Archives for posts with tag: season

How Soon You Forget

September 6, 2020 //

It’s been years since Rick and I canned tomatoes. Back in Two Rock, we planted enough tomatoes to feed a village. In our best year, we harvested over seven hundred pounds of tomatoes…spread the wealth on the farm, donated some, and canned over eighty quarts of tomato products, whole plum tomatoes, diced tomatoes and tomato sauce.

Since then, we’ve been too busy–and we’ve had garden failures. This year, we finally had decent tomatoes–full, tall, leafy, abundant and delicious. Our first harvest we froze. We blanched and skinned them, and then chopped them and bagged them into the freezer (I even skinned cherry tomatoes, because we had so many. You have to be a little crazy to skin cherry tomatoes.) We got over a gallon of frozen diced tomatoes. While nothing compared to Two Rock, it’s a pleasure to be back in business again. You cannot beat the flavor of home grown tomatoes.

I’ve had friends question the wisdom of growing and canning tomatoes. After all, canned tomatoes, even organic, are not that expensive. But the flavor of home grown makes it all worthwhile. This is food. The stuff from the stores is mere fuel.

So yesterday was the second harvest. We’d had winds and rain, they were splitting and dropping. The culls will go to the chickens (who knew chickens liked tomatoes?) So I set up to make sauce.

In storage, we have a fancy manual tomato processer–you can turn out gallons of tomatoes into sauce in short order. But storage is something we’ll get to when “season” slows. And I only had about eight or nine quarts of tomatoes, so I did them all by hand. It looked like a lot. Rick went down to the basement and retrieved seven pint jars and lids.

How soon you forget. Sauce cooks down. A lot. For our trouble we got four pints of tomato sauce. We’ve already eaten one….it smelled so good cooking, I couldn’t resist. But the taste is incredible! It reminds us why we did so much of it before. We’re blending tomatoes–Amish canning tomatoes, San Marzanoes and Black Cherokees. Combined, they have a meaty heft–but are still sweet and aromatic.

I put half of those empty jars back in the basement. We’ll do it again–there will be more ripe in next week or so, but we have a long way to go before we’re actually productive. This year was a garden trial run.

Autumn is looming. No significant color in the forest yet…but those errant branches are far more intense. They’re trying to get our attention. Winter is coming.

Tags canning, season, tomatoes

Categories Uncategorized

Turning

August 29, 2020 //

One day it’s muggy and unbearable, and the next…something has changed. The tomatoes are still there, hanging heavy on the vine. And the beets and potatoes…not quite ready to harvest. But the season has decided to shift. The scent of fall is in the air. The winds are just a little wilder. The warm days left will be wistful, seeking to wring every last moment, every last golden ray of sunshine out of it.

The trees haven’t yet turned, well, except for those few errant branches that go early every year. But the sense of it is unmistakeable. Autumn. It seems early this year–but maybe we always say that. “No,” my mother insists, “It is early–the mice are coming in already, and it’s not even September.”

“It’ll be a tough winter,” decrees the guy at the local hardware. “The mountain ash are loaded with berries.”

According to the native lore of the area, the season is turning early. You can tell, they say, by the dropping of the white pine cones, and the low viscosity of the sap.

To me, it seems the garden is in a rush to finish up. The bumper crop of tomatoes, which often extends into September, seems almost ready for the final harvest and it’s not even the end of August yet.

The days are getting shorter; we’ve noticed that suddenly we’re eating dinner at a more reasonable hour. Mid-summer, our days are so long that we sometimes sit down to dinner at nine-thirty or ten.

I check my blog from last year, and we were still finishing end of season chores through to the end of October, and I’m left wondering if this sense of turning is all in my head. I’ve ordered a dozen or so fall-planting trees, and they won’t arrive until the first week of October. Will we be planting in an early chill? It will be fine if that’s the case. But we do love a lingering late season.

Already we’re planning winter. We’ve started consolidating the bees–though I’m sure they have weeks of foraging left–late season stuff from the goldenrod and spotted bee balm. They’ll make us richly colored and strong flavored amber honey from the late blooms. And we’re splitting and stacking firewood. Next week the chimney sweep comes to clean our stove-pipes, before the winter heating season.

It seems, with all the insanity in the air–the pandemic, upcoming elections and the summer’s social unrest–that summer got away from us. But seasons keep their own rhythms, and I think it’s us that lost track of it.

I want to dig in my heels, to slow it down, as though I had any control. But since I love autumn, it’ll be fine whenever it is that we slip into it. And I don’t mind winter, either. But I can hear friends and family, wailing. “No, no, not yet.” These, too, are traditions and we take them all seriously.

