Tag Archives: growing

~summer shorts~ give rise

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“Some people have an aesthetic of delineation and symmetry, of keeping each vegetable distinct from each other vegetable. That’s great, and it works for them. My philosophy, though, is abundance. I want to draw people in with color, and piles of overflowing vegetables, spilling forth from cornucopias, piling into one another, blending into a rainbow.”

I stacked sopping wet bunches of carrots, cold water droplets sprinkling the multicolored veggie-print fabric on which I laid them. The new staff member painted by number, adding veggies to each basket I had laid out with a representative of what I wanted there.

Laurie had asked me to help refresh the vibe of our market booth. When she asked me to make a rainbow display, it flipped a switch for me. My pandemic farmer’s market year-plus has been a continued effort of showing up, devotion, doing what I believe in – food security, organic growing, getting food to the people. It used to be more about enjoyment than just devotion. I haven’t been making displays, much less rainbow ones. I have been letting the crew who handled the veggies handle the veggies, while I handled the money. An important job, but not soul-nourishing. Emerging from the pandemic has been halting and awkward, as predicted, but it’s been dawning on us that we can revive some things, like big, beautiful displays. The prospect of making a sweeping swath of veggie artwork before me, I was back to excited.

Cascading eggplants, purple onions, and purple majesty potatoes, purple carrots with their orangey-red lateral root scars. Fragrant basil, parsley, dill, and mint flooding green leaves around four kinds of zucchini, two kinds of cucumbers, and broccoli. Pattypan and yellow summer squash the color of sunshine blending into goldenrod-hued sweet Italian peppers, their tapered tips and seductive shoulders peeking from a basket near the center, making their summer debut. A mountain of orange carrots, golden beets blending into red beets, red Norland potatoes, dryland (non-irrigated) tomatoes, concentrated red succulence.

While searching for the term for the lines on a carrot, wondering about that specific feature of rootiness, I stumbled upon a Plant Ontology forum (as one does) and learned they can also be called root periderm scars. I guess they have been called root lenticels, but it is now understood that they do not conduct gas-exchange. They are formed when lateral roots emerge and initiate a wound response in the periderm – the peripheral cell layers. Cells proliferate, heal over this wound, form a new layer. The plant ontologists decided a new name, root periderm scars, was warranted.

It makes me think about how forming new roots can inflict injury. How wounds can result in scars, in tissue that cannot breathe. But also how injury can give rise to new growth, new layers.

~rainbow mondays~ from

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Where I’m From

 

I am from a shovel full of soil.

From the worn handle of the pitchfork

And the lurching advance of the hay wagon.

I am from gentle nurturing and sweaty stubbornness.

I am from enduring apple orchards.

(They slept, hidden beside farm fields

and wrapped in brambles.

Uncovered once more, they beckon

Butterflies and bees and me.)

I am from rolling green hills where mantises pray

And calves surreptitiously slipped into the world.

Apple pie and grilled cheese with tomato soup.

I am bursting from a screen door on a summer day

Across a lawn full of dandelions and clover.

I’m from, “it’s time to do the chores.”

I’m from Country Roads.

Even here, there is still dirt under my nails

And untameable roots.

Apple saplings sprout unintentionally

In every neglected flowerpot.

When through the woods and forest glades I wander

And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees,

Then sings my soul.

(I found the prompt for this fill-in-the-blank where-I’m-from poem on rarasaur’s blog. I did not expect to end up liking the results scribbled in my journal!)

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

a happy birthday!

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quinn turned four on wednesday!!!

we spent last week with mama mostly home from work, and quinn pretty low key and sniffly and feverish and coughing. on sunday i could see him livening up again, and since it has been cold,  i spontaneously busted out some “big stuff” so he could be active indoors. first, he wanted to go to the farmer’s market (i know, buddy, i’m jonesing too!) so instead, he had his own farmer’s market indoors, and i played customer. over and over again. his prices are pretty fun! sometimes all i needed was a little pirate treasure, or thirteen pennies. other times he decided on some serious markups. he charged me twenty bucks for a pair of his socks. i happily paid. then we went for rides in his cardboard box boat.

since we were doing the farmer’s market gig, we got out his tent, and by monday night, we had it so fully rigged with a deep layer of blankets that we slept in it, after cooking our hotdogs over the woodstove and reading some jungle book and some nim’s island while snacking on graham cracker bunnies. then of course, on birthday eve, we decided it was only fitting to “camp” once again. when i called it birthday eve, he decided we needed the baby yew tree we use for christmas/solstice to come inside “in case that guy wants to come and put any presents under it.” so we brought in that rugged little potted tree. then it needed lights (conveniently, i haven’t taken those down yet…. ahem.) then we tried to wind down, i told him a long snuggly story about when he was born, and he finally went to sleep in the tent and i miraculously remained awake to stand in for “that guy” and put the presents under the tree.

we woke up in the morning and took it easy and he was sleepy nursing waking up and then remembered…. “is it my birthday?” yes sweetie it is. then unzipping the tent to see if there were presents- there were! he started right in opening the first one, which was treats like fruit leather and a lollipop and he was ecstatic already. then he opened his marble track which he was SO thrilled about even just looking at the box and he needed to play it right away so that was good, so i could sneak into the kitchen and make breakfast and coffee. he had his standard breakfast of bagel with goat cheese and jam. he’s been favoring plum jam. my mom sent him FOUR new ones for his birthday.

