WATER

I was going to write of other things, but it’s not possible to write about Vermont this week without mentioning water.  A lot of water in a short time poured on us by tropical storm Irene, nine inches in some places.  Since last Sunday, the day of the storm, we have been learning about the damage throughout the state. Each day brought more news of destruction.  It was incongruous, because our early awareness was only of our pond filled to overflowing, and Otter Creek higher and more fast-moving than it had been in the spring rains.  The waterfalls in Vergennes and Middlebury were milk chocolate brown and sounded thunderous.  But we were only sightseers. 

The falls at Middlebury, the day after Irene

An email went out a few days later from the local USDA office asking farmers in this county (Addison) to report crop damage caused by flooding.  So there must be more crop flooding in low-lying areas than we have noticed.  (I wonder how Erik, the rice farmer, fared.  See "Bread.") Bill, living up-mountain in Starksboro off route 17, has had to adjust his commute because of a partial road closure.  A road to nearby Sugarbush is closed.  Harry’s vet mentioned today that the trail to Buck Mountain behind us has some tree damage.  My sunflowers were destroyed.  This is minor, my sunflowers trivial, compared with what happened elsewhere. 

Three covered bridges were lost.  Still, I read that the flood of November 3, 1927 was much worse.  Two hundred covered bridges were lost (out of a total of 1,450 bridges).  Not surprisingly in those times people were happy to replace them with steel.  Wood=old.  Steel=new.  Today there are fewer than 100 covered bridges.  The Pulp Mill bridge in Middlebury, built in 1820 and mightily restored in 1984 and 2002, an unusual double or two-lane bridge, easily survived.  We often cross it when we take Morgan Horse Farm Road home.  It’s one of five covered bridges in this county.  In the many summers I spent in Vermont as a child I never quite worked out exactly why the bridges were covered.  It’s not that I didn’t ask.  But I got answers like “to keep the snow off the bridge,” or “to make it easier to cross in bad weather,” or, more dismissively, “it was the way they built them then.”  Not quite.  They were covered to protect the those elegant massive wooden trusses from the elements.

A week ago we stumbled into a photography exhibit called “Visions of Place: The Photography of John Miller, Peter Miller, and Richard Brown” at the Middlebury Folk Center that brought home a powerful sense of the changes in Vermont culture of more recent times.  Not so long ago, when covered bridges had long been antiques, in the 1960’s, the 1970’s, even the 1990’s, more people farmed, and more people lived more simply than we do now.  I shouldn’t romanticize this because it was a harder life in many physical ways.  It reminded me of a long time ago when I and my family were spending the summer, as usual, in Townshend, Vermont. I must have been about eight years old or so, when one day I went with my mother to a market in Newfane, Vermont where a new butcher had begun work.  I remember standing there listening to him telling my mother his story:  how he and his wife had moved here earlier that year from New York City (before route 91 was built, and New York City was worlds away!), and how harsh their first winter was, and how his frightened wife wept every night for the loss of friends, familiar things, familiar food, and the vibrancy and comfort of city life.  Such contrast:  we are going to Boston for two days next week, just to see a play.  Our friends are all on the internet.

In the 1927 flood eight inches of rain fell in a 36-hour period.  Eighty-five people died in Vermont and 9,000 were homeless.

The trusses of the Pulp Mill bridge

SUMMER FRUITS

If you measured summer by its fruits, this would be the season of the third berry.  Blueberry time is here, but won't last much longer. Strawberries are long gone.  (We had only a few plants growing near the house.)  Our raspberries gave us several pints, but only a few berries remained as of last week. (Note to self:  must remember to cut the stalks for a bigger harvest next year.)  Our small vegetable garden is producing at a pretty rapid clip, the usual tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, eggplant.  There's a pear tree growing wild at the end of our woods with plenty of pears, quite high up, and probably still unripe.  Our apple trees aren't doing much in the way of production.  Hmmm.  Not enough cross-pollination?  Or is this a bi-annual thing?

