The Emma Caites Way has it’s very first (media) review!
http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/a-sense-of-place/Content?oid=2283946
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A. V. Walters
Egrets
I always think of egrets as being shore birds. In the wacky world of associations and personal superstitions, I always believed that an egret (or heron) sighting was a sign of good luck. (Imagine how I felt when I lived down by Oakland’s Lake Merritt!) Here on the farm we are landlocked. The only bodies of water nearby are farm ponds fashioned to store water for livestock.
In spring, though, we have vernal pools. Even the briefest interval of rain can fill the bottom of the valley with a temporary lake that attracts ducks, geese, and (yes!) egrets. They are a brilliant white contrast against the spring green. It’s always a bit of a shock to spy them, white flags, all the way across the valley. You’d think they’d stick to the pools, though they don’t. While the ducks bob and the geese laze about on the ponds’ edges, the egrets are out parading across the hillside with their weird stilted gait. I have binoculars on the windowsill and I watch them marching in strange egret formations—spaced equidistant in respect to some territorial mandate. One morning I counted 29 of them, in and amongst the cows on the hill.
What are they eating? I fear it may be our frogs. I love the chorus of peeps and croaks that we get as soon as the rain falls. The evenings are loud with them. A friend from Sausalito recently commented on the noisy crickets and I just laughed. City folk! Them’s frogs. If the volume is any measure, I think we have enough to share with some hungry egrets.
A.V. Walters
Henrietta
When I first moved to the farm I’d been in the city for 29 years. I was viewed with gentle humor as a kind of exotic transplant. You know, Big-City professional with a ‘tude. It took the garden as a way for me to earn my chops. In the meantime, I was an avid observer of the dynamics of this small farm. I have come to believe that everything in life is personal.
Shortly after I arrived, the farm took in thousands of “used” chickens. (“That’s right, folks, these babies have had only one owner and only laid on Sundays!”) Elmer had a chicken-farmer friend who was retiring. These days that usually means that a small farm is going out of production. The college-educated children of farmers have little interest in farming. More and more, farming is being relegated to agribusiness, by default.
So, the chickens were transferred to one of our empty chicken houses. More often than not, I don’t understand the movements of livestock around farms. Cows, sheep and chickens are on the move all the time around here and, aside from the obvious management of grass length, I understand little of it. But this chicken transfer was a simple move; as a recent transferee to the farm myself, I understood it very well. It was a busy day, trucks with trailers stuffed with chickens in cages, rolling up the lane for most of the day, then deadheading back down the road to the retiree’s farm, empty cages bouncing and clattering, to collect more chickens. As I’ve since learned is often the case with a big transfer, a number of chickens usually escape. It takes a few days to round them up and get them back into cages.
That same day I was having a water problem. I didn’t want to bother Elmer in the middle of so big an operation, so I laid low until after the trucks had made their last run. Things go from full speed to dead pretty quick on a farm. When the work is done, the day is pretty much done. By the time I went looking for Elmer, the place was deserted. I checked the house, several of the chicken barns, even Number Four—but no Elmer.
Finally, I peeked into the chicken barn where the new chickens should have been settling in. Hardly. Chickens don’t like changes to their habitat and the barn was a cacophony of poultry, with feathers flying as chickens reestablished the pecking-order in their new digs. The cages in the chicken house hang about hip-height, and another tier above that. Now, below that, scores of the escaped chickens were roaming the floor, clucking up at their caged compatriots. Some jumped, wings flapping, in vain attempts to get back into the cages! I stood in the opening of the barn’s rolling door, flummoxed. If ever I thought chickens were smart—this cured me of that notion. Other than the escapees, there was not a soul in sight. I watched those loose chickens in their desperate antics, crestfallen. It flew in the face of my own recent flight to the country. Those dumb chickens wanted back into their familiar confines! (And let me tell you, the familiar for an egg-producing chicken is not a pretty thing.) Still, there is that old saying, “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.” I recoiled from any message that might lurk there, for me.
Peering into the darkening expanse of feathers and dust, I yelled out, “Run Chickens! Now’s your chance, make a break for it while you can!” It fell on deaf ears. Mostly.
