Apple Blossom Time

We’re at the end of May now. The growing world is vigorous and green. The days are long. We’re about to pass into June, the finest month in all the year here. The flower garden is in an in-between stage right now. There isn’t much color besides green – some forget-me-nots, the very last of the late narcissus, the first of the blooming alliums. In the woodland garden there are bluebells and lily-of-valley. June will bring on the poppies and peonies and irises and colors will glow again. The weather has been wonderful all week.

The long border.

The last of the late narcissus.

Bluebells and lily-of-the-valley.

It’s amazing to me how quickly the earth responds to a few warm days and a bit of rain. That’s what happened last week. Instantly new growth appeared. Asparagus erupted from the earth. Apple blossoms unfurled. One day the leaves on the maple trees were tiny and the next day they were casting shade like it was high summer. The lawn that I had just mowed the day before already needed it again. In the vegetable garden, seedlings of spinach and lettuce that were so tiny suddenly grew new leaves and soon will be big enough to eat. It is miraculous.

Suddenly leafy.

Spinach and lettuce.

The weeds also responded in an alarming way. Any patch of bare earth was instantly covered with chickweed, corn speedwell, pigweed, and purslane. Worst of all, the curse of the sunchokes has begun anew. Sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus) are also called Jerusalem artichokes and there is an interesting reason for that. They are not from Jerusalem and are not related to artichokes in any way. They are actually a type of native North American sunflower. Their name, Jerusalem artichoke, comes from a mispronunciation of the Italian word for sunflower, girasole and I have no idea how they came to be associated with artichokes. Unlike annual sunflowers, they are perennial and form an edible tuberous root. I read about them ten or so years ago, about how they are easy to grow and how delicious and nutritious they are, so I ordered some and planted them. They grow to be about eight feet high and form dense stands. In late summer they bloom with pretty clusters of yellow sunflowers that smell slightly like chocolate. When I harvested them that fall, I set a bucketful of them on the back porch. We cooked some up and found we did not like them. They tasted like dirt. In the spring I found the bucket with what I thought were shriveled and dead roots in it and (unfortunately) dumped it into my compost pile. Everywhere that compost went, the sunchokes sprang up. Ten years later, I’m still battling with them. Once they establish themselves, they are almost impossible to eradicate. And they spread. The original patch that I actually planted on purpose is still there and has invaded my asparagus patch. So far this spring, I’ve dug up fourteen buckets full of them just in the asparagus patch. If I didn’t dig them up, they would overwhelm the asparagus and that would be tragic.

They also established themselves in the vegetable garden over where the pigpen now is. I stopped using that garden several years ago and let it go fallow and the sunchokes took over. This year I decided to plant beans and corn on the part of the garden where the pigpen isn’t. I tilled it and pulled up hundreds of sunchoke roots. I felt rather smug that I’d done such a good job of removing them. Then last week, after the warm days and the rain, thousands of sunchokes sprang up there. I spent an afternoon trying to remove them before I planted beans and corn. I pulled up eleven buckets full of them, but I know more will sprout. I planted the beans and corn anyway and will continue to wage war with the sunchokes. I console myself by saying that if times ever get tough (and I mean really tough), at least we’ll have plenty of sunchokes to keep us from starvation.

The bean & corn patch full of sunchokes.

Sunchokes.

Eleven bucketfuls later.

Speaking of asparagus, we ate our first pickings last week. I hope there will be many more. We look forward all year to asparagus time. Another much anticipated spring event is happening now too – the black currant bush is in bloom. Its little yellow flowers give off a powerful fragrance of cloves that fills the whole garden. And the lilacs that survived the repeated attacks of frost are blooming. There aren’t many, but they smell wonderful.

The black currant bush.

A few sad lilacs.

After much waiting, praying, and hand-wringing, the orchard is in bloom. Every tree old enough to bloom has blossoms – some (the every other year ones) have just a few and some (the old reliables) are full of flowers. And the pear trees, after taking several hits by frost, have still managed to burst into bloom. It looks like it could be a good year for the orchard. I love apple blossom time. The flowers are beautiful individually and en mass. The air is scented with their sweet dusty perfume and when breezes blow through the orchard their petals drift down in flurries far more beautiful than snow could ever be.

The old Yellow Transparent apple tree.

An orchard path.

Across the orchard.

Even the wild apple trees are gorgeous.

My prettiest tree.

Three apple blossoms and one pear (lower right).

The weather all week was wonderful. It was warm – even hot some days – with temperatures rising into the 80's. I checked the ten day forecast and it looked safe, so I started planting out in earnest. I planted out flowers – starts and seeds. I dug in my dahlia tubers and gladiolus corms. I sowed corn and beans. I planted my peppers in their glass hot box. I loved working in the heat. I wore shorts for the first time this year (in Potter County anyway – I wore them while we were in Florida back in February). My hair was a problem, though. The last time I had it cut was while we were in Florida in the first week of March. It was long and shaggy and a sweaty bother in the heat. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and called the lady who cuts my hair. Our county went to Code Green on Friday, which means she can resume business now, but she agreed to open a few days early just for me. So on Wednesday I got my hair cut at last. I told her to cut it short, and she did. It feels so much better.

