Mums Away! September Song....

Oh its a long long while 

from May to December.

But the days grow short 

when you reach September...

...And the days dwindle down

To a precious few....

September....

September Song (Anderson/Weill)

Way back when, a couple of calendar pages ago, the greenhouses were full of fresh tender young things; the people began walking and watering and picking up and setting down when the day was young and rested but briefly before beginning the whole process over again the next day.  Mornings were cool but middays were bright and hot inside the greenhouses when the next season's boxes arrived via FedEx just after Mother's Day.  Those boxes held the germ of fall in the form of stems and leaves: the essence and scent of fall without the root, the flower, the hue, the mass of color that the cuttings portend.  Each sandwich baggie held 100 cuttings and a thin piece of plastic with their name.  One hundred and eighty baggies.  Eighteen thousand potential mum plants.

Mums themselves are both tolerant and tough.  But not without roots.  From May 12 to the first week of June, the cutting lived in sheltered comfort, as climate controlled as we could manage given Mother Nature's vicissitudes in late May and June.  The cuttings were watered in gently and lined out on the floor of the greenhouse where the groundcloth was still cool and damp.  The greenhouse was covered with shade cloth and the mister ran twelve hours a day providing humidity and lowering the temperature and stress level of plants and humans.  After a couple of weeks, the cuttings ceased to wilt at midday and began to put out some new leaves.  Growth on the top meant growth underground; underneath the six packs clean white roots poked out of the drainage slots.  Time to move outdoors, to be pinched, to be potted  and lined out row by row like the soybeans planted in the field surrounding.


Mums grow fast.  They are vigorous and will fill just about any size container given enough time. Mums come in multiple sizes naturally; some stay compact enough to flower and flourish in an 8 inch pot.  Others billow and branch and need more ballast to balance out their enormous bouquets atop. Mums are both daylength and temperature sensitive, meaning they are prompted to start developing buds when nights are long enough.  In the very early spring, mums in a greenhouse can set buds and bloom because the nights are long enough to send that signal.  Growing mums out under the sun and stars like we do is always a gamble.  A June toad strangler followed by July heat can put the new roots under stress and bring on some pretty nasty fungi to attack the crowns and what lies under the soil.  As the soybeans grow, the number of pests they host and protect expands exponentially as well.  No one buying soybeans has any idea what ravages the foliage of the parent plant has endured.  Not so your garden mum. If there is more than a critical mass of damage from beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers and all other crunchings and munchings , the mum won't reach its full potential as a blooming machine. Mums in one's garden have the luxury of being laissez faire with regards to pest control, but mums contracted for sale, a certain number of a certain color for a certain job at a particular location cannot afford the natural state. We usually have to spray for pests with six or more legs twice and maybe three times.

Watering is a daily chore unless Mother Nature intervenes with at least a half inch. At the start of July, watering is an every other day affair...but by the end of the month, the mums have fulfilled their destiny, have filled their containers with roots and are reaching down through the groundcloth.  A pot bound mum needs water every day....I repeat, a pot bound mum needs water every day.  Mums are resilient but not designed for a xeriscape.  We walk the lines as the pump motors whine and the swallows do cartwheels over the greenhouses grabbing snacks off the hot plastic.  The crops in the field this year reward the temperate conditions with glorious extravagant explosive vegetation, the likes of which we haven't enjoyed for these last three dry years.  When I lift my eyes from the rows, checking for the tell tale fountains of leaders chewed off by goodness knows what small annoying thirsty creature, I follow the velvety curves of the soybeans, regular as corduroy around the terrace, 

This July's summer nights dropped into the 50s and sure enough, our mums, with no eyes to read the calendar, sensed fall around the corner and started the blooming process.  Hmm.  That is going to result in a compressed season with the mid season bloomers joining the chorus of early bloomers in a glorious explosion of color.  Not what we drew up last winter when we ordered the blend of varieties we have, but flexibility becomes a virtue when wedded to circumstance.  The moderate, wet August keeps folks from hunkering down under the air conditioning unit and makes football season and fall less a futuristic figment, so mums away!  Let the deliveries and September begin!  Harvest is upon us all....

 

Magic Numbers

Cards cut magic number to 1 

Kind of at loose ends tonight...

