How many tomato seedlings could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck your fucking garden into the trash?

orchid in my mothers kitchen
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Last night I saw the groundhog. You know, that could either be a really great opening line to a bad horror flick or the beginning of the long and complex tale of a hippie's spiritual awakening on too much bad mescaline but in actual fact it is, in fact, a simple statement of fact. After consultation with my son and a half heard radio gardening program I caught parts of driving back from my mother's, I have decided that the huge groundhog who lives under the scary, collapsing shed in the way back of my yard is the miscreant who has been eating my tomatoes and lettuces. Yesterday evening I was out on the deck with S, drinking beer and commiserating about how large portions of both of our lives have essentially turned to pure-D shit in just the twinkling of an eye and there, back in the back of the yard, was the groundhog. He was heading towards the garden, observed with interest by the neighbor dogs (my dogs, alas, are much more interested in whether some other dog is going to walk down the street in front of their house so they can go completely berserk than in protecting my food supply from marauding rodents.) I would have gone and gotten the BB gun from the coat closet but a) I don't know if it's loaded and b) I don't know where the BBs are, if we even have any BBs, which we may well not and c) I probably am not at heart tough or country or starving enough to actually shoot something cute and furry and d) let's face it: I don't know how to load the BB gun or fire it or turn it on or, actually, do anything with it except either look kind of tough if you think girls with guns are cute and/or club something. Groundhogs are immune to my cuteness factor (why should they be an exception to the general rule?) and I really don't want to get close enough to a groundhog (they have serious teeth and claws and yikes, help) to club him with a BB gun. Fortunately, the groundhog feels the same way about me and so he split when I started running down the steps into the dog yard, shouting and brandishing a large rock; the groundhog doesn't know, yet, that my aim with a rock is uncertain at best and actually totally nonexistent at that distance, like, it would probably have fallen some 20 feet short. Then he could have sneered at me. We haven't gotten to the sneering part of our relationship yet but something tells me that we will, alas, we will.

Yardwork

Well, I just weed whacked almost all of the dog's part of the yard. The dogs have a lot of the yard and my arms are tired and also, I'm vibrating. I feel like I may be vibrating for some time. I'm out of weed whacker cord too. My ex husband told me some arcane tale one time about using steel guitar strings on a weed whacker which, apparently, turns it into a deadly weapon nothing can withstand, but that sounds like more whacking strength than I really need. I'm thinking about it though, while I'm sitting here putting off going to Lowes, where I also need to buy a nut for the bolt which holds on, or, rather, held on, the left front wheel of the lawnmower. I swear, I try to get things accomplished but the world takes great pleasure in stopping me halfway. The lawnmower seems to actually need all four wheels - go figure. Yet another high school geometry lesson proved useless.

Also, I hired a very cute guy to rototill me up a vegetable garden and that was purely awesome. It cost me very slightly more than it would have to rent a rototiller and I didn't have to do anything except chat with this adorable hippie guy, who, it turns out, lives next door to my friends J & K. "Oh hey!" I said happily, "I've photographed your chickens!" "Far out," he said, and it struck me that I had perhaps stumbled across the perfect total Asheville conversation. Now I have a vegetable garden - well, I have a large patch of dirt somewhat dauntingly far away from my house that will soon be a vegetable garden. I dragged some landscape timbers out there to edge it and it all looks a bit forlorn still but soon enough there will be zucchini and beans and corn and whatever other oddities I pick up next week at the Herb Fair. I'm excited. I've missed having a garden. So I called my mother and told her I want 300 feet of hose for my birthday (and/or this black skirt and embroidered shirt I tried on yesterday afternoon at that shop I love so on Biltmore Avenue.) "300 feet of hose tied up with a pink ribbon," said my mother. "Okay. Got it."

Bat Cave Garlic

fog countryside
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

I went up to Bat Cave today to visit my friends D & A, and their kids, N the prodigal son & R. It was a gray, misty, rainy day and cold up there on the mountain, where the leaves are just starting to turn. I took my brother, because ever since my brother read this article, he's been obsessed with the idea of becoming an organic gourmet garlic farmer himself, and this idea involved using my backyard as the starter farm. He came over on Friday and looked at my sad excuse for a vegetable garden, which I abandoned to weeds a while back and listened to me explain my vision for the backyard, which involves raised beds which in turn involve a lot of money and an obscene amount of work. "Lot of work," he said dubiously, and I agreed. I don't have that kind of energy for gardening this time of year: I get gardening energy in about March and it begins dwindling in June, only to peter out altogether by August when the weeds get fierce and I never want to see another goddamned green bean again anyway. Garlic, though, must be planted in the fall, thus keeping vampires at bay throughout the wintry months and a good thing too.

