BEARDED IRISES: MESSENGERS OF THE GODS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/25/2010)

While daffodils are the first wave ashore in the struggle to reclaim gardens from late winter’s doldrums, bearded irises are the second wave, securing spring’s beachhead. A poor man’s orchid, they are one of the most complex and beautiful flowers ever to grace a garden. Indeed, the word “iris” is a Greek word meaning “rainbow,” “halo,” or “messenger of the gods.” John of the Apocalypse writes: “Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire (10:1).”

Adaptable to the climatic rigors of High Country, irises are both tough and beautiful. Tough means they’re hardy, but it doesn’t mean they can be neglected. They need care, such as nutrients and bedding, and if cared-for well, they will return the care with a nonpareil beauty. Care begins with bedding. The makings of good bedding are aplenty in the High Country, clay, cinders, and compost.

If a gardener has clay, add cinders, and if cinders, add clay. Irises like a soft, friable bed. They also like lots of compost. The best bed has good drainage because they don’t like a soggy bed. But who does? Irises will tend to rot if swamped out.

With irises it’s important to start out well because unlike annuals the beds can’t be enriched with compost each year. Those rhizomes are going to be stuck in that bed for several years. One of the big items in caring for irises is being fertilized with a low nitrogen and high phosphate fertilizer (6-10-10) six weeks before they bloom and right after they bloom and with super-phosphate or bone meal (0-10-10) in the fall. Since irises are all root, they need phosphorus to promote root development. With too much nitrogen, as in lawn fertilizer, they will tend to rot.

Irises do best in a sunny location with at least six hours of sunlight a day. As far as water is concerned, they’re a xeriscaper’s dream. In the High Country, they need water when they’re planted until the new center leaves appear. During dry spells, they’re best watered every 3 to 4 weeks, and again in the spring before blooming. Also, they’re best mulched before the snows of winter with the mulch removed after the last hard frost.

The best time to plant iris rhizomes in the High Country is the middle of August, giving them enough time to get their roots established before the winter freeze comes. After the soil has been enriched, make a shallow hole in the soil about twice the size of the rhizome with a small mound of soil in the center. Put the rhizome on top while draping the roots down the sides of the mound. In Flagstaff because of our cold winters, the soil should slightly cover the rhizome. Do not plant them deep.

Irises can be attractively planted in groups of three throughout a yard, 12” apart, with the toes pointing inward in a triangle. If planted in rows, all the toes should point in the same direction to avoid crowding, spaced 18” apart. Remember to keep the soil in which the rhizomes are planted moist for two or three weeks until the first news leaves appear.

After blooming, the stalks on which the flowers appear are best removed, not to drain energy from the plant. Every three to four years, irises should be replanted to prevent overcrowding and to encourage renewing. This is generally best done a month or so after blooming. Clumps can be renewed by removing the old center of the clump or by digging up the entire clump and removing the old plant and replanting the newer rhizomes with the fans attached.

Irises come in many sizes for many tastes. The tall bearded irises when planted in a circle or triangle appear as though they were a lush aureole of exotic colors hovering above the garden betraying their name “rainbow” or “halo.” When studied, one can even hear the voices of those messengers of the gods.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

EVERY LEAF A FLOWER

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7-2-10)

In the middle of summer with autumn a month and a half off, Albert Camus’ sentence, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower” comes to mind. Every season has its own beauty, especially autumn when the trees’ haunting beauty displays hues of life as the slumber of winter looms. The exception is late winter’s bleak grasp when the snow no longer glistens white, but a dull gray, and the ground is covered with winter’s dead debris. That’s the time to break the dismal spell.

Oddly, late summer is the time to think about that grim interim season when the first flowers break bleak winter’s faltering grasp. If there is anything that would break that grasp, it’s Wordsworth’s daffodils “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” Autumn’s the time to plant them, and the late summer is the time to order them to get the best bargains and best quality.

While nothing is ever a cinch in the garden, daffodils come close. For the fussy and pristine, they have only one drawback. After flowering, the stalks should be allowed to whither and dry in plain sight. Only when they’re desiccated, should the husks be swept up and taken way. The reason is simple: the bulbs are drawing nutrients back into themselves. After such a glorious display, tossing “their heads in sprightly dance,” it’s heartless to deny the bulb its place at the dinner table. It’s also unwise because if denied, the bulb will retaliate with an ever decreasing glory, ending up like a fashion model sans make-up. Also, after the blooms are spent, the blossoms should be picked.

As with most things, success with daffodils begins with preparation, that is, the preparation of the soil. First, pick a site with good drainage, else the bulbs will be prone to rot. The soil should be friable. If clay, add either sand or volcanic cinders. Compost should be dug in a foot in depth along with 5-10-10 fertilizer. Don’t use a high nitrogen fertilizer because nitrogen will induce rot or excessive leafage. Also, dig in bone meal. Then plant the bulbs about six inches deep. Their “jocund company” looks best either strewn out in drifts or in spots of four or five bulbs here and there throughout the garden. Marching them in line doesn’t do justice to their “sparkling waves.”

They need about 5-6 hours of sunlight a day, so depending upon where they’re planted, their blooming season can be extended. A southern exposure will produce earlier blooms while a northern exposure will produce later blooms, stretching out their blooming time.

After blooming, when the dead stalks have been carried away by the wind or at the hand of a tidy gardener, it’s time to fertilize them with the same type of fertilizer with which they were first planted. Before winter sets in, they should be covered with a layer of mulch.

