Fall!

While we were away for nine days in Colombia, the rains happened and everything grew. The vegetable garden we rely on is covered with weeds threatening to overwhelm the seedlings I had left in pristine mulched rows and mounds. The lawn needed cutting.

After two days of recovering from Montezuma's revenge, doing all the trip laundry, tending to hundreds of e-mails and family needs and reassuring the dog, I am back! Everyone in Florida is excited that there is going to be a cold front coming through tonight (they say). After the extreme heat and humidity in Colombia, it already seems cool to me.

The giant cosmos have started to bloom and the hummingbirds have left and soon the chimney swifts will be on their way and we will not hear their twitter until next spring. I see a few love bugs beginning to mass for their fall invasion. We need to put up our bird feeders for the returning migrants.

I left the automatic watering on for the vegetable garden and I see that the sweet potatoes are lush and there is enough eggplant to feed an army. The broccoli and collards I planted before I left are doing well, and even the carrots and peas are pushing up through the weeds. The summer zinnias have repopulated themselves from dropped seed heads and I must transplant them to more suitable places in planters I have next to the front door. The lettuce in the raised beds are almost big enough to pick. Deer tongue and black seeded simpson have grown well, but it was obviously too hot for the rest of the mesclun to germinate. The beans have been attacked by the grasshoppers but they will recover. Wild red sage grows rampantly everywhere, even in the vegetable garden. I hate to take it out because it is such a butterfly attractor and I can love even weeding when I am surrounded by those huge tiger swallowtails and gulf fritillaries and monarchs and all the others. I love seeing the queen butterfly caterpillars eating away at the milkweed. So, I cannot remove these plants, not yet!

The compost pile is now perfect, sweet and crumbly brown, and I can dig out just what I need to spread around the vegetables. Just next to the compost pile is our old time friend, the giant gopher tortoise who comes out and hisses when I am out there sweating in the garden. And the cows come to the fence hoping for some collard leaves or a scratch on the head.

But the BEST was the orchids that live in the swimming pool enclosure and are all in glorious bloom.

Now that we have a sniff of cool weather, we have so much to do outside. The asparagus bed, and the roses, and the wild place outside the screen porch. They all need tending. All potential!

Colombia

Here is the best house in a village in the Sierra Nevada of Colombia. Look carefully and you can see the baby sleeping on a cot, dogs near by. I was so charmed by the amazing saturated colors of the houses in the cities and the villages. It was in this village that the women had a business of making wallets and bags out of recycled potato chip bags. (I hear they sell for big bucks in a boutique in Miami)

We went on a nine day trip to Colombia. People were surprised that we would go to this known dangerous place. We went to do the work of The Nature Conservancy, a huge non-profit organization that buys land, or the rights to it, all over the globe. The idea is to preserve natural spaces, and depending on the place, this means that the Conservancy protects land, forests, water, and indigenous peoples.

In Colombia, we were here to partner with this country on a program to protect water. The Colombians need to have clean water for fisheries and for drinking. We North Americans cannot imagine what it means not to have clean water because we think of it as a given. In the bay of Cartagena, the water is so polluted, it looks gray. One wonders about the fish they catch there. The lobster fisheries are all but dead, coral reefs are bleached, the forests are decimated for the most part. "Green" is not in vogue here in Colombia.

In the Sierra Nevada of Colombia, miles north of Cartagena, there are four indigenous peoples living on various levels of the mountains. Each of these tribes has a population of twenty thousand, give or take, and they speak different languages. We spoke to a leader from the Gogi community. This was a short brown man with long wavy hair who wore a compact straw hat and loose linen clothes. He seemed completely at ease with this bunch of gringo tourists. I immediately loved him.

His people live simply; they are self sustaining. They believe that people on earth must compensate for the damage they do to nature. So they, the Gogis make compensation in the way of ceremonial stones they place here and there. The Nature Conservancy employs anthropologists to help us understand these indigenous people, because, after all, it is these people who are so important to conserving nature (if we can only listen)

We are working together. It was an amazing time and I will be forever changed for it.