Then I bethought myself of my Bat Cave friends, and their large well established garden, so we went on up the mountain today to check it out. Worked like a charm: I am patting myself on the back with the simple joy of the successful matchmaker. Now D & A will have a frequent visitor; my brother B will have somewhere else to go on his motorcycle, and in a few months, we'll all have enough garlic for, well, pretty much anything that requires gigantic amounts of garlic. I knew they would all get along, with visions of garlic millions dancing in their heads, and soon, Bat Cave Garlic will be a reality. A reality with a really great name; I've already got the logo designed in my head.

A Trip to Bat Cave

So my friend D is happily ensconced in her incredibly beautiful new house perched snugly at the top of a mountain in Bat Cave and S and N and I drove up there yesterday to visit her. On the way back we stopped to take pictures of kudzu and cows, since there were plenty of both, although not, sadly, in combination. We rejected some brown and black cows as being not photogenic enough, but these spotted cows are perfectly glamourous and in fact enough to make a Barbizon painter turn faint and green with envy. Kudzu always looks like monsters to me; as if the monsters had been ambling along through the valleys and suddenly been caught up by the vines and stuck there, helpless in a sea of green. Either monsters or fairy tale castles, vistas from another world: things we wouldn't know were there at all until the kudzu captured them for a summer.

D's house is spectacular. It's posh without being ostentatious, homey without being shabby - it reconciles all those good things effortlessly and even has a tiny, wonderful guesthouse and a vegetable garden which the previous owners left fully running along complete with mountains of tomatos and squash and greasy beans. There's a big open field above her and a tiny creek running alongside and woods all around; a dirt road, a patch of lawn and really, what more do you need? I was overcome with jealousy but only briefly; I did my country living time in Maryland and while I enjoyed it, I don't want to go back. I like living near the city, on a bus line, close enough where I can get downtown in a heartbeat and yet still have my big garden. I need people around me or I start to get way too introverted; it doesn't take much for me to forget how to talk to people (shut UP. You should see me when I've actually been alone for days and days and you could tell the difference then.) and get really strange.

Granted my garden is not as good as D's, but then clearly I am much lazier than the people who used to own D's house. I'm great in the spring, but by the time July rolls around I've kind of lost interest, and by August I really can't be bothered. Oh well, you can't change your nature, and mine is just suited to the city, I think, But I'm delighted D is here, with her parrot and guinea pigs and bunnies (the female bunny lives in a big pen with 3 or 4 male guinea pigs who are constantly humping her; she takes it with equanimity and D says so far there have been no hideous mutant guinea rabbits resulting) her salamander and cat and little dog Cookie. I have full intentions of spending a lot of time out there in the country now myself, now that she's here and I can go anytime I please, oh yeah.

A Book Thing

This is going to be one of those posts where I talk about books, which posts I know are never very popular, but tough skivvies, people, because books are what I feel like discussing. So don't be fooled by the sunflower, which is just there to add, you know, a bit of visual interest and also because I am so deeply enamoured of that particular peachish shade of virtually orange where the pink and yellow start to melt together. All the sunflowers in my garden are blooming right now, which is a) awesome because it always is, yet b) sucks because I was hoping they would all bloom the first weekend in August when I have a bunch of people coming to my house and c) is downright peculiar, because in an effort to prolong the blooming season, I planted them all at different times over the course of about 4 weeks.

But. Wait. Books. A couple of weeks ago I was in the downtown library, rushing as always because I have this bad habit of parking in the illegal 15 minute loading zone out front and I grabbed a book at random off the shelf called The Chymical Wedding. I am prone to fits of alchemy and I even know what the hell a chymical wedding is, so I thought, okay, that looks cool. The downtown library, unlike the West Asheville library, is not organized by genre, which I applaud in general as being less ghettoizing, but it does mean that you really don't know what you're getting, whereas in the West Asheville library you can (and I do) just go straight to the fantasy/sf section and stand there glumly for a bit because you hate Anne McCaffrey. Anyhow I took The Chymical Wedding home and discovered. . . that I'd already read it. Of all the books in the library, and so on.

I barely remember it, and I don't know when I read it, but I know that I did. So because I have this Zen Therapist I decided that this odd finding of the book was Meaningful (it's kind of a Meaningful Book, if you know what I mean) and meant that I had to reread it. Which I am doing, and so far all it's doing is bugging the hell out of me, because what it seems to be, really, is a poor man's The Magus. Now The Magus blew my small mind and changed my life and generally freaked me out and radicalized me and sent me on a strange and lifelong path - I read it for the first time when I was about 17 and I've read it a bunch of times since. That may be because it's just way, way better than The Chymical Wedding which so far is about a poet whose wife had an affair which wigged him right out and sent him headlong into the country where he naturally has a friend who loaned him this faboo cottage (why don't I have friends with faboo cottages in the country, I ask you? And why is it that English poets always do?) where promptly he starts getting Green Man intimations and meets a strange gypsyish American babe and then there are flashbacks to 100 years ago and Tarot cards, because there are always Tarot cards and a sheila na gig on the church and so on and so forth and if I remember correctly there will be all kinds o' weird Corn God type bloody wickerish goings on in the next 300 pages or so. But then I am jaded. Still, I shall persevere.

