SNAP BEANS: A SHIRKER'S DREAM

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/22/2010)

A slothful man, I'm always on the lookout for the easy way out. Meine Überfrau says, "You look like you're walking backward even when you're walking forward." Her mother, Iola Schulz, of innocent countenance and mischievous disposition, once said, "Dogs like Dana because his favorite position is prone." She died at 96 when she was ready, the peaceful death of the just. So, as a gardener, I'm alert to things that don't require much effort, like dill, a shirker's dream.

Another shirker's dream is snap beans. Once called "stringed beans," some genetic whiz has bred the strings out. Snap beans or green beans should be harvested while immature. If they are left to mature, the result is a fibrous husk and big, lumpy beans, a tasteless unpleasantness. Best is an edible tender husk and puny immature beans.

Part age, I just turned 83, and part sloth, I don't like to bend over. I don't know many people who do. It's an unnatural position because human beings are designed to stand up straight or lie down. My gym teacher, nowadays called a physical therapist, tells me I should squat rather than bend over. Now, squat is an ugly word. My drill sergeant in the army, a disagreeable carrot-top named Statz, was particularly fond of the word, often using it as a command. I once drove 250 miles out of my way to give him a piece of my mind only to find that he'd died of unnatural causes. When I became a drill sergeant, I, also, found the expression useful in humiliating recruits, the first step in learning military discipline.

"The squats" aside, picking immature beans is often unpleasant because bush beans grow underneath the leaves, a hangout for bees, grasshoppers, and spiders. If gardeners like to talk while gardening, agape, a grasshopper just might see an open mouth as a safe haven. Some gardeners wear gloves which are inconvenient. The trick is to find immature beans that grow on top of the leaves.

Happily, such a variety exists. "Maxi," a cultivar, can be obtained from www.gourmetseed.com and is a fine green French Filet, thin, straight, and tender which matures in 51 days.

Another bush bean which is worth a little back pain is the cultivar "Rocquencourt," another French Filet. A yellow wax bean of golden color, its full name is "Beurre d' Rocquencourt" (Butter of Rocquencourt.) An heirloom from one of the richest agricultural areas in France, it's probably a descendant of the first beans introduced to France from Algeria in the 1840's. Its flavor is worth the price of standing up a few times to stretch out the kinks, even some extra effort, while keeping the mouth shut.

The next bean is "A Cosse Violette Sans Fil" which means a purple husk without string. A beautiful plant with lavender flowers and purpled veined leaves, it is a trophy which produces long, purple beans. A pole bean, it's so attractive that it can be used on a lattice to shield a deck or patio, doing triple duty as shield, trophy, and vegetable. It is best steamed rather than boiled to retain the purple color.

Of course, there are the durable regulars, such as the Kentucky Wonder, also called Old Homestead, and Blue Lake, and, reliable they are, producing delicious snap beans, both bush and pole, all-American regulars. The two mentioned first are fancy French haricots verts.

Beans are easy to grow. The only inconvenience of the pole bean is erecting a pole which can be a teepee, a lattice, strings, a wire fence, or what-have-you. The "Cosse Violette" is worth the inconvenience.

Snap beans are best planted in a rich, friable soil, laden with compost and manure. They should be planted about 1½ inches deep, 3 to 5 inches apart, and covered with organic material, like straw.

Since snap beans produce their own nitrogen, a low nitrogen fertilizer is best, first dug into the soil before the seeds are planted, and then side-dressed every few weeks thereafter. They should be watered to about nine inches in depth, but the ground should never be sopping wet, just moist.

Se planter des haricots succulents et savoureux.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

Susan Lamb

Gardens on the outskirts of Flagstaff are patient and persistent teachers. Most of them eventually manage to educate even the most stubborn of gardeners about how to cooperate with the local climate and just how little they can boss around nature.

My husband and I live at the edge of the ponderosa forest, on a south-facing slope above a meadow. Biologists call such a place an ecotone, “a transition area between two ecological communities with species characteristic to both.”

Where we live is not only a biological ecotone, it's also something of a cultural ecotone between human beings and the natural world. We have learned from our garden that what will grow here is definitely not up to us. The plants will mostly determine that for themselves, in collusion with butterflies and chipmunks in the daytime and moths and rabbits at dusk. Even the inanimate — the sun and the soil, the wind and the rain — have a much stronger voice than do we.

At first we tried planting what we wanted, based on what we found at nurseries and in catalogs. We put in cosmos, for instance, but chipmunks and ground squirrels ate them all immediately. Pansies and petunias met the same fate. Sudden frosts blackened most nursery stock and dry winds shriveled transplants grown in distant, muggy greenhouses.

