Category: Work

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So, How Did It Go?

Not too bad!

That’s corn, pole beans, and corn on the left, sunflowers on the right, basil and melons in the foreground.

Big fails were tomatoes, 1/3 of which succumbed to blight (I’m never getting that variety again). The Romas and Lemon Boys did all right, and I was able to get about 14 pints’ worth of spaghetti sauce out of them, but they got pretty sad-looking by August. They’re beginning to green up again, but we’ll see if there’s enough season left for them to produce.

I got my strawberries too late (I’m never ordering from Burgess again); out of twenty plants, only three survived. They’re now spawning baby plants, so maybe I can get a row out of them for next season. All the blackberry plants died (same company–boo!). But the asparagus looks okay. Except for basil, the herbs were hit-and-miss: some parsley, chives, and cilantro, no dill or oregano. I was really looking forward to the fresh dill, too. All that stuff needs to be planted nearer the house, anyway.

Moderate success with the corn. The first row was probably planted too soon during a very rainy spring, and always looked puny. The second row went in three weeks later and did much better, though not many of the ears filled out well. Still, I got about 2 dozen substantial enough to eat, and good eating, too.

The pole beans (Blue Lake) came in with a rush: 4 lbs. in 3 days, amounting to 7 pints canned. There’s more okra than I do what to do with, which is usually the case, as I understand. But the big success: melons! I wasn’t too hopeful, as I’ve never had much success with them–never really tried, honestly. I set aside one raised bed for cantaloupe and stuck a few watermelon seeds in a vacant space. Somebody gave them to me, so why not?

The cantaloupe did great! I got at least two dozen, including this beauty:

Not all of them were uniformly sweet, but most were at least passable. It was a joy to watch them turn yellow and sunny and tumble happily off the vine.

And much to my surprise, six little watermelons made their appearance. I cut two of them too soon, while the flesh was still white–watermelons are notoriously coy about letting you know when they’re ready. But then, there was this little guy:

Sweet, crisp, delicious

Overall, the successes more than balanced out the failures. We got too much rain at the beginning, but mostly adequate rainfall thereafter. I only had to water for two weeks or so. Lots of work: my one hour in the morning often stretched to 90 minutes, and my back is still sore. Definitely put more money in than I got out, but that’s not the point. Nobody I know, besides farmers, plants a garden to save money on food. There are other rewards, which I tried to express in my spring post. My views still stand, but I’ve learned a few things:

What I’ve Learned:

  • Corn has to be fertilized throughout the season. I knew that, but it just got away from me.
  • Tomatoes need a lot of prep and careful watching. But they can be worth it.
  • Don’t mess with bush beans after June. The beetles always get ’em in July. Plant pole beans early in June and by the time the bushes are done the poles are getting their mojo.
  • I worried about critters (the furry kind, not the six-legged kind) getting into the melons and corn, but several websites recommended blood meal as a possible deterrent, and it seemed to work.
  • Another thing that probably worked: I got a free packet of “vine peach” seed and poked them into an open space. Because why not? Vine peach is a small lemon-colored melon, about the size of a mango, and they don’t taste like much. One of those okay-if-you-re-starving kind of plants. The vines took up lots of room and I was ready to pull them up when I read that some gardeners use them as a decoy plant to distract four-legged foragers from the melons you want to harvest. And so far, it seems to work! I’ve found several hollowed-out vine peaches while my cantaloupe and watermelon are left alone to do their own thing.
  • Plant the okra all at once, not staggered, and one row is plenty.
  • But I might try this next year: two rows of okra with bush beans in between. In mid-July, pull up the bush beans. In mid-August, plant lettuce where the beans were. The okra might provide enough shade for the lettuce to get a start, and when it gets too cool for okra, the lettuce will be happy to keep growing.
  • Try to keep ahead of the bugs, instead of cleaning up after them. I say that every year.

The work isn’t done. I need to tighten up the fence and bring in some topsoil to fill in the low spots and haul a scoop or two of horse manure to season over the winter and maybe turn the mulch over . . . but you notice the references to “next year”? Next year could be a total bust–you never know. Gardening is not something you can predict, but neither can you lay back and coast.

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Growing up with Little Britches

Ralph Moody isn’t as well known as Laura Ingalls Wilder, and didn’t occupy quite the same time period, but he accomplished something similar. My husband and I have been reading through his series of memoirs, which he began writing at the age of 50.

