Burdened

I’ve not been able to write. My heart is heavy. With so much at stake, so many big issues, so much pain and suffering, what is the use of my little garden? What is the use of my words or thoughts? They are of no use, at all. I cannot add anything to this conversation. I am superfluous. The more that this thin ‘house of cards’ that is our society begins to break down, the more clearly I see how false and unstable it really was. I am confronted by my own privilege. I am confronted by my comforts. I cannot figure out how to be useful, how to help. I have no answers. I am learning. I am sad.

My garden is also a prayer of sorts. Not just a place I go to calm my thoughts and anxieties, but also a sort of hope in the future. Nature heals. I try to go outside when I can’t think of what else to do. Here I can see the reality of the world, the systems, the interconnectedness, the perfection, the ideal. Nothing I write here can sound anything but trite. The garden is the place to be right now.

The Garlic Forest

Before I write anything else, I have to ask for your indulgence if this post seems weird or misspelled or has a ton of grammatical errors. A bee stung me yesterday as I was harvesting the year’s garlic, and it was on my head, stuck in my hair, and it took a while to get the stinger out, and therefore I had a giant reaction and just barely avoided going to the hospital, and the entire left side of my face is completely swollen and my left eye is swollen shut. So! I’m having some vision issues. And some headache issues. However, I’m confident that in a couple of days I’ll have the use of my face and eye back, good as new.

What this did mean is that I spent today with an ice pack on my face and couldn’t help Tom with this project, which looks AMAZING don’t you think? But hang on, let me back up a bit.

I didn’t intend to harvest the garlic this early, but here’s what happened: For the second year in a row, we lost our shallot crop to black (allium) aphids. This happened about a week ago; I went to take out a bunch and see how they were doing and then I saw the multitudes of aphids all over the green parts of the shallots, and then when I dug them up they were rotten. I did everything right - made sure the soil was light and fluffy before planting, interplanted with clover to bring in predatory insects, and stopped watering a month ago to dry out the crop and start the curing process. It didn’t help. Failure happens, sometimes, even when you do everything right. Even when you’re an experienced gardener. Even when you’ve had successes in the past. Farming is always a crapshoot. The good news is that we are not relying on the shallots for our yearly income, and the worst thing that will now happen is that we’ll have to buy shallots all year from the market.

However, I knew I didn’t want those aphids to hop over to the garlic and do the same thing to that crop. So, I went ahead and pulled it out a little before I wanted to. The bulbs are a nice size, but the greenery was barely starting to turn yellow, so I would have liked to leave it a bit longer. Now it needs to cure for a month before I braid it and bring it in the house.

Usually we just shove it up above the chicken coop, but I’ve decided that isn’t ideal because it sometimes gets direct sun, and often there isn’t enough air moving around the stalks. I asked Tom to build me something different on which to cure the garlic. We both did a little research on how small farms generally cure the crop. We saw lots of tables with slats - you slide the garlic in, with the head on top and the greenery falling down below. Tom did some drawing, then went into our garage rafters to see what kind of wood we had on hand, and spent a morning at my dad’s table saw and knocked together a table/rack. First he put it on sawhorses and tried it that way.

Tom wasn’t satisfied with this, because the greenery was dragging on the ground and part of the table would get morning sun. So he rigged it up so that it could hang in our garage on chains, and there The Garlic Forest will stay until the end of June. Since we are home, we will open both garage doors during the day to get a cross breeze, and the garlic should cure nicely in that warm, dry, dark space.

I’ve spent some time being mad about the shallots, which I think is my right, after all that work and time. Shallots haven’t gone right for us in several years. I think I’ll skip them next year. I’ll still plant garlic, in a different spot of course, but we’ll wait a while before trying onions again.

I know that there are some new readers here, some folks just starting out on their gardening adventures, and I want you, specifically, to know: Sometimes when you look an at established garden, it’s easy to think that the gardener has it all dialed in and everything is effortless. That’s just not the case. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or a newbie, there are always challenges. It’s ok to have frustrated feelings about failures or mistakes. The important thing is to keep going - keep trying - keep growing. You will have successes far more often than failures. And we learn from both those things. Don’t quit!

As always, I welcome your questions and input below in the comments. I respond to every person who takes the time to write to me - I so appreciate your engagement and company. And if I don’t have an answer to your question, I’m sure someone here will!

Off to ice my eye again. :) Have a good Memorial Day weekend everybody.

Sieves and Riddles

Yesterday I got an intriguing note from my dad, asking if I’d like to pick up some ‘screeds’ he had inherited from his grandfather. Having seen something like this in use on Gardener’s World (Monty Don always covers his newly sown seed over with sifted compost, using a tool that looks like these), I immediately answered yes! Today, I’ve been researching what these tools are called, what they were originally used for, when they were in use, and more. It’s been a fun project! Turns out there is a lot more to these tools than meets the eye. If you’re interested in history or craft, then continue with me in this deep dive.

