Tag Archives: wildlife

Visualizing whirled peas

I pulled the peas today – both the sugar snaps and the snow peas.

Peas in the compost

It’s difficult to pull up plants that you’ve fed and watered and looked after and babied for months, but you do have to know when it is time (or past time) to take them out and send them on their way to completing the next cycle of what they provide beyond the food they give: compost. They had, as we say in the tech world, reached end of life.

We harvested and shelled quite a lot of peas from these plants, and those are all safely resting in the freezer, awaiting their turn in the pot on some future date.

Technically, by the calendar, it is still spring. Today, though, was what would be a typical summer day for us: hot, humid, and simply taking the step off the threshold and onto the porch was enough to draw the breath from your body involuntarily. Still, there is always work to do around the ranch. Today, that meant pulling the peas above and then beginning the second layer of framing on the frames where those peas had been. We have moved to double frames not only in the rear (now main) garden, but also in the very front garden, which at one time was in the rear of the property. After pulling the peas, and taking a break, I went back for round two, taking down the trellises and hauling lumber from the barn area, the sweat simply rolling down my entire body, from the top of my head to the sheen that covered my legs.

After one such trip in the middle of the afternoon, I thought for a few panicked moments that I was going to pass out or puke – or both – while toting an armful of lumber. This would not have been good, naturally, since the tiny bit of shade from the tree under which I was walking was beginning to shift as the sun sank off to the southwest, and I envisioned frying there in the sun, with no one else at home to wonder where I was after awhile. Luckily, I made it back to the house, managed to get some water, and had a seat, allowing the heat to fade.

After getting the roast I’d pulled out seared and into the oven for a braise, I headed back out into the heat to do the framing. The beauty of braising, like any other slow cooking, is that you can set it off, go do all the myriad other things that need to be done, and in the end, have a fantastic, and, in this case, hearty meal waiting to restore you.

Dinner May 1 2010

The nine frames topped off, it was time to move into the herb garden.  My goal was to complete this area today, but I found a visitor in the black plastic I had left out in the rain yesterday: a snake a few feet long, curled up in one of the rolls, who slithered back and forth through the pools of water on the plastic, preventing me from getting a good grip on him. I took one of the shovels and boosted him outside the fence, but unfortunately, he refused to take the hint, turning back at me and slithering right back through the fence, shaking his tail as if he had rattles and trying to show me poisonous fangs, dripping with venom that did not exist. While I knew he wasn’t poisonous, I also knew that if he latched on to my legs, or on to one of the dogs, it was going to be painful. He squirmed too much for me to get him on the shovel and carry him all the way across the property to a safer place for him to reside, so there was only one thing to do.

Snake May 1 2010

With the snake dispatched and thrown into the wilder underbrush area for nature’s cleanup crew to deal with, I moved some mulch and laid some plastic around the perimeter of the herb garden before calling it a day. According to the scale, I lost just under two pounds today, and I’m certain all the sweat I dripped all over the property accounted for that.

And now, I return to my todo list, which never seems to shrink, and plan my assault on filling the frames I topped today so cucumbers can be started where the peas once were. This is in addition to filling the last three 8 x 4 frames in the rear garden to finish off the sixth row so the next row can be started.

“Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.” – Samuel Johnson