The only plants that thrived in those early days were the ones whose seeds arrived in our garden via the wind or the alimentary systems of birds: alpine pennycress and silverweed cinquefoil, MacDougal verbena and common yarrow, pussytoes and pygmy bluets, wild sunflowers and Flagstaff senecio with its rosette of leaves and single yellow flower on a stalk.

Noticing where these locals established themselves, we finally learned where to put the native—or at least hardy and drought-tolerant—plants we brought home from a nursery. We stopped dotting them around the house in naked patches of dirt. Instead we planted perennials beside football-sized rocks that would keep them warm, shield them from the wind, and hold moisture in the soil to sustain them between rains. Seeing that new plants did best near established plants, we grouped them together to form mutually-nurturing neighborhoods that shelter each other’s seedlings and attract hordes of ecstatic pollinators. The house itself became part of the garden, fostering mosses and moisture-loving plants on its shady north side, and agaves and other drought-tolerant plants on its sunny south.

In the early years, it sometimes felt as though we were in an endless struggle with marauding rodents and harsh elements, which foiled our attempts to establish plants we wanted just where we wanted them. We squandered time, effort, and expense before we learned to observe what was already here and the character of each plant and place in each season.

It was when we finally let the garden have its own way that the struggle ceased. Our garden taught us to cooperate with what naturally occurs and to offer only gentle encouragement. In our case, this meant providing sheltered niches in appropriate spots for plants both wild and bought. After that, voila! Our garden’s evolution into flowering mounds, mats, and spikes began.

We are patient now, recognizing that the garden goes through different stages in concert with its pollinators and pruners, from its small and shy early bloomers to its dazzling summer crescendo. Shrubs leaf out and perennials emerge as if by magic each spring. Pollinators from beetles to bees to hummingbirds arrive as their preferred flowers open in sequence from April through October. Ripe asters attract lesser goldfinches and other birds which bob up and down as they pluck at the seedheads, dropping a few to germinate next year. Golden-mantled ground squirrels harvest the fescue, leaving it to dry in the sun then storing it like hay. In winter, rabbits nibble shrubs poking above the snow, neatly and naturally pruning them back. Elk and mule deer mysteriously keep their distance (much to our relief) but coyotes, fox, and an occasional weasel do their bit to keep things in balance as they prowl at night around the house. On our land, there is no question that nature is the Master Gardener.

Susan Lamb, a local writer and naturalist (www.susanlamb.net), and her husband, Tom Bean, a photographer, won the Best Native Plant Garden award of the Arizona Native Plant Society in 2008. She is the author of The Natural World of Saint Francis of Assisi and Arizona's Scenic Seasons.

A FEELING WITH NO NAME

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/16/10)

Tam Nguyen is a young Vietnamese woman learning to speak and write English at the Literacy Volunteers of Coconino County. Under the tutelage of Joel Baillere, AIA, she wrote a composition in which she said, "Deeply inside each of us we have an empty area. We do not have a name on it or understand what it is. So we try to turn the empty feeling to the arts."

William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury, a tale of the Compson family's fall into ruin, wrote of the same emptiness. Dilsey, the family's black maid and silently heroic presence, at the end said, "They endured." It is to that experience of enduring to which Tam points. There has to be something beyond the "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," and for many, as Tam points out, that something may be found in the arts. The arts often touch the fringes of meaning, the presence of mystery. Rudolph Otto, the great historian of religion, called the experience both awesome and enchanting (mysterium tremendum et fascinans.)

The arts, as Tam writes, sense the awe and enchantment. Ironic it is that a newcomer to the English language from a distant land of our troubled past has put her finger on that experience with no name. However, the arts are not the only ways to touch the fringes of meaning. Listening to the silence of a snowfall on a winter's evening will do it.

Spring, also, carries a sense of wonder, the experience of mystery. The emergence of daffodils or a tulip in retreating banks of snow, a wildflower in a meadow, the slow greening of a field all witness to that mystery freighted with meaning, the meaning that makes it all worthwhile.

So much of this is the gift of gardeners and their gardens. Taken for granted, maybe even seen as eccentrics, gardeners paint their canvasses of beauty all over town, places that take us beyond the ordinary and the humdrum into the mysteries of beauty, allowing everyone to pause and sigh at wonders so often wrought.

As Tam pointed out, it does not have a name because it is not an object "out there." It envelops us in the experience of the mystery, sweeping us up in a moment of transcendence in the "twinkling of an eye." Small scenes of these moments of transcendence can be seen throughout the city when two or three people pause before a garden to gaze at beauty, hold their breath, sigh, and then walk on.

