You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘fruit trees’ tag.
here it is, again: a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings. I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights.
life with a little one (abridged, and in pictures):
Andi is in to everything. We try to incorporate her in to our chores (and the bottom of the clean laundry basket) as best we can. We are needing to be more and more creative to allow for learning opportunities while managing her safety and the state of our home. ————————————-
She is on the move. Her crawl is perfected, and she’s cruising on her feet when she gets near enough to a wall or steady object. She loves her father’s toy piano, which was the first thing on which she pulled herself to standing. -
Her sweet german swing, while more brightly colored than out typical household adornments has been a precious gift of time. we have attached hooks in the new addition and in the entry to the kitchen, so I can have a few minutes at a hot stove or a computer. ————————————-
outside:
i) potatoes are growing fast, and we’re doing our best to keep them well hilled so we’ll get a good crop.
ii) The pear and apple suffered from blight, but we’ve pruned, garlic-ed and sulfured them, and they are recovering. the other fruit trees are doing well and are all producing- save the almond, which just went in this year.
iii) While the birds got to our cherries and grapes before we did, they haven’t been fast enough on the strawberries (or perhaps we planted enough to share). Strawberries have become Andjoli’s favorite food, and perhaps mine as well. They are interspersed through our front and back gardens and our orchard area, and the certain find of a ripe berry makes garden tasks in all of these areas more enjoyable.
inside:
i) the summer work has been more overwhelming than I anticipated. I have a lot more on my academic plate than I originally realized, and the fact that I had planned to rest and am substituting that rest out for more work makes it all more daunting.
ii) We have moved into the addition- as it is the coolest place in the house. We have spread mattresses to lounge on in the living-area. It is not the most put together, but is a soft landing for an experimenting child and it makes family bed bigger- so we can spread out in hot weather. It also affords a beautiful view of the back gardens. The true bedroom is stifling hot, as we are (intentionally) living without AC this summer to save natural resources.
iii) for a long time we have been focusing on eating local organic foods, with the regular addition of dry bulk items. The changing season is making this more palatable, and we have been forced out of our winter standards now that we have an abundance of fresh greens. Some of our favorites this month were homemade falafel on homemade crepes stuffed with all the spring garden green. Also: savory oatmeal. yes, you heard me. we’ve added spring onions and green garlic and a bit of local cheese to our oatmeal and it is wonderful.
iv) we are trying to do all of our indoor cooking in the evening time, so the house has a whole night to cool off after the stove heats it up. We have created a miniature outdoor kitchen for the day that houses our toaster oven, rotisserie and crock pot. B is excited to build a more attractive and efficient outdoor kitchen for the summer, complete with clay oven, and an induction burner, and perhaps a solar cooker or thermal cookers. For this year, we will probably add the induction burner and build a solar cooker, and look at the more complicated (clay oven) and expensive (thermal cooker) projects for the future. I am excited that my husband is excited about cooking- even if it is the energy saving/green technology/building kitchen side of things.
A side note: it is funny that even when I try to write about indoor things, it somehow bleeds in to writing about outdoor things. This is rather reflexive of the way we live life. and I like it.
v) In order to ameliorate this tendency to focus on the outdoors as much as we do we are making plans to bring some of it inside, in the form of houseplants. We have some overwintering edibles that stayed at a friends house for the colder months that might return to our home: a banana, lemon and pomegranate. I planted some ginger (and await more plants from my mother) and we hope to add vanilla, cinnamon, figs, limes, indian coleus, and bay to our indoor plant collection this year, so we will have a good deal of green things to keep in our home when the world turns brown outside.
creation:
i) I submitted a short story to a writing contest. this is only the second time I have ever done this. I do not know when results will be published, and don’t want inquiries. just forget I said anything.
community, work, politics, and the rest of the world:
i) all of these things keep happening. I’m just too tired to recall much of it.
here it is, again: a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings. I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights.
life with a little one (in pictures):
Row 1) Andjoli is getting filthy. many of the things we hope will make it in her mouth never get there. Aim is impeccable, however, with less desirable objects.
