriculum. Many parents feared their children would not be interested, but since there is as much fun as learning in the garden those fears were unfounded.

            Gary explained the ways the garden fits into the standard curriculum. The theme for all the kindergarten children is Explore; there is everything to explore in the garden.

            Gary teaches one of the Primary classes this year (Heath School combines ages in some classes) and the science curriculum focuses on Life Cycles. She said last spring students planted pole beans with beans they had saved from the previous year’s crop. That was a concrete example of complete life cycle.

            Third and fourth graders study plants. Where better than in a garden?

            It is a challenge to find a garden hook in the fifth and sixth grade curriculum, but this year they will be doing soil testing and studying the implications, as well as helping spread wood chip mulch around the perimeter of the garden in every gardener’s never ending battle against weeds.

            Each classroom accepts responsibility for a section of the garden. The kindergarteners got the biggest plants – Hubbard squash!

 Jorie McCloud’s class grew the native American Three Sisters, corn, squash and beans, but with a twist. Instead of sweet corn McCloud grew broom corn. These older children combine their garden work with what they learned at Old Sturbridge Village about brooms. They will make their own broom and research the capabilities of the brooms they find in their own homes.

When it was all planted the garden included all the usual veggies.

            It took some community help to start the garden in the spring. Mike Smead rototilled and Dominic Musacchio, Shelburne Farm and Garden, and Avery’s General Store donated seeds and plants. David Gott of the Benson Place blueberry farm worked with the older students on pruning the school’s fruit trees.

            All the students spend some time in the garden every week.  Working with the cold frames provide extra excitement because the glass sections are not hinged and need to be lifted and laid on the grass. And what enjoys that warm space under the glass after it has been in the sun for a while? Snakes!

            “Yes,” Gary sighed, “everyone loves snakes. And catching crickets. And watching caterpillars. I am hoping we can plant a butterfly and hummingbird garden so we can attract even more birds and butterflies.

            “Thinning the carrots is not so much fun. Still, one child got so carried away with thinning, we had to replant that section. It’s all learning,” Gary said.

            The garden was tended during the summer by families who took responsibility for a week or two.  Some families spent a lot of time in the garden together. Families were also welcome to harvest the produce as it came in.

            Now that school is in session produce has turned up in cafeteria lunches. The children loved digging up the potatoes and washing them. And eating them, However, the big stuffed baked potatoes were not from the garden. Even though the youngest students had dug and washed their own small potatoes, they had trouble grasping the concept that the big potatoes did not come from their own garden.

            Teachers and students continue to learn, as I have, that work in the garden leads down many paths, history, math, writing, art and music.  They measure and map the garden, keep journals of the garden’s progress, study how plants like potatoes originated in the New World, are transplanted to Europe, become diseased and send thousands of Irish immigrants to the United States to escape the great Potato Famine. This is a whole different aspect of the ‘Columbian Exchange’, the movement of plants both east and west across the Atlantic.

            They look at the mysterious zucchini-pumpkin cross and talk about pollinators, pollination, and hybridization.

            “We want to feed the school,” Gary said. “That is one of our goals.”  To that end they are planning ways to improve the garden. “We need a shed. Right now it takes nearly half a period just to bring the wheelbarrow and tools to the garden. We want to make raised beds which would make it easier for the students, and keep the soil from compacting.”  Grants are being written. All donations are welcome.

            “Inch by inch, row by row,” this garden is growing, as are the gardeners. They grow in their understanding of the soil, in their appreciation of the bounty they can help produce, in the discovery of where they fit, and how they affect the natural systems of our planet. That is a full curriculum.  ###

In early June I visited the Heath School for Garden Day. The kindergarteners were going to plant sunflowers around their sand pile. They dug a trench but needed bags of top soil. Heavy bags. The girls were just as strong and devoted to duty as the boys.

The sunflowers grew all summer, as best they could this cold wet summer. Another lesson in the garden, but the kindergarteners were perfectly happy.          

      Between the Rows   October 10, 2009 

Blog Action Day – Water Here and Where

Our Frog Pond

Our Frog Pond is beautiful. And useful. When our dilapidated barn was struck by lightning in the middle of the night, July 5, 1990, the volunteer fire department was able to pump water to help put out the fire. In fact, the previous owners had enlarged the pond which is stream and spring fed to make it a fire pond. The frogs like it, and so do the grandchildren. So do we. It’s good for swimming and catching newts. Catch and release, of course. We never manage to catch frogs.

