Spring Vacation !

"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly,
"one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”
― Hans Christian Anderson

We have been blessed with an early spring (winter never really arrived here this past season) and everything has been coming all at once––at least when things are somewhat sequential you know what to expect and you can enjoy things as they come. There is such profusion of blossom and fragrance and great weather right now that it's like spring on steroids! Most days, as the weather has been so glorious, it's a question of "OK, do I clean out that closet or that office pile or do I just go outside and play in the dirt?" You can imagine what I've been choosing as much as I am able.

Like the plants, I tend to bloom in the spring. I want to be out kicking around, visiting, and outside (especially in these lovely more temperate months before it gets too hot). I have a very different temperament in the spring and summer and have learned to go with it. Part of me needs to hermit-up in the winter and part of me needs this great stretch of weather and the warmer, sunnier months ahead. In Kentucky it's like we go from drab brown to glorious technicolor in a matter of a few weeks.

This swallowtail visited the lilacs that Henry picked for me today. I had just put
them out on the porch table at the cottage to enjoy with dinner.
And now you know why I usually have my camera within reaching distance!

Our boys are off for Easter vacation and we are puttering around our farm, taking a few day trips, and enjoying each other's company. Eli, helped by Henry (and friend Gabe today), has started another fort. This one is in shouting distance from the cottage porch where I've been spending much of my time planting seeds in flats, sorting through stuff, doing some writing, and serving many meals. [It's really unheard of to be able to eat outside in Kentucky in March!] The porch will also be my summer office, before the sun comes around to the west. I so enjoy the big picnic table that my great-grandparents (and that we had in Akron growing up) had made for cookouts and that has graced our porch for several summers now. There are wonderful vibes in that old wood and it easily seats twelve (my great-grandmother seemed to get sets of twelve in dining-related things and linens: it's a habit that I seem to have inherited, too).

I have some other projects for the week ahead and will blog about some of them. They are, in no particular order:

1. Finish planting four large galvanized tubs with spring vegetables;
2. Finish starting seeds;
3. Plant some containers and tubs (but I need to remember that frost could occur! Our "last frost date" is usually in mid-May but often sooner);
4. Make Easter sugar cookies using all of the vanilla combos that I've had percolating since last fall;
5. Pick violets for vinegar and jelly;
6. Resume spring cleaning on rainy days (if there are any this week);
7. Attend the first produce auction of the season [See GROW Casey County];
8. Clean out the henhouse!

And, the best news is that our daughter will be here in a few weeks for a good stretch of time between resort seasons. It's always wonderful to have her with us again.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine


Postscript ~ Our daughter has bumped up her visit! She'll be arriving on Good Friday instead–just in time for Easter (and until she has to return to work in early May)! Now, this Snow White had better bump up her plans to spring clean that cottage...Hi Ho Hi Ho!

Kentucky Wildflowers

One of my favorites, the Common blue violet, viola sororia, often seen along roadsides (a fall leaf above center shows scale).

We had such a strange, warm winter that I suppose it makes sense that we have had a very early spring. The redbud came out a month early and peaked in a day, it seemed, in the recent warm spell––in cooler weather, they will last for several weeks. My peach tree bloomed a month ago (so I'm not expecting peaches to sustain through any cold snaps, but you never know), the forsythia is almost spent and the Bradford pear trees, always the first bloomer, have come and gone. I saw a full bush of blooming lilacs further down the ridge today (easily three weeks early here). Our peonies have even budded and have ants crawling on the now tight, round future blossoms. A gardener in nearby Casey County is already picking asparagus and has noticed both blooms and green fruit on her strawberries!

The elusive Yellow Trout Lily (Dogtooth Violet, or Erythronium Americanum).
It was growing in a small clump of other emergent ones in a loamy creek side area.
The Trout Lily can apparently grow in established clumps over 300 years old.

A creekside bank covered with Dutchman's Breeches
with Wild Blue Phlox (Phlox Divaricata).

