That's why they call it a FLASH flood

Remind me again why we live in the sticks, I ask, but of course I know the answer: birds and bees and butterflies, summer fireflies and spring ephemerals, creek walks with the grandkids, quiet nights, lovely days, space for a great big garden, all wonderful things until the rain falls and the creek swells and the garden is under water.

It was barely raining when I left campus yesterday but I had to pull over twice on the drive home because the rain was so heavy I couldn't see the road. It finally let up a bit and I followed a line of cars moving slowly up the highway past loose debris. A tree had fallen and pulled down a power line across half of the road, forcing us to drive perilously close to a drainage ditch swollen with fast-moving water. But I made it home! The creek was rising but didn't look dangerous.

There's a reason they call it a flash flood: it happened so quickly that no one had time to prepare. The first time I walked down toward the bridge, the driveway on this side was still walkable and the bridge and road were visible above the creek; by the time I'd walked back up the hill, the driveway was under water. Flood waters crossed the meadow but looked like they'd stay away from the edge of the garden, but the resident green thumb moved loose garden chairs and other floatables uphill just in case. 

From our side of the bridge I could just barely see my neighbor's blue pickup truck parked next to the garden shed he'd been building by hand for some months. Twenty minutes later, our bridge and garden and road were under water and the neighbor's truck and shed were just gone. The entire meadow had become a rushing mass of water louder than Niagara, and it sounded like the bridge was being hit repeatedly with battering rams.

The floodwaters came within a few feet of the chicken run, which distressed me immensely, but the chickens reveled in the bounty of bugs trying to flee the rising waters. Special delivery! 

Within an hour the water had receded, and this morning the creek is well within normal bounds. The bridge is covered with debris and we'll need a load of gravel before the driveway is passable again, and the garden is a big mud pit, with corn stalks bowing to the ground in a downstream direction.

The last big flood we suffered (click here) washed away our driveway and garden shed, so I'm glad we didn't lose more. Elsewhere in the county, a tornado struck down and buildings and trees suffered massive damage. We got off easily this time--nothing that a few tons of gravel can't fix. 

Except the garden. I went to look at it this morning and found mud where tomato plants ought to be. The garden might spring back, insists the resident green thumb. Good thing I married an optimist--otherwise I might find this situation a tad discouraging.

Just a little water in the meadow. Nothing to be concerned about.

The bridge sounds like it's being battered, but it's above water....for now.

You can just barely see the neighbor's truck behind the trees.

Wait, I was just walking down there and now it's under water....

Garden stuff on higher ground

That little row of plants is at the edge of the garden.

The electric fence around the garden is all that's visible

Lake Hogue

Wait, where did the bridge go?

Standing wave. You wouldn't believe how loud the water is.

Nope, still no bridge.

Looking toward the road, which is under water.

Where the neighbor's truck and shed used to be.

Chickens find higher ground

The garden....what's left of it.

Corn, bowing.

Flood debris with creek in the background.

The mud on the driveway is so slick I didn't dare walk on it.

Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz

After a weekend with the grandkids, I arrived home yesterday to find my kitchen and dining room overflowing with produce from the fall harvest. I don't even like spaghetti squash but they're stacked on the dining table alongside a pile of fragrant pawpaws that seems undiminished by the dozens I took north with me. The kitchen counters are covered with tomatoes of many sizes and colors while the fridge is full of okra, habaneros, and red bell peppers. The resident gardener wonders whether I can throw together a batch of stuffed peppers sometime this week, but stuffed peppers are not so much thrown together as painstakingly assembled over a series of hours. So maybe--but not today.

On Friday before I left my husband put a great pumpkin into the back of my car, a pumpkin so big he had to use the tractor to carry it up from the garden, and then he wedged it in with pillows to make sure it didn't roll around. All well and good, but I wasn't able to take the tractor with me to the grandkids' house and I certainly wasn't planning to try to pick up that pumpkin myself. It took a group effort and a garden cart to move the orange behemoth. 

It's been a bizarre garden year: many early crops did nothing--we had very few zucchinis or broccoli and a handful of beans--but later crops are going bananas. I hope we can find someone interested in spaghetti squash because I certainly don't intend to cook all eight million of them. I've been bringing containers of tiny tomatoes to campus to share with colleagues, but I'm not hauling in a giant pumpkin. And all those habanero peppers? If my husband eats them all, we'll never be able to kiss again. 

