Last week it felt like the last vestiges of winter finally had faded away and spring had settled in at last. It was warm and lush. We had no frost. The mornings were drenched in dew. I’ve resumed taking predawn walks again now that the sun rises earlier. As I step out each morning I take deep breaths. I love the smell of morning air. The days are long and lovely now.
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| Out in the big garden on a morning walk. |
I gauge the progress of the sun through the seasons from a chair in the music room. Most mornings, after my walk, scripture reading, and family prayer, I sit in that chair to do my morning sudoku. In winter when the sun comes up, it is far to the south and it shines through the leafless trees and the front bay window directly into my face. I like to feel the sun on my face in the morning. As the long days advance, the sun moves north and, for a while, the corner of the house blocks it. Then it moves further north and its first rays shine through the front porch window to find my face again. Soon after that, the trees leaf out and the front of the house is in shade for most of the morning. As the season moves on, the process will reverse itself. The leaves will fall, the sun will move from north to south. And I will watch it all from my chair in the music room.
Monday was about as perfect as an April day can be. It was sunny and warm, 76°, there was a soft breeze all day. That morning I moved my potted plants out of the house and off the back porch and onto the back porch stairs where they will spend the warm months. It was an act of faith, perhaps a bit foolhardy, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t believe that there would be anymore freezing weather. So far, so good.
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| Plants on the back porch stairs. |
After doing that, I spent the rest of the morning finally making the dead hedge out in the orchard. I read a while ago about dead hedges, hedges made from interwoven branches, and decided to make one along the edge of the orchard where the new peach and cherry trees are. Back in early March, Miriam and I did a drastic pruning of the hazel hedge. The piles of cut off branches had been laying in the orchard since then. Every time I wanted to build it, something interfered, but Monday was perfect and I got it done. I used all the hazel branches. It looks a bit ragged right now, but it will settle in. It will act as a windbreak for those trees.
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| The dead hedge. |
When I finished the dead hedge, I mowed the lawn. The grass is growing fast now and the dandelions are growing even faster. When I finished that, I chose a flowerbed and set to weeding for the rest of the afternoon. There’s always weeding. When Stacey and Hannah got home from work, we put the cover on the high tunnel again and tried securing it with plastic clamps and holding it down with rope stretched over the cover. We’ll see how well that works when the next windy day comes along.
Tuesday was Dandelion Day. I decided to focus all my weeding exclusively on dandelions in the flowerbeds. I have six flowerbeds in the back yard – the peony bed, the fruit and flower bed, the bench bed, the short border, the long border, and the driveway bed. I tried to keep count of the dandelions I pulled as I moved from bed to bed, but I got tired of it and gave up when I reached nine hundred. I estimate there were about eleven hundred of them in all. They were easy to spot because they are in bloom. They are not easy to pull up, however. I used my hori hori knife and my trusty long screwdriver to pry them out of the ground. I threw one load of them to the chickens, but they didn’t seem to care about them, so the rest went into the separate compost pile I reserve for persistent weeds. Toward noon that day the sky started to cloud over and it smelled like rain was coming, so I quit weeding and went down to the barn. The rain came around 1:00, but it didn’t last long. It was just enough to cool things down a little and make it damp enough that I didn’t do anymore work outdoors that day.
For one of my big spring projects, I’d planned to clean out the middle part of the chicken coop and make a place to set three hens away from the main nesting boxes. I never got the chance to do that and finally gave up. I’ll wait and try again next year. But I have a hen who always lays her eggs on the floor of the coop, in a corner by the regular nesting boxes. I decided to leave those eggs and not collect them, hoping a hen might go broody and hatch them. By Monday there were three eggs in the corner nest. I added four more and waited. When I went down to the barn on Tuesday, the Black Cochin hen was sitting on them and I began to have hope. But hens are notoriously flighty, and this one still seems unsure of herself. She’s been on the nest every day when I go down to do the chores, but she doesn’t seem broody yet. She doesn’t have that grumpy, staring, defensive behavior that indicates broodiness. I hope she settles in and hatches these eggs. I love to have a hen with chicks in the flock.
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| My nesting hen. |
Wednesday was another beautiful day, entirely befitting the first of May – warm, sunny, with a soft breeze carrying the smell of the neighbor’s freshly cut lawn, the spicy scent of the black currant bush, and when in close proximity, the perfume of narcissus. Following my designs on Tuesday, I made it another dedicated weed day. This time my victims were the detested trio of sheep sorrel, chickweed, and blue speedwell. Ignoring all other weeds, I went from bed to bed ripping them out, digging them up, and tossing them into the compost. These are mat forming weeds that spread and suffocate other desirable plants. I worked at it all day and didn’t finish. I only made it through three of the six beds.
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| The black currant bush in bloom. |
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| Dandelions, sheep sorrel, chickweed, and blue speedwell. |
Just before dinner time, I thought I’d finished working for the day, but Kurt got on his tractor and we went to work again. It’s easier working when a tractor is involved. We tilled up the soft fruit orchard to prepare it for a sowing of wildflower seeds. Then we tilled some of the beds in the big garden. I say “we” tilled, but Kurt tilled and I raked. When we finished tilling, I planted the last of the onions. Then I really was done for the day.
Thursday was another fine day. It started with a very pretty sunrise. I took a walk along the beaver pond to enjoy it. That morning I ran errands, my usual trip up to Wellsville to buy chicken feed and other items. The drive up and back was beautiful. The hills are full of the colors of the emerging leaves, bronzy reds and a dozen shades of green. In town the crab apples along the streets are in bloom. There is a row of them at the Wellsville cemetery that is especially beautiful. When I got back from my errands, I went to work weeding again. This time I tackled the old asparagus patch. The asparagus is up now and so were the weeds, of course. I went down each row on my hands and knees digging up devil grass and sunchokes, the two most horrible of all the weeds I deal with. They spread so vigorously. Asparagus doesn’t like to compete with weeds, so naturally those are the weeds that want to invade there. After I pulled them up, I didn’t add them to any compost and will not dump them anywhere on the property. I let them sit in buckets for a few days to dry up and then I tossed them on the burn pile.