But what I enjoy most about our glorious (usually prolonged) Appalachian springs here in Kentucky are the many wildflowers that speckle the roadsides and woodlands. The cooler hollers and woodlands do slow down the plants but even this year the wildflowers are emerging earlier. I have a few spots where I look each year and I'm never disappointed. In fact, one such place in a creekside holler yielded several new discoveries this year: Dutchman's Breeches and the yellow Trout Lily. Both had established themselves in an area that I'd not seen them in before and that I drive past almost every day.

Dutchman's Breeches, Dicentra Cuculleria, are surely related to the Bleeding Heart.

A Kentucky woman carrying a bouquet of flowers.
© Wallace Kirkland, November 1954.

I will post more photos in the coming weeks as things emerge. Spring has sprung!

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

During the Storm

Heading up the hill towards the farm to feed the calves: timing not so great.

The water tower on our ridge, about a mile from our farm.
This was that funny, pinky sky you hear about.

We realize our good fortune in escaping what could have been a very dangerous bullet. The storm last Friday, March 2nd that thickened and swelled and danced over our farm went on to create a large funnel over Somerset, our Pulaski County seat ten miles to the southeast of us, and then turned into a killer tornado less than an hour due east of us in Laurel County.

We had been storm-watching all day (see Before the Storm blog post) and by 6pm it seemed imminent. We still had to feed our two bottle-fed calves and went over together to our farm to do that (our doublewide, sans storm shelter, is across the street). I dropped Temple and Eli off at the cattle sorting building and waited in the car. As I did the sky darkened to almost night-like and the rain started. Then it hailed. Temple came out and told me to move the car under the shed (which was in vain–he had to do it!). Then the storm passed almost as soon as it started. I was glad to see the moon.

Before we got hammered.

We returned home after taking some photos and gathering some hail (Henry had done the same at the doublewide). The house was dark as we'd lost power so we sat with our flashlights for a bit, had another brief burst of wind and rain, and then decided to go see if our Mennonite friends, Melvin and Anna were OK over in Casey County. They were fine and had experienced more of a blast two days prior when they had a hard hail storm. We returned home, able to sleep a bit easier, but unaware of the tragedies that were unfolding in other parts of Kentucky and Indiana.

I will always be fascinated by tornados but I have a healthy respect for their power and randomness. It is possible to observe and see the weather here before it arrives, to be as prepared as possible, and to enjoy the awesome beauty–and ferocity–of nature. It is exhilarating in a strange way because you realize that, despite our best intentions, we are not in control.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

Definitely trying to be a funnel cloud: view of the clouds over the southern part of our farm.

Trying to be funnel clouds.

All of our farm buildings were spared: we really just had a bad hail storm.

The cloud formations were amazing and all going in different directions and at different speeds.

The bad storm that hit us and moved along to the east.
The background was so black it appeared blue.

I was glad to see the moon above us, even as the clouds continued to move around us.

The view to the west after the storm at our farm: this passed over us.

Thickened tornadic layering over our knob after the storm passed through.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Before the Storm

Thickening cumulonimbus clouds over our
knob field, to the south, later in the afternoon.

It began with a "7" on the Dr. Greg Forbes' now infamous TOR:CON scale. Before bed on Thursday I thought it an unusually high number for south-central Kentucky. By Friday morning, Forbes had bumped it up to a 9 out of 10 and we were clearly in the bulls-eye for what promised to be a dangerous and active weather day. A "9" is a 90% chance of having a tornado within 50 miles of your location. Not only was this a high number but it was March 2, not April. Tornado season had arrived a full month early, capping off the oddest winter in recent memory (for everyone, it seems).

My adrenalin was already going full-tilt and would remain that way for the rest of the day and into the evening. All of my life I have had recurring tornado dreams, left over from being truly terrified of their possibility in suburban Akron, Ohio (where, really, they are extremely rare) and the realization that, unlike a hurricane or large-scale snowstorm, they are random events and still unpredictable. We can only predict the conditions and the potential. It's like waiting for the angry fingers of something on high to come down and randomly play with us, poke at us or sometimes create complete devastation and chaos. As the local Lex 18 weather station kept repeating, "Stay Weather Aware!" That's really all you can do (that and watch Weather Channel like an obsessive, hyper-aware crazy woman!).

