Talking 'bout the birds and the bees, and the flowers and the trees

Prairie Moon Nursery photo

The roadside ditches ripple silver with runoff from the snow still lingering in the shadowed woods, and a wind from the northwest howls cold and wild around the eaves.  A week ago, the winter loosened its stubborn hold.  The sun shined; the temperatures rose, and the rivers and streams reached flood levels, leaving us holding our breath and wondering who might be flooded.  The warmth and sun send us outdoors, longing to break the forced confines of the house.  We cleaned flower beds left undone in the fall, edged sod from the driveway, pulled back the mulch from the parsnips, anticipating their sweetness.  But the earth was still frozen, and so the parsnips will wait a few days or maybe weeks before they make their way to our table. 

  We are anxious for spring, especially after a winter that really wasn’t, at least not by northern Maine standards.  Oh, we had snow, and a few weeks of temperatures below zero, but usually those storms came in like a blizzard but petered out a day later to rain, then more cold so the worlds was coated in ice.  It was impossible to snowshoe, more impossible to drive and so we were housebound.  But spring must come, and though the wind and cold have been persistent, the sun rising higher in the sky, the sunlight stretching longer each day melted away the snow in the fields that are now shades of dun and sienna, brown, and tan, stubble and furrows waiting for someone with more patience than we show to come and coax them into production.

Spring seems to be tardy in spite of the deer gathering daily in the back field to munch the slowly greening grass.  The popples have not put out their furry catkins and even the distant hills seem stubbornly gray, not blushed pink with burgeoning leaf buds.  The soil is still frozen two inches down and the live plants I ordered – pussy willows shoots and common blue violets, red flycatcher and more asparagus – are safely stored in the refrigerator alongside salami and cheddar, leftovers and condiments.  Warmth cannot come too soon. 

Deer in the garden -- taken from indoors

We have begun the spring planting, however.  The rickety folding tables have been set up in front of the kitchen window, and on them are trays of onion seedlings and leeks, as well as hydroponic planters – a new and delightful purchase this year – exploding with herbs and vegetable seedlings.  We purchased one of the planters at the urging of my friend and colleague, Laura, who grows cherry tomatoes and fresh herbs year round in hers.  Along with the planter, we chose herbs: Genovese and Thai basil, dill and mint, parsley and cilantro.

Parsley, cilantro and rosemary

The ambitious dill and Genovese basil sprouted within a day, stretching up in their little domes toward the LED lights on the grower, and a few days later the Thai and the mint.  We bought another grower, and peat plugs to plant vegetables. Now there are a dozen and a half Roma and Mortgage Lifter tomatoes, broccoli and Brussel sprouts, hot and sweet peppers, reaching their green leaves upwards to the light.  Bruce dug out the seed flats and planted the onions and leeks in regular potting soil, but we also ordered an LED light, and soon they were up and stretching tall. 

We have long begun our own seeds, but here in the north, the plants just couldn’t get enough light and grew fragile and spindly.  For the past two years, we have had a friend who owns a nursery start our tomatoes and that has worked well, but there is a joy in watching the seeds sprout, the first tender leaves stretch upward.  The growers make that possible again. I stop a couple times a day, at least, to check the progress of our future meals. 

Rosemary blossoms

We order seeds each year from the same companies, and my herbs come mostly from Richters in Canada.  They have an amazing selection of herbs and even more amazing descriptions of those herbs.  When the catalog arrives in January, I spend hours pouring over it, trying to decide what I will grow and plant.  There are the standard annuals – basil, cilantro, dill, parsley – that get planted in the main garden, but last year, we finally began shaping my backyard herb garden.  Although I bought a few plants from a local nursery- bee balm and lavender, lemon balm and catnip, and I have a few plants – mints, oregano and chives, there is still a lot of area to plant.  I went on a buying spree.

In part, this was because ten years ago when we first began shaping this homestead, all we had to work with was played out soil left from years of potato production.  The first year, and the second, and truth be told, the third and the fourth were spent picking rocks and digging weeds.  We composted and brought in manure, mulched with hay and straw, and slowly the soil improved.  We built a raised bed for the asparagus, and then I began work on the herb garden.

