Rolling On One

The trees went in mostly in priority order.

First, a Gala apple. I like Gala apples from the supermarket, and my book on growing apples says that fresh locally grown Galas are way better than supermarket ones. Certainly I like my homegrown Red Delicious apples better than supermarket ones. So, even though it’s all we can do in September and October to keep up with the apple trees we already have, I put in a dwarf Gala. I followed the planting instructions, digging a nice deep, wide hole, spreading out the roots, and tamping the soil down carefully.

Second was an Orange Quince. We get a few quinces, and lots of beautiful red-orange flowers, from a small quince in Newton. I’d like to have more of the fruit. This was a pretty tall tree, about five feet, with plenty of roots. It got a good-sized hole too.

Next was a Collette pear. The pear trees I put in last year were buried in snow when I placed the nursery order. I wasn’t the least bit confident that more than two of the four would have survived, so I ordered another for a replacement. I was still doing a good job with the holes at this point. Just as I had finished putting the tree in the ground and patting the soil down around it, Arlene said, “There’s something big flying over. I think it’s a vulture. Wait! No! It’s an eagle! Sure enough, it was a bald eagle.She got a clear look at the head and tail before giving me the binoculars, and I got enough of a look at the tail to be sure of the ID. I went back to the pear tree, placed my hands on it, and said, “I dub thee Eagletree.” If the eagle knew, it would say, “pffft, that’s not a tree, that’s a piece of nesting material.”

Oh, by the way, notice those stakes holding up the baby trees? Earlier in the day I had walked up to Sleeping Rhino to case out planting sites near it (decided against it) and to cut saplings for stakes, because I’m trying to open up the view around the rock anyway. As I was bending down clipping bramble canes on the path, I heard some noise in the leaves. I looked up and saw a hen wild turkey about 20 feet away. Just a single turkey. Usually we see more than one at a time.

After those three trees I was a third of the way done with the job and ready for a break. We drove to Raymond to check out a community yard sale at the elementary school. We came home empty-handed.

The remaining trees were walnuts. They’re supposed to grow to be big, impressive trees. The nursery stock was far from it. I had four little sticks with roots to put in. Actually, that suited me fine, because I wasn’t going to have to dig such big holes as for the fruit trees.

I put in two Carpathian Walnuts on the far side of the runoff from the well. They’re long-term investments, not going to bear nuts for five years or longer.

Then two Thomas Black Walnuts, a cultivated variety that’s supposed to give plenty of good nuts for baking, and are supposed to start bearing much sooner than the Carpathians.

One of the Thomas Walnuts looked questionable. I’m not positive I got good value from the nursery on this one; there were barely any roots, and the whole thing was about two feet long. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the tree establishes itself. You’re supposed to have two of the trees for pollination, but I’m pretty sure the native black walnuts will do for that.

Then two native Black Walnuts, that the nursery catalog was pushing for growing for lumber and shade. If they yield nuts that the turkeys and grouse like, so much the better; but if one of the Thomas trees bears nuts, that’ll probably be enough of them for me. These were inexpensive. Maybe I’ll stake them later.

In response to many people who have written to ask, “Considering all that Dean writes about nature, would you call him a tree hugger?” we present the following evidence:

(Actually, nobody has written to ask any such thing. It’s a little like Tim Sample at the concert we went to on Saturday asking, “How many of you once had a ’58 Hudson Hornet?” When he got a very subdued response, he said, “Come on, people! When I ask something like that, I’m not looking for the truth. I’m not going to check up on you. I want a little enthusiasm. You can pretend you had one. Let’s try again.” This time he got an enthusiastic response. He said, “Now, isn’t that more fun?”)

Not only one tree at a time. Here he is, hugging nine trees at once:

Yup, my order from Miller Nurseries had arrived just as the UPS tracking site said. There are supposed to be nine trees in the bag. This looks about like the package I got last year, so I had a better idea of what to expect than a year ago.

Came the dawn, I took them out of the bag so you can get a better idea of the contents. You probably can’t count all nine in the picture. In fact, don’t even try. Some of them are only two feet long, and some of the branches towards the top are all from one tree.

This was just possibly more trees than I wanted to plant in one day, but this was the only weekend I had to do it, so there it was.