Some walk by without pausing, consummated in their boredom. Never once smelling the aroma of a bouquet of roses or pausing to admire its beauty, they seem coiled within themselves. Albert Camus in his essay The Minotaur wrote, "Obliged to live facing a wonderful landscape, the people of Oran have overcome that fearful ordeal by covering their city with very ugly constructions," "turning back upon themselves like a snail." Some people cannot abide the beautiful, much less the mysterious. In the same essay he mentions the friend of Flaubert "who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at this irreplaceable earth, exclaimed, 'Close the window; it's too beautiful.'"

Along with artists, gardeners are the guardians of a community's soul. Just as a school without the arts is likely to turn out graduates without imagination, so a city without gardens is a city without a soul. Some say that they have no time to garden. Do they have no time for beauty? What kind of souls do they have? It is a wonder what these people think of themselves who let their yards go to weed or cover them with gravel's "very ugly constructions."

Legend has it that when Michelangelo finished his statue Moses, he was so taken with its life-like quality that he struck its knee with a hammer, crying out, "Now speak." Its knee is, indeed, scarred. We need no hammers with our gardens and flowers. They speak when we pause to look, and having looked we sigh for a brief encounter with the experience with no name.

For that we can thank the gardeners who have names.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

SMART GARDENING IN FLAGSTAFF

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/9/10)

Tallulah Bankhead, after watching Leonard Bernstein conduct the orchestra at Tanglewood , sent him a note, saying, "Darling, I have gone mad over your back muscles. You must come and have dinner with me." The rest is lost in the mists of gossip.

In another vein, I would like to send a note to novice gardeners that while back muscles are required for gardening, they don't have to be a body-builders'. Supple, even creaky, is enough. What counts is smarts. Geeks and nerds make excellent gardeners.

First of all, to dispel a well-known fact: gardening is not an uphill battle in Flagstaff. Veteran gardeners, like battle field veterans, relish frightening recruits with tales of gardening terrors, and, one suspects that their tales improve with the telling. Gardening in Flagstaff is not difficult if gardeners use their smarts, especially with tomatoes.

The first smarts is varieties that mature early, and if one is given to starting with seeds, the middle of March is the time to begin. Seeds offer a great variety, such the early maturing Sasha's Altai, Galina, Early Girl, Stupice, Prairie Fire, and Big Boy. Starting with seeds is simple. Commercial nurseries have planting packs for starting with seeds. A sunny window sill serves very well as a green house. After the plants have developed a second set a leaves, transplant them to a pint container, using potting soil, so that they'll grow larger. When they've reached about foot or more, it's time to transplant them outside.

The second smarts is soil. Control-freaks can shine manipulating soils. No one in their right mind ever just sticks a plant in unprepared soil. I've heard tales of that happening in Wisconsin, but I doubt them. I've been to Wisconsin, and I saw lots of cows, pine trees, football crazies, cheese heads, and fisherman but never anyone sticking plants in unprepared soil. Maybe Iowa, but not Wisconsin.

Smart soil should be friable, loose and flowing through the fingers, so that the roots can grow. No brainer. A soil desideratum: a nice mixture of volcanic cinders, clay, and organic matter, such as compost and manure. Also, it should have the sweet smell of earth. One of the pleasures of gardening is smelling dirt.

An excellent way to control soil is in containers which is especially true for tomatoes which tend to be soil finicky. A black five gallon container will do. If there is money to burn, fancy containers can be had. The soil can be sterilized by draping the container with a black plastic bag and let the sun do the cooking for a week or so. Also, sterilized soil can be bought if there is even more money to burn.

The next smarts is fertilizer. Tomatoes will produce marvelous foliage but no tomatoes with a high nitrogen fertilizer, the kind used for indoor potted trophy plants. Tomatoes like a somewhat balanced fertilizer high in phosphorus for the production of fruit, but with ample nitrogen and potassium for healthy foliage and plant well-being. Also, they should be fertilized regularly.

The third smarts is water. Tomatoes like to get their feet wet while their leaves stay dry. Their leaves crisp when the sun hits them if they're wet, and air borne infections are fond of wet tomatoes. Also, they don't like standing in old foul water. Who does?

So far so easy. The problem that creates the whining about gardening in Flagstaff is the weather which I would like to point out is not the tomato's fault. Complaints about the short growing season are predictable because people often shirk their responsibilities and blame the weather. Weather and climate are safe scapegoats although sometimes they strike back.