Tomatoes, broccoli, brussels and peppers

It is built into a slight slope, raised with fieldstone, not the flat smooth kind that makes great patios and pathways, but real fieldstone.  Rocks we dug out of the garden and the lawn or picked up along roadsides and turned into a wall that looks as if it has always been there.  We filled it with compost and whatever Perham tilth – a gravelly silt loam – we had left over from other projects.  I set in flat stones to make a series of two steps up into the garden area, planted creeping wooly thyme along the upper edge of the rock wall to hold the soil, and tucked in some chives, oregano, chocolate mint and catnip.  As we got busy planting the vegetable garden, I promised myself I would get it under control and planted – soon. 

Onions and leeks

Last summer, with the rest of the growing under control, Bruce and I began designing and redigging the herb garden.  We screened the soil, laid out walkways, built low walls to shelter the more tender herbs, and designed a simple yet effective picket fence and archway for the garden.  And then life got in the way.  The vegetables and fruits that we rely on to eat throughout the winter started coming in, and in spite of our best efforts, the herb garden again got shot shrift.  I managed to tuck in some lavender, bee balm, and lemon balm, and then things stopped as I headed west to do research to finish my doctorate.  I mourned the completion of the garden, but on that trip I found new inspiration.

When we first bought our land, it was about twelve acres of overworked fields and another eight of overcut woods.  Along the verges of field were chokecherries, a few scraggly raspberries, and native hazelnuts.  Little more.  That first year, we hastily dug in the plants we had brought with us – a couple roses, the oregano, mints, chives, comfrey, horseradish, and rhubarb, and bought a couple cords of wood and settled in for the winter.  We fared well.

The next spring, our son-in-law plowed and we planted the first garden patch, and we began building lawn, planting some birches and mountain ash trees, and a couple of slips of lilac.  Each year we added to it. Crab apple trees, bush cherries, and apple trees, and we expanded the garden, planted asparagus, donated raspberries, and high bush blueberries.  With every addition, more birds flocked to our yard, including the hummingbirds, for which we named our farmette.  But in Wisconsin, on a day off from researching, Kasey and I roamed a farmers’ market, stumbling upon a cooperative extension service table and discovering wild native plants from Prairie Moon Nursery and Prairie Nursery. The two offered native plants, especially targeted for native pollinators, bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds.  I grabbed two catalogs and fell in love with what the pages contained. 

If you haven’t heard, bees are having a terrible time of it.  Whole colonies are dying off, and the reason is not yet fully explained.  Some blame pesticides, others fault pollution.  Probably it is the result of both.  Native plants, however, are not genetically modified and provide a safe haven food source.  Better yet, much of what I was growing or planned to grow for the herb garden, and the additional bushes – elderberry and Saskatoon berries – we had just planted – fit in fine with providing a pollinator Eden by securing plants and seeds from the two nurseries.  And so we continue our adventure, but with new purpose.

Sustainable has new meaning now. It is not enough to feed ourselves with freezers full or frozen berries and veggies.  Not enough to buy local honey and meat.  Not enough to buy our eggs fresh.  Rather, we will continue to expand our pollinator’s Eden by planting those flowers and plants that are not only beautiful but also serve a beautiful purpose: feeding the bees, and butterflies, and yes, hummingbirds that help feed all of us.  At least I will once the weather warms enough to thaw the ground and get the plants outside. 

Busy bees.

This Capricious Spring

This capricious spring, shadow and light, the tug of spring and the pull of winter has us anxious and longing for warmer days.  One day the blue bowl of sky is so bright and clear it hurts the eye, and the next there is the thin opaque gray dome that bodes of snow.  It has been a long winter, filled with sleet and frozen rain and heavy wet snow.  The remains of snowbanks along the roadsides smudged and dirty with the sand and gravel flung airborne by the plow trucks, scarred and sooty, and beyond, the fields are sheened with ice from the last mixed storm.  It reminds me of childhood when some winters we could strap on ice skates and glide across the frozen fields, our shadows snaking along behind us or dancing ahead in daring. 

I change my coat daily;

on one, the red wool coat, and another the down parka.  Mittens and gloves are interchangeable too, and the heavy snow boots give way to flats, and then back to the boots.  It is tiring to keep up, especially when we long to be outdoors, something that has not been possible this year.  There was no snowshoeing, because snowshoes slid on icy snow and trails, and little cross-country skiing either.  We’ve even held off from walking the dogs too often because the frozen ice on the road cuts the pads of their feet and leaves them limping home to the warmth of the house where they curl in their chairs and dream doggy dreams, noses and paws both twitching in the chase of rabbits and squirrels and birds.  We all have cabin fever.

