Pancakes at Home: Lessons of a First Summer in the Country

Some years ago, a ladies' garden club invited me to give a talk about shade gardens. The club membership covers an affluent older neighborhood, full of old homes, old shade-trees, and old money. Jags, Benzes, and Volvo SUVs line the driveways of yards kept manicured by yard services.

I put on a nice tie and sport coat, and I even remembered shirt, shoes, and pants.  The meeting was delightful to me, since the appetizers were catered, the wine carefully selected and plentiful,  the ladies lovely and welcoming. Give me a room full of girl-talk anytime, so I don't have to discuss sports, about which I know nothing and care about even less, or find out how little my male companions really know about things I do really love: fast cars, World War II history, the space program, good liquor.

At the club meeting, as the setting sun made us all aglow with our wine and good cheer, I covered the basics of how to work with shady yards, emphasizing native plants, reduction of chemical use, and ways to conserve soil and water in Central Virginia's fickle weather.

I thought I'd knocked my "gig" out of the park, taking questions, drinking in moderation to their success, listening as everyone said it was a great talk.

I was never invited again.

It proved no great personal blow; I forgot about this one-off talk until one day, on the tractor mowing, it came to me: I told these gardeners what they did not wish to hear. They wanted me to recommend non-native species, discuss how to best remove healthy trees that were "in the way," and generally affirm what they already wanted to believe, what they already knew and did.

There on the tractor seat, I saw a fundamental difference between urban and suburban life and life "out here," where the land is Boss, water depends on a well, time moves differently, and the knowledge is acquired, often in harsh ways, never assumed.

So in the spirit of that realization of a fundamental difference between what the country and metropolitan areas teach, here are my lessons from year one in the country.

• Work with the land or it works you to death: Perhaps the very wealthy can simply hire enough help to tend many rural acres. The Amish, scarce around  here, can lend each other a hand. Unlike the garden-club ladies, however, I can't spray or bulldoze my way to a "better" yard without breaking the bank. The land has a will of its own.  A large plot of land necessitates hard work with machinery, something Michael Pollan discusses well in his early book, Second Nature. Even there, however, it would be easy to ruin the character of land and soil with too much scraping and cutting.
  
  Old-timers used the first tractors and backhoes and bulldozers to push back the woods to what I call "bowshot range," as if some ancestral memory of Indian raids haunted them. While I do provide the local raptor-birds with a good "kill zone" around our garden and house to cut down on the population of rodents and snakes, I also don't try to make the land into a golf-course or Japanese tea-garden.
• Local really means local here: Ours is not the meritorious "locovore" movement in town and the DIY ethos of hipsters (I say that with admiration, not irony).  The local businesses here offer limited goods and services rather than boutique goods, but in nine months I've gotten on a first-name basis with my butcher, hardware-store manager, and deli owner (where the food is drop-dead fabulous, he being Lebanese-American like me). I support our tiny post office to keep it open, as do many neighbors. It means a job with benefits for another neighbor. 
  
  I think one of our biggest adjustments has been "making do or doing without" so we don't have to drive to the suburban hell of Short Pump on a night I want left quiet. If Food Lion only has one type of really good cheese, so be it. I pretend I'm in 1970 at the A&P, and I make do. I do my "town shopping" in clusters to save gas and during  the off hours, when even Short Pump "Towne Center" can be as pleasant an excursion, almost, as loitering in Cary Town.
• Time slows..and then slows some more: From a county extension agent, I got a booklet about making the transition to rural life. One fact stands out as impressively accurate. Locals don't hurry, and they look down on the "oh, I'm SO busy" attitude of urbanites. One is expected to linger, share news and, more importantly, listen. This will probably erode over time, given the always-online culture of kids here, but who cares? I'll be gone to whatever reward awaits me, by then.
• Holding your tongue is a good thing: Local Tea-Party activists, mostly older white folks, meet in our deli. They could not be further from me, politically, but they are pleasant and not grumpy. We say hello and I eat my felafel while they bash Obama (rather politely).  In town I'd have fired off a verbal salvo. Not here. I've learned not to talk about religion, politics, or tractor-preferences save with close friends. That is reported to have once been a nice part of American life.
• Being older has its advantages: I no longer feel the urge to be part of a scene that excludes those my age. That means it's fine to make my own pancakes at home instead of driving 30 minutes just to visit the latest hip place for pancakes that would cost me $10.  And my batter recipe is good enough, when paired with the locally made sausage.

Perhaps I expected real transformation, spiritually and emotionally, out here. Instead, country life means the slow accretion of the "facts on the ground" and a gradual calming of life through acceptance and hard work that builds the body and clears the mind.

Not bad for nine months. If the ladies of the garden club ever ask me back, I'll make that my focus.

A Year Without Flowers?

