Bar of many pruposes

 

What you call this may depend on what you use it for.  I encountered my first one, called a Lining Bar, when I worked on the railroad one summer as a kid, and somebody else me know it as an Ice Spud, used to make holes to ice fish through, but then I used them in construction foundation work as a digging bar, and now I am using it as an Ice Breaker to loose up the frozen wet gravel pile, so I can shovel some onto the mushy parts of the driveway.  It is a bit much to enlist it as a Javelin though.

Very very late season greens.

 Too dry at Dogs Plot  this spring for watercress to thrive, now it's wet warmish winter, and I can harvest some.  It just ain't right.

Return of the Native

 
   These pole beans are  the third generation grown here at Dogs Plot   desended  from the ones given me by my old friend  Gene Peters, who (as he tell us in th text below) had already been growing them for thirty five years since having been given some by his  aunt, who had arrived in this country from Italy as a girl around the turn of the twentieth century carrying a pouch of the beans …. which had already been cultivated by her family for long enough that she may not have known that she was bringing them back to their country of origin, and it could be that they are closer to the early native American beans than the ones growing on Indian Land today.
         If you want a few of these beans to plant, send me a hundred fifty bucks.  Shipping is free if you act now. If that seems a steep price to pay for purity, take heart in the suspicion that there are good reasons for the traits introduced by generations of breeders of the modern varrities.
    I don’t care; I’m fine with these.


Roman Pole Beans                                     2015

Carolina Sementelli was my mother’s godmother (in proper Italian: Madrina)

At age 13, she brought these bean seeds from Italy when her family
emigrated to this country.

Carolina’s family (I don’t remember her maiden name!) came from a small
town in Lazio, the region surrounding Rome.

She would be about 130 now, which means these beans have been in American
115 20 120 years.

Carolina asked me “to keep them going!” I have passed a handful of seed to
whomever was interested to “keep them going!”

The beans love sun and water. You must use a tall trellis-for they are
vigorous growers and prolific producers. They seem to have few natural
enemies and do not succumb to plant diseases in my 35 years of experience
with them.

They are unsurpassed in flavor. Pick them early (before the beans plump
the pods), blanch them briefly 90 to 100 seconds in boiling salted water.
I like them chilled in a salad with onions and vinegar or hot with oil and
garlic or just plain butter.

When the pods mature I shell them, cook the beans with water with a little
celery & onion, then freeze them in one pint containers for the winter.

Perfect for pasta e fagiolii, or a nice minestrone!

Just remember to keep a few pods for seeds for the next year.

Keep the pods unshelled in a paper bag in a low humidity spot. I use the
Attic.

Shell them on the day you plant them. They germinate at about 98%, even
after several years in my attic!


Gene Peters.

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Zen of Bad Mitten

 

   Our Metaphysical Times  contributor and now local resident Oren Pierce who authors the Nowella and Threadbear stories, designs oracle cards, and offers himself as a private investigator, also offers what he calls Zen of Badmitten instruction, which is intensive, costly, and of goes on for years, but is simple at the outset and you can get started on your own.   for whatever reason, Oren prefers the badmitten spelling to the normal badminton, at least until he gets a new business card.
     Oren was raised in extreme poverty on the fringes of the Fort Drum military reservation, living after the age of six behind the main shack in the chicken house, which was not all that different from the main shack, had no real toys, even balls and bats, but he and his siblings made do with what was lying around and what they could scavenge in the back yard dumps around the Reservation’s borders.  They did come home with a pair of snow shoes, a common item up there in that era before snowmobiles, and using these as raquets, they played a primitive form, of badmitton, though they had never heard of the game, and they played with real birds instead of the conventional, feathered, shuttlecock..
     If you were to take instruction in Zen badmitten you would, as with the bow in Zen of Archery learning, endure the whole first year of training without being allowed to even pick up the raquet. You would just be chasing birds, which you can start doing right now.

I Had a Brilliant Thought

 

 I had a brilliant thought when I was spading a garlic patch this morning: one of those  maculatre conceptions one could put into a post of a few crisp and country-fresh words …. but which would be my way into a few  paragraphs  developing that  truth for your entertainment and edification:  then I came back inside with that in mind,  and SOMEONE close to me talked ... distracting me so I forgot the the whole thing.  But when I get it back, you will be the next to know, and she will learn about it on Facebook.

Poor Orchards Almanack: Let it Rain

           Double tasking today:  partly watching the rain advance on laptop radar, then getting up to watch it plinking into the frying pan we set on the deck to feed cats and measure rainfall.
        It could rain all day and rain all night and it would not be enough to bring the well up enough that we could actually water the vegetables … except from the ponds, which are only slightly more than mere wetland now, and I don’t know if much less than a week of rain would be enough to get the orchard through a good fruiting.
      It is a good thing we have social security and egg money, because ….  after several years of disasterous late freezes…  if we were depending on produce from our hundred trees, we would have been eating bark.

   Then this season, we had the early warm temperatures again, but (so far) no freeze, although … with the present administration of climate … a freeze could happen anytime.
        We had so many blooming Pear trees this season that I was afraid  there would be more fruit than I could tend to;  but I have only found a dozen or so trees that will have a full crop that I will need to thin and harvest. 
      I leave a few of the natural trees to grow tall in the steeple  form that allows them to come up above the brush and   pollinate the others through the wind. 
     But that didn’t suffice.  It seems we really need another agent of pollination.
 I saw a couple of honey bees when the Horse Chestnuts were flowering, which is not the swarm we need to do the job.but they are non native anyway; they are commonly trucked up here from florida, like other migrant laborers  in season. We do have neighbors with their own hives, but we should be able to depend on our native bees anyway, even if they can’t be enslaved and don’t look like Disney cartoon characters. 
  So have the native American bees all been pushed to reservations, or what?