Also, daffodils can be planted in pots. Indeed, a few pots with blooming daffodils are a cheery greeting on a front walk or a delightful sight from the kitchen window on a back deck. Planting in pots isn’t difficult, but the bulbs are best replanted the next season outside in the ground to be rejuvenated. Pots aren’t their natural habitat. The pot should be six to eight inches in depth and should thoroughly cleansed before using to prevent rot. It’s best to use potting soil because of ease and clean soil. Daffodils require at least thirteen weeks of cold weather. If an early bloom is desirable, after the 13 weeks cold spell, the pot can be brought inside and maintained at 60ºF. three to four weeks.

A display of daffodils is often enhanced with companion plants like grape hyacinth (Muscari armeniancin) or even a variety of daffodils to lengthen the blooming season. When everything is spent, wildflower seeds can be sown in the same plot or drift or other annuals can be planted, extending the blooming season.

While daffodils bring a early beauty to a late winter’s melancholy eye, they also bring the heart pleasure. Wordsworth said it best: “My heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

DIRT IS DESTINY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/25/10)

Dirt is destiny. There is no nonsense about free-will when it comes to dirt. The French philosophers and litterateurs call it a donnée, a given, a brute fact. Free-will isn’t so much a fluttering around in the atmosphere of life, as a finch on the wing, as it’s our response to destiny, such as being born male or female in a certain family of a certain culture.

Some respond whining and complaining, some rebel, some make the best of it, and, sadly, some dither. Making the best of our soil means adding to it. In the High Country, our données are clay and volcanic debris, especially cinders.

Now, destiny isn’t determinism, the folly of a tidy rationalistic science, such as sociology or psychology, based on the metaphor of the machine with no sense of chaos.

There are three types of soil, clay, sand, and silt. Clay is the smallest particle, and, consequently, sticks together like glue but holds the moisture, hence pots when the moisture is cooked out. Sand is the biggest, really tiny rocks, and, consequently, the loosest and acts like a sieve to water. Silt is the best. It’s dirt washed down from the mountains into alluvial slopes and deltas. Silt contains all the nutrients accumulated on its trips down the mountains and rivers. Also, it is the easiest to work. We don’t have much silt in the High Country. It’s all been washed down to the Verde Valley and the Valley of the Sun.

We don’t have much sand, either, but we have something like sand which is much better, volcanic cinders. So, the thing we sometimes curse is a beneficence, a good thing, jammed with nutrients, erupting from the earth’s cauldron.

So, we have a gardener’s nightmare, clay and volcanic cinders, sans silt and sand, until one makes the best of dirt’s destiny. This may be why so many people living in the High Country are afflicted with back thumb disease. They dither or curse, neither of which is conducive to successful living, much less gardening.

First, mix the clay with the cinders to loosen up the clay. The word is friable or easily crumbled, at the slightest touch falling apart and flowing through the fingers. Now, some commercial establishments sell volcanic cinders with the undigested lava lumps removed, but the fact is that it’s for the pickings all over the place. Just don’t take your shovel and bucket into a National Park or Monument. Violation of Federal Statute. Surprisingly, some agricultural organizations as far away as Tucson come up to the High Country to fetch our cinders to enrich their soil, at least that’s what William Auberle, wit, bon vivant, ranconteur, boulevardier, man about town, and professor of sustainability at NAU, told me over canapés and wine at one of Harriet Young’s fabulous fētes galantes. All the while, our horticultural treasure has been underfoot.

Our dirt lacks another thing common to rich soil, organic matter, so we have to add it. Now, the fact is that we have organic matter all over the place, but it’s on top of the soil, not in it. Pine needles take a long time to break down into useful organic matter, but animal manure doesn’t. Don’t use the manure of domesticated carnivores, humans, dogs, and cats, because they might pass along microbiological nasties into the soil.

Of course, composting is the premier method of introducing organic matter to the soil. A surprising fact: organic matter aids in releasing the nutrients in cinders. Get a bin, add organic matter in a 3 to 1 ratio of carbon matter to nitrogen material, brown to green, and mix. Watch it cook, and when done, serve cold. Sometimes, in a moment of sloth, burying it will do. Just clear away some dirt, lay down torn up newspapers, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and tea leaves, horse and steer manure, beer mash, and biodegradable refuse, and then cover it with lots of dirt and wait a couple of months or over the winter. Eureka! Arcady!

Ah! Destiny! It’s what you make of it!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

UFO SAFE GARDENS
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/19/10)

Reflecting the apocalyptic tenor of the times, Stephen Hawking, the British theoretical physicist, claims that space aliens someday might raid the earth for its resources. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” He could’ve sited the arrival of British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico.

If we want to get ready for hostile space aliens, who according to Dr. Hawking’s 17th century Calvinism are as totally depraved as are we, then it behooves us to check out where they’ve landed before. Roswell, New Mexico, comes to mind where an unemployed ranch hand reported a sighting, or Phoenix, Arizona, where the witness was a scandal-haunted politician wanting to divert attention from himself. UFO landing fields have been dismal, either out in the middle of a desiccated nowhere or a smog-enshrouded urban bleak-scape. Indeed, some yards in Flagstaff are ripe for a UFO landing, bare, dusty, and scrubby, home to weeds and gravel.

I can’t recall a UFO sighting in such places as the famed Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, Canada, or any other places of beauty. Apparently, the best way to avoid a celestial Armageddon is to develop a beautiful garden. Space aliens don’t like beauty. As a side benefit, beautiful gardens will help prevent the eco-apocalypse predicted by horticultural doomsayers.

