OK, so I am a jaded homeschool mom. But I am sure that I am not the only mom out there who just does not think that the following sounds fun. One of the e-lists that I am on for local homeschool networking has just gone mad of late with messages flying every few minutes about summer get together ideas and possibilities.  I almost hit "unsubscribe" today after the 20th message came through, and then thought I'd give the group the benefit of the doubt. But by night time, my generosity had worn thin and I got seized with the idea of typing out my thoughts in relation to all the enthusiastic suggestions. (I've changed the names to protect the guilty)

I was asking Mary and Carl her kids their opinions of places to go during hot or stormy weather, and they like the idea of alternating places...a park with a pool, a park with sprinklers, a park with a beach and lake; a roller rink, a bowling alley, a bounce house... These last 3 are venues to avoid like the plague aren't they? Aren't bounce houses pretty specifically geared for under 10's? or maybe even younger?? My youngest is 11. And not too interested in a bounce house.   Do your kids feel the same? No, thank god.   Some initial investigating finds that "kids bowl free" (if you sign up) all summer at many local lanes, including Del Lanes in Smithville and Hoe Bowl in Freeport, and both have open lanes when we usually meet.  (The one in Freeportl is about 4 minutes away from a terrific waterfront park/playground which has a food/ice cream stand and outdoor concerts Thursday nights! "Food" needs clarifying here. I'm pretty certain that was is being served up at this location does not qualify as "food" in our house.   I would love to go from one to the other.) And I would love to bang my head repeatedly with a hammer.     Rollarama roller skating rink in Kingston This is only an hour and 10 minutes away!  offers "Family Night" every Thursday, with a family of 4 paying only $12 for the entire family ($3 for each person over that), plus $3 skate rental if needed.  (Much cheaper than Rollarama's, and much cheaper food as well. Again, we probably have different ideas about the merits of this cheap food. )  The down side is that it doesn't start until 6:30,not from my point of view as that might be enough to stop me from going  but I still think a lot of the kids would go for that.  "Bounce Around" in South Mall offers group rates...Still waiting for someone to remind me of where that other bounce place is. It won't be me.

Before and After

Vegetable garden: BEFORE

So, yes, this is a picture of my so-called vegetable garden. As you can see, it is actually an exquisite document of about 25 different native plants that grow easily in the fertile farm soil of my garden. I am currently taking a "Native Plant" class with Dina Falconi and am starting to distinguish these weeds one from another. We enjoyed Cream of Stinging Nettle Soup last class a month ago. It was really really good, and (here I must review my notes) it helps with allergies, and is good for the circulatory system among other things.

Since I took this picture a few days ago, I have exercised my power as a decision-maker, and I have removed most of these plants to make way for my broccoli and celery seedlings. I have laid the huge weeds in piles along the pathways of the garden,so as to allow the minerals and nutrients to leach back into the soil. Again, not the neatest looking garden, but I have been cheered to find some role models for this sort of patchwork gardening in the likes of old lady gardener Ruth Stout's gardening methods. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWz0-DznwSE

As soon as I finish establishing the vegetables in neat rows, I will publish an "After" picture. Ot course, there is always an "after" picture after that too, as the summer progresses and I either stay on top of the weeds or I don't. Unlike Ruth, I mostly do my gardening clothed.

Making pizza and paintings

my glasses where I left them

 Channeling William Carlos Williams here:
(but the female multi-tasking version)
making pizza
need yeast from fridge
old celery in fridge
recipe for celery soup?
need glasses to look in cook book
where are they?
outside hanging from the garden fence post where I left them several hours ago
go get them
take camera with me to take a picture of the inside of the compost bin.

interior of the compost bin

Which brings us to the main idea of this post:
I have become someone who thinks of "planting" plastic bags on my property so as to allow it to get embedded into the natural environment as it does in the woods around here....I want to make some more paintings of this phenomeon...and when I went to get compost out of the big bin, there were some beautiful plastic bag specimens curling through the compost....

Detritus #4 oil on linen

Gardening?

Is this gardening?

  So I was out taking care of a big job: removing the entire "raised bed" of raspberry bushes. Please don't ask why I had a raised  bed of raspberry bushes; it was not a good thing. So  that's why I was removing it, re-potting as many of them as possible in the hope of finding them new homes either with friends or even elsewhere on my property.