But I'm not complaining. As long as we have sweet corn in the freezer and fresh tomatoes boiling down into paste in the kitchen, I'm ready for a tasty winter. 

 

Down the garden path

Rather than moping over my ruined zoom lens, I'm forcing myself to learn how to take better photos on my phone. It's not as satisfying as my beloved Nikon but I'm enjoying messing around with it and trying to like the results. 

This morning, for instance, I hobbled down the hill on my bum knee to visit the chickens (and two guineas) and see what's still growing in the garden. Last weekend we processed dozens of ears of sweet corn for the freezer, but this week the sweet corn patch is pretty much done. The okra suddenly shot up to six feet tall and started making pods, so today we'll fry up a mess of okra for lunch. It looks like we'll have tons more tomatoes and tomatillos and hot peppers, plus three big watermelons and massive pumpkins. Sunflowers, spaghetti squash, a few lingering cucumbers, lovely red beet greens mingling with swiss chard...all very promising, and very pretty.

It's been an odd year for gardening, with the cool, wet spring hampering many early crops--even the zucchini has been disappointing. But this late-summer burst of growth will keep us busy and happy for weeks to come. Though I'm not sure what we'll do with those giant pumpkins. How many pumpkin pies can the two of us eat?

Peoples is peoples, says Pete

A few observations from a busy week on campus:

If I carry a pair of freshly-picked cantaloupes into the library and a human being's nose catches  a whiff of the scent, I will not be carrying any cantaloupes when I leave the library, which is a good thing since my resident garden guru has just picked a dozen ripe cantaloupes. They don't keep well, you know? I'm happy to try making some cantaloupe-and-ginger sorbet this weekend, but my experience has been that frozen cantaloupe loses massive amounts of flavor.

If I walk into a meeting expecting a meaningful contribution from someone who has previously demonstrated an unwillingness to contribute anything meaningful or even, often, to show up, then I'm expecting too much. Can't expect a tiger to change its stripes just because I said Pretty-please.

If one person emails to ask politely for the kind of help and training I'm accustomed to providing while another person sends an obnoxious email berating me for not having already provided such help to certain people who never asked, I'm answering the polite email first, every time. Why do some people go straight to the nuclear option? I'm here to help, but don't scream at me for failing to help someone who never asked for my help! After all, I'm only human.

If I'm already having trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep, and keeping alert in the afternoons when we haven't even gotten to the stressful part of the semester yet--you know, the whole teaching two new classes thing--then it's going to be a very long and exhausting semester. I need to develop some better relaxation skills--but I'd better do it quickly before everything gets any crazier than it already is. Hurry up and relax! Nope, that didn't work.

It's always nice to be reminded that human nature continues to be entirely what it has always been: human. Or, as Kermit the Frog learns in Pete's Luncheonette, Peoples is peoples.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  

A promise of produce

Signs of hope: the ice in the creek is breaking up and the mailbox brims with seed catalogs. The other day I asked my oldest grandkid what she was looking at so intently on her computer and she said, "I'm looking for ways to keep cabbage worms off of my cauliflower plants in the garden this summer." 

Well that was unexpected.

Springtime is coming, the time when young girls' thoughts turn to cauliflower--and cabbage and carrots and corn. Later she used graph paper to sketch out all the things she wants to plant in her garden plot, and looking at that sketch made me grateful for the people who have, over the years, planted in my grandkids a love for gardening. 

I think of my husband's grandma stooping over her tomato patch well into her 90s, and I think of my husband's patience in teaching our daughter how far apart to place the seeds and how to distinguish the weeds from the beans. Now, just like her dad, she can make just about anything grow, and all my grandkids look forward to getting their hands dirty in the community garden where they tend their family plot.

The thaw is coming. Soon spring will be here, and the young people will play an essential part in making new things grow.

Great ideas illuminating the path ahead

When the academic Powers that Be proclaim that we need to work on negotiating the compliance landscape, my first question runs toward wardrobe: does this kind of excursion call for pith helmets, snowshoes, or parasols? I guess I'm going to find out because the compliance landscape plays an important part in our institutional goals for the year. I'll keep my eyes on the new president so I know when to reach for appropriate accessories.

