In Which She Summons Normal

This past month has been amazing, "I'm so lucky" beauty side by side with ridiculous out of control "I can't believe this is my life" despair. Nobody died. We didn't lose our house. We all had more than enough food to eat but the feeling of real, painful frustration was still legitimately there sandwiched by flashes of fabulous.

We were sick over and over and over from Nib's hospitalization through two days ago in June with no apparent cause besides random chance, the roses bloomed beautifully, the house was trashed perpetually, the baby continues to be a gentle soul who sleeps and only wakes once or twice in a night, my hive got overcrowded and then I accidentally killed a few of my bees babies through sheer clumsiness, Our CSA began and it is wonderful, Nib started teething his two year molars and we had the most amazing summer thunderstorms, the heat was withering (literally in the case of my garden) and I hit my pre-pregnancy weight. And on and on it went...back and forth like a crazy rocking pendulum.

 

It feels like it is evening out a bit now...more stable, more normal or at least less painfully raw moments of bad happenings. I have tried to be strong or to figure it out or to even let go of it and I'm not sure I succeeded at any of it. I just survived accidentally. Am very happy to be apparently on the other side though and hoping to have a very smooth stage next. I am so desperate for some regularity, some even living and some frigging social contact! I cannot wait for the next bit.

 

I have hacked into our hedge, I have formed a health accountability partnership with Jane, I have a 38 day spiritual contemplation spinning, and I am itching to paint. I predict good books, fresh batches of kombucha, beans from the garden, a clean guinea pig cage, and some grand adventures with my boys. May it be so.

Hydrangeas Don't Have To Be Blue

 We're getting to the end of the heady blooming season for most gardens. All that really seems to be left are the hardy, and ever optimistic black-eyed-susans. In our garden the same is true, although some previous owner left us one botanical trump card, two stunning hydrangea trees. They're not really trees...in the classical/botanical sense of things, they're shrubs, but over the years somebody worked hard to prune them into beautiful fountaining tree shapes, and with very little care on my part they're the late-season garden stars.

 I love how amazing it feels to be underneath them, the world barely visible through the emerald umbrella the arching stems. They are perfect little dream-houses, wonderful places to play on hot days when the boys are scheming up a world of secret kingdoms.

The Latin name for these hydrangeas (in case you're interested in hunting one up for your own garden corner) is H. paniculata 'Grandiflora.' I love them for being such lush, spectacle bloomers (check out those blossoms as big as my head in the shots above!), their carefree nature, sweet scent, and the way my honeybees are drunkely stumbling all over themselves to get back and forth from the blooms to their hive. Some of my sources tell me that this hydrangea which is a garden plant over 150 years old is out of vogue, and has been overdone in many gardens. I say, baloney! You can't overdo the classic plants, and the only thing it could do to impress me more would be produce fruit. I'm a wild fan.

 The blossoms are positively humming with visitors, tiny butterflies, shimmering irridescent flies and of course the girls from our hive, I even saw a ladybug there, doubtless eating some less fortunate visitors.

I am thinking about trying to dry some of the blossoms this year and hoping for some kind of artful arrangement. I love the delicate, papery way they can end up, like a million tiny wings. See here, here and here for examples of what I'm dreaming of. I could do that, right?

Related articles

• Different Types of Hydrangea (homeandgardenideas.com)
• Flowers 101: Hydrangeas (casasugar.com)
• How to Dry Hydrangeas (homeandgardenideas.com)
• Hydrangea paniculata 'Great Star' (allandrewsplants.wordpress.com)
• Flowers That Bloom Later In Summer (mydecorarticles.com)

The Wind That Shakes The Corn

 We've got our paintbrush out and we've been helping the wind pollinate the corn at our house! Corn plants have both male and female parts on the same plant and the plant sex that creates big juicy cobs of corn is all about the pollen getting from the male parts (the tassels, up top) onto the female parts (the silk, at the tip of each potential ear).  In a big field of corn, the wind does the job admirably. In our little backyard patch with only three rows and a hedge around our property to block wind, not to mention neighbors houses and trees and such, we can't be sure the wind will get the pollen in the right spots.

