Perfect Form and Grace

On Sunday night, Monday and Monday night there came a blizzard dropping a little more than a foot of snow, with high winds and consequent drifts here and there--near window height at the back of the house. I had to go out twice with the snow blower, once on Monday and again this morning, to make paths around the house, the barn, and the old store. This afternoon, with the temperature in the low 20s, it was ideal for cross-country skiing; so off I went for a half hour or so, on the same walking paths I take that start with the trail going back from the house to the orchard. One of the advantages of this location is the ease of walking or skiing, just out the door and into the woods.

My father, who died two years ago aged ninety-four, was a skier, a downhill skier. He had learned to ski at Cornell, in college, and did not stop until he was in his late fifties; he continued to play tennis up to his very last few years. As a young married business man, he took his vacations in winter; my mother and I accompanied him to various ski resorts. His favorites were the one at Stowe, Vermont, and another in Quebec, now no longer in operation, called Jasper-in-Quebec. He was, as my mother was fond of repeating, an "expert" skier. He taught us both to ski.

I learned from my mother--my father did not speak about this sort of thing--that an expert skier was not the one who could go the fastest down the hill, the one who could win the slalom or downhill races. The downhill racers jerked themselves around to catch the steepest parts of the slope and did not bother to keep their skis together. No, the expert was the one who could ski the trails with grace and skill, a ballet dancer on skis, always in control of the most difficult terrain, making the hard look easy. He had, as my mother would often say, perfect form.

Perfect form, then, was something for a boy to strive for. As I grew to be a better skier, I tried to shape myself in his form, skiing down the trails. We would go together, sometimes he in the lead, sometimes me. Eventually we skied the expert trails together. I was able to navigate them, but he remained well ahead of me on the grace and form front, try as I might to carve the turns and hold myself as he did.

I realize, now, that I could never have achieved his perfect form merely by trying to shape my body like his, whether skiing or playing tennis (another sport where "form" was evident). I would have gotten closer if I'd felt about skiing (or tennis) as he did; but I was far too young to have had those feelings and to have understood their reasons and histories. Occasionally as a boy I overheard him talking with other adults about the best skiing in the world and where it might be found. On these occasions when it was his turn he would speak about skiing in the French (or was it the Swiss?) Alps, on furlough while in the US Army during the Second World War. He and a few of his army buddies used to spend all morning climbing up a remote mountain glacier. I suppose they must have had their rifles as well; my father was a crack shot, a rifle instructor. Then they would spend an hour gliding down through the fresh fallen snow. There was nothing in the United States like that alpine touring, as it was called. Well, there was one place--Tuckerman Ravine. It was on one of the faces of Mount Washington, in New Hampshire. You had to walk all the way to the top. My father had skied there after the War, but it wasn't the same. The only danger there was from avalanches. Usually the others were silent for a little while after he got done talking about that. I heard his story more than once. I understood what he said but not what it meant to him.

When my father skied, his outward form embodied the motions of his inner ecstasy, circling over the snow with the rush of wind at his face while his two skis moved as one, balanced and "centered over his skis," as the saying goes, curving over the bumps and bending into turns, arcing his improvised path down the steep mountain trails, occasionally--very occasionally--having to compensate for an instant when an icy patch would speed him up or a wrong decision about a mogul would force him into a new direction, a new rhythm. He did not talk to me about it. No nine-year-old boy would have understood why he would choose to spend six or seven hours a day on a mountain, repeatedly going up on the chair lift and then skiing down, while soldiers only ten years older than I was were killing one another in Korea, and while nuclear warheads were being armed and aimed for so-called defense. He did not speculate aloud on which world, the mountainous world of skiing or the dangerous world of mutually assured destruction, was the least absurd, or which was the most human.

A dozen years later when I started graduate school in Minnesota I thought to go skiing there, but there are no ski mountains near Minneapolis and St. Paul. The  only skiing available was cross country skiing, something I'd never done. I tried it a couple of times at nearby ski resorts built for the purpose, trails with lots of skiers walking themselves around. Pushing and gliding along the crowded trails on rented skis was easy enough--all too easy; it wasn't challenging and after a while it became tedious. I stopped. 

But six years later, PhD in hand, living in the town of Reading, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, and teaching at Tufts University, I longed to ski again. I was an adult with a full-time job; by then I had a little history and ski memories. I recalled the thrill of making the early-morning "milk run" after a night that had dropped snow as fine as powder, the first tracks in the new snow.

My house in Reading was not far from the town forest, a tract of land owned by the town that had been set aside for conservation and light recreation. Trails for walking; no snowmobiles allowed. I bought a pair of cross country skis and waited for the first snowfall, when every trail would be a milk run. For the two years I lived in Reading I skied there and also in the Audubon bird sanctuary, not far away. Instinctively I knew that was my kind of skiing, out in the natural world, away from crowded ski resorts with their groomed trails. 

Here on this island off the Maine coast, where for thirty years I have spent most summers and some winters, the trails offer the same possibility. It is not a dangerous mountain climb and drop during wartime, but it is what I am able to do here, right out the door. And so today, only a few hours ago, less than a half mile from my house, skiing contentedly where the trail slopes gently down, passing by deer tracks in the snow, hearing the dee-dee-dee of a chickadee in a spruce tree, and bending to avoid its snow-laden boughs, I was put in mind once more of my father, and perfect form, and grace.

