Dodged Another Bullet

Last night the weather kids very clearly stated that we were very likely to have dangerous weather between three and five in the afternoon today.

This morning Steve and I did some work in the garden, mounding up potatoes, and weeding and mulching  and then replanting the bare spots in the okra row. I told Steve not to set the sprinklers because we'd be having some rain later in the day, and oh, did we ever!

Big crazy mean tornado, grinding through Canadian County, EF5 tornado doing its level best to flatten El Reno and environs, rolling SLOWLY across I-40... long story short, leaving a long, wide path of destruction but missing us to the north...then a firing line of similar weather setting up again, missing us to the south.  The whole time we're watching live continuous coverage with color Doppler radar on our local TV station AND the interactive weather map on the internet.  For hours we watched intense weather patterns heading straight for us, only to dissipate slightly as they neared us as if opening a portal, sending the brunt of storms around to the north or to the south of us.

We did get about forty five minutes of pretty intense, no-kidding-I-really-mean-it rain right here on our little homestead, probably about two inches worth here. (I expect to see okra sprouts shortly!) Then the weather cleared out, moving on to the east, revealing clear skies and sunshine to the west, thank you very much. We had been so wrought up with watching all the color radars and being prepared to go blankets and pillows into our Safe Place that I had not made a move toward supper preparations, so when it was all done for us here, Steve said, "Wanna go up and get a Chick-fil-A or something?"

He went out to the front porch to wait while I locked up the house, and observed a small piece of torn leaf falling straight down from the sky, a little green piece of storm debris. Landed right on our porch.

Now we're back home for the night, and glad to be. Garden got a good quality watering.  There's water in the pond across the road again, and even though it isn't quite full (yet?) it's another beginning. I saw an egret circling the pond again and the sounds of little froggies already fill the air. Doesn't take those frogs long at all!

Wonder what it's going to do tomorrow?

...Looking Forward,
Vicki

Mud Season Update

In my last post I mentioned that WeatherBoy was threatening winter weather (again). You can see by the picture the little darling delivered as promised!  This photo, taken January 29, 2010, depicts about six inches of snow. With ice under it.  Out at our place the ice was only about a half inch on wires and tree limbs and such. On our concrete surfaces the icy underlayment was more like two inches because of the way the precip evolved from freezing rain to sleet to snow.   

Many Oklahomans lost power in this storm and as of the first week of February, some 28,000 of them were still waiting to be reconnected. Most of those folks are in Grady County, around Chickasha, about 33 miles south-southwest of us. I am grateful to report that we did not lose power during the storm, big-sigh-of-relief.  

Last post I was waiting for the Propane man and of course he was swamped. I think we may have been triaged a little farther down the list than I would have liked. Complicating that, they lost a family member (another one in a year's time), so they not only had their usual customer overload of frantic customers dreading a winter storm, they also had another funeral to plan in the midst of all that weather.  Always wise to have a good solid Plan B in stock, and fortunately we had our contingencies lined up. 

In a small twist, we kept power through the storm and once the melt was well underway we had an outage. It was in the middle of the day for about two and a half hours earlier this week. I got a little frantic about it at first because the propane man hadn't been able to get out here yet, and it was the day of their family member's funeral, so I knew he wouldn't be coming that day either. But good ol' OEC located the trouble and fixed it and we were back on well before dark. Yay OEC! 

This picture was taken one week after the one above. in one week's time, this shows significant melting in a particular form we call "Mud Season."  This is way too wet to walk on unless you don't mind getting in up to your ankles or deeper. I know from personal experience that this mud is soft enough to suck the shoes right off your feet, not my favorite thing. 

Just because I can't get right out in the middle of it doesn't mean I'm not planning this season's garden, though!  I'm thinking about starting a few plots of Square Foot Gardening.

Now WeatherBoy is saying rain tonight and tomorrow, which may melt the rest of this snow, but then more snow tomorrow night. Sigh. Criminy, where does he think we are, Central New York?! 

That's okay. We can use the moisture. And I do know, to quote an old friend, who is probably telling all the angels in Heaven now, "It too'll pass, Hon!" It'll be Spring soon.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, y'all!

Our exciting New Years Eve consisted of a quiet evening at home, including supper and a movie - The Godfather on DVD - to which we both fell asleep before the end. That's okay. We are Godfather Movie watchin' fools. I love some of the quotes, such as, "I have a special kind of practice. I only have one client," and "Leave the gun. Take the canolis," for example.

Daylight now, and January One of a new year, new decade, and look who got their first garden catalog of the season! Perusing it and possibly formulating an order are definitely on my List of Things to Do today.

