Fixing Trucks and People

The days grow short and the nights long at this time of the year, and in this northern location the sun is down shortly after 3 p.m. and it is near dark an hour later. It is an indoor time for most, but it's important to get out into the natural world, always, and it's always here at the door. Birds are coming now to the feeder, the usual chickadees and nuthatches and goldfinches. There've been a few snowfalls but so far nothing to get the tractor with the snowblower out for. They'd predicted a big storm earlier this week, so I spent an hour removing the sickle bar from the tractor and attaching the snowblower. But the snowstorm inundated the northern third of the state only, and nothing fell here. And today it warmed above freezing for the first time in ten days or so. The snow melted back to a few inches of cover at most, with many bare spots. 

This morning I drove my truck into the local garage for repairs. It had been jittery at speeds of about 35 mph and above. At first I thought it was the tires out of alignment or balance, but as it went away when I would ease off on the throttle, it had to be the engine, I thought, so I expected a tuneup. But it turned out to be the universal joint that needed replacing, and fortunately the garage was able to get the part and the mechanic do the job in about an hour, for seventy-five dollars including labor. This mechanic has worked on my trucks for twenty years, and I've come to appreciate his diagnostic skills, his ingenuity and abilities with wrench and torch. The garage is less than ten minutes' drive from the house, and usually I can get an appointment within a day or two of my phone call. In an emergency they work on a vehicle right away. 

Fixing cars and trucks on this island is a lot easier than delivering medical care, apparently. I sometimes wonder that it's easier to get your truck fixed up than to get yourself fixed up. Who has a doctor these days for twenty years, when doctors are moving about so often? A mechanic is a vital part of the local economy, but also a part of the community: relationships with customers matter, reputations are important. A person who is a failure as a mechanic does not leave the community but finds another job; a doctor who is a failure is covered by malpractice insurance and moves elsewhere. A doctor's kindly bedside manner is a thing of the past--no doctors make house calls anymore, and if they are brusque with their patients as they shuffle in and out of several waiting rooms, they justify it in the name of efficiency and the economics of health care. In the office for medical care, a patient feels like a part moving down the assembly line.

When I was growing up, my family was close to another family whose head was a country doctor. His name was Fred Zipser. I didn't know much about his practice then. But now I recall that he was a family practitioner in a small town, he made house calls, his office where he saw patients was a part of his home, and his wife kept the books. Does this kind of doctor exist today? Only in the world of alternative medicine.

I was lucky for the past five years and was taken care of by a local doctor who was willing to spend time talking with me, not just about my physical condition but also about my life and what was on my mind. I know she was unhappy with the way modern economies in medicine translated into a loss of facilities at the hospital where she practiced--obstetrics for example--and also the way they translated into bean-counter productivity, seeing more and more patients for shorter and shorter periods of time. She is moving to a different part of the state, and soon I'll have to choose another doctor. I'll be lucky if I can find someone who shares her medical philosophy and who is curious not only about my health but about my life.

The full nine

Nine inches of wet snow fell on the island last night. Evidently the snowfall tapered off a good deal as one went inland. This morning I was out shoveling. Getting the snow blower going seemed like too much trouble, as I'd have had to take off the sickle bar and put the blower onto the tractor, and I just didn't have enough time to fuss with it and get everything else done today that I needed to. 


Checking Newell Cotton's diary entries around this time for snow, I find that on Dec. 7, 1896, "It snowed hard for a short time." On the 6th he'd written, "No sledding yet."


 

Too Soon Snow

The weather forecasters are calling for five to nine inches of snow tonight, with colder weather ahead and the possibility of an even more serious storm in five days' time. The coming of the snow and cold means that this and succeeding snowfalls aren't likely to melt away until March, unless this is a December without much snow at all. An early snowfall in October (I have seen them as early as Columbus Day) or November will melt, but December's snows can pile it on or, worse, melt halfway and then freeze to ice under foot, requiring a good deal of attention when walking about. The alternate freezing, snowing, thawing, and icing can last for weeks.


And so the possibility that the ground may be covered from this evening onward for a few months required me to cancel my planned reading and writing in favor of choring about, as my 140-year-old acquaintance Newell Cotton put it. More on this unusual companion later. Choring about meant wrapping the young apple trees trunks with their plastic winter guards. It meant cutting down a few trees in the wet area down the hill behind the house. Most of all it meant carrying wood from the pile that is still outside over to the storage area on the porch--three cartloads worth, each taking a half hour to load, haul, unload and stack. When the wood in that storage area is used up I will probably need to haul wood over from the barn because what is left of the wood pile behind the store will be frozen over. Then next summer I will put the wood from that pile into the barn where it will dry again and be ready for the winter. But I expect to be able to spend more time on the wood overall, because unlike this fall, when I have been traveling to Providence and coming to Maine only on some weekends, next fall I will be on leave from teaching as I enter a phased retirement which will require that I teach only in the spring semesters. I look forward to being able to spend more concentrated time here in the fall, which is surely the most beautiful season in this state.