Digging Beets near Winter Solstice

These are the quiet days approaching the Winter Solstice, when the earth and activity on it seems to slow down, waiting for the darkest time of the year. Here on an island, in a far northern latitude, the darkness lasts longer, and can almost be felt. The foot of snow that fell ten days ago was washed away by a tropical storm yesterday and the day before, with winds to 60 mph and nearly 6" of rainfall, accompanied by temperatures in the 50s which unfroze the ground. Today when the sun came out I lifted the row covers and saw the Red Sails lettuce had survived the month's early freeze and then the snow, so I harvested much of what was left of it. I looked over at the chard leaves and the beet greens, still filled with rich color, and decided to harvest the remaining beets--all of the Bull's Blood variety. 

Beets aren't something grown here very often, so I'm not experienced in how late they may remain viable; but seven beets ranging in size from spinning tops to a couple the size of baseballs came out of the ground without a struggle and were washed and their tops taken off except for an inch or so, then put into the refrigerator for storage. I will boil a few tomorrow or the next day and see how they taste. Are they old and tough? Do they have white rings in the interior? Did their taste deteriorate completely in the freeze? The little research I've been able to do on whether beets survive freezing is inconclusive. Frost and light freezes, yes; but after the snow we had a hard freeze for a couple of nights with the temperature down to about ten degrees fahrenheit at the lowest. Tomorrow I'll look more closely at the chard and if it's not too old and tough, take a few leaves to add to the supper. Unlike human beings, these remaining "half hardy" garden plants--the beets, chard, cabbage, parsley, lettuce--do not die all at once. There is no stopping of a beating heart, no precise marking of time, as of a solstice; as the deepening cold enters them, night after night, they fade, they fail, they curl, they draw inward, until they will no longer revive in the warmth of the next morning's sun.

All December thus far, I have been reading drafts of doctoral dissertations submitted to me by my graduate student advisees. I expect to be reading them for another couple of weeks, at least. These book-length works are the result of each student's three years of course work in our PhD program in ethnomusicology, plus several years of original research and writing on a topic of the student's own choosing. Although they have been among the most successful scholars in their fields, writing a work of this nature and length is not easy no matter how well one is equipped; and my responding to them with comments and suggestions for revision takes a good deal of thought and time. But if there is any season that is most favorable for harvesting doctoral dissertations, it is the winter solstice, when everything seems to be coming toward a point of rest, until the earth tilts forward on her axis and the days start to lengthen once more, promising the new year.

Reminder of seasons past

The weather forecast for tomorrow predicts about three to five inches of snow--the first snow of the season. As it's gone below freezing every night for a week or so, I've been harvesting the lettuce under the agribon row cover during the day when the temps warm to around forty degrees and the frozen water melts from the leaves. The Red Sails variety isn't supposed to be this hardy, but it's holding up fine. The arugula is also hardy enough for harvest and very tasty. I've also been getting wood up onto the porch and have about 3/4 cord up there now, waiting for times when it won't be easy to get it off the woodpile. Each year I say it would be nice to build a woodshed. 

As a reminder of seasons past I will post a few pictures that I shot last spring and summer of some more wildflowers on the trails behind the house. On June 8 I showed the white bunchberry flowers in  bloom; by July 23 the flowers had turned to red berries, waiting to dry and turn a more purplish crimson for the birds to eat. The bunchberry is a dwarf dogwood. They inhabit only a few places along the trail-edge, but they are very showy and impossible to miss in season. I've never seen a bird eat one of the berries, but by this time of the year they are gone.

One of the interesting wildflowers hereabouts is the jack-in-the-pulpit, which comes out of the soil in early spring. It appears in the lowground behind the house where it is usually damp, and also on the trail sides in the deep shade where it is dry. I had to wait until just the right moment for a streak of sunlight to strike this one. Some think that the striped spathe (pulpit) is a trap for insects, but although insects crawl in, they also crawl out. By late July, the spathe has fallen off, exposing globed, green, shining berries. In the picture to the right you can see the topmost berry turning red. In September they all are red. I'd meant to take another photo showing this, but did not get around to doing so. It is also called Indian turnip because Native Americans used the corms (roots) for food. Of the taste, the great 19th century naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock wrote: "I think all children test the corm as a food for curiosity, and retire from the field with a new respect for the stoicism of the Indian when enduring torture; but this is an undeserved tribute. When raw, these corms are peppery because they are filled with minute, needle-like crystals which, however, soften with boiling, and the Indians boiled them before eating them."

Near the end of harvest

This afternoon I picked a bushel of brussels sprouts from the garden and as the light grew dark I cleaned them and cut off the stems and outer leaves. After supper I blanched them and put them in plastic bags and then into the freezer for the winter and spring. The outside temperatures have gone below freezing a couple of times now--just barely below--which, somehow, makes the brussels sprouts a little tastier. Wait another week, though, and they could suffer from the first hard freeze. 

