One More Market Day in Northport -- etc., etc.

Friday mornings in summer and early fall are special, thanks to the excitement of a colorful farmers' market with lots of local fruits, vegetables, flowers, bread, cheese, meat, jams and jellies and lots more, all set up down by the marina parking lot, just out of sight in the photo at left. The weather on the last Friday in August was a challenge for all concerned -- driving thunderstorm, horizontal rain, and hailstones, too! -- but September 6 gave us a beautiful morning. 

I like to get to the market early, before long lines form at my favorite vendors' stalls. It has been greatly expanded from the previous year's already wonderful array and is a social occasion for many local residents, along with a weekly shopping trip. Isn't that what a traditional market day is all about?

I had already bought green beans and tomatoes before making a beeline to Kathy's display for a bunch of onions, and it was a good thing I remembered those onions and went after them, because her cucumbers were on the same table, and what would my gazpacho have been without cucumbers? She threw in a couple of small tomatoes, saying they needed to be used right away.

From the Northport events calendar sent out from the NCAC (Northport Community Arts Center), it looks as if Friday the 13th will be our last market day of the 2013 season. I'd love to be wrong about this, but either way you don't want to miss this coming market day in Northport, if you're anywhere near. It is definitely the place to be in our small town on Friday morning.

Report of my Gardening and Gathering

It was a good year for strawberries and rhubarb in my garden. Delicious pies resulted, and there is still rhubarb in the freezer waiting to be canned as sauce. Later summer and early fall have brought wild raspberries and blackberries in abundance, with the jam-making ready now to move into its final phase.

Collards did well. Tomatoes were late but prolific. Sweet little orange cherry tomatoes have a growing habit much like the berries on deadly nightshade, accenting the mysterious family relationship between the edible and inedible. Acorn and butternut squash and pumpkins are looking good. But eggplant? What do you say to eggplant that doesn’t blossom until September? And my pretty little plum trees definitely need to be pruned this winter, branches eliminated so that the trees will put more energy into fruit and less into wood and leaves. It will be worth it. The small golden fruits with rosy skins are delicious.

Recent Photography Experiments

Overcoming shyness about photographing people, I have lately been doing just that – always and only with willing subjects, of course –and have been so pleased with the results that I asked a couple of friends if I could post their portraits on my photo blog. The first two, once they saw their pictures, said yes with no hesitation, and so, far from feeling as if I’ve “stolen their spirits,” I feel I’ve given them a mirror to see their beautiful selves and have shown those beautiful selves to others now, too. I would never do this without the okay of my subjects, but they seem very pleased, and that makes me happy.

Happy P.S. to this subject: A third friend said yes to my request!

One Sad Note

A poor young robin, adult size but still speckled, smacked into our front porch window early on Sunday morning. I’d gotten up early and was out there reading when I heard the telltale THUD! and went out to see what kind of bird had had the accident. Tried to feel for a heartbeat, but such a tiny heart it would be! I was clueless. Left it for an hour, hoping it was only stunned and would revive, but -- no such luck. Picking it up with a paper towel, I saw that the young bird had been feasting on late summer blackberries, and I hoped its short life had been a happy one.

Seedtime -- Harvest in Preparation -- Time Rushes On

Pumpkins

Acorn squash

Pumpkins are ripening in my higgledy-piggledy garden, and good-looking acorn and butternut squashes are taking shape. To us they are winter food, but to Nature they are nothing more than giant wombs, shelters for the seeds nourished within. 

Butternut squash

Alongside luscious blackberries, thistles flourish, and the purple and gold of a month ago has turned to brown and beige in the fields. All around us, as summer segues into fall, seeds are ripening.

Blackberries

Thistles

Box elder

Seeds are quieter than flowers. The latter are display, the former potential. But there is nothing “mere” about floral display, since it is necessary to attract pollinating insects that enable plants to make their seeds. To every thing there is a season. Again and again, all we need do is look around to see that truth. Turn, turn, turn....

We had a busy week leading up to the busy holiday weekend, and I'm still way behind with book news but hope to catch up soon. Visiting family, a birthday dinner, evenings of laughter and love -- all that took precedence, and then there was the holiday, with a busier Labor Day than I expected at the bookstore.

Gold in the fields is not all gone, as there is goldenrod everywhere, and soon there will be the purple of asters. So maybe I can still work in that purple-and-gold poetry post, after all. We'll see. So many books -- and you know the rest....

Goldenrod background for grass seedheads

If I Could Figure Out How to Blur This Title, I Would

Summer is always a blur --

Every year, come fall, whenever people ask (as they always do ask), “How was your summer?” I answer, “It was a blur!” Because every year that’s just what it is. The blur is a reliable phenomenon for those of us who work through the Up North summer.

Take the long, 4-day (this year) 4^th of July weekend. People in business in little tourist towns always feel that the 4^th will never arrive, and then – suddenly! already! -- it is upon us!!! This year the pace began at the beginning of the week and continued heavy through Saturday, easing off by early Sunday afternoon as holiday-makers began heading home. The Motovino/Lelu people mounted a four-day music festival, “North by Northport,” the first in Northport history, with music at various venues throughout the village. Music began before noon each day and continued until at least midnight, sometimes beyond. Could this be our little town? Wow!

In the woods, under beech canopy

Leek flower

I managed to get into the woods with Sarah each morning for restorative quiet, where, thanks to our late, cool, slow spring, jack-in-the-pulpit had extended its season into July, overlapping with wild leeks reaching their flowering stage. It’s been a good strawberry year. Looks to be a good year for bramble fruits, too. Sweet cherries are (already!) being shaken, but I don’t want to count the little green plums on my tree, for fear of jinxing the crop.