Another no brainer. It's called shelter, like coming in out of the rain and dressing for the cold. To blaspheme Noel Coward, "Only mad dogs and Englishmen take their tomatoes out in the noonday cold." When transplanted outside, the plants can either be bundled up in blankets or surrounded by a nifty device called Walls-o-Water, also available from commercial nurseries which are really portable, mini-greenhouses.

There you have it. Smart gardening in Flag.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

AN ECOLOGY OF MUDPIES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D.

"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" echo the charmingly primitive second creation narrative in Genesis. "A mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground--then the LORD God formed man of the dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being."

A metaphorical potter fashioning the man from clay points to a human rootedness in the process of nature, a reality often forgot in the modern emphasis on cognition. The Hebrew word for man as an individual, 'adham, is closely related to the Hebrew word for red earth, 'adama. Modern psychotherapy attempts to understand human beings by exploring their pasts as if they were locked in an historical time-line. Theologians claim that human beings, imprinted with the divine image, are more than the dust of the earth. As the narrative in Genesis points out, human beings are mud pies infused with the breath of life. It may, also, be time to understand human beings in their earthiness, as in digging down in the dirt.

Years ago, as a graduate student floating around in the world of ideas, an old-time physician told me, "You've got to remember, Dana, that you're 99% animal." As the ancient (1350 B.C.) prophetic narrative indicates, we began as mud pies. At heart, we are primitives with a very thin veneer of sophistication, and if we don't get that, we're in trouble. 99% primitive.

The closer we are to the natural process, the more efficiently we function, the psychological corollary of sustainability. A recent study placed 90 highly stressed adults in one of three different contexts: a window facing a meadow and trees, a 50 inch plasma television screen of the same scene, and blank wall. The heart rate of those looking through the window decreased faster than the other two who fared the same which doesn't say much for television. Staring at the nihilism of a blank wall can be unnerving. If the study had added lying in the grass, looking up at the sky through the trees, or sitting at a monitor checking the Dow Jones, the differences would've been even more marked.

The further removed we are from the natural process, the more inefficient we become because, encapsulated within ourselves, like snails coiling upon themselves, we are ill-nourished. Experiencing the natural process technologically second-hand impoverishes human beings by cutting them off from their origins. Without the connective tissues of touch, smell, sound, or taste, human beings experience only themselves, a solipsism of the spirit.

While "getting back to our roots" can mean an age regression or an ancestral time-line, it can also mean digging in the dirt which is the heart of gardening. Digging allows gardeners to connect to their primitive origins, being "of the earth, earthy."

Gregory Bateson, the famous anthropologist, former husband of Margaret Mead, and underrated genius of the last half of the 20th century, wrote in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) that one of the greatest flaws in western thinking is the separation of the mind from the body as though they were separate entities. The brain is not the same things as the mind. Indeed, a baseball pitcher doesn't calculate wind, velocity, trajectory, and thrust in his brain. The mind in his shoulder and arm does it. He's connected to his flesh, often shaking out the stress before he hurls the ball.

Rather than a distinction between body and mind, we are a continuum from the dust to the mind, and it is those sensory connective tissues that keep it all together, especially touch, smell, and taste. We cannot feel or smell the grass through a window, much less a television screen. Gardening allows us to use all of our senses to the fullest, connecting us to the natural process, keeping us in contact with the dusty sub-stratum of our lives, as the mind is enriched. The imagination is free to soar in lovely gardens filled with life. Cicero wrote, "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

A HIGH COUNTRY SPRING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/24/10)

As I was listening to Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring," I realized how much he used woodwinds and strings. It evoked memories of Appalachia, feeling again the gentle quality of springtime, especially the rains. Sara Teasdale said it well, "There will come soft rains, and the smell of the ground."

Living now in the Above the Rim, I suspect that if Mr. Copland were alive today to compose music about monsoons in the High Country, he would use trumpets, trombones, coronets, bugles, snare drums, cymbals, and timpani, to evoke the experience of Flagstaff's weather. Surely, no mellow French horns or saxophones, but instead, the introductory fanfare to Richard Strauss's tone poem "Also Sprach Zarathustra," made popular in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Weather in the Southwest is a bit brassy which befits the stark beauty of the landscape. The Grand Canyon and Monument Valley are neither gentle nor mellow but evoke rather a sense of grandeur and awe. Rudyard Kipling might well have written of the Colorado Plateau as he did of Mandalay's bay where "dawn comes up like thunder."

While kale doesn't "come up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay," it does very well in weather both stark and demanding. It's even usable after a shot of hail because even though it's perforated, it's still usable, holes and all, its nutritional efficacy not relying on its beauty.