I still have some lettuce, spinach, and arugula growing under agribon spun polyester row covers. Light freezes do not affect it. I've been harvesting it some, but there is much more available. I'm waiting to see how cold it needs to get before it freezes to the point where it is adversely affected. It's possible to cover it with a second layer in the form of a low tunnel covered with more spun polyester, or transparent plastic, which will create some air insulation and keep the greens growing in much lower temperatures. Some who grow vegetables no more than an hour's drive from here, on the coast, have experimented with this winter gardening and written books about it. The winters can be very cold; I've felt the temperature drop to twenty below zero (F.). And if the summers are mild and foggy here, rather than hot and dry, if tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, corn, and other heat-loving crops do better elsewhere, the long growing season and late frosts (increasingly late, perhaps a month later now than fifteen years ago) favor other crops, such as greens and brassica.

All of this is highly labor intensive, and uneconomical in the sense that it costs more in terms of one's time than it would if the produce were purchased at the supermarket. Sometimes I'm asked why, then, do I do it; why have I done this for nearly thirty summers? I have many reasons. Economics does not figure in them. One, the food from an organic garden is more healthful. Two, gardening itself is healthful in the sense that it is good exercise. Three, and this is harder to explain, I get satisfaction from the physical work, and it seems to both rest and free my mind. I'm sure that if I grew up on a farm and had to work in the fields from dawn to dusk I would hate it; luckily, gardening on the scale that I do it, to supply a household (and not all of its needs, be it said), is not tedious and without respite.  

A mind and body tired from physical labor rests and sleeps better, I believe, than one which spends a day at a computer keyboard, in a classroom, or scheduled from one meeting to another, clients and colleagues. At least mine does. Four, gardening is a challenge, a mental stimulus, a discipline of mind and body which I find satisfying. And finally, as we think more about energy use and global warming, home gardening has a much lower carbon footprint than buying one's food at a grocery store. It is one small way of contributing to a more sustainable planet. If many families grew their own food, in small-scale organic gardens, the contribution would be substantial.

Apple Harvest 2010

In late September we picked apples for eating and storage: Liberty and Prima mostly. We got about 3 bushels. The Shiawassee, Winesap, and RI Greenings also were loaded with apples, while the Golden Russet and Baldwin trees had a modest crop. Some of the unknown and volunteer trees had a good crop also. We looked forward to the possibility of a good harvest. Normally we would do this around October 12 but this year I spent most of the first couple of weeks of October getting my paper written and ready for presentation at the American Folklore Society conference in Nashville, on October 14th. But on the 15th while we were still away at the conference, this part of Maine experienced a nor'easter, with winds to 60 mph, which among other things blew most of the apples down, whereupon the white-tailed deer feasted on them. My conference paper was on the subjects of biomimicry (following Nature) and Nature's economy, a concept that goes back to Enlightenment naturalists such as Gilbert White. Nature's economy refers to Nature's efficient care of her household, the Earth and its inhabitants. While I was speaking at the conference about Nature's economy, it was in operation at home, in that blowdown and the deer feast. But we'd already harvested plenty for eating and storage, and in this way Nature took care of us and the deer, too.

Prima's Progress

We've been following the progress of the Prima apples this year. The vanguard became fully ripe last week, the seeds turning blackish brown, the taste not too tart but as it should be, the texture no longer crisp but softening. Prima is an early apple, but early here means mid-September, not late August as elsewhere. Various storms have blown some of the apples down, including ones I photographed earlier, so now I can't show the same apple as it progressed to ripeness. Others will have to do.

The rains continued through July, coming frequently enough so that there never was a drought. The apples grew well. Here is a Prima as of August 1. It has attained a good size, although it's not quite full size yet. It is still very green and unripe, though. These Prima apples are immune to scab, and this one looks as if nothing else has harmed it either. Sometimes the coddling moth is attracted to them, and sometimes other apple pests break through the fruit also; but this one looks good so far. I could spray pesticides, and at one time I used to spray the organic kind of pesticide; but it turns out that most of the Prima apples are perfectly fine, like this one, without any kind of spray at all. The Prima is one of the original scab-free varieties developed at the New York State experimental agricultural station in the 1970s. The best, and best-known, of these original varieties is Liberty; and I have a Liberty tree as well. But the Prima tree has done quite well and the apples it produces have many good qualities, although they don't store very long.

Here is a photo of a Prima apple two weeks later, as it was beginning to ripen. This is not the same apple as pictured above, but it is representative of the Prima at this stage, about a month before becoming fully ripe. Again, there is no damage from scab or insects to the apple, although much insect damage can be seen on the leaf to the left of the fruit. This particular tree needs to be pruned and if I have time to do so this winter, I will. They say you should be able to throw a bushel basket between the branches of an apple tree if it's pruned properly. 

Now here is a picture of two Primas fully ripe, taken on September 18th. The tree is filled with apples in various stages of ripeness--on account of too much leaf cover from branches that are too close together, several of the apples are not yet ripe. But these are. The apples will stay on the Prima tree nearly until mid-October, but some will start to turn over-ripe and soft, whether remaining on the tree or even in cool storage, although the cool will delay the softening some. We intend to pick a few bushels and make sauce and apple butter, and of course to eat them. But other, later varieties, including Liberty, will store longer; these are not yet ripe but they will be shortly. In all, it was an average to better-than-average year for the apples here. Some of the trees that came only gradually into bearing, like the Golden Russet and the Baldwin that I planted twenty years ago, are now bearing more abundantly. Patience is a virtue here as elsewhere.

