Weasel – Trapped!

Saturday morning I substituted for our wonderful Assistant Librarian, Lyra, who is on maternity leave and tending lusty young Jupiter. Needless to say the three chickens I had lost to a weasel during the week was a topic of conversation with library patrons. I said we put out a rat trap and a Havahart, but did not think that peanut butter was the kind of bait to attract a weasel. Everyone agreed that peanut butter did not sound like weasel food – and one knowledgeable patron confidently suggested liver.

When I got home I learned that another chicken had been killed. The traps were empty. Liver was our next strategy.  We found frozen liver at the supermarket and briefly balked at the $3.50 price tag. If successful we were only going to use an ounce or two; if unsuccessful we were going to give the chickens away and save them from certain death.  Finally we did toss the beef liver into our basket.

Sunday morning Henry gritted his teeth and tromped out to the hen house through more inches of new fallen snow.

He came back in the house and made me scream; the weasel had been seduced by the bloody liver. I will say no more about the weasel’s fate.

Mary McClintock’s Gift

Many of us know Mary McClintock as a writer who delights in good local food, celebrates the farmers who raise it, and brings us advice from the cooks who really know what to do with it. I know I have enjoyed her Wednesday food column, Savoring the Seasons, ever since it began  nearly four years ago. I’ve learned a lot about vegetables unknown to me including the gilfeather turnip.

During her California youth McClintock probably didn’t spend any more time thinking about vegetables than any other child in her neighborhood, although she enjoyed working with her mother in their garden and attending farmer’s markets where they could buy fresh local food – before that was a catch phrase. Her mother also taught her about preserving food. Together the two of them would pick apricots and peaches and then turn them into golden apricot jam and peach chutney.

Playing on the Hawaiian beach where the family lived for a couple of years, and learning the names of plants in the California woods from her mother instilled a deep love of the outdoors in McClintock.

McClintock’s life has been filled with many jobs and many academic adventures. “Important people in my life showed up at the right moment to steer me into my next educational institution or path. . . .  Two high school teachers spent two years talking to me about the wonders of Mt. Holyoke, including that I could ride horses, canoe and be part of the Outing Club. I thank them every day of my life for getting me to Mt. Holyoke,” she said.

Joan Rising, a teacher at Greenfield Community College “steered me to GCC’s Outdoor Leadership Program when I was wanting to pursue work as an outdoor leader and didn’t know how to get there.”

The work McClintock did in Springfield with very difficult teenage boys in an outdoor program made her realize she didn’t have the knowledge of education and psychology that would make her more effective. One of her colleagues in that program was a student at the University of Massachusetts School of Education and led McClintock to attend and study Organizational Development for a Master’s Degree.  She said the important thing about this program for her was that it could be applied to any field, not only outdoor leadership, but to the issues of social justice that were so important to her.

Over the years, but especially during and since her years at UMass she has worked both as a professional and as a volunteer on issues elated to women, disability rights, and lesbian/gay/bi rights.

McClintock explained that these two professional threads in her life are vitally connected. “The oppression of people is completely and totally parallel to and comes from the same impulse as the oppression of the natural world/earth/environment. Reading a book called Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin in the late 70s or early 80s was the first time I understood the connection between the oppression of people and the oppression of the earth. It has been a foundation of my understanding of the world and my activism ever since. All of my social justice work relates to my environmental work and vice versa, “ she said.

Always interested in good food, she became really involved with local food. in 2001. She was inspired by Gary Paul Nabhan’s book, Coming Home to Eat, about the wisdom and pleasure of eating local food, and a workshop led by John Hoffman who farms at the Wilder Brook Farm CSA. Soon she started a local food group who enjoyed potlucks together. As word spread she joined the group organizing the first Free Harvest Supper in 2005.

When Juanita Nelson came up with the idea of a winter farmers market, “we all thought she was crazy,” McClintock said. To promote this crazy project Nelson and McClintock decided to write monthly articles for the Recorder. “Along the way I thought there were so many topics to write about that I could probably write something every week,” she said.  That was the birth of Savoring the Season which debuted in the Recorder in July 2007.