Oddly, as the first flakes of snow fell this afternoon, the mail brought the Fedco seed catalog, with its confirmation of the late tomato blight that caught my ripe tomatoes before I could harvest most of them. I had thought they'd escape it, because my potatoes did. But according to Fedco, this past growing season was the worst in Maine in the last 40 years. I can believe it.

The weather forecasters usually get excited by the first significant snow storm of the year and they tend to predict more than what falls. But generally the winter forecasts are more reliable than the summer ones. I can only attribute the problems with the summer forecasts to a bit of wishful thinking, or hoping, applied in this case by the forecasters to the tourists who come to the state of Maine to enjoy the summer. Tourists want optimistic forecasts, days that are partly sunny, not partly cloudy. A spell of fog and rain, which can sometimes last for a week or more here, is not likely to bring them in; and although it's hard to believe that the forecasters have one eye on the weather and the other on the tourist bureau, the forecasts in the summer behave as if they do. 

A word about the aforementioned Mr. Cotton. I came into possession of some diaries kept by this man, who lived on a farm in Grange, New Hampshire, near Lancaster, way north in New Hampshire but at about the same latitude as my place in Maine. He is not a relative of mine. I imagine he might be a descendant of the Puritan John Cotton. The diaries run from 1888 until 1900. I spent some time this summer reading them, and I will consult them as I move through the seasons. 

Mr. Cotton was a small farmer who, when the diaries I have began, was living on his parents' farm; in a few years he married, and brought his wife to live with his family there; gradually as his parents grew older he bought the farm from them, while they continued to live there and he assumed the major responsibility for operating it. And so the daily diaries are filled with farm doings--what a northern New Hampshire farmer had to do to scratch out a living in the last years of the nineteenth century. In this case it appears that Mr. Cotton spent most of his time working with wood, haying, growing vegetables, making butter from his milk cows (which he sold in town), selling surplus crops (especially potatoes), and hiring himself out to work for other people--notably a sawmill operator named J.W. Whipple. He also exchanged work days with friends and relatives as they helped each other with some of the larger farm tasks.


What was unusual about Newell Cotton was that in addition to farming he wrote. Not just in his diary, but he wrote news items for local papers, as well as short non-fiction pieces for newspapers in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts. He also attempted to write stories and longer pieces of fiction, and had some of his stories published. I am on the trail to track them down. He read considerably--fiction, mostly, but also history. His diaries chart his ambitions, successes, and failures as a writer. Also, unusual for diaries in that time, he occasionally discloses his feelings. Given his busy schedule, as a farmer, and a father of two daughters, he found time to write chiefly on Sundays and rainy days when he had finished "choring about." I have searched for information about him--when he was born, when he died, and so forth, but have turned up very little. My recollection now, without consulting the diaries, is that he was born about 1870. 

The Cotton farm usually had snow by December 5. The winter months' work mainly involved wood, particularly chopping and splitting it up "by the door" -- just outside the house, I assume. I don't know how many cords he went through in a winter, burning wood in fireplaces to heat his house, but the usual amount was 14 cords in New England. Given his location, he may have burned as many as 20. That is a lot of wood to work up every year. Thinking about it makes me realize how small a job I had in carting all that wood to the porch. The wood stove here is far more efficient, the house is laid out in a way that the heat goes upstairs, and of course I have a backup oil furnace. For Mr. Cotton and his family, it was much harder. 

Learning English in China

One of the striking things about my visit to China was how interested the Chinese, young and old, were in learning English. They were particularly happy to hear me speak English with my American accent. They said they wanted to learn that rather than a British accent. Some visitors to the Conservatory, while I was there, were from New Zealand; the Chinese students said they had difficulty understanding their accents.

Accent among English speakers is something I've noticed, but except in a few instances it hasn't prevented my understanding. I spent my first 15 years in the US above the Mason-Dixon line, and then my family moved South, to Atlanta, where I went to high school. More important than differences in accent were differences I found in sociability. Southern hospitality was new to me; the new habits of social interaction were more difficult to assimilate than differences in food or accent. When I began to listen to blues, while in Atlanta, the deep southern accents of the African American singers made sense to me. Years later, when transcribing blues lyrics for my dissertation and for my second book, any difficulties I had in making out the words were due more to the poor technical quality of the recordings, and to the occasionally specialized vocabulary of Black English, than they were to accent. Listening to British speakers presented no challenge to me, apart from occasional differences in vocabulary. Australian and New Zealand speakers seemed to speak a regional British form of English. I could understand, though, how for Chinese, sensitive to intonation in language (theirs is a tone language), and used to British accents, New Zealand speakers could be a challenge. 