Out from behind a rack of tall cages, stepped Elmer, his eyebrows knitted quizzically. “What are you telling my chickens?” he laughed. I blushed, relieved that the cool, dark of the barn kept this secret. Elmer shook his head, still chuckling. I decided to pretend that the only words I spoke in that chicken barn were about my water problem. He nodded and said he’d get up to the tank-house to fix it.
Most of the chickens were retrieved and repatriated over the next few days. All but one—a feisty little hen that eluded capture. Apparently, she’d taken heed of my message, made a run for it and wouldn’t let anyone near her. On a farm that houses tens of thousands of chickens, no one is going to waste a lot of time and effort pursuing just the one. Over the following weeks she grew fat and bold, feeding on spilled chickenfeed and bugs. Over time, her feathers filled out. She preened in the sun on the apron of the barn. We saw her frequently as she made her rounds. She became the talk of the farm, as one tenant after another alerted Elmer, or the farmhands, that there was a chicken on the loose. They’d nod, “Yup.” A loose chicken will usually fall prey to any number of hazards. There are dogs, foxes, hawks and coyotes around here, any one of which will gladly make a meal of a fugitive chicken. Still, she survived.
After about a month, this hen settled in the garden area around Elmer’s house. It became sport to spot and collect her eggs. Emboldened by freedom and the realization that no one was after her, she started hanging around the farm shop, especially when the farmhands took their breaks. They fed her treats from their lunches. They took a poll to name her. Some of the suggested names were getting crazy. Well, after debate, Elmer took the farm-owner’s prerogative and put his foot down on the matter. The chicken would be Henrietta.
I watched this unfold with some measure of mirth. Here this one chicken had, by force of stubborn personality, managed to elevate her status from escapee to pet. She made it personal. One of the farm hands brought her raw sunflower seeds. They argued such things at break-time like whether it would be okay to feed her popcorn—you know, because of the salt. They were teaching her to catch treats tossed in the air. The best of it was that everyone saw the humor (not to mention the irony) in it—a chicken farm with a pet chicken.
One day Henrietta mysteriously disappeared. Not a trace, no evidence of “foul” play. Folks would ask each other if they’d seen Henrietta. Everyone kept an eye out. This really shouldn’t have been a surprise; we all knew the risks. But still, nary a feather to be found. And it did seem odd, since she generally stayed so close to where people were. As you would expect, her absence sounded louder than her presence ever had. Break-time talk lapsed back into the work at hand and any funny story of the day. (Farmers are such gossips!)
We have a guy on the farm, Bill, who works the chicken houses. He mostly keeps to himself and doesn’t come down and hang with the other hands at break-time. He’s developmentally disabled and is more comfortable taking his breaks in his quarters, or out wherever he’s working that day. He’s nice enough, but shy, and uncomfortable trying to keep up with the ribald conversations in and around the shop. Well, about a week after Henrietta’s disappearance Elmer mentioned it to Bill. He nodded, “That loose chicken? Yeah, I finally got her.”
“What? You caught her? What did you do with her?” Maybe Elmer’s tone was a little too strident. Bill, who thought he was just doing what he was supposed to, got defensive and flustered. “I put her back in the cages.” “Which cage?”
“I dunno—over in Number Six, somewhere.”
Elmer couldn’t exactly be angry. A farm hand had put a loose chicken into a chicken cage. It’s what’s supposed to happen. How was Bill to know that this was no ordinary chicken? It had never been explained to him that Henrietta was now a pet chicken. I know that Elmer spent some time looking, walking the aisles between the cages in Number Six. I think most of us did. You’d think she would have been easy to spot, but it’s difficult to tell one brown hen from all the other brown hens, in a barn with thousands of other chickens. Whatever it was that was special about her, she didn’t stand out when you were peering through the wire.
