PROMISES TO KEEP

 

            I just spent two irretrievable hours of my life wearing one of Tim’s hard white art erasers (not to mention my thumb) down to frass removing the first three months of journal entries from my second-decade weather observation book. Seemed like a good idea back in 2010, making brief daily jottings on the goings-on in the yard in a ten-years-at-a-glance context. When all interest in continuing evaporated that same May—about the time when being in the garden was ’way more appealing than writing about the garden—I shelved the idea and the book, resolving to deal with the latter before 2013.

            Guess what arrives tomorrow?

            Guess what arrived today? A New Year’s resolution I know I can keep: after 50 years in the trenches, I’m swearing off formal journaling.

            Obsessive journaling is really a sort of masturbation. It’s why the blogosphere thrives. There’s the titillation of others reading, perhaps commenting on, your revelations. There’s also the possibility of the odd 15 minutes of fame, such as the kvetching blogging mom who declared her own kid would be the next Adam Lantz, garnering herself appearances on the morning talk shows. I mean, really. No wonder the kid has problems.

            The realization dawned that I’m no Samuel Pepys (pronounced PEEPS, not PEP-is). The realization also dawned that I turn 60 in 2013. Over the past several years, I’ve been moving steadily toward the place where it’s a lot more important to be out living life rather than just writing about it.

            Does that mean GFTGU has finished its run? No. At least not yet. Playing in the dirt is a life-long love affair, and the best education, and the best therapy ever. But, to steal from Robert Frost,

                                    I have promises to keep

                                    And miles to go before I sleep,

                                    And miles to go before I sleep.

            Happy New Year, y’all. And thanks for dropping by.

                                                                                    Kathy

P.S. – Wanna know the most profound thing I erased this morning? On March 2, 2010, I wrote: “Met Allan Armitage [at the Davidson College Gardening Symposium]. He’s a jerk.”

AND NOW FOR THE GOOD NEWS

            "The Avant Gardener" carries good news briefs as well, such as the following:

NOT JUST FOR HEADACHES ANY MORE

            Does an aspirin drench really enhance a plant’s natural defenses to promote growth, reduce stress, and ward off disease and insects? Replying to a reader letter to Fine Gardening, University of Rhode Island Professor Rebecca Brown says yes. One component of aspirin is salicytic acid, a chemical naturally present in all flora. Its name derives from Salix, because willows produce the compound in high concentrations. Dissolve one or two aspirin per gallon of water, and apply generously around the roots of your plants. Dr. Brown recommends a douse every two weeks during the growing season. Seedlings and new transplants benefit from aspirin-water spritzes too. Or you can feed them a tea made of willow twigs steeped in water.

            Except using aspirin’s easier.

*****

In the 'Phenomenal' field

            Know what else is good for headache? Aromatherapy with home-grown lavender. For those of us living in climes somewhat dissimilar to those of the English countryside or Provence, Peace Tree Farms of Pennsylvania has developed a super-hardy cultivar of Lavendula they dubbed ‘Phenomenal.’ Bred for American Horticultural Society’s (AHS) Zones 4 to 8, the silver-foliaged densely branched plant grows to about 36” high and wide, and produces “deep-blue” (hort-speak for “purple”) bloom clusters. Go to Peace Tree Farm’s website for more information.

*****

Honeycrisp apples

             
            Are you hungry? How about a nice apple? U.S. growers produce zillions of them (more or less) every year. Our own USDA expended considerable time and taxpayer dollars to rank our favorite varieties by volume. And the winners are: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Gala, Granny Smith, Fuji and Braeburn. But keep an eye out for newcomer Honeycrisp. This yellow and red marbled-fleshed University of Minnesota introduction is on its way to the top.

*****

Blueberry 'Pink Lemonade'

            The busy boys at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service have released two new blueberry hybrids. Early fruiting ‘Sweetheart’ “… not only holds its sweet flavor longer than other blueberries, it produces a small repeat crop in the fall” after the main run in June, according to “The Avant Gardener.” She’s hardy to AHS Zone 5. In keeping with the American fascination with all things pink, the second AHS entry is ‘Pink Lemonade,’ a blueberry whose fruit is, um, pink. (Why don’t they call it “pinkberry”? No one knows.) Only a moderate producer and hardy only to AHS Zone 6, “this novel blueberry gained a ‘best new shrub’ award at the Far West Horticultural Show.” High praise indeed. I guess.

*****

            Both apples and blueberry provide consumers with lots of fiber, which, as we all know, promotes happy and healthy colons. But listen to this, girls: out of 20,000 women participating in a study, those who got the most fiber from their diets had a 25% lower chance of developing heart disease than their processed-food loving counterparts.

*****

Calm down! Have some raisins.

          

            
            Got raisins? Swedish researchers found that hypertensives eating a handful of raisins a day appreciably reduced their blood pressures. No one knows why, exactly, but then, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

*****

            One last dollop of good-ish news. Today marks the last of the earliest sunsets here in the Southport area. Starting November 28 and continuing through this evening, the sun’s gone down at 5:03 EST. Tomorrow, we gain a minute as it waits until 5:04 to slip below the horizon. On the other end of the day, however, sunrise gets incrementally later until January 3^rd, when it claws its way into the morning sky at 7:17 EST. There it levels off through the 13^th. After that, it’s all good with earlier sunrises and later sunsets until the summer solstice in June, when the slow slide kicks back in.