Common Yellowthroat and Yellow Warbler

Black capped chickadees, red-breasted nututhatches, bluejays, goldfinches, white-throated sparrows, mourning doves, robins, and crows are among the easily seen and often heard birds of this upland spot on the island. Less often seen and heard are the phoebe, downy woodpecker, song sparrow, hairy woodpecker, and the purple finch, once numerous but not any more. Often heard but seldom seen are the black-throated green warbler, common yellowthroat, and the hermit thrush. On my walks on the trails behind the house this year I was able to see and photograph a few of the less common birds, particularly those that enjoy a swamp habitat. There is a marshy pond just above the high tide line on an isolated spot of shoreland that I enjoy visiting when I lengthen my walk. Here at different times this spring and summer I was able to photograph the Common Yellowthroat, whose "whichity-whichity-which" song I've heard more often this summer than any previous. 

This is a male Common Yellowthroat, that I photographed on June 15th of this year. His curiosity was aroused by my "psshhh" sounds. He flew from branch to branch as he tried to size up the intruder, and as he did so he uttered his "chhk" alarm call, a typical response to what might have seemed to him an alarm call from me. The Cornell Ornithology website says that the common yellowthroat is a "skulking masked warbler of wet thickets, more frequently heard than seen." He certainly wasn't skulking here, although a little more than a month later I found him skulking about in a nearby thicket.

Now on July 23rd he was hidden, singing his "whichity" song. In response to my "pshhh" sounds he flitted from one branch to another, but this time he was in no mood to come into the open, warily keeping his distance while alternating between the "chhk" alarm call and his "whichity" song. It was very difficult to see him, let alone photograph him; the image at the right is the best I could do. The female Common Yellowthroat is said to be secretive. When I considered its behavior during my return, and before I had a chance to look closely at this photo, I thought the bird might be a female; but looking at the photo I can see the black hood of the male, a feature that is absent from the female. I will look for a nest on one of my next walks in that area. One of these males ventured into the apple orchard behind the house in mid-June, singing away for about ten days, but afterwards the song stopped and he went away, I assumed, without having attracted a mate. If he had done so, I'd have heard the song again in July after they had produced offspring.

I was also able to hear, see and photograph, on May 29, a Yellow Warbler. This was the first time I'd seen this bird on the island, although it is not uncommon according to those birders who keep track of these things. I heard its song as well, "sweet-sweet-sweet, I'm so sweet." This is, again according to Cornell, the most yellow of warblers and it, too, was taking up residence in this marshy area near the ocean. 


It is interesting that while different species of songbirds can reside in the same area, without animosity, two pair of the same species cannot, except for certain birds like the chickadees and nuthatches, that travel in flocks. How different it is with humans, where people of the same ethnic group reside in the same area without upset, but when different ethnic groups live together, sparks sometimes fly.

Apples after the June drop

A month ago the Prima apple tree was getting ready for the June drop, in which the clusters of tiny, developing apples self-prune, the presumably weakest dropping off to leave one apple to get the full amount of sustenance and grow as large as it can. Now a month later the June drop has taken care of most of the clusters. Here is the one I've been picturing from pre-blossom to this point. Looking into the center of the photo, you can see the scar where the other stems and apples have dropped. At 9 o'clock a lesion can be seen on one of the leaves; at 11 o'clock a leaf has been eaten by an insect; at 3 o'clock there is an insect on the leaf. The apple itself has a small vertical scar but is otherwise all right. This year the Prima tree has more apples than most. The freeze that affected the commercial orchards to the south and west didn't have any effect here. 

Most of the trees have some apples but only the Prima and the Greening behind the house appear loaded. To the right is a picture of a portion of the Prima, which is a full-sized tree about 25 years old. Most of the apple trees used to be bothered by porcupines in the late summer and fall. They would eat the apples, bite off the branches, and strip the bark, eventually killing the trees. But they haven't been around for about ten years now, for reasons unknown to me.

Late spring wildflowers

At the start on the side of the trail to the orchard the heal all self-heal shows its community of purple flowers. At the back corner of the property where the the trail goes into a T, the bunchberries are in bloom, their white flowers held just above the leaves.Throughout the trail, clusters of bluets form among the grass in the sun-struck areas.

Apples after bloom

The past ten days have been mild and dry, perfect weather for apple after-bloom progress. On May 28th I photographed a cluster of tiny apples forming on the Golden Russet tree just after petal fall. It's possible to see some of the dried petals still attached; they are orange colored. The styles and stamens are prominent but they too will dry up and fall. Below the sepals the tiny apples are beginning to swell and form. The Golden Russet is one of the later-blooming trees, excellent for cider. For the first seven or eight years after planting it didn't bear; for the next eight it was shy in bearing; but for the last few years it has borne an increasing amount of apples that, true to form, are russeted and not very attractive. But their taste is sweet and very pleasant. Possibly in a few more years it will bear enough for both cider and for eating; at the moment, the apples are too few and too tasty to blend in cider.