Whole Foods claims that kale is the most efficient of vegetables in a calorie and nutrient ratio. In other words, with kale the gardener and the gourmet get more nutrients for the least amount of calories, more bang for the buck. Often the color of battleship grey, as the dreadnought of vegetables, kale even gets better when nipped with frost. Crambe contra mundum.

Kale is what the horticulturalists call a cool season vegetable,
which means that it's just great for Flagstaff, taking advantage of our cool climate. It can be planted early, may even limp through our summers, is refreshed by the cool of autumn, and marches like a soldier straight into the first snowfall.

What more could a gardener and a gourmet ask for than a vegetable jammed with nutrients, low in calories, which is easy to grow in Flagstaff? Edibility.

We are rescued by a low country native from New Orleans of Cajun heritage, the diva of Coconino County's Democratic Party, Harriet Young, who can make Brussels sprouts, palatable, even, tasty.

Her recipe is simple. Olive oil, two cloves of garlic mashed and chopped, ½ onion chopped, water, lemon, salt and pepper. Sauté onion in olive oil, add garlic and kale and continue to sauté, add water and steam until tender. Add zing with juice from ½ lemon. Salt and pepper.

Recipes from Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians, as well as fellow Anarchists are welcome for a database of kale recipes to be available ecumenically online at http://oldfartskitchen.blogspot.com.

Kale appears in three forms with variations, Russian, Italian, and Scots. Foodie snobs prefer the Italian or Tuscan kale. Scots kale is kilted with ruffles, and Russian is red with a broad leaf.

For what it's worth, which is not much, I prefer the Russian largely because it's easier to use with its broad leaf. The foodies claim that the Italian tastes better, but since my taste buds suffer from a wasted youth of fastfood salt abuse, beginning with Bob's Big Boy, I can't tell.

Like dill, kale grows almost like a weed. I've had volunteers all over my flower and vegetable beds from previous plantings. It can be seeded outdoors when the temperature of the soil is 45º F. or indoors six weeks before the last frost and transplanted when the danger of frost is past. Since outdoors is so easy, transplantation is a waste of energy.

A warning: aphids like kale. The best antidote is the garden hose's nozzle. Turn it down and blast away at ground level, the beasties savoring the underside of the leaves. It may take several applications. If that doesn't work, try insecticidal soap, but wash it off before eating.

As Euripides said, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Stay sane. Eat kale.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

A LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/8/10)

I would like to say a few words about the up-coming Master Gardener Class offered by Coconino Country Extension. It can be a life-changing experience because it is about more than insects, drought-tolerant plants, tomatoes, and compost. Under-girding it all is a profound change in the way gardeners, and everyone else for the matter, should look at things, a shift in what Emmanuel Kant called a Weltanshauung, a world-view.

I'm sure that Hattie Braun, the Grand Impresario of the Master Gardener Extravaganza, would eschew any claim to philosophical, much less theological, acumen. As a confirmed and knowledgeable horticulturalist, her focus is on the furrow, as well it should be, and not on the stars.

There it is. One cannot fight the natural process. As a boy in Sunday School, I often learned it and just as often forgot it. Thomas à Kempis said it simply, "Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit " (Man proposes, but God disposes.) God's will is not something to be commanded as the natural process illustrates and politicians and preachers often forget.

In gardening, the human tendency, filled with hubris, wants to take charge, and do with nature as it wills. Humans want to plant things they like, unaware that the real question is not what they like, but what works. The Master Gardener Class is about what works, pragmatic gardening.

In the High Country not everything that works elsewhere works here. As we have all heard over and over and ad ridiculum, the weather and the soil in Flagstaff aren't as congenial to gardening as they are in San Diego, Tulsa, or Annapolis. So what? Enough kvetching already.

The big message, which bears repeating, is that successful gardening requires cooperation with nature. No one anywhere ever got anyplace trying to command the will of God.

Easier said than done. Oddly, it takes knowledge to cooperate with nature. Just sticking plants in the ground doesn't work. Successful gardening requires knowledge of soil, plants, water, weather, and fertilizer. The knowledge has to be specific to locale and plants as well. The specificity of the locale doesn't mean just Flagstaff. It refers to micro-climates, specific zones, such as the shady side of a house or the bottom of a slope as distinct from the top.

Gardening begins with soil, and the soil around Flagstaff is great for ponderosa pine and native plants and grasses. If anyone wants to move beyond those, even with adaptable plants, the soil has to be amended. The Master Gardening Class devotes time in how to amend the soil to make it more congenial to plants other than natives.

The key element in the right kind of soil is compost. Compost can be store-bought or home made. As with most things, home made is best.
Part of the course deals with the recipes and cooking times for home made.