Row 2) We’re starting to give her more frequent baths. It’s the first time she’s really needed them, and they don’t make her as crazy as they used to. Here are some clean pictures of her in her bath robe . . .
Row 3) she’s loving the outdoors. We’re doing our best to make sure she doesn’t choke herself on the smaller parts of it. Even though she seems to dislike the taste of dandelion fluff, she keeps going back for more.
outside:
i) Some of the winter-sown starts survived my lack of attention, and are now in the ground. For the most part, we’ve tended the front yard and acted like the more expansive back yard doesn’t exist. It’s tall with a lot of things we didn’t plant. The areas we cleared and planted in the earliest days of spring have been over-run again. We’ve got an almond tree, grapes, blueberries, peppers, tomatoes and eggplants to set out back in the next few weeks . . . so we’re going to need to pull out some of the un-invited green.
ii) the fruit trees seem to be in good form. I love the fuzz of the miniature peaches setting out. The apples and pears, which flower later don’t have their fruit sets yet, but everything else looks like it will be in production this year. The nectarine had a little leaf curl, but I plucked off the mottled leaves, and there’s no reoccurrence yet.
iii) the asparagus came up and was had a few times before we let it unfurl to the small trees it hoped to be. fresh cut asparagus is really something.
inside:
i)papers finished. grading finished. A breath, and then a quick leap to summer session.
ii) the addition is usable and has been used. B’s family came in to town at the end of the month, and we spent good time in the new space together watching a film, eating at a table, and they, of course, slept there.
iii) We’ve started fermenting our grains much more frequently, and it makes me feel worlds better. We also are whey fermenting baby food, and finding good uses for the sourdough start that keeps growing and needing to be used (biscuits and pancakes were wonderful, the sourdough banana bread, not so)
creation:
i) sigh. someday.
community, work, politics, and the rest of the world:
i) all of these things keep happening. I’m just too tired to recall much of it.
I’ve decide to provide a monthly review for family and friends who decide to follow this blog and are interested in the actual goings-on in our life, rather than my less practical musings. I have divided our month into categories, and provided the highlights. This means that you can not complain that I never get to the stuff of it in this journal.
life with a little one:
i) Andjoli and I still do not sleep for more than two-hour windows. I am resigned to this. B sleeps six to eight hours but often still looks less rested than I. We all need (and take too few) naps.
ii) teeth hurt- both for her, and for anyone who gets too close to her mouth.
iii) Andjoli is slightly obsessed with the cat, Ossel. She gets the jitters when she is in close proximity.
iv)The little lady made it through RSV, and is now breathing again like a normal person. It is amazing what a blessing a steady breath is.
v) She has grown out of everything she used to wear this month- diapers, diaper covers, pants, boots. I’ve done my best to hand make or alter new clothes to fit her. My favorite creation is four pairs of recycled wool longies, balaclavas from her old (now too small) hats, and new booties. perhaps I’ll post pictures for anyone who cares.
outside:
i) I have yet to complete my winter sowing. I have all of these containers saved, but haven’t found time to actually get my hands dirty.
ii) some of the early bulbs that are in our front yard are poking their green heads up. spring buds are bulging on the trees and bushes.
iii) all of the fruit trees have been pruned. or butchered. I’m not sure how, exactly, to express what it was that i did to them.
iv) we have not winter mulched or prepared the beds. this spring smell is making me anxious.
v) we have too much green matter and not enough brown matter in our compost from the winter, and as it warms, it is looking more pitiful and soggy . . we need to track down some leaves or waste wood chips to remedy our compost slop.
inside:
i) we spend more time here than we should when it is dreary outside. I look forward to having a more hardy little person next winter so that I can drag her out in weather like this.
ii) B finished laying the wood floor in the addition, and we are deciding if we should just go ahead and stain it and forget about sanding it. We’d prefer a more natural look over an even look anyway, and since we are using an osmo non-toxic stain/sealant rather than polyurethane I don’t think it needs to be perfectly level . . .
