That Old Feeling

“I saw you last night and got that old feeling”...

“That Old Feeling”, lyrics by Lew Brown, music by Sammy Fain

My shin sports a brand new welt.  My hands could etch glass. And the boots I’ve worn every snowy day this winter have suddenly sprung a leak.  My feet have ’that cold feeling’.

There are already worries a plenty….too much weather, too little help, too many plants for too few pots….stuck trucks and frozen vents and cancelled orders.  An unexplained shortage of sunpatiens. The perennial lack of scaevola. Happens every year….’that old feeling’.

But problems a plenty flutter away like dry leaves any time I slit the packing tape on a box labeled ‘Live Plants’:   instead, I hear Ella swinging soulfully about ‘that old feeling’….as I pull out a tray of potential springtime.

Ella Sings 'That Old Feeling'

It’s been that way for years.  

Never mind the patience Blake exhibited when, instead of an intrusive family, I brought a collection of houseplants that was more than enough to provide a healthy level of oxygen in our first apartment.  No furniture, no problem! After we moved to the farm, I discovered a new hobby: propagation! A pinch here or broken stem there stuck into a tiny 2” plastic pot and placed under a cheap fluorescent shop light and lovingly watched over and watered carefully almost always yielded a baby.  Hey! I was good at this! Not only that, but there were hobbyists out there who supported their plant habits by selling cuttings and fresh leaves to folks like me who wanted to try a different begonia or a fancier African violet….

Our tiny house was being overrun.

Unfortunately, I did not have a mail order business...or any other kind of business...that would offset the increases of the plant population due to propagation and/or acquisition.  I tried. I painted a sign with the name “Hurst Greenery” and displayed it at a weekend flea market at the Tarkio Community Building. Even seen through the foggy, forgiving resolution of an Instamatic camera, it’s a pretty pathetic little effort.  

Another attempt at inventory reduction from a few years later….

These look a little better…

Eventually it became clear that the peak of the house plant boom had passed. I had a yard, a garden, and two cute little girls that liked to play outdoors more than hang out in a barren basement. Propagation by cuttings gave way to propagation by seeds.  A few trays and some plastic wrap and my germination chamber was complete. Seeds were cheap!

And...it turns out, the plants one grows from seeds could be sold.  Here are a couple more shots of some early efforts.

I cringe now when I see the weeds under the benches, the stretched petunias, the starved tomatoes and marigolds.  The camera doesn’t lie; there are also pictures of equally ugly poinsettias and overgrown impatiens, jury rigged wiring and some home grown greenhouses that weren’t up to the wind and weather load of Deadman’s Hollow.  

They were all part and parcel of the learning curve.

These old photos have a certain piquancy.  They are lovable in the way your first burnt cakes or tough roasts are funny years later.

“There’ll be no new romance for me, it’s foolish to start….”

That old (Spring) feeling….

is still in my heart.

Doin' the Continental

A humid continental climate (Köppen prefix D and a third letter of a or b) is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, which is typified by large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and cold (sometimes severely cold) winters.

Where was spring?  Where were the days we rolled up our tshirt sleeves in April to begin working on our farmers’ tans? Each morning I’d don a short sleeve tee in hopeless optimism….then a long sleeve tee...and a pullover fleece.  The aborigines have their three dog nights, but we marked the April calendar with X after X of three shirt days. Most springs, the first optimistic tomato customer will call soon after April Fool's (coincidence, no doubt), but even the most Pollyanna-ish gardener will save their ammo when the morning low is 19 degrees.  Snow? Unpleasant and messy, but not unheard of. Frost in May: economically damaging and a monkey wrench in any delivery schedule. But NINETEEN DEGREES? “Always winter and never Christmas”, C.S. Lewis would say.

Continental Climate

noun. a climate characterized by hot summers, cold winters, and little rainfall, typical of the interior of a continent. Collins English Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers.

It snowed. It snowed Palm Sunday. Well, that can happen: we noted, with bravado, that March was just going out like a lion. It snowed again, the next weekend, while we were purportedly hosting our annual Open House. Nary a customer braved the roads, but Mark and Laura and Grandma Millie and Grandpa Charlie came to drink lemonade (!) and eat cookies for the kids’ sakes. ‘Cause nothing can really warm you like a cold glass of lemonade.

The next weekend it got serious. Though most of our customers told us to hold their plants until it warmed, some sales have no “rain date”. Necessity being the mother of inventions, we improvised, leaving the tender veggies in the heated houses overnight and swathing every cart in shrink wrap to keep the warmth and moisture from dissipating.  An electric heater kept the semi and the Isuzu above freezing several nights. The gaps in the trailers were even sealed with duct tape so the windchill couldn’t sneak in. The first morning the temperature was above forty degrees, we almost broke out the t-shirts.

Lower 48 States Just Had the Warmest May on Record | The Weather ...

https://weather.com/.../2018-06-06-may-2018-record-hot-temperatures-united-states-n...