A. V. Walters
Musings on Spring
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day and, with this week’s heavy rains, our corduroy hills have taken on that Irish, emerald green. I call them corduroy because the ranchers cut the hay and leave it in rows on the hillside. The hills across from us are so steep that a tractor can only go strait up and down–any turn on the steep part of the slope and they’ll tumble. On that steep terrain they cut, but don’t bother to bail or collect the hay. So the cut hay lays on the hillside in stripes–stripes that echo, season after season, on the landscape. The week’s rains have washed the cows and today they stand out starkly–black and white, against the green. With the intense green and the equinox next week, we can’t help but think of spring.
In my Michigan hometown, up on Lake Superior, they’re thinking of spring, too. My mother, even in her mid-seventies, is a rabid gardener. As soon as the snow retreats she hustles to rake up the garden in preparation for spring planting. It’s a big job, one she tackles in stages that are measured by the progress of the snow’s melt. She races against time, knowing that when late May fades into June, it’ll be blackfly season–and she’ll want to be indoors for that. It’s been a mild winter in the North, too mild. This week they’re having a false spring. It was eighty degrees in the Harbor today–a record breaker by all accounts. Most of the snow is gone, or nearly so. I can picture my brother-in-law standing in the parking lot of their general store, broom in hand (his excuse for being outside) face tipped to the sun. In fact I’ll bet all the inhabitants of the Harbor were out today, drinking in the summer-like weather.
It’s not necessarily a good thing and they all know it. In separate calls to my family today, three of them mentioned the obvious danger of too early a spring. The trees can be fooled, lulled into an early bloom. Flowers have the same risk. When that happens, winter reaches her icy fingers back to what March should be and the bloom will fail, taking next summer’s fruit with it. And nothing is quite as winter-numbing as the sight of a daffodil in it’s crystal sheath, after a freezing rain. Still, standing outside in shirtsleeve weather has its own hooks, after months of cold and grey.
Today in Two Rock the rains gave way to blustery winds. The clouds have been chased away and the sun shines on new hills. The grass is growing faster than the sheep and cows can eat. Walking out to the road, to get the mail, I spooked a huge flock of black birds–invisible in the tall grass until the moment they launched, en masse, into the sky. I was startled and laughed out loud at the surprise of it.
During the worst of the rains I was scheduled to collect signatures for California’s referendum to require foods with genetically modified ingredients to be labeled as such. We were positioned at the door to Whole Foods. (Yes, I know–shooting fish in a barrel.) Still, it was interesting. The signatures flowed easily between cloudbursts but when the rains really came down, the shoppers hunched their backs, scrunched up their faces, avoided eye contact and ran for their cars. I can’t blame them, it was cold and wet. Some people stopped to say they’d already signed, and to thank us for being there. One well-dressed man shook my hand and told me he hoped it wasn’t too late already. I couldn’t help but agree.
It’s an early spring here, too. To a lesser extent we have a similar problem as my family back home. We’re not clear of the danger of frost, not until May. But the equinox is a milestone. I can start hardy seedlings indoors next week. Then, in the weeks after that I can start some of the more delicate vegetables. I struggle with the temptation to rush the process. I’m no different than the folks back home, who sweep parking lots in the sun, where only a week or so ago there was snow. We all yearn for spring, for planting and the promise of summer’s warmth. And that’s what’s up in Two Rock.
Paradise
I have lived
on the edge of paradise—
once in a small beach town
where you could smell
if not see, the ocean from every street,
walk to the beach from any part of town,
not wear shoes for days.
And later,
in an even smaller town
with only three side streets,
one gas station and seven bars,
mountain peaks so close
it looked as if you could touch
their smooth granite sides,
run your hand down
the soft curves of the forests
in their crevices.
And when you came out of the drugstore
with your aspirin or band-aids
you might see a single bison
staring at you, breathing white puffs
into the morning air
or a prong-horned antelope grazing
a few feet from where you parked your car
by the laundromat.
“You’re so lucky to actually live here!”
the tourists would say, their eyes shining.
Now I live in a place
surrounded by farms and chickenhouses
where I sometimes have to stop my car
and wait, while dairy cows are escorted
across the road to milking barns.
No tourists here, no one
to tell me I’m lucky
except the voice in my head that says
you’re so lucky
to be alive, after the cancer,
the hospitals and doctors,
after waiting so many hours
in small curtained rooms
with sinks and needles,
stunned and mute.