Haircut - before and after.

Down in the barn, all the chickens and chicks are together in one flock now. The pecking order adjustments are still ongoing and will continue for a while, but things will settle down eventually. Out in the pigpen, Orville and Wilbur are growing fast. They have quite a piggish obsession with food. There is something satisfying about watching them eat with such gusto. Maybe I envy them. The whole point is to let them eat all they want to get big. My obsession with food runs counter to that – I have to limit what I eat to keep from getting bigger.

Wilbur and Orville.

We sent our riding mower to the shop in town for some much needed maintenance last week. The blades were dull and uneven and the oil needed to be changed. The repair shop said they are very busy right now and they don’t know when they’ll return it. I think the lawn can sense the mower is gone. It seems to be growing even faster than usual. So I’ve had to resort to my push reel mower. It takes me hours to mow with it, but it’s great exercise. I get over 14,000 steps on my Fitbit when I mow with it. I have a nostalgic attachment to old fashioned push reel mowers. That was the first type of mower I ever used back in the days before I was ten and we had our little backyard lawn on Bridge Street. Every place we lived after that growing up, we had bigger lawns and we always had a power mower. This house has the biggest lawn of any place I’ve lived and we need a riding mower, but I bought a reel mower a few years ago, reasoning that it would be good exercise for me. I don’t use it every time I mow, but I do now and then when the fancy strikes me.

My push mower.

When I was a teenager and was avidly exploring the world of paperback Science Fiction novels, I fell in love with Ray Bradbury. I read many of his great books – The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, and others. One summer day, I walked down to the Paradise Bookstore, the little shop I haunted downtown in Naperville, and, armed with money I’d earned from mowing lawns, I bought another Ray Bradbury novel, Dandelion Wine. It turned out to be not a Science Fiction novel. It also turned out to be my favorite work by Ray Bradbury. For years after that, I reread the book on the first day of summer as a personal seasonal ritual. I thought of it last week because a chapter of it (Chapter 12) occurred to me while I was pushing that mower. The novel is set in the fictional town of Greentown, Illinois in the summer of 1928. The main character, twelve year old Douglas, lives with his grandparents. In this chapter, Grandpa wakes on the first day of summer to the “clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass.” Then he finds out that Bill Forrester, a boarder at his house, has purchased plugs of a type of grass that never needs mowing. There are flats of it waiting to be planted. Bill tells him that the new grass will save time. I love Grandfather’s response:

“That’s the trouble with your generation,” said Grandpa. “. . . All the things in life that were put here to savor, you eliminate. Save time, save work, you say. Bill, when you’re my age, you’ll find out it’s the little savors and little things that count more than the big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You’ve time to seek and find. . . . If you had your way you’d pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you’d leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you’d have a devil of a time thinking up things to do so you wouldn’t go crazy. Instead of that, why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life, son. . . .There’s a thing about the lawn mower I can’t even tell you, but to me it’s the most beautiful sound in the world, the freshest sound of the season, the sound of summer, and I’d miss it fearfully if it wasn’t there, and I’d miss the smell of cut grass.”

Grandpa pays Bill the ten dollars he paid for the flats of grass and they dump the grass in the ravine. As I was pushing that mower last week, sweating, enjoying the movement of my muscles, the smell of the cut grass and the lilacs and the apple blossoms, I remembered Grandpa’s words and I agree with him.

Toward the end of the week the weather forecast changed. After a week of fine weather, I could see that the jet stream had shifted. Cold air was pushing down from the north again. The forecast for last night said the temperature would fall to 41°, chilly but still safe. Gold is always colder than the forecast predicts, but I still felt okay about it. When I woke up this morning, the thermometer read 34° – just two degrees above freezing. Tonight the predicted low is 39°. If Gold is seven degrees different, like it was last night, that will put us at 32°. The fruit trees are at their most vulnerable stage. The tender flowers I planted out will freeze. Tomorrow is the first day of June. Summer will begin in just twenty days and I’m still being plagued by threats of cold and frost. I will be praying mightily tonight for a blessing on my garden. There’s nothing else I can do.

This Sabbath day is beautiful, bright and sunny, if a bit chilly. This morning I checked the news, as I do each morning, and I see that our already vexed nation is in greater turmoil. Men’s hearts are full of rage. Mobs are plundering and burning our cities. Here, on the threshold of lovely June, in my remote fragment of the planet, I feel the ripples of it, but I am far away from the storm. I fear for the nation, but not for any immediate danger to myself, my family, or my property. I feel blessed for my isolation and that my greatest worries are weeds and the weather. I love this nation and peace and freedom and they are in peril. I pray for blessings on them too.

My quiet corner of the world.