We've noticed something strange this season, the wettest summer I can recall: the land is as green as Ireland was in 2011, my last visit to that side of the Atlantic.  It's lovely in August, but it has also meant we are coping without forage for our bees.

In short, the clover is not blooming and the wildflowers are absent. I don't know if others have had this issue, but we'll be feeding the hives sugar-water all Fall now, since a "nectar flow" looks as unlikely as it would be in a year of drought.

The last of our harvest is coming in, and fall greens are in the ground, even as I cut grass as steadily as I would in early June.  I can only guess what Winter might bring: something seasonably cold and snowy, I hope.

That Change in the Air

Every year, when the annual cicadas start up their late-July chorus, I begin to grumble that 1) school is about to start and 2) the good weather for working outdoors will be coming, just as I get busy with my day job.

But in 2013, it's been a strange season. I cannot recall a summer when it was actually fun to be painting a metal roof, as I'm now doing in this crisp weather. Soon enough, an old wreck of a building used for painting cars will be reborn as a barn-red paneled gem with a dark green roof.  Getting that building done is worth a summer of labor, but what a summer we have had.

I should have known that an odd summer was coming. It was heralded by the seventeen-year cicadas who emerged with the first really hot weather. While no swarm came closer than a quarter mile from our farm, so we heard only a strange echo of their trilling in the distance, but just five miles west it was deafening, their song that of a squadron of UFOs landing.

Those insects have burrowed down into the earth again, and I'll get to hear them, most likely, once more before I join them underground. Yet their appearance was just the start of the strangeness. For the past several summers, I can't recall letting the garden water itself from the sky or leaving the house windows open nights after, say, mid June.  And yet, in a cool wet summer, punctuated by spells of tropical humidity and heat, the rain barrels went un-tapped and the windows have been left up repeatedly.

What IS this late-September night-breeze, coming through my kitchen window in mid-August?

So we count what good fortune we have. I sold a science-fiction story, my second sale in the past three years. That was magic enough, but then our hilltop garden, a curse in a dry year, is abundant. The tomatoes in Fort Tomato are only now showing signs of excess rainfall: some are splitting, but we've probably gotten out a bushel and a half from a dozen plants.  That means more pots of sauce for winter. I usually can at least two gallons, and I'm almost there with more fruit on the vine.

If I do have to give 3 or so hours weekly to run the tractor to mow the grass in the fields around the garden and in front of the house, it's small payment for such an abundant harvest.  If next summer brings drought and disaster, I'll think back to that cool breeze and the vines  heavy with fruit from 2013.

"Fort Tomato" Nearly Complete, and Just in Time!

Readers may be familiar with an annual tomato-fight in Spain, La Tomatina, held in the Valencian town of Buñol. Spain has lots of tomatoes, as I found out when I lived there for a year, but I'd claim that no one has enough to simply wallow in them. I certainly don't. Each year, depending on our harvest and time, we put up in pint and quart jars between two and four gallons of my Mediterranean tomato sauce, a slow-cooked delight that serves as the the basis for everything from pasta dishes to Lubee (a baroque Lebanese concoction of string beans with lamb).

That means I need a lot of tomatoes. Some years, when the garden is lean or the weather poor, I hit the farmer's markets near closing time; last year I got a twenty-five-pound box of "crooks" for  $10. These are the mishappen tomatoes from the bottom of the vine. My dad was a produce wholesaler who taught me to savor these oddballs from the tomato patch. Their flavor is exqusite.

This  year, we have no shortage of plants or produce, but I'm watchful after two "corn raids" by racoons and earlier incursions by groundhogs. If they finish with the corn, the tomatoes may be next. And that means all-out war.

Note for the non-snarky: that's a plastic Johnny Seven rifle that belonged to my old buddy, the late and legendary Gary Braswell. Before his executor sells his antique toys, I had to pose, just once, with the toy gun every little boy craved in the mid-60s.

Firearms aside, the groundhogs cannot penetrate our new fence, over or under, but raccoons have a little advantage: thumbs.  I've trapped and shot one already, since it's illegal to relocate animals in Virginia. As I write this, I've two traps outside ready for the bandit who gobbled down half our corn last night. I picked the rest, as I wait for the next rows to come in.

Tomorrow "Fort Tomato" will have a finished garden gate. Next year, it will have electric and some dogs to run around 3/4 of it, after I do an outer fence that includes our little apple orchard.

More money, but worth every penny to grow one's own food. Even if the critters get some of it!

The Garden Comes In

And it comes in all at once, too.

There's great satisfaction in seeing so much abundance, in a year when the rain has fallen in buckets. Bunny in Buckingham lost his garden, and he blames it on near-daily rains there. We had torrents, but then a dry-enough spell to get the tomatoes to begin ripening.

Tonight Nan is freezing squash and beans, and I'll soon be making gallons of Middle-Eastern tomato sauce by the gallon. It cans easily.  We probably have enough cukes to pickle but last year I put up a lot. So we'll eat cucumber soup and make gazpacho.