I receive "Organic gardening" magazine in the mail. The pictured gardens, fruits, and plants, are all so perfect and lovely. Nothing like the intense chaos that I call a  garden. The raspberry culling event happened to be right next to what is supposed to be my herb garden. Some different concepts are battling for supremacy in my herb garden, There are the many "volunteers" or plants that have decided to show up without necessarily checking in with me first. These include fabulous things like anise, echinacea, chives....It also includes weeds, which brings us to the second category: useful weeds like lambs quarter which I use to augment the spinach in spinach pie....and then the third category is baby raspberry bushes. These had made an escape from the "raised bed..."
 .
As I work in the garden, I am aware of how much it connects not only to house-keeping, but to how one lives life. I keep my garden open to so many possibilities, that they sometimes smother each other out. Or don't produce as they would if they had more space. Reminds me of both my attic and my life. I have a lot of trouble deciding that one plant (or a book or a dress) is good and another bad.

Naturally then, weeding is extremely challenging to me. Even huge dandelions seem worth keeping; I think to myself that I might want to photograph them soon for a possible painting idea. It is just like going up to my attic determined to find some stuff to throw away on trash day, and coming downstairs with a big box of "junk" that turns out to contain a potentially valuable Hess truck toy, a sheaf of writing and drawing from when my oldest son was fabricating paper cars, and some soccer trophies. It is not clear that these things can be thrown away, though in the cold light of the computer as I write about it, it seems like they should. At the moment of dragging them from the attic closer to the trash can, I am wondering if I should wait to ask my son if he wants any of it, and I know my husband would kill me if I threw away one of the Hess trucks....

But for some reason, I love to weed. I love the visual clarity of weeding everything out but one type of leaf in a given area, and of how often the weed in a given area seems to mimic the chosen inhabitant of that area. When I weed for hours in the SPring or summer, I sometimes see after images when I shut my eyes at night, huge black circles of dandelion leaves exploding in some canyon of my vision....And then the otehr day, I was done weed-wacking and staggered across my patio and happened to look up and found myself stunned by the dangling beauty of the wisteria.  They reminded me somehow of galaxies....

Tooth and Tree

Can you see the crack running down vertically from the junction of the two main limbs stretching up? This is the same old huge maple tree that my son and artist Matt Bua secured the base of their "tree house bridge" to.

My husband noticed the crack a while back. This tree is behind our house, very close to our house. I have since noticed a similar old maple tree at our soccer field with a similar crack. I wonder if this is a common old age affliction of maple trees. The huge limbs press upward full of strength for years, and then the weight of all that vigor and strength begins to succumb to gravity...and slowly, the huge vertical limbs start to pull away from their core....they come "unglued" so to speak.

We need a "tree guy" now to come tell us what to do. Can we wrap the tree with a huge steel belt,  to prevent it from splitting apart? Would that work? OR would he suggest lopping off one of the huge limbs, maybe the one looming over the roof of the house?

Meanwhile, and not so differently, I must seek the attention of the dentist to ascertain exactly what is going on deep inside my tooth. Does it have a similar crack that is slowly widening and allowing great gusts of cold air to hit an exposed nerve? Ot is it simply decaying gums exposing the root of the tooth? Which would be bettter? Which costs more to fix? or shore up? Can something be loped off to make it stop hurting?

That's all for now from Aging Acres....

The Drawings

the Crisis Farm drawings

See "Crisis Farm" post about 2 posts back. It was unseasonably warm and beautiful...no one moved all the collected detritus, so I could work several hours a day on these drawings. There is nothing so rejuvenating as slow rumination on the concept of crisis...I find myself pondering the big questions, like, Will any of this stuff get moved once my drawing is done and there is no reason for it to remain? and Where can all this stuff go? To what category of storage does a large plumbing apparatus belong? Will we be able to eradicate the collapsing barn? What would it feel like to look out my bedroom window and not see the old ramshackle monstrosity?

But drawing the whole time. Drawing and thinking.

A Less Orderly Life

garden fresh

One of the many benefits of a less orderly life is that in the Spring, when I crave the bitter strong taste of dandelion after a long winter of store-bought greens, we have plenty of huge beautiful specimens to dig up. I bring them inside, wash them, cut the leaves at the base so they are all free of the stem, and toss them into a frying pan in which olive, garlic, and salt are already sizzling....Soooo delicious. And as organic as the $5.99 bunches in the "Health Food Store".

See other posts for some of the drawbacks of a less orderly life. My 16 year old son just asked me the other day while making a cup of tea, wether I thought it was possible for a "Crisis Farm" to be neat and tidy. In other words, is it perhaps the nature of the beast to constantly be in flux with unfinished projects, collections of potentially useful materials, gardens in which weeds are OK (cause many are after all edible!) and so on. I told him about an old, but working, farm I had just driven by yesterday where the verdant pastures were littered with rusting machinery and bits of ancient vehicles, but where also perfectly operational tractors and trucks were parked in front of the big barn.....Perhaps each vehicle as it died functioned for awhile as a parts supplier....And it almost looked to me yesterday like a natural sculpture park...but I know I have a special vision when it comes to junk.