Which brings us to fertilizer. Not all fertilizer fertilizes the right way. Tomatoes don't want the same kind of fertilizer as lettuce, grasses, of onions.

Even though the soil may have been amended to make it plant- friendly, the right kinds of plants and seeds have to be chosen. For instance, while an heirloom Brandywine tomato may be grown here, its fruit will not mature fast enough here to produce edible tomatoes. Artichokes can be grown here, but don't expect a bumper crop although the colorful thistles are worth the effort.

There are lots of other topics: good and bad insects, fruit trees, vegetables, flowers, and bulbs. Water conservation is a big Yes, Yes.

The key element is, of course, the Grand Impresario, Hattie Braun. She knows her stuff. She relishes horticulture, and she brings in a collection of experienced gardeners and horticulturalists who know how to garden in the High Country. The class which meets once a week for 15 weeks is a pleasurable experience, and if one doesn't resist the inevitable, it can be a life-changing experience.

The up-coming series of classes begin Tuesday, February 2, from 1-4:30 p.m. at the East Flagstaff Public Library's Community Room. Hattie can be reached at (928) 774-1868, x17, or at hbraun@cals.arizona.edu.

Bon jardinage!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

DINGY TEETH AND BRIGHTENING CUISINE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/31/09)

Stepping out of a warm shower stall on a cold winter's morn, stark naked, dripping wet, half-blinded by soap in my eyes, groping for a towel, meine Überfrau greeted me, saying, "You know, DP, your teeth are a bit dingy, like some old geezer's." I replied, "What's the matter with that? I am an old geezer, and, besides, I don't look at my teeth." The retort was swift and fast, "But I do, and you're not my kind of old geezer. Here's some whitening strips for your teeth. Dingy teeth age you. Besides, I want you to look nice. I love you."

Straightaway, whitening strips were thrust into my mitts, and I was told them to put them on my choppers. To put a blasphemous twist on Hebrews 10:31: "It is a fearful thing it is to fall into the hands of a loving woman!"

As I tried to affix gooey, slippery brightening strips to my teeth, I ruminated on the irony that women are always trying to improve on their husbands while men wish their wives would stay the same as when they first knew them. First, I thought that perhaps women were smarter than men, but then I concluded it's that damned managerial gene they get from their mothers. "If mamma ain't happy, ain't nobody gonna be happy."

"By the way, are you going to plant all those onions this year like you did last year? You know, you go overboard on tomatoes and onions, like twenty tomato plants and 405 onion sets. Really compulsive."

"Just think of my tomatoes and onions as brightening our taste buds, besides it was only 375 onions, and we ran out at that."

While my teeth were still brightening, stealthily I ordered my onions sets on the Internet to be delivered on March 15 for planting on March 19, the first day of spring when the days are long enough, 12-13 hours, to grow onions. Chastised, I ordered only 225 sets.

Around about January or February is the best time to order both onion sets and tomato seeds because the selection is greater. Wait until it's time to plant, and it's the dregs. There are lots of places to buy onion sets on the Internet, like Brown's Omaha Plant Farms in Texas, www.bopf.com.

Onions, like Caesar's Gaul, are divided into three parts, short day, intermediate day, and long day. Flagstaff is intermediate. Walla Walla onions are long day, coming from up north, and Vidalia's are short day, coming from down south. Three intermediate sweet onion hybrids are Superstar, Hybrid Candy, and Red Candy Apple. Onions are tolerant to the cold so they can be planted without protection when the temperatures are still freezing but the soil has thawed.

My Superstars from last year were so sweet that one of my dentist's assistants, Leona McGeary, ate one as if it were an apple without any serious side effects. We, Leona and I, barter onions for chicken manure, not dental work.

As with everything, success is in the preparation. Onions, being a bunch of tight-knit leaves, love nitrogen fertilizer which means blood meal and coffee and tea grounds as well as other nitrogen fertilizers. They also flourish in friable or loose soil and that means lots of compost and manure. If the soil is clay, it's best to dig in sand or volcanic cinders. Making a virtue out of a necessity, cinders in Flagstaff are readily available and are more nutritious than sand.

Since we are in a drought and onions need lots of water, the prudent way to plant onion sets is in a trench, ensuring plenty of water carefully conserved, not watering the whole bed, just the trench. Also, they should be watered regularly.

A week or so after planting, they should be side-dressed with a high nitrogen fertilizer and regularly thereafter.

The sets can be planted five inches apart so that around June 15
spring onions can be harvested by plucking every other onion. The remaining onions can be left to grow into magnificent globes, much to be enjoyed later in the summer and into autumn.