Four or five weekends ago Arlene and I tromped out a snowshoe trail to a patch of aspen trees in our woods and then to the clearing we call the patio, then back to the backyard. Two weekends ago we did more work on the part back from the patio, which mostly consisted of clipping down the last foot of the stems we had cut off at snow level the first time. Last weekend we and Anne and Matt did the same for the other part of the new trail. Late Sunday Matt went out and walked the entire length of the trail system with his GPS. He reported that the GPS said that the total length of the trails was 0.96 miles. I asked, “Did you do the back way in to the blueberry trail, too?” “No.” “Well, that must be another 0.04 miles.” So we’re going to say we have a mile of trails on the property.

Yesterday (Tuesday May 6) I was seeing lots of orioles around Cutler Park. It wasn’t a case of “everything that moves is an oriole” the way I remember it once several years ago, but there were plenty. I saw one Savannah sparrow with exceptionally bright yellow stripes on the head, quite close.

Today (Weds May 7) Arlene and I went out to Nahanton Park on my way to work. I bicycled. She gave me a few minutes head start and drove. She got there just as I was getting off the bicycle and locking it to the big signpost. The timing couldn’t have been better.

What we saw:

– three male yellow warblers chasing each other

– a yellow-rumped warbler in beautiful plumage

– female and male rose-breasted grosbeaks. I saw the female first and recognized it, then looked for the male.
– savannah sparrows

– field sparrow

– catbirds

Thursday (May 8) at Cutler Pond, co-worker Mimmi and I saw a yellow warbler, a yellowthroat, an extraordinarily cooperative black-and-white warbler (it just went about its foraging on a tree trunk not more than ten feet from us), and a swamp sparrow.

We had the first Passover seder here (this is two and almost a half weeks ago I’m talking about) but didn’t take any pictures. For the second seder we went to David and Rachel’s out in Southboro and did take pictures. All of Millie and Joel’s grandkids were there. We had expected 18 people for the seder, but Charley, Nicole, and Emma had some kind of medical hang-up and didn’t get there, and Rachel’s sister changed her plans at the last minute, so there were only 14. See if this adds up: Gena and her three boys, David and Rachel and their two boys, Millie and Joel, Anne, Arlene’s college roommate Judy, and Arlene and me.

Rachel was very organized about the whole thing. She had decided what serving dishes she needed in advance:

Darn, I can’t quite read the label there, but it says “gefilte fish”. I wanted it visible in case there are any readers who think gefilte fish is a semi-mythical entity that people just joke about. No, a Passover seder without gefilte fish would be a lot like Thanksgiving dinner without squash. Not like Thanksgiving dinner without turkey, but very conspicuous by its absence.

Dinner set for this many people takes up more than a dining room.

Here’s a closer look at the seder plate. I dug the horseradish out of our garden and we had already used it on our seder plate. There wasn’t enough to cut up for people to eat, but enough to look at anyway. The orange is a recent but widespread tradition. Apparently several years ago a prominent rabbi said “A woman belongs on the bima [leading a synagogue service as rabbi or cantor] as much as an orange belongs on a seder plate.” Of course he meant he didn’t approve of ordination of women, but many people chose to interpret it as, “since everyone knows it makes sense to have women rabbis and cantors, an orange must belong on the seder plate.” So having an orange on your seder plate is definitely a political statement.

Of course, the main point of pictures is to have pictures of kids. The four older kids were playing with a very complex Brio train layout a lot of the time.

Here are the two youngest, Jacob and Baylor.

Trey, Gena’s middle kid, is the most active of the bunch but surprisingly sensitive and considerate for all that. We had been hoping that this would be an opportunity for Emma to meet all these kids, and especially Trey and his older brother Mason, but it didn’t happen.

Jared, David and Rachel’s older kid, is big on costumes. He put on his pirate outfit for this picture. He had made the placecards that show up on the picture with the seder plate.

The JCC klezmer band gave something we tried to call a concert last Tuesday (April 29, I guess) evening. We set up in the lobby, put out a couple of chairs, and started playing. There were a couple of people listening on purpose around the corner where there are comfortable chairs, but mostly the audience consisted of the woman working at the front desk and people walking by on their way to and from the gym and swimming pool. A few of them sat down and listened until the end of the number we were playing. Most slowed down a little and continued on their way.

Setting up in front of the judaica shop, the site of the former Starr Gallery —

The flute and recorder section —

The rhythm section, keyboard and bass —

Me on baritone horn and Jim D’Amicco on clarinet. I was wondering what the dress code for the event was. Then I remembered that there was something about Israel Independence Day, and I remembered that I have an Israeli-style shirt. It seemed appropriate. In case Ada Marie is reading, yes, I embroidered that shirt under the supervision of Michal Artzi in the winter of 1966.

