I've Been to the Mountain Top

The ancient Ocooch Mountains of southwestern Wisconsin, also known as the Driftless Region, were untouched by melting glaciers of the last ice age which flattened most of the midwest United States. Millions of years ago, before the ice age, the land was the bottom of an ancient sea, where hundreds of feet of limestone and sandstone deposits accumulated. The geology is seen in limestone outcroppings in hillside landscapes. Caves are common, often becoming temporary homes for early settlers.

The Driftless Region, surrounded by glaciated land, is an example of what most of the northern and eastern United States were like before the last ice age. It's this beautiful, fertile land my mom and her husband retired to several years ago.

They bought their 68-acre mountain home a few years before retiring, and spent many weekends and vacations renovating the spacious, light-filled house. Windows and siding were replaced, wallpaper was removed, flooring was replaced, a greenhouse was built, a high-efficiency, non-polluting wood burning stove and fireplace insert were installed, and painting was done, along with research and preparation for the active, highly self-sufficient, locavore (long before the term was coined,) retirement lifestyle they carefully planned and are now enjoying.

Their home is nestled in a clearing on the flattened top of an ancient, forested mountain.

This is a look into the forest as we climb the steep private road to the mountain top.
Mom and her husband are garden buddies and caretakers of their beautiful property. They have a huge vegetable garden on their mountain top, steps away from the deck off the kitchen and the greenhouse overlooking the back yard. They grow greens, melons, squash, broccoli, cucumbers, okra, brussels sprouts, herbs, all kinds of tomatoes, green beans, beets, sweet potatoes, peas, radishes, and lots of other delicious organic veggies. The garden is surrounded by chicken wire and low-voltage electric fencing to keep marauding wildlife out. Much has already been harvested and preserved for the winter months. Summer meals are a bounty of fresh organically-grown fruits and vegetables.
Besides the fruits growing in the garden, there are also grape arbors, berries, and fruit trees adding to the generous bounty of their fertile soil. Because of the elevation, their soil and water supply are free of chemical runoff and residue typical of most urban and agricultural land and water supplies.

Although it might be hard to tell the scale from this picture, this butternut squash peeking out from its trellised vine is huge - probably the biggest I've ever seen.A bowl of these delicious orange cherry tomatoes sits on a kitchen counter ready for snacking and salads.
Watermelons are ripening on their trellised vines.
Hopefully there will be enough remaining warm days for even more of the paste tomatoes to ripen.
I didn't make it down to their meadow this trip. It's in the meadow where a second garden grows potatoes, life-changing garlic, and onions.

A summer visit always means a care package of delicious produce to take home from the garden, and this trip was no exception.

It was here on a mountain top I spent my weekend enjoying the warmth and companionship of my mom and her husband/garden buddy. Their loving marriage is a true partnership, close friendship, and an inspiration to all who know and love them.

I had a wonderful, relaxing trip, and will share a bit more of it after playing catch up back here at home.

Our Garden of Dreams - Part II

This is a shot of the corn, damaged by a bad storm, and is the only picture we have of our huge vegetable garden. Behind the corn, you can see the honeysuckle bushes that made forts, houses, and secret hideaways when it was too hot to work in the garden. We cooked up all sorts of big fun in the cool, dark shade we found when crawling underneath them while exploring the nooks and crannies of our new home.

The photo with Part I of this story is a shot from Mom's garden in a new century. Now a great-grandma, she's still gardening big. She and her husband still grow a humongous vegetable garden every year. In fact they have not one, but two gardens. They grow about everything you can grow in a garden, and preserve the surplus, which lasts them until the next year's garden harvest. If you visit them in garden season, you'll get to enjoy the garden's bounty too, and even bring some wonderful veggies home with you. At Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, you're likely to get a care package of potatoes and life-changing garlic. (Life changing because I promise you've never had such wonderful garlic in your life, the phrase was coined by my dear husband's close friend whom we shared some with.)

I have no doubt a lifetime of healthy eating, including produce grown in her organic garden, and the good exercise she gets tending it all have contributed to her good health. How many 70-somethings do you know who take no prescription medications? Although Mom doesn't have as much energy as she used to and deals with a chronic back problem, she's one strong, healthy woman. I have no doubt her lifelong passion for organic vegetable gardening contributes to her enviable good health. And it all started a long time ago, back at the crooked little ranch with the huge yard where my parents first fulfilled their dream of gardening and home ownership.