Think of onions as cuisine brighteners for dingy taste buds.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

ALTERNATE REALITIES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/12/10)

Visiting The Prelude Show of the Artists' Coalition at the Coconino Center for the Arts last year I felt as though I were on an excursion through alternate realities. Artists, like gardeners, are often slightly off the grid, and, therefore, entertaining, interesting, and often lit with insight.

Artists see things differently from the way most people see them, putting things together in fresh ways. While they don't create ex nihilo, out of nothing, as does God, as human beings, they fashion variations on God's creation. Creating in their minds' eyes, their vision remains unknown unless crafted. So art as an artifact is a craft as well as a vision.

On a journey of discovery, I tried to see what they saw as well as how they saw it. Some were angst, some libidinous exuberance, some remembered sorrows, some the joy of elegant form, and many private ironies. So it is with gardeners because they, too, fugue on themes divine.

Some appear as junkyard gardeners, their gardens littered with broken pots, leaking hoses, piles of compost, over-grown vines, and old benches. Amidst the chaos, isles of beauty appear, flowers seldom seen, cascading planters hanging from trees, tables laden with extravagant plants, and small, carefully tended plots of rocks, flowers, vegetables, and grass, all configured to see the ordinary extraordinarily. A garden is a Weltanschauung, to use Emmanuel Kant's word, a way of looking at life and the world, and these apparently chaotic gardeners use the beauty of their plots as means to survive in their worlds "without form and void."

Then there are gardens, carefully tended, architecturally crafted, everything in its place. Grass carefully clipped, flower beds fashionably curved, as places of ease and contentment, these gardens invite an afternoon snooze, a picnic with wine and bread for two, reading a favorite book, a place of safety. Fashioned out of chaos, these gardens are achievements, where gardeners aren't merely surviving, but prevailing. No absurdities, inconsistencies, and unintended consequences, they're predictable and reassuring without tumult or turmoil. As the ancient Hellenic cult temples set in the chaos of Greek history, their art is in the elegance of the form where chaos stops at the property line.

Some gardeners don't seek to impose order on chaos or seek refuge amidst the chaos, but seek rather to protect themselves against the chaos. Buttressed by a no-man's land of gravel and fences, they resemble moated castles, defended against a hostile chaos without. Plots of beauty behind the fences, never seen save for those who live within, may be exquisitely beautiful, inner gardens of beauty, akin to medieval monasteries in which a faith under assault was protected.

Other gardens, which are usually near the end of the road, are neither examples of imposing order with everything in its place and a place for everything nor fleeing from disorder in which everything means nothing. Rather, they're examples of looking for patterns and rhythms in the natural world, contours in the chaos, such as communities of plants, such as pines, oaks, and penstemon. At the end of the road, they are leaving the disharmonies of urbanity behind them to find a harmony with the natural world. The silence of the forest and woods where there are no straight lines and jangling noises, where boulders aren't removed but used as pivots of design, offer a sense of fusion with the creation instead of an alienation.

Last, a no garden at all, the weeds and refuse of "I don't care," "what's it to me?" and "so what?" Nihilistic, a belief in nothingness, they're the art of the irresponsible the punked-out grunge garden, mumbling an inchoate "whatever."

Of course, all gardens are works in progress, never complete, never finished in which the gardeners' art is either disintegrating or unfolding, as gardeners reveal themselves as their gardens evolve. They may appear disorderly, but as any experienced gardener knows, failure is as much a means to accomplishment as success and, often as not, a better tutor. Of course, these gardens are all of us who are becoming rather than being and in becoming do it in the dirt.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2010

DOOMSDAY HORTICULTURE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (12/22/09)

In a time when apocalyptic thinking is in vogue with dire threats of global warming, asteroid attacks, nuclear holocausts, desertification, coastal flooding, climate change, financial collapse, and terrorism, a "Doomsday Vault" near the North Pole seems appropriate. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is the biggest and coldest seed bank in the world. Located just below the North Pole in Spitzbergen, Norway, it's large enough to contain four and a half million seed lots from all over in the world, stored at -0º F.

As a seed bank, it's insurance against a catastrophe which would wipe out food production world-wide. Fundamentally cold storage, it's a high-powered, super-duper refrigerator dug into the side of a permanently frozen mountain with a refrigeration unit to assure a -0º F. temperature.

Another Noah and the Ark operation, only with seeds rather than animals, the Millenium Seed Bank in Sussex, England, cold banks seeds from wild plants throughout the world just in case the wild plants are wiped out in a climatic Armageddon.