Since the death of Mao, increasing numbers of Chinese have been learning English, to the point where for the last 20 years it's been the chief foreign language taught in the schools. Chinese students are diligent, and although the two languages are very different, they are able to learn English, particularly how to read it. Pronunciation is more difficult. I noted a marked difference in the English proficiency of Chinese under about 25 and those above 35. 


I was walking along the streets of Beijing one afternoon and I came upon a group of middle-aged men and women, perhaps a dozen of them, clustered around a young man with a large artist's sketch pad in his left hand. With his right hand he wrote English words and next to them, Chinese translations. Boat: 小船. Coat: 外套. Throat: 喉头. Vote: 表决. Seeing me, he realized I was probably an American or a European, and possibly a native English speaker. He asked me if I would pronounce the words in English for them. I said I would, if they didn't mind an American accent. He said they would prefer it. And so I did, and they pronounced the words after me. From the English teacher I learned that these middle-aged people had each paid the young man the equivalent of about 25 cents for an hour's lesson in English, right there on the street in Beijing.

Gardening and writing in China and Maine

I was in China between Oct. 31-Nov. 9 giving a series of invited lectures on music and sustainability, sponsored by the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing. I met several faculty members and students of university age. In the course of conversation they asked me what I did with my time in the US when I was not teaching. I said that I had a place in the country where I went in the summers to think and read and write and make music and grow apples and vegetables, and that working in the gardens and the orchard helped me think and write. I said I worked on restoring old violins and other stringed instruments and that also helped me think and write. I said that when I could get away in the fall I went there for long weekends to do the same.

My Chinese hosts found it difficult to understand how anyone would want to be a farmer. Farming is something that much of the population still does, in China, and they produce an abundance of food. At every meal there was much left over. The restaurants do not distribute it to the poor. Not even the cafeterias do that. Nor were students aware of organic farming and gardening, even though traditional small farming in China has been organic for many many centuries. One does not farm for pleasure, or to free the mind; one does it out of necessity to make a living. Farmers and scholars belong to different classes of people. Scholars (not only academics but anyone who writes, whether poets or accountants or scribes or philosophers) go back to Confucius' day.

For contemplation, scholars, like emperors, had gardens. And gardeners. Gnarled old cyprus trees, and ancient rock formations, were favored. These were not food gardens. These were contemplation gardens. Above is part of an emperor's garden in the Forbidden City, Beijing.

After sitting and thinking a scholar might go into a building and write a poem. Emperors went into temples like the one in the Forbidden City, above, to write theirs.

Contemplation sitting in a garden of stone and cyprus followed by inspiration to write a poem (in calligraphy) sitting in a temple gives me something to think about. Hoeing beans followed by writing an essay doesn't seem to belong to the same order of experience. Perhaps I would write better essays if I first contemplated in the forest back of my house in Maine, sitting on a moss-covered stone outcropping in a clearing, surrounded by spruce trees. I'm going to try it.

Probably if I had to be a farmer for a living I would not write about it as I do now. I'd like to think I'd still write about it--I know farmers who also are writers: Wendell Berry to take one prominent example. Or is he a writer who also is a farmer? I don't want to be cute about this. In Berry the two vocations are complementary.

A moderate fall harvest

In this unusual year, one crop did very well: potatoes. In more than 25 years of growing here I've never had larger ones. This must be due to the immense amount of rain in June and July. Most of the Satinas are near a pound in weight and larger in size than the big store-bought russet ones, although the Satinas are white but not russet potatoes. In past years Satinas have been medium sized at best. The Dark Red Norland potatoes, earlier, also were larger than ever; but the Satinas grew longer and when I pulled them out yesterday the some were still growing. The onions, on the other hand, are puny. Tomatoes have been finally ripening, and if we don't get a frost before the end of the month and late blight doesn't take them, there will be enough for the year's worth of puree. Similarly, the edamame is coming in, and although in an average year I'd have harvested them already, if there's no frost by the end of the month I should be able to get some at least. The cabbages did well enough, as did the greens; the string beans are puny and late, and it's lucky I decided not to plant dry beans this year (I have enough sitting in jars from the last couple of years).

The winter rye in the garden by the store is doing all right, and today I took the sickle bar to the mat of vetch in the garden down toward the Scotts. Also picked up my spare sickle bar after repairs; that makes $500 in repairs of the two sickle bars this summer, although a new one costs $1000. I hope they last another 20 years. The apples are a little smaller than usual, and otherwise an average year in quantity. Considering the work I must do this fall in preparing my lecture series for my trip to Beijing I'm not sure there'll be enough time for a cider pressing, but we'll see. Altogether a moderate harvest is possible, better than I thought it would be at the end of July; but we'll have to see how soon the first frost comes.

Mowing; Vegetable Report

For the past couple of weeks I've been spending a few hours every afternoon that weather and time have permitted in the fields with the sickle bar mower attached to the BCS walk-behind tractor, a jarring experience. Ordinarily I like to mow two of the fields in mid-June and again at this time of year, but they were too wet to mow in June, and so I skipped it. Except for mowing the orchard and scything on a steep bank behind the house I'm done as of today.