Tags fall, season

Categories Autumn, chores, color, Color Season, heating with wood, Honeybees, planting orchard trees, Uncategorized, weather

The Path to Spring

February 28, 2019 //

In like a lamb? There’s another polar vortex event in the forecast–one that should put a chill on the lower 48! Some friends are posting pictures of flowers, and reports that their bees are on the wing. Sigh. For now, we’ll have to content ourselves with pictures from seed catalogues. For us…for now…this is the path to Spring.

Tags environment, season

Categories chicken coop, chores, cold, country living, rural living, snow removal, Spring, Uncategorized, winter

April?

April 6, 2018 //

Break out the snow shoes. Who said anything about Spring? It is beautiful, though.

We woke up to another six inches. It’s spring snow, sticky and heavy.

And still falling…

It changes how you look at the day. (And makes adjustments to your schedule.) No gardening today!

Our work is cut out for us. Oops—forgot to cover the tractor after clearing yesterday. I guess that’s where we start.

Tags season

Categories climate, climate change, country living, season, snow, Uncategorized, winter

March of the In-Betweens

March 27, 2015 //

March of the In-Betweens

A.V. Walters

Critter calling cards on our stoop.

T.S. Eliot was dead wrong. April is not the cruelest month. March is. One day it’s warm and lovely, the next, snow is falling and the ground is white, again. For those of us waiting to build, to plant, to get a jump on the season… it’s agony. Those nice days—just teasers—don’t let them fool you into starting your seeds early. It’s March, the season of the lions and the lambs.

My years in Northern California, where daffodils come up in February and (if you’re lucky) March will deliver a seasonal, finale rainstorm, have confused me as to the truly transitional nature of March. March, in Northern Michigan, is here to teach patience.

I’m trying to find transitional, spring-readiness things to do. I’ve hung my laundry on the line in the snow. (Yes, it works.) We’ve assembled, primed and painted the bee boxes. I’m pulling nails out of some recycled flooring we bought on craigslist. It’s a time of enforced waiting. Today we’ve seen light snow and temperatures in the teens, again. By midday, we may see twenties—what’s spring-like about that? Those stellar 40s and 50s of several weeks back, spoiled us. Now, temperatures in the 20s and 30s feel cold. We’d spent February hiking in single digits and teens, without complaint but now, we turn up our collars on much nicer days.

We’ve been tempted to take the snow-blower off of the Kubota (and maybe replace it with the backhoe, for building) but for the fear that we’d trigger one of those late-March snowstorms. Maybe that’s the origin of the term ‘March Madness.’ (Basketball may have nothing to do with it.)

There are things that need this on-again-off-again season. Warm days and cold nights wake up the trees. Sap begins to run. March is the sugaring season. Without the stuttering warm-cold cycles, the sap production would go straight to manufacturing leaves—and we’d have no maple syrup. I’m a little in awe of the sugaring process. Who thought that up, all those eons ago? The whole thing is an exercise in patience; collecting the sap, literally, drop by drop; boiling it down, for syrup it takes forty gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup; and bottling it up. Sugar-maple candy boils down even further, and then gets instantly crystalized, ladled into the snow. Around here, it’s mostly the old timers who still tap the trees. Our neighbors do, using new-fangled drip collection bags, (if you’re patient, you can watch the steady dripping that turns the season.) We’ve talked about it; we certainly have the maples. It goes into our ‘maybe someday’ list.

The critters are out. We’re in a walk-out, basement apartment, so we see them almost eye-to-eye as they wander about, unfettered by deep snow. There’s a herd of deer who happen by everyday at dusk. Just before the deer show up, there’s a small parade of turkeys. The bunnies come out just as the last light fades. If we miss them, we can take attendance by the tracks left in the thin spring snow. Two days ago, the robins arrived. I was sitting by the window and suddenly the yard was full of them. To the impatient among us, they are a sure sign of Spring.

Tags animals, California, chores, maple syrup, March, Michigan, Northern Michigan, season, Spring, sugaring, winter

Categories bees, maple syrup, March, season, wild animals, winter

Sundays and Making Wood

August 25, 2014 //

Sundays and Making Wood…
A.V. Walters–

We’re busy building. I suppose, given how late it is in the season, we could/should just power on through and build every day. But there are other priorities in the mix. Once built, we’ll need to heat our new home. Our plan is to heat as much as possible using wood from the property. One cannot wait until the snow is thigh-high to go out for firewood. “Making wood” is what the old Finns call it, back home. Mostly, we’re cutting deadfall. There’s plenty of it these days, because those damned (but beautiful) Emerald Ash Borers keep killing the ash trees. At least the wood will still make good fires, and keep us warm in the winter.
Anyway, we decided to take one day a week to cut firewood. Sundays. It’s a lovely change of pace, and brings us deep into the forest. It’s still backbreaking labor, especially on our steep hills but there’s always something new to see. Today it was Indian Pipes.