We moved in May, and there was no time to waste getting ready for planting. I don't think we were even fully unpacked before work began on the garden. A compost enclosure was built, and the sod removed from the garden became the first contribution to our compost pile. A rototiller was rented, and the cultivation began. Huge piles of compost were spread evenly over the garden and tilled into the soil. After Dad tilled, we five children were charged with walking up and down and back and forth to break up clods of soil and pick up debris to throw into the compost bin. We all took turns with rakes, smoothing and evening the surface of the soil.

Dad built up sections of the garden into hills for certain plants, and raised rows for others. Mom inoculated peas and left them to soak while dozens of seed packages were torn open and planted in the warm, sweet spring soil. It took days to get the soil prepared and our garden planted.

I pretended I was a young pioneer girl living on the prairie, helping my parents plant the crops our family would need to see us through a harsh prairie winter. Our crooked little owner-built ranch was our rustic cabin (during the winter the plumbing worked about as well as a 19th-century log cabin's plumbing might have.)

We planted corn, beans, melons, squash, eggplant, spinach, beets, onions, chives, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, turnips, potatoes, strawberries, peppers, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. I learned about staking tomatoes, blanching cauliflower, and how wonderful a radish tasted; spicy, fresh, and crisp from the garden after brushing off the dirt. I learned about crop rotation and the hazards of pitchforks. (Someday I'll tell you about my encounter with the wrong end of a pitchfork.) And I learned to love vegetables that used to make me gag.

What do I remember of those days? I remember working on that garden alongside my parents and siblings, the smell of freshly-turned soil, and the excitement of sitting with Mom on winter Saturday afternoons, looking at catalogues with names like Burpee and Jung, and reading Organic Gardening and Mother Earth News while the other girls in the neighborhood were reading teen heart throb magazines and shopping at those huge new air-conditioned shopping centers they called "Malls."

I remember the excitement and wonder as tiny seedlings emerged from peat pots and flats on shelves lit with florescent bulbs and sunlight from the living room window. I remember corn stalks that grew taller than me, and watermelons and cantaloupes and fresh corn on the cob, and I remember that one year the corn all got ruined by smut. I think I was the first one to find smut, since I was always checking the corn to see if it was ready yet.

I remember how much we looked forward to the first sweet ears of corn, and how disappointed we were to realize our corn would have to come from a farm stand or a grocer that year. I remember thinking smut was a funny name for a corn fungus. I thought smut was those magazines teenage boys hid between their mattresses.

I remember picking heirloom tomatoes from our organic garden decades before and after either were fashionable. I remember with great fondness those days spent with my family in the garden where my mom and I would sometimes stay and keep working into the cool of the evening after everyone else had long since gone on to some more 'exciting' activity.

Since our house was on a corner lot with one side along the main school bus route for our neighborhood, the kids on the bus could see our garden from their seats. I was one of the new kids on the bus and at school, and found myself subject to curiosity and teasing at first. One of the boys on the bus started calling me "Garden Girl," and not in a complimentary way. I dreaded getting on the bus to hear "EEEOOOWWWW, look, there's the garden girl." Soon other boys joined in the teasing, and that was how they 'greeted' me as I boarded the bus for what felt like a very long ride.

Then one day a girl in my fifth-grade class invited me to play jump rope with her group, and later that afternoon, to take a seat with her on the bus. I'd become very shy at school since our move, and while I was happy at home, school became an exercise in enduring stares, curiosity, teasing, and feeling like I didn't fit in. I wanted to move back to our old city neighborhood where all the moms sat out on the front stoops while all the kids played together, fought together, and knew each other almost as well as we knew our own families. The girl who invited me to play became my best friend into high school. Although we don't see each other often enough, I feel a special bond with her and we've remained friends. We had our second babies within weeks of each other, and soon she'll be a grandma for the first time. (I've been one for almost five years.) I've always been grateful to her for being the first to reach out to me in friendship after our move.

