Fleur-de-Rain!

Grandma’s Pick

August 14, hardly the end of summer, marked the wettest Centre County’s summer on record: a total of 20.35 inches. We’re way beyond that now.

Roof Leak Central, my nickname for my workspace, recorded 184 leak calls over a span of 30 stormy, rain-filled days. I try to stay upbeat, especially over things which I have no control, but gloominess did seep in.

One morning I awoke and was determined to go for my bike ride, despite the fact that 4 inches of rain had fallen in the past 12 hours. Sure, I’d come back mud splattered and soggy socked, but I needed to get out in the fresh air.

The portion of the bike path I ride on passes below East College Avenue and on the edges of Slab Cabin Run. I knew the dark underpass would be treacherous, but I made it through—water halfway up my calves.  Then the path takes off to higher ground and all I had to worry about were downed branches.  Another dip, a few turns, and the path disappeared, swallowed in floodwaters. There, in front of me, were three mallards, swimming across the bike path.  They paddled across and I pedaled through, and any ounce of gloom lifted as I marveled at the experience.

My garden is in a sorry state.  Most tomatoes are rotting from this blight or that.  Despite putting up a new fence, some little critter keeps eating all of the blossoms on my Poona Kheera before they can turn into cucumbers and then dines on my Sungolds, spitting all of the seeds on the plank walkway.

But on my weekly visits to our Master Gardener community garden, I’ve been taken by the success of one tomato in particular. It is a hybrid with heirloom parentage named Grandma’s Pick, and seed is available from Territorial Seeds.  Grandma’s Pick is growing in Janet’s raised bed. She put a tomato cage around it early in the season and dutifully prunes off any brown or spotted leaf, and removes all suckers. By mid-August, the plant was just packed with hefty, green, accordion-like tomatoes—more than I’ve ever seen on one tomato plant. My camera battery died, so I couldn’t get a photo, but when my replacement battery arrived in the mail last week, I stopped by to photograph Grandma’s Pick. Janet has been harvesting the ripe tomatoes, but the plant is still heavy with fruit.  It will definitely be on my Must-Have list for the summer of 2019. Laurie Lynch

Bonsai Babysitter:  I’ve babysat babies and children, dogs and llamas, sheep and chickens, but never a Bonsai.  My newly retired friend Jan was traveling from Pennsylvania to Tennessee to Illinois to Wisconsin and back, and she needed a temporary home for her two Bonsai, a Ficus and a juniper, so I became a Bonsai babysitter.

I’ve never been overly taken with the Japanese art form of Bonsai, carefully root pruning and wiring and stunting a tree to grow as a miniature of itself.  The juniper when out on the deck, where it received ample rain, and the Ficus sat on the Lazy Susan on our dinner table.  You might say it grew on me.

While we usually have a vase of flowers on the table, there is a downside: pollen and petal drop, or little bugs, cloudy water, or drooping sunflower, zinnia or rose necks.  The Bonsai was so easy, so simple. So serene.

Mandevilla Mailbox:  Spotted on a recent bike ride…this year’s favorite mailbox planting. Mandeville, a tropical flowering vine, enjoyed our Central PA rainforest summer. And don’t kid yourself, several times when I rode past I spotted a woman outside tending it, tucking in a tendril here, and deadheading a flower there.

Written on Slate:

All the names I know from nurse:

Gardener’s garters, Shepherd’s purse,

Bachelor’s buttons, Lady’s smock,

And the Lady Hollyhock.

Fairy places, fairy things,

Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,

Tiny trees for tiny dames—

These must all be fairy names!

Tiny woods below whose boughs

Shady fairies weave a house;

Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,

Where the braver fairies climb!

Fair are grown-up people’s trees,

But the fairies woods are these,

Where, if I were not so tall,

I should live for good and all.

–The Flowers, Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Fleur-de-BranchingOut

I treasure my morning bike rides—Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. It’s my peace time. My alone, communing with nature, time.  Uninterrupted me time.

I take the same loop, so I’ve memorized the dips and turns and climbs and places where the berm evaporates to about six inches and I have no alternative but to ride on the white line. Though the route is the same, weather and seasons bring different vistas.

About a month ago, I decided I had to become more observant. I didn’t want to pedal mindlessly without noticing details. So I decided to look for something new on every ride.

The first several rides were all about roadkill. Flattened groundhog.  Fledgling with an orange beak that took its last flight. Dead squirrels. So many dead squirrels. A fawn, spots and all, curled on the side of the road as if asleep. A lime green luna moth, crunched. The thought of a cyclist ending up in the same state spins through my mind.

One day, as I was riding through Lemont, my bicycle tires crushed white mulberries that fell onto the road.  I remembered a woman in Maxatawny who stretched out a tarp under her mulberry tree to catch the fruit for pots of jam. But you can’t stretch out a tarp on a busy country road. 

A thought came to me. I could hang open umbrellas upside down from the branches to catch the mulberries. They’d call me the village fool, but I’d get some sweet mulberries to eat instead of pressing them into the pavement.

Some days, I see a hot air balloon or a caravan of landscaping trucks headed toward the next job.  A flock of goldfinches darting above the teasel or an especially handsome labradoodle strutting his stuff on the bike path

One morning on the road I drive or bike at least twice a day, often more, I looked up and saw SUSAN BRANCH.  Actually, it was a sign post, East Branch Road intersected with Susan Lane. SUSAN BRANCH.

When I got home, I Googled Susan Branch to be sure my memory was correct.

It was.

Then I went to the basement to look at my mother’s collection of cookbooks, many holdovers from The Country Sampler, her former gourmet cooking and gift store.  I worked there part-time in high school and college, and loved to shop there in the years after that.  As I scanned the shelves, Susan Branch’s Heart of the Home series was not to be found.

Years ago I salivated over Susan Branch’s cookbooks, calendars, and keepsake books in my mother store. Her first book, Heart of the Home: Notes from a Vineyard Kitchen, features recipes that she made in her house on Martha’s Vineyard.  I don’t remember any specific recipes, but, oh, I remember the watercolors and sketches that accompany each recipe. They are whimsical, as light and bright as pedaling around Martha’s Vineyard.  Spokes in the circle of life. Laurie Lynch

Pun-y Story:  This spring at our Master Gardener Home Grown Project at Limerock Court we added three raised beds. I was cleaning up and collected pieces of 2”x2” scraps and had a handful.

“Jake, would you like to use these as building blocks?” I asked one of the youngsters helping out.

“Sure.”

“Let me find a bag for them,” I answered.

I searched the dumpster, then my car. No plastic bags. Walking back, I looked up and a plastic bag blown by the wind glided over a pickup truck parked nearby.

“It’s a miracle” I said to Jake.

“No, it’s a bag-acle,” he replied.

His parents tell me he is a regular pun master.

Not So Funny:  I’ve had no luck with my Purple Bell vines.  The plantings in each hanging basket were moved outside, one with those in the tall planter, the other on the opposite side of the house. Neither has filled out, flowered, or changed at all, Meanwhile, the vines in the planter are on the decline—droopy with brown leaves.  I think it is all this rain we’ve been getting—3 inches last night alone. But what am I to do, raise an umbrella over the pot?

Written on Slate: “In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.”  Carl Sandburg