Since moving to Kentucky four years ago and following spring weather outbreaks more closely, I've never seen a 9 on the TOR:CON index. During the morning hours Forbes further predicted the potential for "dozens" of tornadoes and several sustained tornadoes of longer duration (and above **F-3) before the day ended on Friday. You have to take this kind of prediction seriously and Dr. Forbes is always serious (after all, he studied with Dr. Fujita and helped develop the famous **Fujita scale of tornadic wind speeds that were devised after the "Super Outbreak" of April 1974, which also severely impacted Kentucky).

All day it was blustery, balmy and filled with gathering cumulonimbus clouds. Most of the time it was even sunny with patches of blue sky. It was hard to imagine the potential for severe weather because it wasn't even hot. In reality, the advancing cold front–that cut an angular swath from the west, with temperatures behind it in the 40s–and the warm winds coming up from the Gulf provided a "perfect storm" scenario that would only develop later in the day. Coupled with the split in the jet stream, literally to the north and to the south of Kentucky, and you had all the right ingredients for a severe tornado outbreak at Ground Zero. 

When Jim Cantore is heading to your state, you know it's going to be big.

At one point in the day the radar map looked like this: Kentucky seemed like
it was safe with the winds and bad stuff all around it, or coming up the Ohio River.
One of us said, "But there's no clouds here!" I said, "It's more like the eye of the storm."

I worried about our cows but most seemed to find cover in low areas.

Early in the morning we had a hard thunderstorm with much rain and a bit of hail that came in advance of the cold front. The rest of the day there was almost an electric quality to the air, like you knew something would happen. My husband and I had just made the decision, around 11:30, to get our boys early from school (based on the predictions) but the school (and other schools in the region) beat us to it. By 12:30pm the boys were home and we were all on the farm doing necessary chores and some yard and porch stuff (that, frankly, I should have done last fall). The breezes and winds were picking up to the south but there wasn't a storm cloud in sight. We battened down the hatches, secured gates and doors, and we waited. I even unplugged my computer and put it in a canvas duffle bag, along with some other stuff, in case we had to leave quickly (we have no cellar and just a small storm cellar to the east of our doublewide).

Looking north towards Carter Ridge, and Mintonville, just over the line
in southern Casey County. Green River Knob is off camera to the left.

While watching the local and Weather.com coverage and radars, every hour or so I would drive around our knob field and over to the lookout from our ridge towards the northern part of our county. There I can see Green River Knob (the highest point in the state, west of the eastern Kentucky mountains) and a ridge that divides Casey and Pulaski counties towards Mintonville: this is often the dividing point for severe weather as it had been only two days before on Wednesday when we had another bout of tornado weather that skirted us to the northwest (and caused hailstorms in nearby Casey County). Five years ago, in early April, there was a tornado that danced through the Mennonite valley in Casey County, hopped around Mintonville and on down Carter Ridge, a mile as the crow flies, just to our north. 

The view towards Mintonville a few hours later.

I will write about the storm itself in my next installment. This is not to minimize the major, catastrophic events and tragedies suffered by others in the state and in other areas hit by this storm, but to share our own experiences, which were blessedly safe.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Doldrums

Watching Walton Goggins helps my doldrums!  As the complex white supremacist felon-turned-
preacher-turned-backwoods-Robin Hood-Harlin County-pot lord, "Boyd Crowder," Coggins has shaped
as fascinating a character as they come, in FX's Emmy-winning Justified (now in its third season).

The other day I was helping one of our sons in his homework review, as I often do as the "designated homework go-to person" (which now, despite eighteen years of formal education–not including two years of preschool–I find is quite limiting in certain subjects, especially math, science and parts of world geography).

The word "doldrums" came up, not as a vocabulary word but as a geographical term. It is defined as follows: "an equatorial region of the Atlantic Ocean with calms, sudden storms, and light unpredictable winds." [Mmm, sounds more like perimenopause to me!]

I have only known it in terms of emotional weather: the blahs, blues, feeling down or mildly depressed. The Oxford American Dictionary is more specific: depression, melancholy, gloom, gloominess, downheartedness, dejection, despondency, low spirits, despair; inertia, apathy, listlessness, blahs, blue funk, blues. It further describes the origin of the word as a "dull, sluggish person" (late 18th cent.): "perhaps from dull, on the pattern of tantrums."