Whatever landscape we're entering this year, I'll be well equipped with good ideas. I brought a container full of them today, tiny yellow tomatoes that look like lightbulbs, so sweet and juicy that every time I eat one I'm reminded that planting them was a really great idea. I'll take my tiny lightbulbs to the workshop I'm leading this afternoon and tell my colleagues I'll share my great ideas with you if you share yours with the rest of us.

I hope they'll comply--otherwise, the landscape will feel really lonely.

Edible lightbulbs--great idea!

 

Surviving the veggie-pocalypse

As summer problems go, too many vegetables is not a bad one to have. Right now my kitchen looks like the aftermath of an explosion at a farmer's market, but an excess of eggplant is far more manageable than an excess of, say, wildfire. 

So I'm not complaining! But I'm grateful to my friends who accept my offerings of zucchini and tomatoes, and I'm especially grateful to my vegetarian friend who came out for lunch and helped me gobble up zucchini quiche, babaganoush, and cucumber salad. 

But I refuse to be grateful to the raccoons, even if their depredations did reduce the volume of veggies needing my attention.

I remember the time years ago when our corn crop was reaching its peak and we designated a certain day for the harvest--but when I went down to the garden early that morning, I found corn stalks knocked over and ears of corn stripped and eaten. Raccoons! After all the time we'd spent planting and weeding, the raccoons left us about three ears of sweet corn.

That disaster inspired the resident green thumb to start installing a solar-powered electric fence around the corn patch. For a few years we were able to frequently relish the crunch of freshly picked sweet corn and even preserve many ears in the freezer, but then the flood that washed away our garden shed took all the electric fencing supplies down the river, and then for a few years we were dividing our time between home and Jackson so we didn't bother with a big garden.

But this was the summer to bring back sweet corn. My sweet hubby installed the new solar electric fence, taking care to put the strands of wire close enough together to deter small animals and high enough to prevent deer from jumping over the top. All summer he's carefully tended the corn patch until, finally, he brought in the first batch of fresh sweet corn to share with our son on his birthday.

That was August 3rd. For a week we've eaten sweet corn nearly every day, and if you've never eaten sweet corn on the day it's been picked, you don't know what you're missing. What a great week! But it's all over now: on August 9, my husband went to the garden early in the morning and found corn stalks knocked over and nearly every ripe ear stripped and eaten.

How did the raccoons get in there? Did the electric fence fail in the middle of the night? Or did they climb on each other's backs to reach high enough to flip the switch and turn off the power? We'll never know.

This evening we'll eat the few scrawny, immature ears the raccoons rejected, the last gasp of this year's corn patch. We'll have plenty more veggies--the peppers are just now starting to ripen and we still have kale and cabbage and cucumbers and all kinds of squash. Brussels sprouts! Watermelon! Cantaloupe! And a row of sunflowers towering over everything!

But I look at the piles of produce in my kitchen and wonder where we'll put the next batch that gets harvested. We'll eat some and put some in the freezer and keep pushing veggies on everyone we see and maybe at some point we'll be able to see the countertops again and open the fridge without releasing a cascade of eggplant. Until that time, we're learning to live in the veggie-pocalypse.

   

Sunflowers are just starting to bloom.

Corn stalks torn down and stripped.

More zuccinin--always more zucchini.

Corn tassels reach higher than the top fence wire, but not by much

Season of green

Strange spring so far: first cold and wet, then very hot and dry, and now just right, except we could use some rain. The garden looks great but we haven't had any significant rain in the past two weeks and watering by hand gets tiresome. Some woodland creature ate all the leaves off the purple basil, but this morning I see some new foliage coming up. Otherwise, everything is beautifully green.

For the past two years we've avoided mowing a section of the lower meadow, hoping to encourage a pollinator habitat. Last year it just looked scruffy but this year it's taking shape.  mostly tall grass and clover right now, but I see some asters and ironweed coming up. Later I'll try to establish some milkweed and bee balm down there and see what happens. It's an experiment. Nothing much at stake unless you're a butterfly.