And now a tourist myself
in a life I almost lost,
I walk outside
with my black and white dog,
move the sheep through the pasture,
watch the wind blow
through the tops of the pine trees,
look at the faces of my sheep
see the questioning look in their eyes
and the patience.
Copyright 2009 Ina Ray Scrocco
Ina Ray Scrocco lives in Two Rock. She is an award-winning poet from Sonoma County who has been published in several anthologies, and is presently working on an upcoming book of poetry. Her work has appeared in The Redbook, Brief Encounter and the Napa College “Conference ‘81” collection, among others. She has given numerous readings in the area at Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University, Cinnabar Theatre, Copperfield’s Books, and the Vallejo Ferry Theatre in Sausalito.
A. V. Walters
Manzanita!!!
Just a quick update to Snobs–we’ve run out of almond! Even with beautiful days, our cold nights have completely drawn down our store of seasoned firewood. It’s not that we’re wasteful; we keep the house at about 62 degrees. I’ve reached the point where I find a normal home’s (say 68 degrees) stifling.
I called my supplier and he couldn’t help us. Apparently the almond growers have been lured out of the firewood market by guaranteed sales to the biomass buyers. When they pull an orchard for rotation, these new buyers will immediately grind the entire lot for the co-generation of electric power. The growers recover a little less, but they don’t have to store the wood for seasoning. They can almost immediately re-plant with new trees. That is, after all, their business. They’re almond growers and the focus is on the nuts, not firewood.
However, my supplier did slyly indicate that he’d scored some manzanita–hot burning, dense, with as many BTUs as our favorite, almond. It’s a rare opportunity; he’s never seen it before in quantity. I checked it out on the net and, sure enough, manzanita has the same BTU rating as almond. And it is beautiful wood. The interior looks like cherry. The smooth bark ranges from rust to burgundy. And it is heavy. We got a sample–a third of a cord to carry us until it warms up at night. So, this evening we’re sampling our new, exotic firewood. It’s lovely and it’s hot! The listings on the internet warned us not to overload the wood stove and they weren’t kidding. So, for those who thought we were firewood snobs before, eat your hearts out! We’ll finish out the season with manzanita and do next year with a blend of Walnut and what manzanita we have leftover from this season. Hopefully, beyond that, we’ll be able to get more almond.
A.V. Walters
Spring?
I may have spoken out of turn when I announced it was Spring in Two Rock. It’s something, but I’m not sure just what. Northern California seasons can be a little confusing, especially if, like me, you’re from areas that have real winter. I’ve been here over thirty years and I still get caught short by faux seasons.
So we’ve had gorgeous days in the 60s and 70s. We walk up to feed the emus and, from the vantage up the hill, the valley is beautiful. The daffodils are in bloom, even in Two Rock. (I say even because Two Rock is always a couple weeks behind Petaluma–and more when it comes to frost free nights.) The grass is lush, mostly from melting frost or fog, because we’ve had so little rain this season. I just barely got the peach tree pruned before the buds started to swell. A few of the blossoms have popped open like popcorn. Plum trees are in full bloom throughout the valley. Over the weekend we drove to Santa Rosa and saw them pruning the grape vines in the vineyards. The most dramatic and confusing thing is the mustard. Farmers put it in as a cover crop, sometimes mixed with rye grass. The mustard is in full bloom now. Whole fields of yellow, sloping with the contours of our rolling hills, take your breath away as you crest the hill and come down into the valley. How could it not be Spring with that display of yellow?
Three nights of sub-thirties temperatures is how. We still need to keep the fire burning to keep the house from slipping into the 50s. I’ve always thought that this mid-winter hesitation was a feature in the California winter. It’s too early to plant but you can still clean up the garden, prune (though you best hurry up on that at this point), plan, divide bulbs and generally get things ready. If you’re really old fashioned, you can clean and sharpen all the garden tools. (I always wished I could be that dedicated. Instead I sharpen on the fly, as needed, and almost never clean a shovel or spade.) My first Spring here I was chomping at the bit to plant. Elmer said, “No. We see frost until the first week of May.” Every year he’s been proved right. So I wait, leaf aimlessly through the seed catalogues and peer anxiously at the dwindling wood pile.