The garden became my sanctuary from the first lonely months as the new kid. I've had a number of gardens since then, and to this day the garden remains my favorite retreat and a sanctuary from the often cold, harsh world. It's a place of peace, beauty, and meditation that's sometimes hard to find in the hectic, crazy world we find ourselves.

I was born to play in the dirt. I'm thankful I was born into a family with a long, rich history of playing in the dirt before me. The moms who shopped would not have known quite what to do with this little garden girl geek who would rather stay home and weed the patio flower beds or trim the hedges. I still don't like to shop, and I'd still rather be in the garden than just about anywhere else.

Our Garden of Dreams

When I was ten years old, my family moved from our north-side 2-flat rental unit to a ranch home in the south suburbs, fulfilling our parents' long-time dream of home ownership and a place to plant a vegetable garden. The huge yard, the reasonable price, a low down-payment, and owner-financing were all factors in the decision, following months of house-hunting.

The yard was divided into sections. The flagstone patio was bordered on two sides by the house and garage, on one side by a raised shrub and flower border, and on the other side by a narrow path with a small, rectangular perennial bed on either side. The beds were bordered by miniature picket fencing to protect them from trampling by children and dogs. They were planted with perennials and spring bulbs. I remember roses, peonies, bleeding hearts, hyacinths, and tulips.

I learned you could divide a perennial and make more plants from my mom as she lifted huge clumps of peonies from the cool, dark soil. The apple tree one of my younger brothers planted from a seed was placed in the bed on the right, the sunnier of the two beds. It was planted inside the little fenced bed for protection from trampling feet or a lethal lawnmower attack. Last time I was at the house, after Mom had sold it to my youngest brother, the apple tree was still there.

Following the short path between the perennial beds, you entered the heavily wooded side of our yard where we played and romped with our dogs. Left of the patio there was a privet hedge that ran almost the length of the yard except for two paths, one in the middle and one on the side closest to the patio. The privet hedge divided the wooded section from the sunny, open, treeless section of lawn. The sunny side of the yard was bordered by a bridal wreath and honeysuckle hedge that provided fruit for the birds, privacy for our yard, and a cool, shady, secret spot for daydreaming and play. The wooded side of our yard was already an over-sized lot. The other side was narrower. It was, an open, sunny field where my parents would plant the garden of their dreams.

It was an excellent setup for a family with five young, active children. The garden was sheltered and protected from stray softballs and clumsy puppy paws by one of several privet hedges in our yard. It wouldn't be long before this ten-year-old garden girl geek was asking her parents to please, please let her use those brand new electric hedge trimmers to cut the privets. Legitimately concerned for my safety, they were reluctant. Finally after much begging and promises to be careful, I was given a chance with careful monitoring. Soon buzzing the hedges became one of my favorite hobbies. I loved the challenge of shaping them as evenly and prettily as possible. No one had to tell or ask me to do that job. I was happy to trim the hedges even if they didn't need any trimming. It was here in my childhood home where my lifelong passion for gardening was born.

to be continued . . .

Grandpa's Contraption-Part 2

Now, a contraption is usually something no one has ever seen anything quite like before. It is usually, but not always, something you can't buy ready made. If you could buy something, it would be either way to expensive or wouldn't work quite the way you wanted it to work. It is created for some special use, a figment of imagination made material, a dream made real. Grandpa was wonderful at drawing. From the tip of his pencil flowed drawings of parts that somehow might fit together into some useful contraption. He could see the finished item in his mind, along with exactly how to get it put together.

Between 1909 and 1916, a very small automobile manufacturing company operated out of Detroit, Michigan. Kenneth Crittendon designed a car and provided financial backing for the company to manufacture it. The car was named the KRIT. It was a small, four cylinder car and its symbol was a white swastika on a blue background, (not related to the red swastika used by Germany). The accompanying photograph is of a KRIT car.

At some time Grandpa acquired one of these cars. He drove it as a family car for a number of years. At some time, probably in the late '20s or early '30s his oldest son, my Uncle Mike, inherited it. Uncle Mike thought it was a little too stodgy for a young man about town, so he made some modifications to it. After Uncle Mike stopped driving it, the KRIT wound up on the farm, housed in a large equipment barn with the tractors. It wasn't used for transportation any longer and the body was beginning to rust from disuse. Now, if there is anything anathema to a frugal person it is something that isn't being used. So, Grandpa got out his pencil and sketch paper and went to work. He dreamed and he sketched, and he dreamed some more and he sketched some more.