In the middle of this book, because it's hard to stay deeply interested in it, I picked up a book I had gotten A for Christmas (also on a whim, just at Malaprops this time) and which she told me I had to read. The book is My Year of Meats, and you should go right out right now and read it. It isn't science fiction, relax, or rather don't, because it's not relaxing but instead intense and funny and incredible and will make you never want to eat meat again while you are cogitating on women's rights and the differences and similarities between the Japanese and the Americans and so on. I mean it is fucking brilliant. I mean it is great and not only is it all that but the author's note in the back is funny and cogent and made me think for a long time about the writing of novels, the intersections of fiction and meaning and politics and I am invigorated.

Because good fiction, boys and girls, like sunflowers, sometimes has this tendency to burst in your mind all at once despite the date it was planted. Good fiction, like The Magus, like My Year of Meats, has so much going on that it's going to take a while to simmer in the back of your brain. Which has all made me think about why I am so determined to write fiction even though I am old and have so far demonstrated no discernible staying power for the task. But maybe that will change, because I'm thinking now about those intersections of meaning and story, which are the cornerstones of good fiction, and really, you know, of good lives.

Avatar of Domesticity in the Year of the Albino Zucchini

The annual garden deluge is well under way. That means that the garden itself is deluged with morning glories and other less attractive weeds as well as horrible demon bugs of all descriptions, including, but not limited to, Japanese beetles, the showy, glamourous Gianni Versaces of the insect world. Morning glories and Japanese beetles are terribly similar, really, to the kind of thing found in the garment district: parasitic, decorative as hell, amusing and yet slowly killing their struggling hosts.

There are bugs everywhere. Something ate my eggplants; the rest of the squash are succumbing to what is either a horrible fungal infection or the depredations of the cucumber borer beetle and it's hot. Meanwhile, I am deluged with green beans, hot peppers (one pepper plant fell over, so burdened with fat jalapenos that it could no longer stand) and zucchini, which curiously this year are almost all albinos. Go figure. Squash is promiscuous and has weird offshot babies whenever you plant more than one variety but I can never resist in the spring. It's delicious anyway, even if M did refuse to finish his last night, saying "God, it's so, so squashy."

So in a fit of enthusiastic pioneer style old fashioned good womanhood (I have them occasionally. Stop snickering.) I decided to can the green beans. Apparently just canning green beans plain is inviting certain death unless you own a $80 pressure canner: I read the articles and the brochure that came with a box of Mason jars and it scared me right off. I don't want to drop dead of botulism or some other less savory doom just because I want fresh canned green beans next December. Instead, I pickled them. After that, having some pickling stuff left over and all those aforementioned jalapenos, I pickled some of those. That's an experiment. It may be a bad, bad one but I'm already half planning to give them away anyhow, sneaky evil me.

Pickling is a lengthy process. First you have to heed all the dire warnings and wash all the new jars and the lids and the rings and then you have to put them all in pots of hot water on the stove and simmer them. During this process some of the lids will inevitably weld themselves together in a touching display of affection and physical love which winds up being a royal pain in the ass. Why? You try separating them using tongs and you will know. Then you take the hot jars and you stuff them with your prepared (washed, trimmed, inspected closely) vegetables. This is also harder than it sounds, since raw green beans and peppers don't like being stuffed into small spaces and also the damn jars are hot as hell. Eventually, however, you get them all in there along with some garlic and a head of dill and some other stuff for the hot peppers and then you pour a boiling mixture of vinegar, salt and water over them. You will burn your fingers again putting the lids on, and it would be good to admire them then, because after processing, they won't look so bright and fresh, which is a pity, but I suppose it keeps you alive and that's all for the best. Processing, for the uninitiated, means that you put the sealed jars into a big huge pot of boiling water and you boil the everliving fuck out of them for as long as the recipe says, 10 or 15 minutes. They are supposed to be on a rack: I don't have a rack, so I use dishtowels in the pot to keep them from banging up against it or each other and cracking. That's why there's a huge pot of water and wet dishtowels on my stove right now, actually. In case you wondered. Then you pull them out with tongs and put them on a towel on the counter and moon over them with pride and if you have done everything right, they will eventually each make an extremely satisfying little Pop! noise which means that they are sealed.

So okay, the lawn isn't mowed, the living room isn't vacuumed, the dishes aren't done and the less said about the bathroom the better, but I have 6, count them, 6 beautiful glass jars of pickled things and I am proud. Proud, I tell you, with the kind of housewifely pride that made this country great. Now I can fulfill all my families needs for pickled green beans (none of us have ever actually tasted pickled green beans or pickled hot peppers, by the way, and the kids are showing a distressing lack of enthusiasm at the prospect) for the whole winter.