There are a mere three baseball games left in the long season, just one more series of their favorite team for many fans before they reluctantly push the red ESPN score button to some other sport.  They may follow the playoffs, but will neither suffer the thrill of victory nor the agony of defeat.  

But...even though I am  making do with Dodgers/Giants as my nighttime relaxation, post season baseball is on my mind.  The math still matters; during the last three games the Cardinals play the Cubs, the stadium will be electric with more than the normal good humored rivalry.  The stands will hum and the crowd will inflate and deflate as scores of other contenders are posted.  The days will still be warm but the nights will cool down; the stands won't be quite as red as they are during the summer.  Having a magic number means college football will take a back seat this Saturday and the pros won't warrant a second thought on Sunday.  Nerves in our house will be frayed; for the most edgy fan (me), sitting will be a trial and I'll wander the house like Banquo's ghost.  Even though baseball season comes around every year; the pitchers and catchers report in Florida sunshine, the opening day crowds will be hunched into their windbreakers, the fireworks will light the sky over the Old Courthouse in July....these waning days of the season are always bittersweet with loss in a way that no other sport can be.  Who feels regret in June when professional basketball finally gives up a the ghost?  Or tunes in for the Pro Bowl...or cares?  The end of baseball always sneaks up on me; superstitious to the last, no one mentions magic numbers until they are single digits just like a no hitter is that which shall not be named until at least the seventh inning.

Fall is chock full of magic numbers.  They regulate our life.  Four is the magic number until the mums run out.  Noah's crew boarded their vessel two by two but the trailers of mums count the tables of four.  Early in the season, fifty pots fit in the loft (12 trips, plus one handful) and 75 fours on the floor.  But by October, we are trying to deflate those fragrant orbs of bloom in an attempt to fit JUST FOUR MORE, telling them to INHALE as we close the door, as if they were sentient beings.

Each truckload brings us closer to picking up an irrigation line.  Each line holds something under 200 mums.  By October we are loading hundreds of plants of the same variety, marching from bottom to top, calling out our count, knowing that each truckload shrinks the gallons of water we must pull out of the ground.  From six hours of watering for 3 people, we are under 2 hours for two.  But who is counting?

Baseball may rule my nights, but mums rule the day.

With the mums in new homes, the lines rolled and stacked, the ground cloth bundled securely under concrete bricks, its time to face the really big numbers.  Two combines, two eight row corn heads, one 20'and one 25'grain table, two good sized auger wagons, four or five semi trucks and trailers, two long augers and at least one pickup per farm family....this armada is what it takes to conquer the rolling sea of corn and beans spread over the northern part of Atchison county.  The numbers, I apologize, are imprecise because some piece of machinery is always on the disabled list.  Some days the harvesters seem to glide effortlessly along the long rows of the river bottoms and the intricate ballet of trailer, auger wagon and combine rivals any computer aided design as the grain piles into the trucks and flows out of the trucks according to the laws of physics and the variables of shape, moisture, and slope.  We used to count trucks coming off the field, or being dumped into a bin, but now the mighty machines do the math for us...no guesswork in the numbers, no cheating allowed. Unless the yield monitors lose their brains.

Other days I come into the field to see the mechanical equivalent of open heart surgery taking place...or a tell tale pile of grain detritus under the machine....or the hit or miss of plug and play as farmers and technicians try to decipher some cryptic electronic error message. Minutes grind into hours lost and a general constipation of the harvest process.  When we trudge home dust caked and smelling of grease and oil after days like this, we do the math and watch our magic number fade into the mists of the future like the oracle of Delphi.

Corn and beans: 150 days plus
Mums and asters: 135 days plus or minus
Baseball: 162 games.

Long seasons.

It takes optimism to begin, persistence to make it past the obstacles and through the inevitable mid season slump and grit to make the necessary adjustments and finish strong.

Gentlemen, start your engines.
Red, white, yellow, orange..the colors of the autumn rainbow stripe the hillside.
Play ball....

Let's go CARDS!

G' Day..and the Pictures to Prove It

 Happy Tuesday to us all.  Fall comes to mind as I debate how many layers and what shoes to wear to work this morning.  I opt for an extra t-shirt against the 57 degree start but stick to my work sandals, figuring the dew is heavy and my feet will dry faster than my shoes.

