FLYING WHALE STUDIOS
  • Home
  • News
    • About
    • Contact
  • Schedules
  • Galleries
    • Our Better Angels
    • Good Housekeeping
    • Deborah and Robert
    • Archive
    • Design >
      • American Landmark Festivals
      • Geneva Music Festival
      • Seneca Community Players
      • Darwin
      • Geneva High School Drama Club
      • Smith Opera House
      • FWS
      • Miscellaneous
  • Blog
  • Mailing List
  • Purchase

Ideas to chew on

7/26/2012

0 Comments

 
Our daylight hours have been filled picking, preserving — and eating! — beans, herbs, Swiss chard and summer squash, but my evening hours have been spent devouring books about colonial gardening methods, urban agriculture and global water shortages.

Not of my own choosing, mind you. Kevin has been plying me with stealth gifts from the library.

He’ll hear a radio interview or read a review and as quickly as the interlibrary loan system can deliver it, a new tome will arrive. “You should read this,” he’ll say. “And then tell me about it.”

(This is my husband’s standard operating procedure. If I read the highlights aloud and synthesize the message, it frees him up to read more rewarding works by Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.)

First to arrive was “The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century” by Alex Prud’homme. It’s a fascinating treatise on our most valued resource — one that’s made me treasure all the more our abundance of fresh, clean water.

Then came “Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way: 18th-Century Methods for Today’s Organic Gardeners” by Wesley Greene. More of a take-notes reference guide, it’s taught me interesting techniques for extending the growing season. I particularly appreciated a frost-protection apparatus that gets reused as a cucumber trellis.

But the latest, “The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities” by Will Allen, I tore through in two days. (It was too hot to work outside.)

Since 1993, Allen has been transforming a three-acre inner city plot in Milwaukee into the hub of an urban agricultural advocacy center that champions a return to growing our own food — no matter who we are and where we live. The neglected florist nursery he purchased nearly 20 years ago is now home to bio-energy heated greenhouses that produce greens, vegetables and sprouts year round, as well as a commercial composting operation and an apiary. The urban farm also raises fish, worms, chicken, turkeys, ducks and goats.

Allen’s Growing Power complex supplies all this bounty to its own store, area farm markets, restaurants and a modified CSA program — all while offering youth internships and adult workshops on a wide variety of topics, from composting to cooking.

In recent years, Allen has gained national recognition for his work with youth and marginalized communities.

His is an inspirational story, but what I enjoyed most were the lessons he gains and imparts through growing food. Beyond the obvious health benefits, the process fosters patience, perseverance and a “can-do” attitude — characteristics he considers invaluable for all aspects of life.

Definitely food for thought.
0 Comments

A long,soaking rain would be so much less work

7/19/2012

0 Comments

 
A fellow gardener quipped that his plants are loving this weather — as long as he keeps them soaked.

How true!

We decided last year after a four-week spell without rain that left some of our charges stressed and fruitless that we couldn’t let fear of an outrageously high water bill keep us from watering. So, we have two long hoses — one for the front yard; one for the back — that trickle day in and day out. Every four to eight hours, they get moved. But not until the lucky recipient is surrounded by thoroughly damp soil.

Where we can, we create zones so multiple plants can benefit from a single drip session.

The fruit trees and tomatoes get the most attention. We can’t afford to lose the young trees, and plucking off baby tomatoes suffering from blossom-end rot breaks my heart.

But with plenty of mulch and high calcium supplements, we’ve staved off the worst of it this season. We lost only a handful of tomato sets before we got the hose rotation down, and so far, the distressed yearling pear tree is staying with us through sheer force of will.

Most of the vegetables have had to make due with gray water saved from doing dishes in the kitchen sink. We collect the hot, sudsy water in pails and let it cool before lugging it over to whoever needs it most.

As I haul the life-giving refreshment bucketful by bucketful, I wonder what my great-grandmother would think. She left Poland as a teenager because she didn’t want to spend her life lugging water out to the men in the fields!

“I hit the basil this morning,” my husband, Kevin, will call after my retreating back and snap me back to the present.

So I’ll head instead to the freshly transplanted cole crops — young, tender bok choy, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower that have staved off predation from the four-footed neighborhood nibbler, thanks to our new citrus oil spray.


When the buckets are empty, I check elsewhere to see who should be next in line.

The beans and squash are so bushy they create their own shade, and the grapes seem more disturbed by the ravages of Japanese beetles than the lack of water.

The peppers actually are loving this weather — especially the Asian and South American varieties that thrive in this heat.

(But I do hit them with gray water about once a week.)
0 Comments

How much broccoli ...