The chief reason to mow is to keep the fields as fields and prevent them from growing into spruce forest. Spruce seedlings dot the fields every year, it seems. There is also the occasional white pine seedling. The hay, such as it is, may be used for mulch, either right there or moved to surround apple trees as a fertilizer, or be composted, depending on how much time I have to spend on moving hay.

Blackberries are coming in, not nearly so much as last year, but still very good. Nearly finished eating one of the two rows of potatoes. Greens have all gone by and the later plantings were washed away, so it's back to store-bought. Cabbages are ready; beets and onions will be ready soon. Tomatoes plentiful on the vines but way behind on account of the cool, damp June and July; will they ripen? It's getting cool again, now, with temps going down tonight to the 40s, days in the 60s and 70s.

Time for Old-Time Music

The last couple of weeks have been filled with visits and music. A couple of days after playing music with friends at Isle au Haut, our friend Art came to the island and stayed for a couple of days, and we played music much of the time. Art is a multi-instrumentalist, on stringed instruments; but with us he usually plays guitar--unless there is another fine guitarist with us, and then he'll play mandolin or something else. But as there were just the three of us, the same lineup when we recorded music here for our Bound to Have a Little Fun CD which Marta still sells on the internet, he played guitar, Marta played banjo, and I fiddled. He'd just come out of a week at the Maine Fiddle Camp, where he was an instructor; we had plenty of time to visit and talk and share tunes. He had his recorder out and seemed especially to like some of the newer ones such as "Newt Payne's Tune" and "Granny Went to Meeting with Her Old Shoes On." After listening to Bruce Greene and then his source, John Salyer, play a tune Salyer called "Shady Grove," I fashioned a somewhat different setting that I've been enjoying playing a great deal. (It bears no resemblance at all to the folksong revival tune "Shady Grove"; it's close in one of its parts to "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss.") Then a day or two later Nathan came over and he and Marta and I played music for an hour or two. And then again last Sunday Nathan came over, with Fred, and the four of us played, getting ready for our public appearance at the Common Ground Fair at the end of September. So, much music and visiting. Meanwhile I'm getting ready for the start of school in September, and trying to get the fields mowed.

Visit to another island

A few days ago we visited some friends whose extended family has a cottage on Isle au Haut, an island off the Maine coast accessible only by boat. We took the mail boat and spent a lovely time with the family, eating and talking and playing music, with a walk through the woods to the shore to look for whale bones the following morning.

In some ways it seemed like a trip back in time, for life on this island is close to the ideal of plain living and high thinking that attracted the wealthy "rusticators" from Boston and New York to this part of the Maine coast late in the 19th century, where at first they boarded with natives, later rented cottages, and eventually bought shorefront property and built cottages, some plain and others quite elaborate. Mothers, aunts, grandparents and children would come spend a month or two of the summer in this place far healthier than the city, while fathers and uncles would come by boat and spend a week or two. Today half of Isle au Haut is part of Acadia National Park, and people come to hike, bicycle, and camp there; the other half is mostly summer colony, and partly year-rounders, though only 40 of those, with a one-room schoolhouse and two children attending school. Thus very little in the way of industry there, except for the tourist industry. Today it is the summer cottages that dominate the island outside the park, inhabited for a month or two out of the year by families who prefer to live close to nature and far from fast food restaurants, supermarkets, and shopping malls--the nearest ones would be about 90 minutes away. Spend a week there, and it's a vacation; spend a month and it concentrates the mind.

Bottling day

Today I bottled two cases (24 bottles) of cider wine that we pressed from our apples on the island last October. That was the contents of one carboy put into one 5 gallon oak barrel for two months and a little better. As I'd hoped, the wine had just a tiny bit of fermentation left in it, which will help make it more champagne-like when we drink it. The taste was dry rather than sweet, but not unpleasant. Last year's vintage was sweeter. Next I siphoned the fermented wine from last year's second carboy into the emptied oak barrel, and added 1/2 lb. of sugar. Last, I washed out the siphon hose and the carboy. The 24 bottles are sitting down cellar where they will rest for a while and I'll see which corks are coming up more than a little, and then take these out and replace them. Then I'll label them and we'll store them down cellar, perhaps trying a bottle in the fall when bottling the second batch that's in the oak barrel resting down cellar now. The wine usually needs six months or so in the bottle to develop its full flavor; before then it doesn't taste as flavorful and is said to be "bottle-sick." Altogether it took me nearly two hours of pleasant work. Luckily the wasps were not out in large numbers to sample the cider wine, as they sometimes have been in past years.