The first thing about a beautiful garden is design, and the first thing about design is tantalization. While there are straight lines in the creation, such as crystals, most are curved with a sense of wandering, like streams. Skyscrapers, flood control channels, and bowling alleys are all dreary straight lines. A curved line is far more beguiling, leading the eye around the next bend in the road.

The curved line is a symbol of potential power while the straight line is a symbol of power spent, just as a cocked arm is filled with potential power while the arm thrust is power spent, and, thus, impotent. In addition, to being far more attractive, the curved life is a symbol of potential power, the straight line being ho-hum and spent. There are no surprises in straight lines. They’re about as charming as a wagon rut. A meandering stream beckons the imagination.

If a garden is to offer relaxation and safety, it must tantalize the mind. There is not such thing as a relaxed boredom. Indeed, boredom is stressful and agitating and a prelude to the apocalypse because boredom promises no future, and a world without a future is an apocalypse. Life without mystery is life at an end.

A garden also is expression of life which is begotten in a fusion of water, soil, and sun. As Dr. Hocking suggests, the marauding space aliens are after resources, such as coal and oil, not life. Plunderers, like British Petroleum, are not creators.

The charm of a garden is in the textures and colors of plants and grasses, trees with various types of bark, shrubs with differing shapes, and flowers and leaves with appealing shapes and colors. In other words, the charm of a garden is random, verging on chaos, yet held together by a design rooted in mystery, the line leading the mind’s eye around the bend in the road.

A space alien bent on plunder wouldn’t look for mineral resources in a garden but for a bleak-scape of gravel and weeds or a desiccated no-man’s-land of asphalt and concrete. So, make a resolution when the spring thaw arrives to get out the shovel and turn some compost into the soil. Beat the Apocalypse and have a Happy New Year!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

THE COFFEE TREE

Tam T. Nguyen


My Dad grew two kinds of coffee tree: coffea arabica and a liberica. Growing them was so exciting. My Dad sowed the seeds by himself. He made organic natural soil in the small container, and he put the seeds in. It is kind of easy! He told me: “You have to look to chose the right seeds by putting them in the water. If they are floating on the water, they will be not good seeds. Also take care of the moisture of the soil and seeds during time germination and growth of the beans. He showed me the seed coat, beginning stem reach to the sun, called hypocotyl, the first leaf opening to the sun, called cotyledons, and then foliage leaf. Seeing the first foliage leaf growing everyday about six months after he transplanted them to the garden. They cause magic for me to see all the tiny changes from the bean to the trees.

My Dad watered them at late night when the time drop off the temperature. We can save more water for them at night. All along the leaves need the water to help for photosynthesis, taking energy from the sun.

The coffee tree is big tree and height, too. They take long time before they have fruits, about three or four years. When they have the flowers bloom, they are so wonderful with the white colors and smell so sweet and heavy, like the jasmine. The coffee flowers self fertilized. They need the wind, but insects and bee help.

When the bees come up to collect the nectar to make honey, they built the nest at the branch of the tree. My Dad always come to next by, and sometime he left some sugar liquid for them. He told me, why he come near by many times to let them realize his smell. When he smoke them to collect the honey, they will not bite him. (It is smart. I thought about him).

I like the garden work. I help him to collect the dry branches for the cooking, to cut to make the shape of tree, and collected the fall leaves so fun. It smell so good when the weather changing. It is funnier when my friends, and I play the game hide and catch. I always climb so high. They rare to catch me until they had to yell that they lost and I climb down.

At the time I also learn the music of the trees with my Dad. The light comes up and go the through the tree. The light makes the mysterious because whenever the wind go by, it make the leaves moving, and he showed me the shade of the tree changed. He called them the arts of music. After therains, we see the different with the early morning sunlight. The melody of light change all day long.

Way back then, we live in small village so I do not have chance to hear the singer or see the music show much. All the feeling I have for music which one he taught me. The music for him is the sounds of wind, the color of sunlight, the smell of flowers bloom.

He also good at the homemade coffee bean. The fox eat coffee berry, but the coffee bean go through the digester of the fox. The fox like the sweetness but leave the bean. He collected them to make coffee bean. If he does not collect enough, he have choose by himself with really good quality fruit. The colors of fruits change from the green, yellow, red, and when they really right, they have really dark red. So he collect all of the fruit dark colors and big bean. He break the skin so carefully, take off the layers, first pulp and pectin (what the fox like), then remove the hull and epidermis and finally the bean. Then he mix them with the butter, wine, and salt quite awhile. It simple as the job for all of farmer. Other than that he taught me to be passionate about the music of the sunlight!

Tam Nguyen is a student at the Literacy Volunteers of Coconino County where Dr. Smith is her tutor.

WALKING ON EGG SHELLS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/12/10)

I knew Galen Guerrette was a serious gardener when I felt the crunch of egg shells underfoot as I walked through his garden. They’re the mark of a true gardener, not just some horticultural fashionista screening compost to get rid of its undigested leavings. Gardening isn’t for the tidily sterile but those who embrace rotting and decomposition. Trees are nourished, amongst other things, by the decomposition of their own fallen needles and leaves. Synthetic chemical fertilizers eventually turn the soil sterile by salinization.