A dull, sluggish person having a dull tantrum: YES!

A Minton tile by William Wise from his lovely "Country Pursuits" series.
I've been collecting these for about ten years but don't have this one yet.

It's not all bad, really, but the weather has been something else this "winter." Everyone I know who lives on farmland here in Kentucky (or further yonder on farms and other places in Facebook land) would very much like a real winter. Because this has been a perpetual fall: a long, rainy mud season, often dreary (and always muddy). That means access to feed cattle or check on newborn calves in pastures can be troublesome at worst and messy at best. The one nice thing is that my Speckled Sussex chicks that I got in October are doing well and their water never freezes–and we've been able to use our outdoor water, too. My nine, almost three-year old, hens even started laying again on the Winter Solstice and have been providing us with about three eggs each day.

If I felt like it, I could probably start getting our garden beds ready. But I don't feel like it! I want WINTER, dash it, and a nice excuse to be inside doing indoor things and some writing projects without guilt. We had a three-day cold stretch a few weeks ago, when the temperature stayed well below 30 degrees for three days and nights. It was the best I've felt (no cough!) since late November, when it was also warm and wet. I'm blaming mold: everything here has been moldering for months. The leaves in the forest, the grass in the fields, the creek beds. I think even our house is starting to grow stuff on it.

Spring in Kentucky is lovely, long and prolonged, and perhaps my favorite season here. But if the daffodils are already blooming in some people's yards (and they are!), to what do we have to look forward in a few more months? What will this mean for berries and fruit trees or the entire spring flora? Will we have redbud blooming in another few weeks? Strawberries in mid-April? I realize that our growing season is influenced as much by the pull of the sun, as it climbs higher in the sky, as we are (my moods, certainly). So who knows what we can expect in the next few months?

Yes, I could be outside walking, on the roads, at least, as long as our fields are so muddy. I could be doing fall-cleanup. But so many of our days have been rainy and drizzly or just not consistently warm enough to be outside without lots of layers. It's teasing and fickle, hard to plan around. If there's one thing I've learned is that I just want to enjoy the season in its season and that I welcome each of them for what they are. And I like winter for nestling in and working on things that often compete with summer months when we are outside much more (or need to be).

Back in New England they are having a warm winter, too, and it's bad for the ski industry and the snow plowers who rely upon the white stuff to generate the green stuff. But what else can you expect when you have two feet of snow on Halloween?

Call it Global Warming or what you will: I'm just calling it annoying. "Call me Ishmael," as I know that I have "November in my soul." I just don't want a winter, or spring, of Novembers.

Shall we just call this little weather gaffe "Sprinter" or "Wing"? The birds are even coming back early, too, and some, perhaps, have never left.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Downtime

Front Porch, Lincoln, Vermont,  1940, photo by Louise Rosskam.
For more information on this WPA image from the Library of Congress archive, click here.

Here's what's been happening around the farm:

• more canning (nectarine jam, and peaches tomorrow, with Anna––and beach rose hips on route from Cohasset, MA!);
• it's been raining steadily and gently for three days now. Blessed, blessed rain which "droppeth...from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes." [Thank you, also to Wm. Shakespeare for Portia's soliloquy from The Merchant of Venice. And thank you Tropical Storm Lee for your leavings.] 
• for Labor Day weekend we all got late summer colds, care of back-to-school time––I haven't had a cold in forever (thank you zinc supplements––well, at least for the past two years or so, until now);
• our cattle have now been moved to our 50+/- acre knob pasture: after three hay cuttings this summer we let it grow up again for fodder for our 100+ cattle for about six weeks––they seem very happy today;
• I am now officially a basketball mom––this somewhat disrupts our afterschool schedule but in ways that we can work around (I'm just sorry that Casey County Zumba classes do not meet at the same time as basketball practice!);
• and, there is so much happening in the region and in our lives in the next eight weeks that I need a day just to figure and plan it all out––and to update our local produce/agritourism blog, GROW Casey County, with events and more regular articles for the weeks ahead [this will happen after peaches tomorrow].

