Winter Solstice Eve Eve

Like most gardeners, I have a short list of favorite plants. The winterberry is near the top. We used to have a big old centenarian in Lilac Lane, the flowering shrub border planted by the original inhabitants of Wren Cottage. When that winterberry died the year before last, I was very sorry. But this year the North Orchard has given me a new one for Christmas: the volunteer pictured here turned up beside the trunk of an apple in a state of grave disrepair. I am so glad to see it, and I hope the birds will sow more all over the place.

This year on the solstice, we are having a full lunar eclipse, something that has not happened since 1554 or 1638 or some other unspecified time just before or just after Shakespeare. And who knows if it was even clear that night? So obviously this is a moment of some import. And with the revival of the winterberry clan on our hill, it seems to me that this new era will be a good one.

Happy solstice, everybody.

Lo, How E’re The Rutabaga Is Blooming

Here you see dinner in an early stage of preparation. I have never grown rutabagas before, nor ever dug something out of the snowy earth and hossed it directly to the kitchen to be consumed. But it turns out that you can plant rutabaga seed in July and by early December, with no further attention, you have rutabagas so large they are hard to cut up with the biggest kitchen knife.

I made a gratin of these rutabagas and a couple carrots, plus a frozen leek I prised from the ground, topped it off with Bechamel and some sourdough breadcrumbs, and damn. With the snow outside and the fires inside, it’s a lot like Switzerland. So in addition to my own admiration for rutabaga gratin, I felt the satisfaction of many generations of relatives who were glad to see this dish again.

Why Can’t I Go Out Today? Huh? Huh?

A Guest Post By Murphy The Labrador

Mama is not walking me. Why? Why? Where else can I eat frozen rotten apples? Where else cat poo? Where else can life have meaning until dinnertime? Nowhere, that’s who.

She says we are not walking because I am the size and shape and color of a deer. Eat your carrot! Chew your treat! Go! Lie! Down! This is stupid. I am always this color and shape. And we always walk.

I am full of resentment. I will nap.

Owl Together Now, Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving night I was flopped in front of the fireplace with a book, overstuffed and much relieved to be home and out of the slushy weather. Some while later John returned from visiting still more kin, and he reported that there was a little owl in the hemlock at the foot of the drive. We got the flashlight and trekked down there, and sure enough, a screech owl was perched on a low branch, not troubling to hide its irritation at our presence. Owls really do not care about your emotional state and how excited you are to see them. They wish only to eat mice and be left alone. Our little fellow had dramatic great ears for someone who was only eight or nine inches tall. The guidebook shows him also having magnificent two-prong feet, which I wish I had noticed in situ. Our little man was from the red clan, but he looked a lot like this gray individual. Thank you to Cornell Lab of Ornithology for the loan of their screecher, and for all their excellent work in the field.

SDRAM, LED, CAT

Fall has sped by in a blaze of cider and art openings, and the house now has more wooden storm windows on it than it has had in probably 80 years. We are hoping this will make us toasty warm on less oil this winter. Now I am getting ready to settle in for a long, snug winter at my desk, getting lots of writing done in between cooking meals, walking dogs and cats, and feeding barnyard folk.

In the photo above, you will see all the modern conveniences required by a writer, ie a big monitor, a laptop and a cat basket to keep the cat off the laptop and out from in front of the monitor. Yes, the basket has cut down considerably on my work surface, but since the cat was overheating the computer and using his sharp little elbows (even through the closed lid) to delete important emails and highlight long passages of the New York Times while I was reading, thereby rendering it impossible to scroll down to read the rest of the article, the cat basket is an acceptable compromise.

The other black cat, btw, sleeps on the printer on the opposite side of the desk, for symmetry. This is not super convenient, because if you forget and start a print job, the printer ingests the nearest part of the cat, but it does promote thrift in the use of paper and toner.

You are probably wondering why I don’t just close the office door and lock the cats out. And the answer is Ha! Because cats (also dogs, sheep, hens, children, husbands, etc) are the great annoyances that, like Keats’ flowered chains, bind us to the Earth.

Dolly Madison R.I.P.

Poor old Dolly Madison: that elegant creature gobbles no more among us. Although she lived only 17 months, that was still about 500% of the life most broad breasted white turkeys get, and she brought us—well, me anyway—a lot of satisfaction. At the beginning of the summer she lost her ability to locomote, so she spent her last weeks sitting in the grass in the barnyard, taking in the action of chickens and sheep and wild birds and chipmunks and house cats. She was fond of her kibble to the end, as I hope to be myself. The barnyard is notably green now, with no big white orb in it.

I am going to bury her down by Dermott in the orchard. I don’t think she would have had a lot of use for that terrier gentleman, but he would have found her a source of endless fascination.

Sheep Out to Eat

Sometimes circumstances cram you into a really nice spot you never would have gone to otherwise.

It’s practically impossible to move the sheep fence after the middle of June without a brush hog. But the New Holland and the brush hog had gone to John’s mother’s farm to cultivate John’s cornfield, and they never came home. So when the sheep pasture got overgrazed, I couldn’t move the three lengths of fence. Then Joshua, my four-horned problem child, got tangled in one length. Like so tangled he had 50 loops around each of his four horns. We had to cut him out of the now completely useless section of fence, arrivederci sixty dollars, and the overgrazed pasture was even smaller than before. The hay for the winter had not yet arrived, so in a moment of sheep starvation panic, I turned the fence off, opened the end of it and walked out into the orchard with the three sheep following curiously along behind. For an hour they stuffed themselves as fast as they could on multiflora rose leaves, ash sapling leaves, orchard grass, poison ivy and windfall apples. Then I walked back inside the fence, they followed me, and I locked it all up for the night. This worked so well, I have continued doing it even though there is plenty of hay in the barn now. In fact, it has become one of my favorite things to do. I take a book and a step stool and I go sit there for an hour in the goldenrod while my friends chow down. When everyone is visibly larger in diameter and burping up clouds of cider breath, we go back in. We’ve done it so often now that the sheep are the ones who decide when they’re full and it’s time to go home.

I have no idea how long it takes to re-chew that much plant material, but it has to be awhile. It seems to take about 24 hours for me to need my refill of orchard time.