Still snow on the ground here, but on the days it's been above freezing we see melt. The white stuff is receding, revealing the brown earth under it. Those relatively warm days are definitely Mud Season days (ick!). Still winter, though, and our chief concerns these days tend to run along lines of keeping a faucet drip going and making sure we have plenty of propane.

We have a pot of Black Eyed Peas cooking. I'll make cornbread later on, so we can start the year out right.

You know about that, right? Black eyed peas?

On January 1st, you eat black eyed peas. Some folks also recommend other items, like certain kinds of greens, or maybe a particular scrap of meat, but the central figure is black eyed peas. The first time I remember hearing about this was from Grandma Susie, who said that you eat black eyed peas on January first because it's humble fare and represents humble beginnings. Start the year out humble and things can only become more prosperous.

The last few years we were away from home on January 1, so wherever we might be on the 1st, we would make a point to find some black eyed peas to eat. It got pretty interesting some years - trolling a Safeway store in some strange town for a can or seeking out an open restaurant along the way. Got to have black eyed peas on January 1.

I am happy to report that we are home this January 1 and have a pot of BEP on the stove as I write. Humble fare to start out this 2010 year, and a gardening catalog for desert.

Happy New Year, y'all!

Garden Update and Field Pea Lore

I am sorry to say that I have slacked way off blog entries since I got Facebook, so to try to make up for it a little bit, I'm posting this entry with an updated photo of my garden, which is fairly exploding out of the ground.

We have already enjoyed a jalapeno pepper bigger than my whole thumb, a Roma tomato bigger than any I've ever seen in a grocery store (and way tastier), a few little golf-ball sized onions (because I just couldn't wait), several yellow squash, which are surprisingly sweet, and two hefty servings of green beans, yum! But wait, there's more - today I saw a bright yellow spot in one of the rows and wondered how a dandelion grew there so quickly, but it was my first Marigold blossom of the season. Good Morning Merry Sunshine!

In this photo, on the left is the tomato row; in the middle, there, is a row of Georgia Sweet onions, and that row on the right, toward the front are the yellow squash, and behind them you can see some neat trellises I made for cucumbers, cantaloupe (also known as muskmelon), and watermelon. On the crossways rows in the foreground, the little sprouts you see marching across the image from right to left are pink-eye purple-hulls, a variety of what are commonly called field peas. The Pink-eye purple-hulls are close cousins to black-eyed peas, which you may have heard of.

Black eyed peas are significantly involved in a particular southern tradition of eating black eyed peas on January first for good luck and prosperity in the coming year. Grandma Susie introduced this tradition to me many years ago. You can have 'em any way you wish - with or without greens, cornbread, any variety of pork - the black-eyed peas themselves are the thing.

This tradition evolved, as Grandma Susie explained to me, from the point that black eyed peas and all their little cousins are humble food, inexpensive and easy to prepare and, as you can see, one can even grow them in the home garden. As a bonus to all that, they're also quite tasty. It follows that if one were to start the new year with such humble fare, things could only get better. Steve and I have become almost superstitious in our observance of this tradition - January first must not pass without our having some black-eyed peas, even if we have to get them out of a can from the grocery store!

I could grow black eyed peas, and probably will, but I so love the pink-eye purple-hulls. I was introduced to pink-eye purple-hulls by a woman named Mildred Wallace, mother of my dear friend Sue Mitchell. My children and I went to visit Sue at Mildred's house in Arkansas one summer back in the eighties. Mildred was a pip! She nearly always had a "chaw of terbacky" in her cheek. Mildred grew a thick stand of pink-eye purple-hulls every summer. She ate many of them fresh and home-canned the rest, had enough to keep herself well stocked and send home with her loved ones. They weren't quite ready to harvest when we were there that summer, so we had some of the last of the home-canned from the season before - delicious. I also learned from Mildred that summer how to make biscuits. Yeah, biscuits! Tender, flaky biscuits, the kind you love with breakfast. I'll tell you about Mildred's biscuits in another post because this one is about "eye beans."

Black eyed peas are a pristine creamy white with a distinct black eye. They cook up from dried relatively quickly and are tasty. You can embellish the flavor with various seasonings, maybe a joint of ham if you're so inclined, or just enjoy them pretty much the way they come. They are definitely black and white. Once I've actually grown some, I can tell you more about their habit, their pods, and so forth.

Pink-eye purple-hulls are exactly that. One of the fun things about shelling them is that the pods will stain your fingers purple. One of the not-so-fun things about shelling them is the same thing - they will stain your fingers, and it is persistent. Doesn't wash out easily. The beans or peas, whichever one might wish to call them, are a little more pale mauvish in color, with a deeper, sort of a dusty plum colored eye. As I mentioned before, they are tasty prepared from fresh, they home-can well, or cook up from dried relatively quickly, like their black-eyed cousins. My affection for this legume interferes with any objectivity I might have, so I can't really say between black eyes and pink eyes which one has the better flavor. They're just tasty.