The weather gradually turned shortly after my last post, the foggy mornings giving way to sunshine earlier and earlier in the day, with only a couple of days of rain in the past week. I've been eating greens out of the garden for salads every day, but with the warm and sunny weather they will bolt soon. The second plantings of greens must have gotten washed away, and a third planting will follow shortly although these don't usually work at this time. The potatoes have never been larger or nicer; I'm digging new potatoes the size of my fist and eating them every other day or so. The eggplant, pepper, and tomato plants are growing well but behind the calendar and it'll be interesting to see if they're able to ripen. By now I'd normally be eating Sungold cherry tomatoes but this year they haven't even set yet. The deer have been circling around the gardens, browsing the fields. My fence work seems to have paid off so far.

The rainforest

July is almost over and thus far the weather has not turned. It's the most unusual wet and cold July that anyone around here can recall. Almost continuous fog and drizzle has been punctuated by moderate and heavy rain. The number of rain-free days has been almost zero. The number of days with mostly sunshine can be counted on a single hand. In this kind of weather outdoor activity slows drastically, and the storage building I was going to work on has scarcely seen any progress. The second planting of soybeans was washed out along with the first, although there are perhaps 20 plants standing and I will guide them through to term, to save seed if nothing else. Somehow two plantings of snap beans resulted in a decent stand. Broccoli and brussels sprouts are doing little; cabbage is better, onions are good. Beets are fair, carrots few and far between; spinach bolted; lettuce doing well from the early plantings. Tomatoes slow but the plants are growing and depending on the rest of the season may bring in a sufficient crop for eating and canning; peppers and eggplant the same. The apple crop, which looked so promising at blossom time and shortly after, has diminished and will be scabby from all the dampness.

In Maine this summer a potato disease, called late blight, the same disease that caused the Irish potato famines in the mid-19th century, has struck hard. Usually it is present, particularly in the commercial growing sections of Aroostook County, but not a serious problem. This summer it is. The airwaves are full of warnings and advice to growers, not only the market growers but also home gardeners. If you are a conventional gardener you are supposed to spray a poison onto your plants. That has never made sense to me. Why would anyone want to poison the food they will eat and the soil it grows in? If you are an organic gardener there is supposedly an IPM (integrated pest management) program that you are supposed to look into. But that sounds wrong. The blight is not caused by pests. The best way to prevent it, it seems to me, is to have healthy soil, which will grow strong plants that may be able to resist the blight.

And so my potatoes here have escaped the infection, in part perhaps because the soil is now good, and possibly also because there are no gardens with potatoes nearby from which the infection could spread. Indeed, the plants are taller than ever. The Dark Red Norland plants are dying back now and I'm digging good sized potatoes every few days for meals, larger and a higher yield than I've ever had. The Satina variety plants are still going strong.

Were I a market potato grower this would be a good year for me, but each year I grow only for my own use, with occasional surplus given away. The principal food crops I grow and eat are dry beans, tomatoes (put up for sauce, mostly), green soybeans (edamame), potatoes, and onions. I also grow greens and salad vegetables such as peppers and eggplant for summer consumption, and often beets, cucumbers, leeks, spinach, chard, and squash. I have learned from the soil and climate what can and cannot be grown well here; and not every crop can be grown well each year. This is the second bad year in a row for soybeans.

Both Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have made a philosophy out of the idea of "nature as measure." That is, one works with nature in one's local place; nature tells us what can and what cannot be done, what should and what should not be done, if only we will watch and listen and learn, and if we will be patient in doing so. In this way of thinking Berry and Jackson stand in opposition to the idea of bending nature to human will, in opposition to the idea of humans dominating nature. For Jackson, in the state of Kansas, learning from nature means restoring what he believes is the original prairie ecosystem. For Berry, the ideal is a kind of mixed farming which uses the soil wisely and gives back as much or more as it takes.

This is a philosophy that bears thought. Certainly as much as I would like to grow corn here, I cannot do so well. I have learned, as I said, what crops appear to be comfortable here, and I have grown them in a kind of cooperation with what nature will permit, if not encourage. I have used seaweed from the shore as fertilizer; it works well. But vegetable gardens and domestic livestock would not be here without human intervention. This would be a land of chiefly spruce forests with meadows where the poorest soil is. The meadows would be filled with plants for birds and animals. Of course, that is the way much of the land is already. Of those edible plants that grow wild here, rosa rugosa is the most prominent, with edible rose hips in the fall; but there are many berries which must be as good for humans as they are for the birds and wild animals. Yet it is not a place advantageous for farming, as the soil is shallow and rocky. The woods are abundant now with deer that could be hunted, but the chief source of food for humans in this place would normally be the sea, although at present the fish stock is low from overfishing, and the lobster stock threatens to follow.