 So, we're helping out a little. Here is Ru, demonstrating what I've been doing with my biggest watercolor wash brush. I snipped several tassels that were shedding pollen and put them in a ziploc and then dipped my brush into the bottom after giving it a few good shakes. The pale yellow dust collected on the hairs of the brush and then I went around giving each tassel a little brushing.

 Some of our tassels are this pretty color, like some of the female parts got all My Little Pony and wanted to make sure everyone knew their gender by wearing all pink. Kind of makes me chuckle.

 And some of our silks are this pale blond color, almost transparent in the sunshine. I am interested to see how the corn kernels relate to the silk color. (If they do) Every single one of those hairs runs down to a specific kernel of corn and if each strand finds a granule of pollen it will develop a juicy bump on the cob...if not it will be a dry blank spot. Trying to hand pollinate our corn makes the whole process seem ridiculously miraculous. I think it will be astounding if I manage to get any full ears out of the process. How can you ever be sure that every single hair has been given pollen? There are so many of them and the pollen is so tiny. It's amazing to me that it ever works with just the wind to do the job.

 We were the only ones after the pollen. Some bees, not our bees as far as I noticed, but a larger variety that werem't honeybees, were collecting too. Bees actively gather pollen in addition to nectar. Pollen has a lot of protein and fat, basically a meat substitute for a vegetarian species...nectar is mainly sugar, which is a good energy source. The bees turn nectar into honey but they just eat the pollen. Fun to see that our corn is making food for us and others, with no extra effort!

corn, plants, garden, pollen, pollination, sex, ear, cob, kernel, bees, grown, summer, gardening, food, sweet corn

Related articles

• Tips for Growing Indoor Corn Plants to Harvest (brighthub.com)
• Can kernels from an ear of corn which you raised be planted (wiki.answers.com)
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• Garden Friday - Planting 3 Sisters (ourmotherskeeper.com)

Summer Coming In

We're into the real stuff now....hot nights when we lie on top of our beds listening to the fan whir away without even untucking the sheets, epic salads for dinner served in our big wooden salad bowl, days that stretch out longer than they have any right to be. Real summer.

Mango lemonade with mint

I have a window-box of fresh herbs on the back porch and its getting a lot of use. I drop snipped bits into our dinner salads, and snip them over all our meats and every glass of whatever we're drinking is better with a sprig of mint, right? I love fresh herb season. Next year I have to remember to make sure cilantro and thyme make it in. (Help me remember that, will you?)

Our corn went from this....

To this!

And here come the tassels...the male parts of the plant!

The corn/lawn experiment, in which I planted corn right in our turf grass and then mulched over the top once there were rows of green leaves..... is going well. I have never grown corn. My parents always did when I was growing up, but I've never done it myself. Fun to have the space and the sun. My dad always planted our corn when I was a kid, it was his special garden project, he pounded in stakes with taut string between to be sure of perfectly straight plantings, and then he put in the corn. I remember that we always planted from little paper bags full of seed that we got at the feed-store. Not a feed-store in sight here and I still seem to be managing to pull of my own tiny corn patch! Hooray!

The apples on our apple tree are swelling and starting to show just the barest hint of a blush...still wondering what color they'll end up, how big they'll be and if they'll taste good enough for eating. A few weeks ago I ate a jar of applesauce my aunt made, thinking wistfully that I hoped this fall we'd be eating our own. And apple pies, and dried apple rings and maybe a few apple turnovers for autumn picnics to boot! The boughs are starting to bend downwards with the weight of the fruit which makes me smile.

And the bees are happy about summer. They're buzzing around pollinating our cucumbers and tomatoes, and zooming over the hedge, to yards beyond our range of vision. I have been into the hive a couple of times since introducing the bees to their new digs. They're building beautiful comb and filling it with all kinds of good things, and I am hopeful that they'll find enough fodder in the neighborhood to make sure they are all lardered up for the winter. I have plans to build a small fence, with climbing, flowering vines planted on it, to enclose the area where the hive is, and create a little protected bee yard. We're working on teaching Dee to stay away from the hive but he did recently discover it and is now on closely monitored probation to ensure that he never get out of eye-sight. Time for a little landscaping to solve the problem. I'm thinking a short fence of some kind with honeysuckle on it, and maybe pots of jasmine in the summer to make it really highly scented. Mmmmm!!!! I'd like a barrier like that around my house, wouldn't you?



