Nearly Wordless Wednesday: 5/23/12

My hens average nearly a dozen eggs per week—and I'm very grateful, too!

Fresh eggs from my backyard hens in a glass quart measuring cup
LaGrange, Georgia—21 Feb 2010

Monday. Meh.

Today's post is co-hosted by my other blog, WilliamsWrite.

It's Monday, and for whatever reason, words aren't coming to me as easily as usual. Don't know why. I mean, it's not as if there aren't a lot of forgotten plants and places around here to document.

Poke salad, no Annie.
(LaGrange, Georgia—29 April 2012)

That's one of the downsides to blogging: Even if I don't feel very inspired, I still have to post new content on a regular basis. Of course, as I tell my students, there's nothing to get you inspired like writing when you're not inspired. Sounds counterintuitive, but it really works. Just as with plumbing work, you have to flush all the junk from the pipes before the clean water can flow. Write a little while, get the junk and fragmented thoughts out of your brain, and the good ideas begin to flow onto the page. Trust me.

Currently, I'm working on a couple of exciting projects—one involves a historic home, and the other involves highways. For fear of jinxing myself, I won't divulge more. But if these ideas turn out, they'll make for great reading and interesting photos.

I don't know why I took a photo of the poke salad (phytolacca americana) leaves above. I also don't know why I thought it would go with this post. But I stumbled upon it while looking for interesting Nearly Wordless Wednesday pictures, and then started humming "Poke Salad Annie." My late father sang that song all the time. Okay, so he knew only part of the first verse and the chorus, but he still sang it.



Heed the Alabama Extension Service's warning, though, and don't carry any poke salad home in a tote sack.

Doc Speer's Place

Green paint on the outside brick wall of Doc Speer's Place, LaGrange, Georgia (14 April 2012)

Today's post is co-hosted by my other blog, WilliamsWrite. 

Like many small towns, LaGrange is full of interesting photo opportunities. The Hillside neighborhood, in the southwest part of town, is particularly interesting. Over the last decade, DASH for LaGrange has rehabilitated several dozen old "mill houses," saving them from destruction while revitalizing a shrinking community. Doc Speer's Place, the wall of which is pictured above, is among the buildings DASH has salvaged.

The green paint still clings to Doc's brick wall, decades after the last business vacated the premises. The floor and roof of the old store rotted and fell years ago; by the time DASH came along, six-inch-thick magnolia trees grew through the foundation and up the inside walls. But the basic structure was in decent shape, and it was a shame to tear down one of the last old-fashioned store buildings in LaGrange.

So the DASH team and community leaders decided to transform Doc Speer's Place into a sort of open-air meeting place. The vines still grow up the walls, along with privet hedge saplings nearly 20 feet high, but now they hang over picnic tables and chairs set about the 1,500 s.f. space. It's a strangely peaceful place to have a bake sale or street fair.

More photos of Doc Speer's to come, after I post final grades next week.

Every place is a sacred place

Beauty, calm, and peace.
(Near Blue Ridge, Georgia—19 May 2010)

Oak, hickory, dogwood, mountain laurel, sassafras, tulip poplar, elm, sweet gum, locust—I wished I'd brought my tree book along on the hike. New fern fronds carpeted the forest floor with frothy green, but not so much so that I couldn't easily identify the poison ivy leaning out onto the trail. Leaves of three, stay away from me.

Fragments of days gone by

I'm 11 feet tall! Raaaawwwrrr! (6 April 2012)

I've talked before about what people did a century ago with their broken dishes. It's the darnedest thing, but I find dishware fragments nearly everywhere I go—including my own yard. Last weekend was no exception. Nearly every place is an archaeological dig, so to speak.  

Earl Scruggs and Southern food tradition

Country music banjo legend Earl Scruggs passed away last week at age 88.

No, this isn't a music blog by any means (although I'm a country music researcher). But bless the Southern Foodways Allliance for reminding me of Scruggs' connection with traditional Southern foods—Flatt & Scruggs' rendition of the 1953 Martha White jingle. It's still in use today. 