If you want to see more photos, let me know. You can comment.

My life in the Country

It has been a bad patch lately what with having to do the hour and a half commute into town for this and that. But, when we are home here it is our habit to walk out before breakfast the even mile to the mail box to get the papers. There is always a changing landscape, always something to see along the route.

Today, Andy discovered a small box turtle in the middle of the sandy track. I picked him up and placed him on route to going back into the swamp. We could hear the red shouldered hawks, hunting as a pair and cranes in the distance. The regular cardinals and warblers were in their usual places along the road, and today we saw the deer we know looking at us and then bounding off into the thicket showing us their friendly white behinds.

Just at dawn it isn't that hot, but we are longing for the change in the weather that each fall eventually makes us energetic about gardening and cutting wood for the winter. The fall garden is coming along. The lettuces, beans, broccoli and peas are up. I can just about see the carrots emerging. While working in the vegetable garden this morning I have never seen so many butterflies! They are attracted to the red sage and milkweed I left when I earlier did such an aggressive weeding. The weeds, particularly the wandering jew and pennywort keep on emerging and I keep on covering them with heavy hay. Our picnic table and the wooden boards on the garden fence are now festooned with butterfly chrysalises. I check them daily, hoping to see the instant those butterflies emerge.

Tomorrow we are going off for a week in Colombia to look at rain forests. It is supposed to rain here, but just to be safe I have my water timer on in the vegetable garden. The orchids will have to adapt, the dog is going to stay with her special friends.

Today is my daughter's birthday! I am glad that I am not now in the throes of labor, but I am so glad I once was on this very day. It was worth it! How amazing it has been to be the mother to this child, the daughter under my heart.

So, I am off to birding in Colombia for eight days.

Becoming Old

While driving from St. Pete to Dade City early this morning in a driving rain I realized that my shoulders were hurting from the strain of trying to see in the dark, navigating carefully on the slick interstate. I thought of the last decade of my life and how many life-changing events there have been in the last ten years.

On my sixtieth birthday our whole family gathered for a wonderful frolic in south England in a rented manor house. This was a few months before 9/11, and it was a wonderful and carefree two weeks. Since then, we have had national upheavals of a major kind, and family changes: a divorce, two marriages, three more grandchildren born, another split, many changes. My husband and I retired from many years of work and we saw our fortunes diminish in the recession. We rejoiced in the election of Obama and believed that change was coming.

I am gleeful with my life in retirement! I have the time to pursue my artistic bent. I work all the time making quilts, painting, making pottery and writing. My memoir about my thirty-five years of teaching was recently published. I volunteer. I am making a network here in my new community. I am a devoted gardener and have already put in the fall vegetable garden. My husband spends time on the property and makes furniture and volunteers as the chair of The Nature Conservancy in Florida. We work on our land, fixing fences, mowing, removing the soda apples- those invasive plants we have agreed to get rid of since our land is in a conservation trust for Florida.

When we go to the city, where we have a lovely town house, there is nothing to do except water the cacti. When we lived there full time, we were working at our intense jobs, keeping going from day to day. Now, when we infrequently go there it is to see friends, attend board meetings, volunteer at our grandson's school. Our daughter and her son and my sister who live there in St. Pete keep us going each week.

But it is here on the ranch where we live that our hearts are. Quincy, our grandson who visits often, calls it his 'other house', and indeed, he has his own room and toys here. He knows where everything is and he's comfortable with everything. And to me, this is heaven, where I go out each day to look at the birds and the wild flowers and check the level of water in the swamp. And, at night I look at the bats flying and the magnificent stars that keep me humble. Every day is a new adventure and I feel such wonder and thankfulness that I could be here in this peaceable kingdom. I love sharing it with Quincy.

But when we go to our town house in the city, it seems pretty thin soup, though we love to see our friends. Everyone needs to have a purpose. At home here on the ranch we have a purpose of doing the daily ranch chores, making our art, community work, work for Florida. And how long can this last? (I am thinking twenty years.)