My first idea was to look up the word ‘screed’ since that’s what my dad called them. Other than our usual use for this word (meaning a long speech or piece of writing), it is used in construction, when applying concrete or stucco. It’s a tool that flattens the wet concrete or stucco, like a board, moved back and forth to smooth it. The back and forth motion of the tool might be why dad (and possibly his grandfather) used this word to describe it, but the pictures of screeds did not match up with the tool in front of me. I knew I needed to continue looking.

I visited the website for The Heritage Crafts Association in Great Britain. This is a place dedicated to keeping craft alive, and I found this site when Dad made me the hurdles I use in the garden. It’s full of crafts that have gone extinct or are endangered. Scrolling through their ‘red list,’ I saw the words ‘sieves and riddles’ and this sounded likely, so I clicked through. Bingo! This is what these tools are called. The word ‘riddle’ comes from an old English word that meant ‘coarse sieve.’ One of my riddles is quite coarse, with 1/4” hardware mesh, and then other is finer. The HCA says that these are for use in “gardening, shellfish harvesting, pottery, and other activities.” The area where they were originally made was in Derbyshire, and there were many companies that made them, “producing beechwood and wire mesh sieves and riddles for mines, agriculture, fishing, and even on the railways, where they sifted ballast between the tracks.” They were made from strips of beech that were steamed in a steaming chest in order to be bent; they were rolled around cylinders and left to dry for several days. The ends were ‘chamfered’ (a symmetrical sloping edge) and tacked together, and then holes were drilled for the weaving of the mesh. The galvanized steel mesh was woven inside the rim. I believe that these from my great-grandad were made a bit differently, with a pre-made wire mesh instead of one woven in place, but I’m not totally sure about that.

HCA went on to say that it is difficult to source the straight-grained beech required, and that affects the viability of the craft. A man named Mike Turnock was the last known maker of these tools, and he retired in 2010 unable to find someone willing to continue the craft. The craft went extinct. But it was recently revived by a man named Steve Overthrow, who consulted with Mike Turnock, and now has a robust business in Langport. His website is full of these sieves (he claims the sieve is the tool, the riddle is the mesh), in all kinds of sizes, meant for use in varied pursuits: Horticultural, Fishing, Kitchen, and Foundry.

So that told me a little history about sieves and riddles in the UK, but what about in America? How did this tool arrive here, and what was it used for? My research led me to the Shaker Museum in Mount Lebanon, New York. A 2018 blog post detailed their collection of sieves, which apparently is generous; “the smallest, under two inches in diameter, with a mesh of finely woven silk, was used to sift out impurities from medicinal powders. It is the largest sieve in the collection, however, that is the topic of this discussion. At nearly 40 inches in diameter and with a mesh of woven rawhide set at an average of an inch and a half apart, there are not a lot of things that wouldn’t fall through its holes.” The post goes on to detail that when they obtained the sieve from the Shakers in Canterbury, New Hampshire, it was explained that it had been “used for sifting corn husks which were used to stuff mattresses.” Along with straw, corn husks were used to fill bags of cotton ticking to be used as a mattress, and standard practice, once a year, was to “riddle” the contents of the mattress to sift out dirt and bugs.

In another post from the museum, they show a photo of another sieve on which is printed, “Seed Loft No 10.” Reading on, the post says “sieves of all sizes were made, sold, and used by the Shakers at Mount Lebanon beginning as early as 1810. They were made with bentwood rims of ash, elm, and maple. The rims were fitted with a woven mesh of horsehair, iron wire, or brass wire. The size of the sieve rim and how tightly the mesh was woven determined how the sieve was intended to be used… sieves should probably be seen…. as multi-purpose tools. For example, sieves intended to clean wheat, could have just as easily been used to screen the dust from charcoal at a blacksmith’s forge.” This got me thinking about how my great-grandfather would have used his riddles. So I called my dad for some more information.

My great-grandfather, Audley Heintzelman, was born in 1884 and lived his entire life near Youngstown, Ohio, in a small town called Hubbard. He was a railroad man, maybe a station agent, because Dad remembers him using Morse Code, and station agents were usually also the telegraph operators. He was also a farmer in the sense that everyone had a small farm in those days, to provide sustenance for the family. Dad writes, “He had quite a bit of property with a big barn, pond, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens. The only animals were chickens. I just remember him looking like a farmer, working around the property, always sawing logs for the fire, using the scythe for cutting the grass… their property also had coal. Hubbard was near Coalburg. As a kid I remember seeing coal at the surface. You didn’t have to dig for it.” Of course this time my dad was describing was when he was a kid visiting his grandpa there in the 1950’s. But in the early l900’s, when Audley was working for the railroad, the railroad would have been king, having taken over from the earlier canal system. The main railroad operating there was the B&O (which was first to cross the Appalachian mountains and connect Ohio to the East Coast). The steel and coal industries used the railroads to transport product.