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| Sunrise on Thursday. |
Thursday after she got home from work, Stacey helped me plant potatoes. Kurt had the furrows ready, so it was just a matter of dropping them in and covering them over. Most of them were seed potatoes I saved from last year’s harvest, the little ones too small to eat. But I also ordered new seed potatoes, two varieties – German Butterball, probably my favorite variety, and Purple Majesty, which has purple skin and flesh. I’ve never grown that kind before. I thought they sounded interesting.
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| Planting potatoes. |
I was in school on Friday. It was a gorgeous, warm day – almost 80°. I was a little sad that I spent the best part of the day sitting inside at school. But that morning when I went into the office, I informed the school that as of May 17th, I am retiring. I’ve been a substitute there for twenty years. I have a few more days that they’ve scheduled me to work, but after that I’m done. It feels a bit strange to think I won’t be going to school after that. I know every classroom in that building. I sat and pondered a bit and determined that there are only six teachers there now that were there when I started in 2004, and none of the administrators are the same. The children graduating this year weren’t even born when I began working there. That makes me feel old.
Friday for dinner we celebrated Cinco de Mayo a few days early. We’d invited our missionaries and our friends from church, the Leavitts, for dinner and thought that was a good reason to have a fiesta. We made tacos, the Shilligs brought tamales and Spanish rice and guacamole, Miriam made horchatta and chocoflan for dessert.
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| Our early Cinco de Mayo fiesta. |
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| Miriam's chocoflan. |
So it’s May now, the first month in my favorite three month block of the year. May, June, and July are the months with the longest days, the mildest weather, and the lushest growth. They are the most beautiful garden months with apple blossoms and poppies, lilacs and peonies. During these early days of May, the predominant color in my garden, bedsides green, is purple. There are Johnny-jump-ups everywhere. The muscari are at their peak. The lawn is scattered with violets. I have a complicated relationship with violets. They are beautiful little flowers and I love to see them in the lawn and in patches in the woodland garden. But they prefer to grow in the flowerbeds where they proliferate at an amazing rate. I tolerate them while they are blooming, but as soon as they are done, I will have another dedicated weeding day devoted to removing them. No matter how many I pull up, next year there will be just as many.
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| Violets in the lawn. |
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| My magnolia bush in bloom. |
Saturday, yesterday, was a rainy day and I didn’t get much work done outdoors. I drove up to Genesee and got a haircut. I tended to my seed trays in the woodshed and on the back porch. I wanted to go out and work at weeding. The only thing I accomplished was to mow between rainy spells. The rest of the day I just frittered around. But, we needed the rain and perhaps I needed a rest.
Today is a triple celebration day, although only one of them is really important in our family. It is Children’s Day (Kodomo no Hi) in Japan. On this day, families fly carp-shaped windsocks, with a black carp for the father, a red or pink one for the mother, and one carp, usually blue, and sometimes green and orange too, for each child. They display elaborate samurai dolls called Gogatsu Ningyo, a symbol of courage to honor their sons. And they eat symbolic good-luck foods – Kashiwa mochi, sticky rice cakes filled with red bean jam and wrapped in oak leaves, and chimaki, sticky sweet rice wrapped in an iris or bamboo leaf. They don’t sound like they’d taste very good, and when I was in Japan, at first I didn’t care for that sort of thing and only ate them to be polite, but I actually like them now. We don’t do anything for Children’s Day in our family.
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| Kodomo no Hi. |
Today is also Cinco de Mayo. The reason the Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo is to commemorate Mexico’s victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Living in Southern California for twenty years and marrying into a family that makes excellent Mexican food, we use the day as an excuse to have a fiesta. As mentioned above, we celebrated a few days early.
The most important celebration on May 5th in my family is the birth of my brother Steve. Steve was born two years after me in 1960. I only have one very vague memory of the time before he was born. For all of my life he has been a part of my life. Growing up and being the only two boys in the family, we always had to share a room, which created conflict sometimes, he being a messier person than I am. Through my early growing up years, he and our cousin Rick, who lived upstairs from us, were my best friends. We roamed the streets and alleys of New Cumberland, having countless adventures together. As we got older, things changed a little between my brother and me, as is only normal. We had different friends and different interests, but the bond of brotherhood has never changed. I can tell you so many stories, most of them funny, a few of them terrifying, about Steve. Now in our advancing years, with him and his family all living out west, and me and mine living far away from them, I find myself wishing we had more opportunities to be together. So happy birthday Steve! I’m looking forward to seeing you and your family at the family reunion in August.
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| Me and Steve, 1962. |
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| Me and Steve, 1968. |
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| Me, our Mom, and Steve, 2022. |
Today is a rainy day, but I never mind that much on the Sabbath. The only things I have to do on Sundays are church and chores and they can take the rain. Today is Fast Sunday and to break our fast we are having a delicious meal that Stacey prepared yesterday – meatloaf and cheesy potatoes. We’re also having asparagus. I picked our first asparagus yesterday, just a handful so far, but our friends the Joneses have a lot of asparagus and Nancy has brought us two nice batches, so we have plenty. I love asparagus. Steamed, with butter and a dash of salt, it is one of the best and most delicious things to come out of the spring garden. The Shilligs are coming over to share our meal with us. Then after lunch and chores, I plan to take a nap – a perfect way to spend a rainy Sabbath afternoon.
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| Our first asparagus. |
Good Sabbath!