Among the uncultivated, it’s time now for Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota, suggesting the carrot family) in bloom just about everywhere, blue wild chicory (Cichorium intybus), blooming nearly everywhere. But there’s an interloper, one I hadn’t heard of in Massachusetts – wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa, another carrot family member; doesn’t that sound like something you’d like to pick?).  If you brush up against this plant in sunlight, you will likely end up with a rash, blisters, and skin discoloration lasting for months.  The effect is called phytophotodermatitus.  Wild parsnip tends to grow along roadsides or in untended fields, and has now mostly turned to seed.  The plant has been known around here for over a hundred years but is only recently proliferating.  No one seems to know why. 

                                                                                **

Another sign of late summer:  the annual Addison County Field Days ended last weekend.  If you didn’t already know, you would learn that cows are rated for the beauty of their udders and the manner in which these are supported by the rest of their huge bodies.  Or you could discover truly beautiful chickens.   

   

   

You might find out how much agriculture depends upon humongous machinery.  The top of my head only made it to the top of the tires in this example.  It makes you tremble for the creatures that nest or nestle in the fields among the tall grasses and corn.

You might find out how to hand-scythe, or how much weight Percherons or Belgians can pull, or how they were once employed at one end of a Rube Goldberg-like contraption for sawing wood.  Having seen all that and more, it would be time for maple creemies and a couple of rounds of the Demolition Derby.  If you were Hans, Olin, Carly, Audrey, or Ben there would be time at the fair for hours of whirling, spinning, and zooming.

BREAD

When I was about five years old I came to Vermont for the first time.  My parents and I stayed in a kind of boarding inn, I suppose you would call it, by which I mean a place that would now be considered a B&B, a large old farmhouse complete with large red barn and several outbuildings and some hundred acres of land, most of it meadow, across from a covered bridge still in use at the time (even by the logging trucks which ultimately made it unsafe for cars) that crossed the West River. It was a place where people came to stay in the summer for weeks at a time or even the entire summer, and returned year after year.  Like we did.  What made it unusual was that it was run by a Waldorf-Astoria chef and his family, and the clientele consisted solely of Waldorf people and their friends.  (My father was a headwaiter at the Waldorf.)  Everyone, naturally, was from New York City. 

The food was good, I supposed, although I was no connoisseur.  In those days, I understood that eating anywhere besides New York City meant that the food–with notable exceptions, of course–would be just this side of inedible.  Bread, I often heard my father say, they didn’t know how to make outside of New York City.  The lack of decent bread–i.e., the full-bodied European type with a crispy crust, maybe some seeds–was what kept my parents from living anywhere else after my father retired.  I wished they would move to Vermont.  But even in the suburbs of New York they didn’t know how to make bread.

Now there’s no lack of good bread.  There is excellent bread to be had at the Middlebury Co-op, the Vergennes Laundry (a café), at Shelburne Farms, and at farmer’s markets in Vergennes and Middlebury.  We have become especially fond of Good Companion Bakery bread, made just a few miles away.  We met Erik, the baker, at the Vergennes farmer’s market where he was taking orders for “rice-weed-eating ducks.”  That was irresistible.  When we stopped at his farm to pick up the ducks we saw his bread bakery, his sponsored windmill project, and learned of his other projects that included heirloom apples for cider, growing his own wheat, doing his own mowing and all using his own draft horses, raising cows organically, plus a new major project growing rice.  (Really).  Hence the need for weed-eating ducks.  He was featured in the Huffington Report a couple of weeks ago about his rice growing.  (see the link:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/18/local-food-production-vermont-farmers_n_901424.html) As it happens Lesley recently talked with him too, about cows, gathering advice on the topic of raising a beef cow that we’d have a share of for meat. (See “The Social Network” blog entry.)