Now you bake right (uh-huh) with Martha White (yes, ma'am)
Goodness gracious, good and light, Martha White
For the finest biscuits, cakes and pies,
Get Martha White self-rising flour
The one all purpose flour,
Martha White self-rising flour's
Got Hot Rize

Rest in peace, Earl.  

My kind of weather

Weather Channel "classic" Doppler radar
30 Mar 2012, 7:35pm EDT

Tonight in LaGrange, there's a steady rain with occasional thunder. The window next to my desk is open; I can smell the rain as the cool, fresh air flows in through the screen. Perfect evening, perfect weather.

Many people have a personal crisis when it rains. Not me. I'm delighted on wet, stormy days. Why not be happy? Water is life, after all.

Regular rain means plentiful crops, beautiful gardens, thriving wildlife. Those are reasons to be happy when the forecast calls for showers. Okay, so having to be out in it isn't fun. But eventually, you'll get home, where you can watch the rain while staying warm and dry. 

Last summer's Southeastern drought was terrible. It was heartbreaking to watch West Point Lake and other local reservoirs drop to historic lows. The crayfish in the small creek near my mother's house were nearly dried out of their home, and saved only by a couple of early-fall downpours. Animals, plants, crops, communities, you and I need precipitation more than we can ever know. Without a storm now and then, life ceases to exist.

Rain means that life continues. Now that's a reason to be thankful!

Tomato dreams

On Tuesday—the same day I blogged about the Tomat-O-Match—I ordered my tomato seeds from Pinetree Garden Seeds. This Maine-based family operation offers an amazing selection of hard-to-find heirloom vegetable, herb, and flower seeds at great prices. Their mission is to help preserve old-fashioned plant varieties, and they've been doing it for nearly 40 years. Staffers test every seed before listing it in the catalog, and those catalog descriptions are often written with wry humor. All these qualities make me happy to do business with Pinetree.

After much hemming and hawing, and a consultation or 12 with the Tomat-O-Match, I settled on four old-fashioned tomatoes.

• Brandywine
• Cherokee Purple
• Druzba
• Mortgage Lifter

Why these? They're all good for fresh eating or canning, and are indeterminate (they grow and bear all season long instead of stopping in mid-summer). My gardening friends have recommended these varieties or similar ones; these tomatoes hold up pretty well to our punishing summers. They bear heavily all summer long, and sometimes until frost, putting out as many fruits as a gardener can eat. And they produce interesting-looking tomatoes in varying shades of red, maroon, pink, and purple.

My mother bought a pack of seedling pots, but I have the feeling we're going to need more than a dozen. Thank goodness I have a PotMaker and a few months' back issues of the Market Bulletin.

My seeds should arrive by the end of next week. Mom has already set aside an area in her laundry room for our seedlings and a grow light. Last month, she and my stepfather tilled a half-truckload of composted leaves into the dormant garden soil. At least 30 days lie between potting up and setting out; at least 90 lie between now and the first harvest. It will be a while yet—and the wait is worth all the trouble.

In the meantime, I'm dreaming of luscious, home-grown heirloom tomatoes.

Choose an heirloom tomato variety with Tomat-O-Match

After three disappointing seasons of tomato FAIL, last summer my mother and I gave up on the garden. One of the Ten Commandments of Gardening is, "Thou shalt know when to give up." Or at least give it a rest.

Along with hot peppers, tomatoes are supposed to be the idiot-proof plant in the vegetable garden. "Anyone can grow tomatoes!" the garden guides proclaim. Evidently not. The last few summers have been incredibly humid, even for the Deep South, and nearly windless. This does nothing to aid tomato pollination. Add to this unusual summer heat and a reduction in the number of bees around to visit our 'mater blossoms, and you have much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair. And no tomatoes.

This spring, we're back and hoping for better luck. "Let's try heirloom varieties," I suggested. "We'll grow them from seed. Maybe they'll be better adjusted to the yard and weather when we set them out."

Mom sighed. "Well, why not?"