7/12/2012

0 Comments

 
Birds... Squirrels... Beetles...

Critters of all shapes and sizes are after our bounty.

A week ago, before we tossed the netting over the blueberry bushes, my husband, Kevin, watched out the kitchen window as a robin landed on a nearby fence, assessed the ripening fruit and then swooped through the air and snatched a blue beauty mid-flight before landing in the neighbor’s yard to savor the spoils.
A few days after that, Kevin called my attention to a squirrel rattling around among the leaves before leaping to the ground and scampering next door with an unripened peach clutched in his jaws. Then we witnessed him fight over the plunder with a bushy tailed competitor.

I couldn’t tell you which one finally made off with the loot — but I know it wasn’t either of us!

And for days now, we’ve been on constant Japanese beetle patrol.

The shiny metallic pests have been so thick on the grape leaves that we gave up crushing them and have started plunging them into soapy water baths. One bucket the other day had so many carcasses floating in it, I felt as if we were working on a recipe for beetle soup.

... And now ... we have our very own woodchuck.

We’re not sure where it lives. But we do know what it eats.

Kevin first spied it ambling along the pathway between the raised beds, as cool as a cucumber.

We convinced ourselves, in that annoyingly, irrepressibly naive way we have, that maybe he was just passing through.

Nope. Not a chance.

Because just a few mornings later, while I was watering, I noticed some of the buttercrunch lettuce had been munched — on both sides of the mesclun that has bolted. And in the next bed, some of the broccoli on its way to providing a second crop of sideshoots had been shorn of its leaves.

Trouble is, I’d used up the squirrel deterrent on the strawberries and blueberries last month, so I hurried to the computer for a fresh batch. A little research led me to a different formula that specifically targets groundhogs with a blend of citrus and mint oils that’s said to be far better smelling than sulfur-based concoctions. The potion supposedly repels the beasts by creating a burning sensation in their mouths.

It’s certainly worth a try.

So, a ready-to-spray bottle is speeding on its way to us right now.

I just hope all these critters have left something in the garden to use it on by the time it gets here!
0 Comments

At peace in the garden

7/5/2012

0 Comments

 
I gain peace and satisfaction from our garden.

Sore muscles, dehydration headaches and dirty knees, too, of course. But, it’s the peace and satisfaction that keep me coming back.

There’s just something about the whole process that grounds me, brings me back to earth and gives me a sense of place.

Even when my to-do list is long, each little task accomplished is meaningful. I feel afterward as if I’ve done something — even if it’s just mulching at the base of a butterfly bush.

A co-worker teased me after I wrote about doing the happy dance when the peas were first up, but then shared how excited she became when blooming flowers brought cheerful color to her own verdant oasis.

I understood her joy.

It’s these small moments that make gardening less of a chore and more of a delight.
• Fireflies winking and twinkling all over the property — front and back.
• Soft, humus enriched soil falling through my fingers as I sprinkle it over newly planted seeds.
• Black raspberries ripening in full sets — rolling into a quart basket as quick as my thumb can nudge them in.
• Marigolds blooming away in vibrant yellows, oranges and burgundies — sometimes on the same plant.
• Grape clusters peeking out from behind broad leaves — swelling in the sun.
A longtime reader sent me a link last month to an article about the mental health benefits of gardening. Scientific studies are showing that the happiness we derive from digging in the dirt isn’t all in our heads.

Contact with a soil bacterium — mycobacterium vaccae — actually triggers the release of serotonin in our systems. This natural anti-depressant also enhances  immunity, making us feel better mentally and physically.

Another study has shown that we get a jolt of dopamine when we harvest fruits and vegetables, especially berries. It’s a throwback to our hunter-gatherer days, when that flush of mild euphoria reenforced the positive action of finding food.
So, it’s no wonder when the chaos of 21st century life seems like more than I can handle, all I want to do is go “play in the garden.”

Best of all, I have a husband who joins me there — where it’s peaceful and satisfying.
0 Comments

    Kevin & Mary Schoonover

    In addition to art, Mary and Kevin are turning their front lawn into an edible landscape garden.

    Mary's "Front & Center" thoughts appear in purple; Kevin's are in blue.

    Archives

    May 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    August 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012

    Categories

    All
    Front & Center
    Front & Center

    RSS Feed

More


Show Schedule

Exhibition Schedule

About Us

Purchase


Good Housekeeping

Our Better Angels

Archive



Picture

COPYRIGHT © 2020    l    143 WILLIAM ST. GENEVA NY 14456    l    315-719-1499    l    ​FLYINGWHALESTUDIOS1@GMAIL.COM