I declare the 2008 grilling season open. In spite of the slightly wobbly legs and missing acorn nut that lets a wheel fall off, I roasted a whole chicken on the rehabilitated Weber grill with total success.

In unrelated cooking news, I baked two loaves of Red River Cereal bread this morning. I mixed the dough up last night, let it rise overnight, and baked it first thing in the morning.

Matt and I went out to get some lumber to repair the deck at The Red Mill in South Casco. On the way we noticed some horses plowing the field at Watkins’ farm behind the frozen custard stand.

The Red Mill turned out to be a couple of hundred yards off the main road, down a long dirt driveway. It’s an old fashioned sawmill/lumber yard with several, widely separated, sheds with different sizes of lumber. There are muddy, rutted dirt driveways between the sheds. It makes even National Lumber in Newton look like a cleaned up, Disneyland version of a lumber yard, to say nothing of what it makes the lumber department of Home Depot look like. Besides the lumber we need for the deck, we got four rough cut 1 by four inch by eight foot boards at fifty cents each. We thought, even if we do nothing but build a bench out in the woods, it’s worth two bucks.

On the way back we pulled into the Watkins Farm driveway. There were several horse trailers there and several teams of draft horses pulling the kind of plows you usually only get to see somewhere like the farming museum at the Fryeburg fair. It turned out to be a plowing demonstration by the Farmers Draft Horse Mule and Pony club. We only looked for long enough to realize that we’d better get Arlene and Anne and our cameras and come back.

By the time we got back it was raining hard enough, and there was a small enough audience, that the farmers were starting to unharness the horses, load them back on the trailers, and call it a day. But not before getting some pictures and talking with a couple of the club members.

Anne and Dozer, horse-plowed furrows behind her. —

A Belgian draft horse —

Percherons. They were being unharnessed between the time I pushed the shutter button and the time the camera was good and ready to take the picture. If you look closely maybe you can see some of the rain falling. Maybe not. I could in the full-resolution original. —

a vintage horse-drawn plow. I asked someone about the adjustments and controls for the plow. You can adjust the depth of the furrow with one of the levers, and if you push down some pedal you lock the plow to the wheels so the forward momentum of the rig pulls the plow up out of the ground — you don’t have to lift it yourself — for turning at the end of the furrow, for instance. None of that iron just happens to be there; that’s good 19th century mechanical engineering, pals.

Three weekends ago (would that be April 12?) we went to a Native American arts festival at Bowdoin College. By now we’ve been to a few events like that, so some of the vendors look familiar, and some of them even recognize us.

The thing I remember most about this one is one pre-teen girl dancing to the drumming, gracefully, lightly, unselfconsciously, and totally in tune with the music. It looked as though she had been dancing to that kind of drumming all her life and if you asked she would say, “that’s just what you do when you hear drumming, how can you stand still?”

Joe Dana was carving little wooden turtle key fobs. Arlene bought one, and I talked to him for a while about snow snakes, of which he had several for sale. I took a picture of them and his walking sticks, but it’s pretty blurry:

We had lunch in downtown Brunswick and walked another block to Gelato Fiasco, an ice cream place that underwrites on Maine Public Broadcasting, just to say that we recognized them from the radio spots. Arlene asked for a taste of one of their ice creams and the guy asked me if there was any I wanted to taste. I said yes, I was curious as to the Vidalia Onion ice cream. He said, “It’s pretty intense.” I think they may have made a mistake in creating that flavor, much as I like J P Licks’ cucumber ice cream. But why call yourself “Fiasco” if you’re not willing to try making some daring flavors?

Arlene wondered if we could get out to the ocean. Midcoast Maine (that’s more or less from Portland to Bar Harbor) has long peninsulas running north to south with long bays in between, so the through routes are about 20 miles from the open ocean. I wasn’t sure how far we would have to drive to get to ocean scenery, but we set out down the road to Harpswell and found this:

We couldn’t have asked for anything that looked more like Maine coast.

I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but our front yard in Maine was full of molehills last weekend.

We were in the Boston area for Passover (pictures? somewhere) the weekend before, and there was still a foot of snow on the ground in Maine the weekend before that. So we didn’t know what to expect last weekend. We were pleasantly surprised to see bare ground, but strange looking bare ground. The moles had been tunneling just at the soil – snow border. I guess it’s less work going through the snow, but the food is in the soil, so half and half is the ideal solution. At any rate, look at this!

We’re thinking of buying some wind-powered mole repellent gizmos. They look like miniature versions of the windmills you see on the Great Plains, with some sort of rattle device underground that makes a racket the moles can’t stand.