Fleur-de-Butt

I’ve been thinking about butts lately. It comes from running the Katahdin gauntlet.

On the morning of my last garlic harvest, I filled the wheelbarrow with Spanish Roja, opened the gate, and sprinted through the pasture to the barn where I cure bunches of hardneck. Whoosh, the Three Musketeers swarmed the wheelbarrow from all sides, pulling out stalks of garlic to munch. I grabbed a handful and started swinging them around like a gaucho’s bola yelling, “Get away. Get away!”

The next time I filled the wheelbarrow with Music and faced a different challenge. The rams put their heads down and started butting my butt. Then they rammed the wheelbarrow with head-butts.

I dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow and ran. I found a long branch on the ground, picked it up, and began swinging it behind me, like a 4-foot-long tail. Then, with one arm balancing and pushing the wheelbarrow, the other swishing my makeshift tail, I wobbled with my Music garlic toward the barn. I gathered all of the stalks in my arms, quickly opened the barn door, and squeezed into the barn without any of the damn rams following me.

Cabbage with dew jewels

When I returned, Gruff used his sneaky little sheep snout to pull off the advertising sticker from the wheelbarrow.

“Gotcha,” he seemed to say.

The last batch was Quiet Creek garlic. This was grown in a raised bed (I ran out of room in my garlic patch) so I caught the Three Stooges off guard. Branch in hand, I was ready for them. They were off grazing. This last trip was a breeze. After delivering my load, I headed back, relieved that the harvest was done. I was ready for a tall glass of elder blossom ice water.

Something was wrong. I was armed and ready, but there wasn’t a sheep in sight. The Three (male) Furies butted under the quickly latched gate and were burrowing through my asparagus patch in search of delicate morsels.

Time for reinforcements.

I secured the outer gate—I did not want to spend the rest of the day chasing sheep down the golf course. I rounded up Richard and posted him at the open pasture gate while I tripped through the tangle of asparagus fronds hollering at one, then two, then three menaces, chasing them out of the asparagus and into the pasture. What a pain in the butt!

That night, instead of counting sheep … I was counting lamb chops. Laurie Lynch

Written on Ancient Slate: “Such is the destiny of great men that their superior genius always exposes them to be the butt of the envenomed darts of calumny and envy.” Voltaire

Fleur-de-RainLily

When I moved back to State College a half-dozen years ago I was lucky enough to meet Rhonda, a talented hairstylist who cuts my curls and trims my mother’s bobby pin waves.

Our conversations often are drawn to nature. One morning we might talk about a squirrel dangling upside down at her birdfeeder outside the window, or the bear that is haunting her neighborhood, or her gorgeous container gardens.

Rain Lily Buds

This spring after my haircut she surprised me with a handful of rain lily bulbs. Rhonda’s grandmother died four years ago. Since then, the family has been sharing Nana Ida’s rain lilies.

In memory of Nana they hand out bookmarks with a poem on one side and planting instructions on the other. A tulle drawstring bag containing the bulbs is attached to each bookmark so that recipients can grow the beautiful flowers Nana loved.

Rain lilies or fairy lilies are traditional pass-along plants that are said to bloom each time it rains. With 70 species in the genus Zephyranthes, they have grass-like leaves and flowers that come in colors of pink, white, and yellow. They are native to southern U.S., Central and South America. In Florida, they are often used as landscape plants but in northern states you need to grow them in containers and protect them during the winter months. You can buy Zephyranthes from most bulb companies, or find a friend who has some to share. Here are Nana Ida’s instructions:

• Plant bulbs 1” deep in a pot using fresh, soft potting soil.
• Place planter in a cool, dark place and do not water at this time.
• On Mother’s Day return the pot to the sunny outdoors.
• Water the rain lilies every day but do not saturate.
• Lilies thrive best with fresh rain and bloom throughout the summer.
• Before the first frost in autumn, return the rain lilies to a cool, dark place for the winter.
• With each passing year, the bulbs will multiply.

And now, the flipside of the bookmark. The lesson that Ida shared with all who knew her:

Blooming Rain Lilies

Live For Today

I’ll never see this day again,

The seconds or the hours,

Now’s the time to take the time

To stop and smell the flowers.

Today’s the day to give that smile

And happiness away

That you were saving for a friend

Some rainy gloomy day.

This day is golden,

Priceless,

God made this day for you.

The deed you do for someone else

May just come back to you.

So touch a heart, hold a hand,

Call that lonely friend,

Don’t postpone the love you have,

This day won’t come again.

Ah, it’s a beautiful garden out there, enjoy! Laurie Lynch

‘Tis the Season for Harvesting Garlic: And a time to confess. For more than two decades I’ve been extolling the sturdy virtues of growing garlic. Deer proof. Rabbit proof. Squirrel proof. Groundhog proof. Chicken proof. Llama proof. It turns out there is an exception.