In addition to egg shells, Galen sports a black derby, as did the Sundance Kid, only smack dab in the middle of Doney Park. He claims his daughter finds them for him. No fashionably tattered, sweat-stained Stetson for him. I suspect that, quietly, he doesn’t give a damn what others think. Galen isn’t a noisy man.

Of French-Canadian ancestry, actually the Acadians of Longfellow’s poem, Evangeline, he was born in northern Maine’s potato country, raised in New Jersey, and served in the light motorized cavalry as mortar gunner in Vietnam for 1½ years. After his discharge, on the recommendation of a buddy in Vietnam from Yuma, he went west to Flagstaff to study geology with the help of the GI Bill at NAU.

After graduating but not finding employment as a geologist, he took up his father’s profession, contracting. It’s a conundrum whether he’s at heart a potato farmer, supporting himself and his family on the side as a contractor or a contractor, growing potatoes to remember his roots amongst northern Maine’s tubers. I suspect the former because his eyes twinkle when he points with pride to his potato beds. Self-identification isn’t so much a matter of time spent, but of devotion given.

A contractor’s dream, his garden is laid out in rectangles. Often called plots, he calls them cubicles. Scrap glass windows protect his cubicles on three sides. The east side is open. The prevailing wind is from the southwest. Wind is a factor in Doney Park.

Running alongside the cubicles is a water line to which he attaches both dripper and soaker lines depending upon the crop, drippers for squash and potatoes and soakers for asparagus, carrots, beans, beets, and greens. The soaker and dripper lines can be changed to rotate crops.

His soil is alkaline, mostly washed down from the mountains and cinder cones. He mixes vast amounts of compost and some sulphur to his soil which is composed of the ubiquitous volcanic cinders and red clay. Although he has a variety of vegetables, the apples of his eye are his pommes de terre. In the early spring, he digs several large holes, lays down some compost and dirt, sets out his potato seeds in a circle, and the covers them with more compost and dirt. As the potatoes sprout, he adds more compost and dirt, eventually ending up with a small mound while the potatoes develop below in the soft, fertile soil, creating a small backyard Acadia of his ancestry. First called Acadia by the explorer Verrazzanno, the land now called Nova Scotia reminded him the ancient Greek “idyllic land of fertile soil.”

As with many combat veterans, he doesn’t favor blood sports. He owns guns but doesn’t hunt. He’s even regrets killing the voles threatening his garden.

His wife, Andrea, his comrade in gardening arms, devotes her energies to a delightful flower garden in the front yard. For many years, she owned a private school, kindergarten through the 6th grade, called Carden of the Peaks. Both are Master Gardeners.

In addition to 35 years with his contracting business, GRC Construction and 15 years with her private school, Galen and Andrea have raised five children and have gathered 14 grandchildren. Swings Galen built for his children are now used by his grandchildren. Pictures of the whole gang are plastered all over a kitchen wall. But there’s more to Galen and Andrea. A bookcase jammed with books runs across one wall. In the dining room’s china cabinet, settings of English bone china and crystal stem ware betray a touch of elegance a few rods from horse barns and sweat stained Stetsons.


Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

THE ENDURING MYSTERY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/10/10)

As an old friend of mine was being led away on a gurney for a cataract operation, the surgeon said, “You might see of bright light in the center of your field of vision.” My friend, a devout Roman Catholic, began chuckling, and the surgeon asked, “What’re you laughing at?” “Oh,” he replied, “do you mean that I might have a vision of God?” The surgeon replied, “Not in here you won’t.” After the operation, he said to the surgeon, “Well, I didn’t see God after all.” The surgeon said, “I should hope not.”

As Ecclesiastes reports, “For everything there is a season and a time, (3:1),” and being wheeled on a gurney into an operating room would seem an appropriate season for a vision of God.

My friend, a retired professor of philosophy, and I, an inveterate Calvinist, often have flourishing, non-polemical, theological conversations, because both of us know that we “see through a glass darkly,” to use Saint Paul’s phrase. It is important to know that one doesn’t know, that all of us live by assumptions and faith, and that we deal mostly with mystery which brings us to gardening.

Gardening, in many ways, is a journey into terra incognita, an actus fidei, to quote my friend. We may not know clearly where we’re going, but at least we’re on the way. As Abraham “went out, not knowing where was to go (Heb. 11:80)”, so, too, do gardeners. Sometimes things don’t work in the garden, and, then, there are those serendipitous accidents when plants thrive for reasons unknown to everyone. It’s called the unseen hand.

People often say, “I just can’t grow a thing. I must have a black thumb.” They tried, failed, and gave up. “O, ye of little faith.” There are many reasons for giving up, as in “a fool’s errand” and “a certain defeat,” but failure isn’t one of them. Sad to say, some failures are from ineptitude, as in not preparing, and, worse yet, some from sluggardliness and sloth.

For the sluggards, my aunt Emily, a myopic Fundamentalist with halitosis, was fond of quoting Proverbs 6:6 while poking me with her cane when she found me sleeping behind a giant eucalyptus tree, “Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.”

Gardening requires hard physical work, and if people are layabouts and laggards, they should own up to it instead of whining about having black thumbs. Several onerous activities, such as raking and gathering pine needles, shoveling compost into the soil, and picking weeds are part and parcel of gardening. A distinguished woman once asked me what she should do about her weeds. I replied, “Pick them,” to which she said, “Ugh!” Getting down and dirty on your knees is the heart of gardening and the prerequisite of beauty.