Luminous Jacqueline Orange

We have two trailer loads of mums to load before we water...one to Kearney, NE and one to Fremont, NE.  These loads are a pleasure to pick: all the plants are big, busting to bloom, and the customers will love them.  They are still heavy from yesterday's watering though, so our arms are stretched thin when the second truck is full.  This is still a good thing: we know these plants were never stressed yesterday, a far cry from last week's late season furnace.

Corn row on the edge of the mum patch

Even though the corn looks pretty tough from my standpoint facing south, several of our neighbors have put up pictures on Facebook with ears that are short, but nicely filled.  I don't pull any ears on my survey of the rows, but there are ears and they seem to have some weight.  Better than last year, I figure.

Josh's sandwich, payoff for a plant trip

It's Tuesday so Josh is helping us in the mum patch.  He decides he wants to ride with his daddy to Fremont.  The trailer is full so Josh's chair is sandwiched between two gallon pots.  I know Matt will not lack for conversation on his way north today.

Watering done, Lee and I cope with the abundant produce September has granted us.  We have three buckets of unstemmed grapes in one refrigerator and a patio table of ripe tomatoes.  The tomatoes threaten to become mush first, so I gather them, half a table at a time, into a 5 gallon bucket.  The kitchen is still cool and there's a nice breeze through the east window.  This is righteous, grasshopper vs. ant type work. We are making "chili" tomatoes today and I have no difficulty summoning the vision of a fragrant bubbling pot of chili in this self same pot on this same burner during the cold dark months to come.  The tomatoes are firm, clean, and easy to peel.  

Levi in the tub!

Always a bright part of the day when my phone dings and there's a picture or video of Levi. Sometimes he's munching, sometimes playing with his toys, sometimes dancing to a Thomas the train melody...today he's laughing in the tub.  Happy boy equals smiling grandma!

Laden Ozark Gold branches

Tis the season when snacks hang low on the tree.  I pick a Blushing Golden to see if its as ripe as it looks.  These apples are good keepers, better than the late summer Ozark Golds. This Blushing Golden is juicy and creamy clear to the core: just as ripe as the Ozarks.  But the Ozark Golds are falling from the tree and I don't want any of the laden branches to break in the next strong breeze.  Gotta make time to pick the apples...so we can line the shelves with applesauce...and know that Levi will enjoy it in Louisville just like his cousins in Missouri will.  And then there's the vision of loaves of apple bread to be stacked in the freezer, building blocks of holiday happiness. Yep..don't want to waste any apples.

 Four o'clock and the yellow bus delivers the older four grandkids.  They disperse to their outdoor fiefdoms.  The boys have built a fort near the driveway.  The girls are dissecting a zucchini with Lee's Felco pruners.  This is pretending, play acting on a grand and ongoing scale.  Today, Abbie is harvesting a bouquet of the feathery plumes of the hardy pampas grass; these props become camouflage for the boys' fort, a spear or some other projectile for Josh, and garnish, or salad, or other unknown ingredient for the girls.  If one is a country kid, after school, on a gorgeous September afternoon, the whole out of doors is your toy room.

The first batch of chili tomatoes are out of the canner.  The second five gallon bucket of tomatoes fills another seven jars and leaves three to four quarts worth in the stew pot. I set the timer on the second canner while Matt, Lee and Blake deliver mums to the HyVee in town.  Lee needs bread and dog food; she's happy to hear about the extra chili sauce...with leftover grilled hot dogs, we are set for chili dogs tomorrow!

 Its hard to pry the kids away from their imagination so they can help load tomorrow's first mum truck for Ryan to deliver to Lincoln.  He's still an hour or two out on his way back from Kearney.  After a while though, they forget to feel picked on and pitch right in.  We may not have the fastest loading crew, but we have the cutest and most boisterous.  The big heavy Husker mum combos are planted in 14" pots and watered this morning.  It takes two kids to hoist these monsters and haul them to the trailer.

Their enthusiasm when the truck is full and the days' job done is nothing if not contagious.

Grandpa's mum crew

It's been a good day.  Just another good day.

Jam-Packed

Lizzie's Spring Bouquet

Lizzie's Summer Bouquets

"Grandma", says the little voice to my left and just behind me, "When I grow up,can I work here?"

She can't see me smile.

"Lizzie, I would LOVE to have you work here!" What grandma would answer in any other way?  