Erik, with rice plants (Photo: Huffington Report)

Bread, as in money to live on.  There’s not much of that for many farmers.   Not for Erik.  Not for Dan, the farmer who mows our meadow.  You have to love the life, and they do.  Dan stopped by the other day, and stayed a while.  He was hoping to mow, and get rid of the old bales, the next morning, but the weather was only going to cooperate for the next two days, and I guess he needed three. So it's still unmoved.  Dan has well over 100 acres to mow in all.  There was so much rain in the spring (a boon if you have some wet land and you want to be a rice farmer) he didn’t get started sowing corn until late, like a number of other farmers near here. Corn should be knee high-plus by now, but it’s barely that.  He won’t get much reward from this haying, as it’s late in the season for quality hay, and the old bales he has to remove aren’t worth much. Plus it will be a pain in the neck to mow and remove bales at the same time. He needs the hay though, as his cows can use about 400 of them a season.  Last September he had a terrible accident in the barn, fell and tore a muscle right off the bone, and so he had to leave the mowing­–and the tractor and motor repair, and other jobs he does to keep going–to others or let them go undone.  Mostly they were undone.  Medical bills pretty much ate up whatever money was left.  

The weather, not cooperating

Not-So-Idle Days, Idyll Evenings

The view from Snake Mountain, the lake in the background

Much of our time has been spent doing chores of one kind and another.  Well, for me, two kinds, mostly:  painting, and weeding.  The painting that relates to the porch is now pretty much done. The weeding, I’ll admit, will never be complete.  In the long garden it’s a battle against staggering odds.  A hike up Snake Mountain, the mountain we see from our porch to the southwest, was a break from all this.  It was hot, but Harry, thirteen now, managed quite well.

Harry admiring the view

The days have been warm and warmer, interrupted somewhat regularly by thunderstorms, and the nights, soft and balmy.  A picnic supper and swim with the Huston gang at Kingsland Bay on Lake Champlain marked the official beginning of summer as far as I was concerned.  The night of the fourth of July (well, actually it was Sunday, the 3rd) was one of those summer days.  After a dinnertime downpour (which downpoured inside the screened porch as well as outside, thanks to a long-awaited but still-not-completed roof covering, and the rain had Ken scurrying to keep the kebabs on the grill, and himself, from getting soaked) the fireworks went off under a cloudless sky. A good display for a small town, with the same kind of starbursts I oohed and aahed about in the Boston version.  A brass band–the one that plays in the gazebo on the Vergennes Green from time to time–played every piece of march music known to man, ending at last with “The Stars and Stripes Forever” while the rockets got fired up.  It felt very intimate; there were acres of space available for laying out blankets or setting up chairs, not a single thing to block anybody’s view, everything happening directly in front and overhead, and the wind blowing all the smoke in the opposite direction.  In other words, it was just right.

The night before had been just about right too.  A night of music (rocking blues) on a sweet summer’s night.  The event was indoors, though, at the Vergennes Opera House.  Headliners were a couple of musicians from New Orleans (including a blind keyboard player who looked like Stevie Wonder; we have been very into the music of New Orleans after watching a season of Treme on HBO).  Leading off was Panton Flats, a local five-man group that got the place jumping.  It was easy to get moving to this music.  The place was sold out, but there weren’t enough chairs for everyone (most of us were sitting around tables that took up a lot of space), so about a third of the audience was standing, making it that much easier to dance or just move to the beat.  Besides the 30-somethings and 40-somethings I figured would be there, we saw plenty of children, old people (that’s us, I guess), and very old people.  Dancing, too.  A local bar was selling everything from cokes to whiskey.

Nights are beautiful.  Last week I woke around 3AM for no particular reason.  At that moment it occurred to me that I didn’t really know this place at night.   So I got out of bed and wandered downstairs without turning on any lights.  I realized I know the house well enough now to navigate it in the near dark, my way lit by the myriad green and blue and red equipment gear–the TV, stove, smoke alarms, clocks, etc.  (Is any house ever completely dark anymore?)  Outdoors there was a kind of monitoring light too, the meager shine from a slit of moon, the distant glare of a farmyard light, and among the grasses:  fireflies.  Looking at this through the screen door wasn’t good enough, so I got myself a glass of wine (at 3 AM!), went onto the front porch and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs.  I listened to the tree frogs and the bullfrogs and other unidentifiable sounds.  But for these, all was still.  This was just right.

Doings in Gardens

The frogs have quieted down, settling in, I liked to think, with their chosen mates.  Not.  That may have been true the other day.  Now they're restless again.  I’m beginning to realize frog sounds have something to do with the weather. 

The grass isn’t growing an inch a day any more, so we’re no longer raking up haystacks of clippings.  But in the meadow the grasses are as tall as a person, nearly hiding the old hay bales. 