Closing with this song which is humming in my mind, on perpetual repeat, Sumer Is Icumen In, sometimes also called The Cuckoo Song. Can't remember where I first heard it but I know it was a long time ago and I know rings in my mind merrily and makes me smile. Its a very old song, one of the oldest written songs we have in English, written about 1260 or so....a little ode to "sumer." It says "Summer is a comin' in, loudly sing cuckoo, groweth seed and bloometh meadow and springs the wood anew..." Summer is a pretty timeless affair.

Un-Poetry Friday: The Bees Arrive!!!

Happy Un-Poetry Friday!! Too busy staring open-mouthed at my new bees to be able to think up a poem today!!!

The girls, all one to three thousand of them, arrived last night. I took an after-dark, multi-hour, solo road trip to go pick them up and drove home with the big plasticized carton they came in, slightly warm to the touch and faintly humming in the back seat behind me. The bees and I stayed awake listening to country music hits, and gulping McDonald's drive-through coffee...okay, so that was mostly me, but hey, they stayed awake with me while I sipped and sang.

Once home I opened their sealed front door, in their make-shift home and, after just a little bit of staring at them via the light from my iPhone, I turned in, hardly able to sleep for the excitement.  This morning I took a deep gulp and installed them in their new hive, the boys all watching from the dining room window. It was astounding to be handling writhing frames of my own dark honey for the first time in my life. I am so worried that I will hurt them or displease them and somehow jeopardize my almost ten year long dream. Too much pressure!

If I don't answer the phone or the door or my emails, just understand that I am either outside staring at the hive or inside Googling, some new niggling bee question. Sometime soon real life will go on...at the moment, there are only bees!

Equipped For Beekeeping

 It's a great day for a first time beekeeper. The weather was balmy, it smells like spring, yesterday a huge flock of crows swooped into the neighborhood from parts further south and congregated on a big beech tree across the street, noisily recounting their many travel exploits. Spring is on its way and we are ready.

We have a beehive in our house.

  It came to our door in two gigantic cardboard boxes and sat, intimidatingly in the entryway for a while before I had the bravery to open the containers and lift out the glowing wood and deliriously fragrant comb foundation. The whole thing smells like honey...rich, ambrosial, golden honey. I can't wait until it is really full of liquid gold.

 All these mysterious tools and gadgets, glinting, twirling things that are so exciting and require much trying out. Can hardly wait to take my boys down to the buzzing hive and let them see the bees spinning industrious gold while they see what those tools are really about.

Related articles

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• Bill to define raw honey may pave the way for raw food bills ()

Lots O' Links

Am just kind of confetti brained tonight and so am sharing with you all the shiny bits, tossing around inside my cranium. Have a lot of interesting non sequitur fun with  me! Hooray random, fascinating, sparkly thoughts!

(I am a magpie in my soul)

• I am planning to be grounded tomorrow by the blizzard that's sweeping in and am hoping to make this with the extra milk we have in our fridge at the moment. How fluffy and alluring does that bowlful look? I learned to like cottage cheese as a grown-up. Sometimes I learn slow.

• I was reaching past a woman for a whole roasting chicken in the grocery meat department the other day and I was suddenly stopped in my tracks by her breathtaking perfume and I forgot all about the bird and started an animated conversation with her about why I must someday find a way to get some of her Estee Lauder perfume. Usually I find floral scents well meaning but in the end, fake and overwhelming but this one was spot on gardenia, totally exotic and romantic.

• I took two paintings in to be framed at this art shop and accidentally happened on a 70% off sale they were running on custom frame work. The framer was artistic and thoughtful, I cannot believe how good my paintings look in the hands of a professional. 3 weeks and I can go and get them back! Hooray! Can't wait!

• This video made me almost cry.

• Still shopping for beekeeping goods but am so excited to drool all over they keyboard at this site while I mull. I think I should join. Support is good.