Through all the changes in her life whether she was sea kayaking in New Zealand or Alaska, editing and indexing books, or running an editorial and research business called BetterYou Than Me, McClintock’s mother enjoyed hearing about her adventures, “although she really liked it when I had work she could actually describe to her friends,” she said. “I sent her my own writings and she was always a great fan.”

When Elizabeth Welsh passed away last year McClintock wanted to find a way to honor her. That was not hard to do. McClintock had worked part time at the World Eye and when Welsh came to visit a lot of time was spent with McClintock’s World Eye family.

“My mother loved libraries and reading,” McClintock said. She also thought about the books that had inspired her over the years. The perfect memorial would be books purchased at the World Eye, and donated in her mother’s name to the Greenfield and Conway libraries. The books have to do with gardening, food preservation and sustainable living, topics important to mother and daughter. The books were carefully chosen with the help of the librarians to avoid duplication, and enhance their collections.

The books are on library shelves and ready to be checked out, ready to inspire and teach.

Books Donated to the Greenfield Public Library

by Mary McClintock in memory of her mother, Elizabeth Welsh

Berry Grower’s Companion by Barbara L. Bowling

Canning, Freezing, Curing & Smoking of Meat, Fish & Game by Eastman

Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Peterson

How To Make and Use Compost:  The Ultimate Guide by Nicky Scott

Museum of Early American Tools by Eric Sloane

Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier

Pruning Made Easy by Lewis Hill

Putting Food By (5th ed) by Greene, Hertzberg, & Vaughn

Secrets of Plant Propagation by Lewis Hill

Stalking The Healthful Herb by Euell Gibbons

Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience by Rob Hopkins

Wilderness Medicine, Beyond First Aid by Forgey

Compost, Vermicompost and Compost Tea, by Grace Gershuny will be published in April, 2011:

Snow – And Blood

February 25 8 am

The snow was falling when I woke.  I hope this is the first of the four final snowstorms predicted for this winter.

While the snow is beautiful, the view inside the hen house was not as lovely.  For the third morning in a row I went out to find a dead chicken, killed by a weasel. I don’t know if it is possible to keep a determined and hungry weasel out of a hen house. I will spare you the image.  Only a dozen chickens left, including a rooster.

Three Dreams for Thursday

Every year I add a few roses to my garden. The Rose Walk has expanded, the Shed Bed was added and now I have a Rose Bank. Many of the roses are shades of pink; Blanc Double de Coubert, Mount Blanc and Madame Plantier are white, but aside from the spiny Harrison’s Yellow, yellow roses have been missing. I am trying to add  that range of color this spring.

April Moon is a soft yellow Griffith Buck hybrid that is hardy to zone 4 and is  winter hardy in Iowa.  I am dreaming of this rose blooming on the Rose Bank in June.

Gentle Persuasion is another Griffith Buck hybrid. The Chamblee Roses listing describes this as a yellow/apricot blend and I think it will be a perfect companion for April Moon on the Rose Bank. This rose is even said to bloom again after the first flush in June.

Goldbusch is a Kordes hybrid that I have ordered from High Country Roses.  When I visited the New York Botanical Garden in the fall of 2009, I learned that the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is the largest organic rose garden in the world. Part of the impetus  for organic management is New York’s outlawing of many of the poisons routinely used on roses. Kordes, the German hybridizer, saw the need for disease resistance many years ago and have produced many beautiful roses since then that will thrive with good organic management. Lots of compost!

I am dreaming of the day I can plant these new roses and add a new sunny note to the rose collection.

Sastrugi – Two Views

For more Wordlessness this Wednesday click here.

Scrappy Art

My father was a machinist. For many years he worked for my grandfather, Algot Larson who invented the Unique window balance, a device that replaced the ropes and pulleys that were used at the time to open and shut windows.

My father’s avocation was astronomy. He was a member of the Amateur Astronomer’s Association. He often attended meetings at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City where he learned to make his own telescope grinding the lens himself.  I remember him melting lead on the kitchen stove to make the counter weight for the telescope which he named Cyclops after the one eyed monster that Odysseus outsmarted.