So, getting old is not so easy! Your kids never think of you as anything but the energetic people they used to know.

What continues throughout life are the agonizing questions that can have no answer.

End of Summer

The huge poke weeds are in bloom with lovely white jiggly blossoms that will then turn into shiny black berries beloved by the backyard birds. The season is changing slowly into fall. Though it still hits ninety degrees in the middle of the day, evenings are cooler.

Truth be told, it's beastly hot to do any garden work, but we know we must get the vegetable garden in by around labor day in these parts of Central Florida or we'll be caught by the January freeze. I have learned to plant lots of things that can stand a light frost - broccoli, collards, peas, lettuce, kale, chard and carrots. The left over peppers, tomatoes and eggplant from summer die dramatically at the first hint of freeze.

Last week we sweated out there in the garden, weeding, restapling the deer fence that had been torn down by the heavy morning glories, (a mistake!) and mulching with hay and grass clippings. A few days later, I put the collard and broccoli seedlings into holes I poked in the thick mulch. For the row crops, I hoed a thin strip of mulch away to sow the seeds. Later, as the plants emerge, I will add compost and more mulch. After renewing them with a few bags of new potting soil the raised salad beds have been planted with lettuces, chard and celery. In this heat I have devised a cover for them made out of old black screening that had once been panels over the pool but had rips. Still good enough for the garden. (Don't waste anything!)

I used to want at the start of gardening season to have a freshly tilled new area. Straight rows, no weeds in sight. Tidy. Problem with this was that the weeds very rapidly took over! The soil wasn't getting any better and it was hard to keep the garden watered since the soil was open to the blistering sun and beating rain.

I happened to read a book called "Lasagna Gardening". Talk about an epiphany! Naturally, things fall from above: rain, leaves, pine needles, dust, sunshine, blessings. Earth wants to be covered like a Muslim woman. This works!

I started out with my weed patch, kind of daunting as a prospective place to grow food. I took the always voluminous piles of newspapers and covered the whole garden with thicknesses of them, hosed everything down, covered it with anything I could find in the way of mulch - sawdust from the furniture studio, hay from a neighbor, mulch from a tree we had cut down and shredded. After a few weeks I put in the vegetable garden, poking holes in the mulch and noticing that worms had arrived in force.

That's history! Now, I just have to put mulch on the weeds as they sprout. The armadillos and deer were a major problem for a few years. I tried all kinds of dried pee from various predatory animals (bought at some cost from garden products catalogs), and sprays, and tying soap on stakes. What ultimately worked was that my husband installed a proper fence that was buried more than a foot deep, and I found that his old neckties fluttering from a wire above the fence scared the deer away. (They now eat the roses!)

It's important to rotate the planting of your vegetables from place to place in the garden with each new season. I keep notes on what was planted where, so I know to get the tomatoes in a bed they have not seen in a couple of years. Another tip: beans and peas do very much better if you put bean inoculant in the rows as you plant the seeds. You can get this at any of the seed companies.

So, I am smug with those vegetables like new born kids. You never know! Last spring I bought twenty seeds of a special heirloom tomato cultivar. I planted them in little seed starting pots and watered them with my sweat. Later, I planted them in the garden. Immediately, the tomato hornworms attacked, eating all the vines down to sticks. The rest of the modern robust tomatoes did fine by Florida standards. Much later, I noticed that my husband's garden of shrubs had a volunteer tomato plant, more robust than any tomato of the season. Throughout the wiltingly hot summer, this tomato plant thrived on neglect and set many fruits. This brave tomato must have grown from a seed from the compost we put on the shrubs. Our kitchen bowl is still full of these funny looking heirloom tomatoes and they are a daily addition to the salad.

Being here, out in the boonies, is the greatest gift. Growing stuff, vegetables and flowers, admiring the wild flowers so prolific right now, watching the swamp fill and seeing otters and ibis and alligators and deer every day. Quincy, our four year old grandson, comes often. He's getting to know the territory, riding his bike way up the road, looking for the butterfly chrysalises and tree frogs.

Time to go look for the bats.