Those wacky druids at Stonehenge

            The actual shortest day(s) of the year fall around the imminent winter solstice, on December 21 this year. Locally, that plays out to 15 days of 14-hour-6-minute nights. For more insight on the long and short of daylengths, check out my December 10, 2010 post, “The Moon, the Sun, and the Shortest Day.” It’s illuminating (haha).

*****

            Okay, that’s it for me for 2012. There’s a visit to Momma in Williamsburg coming up this weekend, and seasonal shopping to cram in before the trip; our ever-patient clients would really, really like their winter containers filled; I would really, really like to find homes for all the plants in our driveway; a stack of Christmas cards waits on my desk to be addressed and schlepped to the mailbox; six pounds of cranberries languish in the fridge, hoping to become sauce and chutney; there's a weaving sampler I can’t wait to get off the loom because it’s produced so damn many “teachable moments”; and a sweater I've been struggling with since first looping yarn around needle requires ripping out all together as I discovered last night I forgot to make any of the sleeve increases.

            That's life as usual chez Fitz. We wish you the least stressful of holidays and are looking forward to catching up after the furor dies down. Sleep in heavenly peace, if you can. And if not, an occasional Ativan helps smooth out those rough edges.

            Thanks so much for dropping by. It means a lot to me.

                                                                                    Kathy

FIRST THE BAD NEWS

            Is it just me, or does time compress between Thanksgiving and New Years? I’ve taken to setting the stove’s timer to keep me from taking more than an hour to make and record the first weather observation of the day, change the cats’ water, clear the dish drainer, shift whatever laundry’s going to the next phase, answer important emails and delete the junk, and down my two cups of joe. I can never quite believe it when the series of triple beeps start. This morning, for instance, I thought it was the dryer and let it continue for five minutes.

            In the interest of not having to think too much, this post will consist of some bits and bobs gleaned from the November issue of “The Avant Gardener” newsletter. A subscription to this excellent publication would make a dandy stocking stuffer for the computer-literate dirt-monkey in your life: since the venerable Tom Powell retired, Derek Fell has taken the digest online. But it is still soooo worthwhile.

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT

A shelf full of neonicotinoids

            Hooray for Europe. Light-years ahead of the U.S. when it comes to sustainable agriculture, Germany, France and Italy have banned neonicotinoid pesticides, according to an article by Shelley Stonebrook in the August/September Mother Earth News. A growing body of evidence implicates synthetic neonicotinoids (pronounced “knee-oh-knee-COT-in-oydz,” so called because their chemical makeup resembles that of nicotine), a particularly virulent class of systemic insecticides, in the ongoing malaise of European honeybees. Systemic pesticides work by insinuating themselves into every cell of treated plants, from roots to shoots to fruits, and their residual presence is truly impressive. One study cited by Stonebrook found the harvested fruits and vegetables from plants treated with the stuff retained a scary 12% residue. Another study, published in 2012 in Japan, found a correlation between neonicotinoid residues and brain damage in mammals. Beekeepers on this side of the pond want the EPA to get them off the shelves pronto. So far, no dice.

            No big surprise there. Can you say "chemical industry lobby"?

*****

The Swiss member of the Big Three

            Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta are the largest food-crop seed producers in the world. The main business of all three is synthetic chemical production with heavy investment in biotechnology (i.e., genetically modified organisms, or GMOs) to make their patented plants weed- and pest-resistant. Anybody else see a conflict of interest here?  Avant Gardener says, “… who wants to eat a food that has its own built-in insect control even if it is considered biologically safe, or a food that can withstand spraying with a weed-killer? In a nutshell, that is what the controversy over GMO seed is all about, and why some countries of Europe have enforced labeling of GMO food crops, and why similar consumer groups in the U.S. are agitating for GMO labeling laws.”

            Nutshell, indeed. Should be nuthouse, don’t you think?

*****

Your basic female deer tick

            Here’s a bulletin for you: gardeners have a higher-than-average chance of contracting Lyme disease because they, along with hikers, have a higher-than-average chance of attracting deer ticks. Wait! There’s more! Successful treatment of the disease depends on early diagnosis, but: 1) the alleged characteristic bull’s-eye pattern around the bite site often fails to materialize; 2) symptoms—which include fatigue, congestion, headache and joint pain—mimic about 3000 other malaises, like flu, hay fever, arthritis and aging; and 3) the currently available tests for the disease are unreliable. What to do? The “perfectly safe” crowd advocates wearing biohazard suits at all times and hermetically sealing one’s living quarters against mice, who also host the tiny arachnids. Sane people merely maintain routine watchfulness when showering (helps if you have a shower-buddy) and occasionally remind themselves of how few actual victims of the disease they personally know.

*****

            Well, this didn’t turn into the easy-peasy piece I’d anticipated. I forgot how hard it is to avoid plagiarism when excerpting from a text. Bugger.

Stay tuned for a perkier piece next time. And thanks for dropping by.

                                                                        Kathy