If we’re about to go out not knowing where we’re going, it’s best to take the proper equipment. As my grandfather, an oldtime mariner, was wont to say, “You’ll be needing a sextant, a compass, and a fathom line to make sure you’re beyond your depth.” While his milieu was the ocean, the gardener’s milieu, soil, needs to be deep as well, deep with organic matter and compost. The soil is the first item in the gardener’s equipment.

In addition to the standard tools, such as shovels, rakes, and hoes, water, as a tool, comes next after soil. Gardening occurs in that splendid fusion of water and soil, a fusion scarce in the universe, and a fusion in which human beings were first formed or from which they first emerged. Whatever came to pass, there would be nothing but desolation without that fusion.

The secret’s in managing that fusion. Many plants are killed or thwarted by too much or too little water and by hard soil devoid of organic matter. Plants are more likely to thrive in rich soil with the right amount of water. Mariners need an ocean. Gardeners need soil and water, and as mariners respect the deep, so gardeners respect the soil by enriching it, and water by using it wisely, so that the mystery may endure.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

CILANTRO FOR CILANTROPHOBES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/3/10)

Julia Child, the late mother goddess of home-cooked French cuisine suffered from cilantrophobia. She once told Larry King that cilantro and arugula "have kind of a dead taste to me." Indeed, if she ever found cilantro on her plate in a restaurant, she "would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor."

While she may be right about arugula, there is a remedy for her cilantrophobia. The Oxford Companion to Food reports that the aroma of cilantro is comparable to “the smell of bug-infested bedclothes," an odor I recall creeping out of my straw-ticking mattress while tracking miscreants and saboteurs in the Alaskan wilderness. Other cilantrophobes compare the odor of cilantro to hand lotion or soap suds. Pliny the Younger (61 to 112 A.D.), a Roman Senator noted for his well-written letters, wrote that the word “coriandrum,” the seed of the cilantro plant, comes from the Greek word for bedbug, “koris.”

The culprit, according to The New York Times, is "modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes." These fat molecules are used in making soap, and many insects make them to attract or repel other creatures. Thus, cilantro’s smell is akin to the aroma of bedbugs in the throes of concupiscence, a thoroughly disagreeable association. But what to do? Chop the cilantro! Chopping the leaves allows the “leaf enzymes the chance to covert the aldehydes into other substances with no aroma."

Having cleared the stink hurdle, the next issue is growing cilantro, which is relatively easy in Flagstaff and the High Country because it’s a cool season herb which doesn't like high humidity. However, transplanting cilantro is a little chancy because of its long roots. Hence, buying cilantro plants at a commercial nursery may be a waste of money.

First off, cilantro can either be grown in a pot or a plot. If pots are used, they should be deep enough for its long roots. The pots should be about 18 inches wide and 10 inches deep and filled with potting soil and organic fertilizer. Before seeding, moisten the soil and then mix the seeds with some sand. After sowing the seeds, mist the soil. When the first cuttable leaves appear, cut only part of the crop, and then, rotating the pot, harvest another part of the crop each time cilantro is wanted, eventually going back to the first cutting. Don’t use pesticides!

Cilantro is a fast-grower so the tasty leaves aren't around very long before the plants go to seed. If a gardener wants a continuous crop of leaves and is planting in a plot, the seeds should be sown every few weeks for a continuous supply. The seeds should be sown about ¼ inch deep, a few inches apart in soft friable, well-composted soil, and watered regularly. The plants flourish best with morning sun and afternoon shade. They’re good companions for spinach, beans, and peas and repel both aphids and spider mites.

If they go to seed, the mature seed is called coriander and can be harvested and dried. Before they’re dried, the seeds have an unpleasant aroma, but, dried, the seeds have a lemony citrus flavor. So the cilantro or coriander plant produces both an herb in its leaves called cilantro and a spice in its seeds called coriander. So, cilantro’s good for salsa as well as pesto.

Pliny the Younger also wrote that coriandrum originated in Egypt which is confirmed by its presence in the tombs of the Pharaohs. The Scriptures in Exodus report that the coriander seed is similar in appearance to manna. Thus cilantro was used earlier than basil in Mediterranean cuisine.

Cilantro is good for the body as well as the palate. It helps with the pain of arthritis as an anti-inflammatory in addition to serving as an aid to digestion and as a carminative, releasing flatulence. The most surprising medicinal use is with heavy metals, such as mercury. The chemical compounds in cilantro bind with heavy metals, loosening them from the tissues, and releasing them through elimination. So, in addition to getting the gas out, eating cilantro gets the lead out.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

THE FARMER IS MY FATHER

Tam T. Nguyen

My father was a farmer in Viet Nam. He was growing many kinds of plants: persimmon, durian, jackfruits, avocado, plum, and coffee trees which are big trees. They grow up after many years, and then they have fruits. He, also, planted the flowers, bananas, vegetables, tomatoes, onions, and white rice. He also raised the pigs, chickens, ducks, goats, and cows.

The farm is the place to provide food for all the family, and those products to sell to make money for another business. My childhood grow up beside him with the interesting in the farmer. I was a little girl. I did not understand the world around me. I repeated and copied whatever he did, and he taught me.

We lived at the small village of the highland. We had the time hang around together at the early morning or the sunset. I always gave a question to my Dad. At the one morning, I asked my Dad, "Why the clock have the sound tick, tock, tick, tock, so monotonous every time?

He smiles at me and gave me a question again. "It is boring, isn't it?" "No, I wonder why it is only one the sound like that?" "We used the sound to remind the people to think of insight. Because everybody needs to spend time to listen to the sounds of life."