And planting a garden here means thwarting and dominating nature to some extent. If you don't fence your garden the deer and other critters will eat everything you planted. They are happy to dominate you. And at certain times of the year, particularly now at the end of July, they are coming out of the woods to graze on the blueberries and other meadow plants, and they will happily graze in your garden if you let them do so. This evening I saw a doe grazing in the blueberry field across from the house. I approached within thirty feet of her and could have gotten closer, I think, if I hadn't tried to scare her back into the woods by shouting and clapping my hands. Perhaps I should have sat down and had a little talk with her and come to a rapprochement: you may have all the blueberries you want over here, but don't jump the fence and get into the garden over there. But how does one speak the language of deer, without becoming one?

Wet, Wet, Wet

I never have seen a wetter or colder June. Since my last entry on June 15 the fog, damp, drizzle, and rain has been almost continuous. Weather is good reason to believe that farmers are a fatalistic lot. There is an old New England saying that if you don't care for the weather, wait an hour and it will change. But the truth is that the jet stream pattern tends to stay in place for months and until it changes the weather tends to remain similar. Global warming is wreaking havoc with the jet stream, I suppose. Usually in early June it shifts from cold and damp to warm and dry; but it hasn't shifted yet. I assume it will, soon, but I was making that assumption a week ago, two weeks ago, and three weeks ago.

The soybeans I planted in early June rotted in the ground. I did get out to plant some snap beans about ten days ago and half have sprouted, amazingly. Today after two days without rain I was able to replant the soybeans, to the earliest variety (Envy), and will hope that they come in before frost and without too much trouble from September rains. The weather has to turn at some point. It's great weather for slugs, though. They are feasting on the lettuce and cole crops, competing for salad greens. It just means getting them off and washing the greens more thoroughly. Wood ashes are the best slug preventative but I used all last winter's on the gardens to lime the soil, so none was left for the slugs. The potatoes are enjoying the rain for sure. And so are the wildflowers, and the hay that grows rank. The apples are susceptible to fungus diseases. But it is indoor weather, much like winter.

Arts for all

These are wild and naturalized flowers behind the barn late this evening, shortly before I saw a raccoon sitting under a black locust tree. Yellow hawkweed is in the foreground, about to open; purple phlox in the center.

As if to punctuate my last post, this evening's radio news reported that a study by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that the number of amateurs pursuing creative work in the arts has increased, particularly in such areas as photography, painting, weaving, and music-making. Meanwhile, attendance at arts events is in decline: fewer spectators attend concerts, festivals, exhibits, and the like. This is a good sign.

A cool early June

Two weeks of June have gone by and the weather still hasn't turned warm. When it rains--as it has for much of this period--temps are in the 50s during the day and when it doesn't, they go up to the low 60s. Soil still too cool and damp to plant dry beans. Last weekend I had a window of warmth and planted edamame soybean seeds and stuck the tomato transplants into the ground. Potatoes are enjoying this weather; lettuce and cabbage as well as onions too. The only clear period occurred from Friday afternoon through Saturday night; otherwise it has been foggy with off and on rain since Tuesday.

I was reminded of the cool, rainy June about ten years ago when John Wallhausser and some of his family including a relative from Germany were touring in this area. John, retired now from the department of philosophy and religion at Berea College in Kentucky, was enormously helpful to me when I taught there as a visiting professor. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he was one of the few non-Applachians at Berea to truly appreciate the way of life of the Old Regular Baptists, whose music I am very much drawn to. We made our pilgrimages to the churches in southeastern Kentucky nearly every weekend that I was there, sitting and listening to the deeply affecting music, and the musical sermons that are characteristic of this small group.

After John retired from Berea he went in two other directions: with some of his family he bought land in Italy and restored a house overlooking a river, which the family will share the use of; and he turned with great passion to painting watercolors. He had always been a fine poet, though not an ambitious one in the sense of wanting or needing to have it published and recognized. I'm sure that everyone nurtures desires to express themselves in certain ways but delays and delays; for John, retirement was an opening. I have a colleague who retired this year from my university; some years ago she confessed that she had always had a desire to play the banjo. I encouraged her and I wonder if, at some odd moment, she won't borrow a banjo and get started. I hope she does.

These serious, passionate pursuits of old age are not easily understood, but the symptoms are easy enough to spot. Friends often think the oldsters are behaving oddly, or they think that what they are doing is some kind of a hobby, a leisure time activity chiefly for pleasure. But there is not much leisure in these pursuits and although there is pleasure there is also much serious, sometimes painful, effort; and much that is creative. Something deeper than a hobby is getting expressed here after all these years. John's painting -- well, he is as serious and relentless about his painting as he was about his scholarship on Schliermacher.

A cool late spring

Although the beginning of May was warm, the last few weeks have been rainy and cool, with the evening temperatures always in the 40s, which meant that instead of planting soy and snap beans, and planting out the tomato seedlings, around the end of May, I'm still waiting a few more days for the soil to warm up, as we've had a few days in the 60s now which is warming the soil. The tomato seedlings are growing a little better in the cold frame than they would in the field, at the moment. The weather usually turns warm here at some point during the first ten days of June.