Jun 6, 2018 - May 2018 was the hottest of any May in 124 years of recording keeping for the continental United States, eclipsing the extreme heat of that ..

With a flip of the calendar page, frozen April morphed into blistering May. It was so hot, water from a hose  blanched flowers in an instant. It was so hot, hostas bleached and the daffodils that had waited patiently through the freezes around Easter sighed and bowed out for the season.  The wind was a scirocco, sucking the moisture from foliage, flower, and soil. A common refrain was, “Well, I won’t have to mow again!”

One of the few crops that shrugged its shoulders at this schizophrenic weather was the hardy hibiscus.  The hoodlum autumn glory clematis perished in wholesale quantities in my yard, surviving only in the canopy of a century old lilac; the lackadaisical butterfly bushes fainted dead away...literally….but for one pair of leaves I’m fostering like a spark in the darkness. And while the so called “hardy” grasses never broke “dormancy”, leaving behind a thicket of rapier sharp blades for the unlucky gardener to penetrate and dispose of, the hibiscus ignored, as is their wont, the entire frigid calendar page of April, and then, sensing the blaze of May, stretched underground,  and shot to the surface to take a look around.

Now it’s July and the hibiscus are nodding their giant heads in approval over this hot state of affairs.  And so are their potted friends, lined out in rows of ruby and green down by the sweet corn patch. Some of them are blooming: the vibrant Midnight Marvel and silvery Mocha Moon, each blossom lasting but a day.  From cuttings to a three gallon pot is a mere six weeks; but even if you can’t SEE the hibiscus growing, you could certainly MEASURE it day by day….By the end of the summer, the roots are as thick as your fingers and anchored so deeply in the soil beneath the ground cloth that they must be cut with pruners.  But don’t wait that long: plant these voracious growers now while they can still be unpotted without trauma to either plant or gardener and enjoy their flower power for the rest of summer, however hot, wet, dry, or...continental….. it may be…

As for me, it’s off to sleep before another July morning of watering lines of asters and mums, praying for cooler evenings for them to set buds…then an afternoon loading hibiscus, the flower that says….Let’s DO the Continental!
 

The Month of Wind and Taxes

Indoors or out, no one relaxes
In March, that month of wind and taxes,
The wind will presently disappear,
The taxes last us all the year.~Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "Thar She Blows"  [Tax Day used to be March 15th from 1918 through 1954, not April 15th as we know it today. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. ~Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Great Expectations

“Only those with tenacity can march forward in March” 
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The first sweet potato cuttings of the season came in looking like a wilted lettuce salad.  And this was the sweet potato that was delivered.  Another four hundred plants were ordered...and then cancelled.  Was this sudden shortfall of ornamental sweet potato due to the unanticipated bankruptcy of one of our favorite sources for cutting raised plants?  Analogous to the accordion effect one car in a thousand braking for a daredevil squirrel.has on three lanes of congested traffic.  Or is it just Nature's way of reminding me that it goes against the order of the world as created by Almighty God to expect summery plants like Marguerite and Blackie to thrive...or even grow!... before the Ides of March. What I'm saying is there is a natural order that waits for some signal from the sun and the earth even if the the man maintained environment all around seems ideal.  The tomato seeds I plant in February are a little reluctant to emerge compared to those planted when the days grow longer...even though they are all planted in a room with light twenty four hours a day!  Never ceases to amaze and mystify...

The Timehop tells of March madness past: the snow days with grandkids at play in empty greenhouse bays and at work transplanting, or watering, or even getting a haircut.  There are lists four foot long and towers ten foot high that correlate with sun rise shots before the equinox and sunset pictures after the spring forward. And water, water everywhere: an irrigation boom making its slow crawl down the bay like an April thunder shower on the western horizon, a water wand seemingly suspended in mid air while the photographer acts as deux machina. As March marches, water is the driver; a multitude of baby plants cries for water like hatchlings in a nest.  Strapping teenage transplants are drama queens, wilting under an afternoon sunspot.  The curve for water in March is an increase at an increasing rate: in math terms, exponential.

February may have set records in northern Missouri, but our truckload of potting soil apparently originated somewhere so far north that the middle of each bale was more akin to permafrost than peat-lite mix.  The guys filling pots climbed inside the bale breaker with a sharp edged spade, but the biggest chunks still lie outside like over-sized Idaho potatoes awaiting the oven.  Matt stuck his finger into one this afternoon, gauging its temperature, and declaring it 'done' and ready to be scooped back into the dirt machine. We are expecting another truckload on Monday, the fourth of the year, and hope against hope that this bunch will be thawed.

Two weeks to go in March and two greenhouse remain unopened, without heat or plants.  Blake has begun his familiar March refrain:"I don't think we are going to need all this space."..."Why did we build that new greenhouse?"....and...just for variety.."I think we can turn one of these empty greenhouses into a batting cage!"  We tolerate this humor now, but by April 1st, there will be hundreds of flats of tomatoes and the flowers for three different school fundraisers awaiting transplant and we will be deciding how narrow a walkway one can navigate with two feet and 150' of garden hose. As the tension mounts, the sense of humor shrinks...another mathematical function increasing at an increasing rate! Two in one blog post...imagine that!