iii) the front cap to our juicer cracked. They will replace it, but mailing replacements takes time, and I currently don’t know what to do with myself in the kitchen. How do you, for instance, make flour, nut butters, sauces and juice? I did not realize my dependence on the machine before this.
iv) having a laundry room upstairs is exceptional.
creation:
i) I have started this journal, which I suppose counts as “writing,” but I’m not writing well enough or consistently enough to satisfy my desire. I’d like to get something publication ready. hopefully I’ll have something positive to say about that in future monthly reviews.
ii) We have been limited to creating functional things: wool diaper covers, lullabies, breads, sauces and juices from ugly organics (local waste produce that is slightly too unattractive to sell or eat fresh), etc. there has been no painting, no real music, no poetry- no simple extravagance. this must change.
my perpetual schooling:
i) no I am not finished. stop asking.
ii) A proposal for my second master’s thesis is due March 1st. It was not accomplished by the last day in February.
iii) I’m looking for impressive literature from authors who use their writing as a forum for dissent. Suggestions? (This does not need to be limited to the US, but does need to be available in English or French)
iv) We should deflect: B is finished with school! That might be old news to some of you, but all the same, you should congratulate him.
work:
i) I prepared this month to start teaching a short intensive course at the University on Food and Industry. Starts March 8th. Should be exciting.
ii) B is learning about translation software and getting his name out in the translation world, and he is also hosting weekly neighborhood Spanish classes in our home.
iii) We are both considering summer work, but our criteria makes it difficult: we want to work in a place we believe in, where we can learn useful skills and support useful growth. We do not want this work to take the place or time of the rich and rewarding experience of being part of a family and a community, nor do we want it to strip us of the time necessary to create and self reflect as individuals. Because of these standards, it currently looks like we may not be working, or, I should say, we may be working on things we love and not making much of an income.
There is one old tree left at the end of the driveway. Not one stretch of space on our plot of land is otherwise the same as it was four years ago. I feel myself slipping, sometimes, dizzy with how fast this bit of time is passing and place is changing.
Four years. We were impulsive, but not unmindful of the weight of our decisions. We opted to skip a wedding with all its extravagance and expense and we settled instead on a court-house marriage and a mortgage. We found the perfect house- 600 square feet of roofed-over space on a large-enough wooded lot that also had an adequately sunned quarter acre for a garden. It was on a dead end, and saw no traffic. The small wild field next door attracted summer fireflies that twinkled over it in our earliest nights here, and it felt like the something new of childhood all over again, but lacking the cliché that this sentence conveys. I suppose that’s about as close as I can get to saying much about early love.
There were more trees, beyond the field. This was a city space, but one that I could always qualify with the idea that there were “more trees.” It was a mile from the university where I taught and worked on my PhD- we could walk to work, bike to the summer market. The house was in disrepair, which made it affordable- and allowed us a frame in which we could learn, plan, and actualize our first joint fixing-up of a space we would come to know as “ours”. We gutted it, and we’ve worked the four years to salvage and harvest and collect the materials needed to smother this little house with our color schemes and organizational bents. We dug beds into the clay soil in that well-sunned patch. We did our share of making things “ours”, but we anticipated some things- the things we bought the land for- to stay as they were.
I had never lived in the city before this. And I, quite ignorantly, did not recognize immediately that the place did not share the same logic as the woods I grew up in. In the city, trees are not respected, and they are not yours. Fields are not left alone. They are sold off. Roads are extended. As neighborhoods “improve” the majority of the “more trees” are replaced with tall wooden fences.
A house, twice as tall as ours looms now where the fireflies used to light. By the logic of this place it is “beautiful.” The bit of field land that could have been left, or at very least, allowed to remain green in their front yard was shot over with a thick layer of gravel. The stones pierced our old wood siding like shrapnel as they laid it out. They buried our fruit bushes, and now, even as a new fence has been erected between the gravel and our plot of earth- the stones seep under. The neighbors are kind, but they believe in big houses and gravel, and I have difficulty reconciling our difference, because I have always lived before this, in the privileged of the woods. I draw the curtains to the west, and I do what I can to remember the trees and the field. To forget the siding.
