skunk

I forgot to tell about the skunk. It was the last thing we caught and Mom had always said, in a loud whisper, “what if you catch a SKUNK?! what are you going to DO??” well, she was there for it, and proclaimed that skunks were not a pest to the house so we didn’t actually have to drive it to Alabama with the other animals did we? so I threw a tarp over the thing (and it sprayed but luckily not directly on us) and tiptoed across the flower bed with it to the orchard fence where i coaxed it to freedom.

digging again

this time: sweet potatoes

dug the last of the sweet potatoes, got giant ones this time! I’ll be taking the tubers to Atlanta so i hope Viv is ready for some sweet potato casserole.

We’ve gotten a few dry days after all the rain, then some more rain and now it’s dry again and sunny (beautiful). Every dry day this past month or so you see tractors and combines and cotton pickers going by. I expect the H’s will come harvest the rest of the cotton here on the homeplace soon (they just defoliated the field across the road 2 weeks ago). We are certainly HOPING they’ll be done by thanksgiving so that we can hire em (and their bulldozers) to help start clearing the orchard!!

packing today, opening the doors to warm up the house, and the cats are romping in the sun on the porch.

digging around

whew it’s been busy here as i pack to go, but there’s lots to write:

It must’ve been last Friday night that Dora, Mom and I cracked open the cedar chest in the upstairs hall, because on Saturday D and I went to a DAR meeting (as guests) and just rolled our eyes at a presentation of family heirlooms knowing we could do better. Now, how in the world Mom and Dad (and everyone else) got through those summers we spent out here without opening up all these chests is beyond me, but no one ever had. We were greeted with an elegant fur-trimmed coat on top in excellent condition, followed by shawls, knitted wool scarfs, pretty summer dresses, drop-waisted things from the 30s, and the like. As in the trunk in Uncle Emmet’s room, there were several pieces of fur (stoles, cuffs, a fur muff cover to a muff) and another delightfully styled jacket, this time a red knitted cardigan.

Earlier this week Mom and I photographed a couple choice items before repacking the trunk for rediscovery 10, 20 30 years down the road. But Mom is really good at going through other people’s drawers (as her own mother can tell you) and while we were photographing, she was already moving on to other closets and boxes and things. Although not much on the valuable front, we found some great jewelry, purses, and, maybe best of all and most useful, Vanny’s button box! She cleaned those buttons and the box, and now we can play with them all we want.

Finally, around 11 o’clock the other night, she started in on the mouse/bug-nest-filled drawers of a secretary in the parlor. What she didn’t throw out due to the unruly nastiness was a treasure trove of information. Snapshots of my aunt growing up at Sunshine in the 40s, my great-grandfather’s sketch of the land and division of fields or soil types, a list of furniture, where it came from and who it would go to, and lots of letters. Back then you know people wrote letters all the dang time, just daily communication.

Here’s our family history, all right here, carefully squirreled away for future generations, mice and rats–Sunshine the time capsule.

cotton pickin’ 2

yesterday we actually got to ride with J and T as they picked the rest of the field behind sunshine, the part they call “Alf’s cut” (as it’s next to Alf’s house, the last caretaker living on the place). we met all their dogs including M’s new puppy, Carla who was, admittedly the cutest, but Charlie May is more along the lines of what mom wants in a dog (a beagle). Charlie May rode in the picker with T and watched for rabbits.

The picker goes along the rows (it’s got sensors to guide itself) pressing the plants between the picker’s guides. Inside, a collection of wheels whirring this way and that actually pick the cotton and air sucks it all up (probably disposing of some of the debris that got picked) into the back. The picker doesn’t get the bolls down low on a plant which are usually the best anyway. This year, however, with our month of rain right when most of the cotton bolls should’ve been opening, the bolls that opened earliest (and are usually the best quality as they’ve fluffed out nicely by the time they’re picked) have fallen to the ground already and half the bolls didn’t even open, causing the the seeds to sprout and the cotton to rot. all in all, they’re getting a mere bale to an acre right now (500 lbs = bale) where they usually get 2 or 3 (i think that’s right).

Once we were done picking Alf’s cut, i hopped off and walked back over to the house, but mom, rode on to the next field up the road and picked cotton until after B brought them some lunch. J says she picked 20 or 30 acres, not bad. we’ve still got the field across the road to go (they sprayed it with defoliator just a few days ago

As for what we hand-picked a few days ago, that is sitting on the dining room table (:

cotton pickin’

See, here’s all we picked last night, we stayed out late pickin’ with flashlights until nearly 10. now we’re bout to start on this bit here, hope to get it done by thursday afternoon when the rain comes.

yep, you got it, in order to raise a little money for the farm, mom and i have hired ourselves out to Heurkamps to help them get as much as possible from this year’s crop. because those combines don’t really get it like hand-pickin does.

luckily it’s been beautiful weather for picking.

We are definitely thinking of adding this to the list of activities for the Resort. But we’re talking business here, all day in the field with a break for lunch.