Lizzie's normal playmates, her cousins, are on vacation this week and Aaron is making a mum delivery to Omaha with Matt, so Lizzie and I are the lone rangers caring for the mum patches.  

Alone, but not lonely.  "Can I help?" "Can I do that?" Lizzie gets a tutorial on the push and turn of the hose bar and shutoff, then down the aisle on one side and back up the other with an eye out for wilted plants, leaders on the ground, weeds in the pots, weeds underneath the pot.  She is tireless in pulling weeds.  "How many weeds have you got?" "How come you have more?", like there's some kind of competition.  At the end of each row, she tosses her pile to the ground, just like me.  When we pass a plant smaller than its compatriots, she picks up the leader to see if it is dripping water, then nestles it right up to the base of the little plant.  "There you go", says the little mum nanny, like she's spoon feeding some magic elixir that will transform the 50 pound weakling into Superman.  I don't complicate her world view by telling her that mum probably needs LESS water, not MORE. That would be contradictory not only to the basic plant knowledge she has amassed in her young career, but also to her naturally tender heart.

weedy mum pot

Lizzie either runs between the three hoses we are using to water, or she slips her hand into mine and we walk, quickly, but companionably, from hose to hose.  Then...its her turn to change the line. One hand with its fashionably painted turquoise nails grips the black poly pipe: the other tries clockwise and then counterclockwise, until the water stops flowing through the brass shutoff...a mighty pull with accompanying grunt and.....pop!  Out comes the hose bar as Lizzie in her flippy black skirt and hot pink shorts tumbles backward into the dewy grass. Just doin' my job, ma'am...she's up in a sec, turning left, or is it right? until I gently remind her which way we are headed in order to water dry plants...

Watering the mums is work because it takes hours to finish and can't be rushed.  The main attraction of the day is still ahead and the reason her mommy says Lizzie LEAPT out of bed that morning:  we are going to make blackberry jam.  The blackberries in her aunt Lee's patches are thornless, so my only warning to Lizzie the day before was to wear something DARK, because working with berries...or working with Lizzie...is an invitation to dye oneself the glorious hues of nature.  In this case: purple

The berries are big, despite the dry weather, so after numerous eeks, squeaks, and discussion of the distinction between "ripe"and "squishy", we have nearly an ice cream bucket full.  Off to the kitchen where Lizzie takes to smashing the berries to pulp with great enthusiasm.  She's a natural.

Aaron is back and joins to help, measuring out the nine cups of sugar for the five cups of juice and pulp Lizzie has extracted.  Both kids are aghast at the thought of nine cups of sugar in anything; I reassure them that a piece of toast or a peanut butter sandwich with a generous helping of their homemade jam is a perfectly permissible dish for hard workin', hard playin' kids...and there's nothing wrong with a dollop of warm, not quite set blackberry jam on some vanilla ice cream either!!

Now we enter into the magic cauldron stage of the whole jam making process.  Double bubble toil and trouble, mumbles the concoction in the pot, while I stir and the onlookers help me discern the magic moment when the boil "can no longer be stirred down".  NOW!  Foam erupts up the sides to be overpowered by the avalanche of sugar and subside into an even deeper hue now with an intense fruity fragrance. I stir...and we talk about how very very hot this jam is, hotter than 212 degrees, Aaron figures.  The jars and jar lids clatter and jingle on the other two burners.  Just a few more seconds of the "just one minute" and its time to can.  

The familiar ritual is almost surgical....lift the jars, set the funnel, dip the cup and pour into the jar,remove the funnel, wipe the brim, grab a lid with the tongs, tighten the lid with the wash cloth.  Finally, into the canning rack until the last of the setting jam is scraped from the kettle.  It has cooled enough that Lizzie and Aaron get the last spoonfuls to savor.

When the jars come out of the boiling water bath, Lizzie has already chosen the jar they will take home; it is a pint jar with the band printed with colorful peaches.  When the lid pops and after it cools, she writes on it with her Sharpie :

BBlack

Bere

2013

The jar is still hot when she takes it home.  