 

 

Magnolia blossom

Redbud is pretty even when not in bloom

Potential pollinator habitat

Dandelion clock

 

Don't look now, but there's one creeping up behind you

I've lived in the midwest long enough to have learned one of the most important rules for surviving the hot midsummer months: Don't turn your back on the zucchini patch. Even if it hasn't rained all week and you're certain there's no way those zucchinis can be growing, and even if it's so hot and humid that the effort of walking a short distance up a small hill leaves you drenched, you have to check the zucchini patch every day or else you'll end up with squashes big enough to pummel an ox.

That's what I have this week. It's true that I've been distracted, keeping my nose in the books and my fingers on the keyboard, although not both at the same time. But still, I should have known better than to ignore the zucchini patch for a couple of very hot days. And it's not even a patch--I planted three yellow zucchini plants this spring but only one survived.

But what a prolific plant it is. If the Three Little Pigs lived in Ohio in midsummer, they could build a sturdy house from the produce of that one zucchini plant. Forget sandbags--my one zucchini plant could stop the flooding if the Hoover Dam sprung a leak. You say North Korea is suffering from a food shortage? They're welcome to my zucchinis--as long as they don't send back any leftovers.

July is the time when churchgoers all over Ohio know that they must lock their cars in the church parking lot lest they emerge from worship to find their cars stuffed to the gills with zucchinis provided by their generous neighbors. And if they're not pushing giant zucchinis on you when you least expect it, they're bombarding you with loaves of zucchini bread or pans of zucchini casserole.

At this moment I have a lemon zucchini bundt cake baking in the oven, and later I'll chop some zucchini to make a yummy summer casserole, and later still I'll take them both to a church potluck where the table will be covered with zucchini dishes of every size, shape, and flavor.

And when I get home again, I'll trudge up the hill and see how many new zucchinis are ready to pick, because at this time of year they just don't stop growing and if I turn my back for just one day, they'll grow big enough to dominate my every waking hour. Good thing zucchinis aren't sentient, because nothing could stop them from taking over the world.  

A wish for a boring season

I set off for a walk in the upper meadow this morning, wading through knee-high grass wet with dew, and by the time I came down my pants were soaked through up to the hip. Neither meadow has been mowed this year because the tractor has been out of commission, but this week we learned that the gearbox for the mower deck has been rebuilt, which means we'll have a functioning tractor soon. If you're wondering what it costs to get the gearbox rebuilt for the mower deck on a Kubota tractor, trust me--you don't want to know. It's significantly less expensive than buying a new tractor, although it doesn't necessarily feel that way.

So the meadows are overgrown and hard to navigate, but the birds don't seem to mind. This morning I saw what I believe was a blue-winged warbler, although the photos are too awful to share. I heard a kingfisher down by the creek and saw more blue-eyed Mary growing where I'd never seen it before. I credit the broken tractor: no mowing means more opportunities for stuff to grow.

In the lower meadow the garden plots are also overgrown, but I found four thick asparagus stalks sticking up over the weeds. It makes me sad to forego a vegetable garden again this year, but it's just not possible to maintain a garden while splitting time between two houses. I've put a few herbs in pots and we'll have some tomato plants over in Jackson, but our big garden plots lie fallow for the second year in a row.

Oh, it was just this time last year that a flash flood washed away a chunk of our driveway and our garden shed (with all our garden tools inside), which means it was about this time last year that a deer totaled my car and my nephew died and it felt like everything was falling to pieces. Three years ago next week my mother was dying, and six years ago my first grandchild was being born. Eight years ago my son was graduating from college. Ten years ago next month my daughter was getting married and I was diagnosed with cancer. Seasons of life, right? Somehow, the tragedy of foregoing a vegetable garden pales into insignificance. 

This summer, I think, will be a season of coming and going, waiting for the power company to tear the place up and then seeing what it will take to put it all back together again. No big plans, no life-changing experiences, nothing earth-shattering on the calendar; I have some courses to plan and some writing to work on, but mostly I'll relish sitting back and rolling with whatever comes my way. I hope it's a tremendously boring summer. If the most exciting thing that happens is seeing a blue-winged warbler in the upper meadow, that will be just about my speed.

I love to see spider webs sparkling in the dewy morning.

That S-shape is the path I took walking up the hill.

Red-bellied woodpecker amidst the leaves.

Dandelions just begging for children to blow on them.