The apple blossoms are mostly off the trees now. A few days of rain during the blossom time hurt pollination, but there were enough sunny days. With sufficient rain through the summer and fall, and no hurricane winds to blow them down, it should be a very good year for the apple crop.

The apple blossom (2)

There is a fiddle tune called "The Apple Blossom," notable for its wide-ranging melody, with unusual octave leaps in the opening measures. These don't signify blossoms directly, but they evoke a feeling which relates to the feeling of the wide-open apple blossom, attracting bees and birds. And so while staining the deck of the reconstructed porch this noon hour, the overpowering odor of the blossoms on the trees back of the house reminded me of this tune, which stayed with me.

It's unusual to have two good apple blossom years in a row, but it's happened. The apple blossoms are about a week to ten days ahead of their normal schedule, as I've noted the times of full blossom in many years past. Most of the trees are in full bloom today, the Shiawassee especially, the Summer Scarlet, the Baldwins, the Liberty, the Rhode Island Greening, the Prima, and the many old nameless trees in the orchards that pomologists Herbert Wave and John Bunker have tried, and failed, to identify.

The man who built this house 99 years ago planted, as many others did, several apple varieties in the field behind the house, all too close to one another by today's standards. At the start of this post is what they looked like this early afternoon. And when you walk through the woods on the island you sometimes find old cellar holes, the houses long gone. Not too far from these you'll see a half dozen ancient trees, still trying to produce even though hemmed in by spruce.

Bunker, who knows about apples almost as much as he thinks he does, has been in charge of Fedco's apple division for decades, and a couple of years ago published a book about the apple trees of Palermo, Maine, called Not far from the Tree. It is a good book, and represents much labor and time, years of fruit-tree collecting, ferreting out information on the trees in the area and in other parts of the state of Maine. As a birder will travel to see a new bird, an apple-hunter like Bunker will travel throughout the state to find an old variety of apple that he hasn't before encountered. An amateur pursuit of the purest kind, with rewards in knowing rather than in commerce, it's resulted in his ability to identify varieties of hitherto unknown apples, chiefly from the fruits, which he must inspect and taste before deciding what variety they are.

And so every year at the Common Ground Fair, in the Fedco exhibit Bunker has samples of fifty-odd varieties of apples, identified and resting on a table; and he offers to identify your apple, if you bring it to him in a small paper bag and answer a few seemingly simple but actually very helpful questions such as whether you think it is an old tree and what is the diameter of the trunk at chest height and is it by the side of the road, behind the house, or in an orchard with other apple trees. To test his abilities, I brought him two years running a sample of the same apple, with the same information; and each year a few weeks later came a letter from Bunker in the mail, with the identification. Except that one year he said it was one variety, and the next year another. Well, it is a difficult task, unlike bird identification where individuals look far more alike.

For a few years in the 1990s when I was a member of the Seed Savers Exchange I researched old apple varieties in the state of Maine myself, reading the state pomological society's reports published in the annual "Agriculture of Maine" books back in the 19th century. I thought I might try to acquire some scion wood of the old Maine varieties, graft it to stock, and see if it did well; and so I did. I had a little nursery in the late 1990s with a dozen or two growing grafts, but few survived more than a few years and to date only the Hubbardston has done well.

I'm not sorry about my little experiment, and if I decide to do it over I would do it a little differently, exploring and tasting right here on the island, to find what did best in this particular local climate. Besides, the apple varieties singled out for praise by the Maine pomological society more than a century ago were those thought to be promising for commercial purposes, which means the fruits did not bruise easily, they shipped well, they looked good, they ripened all at the same time and did not drop from the tree before they were ripe, and they lasted for a relatively long time both in and out of storage--these qualities were more important than taste. The development of the commercial apple proceeded right through the 20th century until it reached perfection with the Red Delicious, which although red is anything but delicious. For the home apple, taste is paramount.

And so there will likely be enough apples for cider and cider wine again in the coming fall. The cider from the fall of 2008 has practically completed its long slow ferment, and I put half of it into my oak barrel about a week ago. There it will stay for a couple of months until I bottle it, whereupon the other half will go into the oak barrel for a similar treatment. When I tasted this first batch it seemed mild, compared with the best years; we shall taste what happens as it ages in the barrel and hope for the best.

Digging In

This spring is warmer and drier than usual, with the growing season about a week or so ahead of normal, although the birds don't seem to be ahead of schedule--the early warblers still aren't here, the yellow rump and magnolia. A few days ago I was walking the southeastern property line and found quite a few skunk cabbages standing at attention in the swampy places. They did smell skunky, too. Green leaves emerge from a brown striped sheath. They don't really look like cabbages, but their leaves that come right out of the ground look more like large petals. Temps have been in the 50s and even 60s during the day since I got here last Wednesday night, and just above freezing at night; a little rain for half a day but otherwise very pleasant.