I did not understand about whatever my Dad told me. I had great time with him with all my childhood. The time is gone by, and I wonder how he handled with all of the knowledge he taught me. Each of the tick tock, tick tock of the clock going by will never ever come back. I can wait for the time, but the time never ever wait for me.

So he taught me how empty myself to open a door with the nature to talk with the trees and grass, how to feel the aura of the plant and feel the fluid through the trees. I had a wonderful time with him. I can tell him some trouble happened with the trees, or the nice feeling when the trees growing good.

Everything has a condition, even tiny flowers. He taught me how to see the right soil, the right season for each of them, and when is the time to provide the nutrition to grow up the leaves, the body of the trees, and when need some kind of nutrition to make the fruits.

For a little girl, it is really interesting. The whole world is just in the imaging mind. I can see the tree and know that the season is changing. Spending time to do the meditation with tree is so nice. I can feel the cycles of life of the trees. And I would be realize about the life is so short. I can see the germination, or the bud. Each of the second, they are change. It was the crazy to take time to see them. Or the tiny tear drop on the leaf at early morning when the sun come up.

The spending the time to talking with the tree, it helps me to be empty inside my soul, my mind. To forget the question who I am? To be a tree, I can see the world, the weather, the sky, the human being around me. Because the tree also has the cycles life, it showed me the things I can see by seeing under. It is also an aura. The excellent of the circle is the beginning point is will be the end of circle. If the beginning point does not see the end of point, it will be not a circle! It help me to understand how to be generous with everybody, and it is also make me feel generous for myself.

The language of the gardener and the trees are the feeling, the deeply feeling inside the soul. Just a tiny bud will be growing a tree. The conversation to link of the human with the tree is the silent sounds. But it is a micro sound or just a signal between the souls.

Tam T. Nguyen, tutored by Joel Baillere at the Literacy Center, talks often with Dana Prom Smith about words, syntax, writing, gardening, spirituality, and mysticism.

THE KINESTHETICS OF ETERNITY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (5/1/2010)

Years ago, when attending a performance of Lalo Schifrin's Jazz Mass, I noticed that some people sat, stock still, following the music with a score in hand, others cocked their heads the better to listen, and still others, including me, bobbed and weaved to the beat.

The first group experienced an auditory event visually, the second auditorially, and the third kinesthetically, that is, through their bodies with feeling. The visual are the quickest, the kinesthetic the slowest.

In the first grade, I was put in the Opportunity Room, a room with barred windows. Considered "backward," the staff wanted to send me to an institution for retarded children. Stuttering, boredom, and introversion didn't help my cause. After a furious response from my parents, I was merely demoted to the kindergarten. Now, at 83 years of age, I'm still slow and introverted, but no longer bored or stuttered if I speak slowly.

Adept communicators use all five senses. Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls described a train pulling into a station, a whistle's sound down the valley, the sight of plumes of smoke, the feel of thunder on the tracks, the smell of coal smoke, and the taste of steam. Some churches use incense to enrich worship while others are frenzied by pheromones in someone else's sweat, and the Eucharist is a matter of taste.

While we all favor one or two of our senses to process our experiences, we'd all do well to train ourselves in all of our five senses rather than preferring one or two, the better to enrich our lives. Such enrichment brings us straightaway to gardening which is best done with all five senses and is a fine training ground to develop all of our senses.

The feel of soil running through our fingers, of leaves brushing against our cheeks, and of warm, full, ripe sun-drenched tomatoes at our finger tips are kinesthetic sensations which delight our skins. Touch is the first sensation we experience, being caressed as an infant by someone who loves us.

Surely, no one can pass by a rose bed without taking pleasure in their noses, inhaling slowly, savoring the aromas' moment, relishing the joy of a nasal luxury. So, too, a basil leaf, finger-rubbed, evokes an aroma of opulence.

The resinous aromas of ponderosa pines clarifies our minds, cutting through our confusions' phlegm, releasing the mind "to see life steadily and to see it whole," to use Archbishop Ramsey's phrase. The sweet smell of soil connects us with something deeper than flex and flow, just as does the aroma of greening grass give a sense of the fresh and new.

"A small voice of stillness" is the way the biblical writer describes Elijah's encounter with the divine sounds of silence (I Kings 19:12.) Throughout gardens "still small voices" whisper -- whistling pines, rustling leaves, singing birds, scuttling and scampering creatures, and then those almost noiseless murmurs. These sounds of silence allow us moments of reprieve, or as Thoreau said, "a niversal refuge" and "an inviolable asylum." Indeed, silence feels good as well as being linked to healing.

It takes no wit to relish the tastes of a garden. A carrot freshly pulled from the soil, washed off at the faucet, sweet and snap-crisp, is a sensory treasure available only to those who garden. The complex of sweetness and acidity creeping along the sides of our mouths, touching our palates, and sweeping over our tongues are the province of those who raise tomatoes. Some say store-bought tomatoes are tasteless. No, they're dull.

And then, there are the sights of a garden, those delights of the eye. Sometimes the eye can keep wonder at a distance as though it were "over there," but other times it draws us into the mystery. A pansy or a jaunty daffodil brings a smile. Studying a bearded iris in a garden's silence, our eyes are drawn through a quietly beautiful complex of colors into those throated recesses "offering up," as Albert Camus wrote, "for a minute the glimpse of eternity that we should stretch out over the whole of time."