Canada anemone

Along the roadsides, coreopsis has come on gangbusters, black-eyed Susans are starting, and the first chicory added a few lavender blue notes. Giant catalpa trees (not my volunteer “baby” one, which must not have reached its sexual maturity yet -- can anyone tell me if this is the reason it lacks flowers?) have bloomed. Some are hanging onto their orchid-like blossoms, while others have let them drop to the ground, where white lakes of bloom have formed in the grass. In Northport, by the creek, it’s the time of the Canada anemones. What else? Oh, little yellow flowers are appearing on tall spires of mullein, and most farmers got their first cutting of hay baled and in the barn before Sunday night’s rain.

It seems ages since I started writing a post – not yet finished -- about contemporary short fiction, and then I got completely sidetracked and started writing about “valley fever” and soil erosion and haven’t finished that, either. I’m reading letters by Carl Van Vechten, a book about his grandfather by Peter Singer, Thomas Egan’s story of the American Dust Bowl, a tale of French cheese, Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street, and I can’t remember what-all else, bouncing from one book to another whenever I can sneak 10 minutes from other tasks. And so my reading life has become a blur, too.

That being the case, it was a relief to have a rainy Monday and to have Bruce spell me at the bookstore so David and I could pretend we were “on vacation” for a few hours. Sarah missed a morning play date (called on account of rain), but she didn’t know it, so there was no whining. There would be more pictures today if my camera battery hadn’t run down too far. Maybe a vacation from the camera was good for me, too. As you may have noticed, all the images today are very quiet and calm, so they are not at all representative of the past week.

But that's it: only one week of July is past, I remind myself. Really, summer has only just begun. Please, tell me it’s only just begun!

Delicious berries will appear here

Mornings Are Not Hectic -- in the Woods

Forest floor, morning

What are you looking at here? What do you see?  Do you remember those wild leeks only a few weeks ago?

Baneberry & leeks

The leafy plant you see there is baneberry, but the stems with heads shaped like birds' bills are what's left of the leeks after their leaves die back. The stems are still dark reddish, like those you recall from the leaves. Some of the flowers are beginning to open. In a few days the woods will be full of these small, white, rounded clusters of bloom. People will say, "What is that wildflower?" And if you visited Books in Northport and saw this post, you will be able to astonish your friends with your Up North woodland knowledge. You see? Reading blogs isn't always a waste of time.

Stems that hold flowering leek heads aloft

Soon petals will unfurl

And guess what -- there are gooseberries in the woods, too! Sourest fruit you ever tasted, but you can make pie with them.

Gooseberry

As the season heats up to a fever pitch this holiday week, my quiet mornings in the woods mean the world to me.

An Urgent Plea for Bees

You say you’re not a farmer? Well, do you have a lawn? We need to stop killing bees! PLEASE READ ON!

The April 2013 issue of Acres USA magazine (Vol. 43, no. 4), “the Voice of Eco-Agriculture” in this country, has an article by Donald Sutherland entitled “The Silent Spring.” The title should sound familiar: Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, was an indictment of the American attempt to dominate nature with chemistry, poisoning the environment with DDT. It was a wake-up call. Have we gone back to sleep? Looks like it.

Sutherland’s article in Acres focuses on widely used pesticides called neonicotinoids that get their name from their relation to nicotine. They are “in a class of insecticides that attack the central nervous system of insects,” and they are “toxic through the entire growing season.” Corn, soybeans, other vegetables, soil, seeds, timber, animal pests, fruit and nut crops –scarcely anything grown by American farmers is not treated with neonicotinoid, although all fruits, vegetables and trees depend on bees to pollinate their blossoms to produce seeds, vegetables and fruits!

Well, it must be safe, right? If the EPA and USDA allow its use? Think again.

A Purdue University study published in January 2012 concludes that the use of this class of insecticides is killing pollinating bees and can hang around in the soil for years. A study from Harvard School of Public Health links the pesticides with colony collapse disorder (CCD). France, Italy, and Germany have banned their use since 2008, and now the entire European Union is on board with the ban. The company producing the insecticide is a German company, and yet Germany banned the product, which is now banned throughout Europe. Not the U.S., though. While Europe was deciding to institute a continent-wide ban, our own EPA chooses to grant approval of the bee-killing poison.

If you’ve read this far, whether or not you have followed the links – which I urge you to go back and do if you haven’t – you should be getting an inkling of how how bad the situation is, but it’s worse than that, because who more than Americans has such a fetish for perfect lawns? Yes, lawn and garden products also contain neonicotinoids, so if you’re spraying your lawn or hiring a lawn care company that is spraying your lawn, please take time today to look into what you’re doing or having done in your name. Writes Sutherland:

Read the ingredients and look for any of these substances: clothianidin, acetamiprid, dinotefuran, nitenpyram, thiacloprid and thiamethoxam.

Please boycott products containing these toxins and tell everyone you know to do the same. You will be doing what you can at home to safeguard your country’s food supply, and isn’t that more important than a synthetic-looking green carpet around your house? Beyond the boycott, we need to harass our so-called representatives in Congress about this danger.

Water, soil, bees – we're dependent on them for survival. Why is a government agency set up to protect citizens not doing its job? Another five-year study required? Will there be any bees left by then? 

If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem. - Rachel Carson