The work of building "Fort Tomato" and the groundhog invasion (one most certainly shot dead, another probable, two remaining) seems worth while. The invaders got about 12 ears of corn but more is on the way and the fence and traps seem to be working.

The year has been odd, as so many summers and winters have been since climate change really began to influence Virginia's two seasons of extremes. I'm happy for the cooler and wetter summer, but there will be hell to pay later.

And then there are the tart blackberries, growing wild everywhere, to contrast with a bowl of ice cream. It does not get much better in a Virginia Summer, our first in the country.

Conversation with a Groundhog

Today a groundhog pulled up in a pint-sized BWM sedan. He wore a spiffy suit and carried a little briefcase. Soon I was looking at prison-time in a whistle-pig burrow.

Groundhog: Mishtur Essit? Is that you, sir?

Blogger: Among other things. What can I do for you?

Groundhog: Do? I hopes you don't DO to me what you done did to Lucius T. Groundhog, offspring of Phyllis T. Groundhog. Namely, shot and killed! Twice!

Blogger: You have evidence of this crime against your species? Blogger then mutters under his breath: second shot is always to be certain.

Groundhog, presenting papers: Evidence, you say! Oh Yesh I does! I is a attorney you knows! I gots testy-moany (Phyllis bein' both in a testy mood and moanin' about her dear dead boy) that you done trapped and killed little ol' Lucius, on account of him nosing around a garden you claims as your own!

Blogger: I admit to live-trapping, then shooting and killing a varmint, yes. He did not give a name when confronted.

Groundhog: He was just a pee-wee, and didn't know nuffin' about gardens, 'specially ones that ain't been fully fenced.

Blogger: That's his problem. Human law lets me remove pests, lethally.

Grounghog: That am SO cruel! An' we ain't humans! You could o' sent him to Miami Beach instead!

Blogger, looking for trap and rifle: I asked the kind-hearted administrative assistant at work if SHE wanted him, when she quailed over my planned use of lethal force. No dice.

Groundhog: You ever seen Caddyshack? We demands restitushun! Demands it!

Blogger: That was a gopher, and this ain't no golf course. See you in court, fuzzy-wuzz.

It Takes a "Bunny"

We are overwhelmed, at times, with nearly 100 acres to manage in one county and 11 at our residence. "Poor you," I hear some readers saying, but while such rural land is a blessing, if one plans to use the land for anything but scenery, a great deal of back-straining work must be done regularly and in all weathers. You can see what our land in Buckingham County looked like, from the photo above, in 2001. Today, thanks to a lot of family labor, the house looks very different indeed.

Ironically, I am trying to type with two very sore arms, the results of weeding, setting live-traps for ground hogs, and helping a contractor renovate an out-building into a usable and snake-free garden house and place to extract honey from our bee-hives.

That would never get done without having paid help one can trust. Try dealing with several 80' pine trees that topple in a snowstorm, all by yourself.

No one can do it all, and a first lesson of country life I've learned involves finding and sustaining community.

I read a great deal about sustainability and homesteading, and some on the fringe of these movements veer into what today the popular media call "Preppers," though I still prefer the term "Survivalist." There is nothing wrong with being prepared for natural or man-made troubles, but one curious fact emerges: many of these folks strive for self-sufficiency that seems improbable. If a chain-saw were to break, the game would be over.

Recently in Buckingham County we confronted about five-acres of waist-high grass that needed cutting. Had we time and equipment, we could have rolled hay.

Even with two passes of a rotary cutter, the grass near the house remained daunting. We'd contracted with our neighbor, Bunny, to cut the grass after that weekend, since renovating a city home to sell and maintaining our new homestead (and editing a book at night for publication!) take every second of my free time.

Bunny is the sort of African-American guy who is the anchor of a local community. Everyone within 20 miles of his home knows how capable Bunny is. His name is ironic, of course: he has reportedly rolled a refrigerator onto a blanket, flapped the blanket over the top, grabbed the four corners, and carried the refrigerator up a flight of stairs. He has helped me build a spillway, move huge logs and boulders, and generally keep our sanity as we do so much hard work.

As my wife despaired of the cut-but-still-formidable grass where the tractor would not reach, she heard another motor. Up roared Bunny on a riding mower with a weed-whacker in a cradle alongside it.  No knight of Camelot looked more heroic.

As I learn more about country life, I find that friendships like Bunny's are to be cultivated on their terms. He gives us cabbages and we give him honey from our hives. We pay him and let him hunt on our land, and he phones whenever trees fall or something else happens nearby.

In the City we had great neighbors and always looked out for each other. The terms of community are different in the country, but the rules don't change: it's a quid-pro-pro system and it works well. No one lives alone, isolated, and can get things done well.  It takes not only community and trust, but some anchors like Bunny, who can do nigh anything.