When Anna comes to do peaches tomorrow, her husband Melvin (our friend and pantry-shelf builder extraordinaire––and yes, I still need to blog about my new cottage pantries!), will be coming to put more shelves up in a closet at the doublewide. All of these recent canned goods need a place to be, so a closet in our extra room will be converted for all manner of jars and supplies––in addition to what I have on hand at the cottage. When you have no cellars, you must improvise! So can I just say that new closet shelves make me about as excited as, well, a new pantry?

As much as we have been blessed with this much needed and continuous gentle rain here, we are also reminded of nature's fury in Hurricane Irene. While it did not deliver the punch that was just about promised to coastal regions of the northeast, it has devastated parts of inland New Jersey and two regions we know quite well: the Catskills of upstate New York and most of Vermont. Quiet rivers and creeks turned into raging, angry torrents that engulfed entire village centers, swept away historic bridges, and forever changed lives, landscapes and historic structures. 

Our daughter has been on the front lines, just north of Wilmington, Vermont, which is a disaster area, where she works at a four-season resort. She is grateful to have her home, job and everything else but has also been dealing with the sorrow around a drowning death of a coworker and watching many friends and colleagues and local people displaced by the storm. Frustrated, often entitled, tourists and wedding bookings gone awry have been the least of her problems. As I told her, these kinds of events test one's mettle. And she's got a lot of mettle. We hope to see her here again in Kentucky before the busy winter season kicks in up there.

I'd forgotten how much I have missed rainy days: for the excuse to be indoors, doing paperwork, or planning, preparing more interesting comfort-foodish meals. We haven't had this kind of weather, or any rain to speak about, since last spring. And after the intense several month heat of our Kentucky summer, we're all ready for the autumn months and a quieter winter here on the farm––and more writing and blogging, too.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine

Feeling Springy

My friend Anna's former Missouri farm in early May. 

No, and it's not the mattress! As a major, "monster" storm is about to bear down on most of the country, I can't help but think about spring. We are on the warm side of the storm this time around, with the frontal boundary hugging the northern edge of the Ohio River. This often happens in storm world and I find the study of weather patterns endlessly fascinating, totally geeky, and just a tad bit obsessive (just ask my friends and family––but Melissa G., I know that you understand!).

The Great Groundhog Day Monster Storm-in-the-Making––storm hype or reality?

Yesterday I heard my first robin (my friend Joberta saw one this weekend––she calls them "those little harbingers of spring"), and there were thousands of starlings in fields along the ridge. I even saw a pair of sparrows checking out the blue bird nesting box near the cottage and an owl perched on a fence post (the same place where my husband saw five in a row the other day). Those balmy weekend updrafts from the Gulf of Mexico are to blame for this delightful, preseason clamor! Soon it will be colder and more seasonable again. After all, it is just now February. (And where did January go? I think it has been the fastest January on record for me.)

A charming 1920s image, even if her neck is freakishly long.

In thinking ahead towards spring, while still somewhat savoring winter (or what seems to now be Kentucky mud season), I was delighted that my recent article on "Laundry Rooms" arrived in the mailbox today in the March/April 2011 issue of Old-House Interiors. If you like laundry rooms, or doing laundry, or ways to decorate your laundry room, you might enjoy this photo-essay. I enjoyed writing it and styling the photographs that I took, also. [I am also grateful to Carol Spinski of Raised in Cotton, for allowing the editors to use her wonderful laundry room image in the article. There are additional photographs from other photographers, like Eric Roth, in the print version.]

Love the hair, love the clothes, love the rack, love the sink!

I frequently contribute to this publication, as well as essays to its sister publication, Early Homes. You can read the article online here but a more extensive photo layout, and sidebar, is available in the magazine––now on select newsstands (the mega-bookstores should carry it). Writing the article also lulled me into catching up with the laundry––for a bit, at least.

 This photo of Martha is a modern nod to the vintage images displayed here––but dare I say, annoying? But I'd love to get my hands on that belle-époque double laundry sink!

My husband promised me a clothesline for my birthday last October. It's time to take him up on that promise, now that the last cattle-related building is complete. I'm soon going to have a lot of quilts and bedding and old linens packed in boxes that I'd like to be washing and line-drying in the springtime breezes. It will be an easy and welcome task after this wintry season in Kentucky.

You come back when you're ready!

Catherine