You may ask what my father’s telescope has to do with these flowers. They were made by one of his friends on the factory floor who took the metal scraps from his work to make this fanciful sheaf of grass and flowers.  The connection between my father and his friend is the creative impulse that we all share. They did not tamp down that impulse but gave it room to grow and share.

My father told all of us stories of the creatures that populated the sky, the Big Bear, Orion, the Pleiades, and he held star gazing parties for my classmates.  My father’s friend gave away his charming creations.

In this detail you can see more clearly the origin of his scrappy materials.

These flowers do not resemble the real flowers in my garden, but we gardeners also share a creative impulse to cultivate beauty and utility in our flower and edible gardens, an impulse we share with those who want to learn how we do it, and with those who appreciate their beauty and flavor.

Worm Farm Review

In July of 2008 my grandsons and I put 1000 red wigglers into a bin we had prepared. We were worm farmers. I wanted worm castings, considered very fine compost, to use in my garden.  The process of making that compost has been a slower process than I expected.

Red wigglers are not earthworms. They need to be kept warm – at least warmer than 50 degrees to thrive.  I did not want to keep the worm bin in my kitchen so when fall came I moved it to our basement where the temperature is a constant 50 degrees.  A few worms survived to be put outdoors when spring became warm enough in 2009.  In September 2009 I took a very modest harvest of vermicompost and set the worms up with new bedding.  The worm population increased during the summer, but another winter in the basement did it no good.

There was no vermicompost harvest in 2010.  We did dump out the bin and check through in July when the grandsons were again visiting, but we saw very few adult worms and little tiny white things that we thought (hoped) must be baby  worms. We put them all back in the bin, along with damp peat moss, which a vermicomposting neighbor said he used, in addition to wet shredded newspaper. In the fall I gritted my teeth and kept the bin in our kitchen.  The fruitflies I dreaded did not appear. There was no smell, but I did not expect that.  Clearly the population has increased because they are going through much more kitchen waste than they ever have before.  This is especially appreciated since I haven’t been able to use the outdoor compost bin for about a month now.

Yesterday I dug into the bin to take a rough population account.  The verdict is A Lot!  That means there will be a good harvest, just in time for spring planting.

While the worms are luxuriating in the warmth of our woodstove heated living/dining/cooking space -

this is the kind of weather we have been enjoying outdoors at the End of the Road.

Harvard’s Glass Flowers

Photo courtesy of Harvard Museum of Natural History

While the northeast is blanketed in snow and ice, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, amazing flowers made of glass are blooming at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

In a darkened room on the third floor of the museum, glass cases sparkle, carefully lit to best show off grasses with their seed heads, delicate wildflowers, cocao plant and seed, one of the economically important plants on display, and more familiar flowers like rhododendron, mountain laurel, iris and dahlia. Each is displayed so that root, stem, leaf, flower and seed have been available for study by Harvard students ever since 1887.

Although the glass flowers are stunning works of art their purpose was to serve as teaching tools for Dr. George Goodales’ botany classes. As the first Director of the Harvard Botanical Museum Dr. Goodale was concerned about the quality of the exhibits. At that time dried plants were used, as were replicas made of wax or papier mache. Understandably, replicas made of those materials were crude in their depictions of fine detail, and they did not last long over time, while dried plants did not express the vital reality of the plant.

He had only to look to another Harvard Museum, that of Comparative Zoology,  to find the answer to his problem. There he found scientifically detailed glass models of marine invertebrates made by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, father and son who came from a long line of glass workers.

Dr. Goodale went off to Hosterwitz, Germany, a small town near Dresden. He met the Blaschkas and arranged for a few glass flowers to be made for Harvard.  When those flowers arrived at Customs in New York City, the box was carefully marked Fragile, but the customs worker opening it saw merely a bunch of plants, and no need for care. He closed the box and threw it aside.

Though heavily damaged, those broken flowers were sufficient to show how valuable they would be. Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware offered to finance a contract with the Blaschkas.

I can just imagine the time and thought Dr. Goodale spent thinking about what plants should be included, what species, orders, and genera. He wanted a wide cross section of the plant world, and wanted to include many of the plants that had an economic importance. The Blaschkas got a list and prepared their own plan, beginning with planting some of the requested flowers in their own garden.