As we were watering that morning, out of the blue, Lizzie says,"Grandma, when I am a Grandma, will you be in heaven?"  It is really more a statement of fact than a question and I tell her yes.  Whether or not Lizzie, or any of the other grandkids, follow up on their childhood wishes to "work here when I grow up', they will have grown up working here, alongside their moms, dads, siblings, cousins, and, yes, their grandmas and grandpas, too.   They will have days of sweat, dirt, pain, and frustration while they work with us, but they will have days like this one has been, too: a day that Grandma Lizzie will remember, I hope, and some day tell her little people about watering mums, picking berries, and making purple jam with her grandma years before.

Doldrums

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,

'Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, no breath no motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean......

Samuel Coleridge, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

The colloquial expression was used in Norman Juster's children's book Phantom Tollbooth, in which a place called "The Doldrums" is inhabited by the Lethargarians who follow the same list of activities every day.


"And the KMAland weather forecast...." comes on most days just after the 5 minutes of national news at 6 a.m.  This day there is no local sports profile to snooze through, no recap of Corner Conference baseball, no fishing report from local lakes.  There's a meteorologist, and when the weather speaks, sleep flees. "High pressure entrenched in the southwest will spread north and east...."

Words to chill the blood and stop the heart.  High pressure.  Sun day after day, evenings quiet and warm, temperature and dew point exhibiting bracket creep until, like the apocryphal toad in the pan of water, we are parboiled and senseless.

Senseless...but not numb. July's routine: early up, pour the water through the Bunn, out the back door to pull the hydrant up, hear the sprinkler splutter to life and water arc through the morning air for an hour before we leave to spread more water.  Breathe in. Gauge the first rays of sun for their sear potential later on: is it a high 80s day? 90-92? The blistering side of 95? On which morning will the last faint vestige of cool be undetectable?  It will happen....just like there will be a morning when it reappears....in a month or two...

The doldrums are defined by fronts that pass far out of radar range, too far for the cloud tops to peak over the horizon or the lightning strikes to flicker: no pillar of cloud by day nor  pillar of fire by night.  The gravel road is ground to moondust; each passerby leaves a plume like the US Cavalry in an old Western. The last clover blooms crunch; I deliberately walk through each small flourishing patch of soft blue buffalo grass on the way to the mum patch.

Weeds still grow where water flows; watering the mums requires stoops and bends to pull crab grass and purslane from the moist circles under the pots.  The weeds that grow amongst the mums are often sown by the emitters themselves and sprout just where we dropped the lead topped leader in June.  The black ground cloth warms quickly but that doesn't deter a multitude of toads from living in the mum pot jungle...whatever else toads eat, they don't digest cricket shells. The soundtrack of pump motors is punctuated by the killdeer cries as the dog wanders through the corn; too close, too close!

Top...bugs.  Bottom...no bugs

Eternal vigilance is...the price of growing mums.  Doesn't have the same ring as "liberty", but, as a gardener, Thomas Jefferson probably wrote that too.  You may not want to spend all morning with your nose to the ground but if you read Facebook instead, you may miss the first signs of an impending caterpillar invasion. There are more worms in heaven and earth, Horatio, than there are dreamt of in your philosophy. And they are voracious. In the war between the species, fastidiousness goes out the window; less than a critical diameter, the fastest way to dispose of a caterpillar is to squish it between one's fingers. Above that squish  threshold, pick the creature off and grind it beneath your heel.  'Crush its head', you know, before it 'strikes your heel '.  I realize caterpillars are not snakes, Biblically, but they do creep on the ground.

What caterpillars hath wrought

Mum watering complete, one does what one can to escape the doldrums.  There is hope in the potential bounty of our summer gardens, edible and ornamental.  The first wedge salad, the first BLT, the first cucumber dip, the first bruschetta: all these delicacies await the advent of the doldrums.  The ineffable essence of charcoal and beef sizzling on a Weber flutters on the capricious air currents, first north then south, changing directions without detecting a breeze.  Suppers are grilled meat, crunchy salad, juicy fruits; all without heating the stove and kitchen.  Thanks, endless days of heat and spreading fan of water.

Finally, the doldrums gives us the most carefree, careless, graceful and forgiving denizens of the garden.  The coneflowers, balloon flowers, and daylilies shrug off the white bright hot days like they would a passing shower.  They stand as fresh in late afternoon as they were at sunrise, the hour I stepped out that back door, after I poured the water through the Bunn, ready to start the sprinkler, after hearing the weatherman give us another day of .....the doldrums.