To the right is the Prima tree, the same cluster I've already shown twice at earlier stages. Here, with this variety earlier to bloom, the apples that are forming below the sepals are larger and further along than in the Golden Russet above. I've numbered them to show that #s1, 2, and 4 are well formed while #3 is not developing very well--compare, also, the thicknesses of the stems. It's now June, and time for the "June drop" when, in theory, all but the strongest of these little apples will drop off, leaving only one to grow. #3 will surely drop off first. #2 looks like the winner, but sometimes not all of the little ones drop, with the result that two smaller apples grow from the cluster. Certain varieties, such as Liberty, habitually don't do very well in the June drop, and so they should be thinned by hand. The Prima usually does pretty well. I will watch this cluster and see what happens. 

Owned by Machines

Arrived from Providence a few days ago, and after unloading and doing some chores I've had a chance to get back into the gardens, chiefly observing and planning, although I did some rototilling today and spent yesterday morning re-potting tomato seedlings, and weeding with the wheel hoe. It's warm and dry, a nice window to get beans into the ground, earlier than usual. At this time of year the ground is usually wet, the rains keep it so, and planting is difficult; but the season is advanced by a week or ten days, most of the blossoms have fallen from the apple trees, and I plan to get edamame soybeans, dry beans, and snap beans into the ground over the next couple of days. The onions have broken the surface, as has some of the lettuce and the ever-reliable arugula. The beets and spinach and chard are slower, as are the potatoes I planted a few weeks ago. 


More people are growing vegetable gardens these days, partly in response to economic hard times. The idea is that home-grown food costs less, and that is true amortized over time, labor not counted in the dollar equation; but the startup and maintenance of a garden can be costly, particularly if you invest in soil improvements, fence, and various garden tools and machinery such as a rototiller. If the idea of rural living on some acreage becomes attractive, gardening is but one part of it; you'll likely wind up deciding you need a pickup truck, a snowplow or snow blower, a chainsaw, a sickle bar mower, a bush hog, and a tractor. The more machines you have to work with, the more your time is taken up with maintenance; the machines teach you a lot, but they also seem to own you rather than the reverse. In this way country life can become a full time job, if you let it; and when it does, the pleasures of a life close to nature recede.

Apple Trees in Bloom

The Rhode Island Greening tree behind the house is now in full bloom. Along with the Prima, and the Shiawassee, it will provide enough apples for a cider pressing this fall, even though the other trees aren't going to blossom very fully this year. The mild winter, with little snow, is probably as much of the reason for the worse than average bloom, but you wouldn't know it from this Greening, one of the stalwart 19th century varieties, used chiefly for baking as well as cider, as it would keep reasonably well in a root cellar for much of the winter and early spring. For comparison's sake here are a couple of photos of the blossoms from the buds that I showed a week ago. The unnamed tree behind the house, first, the same blossom cluster as before:

If you look closely you'll see an insect in the flower to the far left. And here is the Prima, a sea of blossoms, with the cluster pictured last week at the center:

I wasn't idle in the vegetable garden last weekend or this one, but the blossoms are much more spectacular than the routine of planting. Nonetheless, 3 varieties of potatoes, red and yellow onion sets, and various seeds: peas, spinach, lettuce, chard, arugula, pac choi, beets, and Chinese cabbage all are in the ground now and waiting for the warmer weather (as are the apple blossoms). Last week was warm but a front came through yesterday bringing rain and cooling things down by ten to fifteen degrees. Some spots on the mainland--the usual cold spots such as Penobscot--could see frost tonight or tomorrow night, but I think we'll be spared, and the blossoms should be all right. They can stand a bit of light frost anyway, but at temperatures of 28 and below they won't survive.

Leafing Out

Early spring on the Maine coast is one of my favorite times to go looking for early growth. At this time of year the ferns are springing up from the earth and unfurling. These are in the field across from the house. The ones pictured aren't the fiddlehead kind, which also are unfurling now for foragers. Fiddlehead ferns are such a delicacy lightly steamed and then tossed with butter and garlic, or with a bit of vinegar, that they can be found at the supermarkets now, and for about a couple of weeks until the supply runs out. Unlike garden vegetables whose growth in different lattitudes permits a more or less continuous supply in the markets, they are a wild crop, native to this region, and their season is short--and then it's over. They can be frozen and stored after blanching, but the fresh ones have the best flavor and by far the best texture. The taste is indescribable, really, but a bit like asparagus and a bit like spinach. Delicious.
You don't have to go far into the fields to find wild strawberry blossoms now, but you do have to look for them right on the ground. Although they're abundant, the berries usually get eaten by animals browsing in the fields, even before they're ripe, so if you want to enjoy them you need either to put a transparent row cover tent over them, or a little cage. Many's the time I would mark, in my mind, where one or another clump was in bloom, to return a few weeks later to find--nothing!