Over the years the Blaschkas used their own garden as well as the royal gardens and greenhouses of the castle in Pilnitz which was nearby.  There they found many tropical and exotic plants. In 1892 Rudolph traveled to the Caribbean, and the United States to make sketches, note colors and collect plant samples. His second trip to the US in 1895 was cut short by the death of his father. After that he carried on alone until 1936, only three years before his own death.

Photo Copyright Harvard - Hillel Burger

After the first shipping debacle, Harvard took care to make arrangements to have the shipments brought right to Harvard where the boxes were opened in the presence of a customs official.  Dr. Goodale was often known to say that the shipping process was “almost as wonderful as anything about them.”

The glass flowers rarely leave the Museum, but when they do, as to a special exhibit in Japan, they travel with a companion. ‘Mr. Box’ gets his own seat in first class with a seat belt, and extra stabilizing webbing.

Once six flowers were sent to the Corning Glass Museum in1972, but all were ruined in a flood. Currently the Corning Museum has several pieces of jewelry made by Leopold around 1864, long before he worked to get the botanical accuracy demanded by Harvard.

People in our area may be quite familiar with the way glass is blown to make goblets, bowls and plates, but the process used by the Blaschkas was very different. “Lampwork” requires a small flame at a work table, small bits of glass and fine tools. Some wiring (covered with glass) is required to connect parts of the plant or to stabilize and strengthen a pendant flower or seed.

Models of magnified plant parts

The Blaschka’s work table is now a part of the exhibit which consists of 487 flowers or plants, but about 4000 separate pieces. Many of these pieces resemble microscope slide magnifications of the plants internal parts, of its stamens, pistils, and ovaries.

A few of the plants are not on exhibit. For a time there was a display case in the hall near the special exhibit room. Casual passers by did not understand they were looking at depictions of plant diseases, and wondered by rotting apples and moldy peaches should be left on hallway shelves.

Visitors to the Glass Flower gallery will mostly marvel at the delicacy and artistry of the flowers. Unless they are students of botany themselves they may not appreciate the details of life cycles, however I was amazed at the depiction of a pussy willow, the familiar bud we treasure in the spring, starting to show the pollen laden anthers as they are just starting to be visible.

The glass flowers show us nature’s magic in every season, but human ingenuity and artistry at the same time.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is open daily 9 am – 5 pm. All Massachusetts residents can enter free Sunday mornings, 9 am – noon, and Wednesday afternoons from 3-5 pm. For full information logon to www.hmnh.harvard.edu.  ###

I Am Fascinated

After Bloom Day, wanting to preserve the tulip blossoms as much as possible in order to use them Sunday at church, I moved the pot of Pieter de Leur into the sitting room which is very cool. This is where my few houseplants live all winter. The jasmine dries up slowly over the season, but when I cut it back it always revives with the arrival of warm weather.

I have been fascinated watching these forced bulbs as they open and closed, affected in some ways by the time of day, and somewhat more predicably by temperature and amount of sun. I don’t know exactly what I have learned, but I feel I have been able to observe the mystery of growth in a whole new way.

Win a Garden Starter Kit from Timber Press

Sugar Snaps and Strawberries

Having told you all what an informative and inspiring book Andrea Bellamy has written, Sugar Snaps and Strawberries, I want you to know that Timber Press is now holding a contest that will have three lucky winners. First Prize winner will receive -

A garden starter kit with all you need to start your own vegetable garden wherever you live, including:

• A copy of Sugar Snaps and Strawberries
• A gardening container, watering can, gloves, and a garden journal from Garden Fever
• A selection of seeds including radishes, beans, beets, chard, salad greens, peas, tomatoes, and herbs, as well as a Cobra Head gardening tool, hat, and mug from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Second and third prizes

A copy of Sugar Snaps and Strawberries

All you have to do is logon to the Timber Press contest site,  leave your email address and hit the Enter the Contest button.  Winners will be chosen on March 31.  Just about the right time to start getting the garden ready – or at least walking around the garden space and thinking it will be time. Soon.