Dug Well

We actually have a lot of water on our hill. Some of it we located the day after we moved in right after Thanksgiving 1979. The minute we arrived in Massachusetts from NYC, the temperature plummeted. The pipes in our new old farmhouse froze. We had no water. Our three daughters who were still living at home were not best pleased. The first thing Henry had to do when we woke up was go out and locate the dug well we had been told was in back of the house. It had been covered over and looked like wintry lawn. Henry dug, found it and uncovered it. We admired the well, a miracle of engineering and labor thirty feet deep with beautiful fieldstone walls. We hauled water by hand for several days until we thawed the pipes and got the drilled well in operation. A few years ago we put a concrete tile and cover to top the dug well, making access easier when we used it for irrigation by letting out sump pump down into the well. We never wanted to use water from the drilled well for irrigation. There are enough people in Heath who have had their wells go dry that we are aware of the dangers.

Pasture well

There is also a dug well out in the pasture, about 100 yards from the house. There was a gravity feed pipe that carried water from the well to the house, but it was separate from water from the drilled well that was the main water supply that we continue to use. We used that water for irrigation until it started smelling really really bad.  Henry girded his loins, took a ladder and climbed down the 15 food deep well – and brought up a couple of dead skunks  that managed to get in even though a large stone covered the well. Henry disconnected the line to the house, and we buried the skunks under the Applejack rose. Applejack thrives.

Lawn Bed Well

Ten years ago we created the two Lawn Beds and had our five toddler and infant grandsons plant gingko trees. Those boys are now 13 and 11 years old; the beds have been filled in with shrubs and perennials. One day, about four years ago Henry was helping me dig so I could put in an Alma Potschke aster. He hit a rock. He was always hitting a rock, but this rock slipped and skittered – and went SPLASH!  Upon closer inspection Henry saw that a large flat stone covered another well!  This one was smaller in diameter and only about 10 feet deep.  Again, it was lined with stone. We wondered if it was the first well, dug when the original house was built in the middle of the 19th century. I had great plans for turning it into a fountain, but it only collects ground water and the level varies radically over the course of the year. 

Drilled well

Last year when we had the drilled well in back of the house repaired and added an above ground wellhead to bring it up to code and make it legal, we took the circular cement block that had covered it (and then been covered with sod) and used that to  cover the Lawn Bed Well, that had been much more informally covered. The wellhead is not a thing of beauty, but we haven’t come up with a disguise yet. I do remember my friend Cindy Fisher of Big Bang Mosaics who built a beautiful mosaic bird bath to cover her wellhead.  Hmmmmm.

I have a lot of water on my hill. I am aware of how blessed we are, because wells do run dry, even here in Heath. Even here in Heath we sometimes have to haul water by hand. Even so, we don’t have to carry it far, or we can carry it by car from Whittemore Spring, every Heathan’s emergency water supply.

Snapshot of a Kenya snapshot

I can’t help remembering  when we visited our Peace Corps daughter Betsy on her Kenyan hill town where the women had to carry water from a spring a mile away. One of Betsy’s jobs was to repair a water storage tank at an old British colonial farm house for the villagers to use. She also supervised the laying of a gravity feed line from a spring to a new large water storage tank that she and villagers  built. We were fortunate enough to be visiting in July of 1989 when water was finally available from that tank. Great Celebration! Both tanks brought clean water much closer to the village.

 When we lived in Beijing, the capital city of China, we knew that many families had to share a single tap. The old houses had no running water. Which means no bathrooms. Which means chamber pots or a trip to the public bathroom on the corner. And this was in a modern city in 1989. We have seen how much more work it takes to get enough water for household use in the third world, but where you can at least have your own choo (outhouse).

We have hauled water ourselves, but worse than having to go to a lot of trouble to have water, is living where water is so scarce that the crops have dried up, where the desert has moved in, where people have had to leave their land and where water has to be trucked in their temporary camps.

The talk is all about Global Warming or Climate Change, but I think a more accurate description of what is happening is Climate Disruption.  There are more storms and destructive floods in some places. Too much water. And there are more long droughts in other places. Too little water. Here in Heath we talk about Climate Disruption causing a July with 23 days of heavy rains, breaking weather records, and a very dry September. Local farmers as well as local gardeners suffer. We feel the necessity of slowing and stopping the production of greenhouse gases that cause this problem. We hope our efforts, and efforts around the world, will not be too late.

To see what other over 8000 bloggers around the world have to say about Climate Change logon to the BLOG ACTION DAY site and take your pick. Three of the postings I’ve found valuable are Girl With Pen, Water Is Life and Lil Fish Studios News.