While construction for the big house was still underway the city, who owned the halves and quarters of the trees that sprawled across our property and city property on the east side of our house decided a new drainage system and a fence would better serve the borders between our land and theirs. And we didn’t have much say in the matter, as the “city” who owns “city land” dictates the rules and zoning. And trees, I learned, are unsafe to have in the city. It is a real concern here that, if left alone, they could fall over on someone’s house. I petitioned them to leave us a single old maple in the front yard- far from any structures. It stands alone now, with fences in most of the places where it used to find its brethren.
It is a city maple, unlike the trees you see in the forest. There is an old metal post at the northern side of the trunk, that the tree has folded its bark around. Its limbs are awkwardly unbalanced, as a primary branch was loped off early to prevent the tree from getting in the way of the power lines. But it is the last old thing on this plot, and I fought to keep it because I had this sense that we needed a relic. a bit of something that binds us to the past, and shows us that the world can grow old, and does not always need early replacement. Something to remind us, that there was a before, and that we probably could have left well enough alone. We do not, of course, listen well to this old unsymmetrical prophet: everything else has been removed or strategically covered over. And it is not, of course, all the fault of the city and the new neighbors. We have made it “ours,” remember? We have repainted the wood siding and replaced the windows. We changed the front door. We covered every internal surface with wood, tile, paint, cabinets, fixtures. I dug out the slew of pink flowers that covered the front yard and gave them away to neighbors, because I find the color repulsive. I covered the grass with mulch, and set up an irrigation system that directs the water down from our new metal roof.
And we planted. First, to settle in and make the claim that we were staying put– but then, we planted to make up for all of the loss. I planted berry bushes and native wildflowers. We put in trees. We ceremoniously twisted together a pair of young ash to celebrate our marriage. We scattered young heirloom fruit trees through the back plot. They may set fruit this year. but it will be a long time before they rival the old maple.
But rival, or no rival, our time is passing in plants. We impatiently await the harvest of the asparagus, put in four years ago. This will be the first year that we will be able to cut shoots. A peach tree went in this August, planted over the placenta from our first child. She was born here, in our home, in a summer of cicadas. I labored in a water trough in our yard amid all the late season growth — and for all my bitterness about the changing landscape, I must also at least mention, that the land we have left is beautiful. And while trees typically fall more gradually than is true in our city, without the shade cast from the high branches, the ground bears anew. And we have changed the cycle, yes, but we have not aborted the fecundity of the land. It is re-seeding and sending up shoots. This starting over, while it appears new, is actually very old. The land, the earth under all of our covers, also, is our relic.
And all I can do about it, really, is try to catch it and pen it down. Here it is, I suppose, connecting, and passing. And I try to keep up by translating it into a recombination of old words. These too, I suppose are our relics, made new, re-seeding. When I was younger I found some sanity in trying to make sense of time passing, and it’s high time that I learn something from my youth. And it was youth that gave me the time and motivation to keep record–I would document the raging emotions that came with being young and aware that I could touch the world, and that it, too, was touching me. The page was my creative and constant forum- and I rambled across it, blind and self confident and messy as hell. and here i am again.
hello.
it has been too long since I’ve written anything. and of course, I am aware that I am falling back to the lofty and useless poetics that separate me from authentic life while I’m trying so hard to just get at it. I’m not choosing the right words, and I lack a deep sense of what needs to be said. I’m more self-conscious than I used to be, and I do not trust words like I used to. But I have this sense, perhaps, that if I keep at it, I’ll get there. And the belief that there is a trajectory is what I need right now. And so I’m writing to find it. I’m seeking out relics for meaning. I’m slowing the dizzy down. Which is the best I can do right now.
hello.