Born in 1898 in Rochester, NY, Ralph’s formative childhood was shaped in Colorado, where the family moved when he was eight years old. There the boy learned to rope and ride, acquiring the nickname “Little Britches” from the local cowboys. After failing at ranching, the Moodys settled in nearby Littleton, where Ralph’s father died as a result of a horse/auto accident. As the eleven-year-old Man of the Family, Ralph took odd jobs and organized the local boys into work teams, and even spent a summer working for a neighbor at The Home Ranch, receiving a man’s wages.

In 1912, for reasons too complicated to detail here, Ralph’s mother abruptly moved the family to her home state of Massachusetts. Starting over with almost nothing, Mary Emma and Company” established a laundry business while Ralph worked a number of side-hustles. All perfectly legitimate, but somehow he got the reputation of a troublemaker and at the age of fourteen he went to New Hampshire to work with his crotchety old grandfather in The Fields of Home. He didn’t get along with Grandfather, but that wasn’t entirely his fault; the old man didn’t get along with anybody.

When America entered World War I, Ralph worked in a munitions plant because the army judged he was too sickly to fight. His puniness was later diagnosed as diabetes, and the family doctor held out one hope for susvival: go west young man, get as much sun as possible, eat lots of green leafy vegetables, and don’t do anything crazy. He obeyed every rule except the last.

Not entirely his fault; the only job he could get upon his arrival in Arizona was performing “horse falls” for the movies. The hard-earned stake he gained from that brief venture began disappearing when he met Lonnie, an overgrown hyperactive kid who talked him into buying a Model T they nicknamed “Shiftless”—a total lemon. Nevertheless, the two young men tore across the Southwest, Shaking the Nickel Bush between breakdowns.

They were flat broke when Ralph hit upon his most productive money-making scheme yet: selling plaster busts to bankers and lawyers in small towns between Phoenix and Santa Fe. (He’d picked up that skill from an engineer at the munitions plant who sold sculpture on the side.) He converted the proceeds to fifty-dollar bills, which he carefully rolled up in the cuffs of his extra-long Levis. It amounted to almost $1000, with which Ralph intended to buy a little ranch and do what he liked best. Unfortunately, when he and Lonnie parted ways the latter absconded with the jeans. Ralph was sure (pretty sure) it wasn’t theft; Lonnie just snuck out in the dark with the wrong pants. And no forwarding address.

We’ve just started reading The Dry Divide, in which our hero hops a freight to Nebraska with one dime in his pocket. The back-jacket copy reveals he will end up with “eight horse teams and the rigs to go with them.” In the next and final volume, Horse of a Different Color, he will court his boyhood sweetheart and settle on a career.

All this, mind you, packed into 25 years: quite a ride, and yet probably not too unusual for the time. Ralph Moody’s America was an open society that allowed for amazing mobility, both up and down. For all his natural gifts, including ingenuity, creativity, and a cheerful disposition, he never made a lot of money and the lean times didn’t end with his marriage. But I doubt he regretted any of it, especially those early years which he recalled much later in loving, meticulous detail. He lived with eyes wide open, observing, remembering, and appreciating.

Though he carried a Bible with him, the family religion relied more on can-doism than Amazing Grace. “God helps those who help themselves” might have been the family motto (although it’s not in the Bible), and one senses more than a little pride in his mother’s determination to accept no help beyond what she absolutely had to. That might not be fair to Mary Emma, who endured severe hardship with amazing resilience and positivity, but she could be stubborn too. As could Ralph’s sister Grace, who could figure and dicker like a man but dropped out of school early because, as Mother said, she wouldn’t need any more education to make a home.

Unlike the Little House books, there’s no overt racism or hostility. “Coloreds” are not particularly numerous out west, and the only Indians Ralph meets are falling off horses for the movie cameras. (As rough as it was for them, it was a lot worse for the horses).

For good and ill, that America is gone: rough-and-tumble, snooze-you-loose, unpredictable, perilous, exhausting, and exhilarating. Racism, favoritism, cops and politicians on the take—nothing new about that. A generally honest, straightforward, enterprising, and upwardly-mobile populace—that was, if not new, then certainly rare. Will we ever see the like again? I wouldn’t bet on it.