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith

PACKING HEAT IN THE GARDEN

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (4/15/10)

Artur Rodzinski, the famous conductor of the New York Philharmonic during the middle 1930's, strapped on a holstered pistol under his white tie and tails when conducting the orchestra at Carnegie Hall. "Packing heat" re-assured him while facing down the famous orchestra. One musician, albeit a conductor, facing down a whole gang of accomplished musicians, imbibed as they are in their own interpretations of the score, has to be intimidating. The New York Times called him, "colorful." Whatever it was, he came ready for combat.

Alas, gardeners come ready for combat because they like "kings go forth to do battle in the spring of the year (II Sam 11:1.)" However, they'll not be facing down a gang of fellow gardeners on how to garden, but rather hordes of grasshoppers, emerging from their underground hideouts or flying in over the hill. In autumn, grasshoppers lay their eggs in the ground, forming cells of horticultural saboteurs. In the spring of the year, they slither out, voracious nymphs with the appetites of adolescents, and with their cohorts sweeping up from the dry lowland plains and steppes, they lay waste the lush and verdant gifts of a wet winter in the High Country. Indeed, the USDA is forecasting a heavy infestation this year.

An asymmetrical war, there are no victories and defeats, only stalemates and standstills. Handguns and assault rifles are futile. As a war of attrition, it's possible to fight them to a draw, wearing them down, smiting these orthopterous philistines "hip and thigh (Judg. 15:8.)"

As my instructor in military counter-intelligence, a retired brigadier in the Irish Guards, said, "First find their weak point and then gnaw at it."

If sins are points of weakness, then of the seven deadly sins, gluttony comes to mind for grasshoppers while Wall Street bankers favor insatiable greed. Since grasshoppers have rapacious appetites, the strategy is to gnaw at their gluttony, offering them confections and delights laced with death.

Of course, gardeners have no business polluting the earth with poisons or pesticides since they are not only "tree-huggers" but also "earth lovers." Thus, the most effective weapon in the gardener's arsenal is NoLo bait, a confection made of flaky wheat bran, sprayed with a suspension of distilled water, a sticking agent, and Nosema locustae spores. When the grasshopper ingests the NoLo spores, the spores gradually breach the grasshopper's mid-gut, causing a rapidly occurring death in the young and a slower death amongst the adults. Once the mid-gut is breached, bacteria can enter and infect the grasshoppers as the spores continue to eat the grasshopper's fat, causing death by lassitude and sloth. Happily, NoLo bait is not harmful to "all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small," just grasshoppers.

Another fatal flaw in the grasshopper's character is cannibalism. They eat their own kindred, especially the dead and dying, save for the head. This flaw is a gift that keeps on giving, because as they eat their own, they eat the NoLo spores in the dead and dying, cycling endless extinctions.

The problem with NoLo bait is that it's slow. Gardeners often panic when hordes of grasshoppers appear over the crest of the hill, clamoring for methods of instant destruction which often means pesticides, infecting the earth with poison. Thus, NoLo bait should be applied before the grasshoppers either come out from hiding in the ground or flying in from afar. Early in the game in May, when the grasshoppers expect easy pickings, lay out a spread of No Lo bait to whet their appetites, and let them have at it. The old brigadier would've been proud.

For those preferring combat by proxy, there are three groups of
voracious allies, (1) chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese, (2) praying mantises which can be purchased at commercial nurseries, and (3) birds, making a bird friendly garden advisable with feeders and bird baths placed, cat safe, throughout the garden.

For the nimble and quick who prefer close combat without jumping over the candlestick, they can grab them in flight, squishing them in their hands or, when they're in repose, mashing them under foot. Sans merci.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

HIGH STEPPING VEGETABLES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (3/39/2010)


Characterized as a "high stepping filly" by a veterinarian friend of her family when a budding adolescent, meine Überfrau likes to think of herself as "high maintenance," a species seldom found in Flagstaff. When her "high maintenance" "high stepping filly" mind turns to gardening and fresh vegetables, she invariably focuses upon the "Queen of Sheba" type of vegetables found under glass in special bins with tongs attached at the supermarket, sometimes even in hermetically sealed containers.

This Vogue of Vegetables includes what the French call mange-tout, meaning "eat all." Two mange-tout are snow peas (Pisium sativium var. saccharatum) and the sugar snap peas (var. maccrocarpum) because both the pea and the pod are eaten. The snow pea has been cultivated for about 12,000 years, originating along the Burma and Thailand border. They are peas picked before maturity so that they are flat with only hints of the peas inside and are savored for the pod, not the peas. Gretchen's mother called them "Chinese pea pods."

The sugar snap pea, on the other hand, is only about forty years old, first developed by Dr. Calvin Lamborn for the Gallatin Valley Seed Co., in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in 1979. In the late nineteen sixties, he discovered a mutant in his breeding stock and began breeding it with the snow pea, producing the sugar snap pea a decade later. While the snow pea is fancied for the pod, the peas themselves not being particularly flavorful, the sugar snap pea is favored for both peas and pod, as well as its juiciness.

As with nearly all "high stepping" types, sugar snap peas are a hardy, cool season customer. While they may appear delicate and frail, they can even take a light frost and can be sowed a couple of weeks before the last frost of the season.