I worry about the weather. Though the surface is damp from the dew and frost-melt, too little rain has left the soil dry any deeper than that. I worry about the well and about whether the dry soils will be a challenge for the garden through the summer. Will this cold weather kill off the blossoms and spoil the fruit tree harvest? Can the peaches and plums pollinate so early–when the cool days and nights impede the bees? But I’m a worrier. Probably it’ll all be fine. By April I’ll be planting seed starts for transplanting when the soils warm up. In May we’ll be digging in buckets, and it will fall into place, like it does every year. In the meantime, I’d better throw another log on the fire.
A.V. Walters
Clarification
In my last post I expressed my support for labeling of GMO products in the food supply. In particular, I am advocating for the current referendum in California which would mandate such labeling. The responses have been interesting.
So, to start, my position is based on the premise that we have a right to know what’s in our food. Though there’s plenty of detailed information supporting the measure, I don’t think we need to go there in order to make the point. Yes, I am aware of the studies showing GMO residues in the umbilical cord blood of Canadian newborns; I know about the German study on alarmingly concentrated levels of GMO residues in the urine of adults; I know about the danger of GMO contamination of adjacent croplands; and, yes, I know about the danger to bees posed by both GMO (especially BT products) and current pesticides. I know these things–but I don’t think that we need to get into a science argument in order to support these measures. (Please, you don’t need to win me over, I know. You needn’t educate me with studies and websites.) After all, you’ve seen just how far arguing science gets us in the climate change debate.
These days nobody questions the right to know how much sodium a food processor puts in their frozen pizza. It’s accepted as a natural fact that we can–and indeed must–look at the labels to determine what foods meet our personal dietary objectives. This GMO measure is just an extension of that widely accepted principle. Go to the grocery store and watch the patrons looking at the labels (often squinting at the small print, with arms outstretched.) Labeling works. We get the data we need to make informed choices. It’s that simple. What’s the argument?
Now, can I get back to the farm? It is, after all, spring in Two Rock.
A. V. Walters
Snobs
Like many out here in West County, we burn wood to stay warm. Within legal limits, we try to meet our heating needs with a small wood stove and a sense of grit. It makes for a different rhythm of the day; first thing on waking, even before coffee, is seeing to the fire. Ours is a small stove, so, especially on a very cold night, the fire often doesn’t make it to morning. I’m the early riser around here, so I’m the one who breaks the still of the morning with fetching wood and lighting the stove. If lucky, I start the day with embers; it’s just a question of feeding a hot stove and nursing it into flames. If I sleep in, or if the night was particularly chilly, I can count on having to do a cold start—shoveling out the ashes and starting-up with a little paper, kindling, etc.
We’re wood scrounges. I watch craigslist and when a tree falls in a storm, or somebody is felling one, I try to be quick on the draw. This past fall we scored two walnut trees for a song. Granted it was several weekends, cutting them into manageable sized chunks and hauling them back to the farm for splitting. It came in at just over two full cords. Next winter I’ll be curious to see how the walnut burns. (We’re hoping the two cords will carry us through most, if not all, the season.) This year we’re mostly burning almond and apple. The almond is incredible firewood. It burns hot and long, with lovely flames tinged with blue. And it smells good, with minimal ash. Almond is the exception to the scrounge rule—it’s so good I pay top dollar for it. Then I mix it with whatever I’ve got available. The apple smells good, too. But it burns fast with little in the way of lasting embers and leaves a ton of fluffy ashes. It was cheap though—fifty bucks for a truckload when we do all the cutting and loading ourselves.