One day he called Grandma. "Dora, I think I have an idea for a contraption for the garden. What do you think of this?" And he showed her his sketches. Shortly afterward he got out his pipe, put it unlit into his mouth, and went out to the equipment barn. He hauled pieces of this and that to the machine shop, and then he closed the door. Grinding, banging, and pounding noises, interspersed with intervals of silence, came from inside the shop.

Later, he got my Uncle and together they brought out the old KRIT and got it down to the shop. Periodically, Grandpa would appear outside. He would have a drawing in one hand, and he'd look from the paper to that old car as if he was sizing things up. Then he would disappear inside and more banging and grinding ensued. This went on for several weeks, as he had time between other chores.

One day, at the end of summer, he told Grandma and all the children to go into the house and not come out, nor to look out the windows until he called them. Soon they heard the putt-putt of an engine coming up the road from the machine shop. In a bit they heard Grandpa call out, "O.K., come and see!"

There, in the middle of the remains of the summer garden, was Grandpa proudly seated on his latest contraption - the dandiest garden tractor anyone in the family had ever seen.

A new frame surrounded the body of what used to be the old KRIT car. There was only one front wheel, which he had scavenged from an old tractor.He had fastened a fuel tank to the back. Underneath the tractor was bolted a set of cultivating tines. Grandpa had added a tractor seat with levers for raising and lowering the tines, and a hitch on back for hooking up a cart or other equipment. He had replaced the floor board with a metal foot rest, and made the foot controls larger for booted feet to manage.

That fall the garden was duly manured and plowed. In the spring, Uncle Mike tilled the garden. Through the next spring and summer, Grandma and her daughters planted, weeded, dusted for bugs, and picked the produce.The cycle of growing, harvesting and putting up began anew.

In the 1940s, as a little girl, I spent some summers on the farm. Grandpa's contraption was still running. He had replaced some parts as they wore out, but the last time I saw it, it looked much the same as it does in this photo. Grandpa passed away in 1952, but the stories of his contraptions, and especially of that old KRIT car that he transformed into a garden tractor, are still repeated in our family.

Spring Arrives in Chicago!

. . . Well, in the the conservatories it has, anyway! Yesterday Middle Child and I went to the Garfield Park Conservatory. We had a wonderful day together. This shot is from the Show House, where azaleas, stock, daffodils, and hydrangeas were blossoming profusely. The scent in the conservatory was thick, sweet, and delightful.

Tune in later this morning, when my mom will be guest-blogging with part two of Grandpa's Contraption, the true story of my Great-Grandfather's amazing home made garden contraption!

Grandpa's Contraption

I come from a long line of "Contraption Makers". In fact, one of the most enjoyable and satisfying activities my Gardening Buddy and I engage in is contraption inventing and building. As we stand back and admire our work, we congratulate each other on our ability to make something useful from bits and pieces of this and that. Sometimes we buy bits and pieces. Mostly though, we look around for the odd pieces of wood cut from some other project, a bit of fencing wire, or some leftover piece of conduit.

My Grandfather was a maker of contraptions. Born in the late 1800s, he originally had a career as a pharmacist. Later, he became a Lincoln motor car dealer. But then, fate intervened. My Grandmother inherited a quarter section of farm land when her parents died. Her brother, my Uncle Charlie, inherited the adjoining quarter section.

Grandpa called a family council, including his five children, and spoke about what it would mean for them to leave the city and move to the farm Grandma had inherited. The family conferred on what work would be needed, who might take on what responsibilities, how life would change from living in a city brick home, to a small, frame house in the country. The family voted to move. They would raise cows, pigs, poultry, corn, milo...and have a garden. These activities would have to feed the family and provide income. Each of the children, of whom Mom was the third oldest at age 14, would have tasks. The boys would tend the larger animals and do the field work, the girls would take care of the poultry and the garden. To help with income, the girls would sell eggs, poultry and butter. With their plans laid, they moved to their farm in 1923.