Time marches on and both Sue and her mother Mildred have gone on to the Big Acreage in the Sky. I have no doubt whatsoever that Mildred is in charge of a thick stand of the Heavenly equivalent of Pink-eye Purple-hulls, and that Sue is pointing out to newly arrived angels, "Well, there's a real good example of a pair of wings, right there on your shoulders." I learned a lot from those two women, individually and collectively, miss them both, and think of them often. My old friend Pappy Hines would say "They're not dead as long as we're alive to remember them," and to that I offer Cheers to Sue, Mildred and Pappy.

Y'all go grow yourselves some pink-eye purple-hulls!

Gardening Notes

We pull our rows up in ridges so the plantings are raised. Not a raised bed, but raised rows. Here's a picture of this year's garden so far, with a picturesque backdrop of trees.

We have an assortment of tomatoes, peppers, a row each of Georgia sweet and Texas 1015 (sweet) onions, some cukes, a watermelon, a cantaloupe, some okra, green beans, beets and carrots in the raised rows in addition to the corn circles.

We also have some garlic (not shown in this photo). I'll relate The Legend of The Garlic (with picture!) in a separate post in the near future.

By the way, in case you're interested, the trees shown include Black Walnut, Pecan, Hackberry, Elm, Honey Locust, and an olive relative I call "Sweetbush" because of the way it smells when it blooms in the spring. Downright intoxicating, the Sweetbush.

Elsewhere on the acreage live Juniper, Cottonwood, Mulberry, Willow, Cypress, Sweetgum, Oak and Pine trees. Possibly also a Redbud, the Oklahoma State tree, which I planted over ten years ago, but have not yet found.

Gateway to Oz

I had posted my introductory entry to the Yahoo group on Organic Gardening and another member of that group, Jeff FaithWalker, replied saying, "So God is delivering you out of the Hands of us Yankees and sending you to the gateway to Oz is He.......... .hmmmm verrrrrrrrrrry interesting!"

Gateway to Oz - what a great turn of phrase! The idea made me remember the carrots we planted the day of the May 3 Tornadoes:

Some of the best carrots I ever ate were planted on May 3, 1999, a day of a seemingly neverending series of tornadoes.

We had worked a little ash from the woodstove into the row and planted as the darkening sky boiled up from the west. You can keep a garden alive with the water hose, but to really grow, rain is best, so I knew that these carrots having their first watering by rain, I knew that would be good, as long as they didn't wash out. I kept my eye on the sky as the thunder began to rumble and as soon as we got the seeds in the ground I left my dear husband outside to finish putting up the tools and get things closed up and I went inside to look at the weather radar on the TV, see just what was coming, and how soon. Yikes, what a wild ride we had for the rest of the afternoon and most of the night! A whole 'nother story about all that, for sure. But the carrots did great, yes they did. Best carrots I ever ate.

Gardening

I've been interested in growing things my whole life. I remember at the age of four how dismayed I was when my grandparents took out the flower garden next to the house and concreted that space to keep water from seeping into their basement and it always dismays me to hear of someone dismissively removing trees and shrubs simply because they're tired of them.

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to live on an acreage in Central Oklahoma where I had some chickens, a good sized garden with plenty of vegetables and a smaller (but still sizable) garden where we rotated garlic and tomatoes. I made flower jellies from Honey Locust and Dandelion flowers, which I could only do because I knew they had not been chemically treated. Then, seven years ago we moved to a small village in Central New York.

Up here it's two or three zones colder than where I grew up and while I love the cool green summers in Central New York, I haven't quite gotten the knack of growing my familiars in this short, cool growing season. Also, here in the village, my so-called garden is more postage-stamp sized than the all-the-room-you-want garden I had in Oklahoma. I have been able to grow horseradish, chives, mint, lemon balm, parsley, basil, a little bit of garlic - I had a pair of blueberry bushes, too, but we had some work done on the house and I haven't seen the blueberry bushes since the heavy equipment left. As I write, the yard and my tiny rectangle of garden are firmly covered with twelve to eighteen inches of snow.

I thought we'd spend the rest of our lives here, but as it happens, fortune has favored us in that someone has bought our house and we're moving back to Zone 7, to the very acreage we left when we moved up here. I am ecstatic!

I've already researched late season plantings and average frost dates and see that, getting back there in late May or even early June, I can still get several late season plantings going as soon as we get back and be eating some of our own food again by winter.

Onward and upward!