I grew up in a wood-burning family. Back east the wood of choice is oak—or hornbeam, if you can find it. So I’m familiar with waking up to the slightly acrid bite of oak in the air. When I first came to the farm I scrounged for anything I could pick up free after a storm. There was a lot of bay, manzanita and oak. The varieties of oak we here in sunny California are not all as good as the ones back home. Some has a low BTU value—about the same as apple—better than pine, but not the good, all night burn I remember as a kid. But the smell is still the same—a distinctive edge to the smoke and the ash. You can tell when you walk into the house that there is oak in the woodstove. For that weirdly nostalgic smell, I try to pick the harder, longer burning oak. After all, if you must endure its oakyness, you should get the BTUs of good oak. But in the wet of a rainstorm (when trees fall they’re often offered free to anyone with a chainsaw who’ll haul them away,) I can’t tell what kind of oak is what—and free does not give one the opportunity to be picky. So oak it was, until somebody offered me a sample of almond.
Hot, sweet, long-burning almond. Renewable too, because almond growers in the Central Valley are always cycling out old trees to make way for new. I quickly became an almond snob. Then last fall we had the opportunity to pick up apple, cheap. Apple doesn’t have the heating value of almond (or a good oak) but it starts easy and burns hot. Mixed with almond, it’s a perfect fire. Right now I’m burning exactly that mix, with some oak late at night (when we keep the stove closed up and damped down.) My sister back home laughs. They stick with what grows local there, mostly oak, some maple and hornbeam. To hear me extol the virtues of fruitwood and nut-woods, well, she thinks it’s like Californians and their wine. You know, a little grassy with a hint of blackberry and a smooth finish. She and her husband are simultaneously intrigued and appalled that next season I’ll be burning walnut!
Walnut! That’s for furniture! I felt funny about it, too but by the time we arrived on the scene the tree-fellers had already cut it into 12 to 24 inch rounds, so my guilt was assuaged. At least I didn’t cut it that way. Cutting and hauling the walnut was some of the hardest work I’ve ever done. (A good test for my new partner, who was game all the way.) He split most of it, too. (A neighbor joked that when you split your own wood, by hand, it warms you twice.) In true Michigan fashion, we were cutting wood for next year—to allow ample seasoning time. But here on the farm they don’t always plan out that far. Our growing woodpile became the talk of the farm. Finally, Elmer asked whether there was something about the upcoming winter that I knew, that maybe I should tell him. The relief was clear on his face when I said that much of it was for next year. It’s turned out to be a long and particularly cold winter here. And we were ready with our almond and apple. Even after months of nights in the 20s and 30s (I hope they’re not laughing back home—but that’s really cold for here) it looks as though we’ll just make it through—without having to dip into the walnut. (Though we have burned a few of the smaller scraps, mostly just to see how it performs. But you’ll have to wait until next year for that report.)
I guess my family is right. We’ve become wood snobs. We hew to the rituals and rhythms of ‘making wood’ but we’ve embellished it with a particularly Californian aesthetic, not just the heat, but the bouquet, the color of the flame and quality of ash. Okay, maybe they have something on us there. Burn appétit!
A. V. Walters
Errata
This business of editing is a full time occupation. Just when you think it’s finished, something else comes along. The Emma Caites Way was edited a number of times, by me, and by others and finally by Rick Edwards (a number of times). Each time I was shocked by how many errors had slipped past our notice. Worse, sometimes editing actually added errors in a terrible dance of sentences mangled in the word processing mill.
Along the way of creating the story, some things changed. One of the characters, not a major one but certainly an identifiable person in the story, was originally named Rick. He wasn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy individual, so Rick (the editor) edited Rick (the character) out of existence and the character Rick, became Tom, a not exactly warm and fuzzy individual. Except… one of our readers contacted us and pointed out that there’s a place in the book where Rick (the character, not the editor) is still peeking out between the lines! (Well, actually, in a line.) Whatever happened to global changes through Word!?? Sigh.
When the print version of The Emma Caites Way came out, I (the author) almost immediately found two punctuation errors. Then Rick (the editor) found a mangled sentence. Then our reader found The Ghost of Rick, the character (not Rick, the very warm and fuzzy but not perfect editor.) To our readers: I’m really sorry, we keep working at it and we will correct the errors. Feel free to keep pointing them out. We’re compiling a list for our first (and, with any luck, the only) revision.