Audley might have used these tools on the railroad or in his gardens. He may have even gotten them from the robust Shaker community in Ohio at the time. Wanting to know more about how they could be used in gardens, I found a book called ‘A History of the Garden in Fifty Tools’ by Bill Laws, who published in 2014 and lives in the UK. He explains that the sieve is closely connected to basketry, and that its principal use was to sift soil to remove stones. He tells of one example discovered in a burial barrow in Saxony which dated back 30 centuries. It was cast in bronze and had a handle embellished with the horns of a bull. Steam-bent wood containers would have been made since the Iron Age. Mr. Laws then talks about Mike Turnock, the sieve-maker in the Peak District who retired in 2010! He writes, “He cut and steamed rims of beech wood, bending them into perfectly circular frames and, as his father had done before him, weaving the metal screens, using a crook-shaped tool to thread the wire. In his father’s time, in the 1950’s, the railways had been his principal customer, using large sieves to screen the ballast that was laid between the tracks.” This leads me to believe that my great-grandpa took these screens from the railroad (were they no longer used? did he buy them? were they a retirement gift? who knows) to use in his home garden.

Which is exactly how I will use them, I imagine. Although, I found other uses for them as well. In a book called ‘History of Worcester, Massachusetts,’ I found this reference: “Wire-working as an industry in Worcester was contemporaneous with wire-making. In April, 1831, Jabez Bigelow manufactured “wire sieves, such as meal sieves, sand riddles… and baker’s riddles.” He apparently wove the wire on huge looms, just like thread! So there is evidence that riddles were used in baking and in mills. Truly, an all-purpose tool!

One more interesting item about sieves. In my research, I came across ‘The Sieve Portraits,’ a series painted of Elizabeth I in the 1500’s.

According to Robert Stephen Parry, who writes about the paintings, “A humble sieve is not something a Queen would be familiar with on a day-to-day basis. It is a practical piece of equipment used by gardeners and bakers to separate the finer elements of a substance from the coarse. Of soil or flour, for example. Separating that which is desirable and useful from that which is merely waste. Thus, around the rim of the sieve, we can read the inscription: A TERRA ILBEN/ AL DIMORA IN SELLA. Translated, this means “The good falls to the ground while the bad remains in the saddle.” So it is not just flour or soil we are considering here. It is a kind of sieve of human quality that we are being presented with. Elizabeth, we are urged to believe, is a creature of discernment and refined tastes. Especially where the good and the bad of human nature are concerned. Would-be suitors take note!”

This was a fun rabbit hole in which to fall. I love the idea that we are all keepers of a history, in craft and tools. This strings a thread (weaves a wire?) between me and my ancestors. I shall use the riddles and when I do, I will think about my great-grandfather, Audley Heintzelman.

Plantain Salve

Since I have a little extra time these days (ahem), I decided to delve into an area of botany that I know very little about - the medicinal properties of herbs. So many things that are in regular rotation in my garden can be used to make all manner of healing ointments, tinctures, and poultices. This is medicine that has been practiced since the dawn of time. According to the University of Virginia, “the oldest known list of medicinal herbs is Shen Nung’s Pen Rs’ao or Shennong Ben Cao Jing (c.3000 BC), a Chinese herbal that is probably a compilation of an even older oral tradition.” The Chelsea Physic Garden, occupying four acres of land along the Thames, has grown medicinal plants since 1673. That’s where my plantain came from - seeds brought home with my mother many years ago from a visit to Chelsea Physic (she and my dad used to live near there in London), and planted in a rather neglected but sheltered spot in my North Garden.

Plantago major is easy to find in any meadow or even in urban locations. It belongs to the family Plantaginaceae which also contains foxgloves, speedwells, and snapdragons. It seems to have followed in the footsteps of men, which means it likes disturbed, lean soil. It doesn’t mind compaction and is tolerant of of foot traffic. Its flowers are wind-pollinated and its seeds can remain viable for 60 years. This is why plantain is considered a terrible weed, hated by many. I planted it on purpose, because it can be used to make medicine. Now I’m finally getting around to it! (By the way, the entire plant is also edible, with the leaves best when they are young and tender.)