Believe it or not, I've had a tough time choosing heirloom tomatoes. So many different kinds, and so many variables: canning, fresh eating, or cooking; indeterminate or determinate; paste or sandwich; early yield or later yield...the list goes on. So thank goodness for Fine Gardening's Tomat-O-Match! 

Here are six of 61 potential heirloom tomato varieties to try!
(From FineGardening.com's Tomat-O-Match game, 19 Mar 2012).

Amana Orange and Bison look particularly hardy and interesting. Heirloom varieties were developed before the age of hybridization to stand up to harsh weather and unexpected drought, and are particularly suited to the weird weather patterns we've been seeing the last few years. I'll still ask my fellow gardeners' advice, though. A friend in north Georgia suggests Mr. Stripey. FarmGirl Susan suggests heirloom varieties like Brandywine, but adds, "Just see what works for you." 

We'll see how this goes. Tomato updates are forthcoming...

Chickens: "Old-fashioned" animals

Eggs from my backyard hens, November 2009

Every freshly-laid egg looks a little different from all the others. These were laid by my three hens in November, when the days are short, and chickens wind down the egg-laying season to begin their yearly feather moult.

Late-fall eggs are very exciting for backyard poultry enthusiasts. My friends in Minnesota and Michigan say their chickens stop laying in October, and don't start again until spring is well underway. There's a lot to be said for mild winters and a long growing season.

Since I've blogged about old-fashioned plants and abandoned old houses, it makes sense to blog about chickens. Sixty or so years ago, nearly every household included a chicken coop. Many working people raised their own meat birds, and kept layer hens too. It made sense in a time before refrigerated food transport and big grocery chains. People were close to their food sources—they were directly responsible for what they ate, and for how well they kept the livestock they would eventually consume.

I keep chickens for their eggs. It means a lot to me to know my birds are happy and healthy; when I eat their eggs, I know just what the girls ate to produce them. My hens eat cracked corn (scratch grains), insects, leftover cornbread and rolls, alfalfa pellets, steamed brown rice, watermelon and canteloupe rinds, raisins, white clover and other greenery from the lawn, and as many juicy bugs as I can round up for them. (They seem to get a special thrill out of the common garden slugs that gloopity-glop onto my porch in the summer.) My chickens also have room to roam, unlike battery-caged hens in commercial egg operations.

There's a lot more I could write about chickens—and Lord knows I will some other time. Wherever you see heirloom-variety plants around the ruins of an old house, remember that "old-fashioned animals" likely once lived there, too.

Forgotten places, too

I found these 1940s fragments in an empty lot while walking my dogs.
(LaGrange, Georgia—April 2010)

What was that in the blog title about places?

Whenever I find old-fashioned plants just growing alongside the road (or in any other unexpected place), I look around for signs that people once lived near those plants. For example: daffodils aren't native to North America. All the daffs here—especially the old-timey varieties—were brought here by the first white settlers.

So when I'm hiking through the woods, across a pasture, or down a country road and see a big clump of happy yellow trumpets waving at me, I know they didn't just sprout legs and mosey on over to their current location. Somebody planted them in a deliberate, thoughtful manner, just to add some beauty and color to the site.

That somebody was likely a woman.

Welcome to Forgotten Plants & Places

Tiny jonquilla-type daffodils in clumps along the outline of a forgotten foundation.
(LaGrange, Georgia—late March 2010)

These tiny daffodils bloom on a vacant lot in LaGrange, Georgia, in an old "mill village" neighborhood. Never mind that the house was torn down years ago—these fragrant little flowers continue to spread around the edges of the lot, delineating where the house and front steps once stood, as if nothing ever happened.

On my drives through the Georgia countryside, I'm saddened to see large signs announcing new subdivisions and business parks. There's enough (manmade) ugly in the world. We need to hang on to all the natural beauty we can if we hope to reclaim our humanity.

I do this by dividing and/or transplanting old-fashioned, "passalong" plants from abandoned and vacant lots, old country home-places, and roadside ditches to new homes—sometimes my own yard, and sometimes others' yards. Keeping old garden plants alive is a link to our historical past.

Thanks for stopping in! It's so nice to have you along on this journey.