It's a little too late to plant peas, and I found to my chagrin that I couldn't get the BCS tractor started--this is the first time that has happened in fifteen years with this #735 tractor. I changed the plug and did everything else I knew to do but nothing worked. On Saturday I pushed it up some inclined planks and into the pickup truck, having parked the truck downhill to make the incline not very steep; then took it to a local small engine shop for repair. Bob promised it for this week. Luckily I was able to use the small Mantis tiller to break up the soil in the garden by the barn, and in part of the garden down by the Scotts. This is one of the reasons to have back-ups, whether with hard drives or rototillers.

The garden by the old store is going to lie fallow this year, or I will plant a cover crop, while I work on the fences. Last year the deer got in for the first time in more than 20 years, and they would remember and get in this year also. And so I will be using the garden up the road to the orchard for beans, and possibly squash and the garden down to the Scotts for potatoes, tomatoes and soybeans. The garden by the barn will be for greens, cole crops, onions, and cucumbers. Today I planted two varieties of potatoes: Dark Red Norland, and Satina, each about 30 feet of row. I don't have high hopes for them in that garden, which is apt to be dry; but we'll see. Tomorrow before the rain comes I intend to plant out some cole crops, lettuce, beets, onions and spinach.

On Friday I went to the Fedco tree sale and picked up some soil amendments, onions, potatoes, and five bushes: a "blizzard" variety of mockorange, two red chokeberries (pron. chock-a-berry) and two black chokeberries; these I planted out this afternoon atop the bank behind the house. When I build a deck off the back of the house these bushes will be even nicer to look at. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up around the outside of the house where Kenny and Raymond left a lot of scrap wood and stuff from their work re-doing the porch last winter. I'd hoped they wouldn't wait till the last minute, but I should be grateful with their schedule that they were able to get to it at all.

I was down in the valley behind the house yesterday cutting down some spruce that had been growing up there. More has to be cut down when and as I can.

Martha Dane passed by this afternoon with her two dogs as I was planting the potatoes. She walks the dogs on the back road of my property, which is fine with me. I want this kind of traffic on that road; without any at all, from me or neighbors, the vegetation will grow up and even as it is the tree branches have to be trimmed, which I did last fall. Martha said that deer were plentiful this spring and had eaten her tulips. So I've planned to raise the fence around this garden when I get a chance. Half of the garden will be planted to a cover crop, probably buckwheat.

The apple trees are leafing out to the point where it's possible to see blossoms ready to burst on the earliest trees. It's too early to tell how good a year for apple blossoming this will be.

A Winter Visit in Early Spring

We arrived on the island March 20, the day before the calendrical spring, for a week. My mid-semester respite will concentrate, mornings, on preparing an invited article for publication; afternoons, on getting papers ready for doing income taxes. Betweentimes walks in the woods, making meals, bringing in wood, making openings here and here. Much of the ground is covered still with snow, the road to the back of the property with ice; what is bare has turned to mud and frozen and then to mud again depending on the weather. The ground still holds a lot of cold and hasn't heaved the frost here yet although the roads show the usual serious frost heaves for this time of year. All was well with the house; the back road had a few spruces snap off and blow down, as well as a birch tree on the ground. When the weather warms mid-week I will work some on instrument restoration in the old store.

The bird feeder is filled and awaiting the chickadees and nuthatches and perhaps others. Very few have been seen here, fewer than in past years at this time, and the reports are that the songbird population has fallen off badly all over North America. We will see what the warmer weather brings, with the expected arrival of the warblers in May, the singing of the chickadees and white throats and finches and robins and sparrows and blue jays as the spring warms. Last year there were noticeably fewer blue jays. For now the nights remain below or near freezing, and the days warm to the 30s and 40s. This is only a week here, and I will return for a few days mid-April and again for a week at the end of April, to work on the garden fences and early plantings.

Putting the House to Bed

The cold and snow of the last month has concentrated the mind and the movements around here have contracted. The paths to the store and the barn and the vehicles must remain clear. The driveway must remain clear. The bird feeder has done its job for the usual chickadees, goldfinches, and nuthatches. Very few juncos this year. Cedar waxwings love the tiny crab apples on the trees that I got many years ago from the Arnold Arboretum. Whenever there came a day above freezing I was in the store with the woodstove going, restoring stringed instruments. Other days in the house, reading and writing and preparing for the semester that will start in a couple of days. The house will be put to bed for the winter, the pipes drained, the oil furnace shut down. If I return in midwinter it will be to a cold house to get something left behind. We always wish the house well during this period, safety from falling tree limbs or from youngsters who would throw stones and break windows, even break in only to find nothing of $ value that could be taken. Leaving this winter nest, then, for another one several hours south, we give thanks for the shelter and inspiration it has provided since the late spring, and wait for the coming year in continued hope.