Of course, the most abundant ground fruit here is the low-bush blueberry. At this time of the year the flowers are showing but not yet blooming. When they do, the local bees will pollinate them. I hear that the bee population in North America is under great stress and that fully 1/3 of the colonies died over the winter. The farmers who grow blueberries commercially in large fields usually hire beekeepers to bring hives to their fields during blossom time, and you can see the supers at the edges of the fields by the road. On this property there are plenty of blueberry blossoms and they seem to attract bees without any problem each year, but I'll be on the lookout to see if the population seems smaller this year. The berries themselves ripen in July, and gradually they're eaten by browsing deer as well as by birds, but if I start gathering them when they just turn ripe I can usually get as many as I want.

This blog entry wouldn't be complete without a picture of two of the budding apple blossoms, now at the tip stage--ahead of their normal schedule. This first picture is of a blossom cluster on the Prima tree out in the orchard, which like most apple trees is biennial, blooming more heavily in alternate years. Last year was an off year for the Prima, so this year, despite the general lack of bloom, it will bear many apples. The Prima is one of the scab-resistant varieties bred and made available to growers in the late 1970s. It is a large apple, which ripens in September, one of the earliest of the apples around here. It stores for only a month or so, usually enough to bring it to the cider pressing where it is sweeter and less acidic than most, and therefore valuable in the blend. If you use too many sharp, tannic, acidic apples the result will be tasty but bitter.

The Prima is one of the earliest varieties here, and so its blossom buds are more advanced than most; but one of the unidentified varieties back of the house blossoms first always, and so we'll have a look at it, a few days advanced over the Prima. This is the same tree from which I showed a leaf whorl without blossoms in yesterday's entry. The cooperative extension service at the University of Maine issues an apple crop pest report every few weeks during the growing season, and this year looks like a tough one for the growers. The mild winter without much snow enabled many of the pests to survive in greater numbers than usual. I used to spray my trees with botanical organic compounds, but I've found that in recent years it's not necessary. Much of the fruit is good and some is perfect without spraying here. And so, taking the simpler way when possible, I leave off spraying and hope for the best. We'll see what happens this year.

Another Early Spring

Last year the growing season was about a week ahead of normal; this year it's about ten days to two weeks ahead at present. Because of the warm weather last month, the apple trees have been leafing out ahead of schedule, and blossoms will appear shortly--although this looks to be a poor blossom year thus far. The picture above is one of the buds is leafing out on an unidentified variety tree behind the house, usually the earliest to leaf out. It's plain that no blossoms are inside the whorl of leaves.

The week was fairly dry, and I arrived Thursday night. Friday was trip to Fedco day, which meant potatoes, onion sets, various soil improvements, and two Nanking Cherry bushes were brought back. Today, Saturday, was a gardening day. I'd tilled the garden by the store and the one by the barn two weekends ago, and I did it again this morning; in addition, I tilled the garden down toward the Scotts', and put a tarp over the vetch which is growing well down there in one of the sections with the poorest soil. I cut back the blackberries and removed the dead canes. Then in the afternoon I was able to plant three rows of onion sets (two Stuttgarter and one Red Baron) and four rows of peas (two Burpeanna Early and two Sugar Lace) in the garden by the store. Tomorrow if the weather holds I'll plant potatoes and/or some spinach, and possibly some lettuce and other greens.

Blueberries for All

Today I planted out a few high-bush blueberry bushes in the garden by the old store, and I intend to plant more there in the lower part, where the soil is rocky and hasn't been good for much in the past few years. Blueberries chiefly like acid in the soil, and don't need much else. High-bush blueberries are larger but not as tasty as low-bush. But low-bush blueberries are very difficult to propagate. Neither taste especially good after they've been frozen, but it's possible to freeze and keep them for months of eating during the year. I do have a few low-bush blueberry patches around this property, and in August the birds and I enjoy the berries for a couple of weeks. It remains to be seen whether these high-bush plants will do well here.

Robert McCloskey's classic children's book, Blueberries for Sal, was written about the low-bush blueberry native to this region, growing on the rocky ledges covered with so thin a layer of acidic soil that little else will survive there. The low-bush blueberry is a testimonial to survival in yet a second way, as its antioxidant, cancer-prevention properties are making it a popular food among the segments of the population that pay attention to healthful eating. 

Blueberries are a commercial crop in this section of the state, Hancock County, and even more so in neighboring Washington County to the north. In the spring, some blueberry fields are burned to the ground; the weeds are killed and the low-bush blueberry bushes survive, although it takes them a year and a half after the burning to produce a crop. Nowadays tractors with water tanks, and flame-throwers to start the fires, are standard equipment for the burns, but I recall 35 years ago helping a friend burn his field the old-fashioned way, with matches for fire and Indian pumps with tanks worn on your back to drench the edges of the areas where the fire was to stop. These days you can sometimes find Indian pumps in antiques shops; you won't find them in use on blueberry fields except by people who are nearly too old to be working in them anyway. The bushes bloom in June, and by late July the blooms have turned to small green berries, which become blue in August, ripe and ready to be raked. Raking is still a hand operation, and workers--many of them migrants--can be seen in the fields bent over with their hand rakes working away and filling boxes and buckets with berries. 