The photo to the left is Mom with part of the flock of poultry. There were ducks and geese. and chickens of several breeds, such as Barred Rocks, White Leghorns, and Rhode Island Reds.

My Mom liked the Reds the best. She had several pets from among the Reds.

In this picture she was about 15 or 16 years old. She was always very tiny for her age. When she was full grown, she was all of 4 feet 9 inches tall.

A quarter section of land is 160 acres. In addition to fields and pastures, there would be a garden. It would have to be large enough to feed a family of seven during the season, and yield enough produce to put up for the rest of the year. Equipment - tractor, cultivator, planter, harvester - would be needed for plowing, planting and harvesting in the fields. Grandpa and Uncle Charlie decided that they could share larger equipment and help each other with field work. But a garden of the size needed would be very hard for my Grandma and her three daughters to handle alone. The hardest work would be turning under the manure and garden waste in the fall, and loosening the soil in the spring.

When you turned off the main road onto my Grandparent's farm road, you went over a wooden bridge that crossed "The Branch", a creek that ran into a small, local river. On the right side of the road, past the bridge, was Grandpa's machine shop. I still recall the smells of oil, gas, and metal inside. Next to the machine shop was the windmill. In addition to the tools inside the machine shop, there was a bank of batteries. The windmill charged the batteries, which provided electricity before the county came through with power lines.

The machine shop was a magical place. I was never allowed inside without Grandpa or one of my Uncles. Most of the equipment Grandpa had was purchased used. Tractors needed repairs, parts needed welding - something was always needing maintenance and fixing up. Out of Grandpa's shop also came "contraptions".

To be continued...

A Country Life

I come from a farming, gardening family going back generations. My great-great grandparents farmed in Nebraska, as did my great-grandparents . My grandparents had their little 40 acre farm in the Ozarks, the setting of some of my fondest childhood memories.

My grandfather had degrees in journalism and horticulture. Like so many college-educated women of her generation, Grandma studied home economics. Grandma had grown up on the family farm, Grandpa was the son of immigrants and grew up in New York City. He dreamed his whole life of being a farmer. Finally as their children were becoming young adults and economics allowed, they made that dream come true with the purchase of the little farm and orchard in the beautiful Ozark Mountains.

My mom and stepfather live partially off their own land on 68 acres with woods, meadows, wildlife, fruit trees, berry bushes and brambles, perennial gardens, and huge vegetable gardens where they grow and preserve a bounty that sees them through each year from harvest to harvest.

Although they own enough acreage for livestock, they limit their production to fruits and vegetables. They buy most of their meat, dairy, and eggs from Amish and organic farmers in their community, and other staples through local co-ops and buying clubs. In doing so they help support and sustain the local farming economy.

Because so much of it is undeveloped and unfarmed, their small piece of heaven on earth is mostly a wild and beautiful flora and fauna preserve existing unmolested and unharmed much as it would have long before Columbus.

They participate in an ecologically-sound forestry management program. They re-use, recycle, or compost most of the little bit of waste they generate. They are shining examples of organic gardening, buying local, supporting this country's endangered family farming culture, and sustainable, energy-conscious, environmentally sound living, and they get to live here:



This is a bit of my heritage which may serve to illuminate my recently recurring fantasy of a country life. My kids, at least for now, live reasonably close. Two of them are in the city about an hour away, and one is closer about 30 minutes away in the suburbs. Two of my three girls have started families. I have one grandchild and counting. In part because it's hard to imagine living any further away from my daughters and my grandchildren, it's hard to think about pursuing that country life fantasy.

Yet there's a deep part of me dreaming of a country life. Is it nature or nurture? I guess it's a bit of both. And it seems it's something I've passed on to at least one of my daughters, who like me and generations before us, long for country life.

My mom and stepfather, and grandparents weren't much older than me, and like me, their kids were grown and mostly on their own, when they took the plunge and made their country-life dreams come true.

For now and for the foreseeable future my country dreams will remain dreams. Sometimes though, a familiar yearning takes hold. . . And on February days like this, when it's too cold to work it out in my suburban back yard garden, it can be palpable.