we played with the marbles stacking up the blocks and rampy things (it’s pretty fun!) for a long time. in between he’d notice something, like i had decorated the first page of his new sketchbook with “happy birthday quinn” in rainbow letters, so he spelled them out and asked the letters he didn’t know, then he went on to the next page and drew the three party hats (mine was green, his was yellow and dada’s would be the red one, he assigned them lol) and he drew a hat in each of the three colors and the letter P beside each one. then he had me spell out party hat and he wrote the letters. he also wanted to check out the banner i had sewed for him out of pooh fabric scraps.

we were pretty wrapped up with hats, drawing, and marbles, and bagels, for the first two hours of the day. then we went and picked up dada, we were going to try to go to the beach for the nice 10am low tide but it was cold and rainy and quinn was very firm that the idea of going to the beach “bummed him out” and he wanted to do it on a nicer day, just bring dada to the orange house today. ok.

so we hung out and it was all fine. quinn opened his new bag-o-driftwood blocks. the bag was the thing he hadn’t seen yet, he has seen his dad working on making the blocks in his shop, and  i made his bag extra super special (with amos and boris, friends from one of his current favorite books, sewed on it, and with a rope around the top.) he was thrilled. we played blocks, and more marbles, and then he opened some stuff his dad brought. a friend had given him some playdough (four of them lol) and so he and dada made a t. rex out of purple playdough while i took a walk to the place up the block to get four balloons….

he saw me walking back with them and i could hear him squealing and running to the other door where i would come in… oh he was SO excited. he LOVES those helium balloons.

they were played with for a long time.

we baked “muffins and cupcakes” and he put candles in each one, then put the extras into the yellow playdough cupcakes he made for his t. rex, andwe sang for t. rex and lit his candles and quinn blew those out. then we did the real ones. somewhere in the middle of all of that, quinn decided he needed to plant a pea.

dada left, quinn put off his nap for several more hours  and just as he started getting sleepy  we called so he could talk to all three of his grandparents. when each and every one of them asked “what kind of presents did you get?”  he responded: “someday you should come over and see them” by the time he got to my dad it was actually “someday you should come over and check ’em out” he didn’t want to list them, he wanted grams, grammy and grampy to come and play. awwww. they all melted into grandparent puddles on the floor.

he finally fell asleep in the tent for a late nap, with kitty and his balloons watching over him.

he was sharing his birthday all day- he asked me for a sharp knife to cut up his fruit rope into three pieces, so he could give one to me and one to dada. he made it t. rex’s birthday. when he got my mom on the phone he told her “happy birthday” right away. he sang to each of us, we got given things and said happy birthday to. he just loves to celebrate but is not at all selfish with the celebration.

my mom asked him about amos and boris (i had told her about the bag) and he thought of the book of course, which he got at christmas. he told her “i got that on one of my other birthdays.” you know, christmas, solstice, all of his other birthdays…. 🙂

we left it up to him if he wanted to go to dada’s in the evening, and if he wanted to spend the night. he wanted to go (dada had a present there for him) but he wanted me to come get him to sleep at the orange house.  i had told him i would be sleeping in the big bed tonight (mama’s body needed a break after two nights camping on the hardwood floor) and he was ok with that in theory (earlier) but then when it was bedtime: “nooooo we’re sleeping in the tent!” i said he was welcome to sleep in the tent, and could come in and get in the big bed with me if he woke up and got nervous or just wanted to. somewhat surprisingly, he wanted to try! so he had the flashlight, and he was just going to roll up in the sleeping bag and go to sleep (not have me give him milk first- more of this happening lately) and he was a whole 45 seconds in there after i went in the bedroom. then i heard him unzip tent, get out, zip it closed, come padding into the bedroom, flashlight in hand. he wanted to try again so i helped him go back and zip himself in again. he waited another minute, zip zip, came in again with flashlight in hand, and said he would just have a little milk in the big bed with me and THEN go back to the tent. okey dokey. zzzzzzzzzzz. hahaha.

~dwell~

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wow it’s been a long time since i clipped this comic (or someone else did, on my behalf- it’s been so long, i don’t remember who to give credit to!) at the time, i was a schooner deckhand, which i only know because the clipping lives in my journal from that era. there is another one in the same journal which depicts two sailors in their bunks writing letters home, one asking the other, “how many apostrophes in fo’c’s’le?” (hehe- my spell check has no suggestions, but it’s pretty sure i’ve spelled it wrong.)

anyway, i was in love with the way housekeeping was done on the boats i lived on, and this 1950 housewife hosing down her year-2000 living room was a good analogy. you just lashed stuff down, turned on the pump, and let loose with the firehose. clean!

keeping my current house clean is an impossibility. it is too much space for just two of us. i have to take a walk to get the broom… it decreases my likelihood of sweeping, in some sort of non-linear manner.

but i’m definitely struggling with how everything could fit. this one seems a nice size, and built back in the time before they knew how little fiberglass they could get away with- very solid. i don’t think it’s for sale, in spite of the nice gentlemen on the docks who assured me, “every boat is for sale,” and that the two happiest days in a boat-owners life are the day he or she buys the boat, and the day they sell it. but on this boat- they have new halyards- they must be planning to take this thing out sailing soon… quinn really liked this one’s bright orange dockline. it’s the little things in life. we also really love the charm of this moorage up the river because, look at those awesome huge wooden cleats! they’d be fun to tie up to. they’re fun to balance on, too, if you’re almost four. (looking at how grown he is lately- oh man. words can’t describe the love in a mama’s heart at watching this young man grow…)

so i would say we are definitely still very much in the idea stage of this process… how about you?

~dwell~ is a project devoted to dwelling in my intentions- giving them energy and watching them take shape!