But spring is coming.  The rivers and streams are bank swollen, cold water running in a swift liquid ribbon, overflowing, soaking the ankles of alders and service berry, wild cranberry and cattails.  The moose have been on the move, perhaps because our neighbor had his woodlands thinned and for nearly a month, behemoth timber trucks hauled load after load of long straight logs out of the woods down near where Salmon Lake Brook leaves what passes for Salmon Brook Lake, but only if one doesn’t look too close.  It is really a bog, preserved by the state because of the 1,800 acres of wetlands and six rare plants that call it home.  The local critters call it home, too.  Bear den up deep in the woods, and moose gather along the edge of the bog where young trees and bushes provide good winter feed while the taller evergreens offer protection from deep snow.

Salmon Brook Lake in winter

We often see their tracks, cutting across our field, zig-zagging the overgrown field on the far side of the road where the wild apple trees grow.  This year there were three: White Stockings, a mature cow who has been roaming these fields and woods since we moved here and likely far longer, and then two younger cows, who we suspect are her offspring because both have some variation of the white socks that earned White Stockings her name.  At some time, there had been a bull around too, because he knocked over part of our rail fence rubbing against it and broke the young birch tree we planted last fall.  The fence was easily fixed, and with a bit of pruning, the birch will likely survive too.  That is if the moose leave it alone and don’t treat it as dinner. 

All three cows were noticeably pregnant, rotund bellies swinging from side to side as they waded through the deep snow, eating everything that they could find – red stick, choke cherries, the old apple tree in the north windbreak of our property.  But they left our fledgling orchard of apples and cherries, and plums and hazelnuts alone, until a few weeks ago.

Fifty feet from the house

It was my husband’s fault. 

I had been watching the moose adventure for several weeks, and checking each morning to see if there were footprints in the snow around the fruit trees.  There had not been and I had kept my vigil silent.  Bruce, however, had fretted and worried all winterover the young trees, which had borne the first fruit last fall.  I suppose the imminent threat of moose drove him to breaking the silence.

“The moose haven’t gone after the trees,” he burst out one evening as I arrived home.  He just couldn’t contain himself.   I shook my head and hung up my coat.

The next morning, the damage was done.  The small orchard was laced with moose prints and not a tree was spared from their munching.

“They got all the new growth,” he said mournfully.

“Uh huh,” I replied. 

“Damn moose!” he proclaimed of the critters that the day before he had delighted in.

Sometimes, I do know when to be quiet, and so I was. 

The trees will recover, and with a bit of pruning, likely bear again this year because the fruit grows on older wood.  Next year, he says, he is putting up a fence.  Given the fate of the earlier mentioned rail fence, it seems like a lost cause.

And so we inch toward spring, our patience with snow and each other fraying.

The crows returned about the same time as the moose buffet, and that elevated Bruce's fury.  For the past three years he has waged a battle with a handful of crows that seem determined to set up housekeeping and raise a family in our neighborhood.  Bruce has shot one that ventured too close to the house, and fired into the air to scare off others too many times to count.  Now when he ventures outdoors and there are crows hanging out in the poplars, they raise a raucous alarm and flee. 

Bird Dog

Last week the robins returned too, just before the eight inches of heavy wet snow that nearly shut down the northern part of the county.  And the snow buntings packed up, all but a persistent pair, and headed north to their summer home.  There are chipping sparrows now cleaning up the seed leftover from feeding the buntings, and they offer all sorts of entertainment for the dogs, especially Kris, who woke up two weeks ago and realized he is a bird dog.  He is fascinated to watch them hip and hop and bob across the yard.I only hope the windows hold.

The coming of the birds means the planting of this year’s seedlings and so the tables have been taken down from the rafters of the garage and lined in front of the windows in the house.  Onions and other early seeds are tucked in to them, and the house smells of the warm dampness of starter soil.  We also bought a mini hydroponic set up, Aerogarden, at the urging of my friend Laura, and it is here that I am now starting herbs, and soon tomatoes and other seedlings for the summer garden.  The list of things to do grows longer every day, and we are anxious for the snow to melt away, the wind to come out of the south and not the cold northwest.

We are ready for spring to sweep across the land and turn the distant hills into delicate Monet vistas.  However, the temperature keeps dropping, down to eight above tonight, and so we will keep busy with planning and ordering seeds, and making lists of things to do, and dreaming of when the days of summer paradise finally arrive.  And this year, I won’t be writing a dissertation so I might get to enjoy it!