As an herbal medicine, plantain is a good all-around plant for common burns, stings, and cuts. It can be used as a poultice; just chew the leaves into a mash and apply to affected area. It tends to slow bleeding, but it’s generally thought of as an herb to ‘draw out’ - that is, to draw out the poisons in a sting, or even to draw out splinters. I thought this would be a good ‘first try’ sort of salve, something that is thought of as all-purpose, and therefore a good thing to practice on. The first step is to collect the leaves, wash them, and then dry them thoroughly. This can be done in a dehydrator, or you can just hang the herbs to dry. Once dry, crumble them into a container and cover with olive oil (or almond oil).

Leave it to sit for at least two weeks, and every time you walk by it, just give it a little swirl or mild shake. After two weeks, you have a medicinal oil.

Use 1/4 cup melted beeswax for every cup of medicinal oil. Melting beeswax is a pain, but there is no other purpose for beeswax - it cannot be composted, so instead of throwing it out, this is a good thing to do with it (and the bees worked hard to make it!). We harvested a couple of bars of honey from the hive yesterday, and after draining out the honey, I put the comb (in pieces) in a square of doubled cheesecloth, then put that whole mess into a pot of simmering (not boiling!) water. [Side note: I have now dedicated an old pot and some mason jars for beeswax melting purposes - it’s a mess and you won’t want to use your regular pots for this.] After the beeswax melts into the water, you lift the cheesecloth out, which contains all the debris from the comb (mostly some larvae, sorry baby bees, and some dirt), and throw that out. Leave the pot to cool, and the wax will cool in a sheet on top of the water. After totally cool, lift that disc out and break it into pieces into a mason jar. Refill your pot with clean water and set the mason jar in it, sort of like a double boiler. Simmer the water until the wax in the jar melts. If you’re using storebought wax, you don’t have to do the whole cheesecloth thing - just melt the wax in a jar. It’s already been ‘filtered.’

Meanwhile, drain the medicinal oil, dump the spent plantain in the compost, and reserve the oil.

The oil smells just as it looks, grassy and green.

Put a cup of oil in with the 1/4 cup of melted wax, in the mason jar, which is in the simmering pot. Mix with a bamboo skewer or a stick, something disposable. Then pour into your jars/containers and let it cool before using. Store in a dark place, and it should last years.

I’ll give one of these little containers to Adam to use at work, whenever he gets a burn. I’ll send another to my brother-in-law Peter whose job includes lots of cuts/ouchies. Of course we’ll keep some for our own use, and I’ll let you know how we like it.

Next, I’d like to make some sort of salve for arthritis. Has anyone done something like this before, or do you have lots of knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs, and can give me a few suggestions on which plants to use? I’m thinking calendula, ginger, turmeric? Something like that. By the way, the website Mountain Rose Herbs has a great tutorial for making salves, if you don’t want to buy a book. This company is where I buy organic vanilla beans for my homemade vanilla extract, and I’m always pleased with their products.

May Arrangement

My weather app is inadequately preparing me each day, or maybe it just can’t keep up: We’ve had temps in the mid-90’s, all the way down to the low-50’s with both intense sun and rain showers. May is increasingly becoming a month in which Anything Goes. But finally, between tests and essays online, and anxious trips to the store for supplies, I was able to dodge the weather and cut some flowers for a May arrangement.

I love this new vase, a perfect mix of art and science! It also really highlights the more fragile blossoms, of which we have many this time of year (summer flowers seem much more sturdy somehow). I knew I wanted to highlight the red Flanders poppies, so called because they flourish in a meadow called Flanders in Belgium. During the Great War, they did not bloom for four years, but after war was over, the poppies began blooming again. They symbolize the hope that seized us all after the war. And I figure, we could use a little hope right now, yes?

Poppies don’t last long in vases, but apparently you can extend it by searing the ends of the stems with a match. I don’t bother, because I appreciate their ephemeral qualities. I’ve combined them with other delicate blooms from the garden - white columbine, purple Foothill penstemon, and fragrant sweet peas.

The garden is very much a riot right now, with all kinds of flowers opening up, vines twining, vegetables starting to produce tiny fruit, and bees everywhere. We’re back to getting 5-6 eggs a day and I am freezing some for the next low-production point. I just crack two at a time into little mason jars and stick them in the freezer. I’ve been cutting and drying herbs like crazy, and my plantain “confit” (as Adam calls it) is about ready to be mixed with melted beeswax and made into a salve. More on that later (first we have to get some beeswax from the hive!). I have a long list of woody plants to prune, now that they’ve finished their spring bloom, and more straw to mound on potatoes, and seeds to sow! I just have to get through finals first.

I’d very much like to hear what’s happening in your gardens. I’ve certainly heard of more crazy weather (i.e. snowstorms) in other areas this spring. How’s your garden looking?