Sugar snaps demand a soft bed of friable soil with an abundance of comfortable organic matter. Since they produce their own nitrogen, in horticultural circles called a "fix," they favor a fertilizer low in nitrogen. The nitrogen fix is the sugar snaps' uncanny ability to convert nitrogen in the atmosphere into nitrogen usable by the plant by means of little nodules on its roots.

Originally a vine about 6-8 feet tall, sugar snaps now come as bushes, such as Sugar Daddy and Sugar Ann, and well as vine. Now, the climbers, as do all climbers, social and horticultural, demand special attention, as in special arrangements, like lattices, fences, etc. It is reputed that the climbers are more productive and taste better than the bush. I don't know since my taste buds are corrupted by overuse and age, even aged extra sharp Vermont cheddar nowadays seems mild; however, Gretchen, who fancies that hers are still in working order, claims the climbers are tastier.

As with a lot of climbers, sugar snap climbers need support. I've found a well-proportioned method of raising sugar snaps in a container which is readily accessible to the kitchen door. A container, approximately a foot and a half to two feet in diameter, with a large tomato cage stuck in it for the climbing does quite well.

The seeds should be sown an inch deep and 2-3 inches apart, but since they have a higher sugar content than other peas, the seeds shouldn't be allowed to languish in the ground too long for fear of rotting. They can be sprouted for early planting or germinated in germinating kits found at commercial nurseries. They can also be sown later.

They should be harvested when the pods are filled out and the peas inside are full size. Overcooking and canning turns the sugar to starch, destroying the sweet flavor. They should be cooked no longer than three minutes, boiled or stir-fry, or can be blanched for no more than a minute to cut the agricultural taste for the finicky. Of course, they are best eaten raw either individually or in salads.

Home-grown are best because the supermarket sugar snaps are too long off the vine and long in the tooth, turning the sugar into starch. However, home-grown seldom reach the kitchen because they'll be eaten right off the vine dust and all.

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2010

SECURITY AND FREEDOM

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (4/15/10)

After nearly sixty years of trying to understand human beings, I have set upon a simple theory. The customary diagnostic manual, arcane and Byzantine as it is, is less than useful, especially if one holds to Occam's Razor that the simplest explanation is the best, as in not multiplying entities "beyond necessity."

Most of us are caught between two polar opposites: security and freedom. If we're secure, such as civil servants, we pay for it with subordination, humiliation, and constraint. If we're free, such as entrepreneurs, solo professionals, craftsmen, and artists, we're insecure. The price of security is depression, and the price of independence is anxiety. Varying intensities of these two states of being describe most of us. They're not emotions, such as lust and greed, which energize us, but states of being, the way we function. In one way or another, most of us move back and forth between depression and anxiety. I know I have. The intellectual nabobs call it the existential situation, the way it is.

So there we are, and what to do about it? Well, we can think about what's good for us. First, it's important to connect with the something elemental, like dirt or water, because they're our origins. At the beach at sunset, often as not, solitary individuals or couples, stand at the shoreline, staring out toward the horizon, connecting with themselves in an fleeting moment of infinitude, finding within themselves the soul they'd forgotten.

Dirt will do it, too, as in digging into it and letting it flow through our fingers, and more than that, smelling it, especially after a rain in that treasured fusion of dirt and water. The nice thing about doing it in the dirt is that we can grow things in that fusion, especially beets (Beta vulgaris).

Meine Überfrau often falls into a rhapsody over drifts of daffodils in the spring, recalling Wordsworth's daffodils "fluttering and dancing in the breeze," as her heart "dances with the daffodils." Coming along later in the spring, during the summer, and into early fall are drifts of variously hued leaves of beets, nearly as charismatic, strewn across a garden's bed.

The variety of beets is astounding. Three beguiling ones are readily available in seed packets at commercial nurseries: Bull's Blood, di Chioggia, and Burpee's Golden. Bull's Blood, an heirloom, is a deep Burgundy, sometimes with candy stripes, maturing in 45 days. Di Chioggia is a mild Italian heirloom, pink with bands of white, maturing in 60 days. Burpee's Golden is yellowish and orange and mild, maturing in 55 days.

Root as well as cool weather vegetables, they're suited for Flagstaff's climate. They have a variety of uses. First of all, their foliage is beautiful enough to dress up any garden.

Originally, eaten for its leaves, the leaves are favored for salads and boiled as is Swiss chard, their horticultural kinsmen.

Finally, their roots, those delicious orbs, are a delight at any table, boiled, roasted, or raw in salads, especially the di Chioggia with its bands of pink and white.

Nutritionally they are whiz bangs, full of folates, manganese, potassium, fiber, vitamin C, magnesium, tryptophan, iron, copper, and phosphorus. High in sugar, they are low in calories. Excellent at inhibiting cancer, especially colon cancer, and heart attacks, they are anti-inflammatory.

With seeds resembling Grape-Nuts, they're easy to sow at half an inch depth with five inch spacing, they do well with a balanced fertilizer and germinate in 14-21 days. They relish, as do all root vegetables, a friable soil with plenty of organic matter.

Aside from their beauty, taste, nutrients, and tonic qualities, beets are satisfying. Processed food is not, leaving the eater craving more of the same. One bite begets the next, but beets have a high satisfaction quotient. While not exactly a frisson, beets satisfy, a salubrious quality when a person is on a sliding scale someplace between the frets and the blues. Eat beets and stay healthy of mind as well as body after digging in the dirt.

By the way, Olga Johnson, a native of Saratov in southern Russia, has an excellent recipe for borsch soup at http://oldfartskitchen.blogspot.com.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010