Indian Pipes are a rare form of plant. Also called “ghost plant,” they are a luminescent white—turning to a soft pink. They have no chlorophyll, and so cannot make their own food. Instead, they tap into certain kinds of fungus, which themselves have tapped into certain trees. The fungus-tree relationship is mutually beneficial, but the Indian Pipes are parasitic—they do not give back to either the fungus or the tree. They actually flower, like a regular plant—and are food for bees, both in nectar and pollen. Because they have no “plant” color, many think that the Indian Pipes are fungal. Without chlorophyll, they don’t need sunlight and can grow even in the densest of forests. No bigger than the spread of your hand, they’re easy to miss on the forest floor. They are often found in areas with beech trees or pines. We have both.

We’ve seen several patches of them this summer. When I was a kid we used to find them in the northwoods of Keweenaw County. We picked one once, from deep in the forest, to bring to a naturalist friend for identification. She chastised my parents, because the ghost plants are so rare. That got my attention—an adult wagging her finger at other grown-ups—my parents! No picking! I took the admonishment to heart and, to this day, I treat Indian Pipes with respect.

The Indian Pipes were our big score of the day. Of course, the firewood, too. All of it came from trees that had already fallen. Unfortunately, when the ash trees fall, they take prisoners—crashing to the forest floor, dragging their neighbors down with them. Today we gathered mostly ironwood (hophornbeam), beech and a little maple. We’re clearing trails for future access, so the day’s haul was moderate. Next Sunday, we’ll be at it again and who knows what we’ll find.

Tags botany, chores, Emerald Ash Borer, environment, forest, hiking, rural living, season, wood burning, wood heat, woods

Categories bees, chores, environment, forest, hiking, Indian Pipes, Plant Identification, season, woods

Marching Through the Seasons

April 21, 2014 //

Marching Through the Seasons

A.V. Walters–

Still Closed.

Most of the country is experiencing Spring, in all its glory. Some, in the northern reaches (like my mum) feel the warmth, see the birds, but still have 6-8 foot snow banks, and the woods are still zebra-striped—tree trunks and snow. Some of us have a little bit of everything.

Granted, if you look out the window here, you can only spy a few stubborn patches of snow, hidden in shady spots, or where the snowplows had piled it deep. Here, in town, we have snow-drops and crocuses in bloom. The daffodils aren’t far behind. But if you go into the woods, it’s a different story.

Our favorite hike takes us up and over three layers of wooded dunes before it delivers an amazing high-bluff view over Lake Michigan. The secret of the variable unfolding of season is revealed on those dunes.

The path, compacted by hardy winter hikers, may be the last to melt.

The exposed, or south-facing slopes, are snow-free. There, the forest floor is carpeted with leaf litter and spring plants, pushing through to the sunshine. These early plants of the forest floor are well on their way staking out their spots in the sun—wild leeks, trillium and dutchman’s breeches. They’ll get established before the ferns pop up—later competing for sun and water. Stepping into the woods, I try not to tread on the sprouts, but they’re everywhere. One wrong step and I can identify who’s first in the race for spring. It’s the leeks—pungent and oniony. These early pioneers into season have a built-in defense against the winter-starved deer.

Wild leeks!

Just on the other side of the rise, it’s also a different story. On the north-facing, or shade sheltered slopes, it still looks like winter. The snow is deep enough to make for tough walking (and slippery purchase.) In a few weeks these slopes will catch up, Spring–the sequel. But north-facing slopes have slight variations in vegetation, with cooler, damper, shade-loving plants having the edge.

As you traverse the dune forest, up and down, you alternate your way through the seasons—winter, spring, winter, spring. Until last week we had the same dichotomy in town. All through the village it was winter on one side of the street while the snow was gone on the other.

The forest floor, now visible, is littered with the fallen ash trees, victims of the Emerald Ash Borers.

The critters tell a different tale. To them, it’s clearly Spring. Robins, cardinals, chickadees and sparrows are reveling in the bounty of seeds and worms to be found in the warming earth. The deer, who, all winter would stroll down our road at dusk, now have the full run of the fields. They still come by, but now they’re grazing on the first bits of grass that will be our lawn in a week or two. We’ve seen a pair of pileated woodpeckers, too, our attention drawn by their relentless carpentry pounding.

The destination of this hike is the ever-changing face of the Great Lake. Last week the Lake Michigan was almost clear—with just a lacy edge of ice along the shoreline. This week the wind has changed and we see shifting continents of float ice, punctuating the deep blue of the open lake. Seagulls are back, bobbing and nearly indistinguishable from the small chunks of ice on the surface.

We’re due for some heavy rains this week. I think that will finally spell the end of the snow. In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed this glimpse of the in-between.

Look at those red branches, waiting to leaf out.

Tags hiking, Lake Michigan, outdoors, plants, priorities, rural living, season, Sleeping Bear Dunes, Spring, winter

Categories cold, country living, environment, hiking, snow, Spring, weather, winter, woods