The sugar house is almost hidden behind grass.  Fortunately Ken cut trails through the meadow in several directions.

The hay bales are actually a problem, because the farmer who usually mows the field will have a devil of a time mowing with old hay bales in the way.  He wasn’t the one who left them there in the first place.  A Department of Agriculture guy we talked with downtown in Middlebury a month ago, when we were still trying to figure how who did what, was pretty certain the bales hadn’t been left by that farmer.  “Not good mowing practice.  He wouldn’t have done that, I don’t think.”  Last week the farmer told me he hurt his leg last fall and had this other guy from a shoddy-looking farm up the road do it in his place.  That guy did it all wrong, mowing too late in the season, leaving the cut hay to get rained on, mowing the whole thing all at one time, and then abandoning the bales because by then the ground was too wet to pick them up.  I think this is the same person the previous owners told us hit the well head besides.  Bales mowed the way these were, and left out all year, aren’t good for feed any longer, just for bedding.

 My plantings are settling in and sending up new shoots.  They were planted in clay, clay being the basic soil of Addison County, leavened somewhat by compost, but 99% clay nevertheless.  I keep on being amazed that delicate roots can find their way through this stuff, but apparently they do, quite happily too.  They had a rough start. First it was so wet they were nearly flooded (and with clay the water just sits there for days), then they got blasted by heat, then beaten by wind, followed on by cold.  Maybe it makes them tougher. 

There wasn’t anything much here in the way of perennials other than the black-eye susans that  re-announced themselves recently, only the stubborn remains of about fifteen giant sunflowers.  In the location I figured an herb garden should be, or maybe once was, I planted the usual assortment of herbs (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, mint, coriander, tarragon, basil, chives, little onions), and further on some perennials (lavender, euphorbia, reed grass, coneflowers, monarda, an aster variety, alium , yarrow,  peonies, Joe Pye weed, daisies, false sunflower, salvia, day lilies), sowed some giant sunflowers, and started a couple of vegetables (tomatoes of various kinds, cucumbers, jalapenos, ancho chilis, eggplant, squash), all of this in one fell swoop.  The season was marching on.  I had to get stuff in the ground

Last Sunday I realized everything I’d done in the garden so far was merely a beginning.  It was raw, unformed, definitely minor league.  Lesley and I went on a Middlebury area garden tour that set a standard few could reach.  Granted, having several hundred acres, a couple of huge ponds and lots of money wouldn’t hurt.  So much to be done.  But it was inspirational.

On the garden tour: this house is only the potting shed.

Another garden, and Lesley.   Yes, it was raining yet again.

Memorial Day, With Frogs

Senator Bernie Sanders, just before I shook his hand

Vergennes has a grand parade on Memorial Day.  For a small town (excuse me, "city") this is a big parade.  Just a bit smaller, maybe, than Lexington's Patriot's Day parade.  It's significant enough that the governor of Vermont marches (Peter Shumlin, Democrat and good guy, by the way) and a Senator, our favorite socialist, Bernie Sanders.  I called Vergennes a city, and it really is a city, with a mayor and city council.  True, there are only 2,670 people in Vergennes, but it was chartered in 1788 as a city, not a town.  There were high hopes for its economy at the time, what with Otter Creek Falls for power, access to shipping via Lake Champlain, and the largest ironworks in the country nearby, an industry that supplied iron fittings for the fleet that would defeat the British on the Lake Champlain in the war of 1812.  

There were the fire engines, the old cars, horses, the madcap Shriners, high school marching bands, veterans and military trucks, lovely teens ("Miss Teenage Vermont"), and a few paraders that told you this was Vermont, not Lexington, Massachusetts.  One such was the parade of old tractors.


**
Each night for a week or more we have been hearing frogs carrying on from the pond area.  

It’s a nightly concert, every frog joining in at random and seeming to want to out-sing every other frog.  Trills, croaks, snorts, whistles, beeps.  What a cacophony.  I’ve tracked it down, and the source of the noisiest and most dominant sound is the grey tree frog.  It has a resonating–and I mean resonating–trill, lower in pitch than the spring peeper.  Louder too, by far.  