The increased demand for blueberries as a part of a healthy diet has, in a tragedy of the commons scenario, led to overproduction and thus lower prices--good for the eater, bad for the farmer. Last year wholesale prices were so low that an organic farming family from this area found that the only way to break even was to truck their blueberries 120 miles south to Portland to sell to Whole Foods Market which, for those who may not know, is a chain of upscale supermarkets that feature organic and "natural" foods, usually at high prices. And they surely had some "carbon regret" over the fuel consumed on these truck-runs; they would much prefer to sell locally. 

In this farm family's response to overproduction some would see the invisible hand of the self-regulating market in operation. Next year, the conventional economic wisdom would have it, farmers won't produce so many blueberries and the price will go back up. Instead farmers should raise other crops and livestock for which there is more demand and less supply. But will they? Suppose you are a blueberry farmer and you can raise a good crop. You're set up for blueberry farming; it's the best use of the land, the thing you do best. Sure, you could go over to something else, but that's a lot of startup work and you wouldn't have as good a competitive advantage. And so if the invisible hand works as it should and next year the other farmers raise crops and livestock instead of raking their blueberries for market, you can still realize your blueberry crop and with a smaller supply of berries now that the other farmers have reduced their production, the price you get will have gone up. But if enough blueberry farmers think this way, then the overproduction will continue, the price will remain depressed, and instead of working for the benefit of the farmers, the invisible hand will squeeze them out.


Luckily, my high-bush blueberry plants, if they flourish and bear, will escape this invisible hand. It was said that Helen and Scott Nearing, the famous back-to-the-land pioneers who lived "the good life," as they wrote about it, not too far from here decades ago, got their cash from raising high-bush blueberries, but I believe that after they died it was revealed that Scott had a pretty nice inheritance which helped them make ends meet. All that plain living and high thinking is more easily done when there's a financial moat around you, and an inheritance is more secure than high-bush blueberries. Or low-bush, for that matter.

Newell Cotton and News Items

In an earlier entry, dated Dec. 5, 2009, I wrote about the northern New Hampshire farmer Newell Cotton, whose diaries from the last twelve years of the 19th century are in my possession. I've been re-reading those diaries for January, seeing how he spent his time. This was a period when most of his labor involved working with wood to ensure a continuing supply of heat, getting in the ice that would keep his food supplies cold for a period further into the year, and then writing, which was not a chore for him but represented an attempt to take part in a literary life, as he was a reader of books and magazines and newspapers, and he wrote stories, some of which he had published in newspapers and magazines. He hoped to write a book, but in the diaries there is no evidence that he completed one. He also regularly wrote "items" for local newspapers, and at this relatively slack work time of year he wrote more than usual.

I had wondered what he meant by "items," and I came to realize that these are short pieces of interest that made up much of the newspapers, particularly the local papers, in the old days. They included death notices and obituaries, event announcements, reviews, and the like; they also included news items, local and also from away. I was reminded of that today when reading Doris Grumbach's Life in a Day, where she reports that an old clipping of a news item (undated) fell out of a travel book she was reading.

The item read as follows: "Muskegon, Mich., Jan. 15. Mrs. J.F. Andrews, who was fraudulently placed in a private insane asylum near Detroit by her husband, who then eloped with Miss McGregor, a wealthy young woman of Jacksonville, Ill., has been released on the demand of her sister. Mrs. Andrews is perfectly sane, but is prostrated with grief. She married Andrews here and he has squandered her large fortune leaving her penniless in a madhouse with two small children, the youngest of which was born in the asylum. Andrews and Miss McGregor are living in Paris, France."

Doris Grumbach imagines what life will be like for J.F. Andrews and Miss McGregor in Paris, and how long it will take for him to run through his second fortune. I began wondering whether this was the sort of item Newell Cotton wrote about for the local papers. I'd assumed that the items he wrote were local news and announcements, events, obituaries. One of his diary entries concerns the difficulties he is having writing an obituary for a friend. Perhaps he also wrote this other kind of item, news from away, but where in the late 1800s would he have gotten this other news except from other newspapers? Once he found it, all he would need do is copy it and, like Doris Grumbach, he would imagine these little plots fleshed out into fiction, perhaps his own. And even if he didn't write or copy this kind of item, he surely would have read quite a few of them. I am still hoping to find his stories, but I will wait until I return to Providence to begin to search for them through the resources of my  university library.

The dividing lines among facts, gossip, story, and fantasy are plain in items like this one about the Andrews family and Miss McGregor. How impoverished is our news today, where we either read fact or opinion in newspapers, or gossip and hype about celebrities in magazines--and, of course, on line--but an item such as this would be hard to find, anywhere.

The radiance of wood heat

Heat coming from a woodstove feels nicer, warmer, more comforting than heat from other sources except, perhaps, the sun on a pleasantly warm day. Wood is also much less expensive. Other sources have just about everything else going for them: convenience, ease of use, evenness of heat, set it and forget it. The modern way.

The woodstove is a great improvement over the campfire and the fireplace: no smoke, more concentrated heat, and an airtight woodstove burns all night, while a fireplace draws cool air into the house at night. After that it's a tradeoff. Even the modern passive solar house with radiant heat in the floors offers convenience as well as using much less carbon than wood, even, although unlike gas, oil, and coal, wood is a renewable resource. But the radiant floor heat doesn't have the radiance of the woodstove, the feel on the skin.