The other day I spent a quiet early morning digging garlic with my garden fork, pulling out the long stalks with garlic bulbs intact, stacking them in my wheelbarrow, ready to be tied into bunches to cure. As I continued down the rows, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye moving in the wheelbarrow. Gary the Katahdin sheep was munching the leafy end of a garlic stalk poking through the fence. He nibbled and pulled, nibbled and pulled, consuming the stalk until the garlic bulb got stuck in the wire grid and could be pulled no further. That rascal!

Russian Intrigue: It seems the best hardneck garlic varieties growing in my Central PA garden this summer are those with Russian roots: Georgia Fire, Metechi, and Zemo. Stay tuned to find out whether this has anything to do with Russian meddling in our elections or just that they are a tougher, hardier breed. At least I haven’t found any indication of infiltration from the allium leaf miner.

Written on Slate: “Leave room in your garden for the fairies to dance.”

Fleur-de-BedRaising

Our Centre County Master Gardener community stretches far and wide.

Several residents at an affordable housing complex in Lemont expressed interest in growing vegetables and herbs. The property owners gave Master Gardeners permission to build three raised beds in areas bordering the dumpster (which tells you how some people view vegetable gardens…)

For this Home Grown project, we brought together volunteer craftsmen from a local congregation, a Housing Transitions supportive services coordinator, plants from Boalsburg and Rebersburg, donated lumber and cardboard from State College businesses, and College Township wood chips. Oh yes, and Master Gardeners, their friends, and family members.

We purchased chicken wire (keep those bunnies and groundhogs out of the gardens), screws, soil, compost, and coconut coir, and had everything delivered to the site. We were all set.

Our housing complex gardeners include two Korean families (novice gardeners) and two single women, one who has more years with a trowel in hand than I have, and the other, who hasn’t gardened since she was a child.

After an initial meeting, we gathered to build the beds, and two days later, we filled the beds with soil, compost, and coconut coir, and planted herbs, vegetables, edible flowers, and seeds.

Master Gardeners are supposed to be the teachers, but we also learn along the way. Take, for example, coconut coir. Brian, a fellow MG, explained that he uses it in all of the raised beds he makes to aid aeration and water retention. Coconut coir is the “hair and husk” from coconuts. Coir is sold in rectangular bricks, and soaked in water before using. The hydrated coir is mixed into the top layer of the planting soil.

Soaking Coir

The elder gardener wants to grow lots of parsley and dill. Her friend and raised-bed partner is eager to try growing Malabar spinach for the first time.  One Korean woman is interested in growing tomatoes to teach her young daughter where red and yellow cherry tomatoes come from.

The second Korean woman was overjoyed when we showed her a pepper transplant labeled Extremely Hot Carolina Reaper and a radish seed mix that includes long, white Korean radishes. She is already talking about the kimchi she will make.  She took us to her apartment patio to show us a pot of Korean sesame she is growing and explained to my friend Jan and me that she and her husband use the leaves of the plant with their Korean meals.  All Jan and I could talk about was the sesame seeds the plant would produce. The woman promised to share some seeds with us.

Alas, the old lesson about the folly of common names came back to haunt me. I did a little research on the sesame plant she was growing. Both sesame leaves and sesame seeds are important in Korean cooking, but, they come from different plants—which points out the beauty of botanical names, and the beast contained in common names.

“Sesame” leaves come from the plant Perilla frutescens, an herb in the mint family with large, heart-shaped, anise-flavored leaves. Korean cooks use sesame leaves in many ways—they stir-fry them with garlic and vegetables, pickle them, marinated them, deep-fry them in batter, or wrap them around rice, meat, or fish. Not to confuse the issue, there is a plant Perilla frutescens var. crispa, known in Japanese cuisine as shiso. This perilla comes in a red-leafed form, which I grew at F-de-L farm years ago, and is used to give pickled ginger that pink color.  The American name for shiso, don’t ask me why, is beefsteak plant.

Sesame seeds come from a plant known botanically as Sesamum indicum. This plant produces large pods (much larger than perilla seed pods) filled with sesame seeds that are used as garnish on all sorts of dishes, and yes, sesame seed rolls. Its strappy leaves are not eaten.

It promises to be an enlightening and invigorating summer.  And, about that dumpster…Jan and her friend Ryan noticed the rails to a crib that was tossed out.  MGs are known to do a little dumpster diving…

Jan took the tall, ladder-like side rail to support her birdhouse gourd vines and Ryan took the other.  I collected the two end panels for my late-planted Poona Kheera cucumbers to ramble on. Laurie Lynch

MG Energy Bars: Jan brought treats for the bed-raising volunteers, Lemon Bars and watermelon wedges. I raised my kids on store-bought lemon bar mix, which is good. But Jan’s Lemon Bars, to borrow the vocabulary of Tony the Tiger, are G-r-r-r-eat! Check out the details on Food.com (Lemon Bar Recipe by Diana Adcock.)

Plan for the Summer: Keep Calm and Eat Kimchi.