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a grey tree frog.  Not surprising, as it’s tiny, only between an inch or two, and may be green or grey, depending on the color of whatever it’s sitting on.  We hear other frog voices that try to be heard over the din of the grey tree frogs.  I’m sure we’re hearing some northern leopard frogs as they are widespread and, what’s more, are the official state amphibian of Vermont.  I like the description of its call.  It’s likened to “the twang of a loose banjo string.”  Others we could be hearing are the mink frog that has an almost electronic-sounding croak.  It’s called a mink frog, by the way, because it reportedly smells like mink.  “To those unfamiliar with mink” (i.e., most of us), Wikipedia tells us, the odor is “more akin to rotting onions.”  Chances are I will never get close enough to check this out.  

We may also be hearing the green frog that sounds pretty much like a bullfrog, including the “loose banjo string” call description. There may also be pickerel frogs (they like pickerel weed and we might have some) with a call that sounds like “a short snore.” I think I heard that.  It’s probably too late in the season for the Vermont wood frog (electronic-sounding croaks) and the peepers (high-pitched trills), but, goodness knows, they could be singing too in the background.   


In the daytime, Harry often walks the perimeter of the pond, frogs leaping away from him right and left.  This doesn’t seem to stir any predatory instinct, for he doesn’t snap at them or do much except keep walking, or sit and stare. I like to think he is taken with the wonder of it.

Earth, Weeds, and Rain

 Another wet week.   I can almost hear things growing.

The Weeds: Bag of weeds #3, but lots more to go

The garden was rototilled and composted today. I didn’t do it. I didn’t think of trying.  Our land is amazingly fertile (our grass grows like the grass on Scotts Grass Seed ads), but it is thoroughly clay.  Clay, when dry, turns into hardpack or lumps so hard that if you tossed one at someone, they’d think you hit them with a rock.  When wet, well, anyone who has molded pottery knows what it’s like.  The other day, a day remarkable for blue sky and warm sunlight (no rain!), Audrey made a sculpture out of some of our clay. For several days the result sat there looking ready to be popped into a kiln. 

Audrey's mud kitten

This morning our landscaper dug holes for the huge plastic sonotubes that will be filled with concrete to support the porch.  He dug down about six feet with his bucket loader and hit not one single stone.  Not even a pebble.  Solid clay, all the way to infinity.  If you can get plants into this stuff they will be quite 

Sonotubes in, shrubs, tree, gone.  Looks worse before it can look better.

content.  Getting them in there, and getting the weeds out, that’s the challenge.  (A horticultural note:  you need to mix the top level of clay with some mulching compost to lighten it.  Hard work nevertheless.)  

We have a garden strip along the south edge of the lawn in which the previous owners apparently grew some corn, pumpkins and sunflowers.  I think it’s a mile and a half long.  That’s how long I figured it was after I spent a morning yanking the most blatant weeds.  The typical dandelion had a root about ten inches long and a spread of about twelve.  You see what I’m up against.

We established (“we” meaning me=ideas, landscaper=the work) another planting bed on the opposite side of the pond.  My thought is to have it ultimately look less like a golf course hazard, less fine, more like a natural pond.  Which it is, technically.  A natural stream,  widened and shaped.  Shrubs had to be moved from the front of the house to make room for the porch, so they are now looking at the house instead of looking out from it.  A river birch will soon be added to the mix.  

Some shrubs newly placed on the far side of the pond.

An evergreen that was moved from a location too near the porch-to-be is now the first occupant of an area south of the front of the driveway where it will soon be joined by six more, an attempt to break up the emptiness of the field and, we hope, help keep the road clear of snowdrifts.

When the rain stops (rumor has it it could be a while) I can start planting.  For the first time ever I’ll be able to have plants that require full sun.  In fact, there will scads of sun.  No more hostas for me!  (Gardeners, you know what I mean.)   So far I have put in three peonies in the patio garden.  (Peonies! Giant, lush, bulbous flowers!)  There was no place for peonies in Lexington.  No room for giant sunflowers or pumpkins or other big things, wide things, tall things.  I’ve got to think big.