Noxubee exploration 1

(i want to write a more detailed informative post on the subject of these small towns but for now let me get the adventure part down)

SATURDAY
Noxubee Co. has 3 main towns, Shuqualak, Macon and Brooksville, all right in a row along the railroad, about 10 miles apart. Macon, of course!, is the county seat, and has the most going for it, but by the looks of it Brooksville and Shuqualak (pronounce it like “Shuga-lock”) were once doing pretty well for themselves too. I long to’ve seen these towns in their heyday, to’ve known the bustle of the streets, the coming and going of trains, and the prospering of businesses.

on flickr i’ve documented my afternoon’s adventure, one of those unplanned adventures beginning with a desire to sit on top of Nanih Waiya indian mound (Choctaw).

start here:

lovely gray weather

i forget how beautiful this time of year is, even IN the rain, although i prefer DRY skies–even if it’s still gray–for the outdoor walks over the field and through the wood that this weather inspires in me. today i got some good walking in (it involves me getting another vehicle stuck in the mud), at least 4 or 5 miles under cool gray skies. then my neighbor stopped and offered me a ride; Rosetta, as in Sister Rosetta goes before us…

and though the rains have caused the cotton to rot in the fields, and the soybeans to die, the cold to creep in the windows and even life itself seems pretty gray right now, there are a few bright spots:

have to say, God’s got one hell of an eye for beauty. I just ordered some crocuses to bring us a little purple in February, and there’s already daffodils, narcissus and snowdrops for March, all well before the pecan trees start putting on their leaves.

sweet potatoes

cooked up my first homegrown sweet potatoes this morning, they tasted like, well, sweet potatoes! As i think i said before, Felder had me worried that my sweet potatoes might be rotting in the ground with all this rain, but i was concerned because Barbara Damrosch (author of the Garden Primer) said to pull em up when the leaves were dying and mine weren’t. so i compromised and pulled up one plant in the garden the check. They were a little small but there were plenty of tubers in there and it took some digging to get them all out (while trying not to disturb the nearby plants). The vines spread out every which way and, i discovered, sometimes put down roots which can form into more potatoes!

sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes which could have helped because, if you remember, my numerous attempts to grow potatoes failed completely. regular potatoes are in the solanaceae family, closely related to peppers and tomatoes, hence they share blights/diseases, but sweet potatoes are not actually potatoes, rather than a fruit off the roots of the plant they actually ARE the roots, enlarged and bulbous roots of a plant related to morning glories (just look at the leaves and flowers).

So, they grew! and i’ve left the others in the ground until the weather dries out a bit and hopefully the leaves too — maybe they’ll even get bigger!

california enlightenment

so, it was ages ago that i went to California, a whole month and a lifetime, but i want to post about RL’s garden! She has 3 beautiful high raised beds which are overflowing with onions (in bloom), chocolate mint (in the paths), carrots, corn, and, more importantly, rampant tomatoes. I wanted to know her secret but she shrugged her shoulders, after all, she’s probably been gone half the time. I was primarily interested in the labyrinth Aaron helped lay out, it’s huge, having at least 4 or 5 more rings than most of the labyrinths I’ve seen. “Big enough to be seen from google earth” was the goal and the accomplishment.

the first labyrinth i came across was in the floor of Chartres Cathedral on our family trip to Europe. The supposed origin of the labyrinth lies in Greek mythology, a maze to hold minotaurs and, much later, to star such characters as David Bowie. But in medieval times, the labyrinth symbolized a hard path to God (Wiki) with only one way to the center. This theological path to enlightenment and peace however hard is not misleading. there are no wrong turns, just patience, dedication to the cause. trust me, it takes some serious dedication to get to the center of some–

like the one at K and RL’s place. I couldn’t help but wonder if the tires of edible plants were intended as a distraction on this meditative path to peace, because i did not make it to the center without stopping to pick and eat arugula seeds (or mustard?), mint leaves, check out the turnips and fix rocks that had strayed from the lines. In short, i couldn’t hold any sort of concentration on my path–but what a precise analogy to my life! emily: easily distracted from enlightenment.

those plants in the tires (also sunflowers growing tall out of a few!), brings me back to RL’s garden. the turnips were big, the harvested onions were beautiful and the extra bounty bloomed elegantly where they stood. the corn was over but the stalks still rose among those allium blooms, and tomatoes of various varieties poured over both sides of every bed, toppling their stakes with their vigor, heavy with foliage and green tomatoes (i later found the ripe tomatoes hiding beneath the hanging limbs). odd tomatoes (similar to my volunteers), squashes and pumpkins grew where the compost bin had last stood (volunteered) and they too grew in profusion.

For dinner that night we pulled a few small carrots, turnips, and i forget what else for roasted vegetables over the fire (foil packets, the boy scout way), it rained (this was when the rain started for me, that wierd rainy weekend in california was also the start of the rain back at sunshine and it hasn’t stopped yet!!) but the we sheltered the fire pit just enough to roast our corn and salmon (caught that on fire actually) too. afterwards? s’mores. it’s been a long time since i’ve had SUCH a fun time at dinner! i mean, i usually have fun but that evening was particularly special.

the next morning was sunny and i wandered around under the sonoma sky gathering seeds, particularly lots of fennel which grows wild (and, again, profusely) by the road there–what was this??! oh yeah, california.

fall

Fall is, hands down my favorite season. The leaves started coming down here at Sunshine well over a month ago (pecan trees: they’re the last trees to get their leaves in the spring and the first to lose them in the fall), and once the rain started in september, everything else has just fallen to bits. Between the rain and my being out of town i’ve barely had a chance to get some collards in the ground (an experiment at least) and pick the last 2 cucumbers, the last of the okra, and butterbeans (Yaqui helped with that). The garden now looks like a garden in fall, wind and rain battered, usually under a gray sky.

besides a few green tomatoes that may remain just that, there is a little harvesting left to do:

i don’t know whether to pull up my sweet potatoes… felder says yes before they rot in the rain (after 3 weeks of rain they would’ve been gone already?) but Barbara Damrosch says wait til the leaves are drying up or at least turning yellow. because of the rain it’s all still very lush and green and even still flowering!

this cantaloupe was hiding under the tall grass just outside a bed. turns out that volunteer plant in the tomato bed was not cucumber/zucchini! if i’d only known it was cantaloupe i would’ve tended it better and not eaten a very small one (weird).