When we unwrap the box from Botany Lane containing the two trays of succulents, we can't help oohing and aahing and patting the trays.  Baby succulents are like puppies; everyone loves them and no one can resist them.  The difference is that succulents remain cute and never drag the clothes off the line....

The first soybeans in Atchison county have cracked the surface.  Everyone I know is curious about the soybeans in pots we are growing for a fundraiser.  I am too.  How many soybean plants does it take to make some tofu?  Are these beans going to grace a salad?  Be a snack?  Is edamame going to become a household word?    And the same goes for the stevia cuttings...another new crop for Hurst Greenery.  So unfamiliar, we didn't recognize them when we unpacked them.  For your information, they look a lot like lobelia as a plug...

The perfume of pansies meets me at the door of the annex, a sure sign that we are on the cusp of spring.  Is any flower more lovely than a pansy face?  Be-whiskered, blushing, brilliant and bold or subtly shaded, I suppose it's just as well they flourish only in the cool season, else we should shun every other flower with a lesser palette.

“AND what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;”

No one would dream of applying James Russell Lowell's paean in praise of June to March.  And yet...and yet....on a bright and breezy Sunday afternoon when the watering is done, payroll complete, and our tummies full of another great St. Paul's Spring Dinner, it is possible to imagine Heaven leaning down to watch kids on bikes, or throwing baseballs, fathers and sons sitting in lawn chairs by their backyard campfire, golfers out for the first time, and gardeners peeking at the crabapple trees or picking up sycamore limbs. 

There might even be kids fishing with a stick for moss....and rocks....barefoot like its the first of July.

March can be rare like that.

On This Day.....

You've seen us. 

We're the car just ahead of you that simultaneously brakes, flips on the blinker, and turns precipitously as soon as we spy a historical marker.  We are the people for whom the tongue and cheek plaque, "*ON THIS SITE IN (name a date), NOTHING HAPPENED*" was created

.

And, to be perfectly honest, most days are like that.  Put a big X through the bulk of your Mondays through Sundays and call it good. Most of our ancestors lived their lives recorded in the briefest of statistics, despite what Ancestry.com and their ilk advertise.  For centuries, only the most well heeled sat for portraits and but few of them look out at us from museum walls. The advent of photography brought the weddings, graduations, and family portraits of stiff unsmiling persons not meeting the cameraman's eye and arranged as carefully as fruit and flowers in a still life. "ON THIS DATE.....THEY HELD THEIR BREATH...."

Enter TimeHop.  Suddenly, every date has its day.  Every birthday...naturally.  Every walk on the beach...of course.  Also...a rosy cheeked 'cheese' snapped on an iPhone on February 23, 2009 in the number 8 greenhouse...

...and some cuties in college gear and snow boots splashing in a man-made mud puddle in the big house.

On February 24, 2010,.TimeHop  brings a mosaic of plug trays of posies ...clearly an overwhelming kaleidoscope of work to come for the photographer and friends.....

No mud puddles in 2013, where Lizzie and Abbie are excavating in the bare dirt around a new hydrant in the #7 greenhouse in their school clothes.

I'm not so sure Abbie isn't making dust angels.

Hurst Greenery spring training 2012.  No, Josh is not pushing a cart; we don't let the kids do that before they turn three....Joke! Joke!  

February 2012...the beginning of a dreadful drought year, though we couldn't know it at the time.  The geese were low over the #9 greenhouse that February 23.  And I had a newer phone...an iPhone 4.

And the very next day...on February 24....a thick frosting of snow left by the retreating clouds....

 And some wishful thinking about palm trees and beach chairs as recorded later that night.

Yeah.  She definitely needs her toes in the sand.  Still February 2012.

Beaches are for daydreaming.  In real time, the greenhouses were building  big icicles in February of 2013.

And Aaron is old enough for some elementary basketball!  That means some serious bleacher time.

And it's February 23 again. Every week in February is like Groundhog Day and Christmas wrapped together.  FedEx, or UPS, or a Tagawa Greenhouse grower truck arrives dropping off 2, 4, 6, 8 or several pallets of stacked boxes.   Before we ever plant, we have to unpack.  Lucky to have these guys helping back in 2014.

Ok, ok. No child was harmed in the taking of these pictures. Trust me, that's a rubber knife Josh is holding wrong side up.

The iPhone 5 shows me pinching fuchsias so they will branch into a rounded fountain of blooms.

Told you we do Groundhog Day.  Here's another colorful delivery of cuttings: coleus and calibrachoa and New Guinea impatiens destined for big planters and hanging baskets.  That's what we were planting  on February 23rd in 2015.

Not everyone was planting: some of us were hanging around like monkeys.

Hello, moon over the sycamores at 502 Spruce and a goodnight to February 23, a day without much history...but plenty to remember.  See you again soon.