Thanks for your support, your patience, and your keen powers of observation
Buckets
A.V. Walters
Elmer isn’t just a chicken farmer. Being a farmer requires many skills and those skills translate into other areas. Obviously, since he’s my landlord, he has property management skills. Since he has the farm, and the farm has roads on it, he has road building and maintaining equipment. He has to keep the well in shape, so he has experience with pumps and piping and such. One of the secrets of farming is that you have to know some of everything to get by. It may also be one of the reasons so many farmers are employed, at least part-time, off the farm. They make good employees, because they know so much. Down side is, well, they have a lot of common sense and know how to make do. So don’t be surprised if stuff works fine, but looks a little funny.
Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that Elmer has some rentals, on and off the farm. He and his farm crew maintain them, especially in the off-season. I haven’t yet figured out when the off-season is for chickens, but from time to time this place is deserted because everyone’s out stringing fence somewhere on the property or for another farmer, or paving a church parking lot or painting a rental somewhere. All that painting uses plenty of paint. Plenty of paint uses up lots of buckets. Empty buckets never go to waste, they just hang around inside or outside of the barn we call Number Four, waiting for their second calling. When Elmer told me to look around for stuff to address the garden/drought issue, I saw piles of buckets. Big piles of buckets, the five gallon kind.
Having lived in the city for decades, I am fully aware of the ups and downs of container gardening. It’s a lot of work, filing the chosen containers with earth and compost, arranging enough drainage, planting, tending, harvesting and then emptying the containers each season. One of the risks is that the container will get too hot and cook the poor plants from the roots up. Planting in the ground provides a home that maintains a moderate temperature. But planting in a traditional open garden environment wastes an enormous amount of water. With row crops, you water the plants and the area all around them. I proposed putting our vegetable garden in buckets, which were themselves in the ground. Elmer and the farm hands smiled that okay, Miss city slicker, knock yourself out kind of smile.
I arrived on the farm as a woman without tools. Not that I’d never had tools, or didn’t know how to use them, but that in my retreat from urban living suddenly a lifetime’s accumulation of shared tools suddenly became a gender specific kind of marital asset. Really, it just wasn’t worth fighting about. Nonetheless, it landed me here more helpless than made me comfortable. One day I asked Elmer if I could borrow a saw. Naturally, he wanted to know what for? When I told him I wanted to cut the bottoms off a bunch of those buckets for the garden, he leaned back and considered it. After what seemed like a very long time he leaned forward and asked, softly, “How many buckets?” Then I knew, whether curious or just in it for sport, Elmer was game for bucket gardening. That was half the battle. Not that there weren’t other queries, why was I cutting off the bottoms? What was the point of the bucket? Was everything going to be in buckets? But I had answers.
The reason I wanted the bottoms cut off was to let the water drain through so the roots wouldn’t rot. The bucket tops stuck up above the garden surface and served as a reservoir for watering. That directed the water straight down, to where the plants roots were. But not everything could go in buckets; corn, for example, has very long roots and needs to be planted bunched up with other corn in order to get proper pollination. But that first year, we put the thirsty guys, tomatoes, eggplants and squash, into the buckets. Elmer told the farm hands to cut me as many buckets as I needed.
The crew watched from the sidelines, behind those same smiles, fully expecting failure. The garden flourished; water usage was minimal. Buckets had other advantages, too: they served as hose curbs; because the watering was directed into the buckets, they kept the unplanted areas dry and thus the weeds down; they kept the West County winds at bay when the seedlings were little and they kept the garden tidy. Elmer was won over. He even gave tours to friends of what he called the best garden the farm had ever had and extolled the advantages of bucket gardening. The farm hands shook their heads, with a bit less of a smile. The only hurdle left–gophers.
Two Rock Chronicles is the official blog of Two Rock Press. The blog will be a show place for our authors and editors. Check here to share with us what’s new at Two Rock Press.
Recently we published our first novel, The Emma Caites Way, by A.V. Walters. First released as an eBook on smashwords.com on November 1, 2011, it quickly became a smashwords bestseller. Following that demonstrated initial interest, The Emma Caites Way was released in print and is available through Amazon. We anticipate the release of A.V. Walters’ second novel, The Gift of Guylaine Claire, later this winter.
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