After the snow last weekend we had a fairly warm week and for a variety of reasons I let the oil furnace do the work of heating the house for a few days. Now that it's turning colder--it will be around ten degrees F tonight--it was time to go back to the wood, and it's so much more comfortable. Important to realize this as wood requires so much work, even now, after felling and bucking and splitting and stacking, moving to storage and then moving into the house and then into the stove. And so much attention: in this cold weather, every few hours the stove needs re-loading, except of course at night while sleeping.

But these are good interruptions, conducive to breaks in other work: reading, writing, cooking, and the daily mail and record keeping. And the pleasures of walking and playing music betweentimes. Newell Cotton's diaries show he was able to do much more writing in the winter times, when he wasn't working with wood. His northern New Hampshire house burned wood in fireplaces and a cook stove, some thirteen cords per year, year after year. He'd have been happier with a few woodstoves.

A grower's gaze

The big storm is over; it lasted three days and dumped a little more than a foot of snow, which drifted to a couple of feet in spots, but was no worse than some of the big snows of past years, and not nearly as bad as feared. Nor did the power go out, despite everyone's expecting it. This illustrates the principle that the first few large storms of the winter season are oversold by the weather forecasters. A corollary is that once the snowstorms start coming in earnest, they are under-predicted.

Yesterday I was reading Foucault's history of the birth of the medical clinic, chiefly to explore more deeply his concept of the "gaze," in preparation for a seminar in music and cultural policy that I'll be teaching this spring. In the course of thinking about it I realize that among the many "gazes" there are growers' gazes. The gaze, for Foucault, is both penetrating and authoritative; it describes itself as moving inductively from  observation to pattern-fitting and understanding. In truth it is not so empirical, not so inductive; the known patterns pre-empt the observation, and guide it to a pre-ordained, if not foreknown, conclusion. So the doctor's gaze observes the patient in attempting to diagnose a disease. In the early days diagnosis was done chiefly on the basis of a pattern in symptoms; after the nineteenth century and scientific testing, symptom-diagnosis is confirmed (or not) on the basis of lab tests, whether blood tests or today's MRI or CT-scan.

The grower's gaze involves the health of the plant in its ecosystemic context. Increasingly the authority of the factory farmer's gaze is undermined by the enormous inefficiencies (not to mention dis-ease) of the product. University agriculture schools that used to support factory farming--as Earl Butz said, "Get big or get out!" (Butz was secretary of agriculture under Eisenhower, or was it Johnson?)--now develop and encourage natural and organic methods, though not exclusively. I can recall a time in the 1980s when along the roadsides signs with N/S printed on them were stuck up here and there. The N/S stood for "no spray"; that is, the transportation department sprayed the roadsides with weed-killers to keep the vegetation down, but they wouldn't spray if there was such a sign. The property owner then had the responsibility of taking care of it by mowing. Today on the island the roadsides are mowed, not sprayed. Times are changing.

The new year

I'm attuned to two calendars, neither of which marks January 1 as an important date. The seasonal calendar here on the island marks the winter solstice, a little more than a week before January 1, when the sun begins drawing closer to the earth, the days grow longer, and the seasons hold the promise of a harsh winter followed by a wet spring and then a spirit-lifting summer and autumn. The academic calendar, which I also follow, begins the new semester late in January. To usher in this new year, the winter is bringing a large snowstorm. With the newest computer modeling for the weather, it's now possible to predict storms well in advance. Early in the week the forecasters were excited about the possibility of a "historically significant" storm, if everything set up properly. Now, a day into the first of two storms, a light storm, the forecasters are not so excited but predicting a two-day storm starting tomorrow, January 2, producing anywhere from a foot to two feet of wet snow and winds up to 50 mph and a coastal flood watch because of the full moon and high tide. Surely the power will go out at some point tomorrow or tomorrow night; the question is how long it will be before power is restored.

I was down at (to, in local parlance) the local hardware store and BJ, the owner, was talking to me about how it seemed like there were more power outages this year than before. I reminded him that in the 1980s the local power company on the island sold out to Bangor Hydro, with the promise of better lines, and fewer outages. In truth, the lines are better, service is better, and perhaps there are fewer outages. The island power company didn't generate its own power; rather, it bought it from suppliers and brought it to the island. If it had generated it on the island and distributed it to the people here the costs would probably have been prohibitive; yet if I peer 50 years into the future I see an island power company here, with windmills generating local power.

With the electric power out in the sub-freezing winter life becomes elemental. The furnace and water pump depend on electricity, not to mention lights and computers. The phone usually goes down when the power does. A small minority of locals have electric generators for power outages. I'm thinking of getting one. When the power goes out, heat in the house depends on the wood stove, plus a kerosene heater. Water is bottled and rationed for washing, drinking, and coffee. Some of the contents of the refrigerator are placed outside. Toilets are not flushed. If possible during breaks in the storm I will go cross-country skiing out the door and back on the woods trails. It's never soon enough before the power is restored.

I am still hoping that the storm won't be as bad as the forecast.