Surprisingly, Northern Arizona has a seed bank, too, not dug into Mt. Humphries, but cozily sitting inside NAU's Research Greenhouses. It's actually a maximum, industrial-sized, stainless steel refrigerator kept at -10ºF, supervised by none other than Brad Blake and Phil Patterson. They're saving seeds of ponderosa pines and several other trees in the mountains of the Southwest, preparing for the next catastrophic wildfire, parasitic infestation, or some as yet unknown plague. A bank without tellers or loan officers, the Research Greenhouses' refrigerated seed bank does, however, offer insurance on mortgaged futures.

Apocalyptic thinking differs from prophetic thinking in that it offers no hope, only mayhem, catastrophe, and destruction as in lethal injections, the Beast of the Apocalypse, Noah and the Ark, and Avatar. Prophetic thinking doesn't predict the future but rather offers hope for the immediate future, maybe even long-term, as when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "I have a dream." His theme was "redemption follows repentance," instead of a nightmarish "Burn, Baby, Burn."

Brad and Phil travel the Southwest gathering pine cones from ponderosa forests for their refrigerated Ark, taking along with them an arborist to climb trees. Their seed bank contains ponderosa seeds from various and varied places in the Southwest as well as other pines, such as Chihuahua, Apache, and Southwestern.

The trick is to reseed a forest after a wild fire with seeds from trees native to the devastated land. If the forest near Strawberry or Happy Jack were devastated by insect or fire, it could be best reclaimed by seeds saved from that locale. The ponderosa pine can be found high on the San Francisco Peaks, the plains of Kansas, and the shores of California. However, ponderosa pine seeds from the shores of California wouldn't do well on the San Francisco Peaks. The principle is that all reforestations are best local.

Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North would've survived if he had been transplanted to Savannah, but it would be doubtful if Tin Pan Alley's Vamp of Savannah would've survived on the shores of Hudson Bay in Arctic Quebec.

Brad Blake is American royalty, tracing his ancestry back Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Plantation by way of the plains of Kansas and the steppes of Arizona. Phil Patterson, MacTavish thrifty, is a flame-haired, jolly tall drink of water of Scot's descent. Both are savvy, keepers of the forest.

Now, not all of their work is tending to their apocalyptic refrigerator. Much is prophetic as in "If you don't replace all those invasive water-sucking Saltcedar trees (Tamarix ramosissima) along our streams and rivers, you're shrinking our water resources during a drought." Repent to be redeemed, going native and save water. They grow native and adaptable plants for restoration projects throughout the Southwest.

A pet project of theirs is the development of an aspen genotype garden on the NAU campus, the better to protect our aspens groves from drought or herbivores. They purpose to acquire genetic information to provide adaptability to the larger genome to help aspens cope with climate change.

Also, they provide research facilities for the faculty and students at Northern Arizona University.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

THE MCCORMICK ROSE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith (11/18/09)

A touch of class, a hint of civilization, a love story, and a tragedy are themes entwined in the tale of the McCormick Rose, a cutting of which graces the steps into Old Main at NAU. The first McCormick Rose was brought as a cutting by Margaret Hunt McCormick, the bride of Richard McCormick, Arizona’s Second Territorial Governor, to Prescott in November 1865. A French Boursaid (Rosa gallica), an ancient French hybrid, this pink rose was the first cultivated rose in Arizona.

The rose at Old Main was a cutting of the McCormick Rose at the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott which was in turn a cutting from the original rose planted by Margaret McCormick by the front door of the Governor’s Mansion in Prescott.


The McCormick Rose began its journey in Margaret McCormick’s trousseau as she and Richard made their way to Arizona. First, the cutting accompanied them by steamship from New York to Jamaica and thence to Aspinwall at the Isthmus of Panama. Next, the cutting went with them overland on mule back to the Pacific Coast where they and the cutting again boarded a steamship for Acapulco. Richard and Margaret spent two days touring the deserted city, the French Army having chased out the Mexicans. Finally, the cutting went with them to Los Angeles.

After a few days rest in Los Angeles, they and the cutting took a stagecoach to Yuma where they boarded a steamer for a trip up the Colorado River to Ehrenburg. Then as Margaret described the last leg of the journey, it was “two ambulances, six government wagons, and two private baggage wagons” crossing the Mohave Desert to Prescott. The McCormick Rose, a hearty cultivar, flourishes today at Old Main and Cline Library.

Prescott had barely become Prescott at the time. Before that it was a single hastily built, ramshackle log cabin on the banks of Granite Creek, called Fort Misery by John Goodwin, the First Territorial Governor. The Governor’s Mansion to which Richard McCormick brought his well bred, well educated, New Jersey bride was a log cabin with dirt floors and windows without glass. Happily, Margaret was given carte blanche on improvements, furnishings, and decorations, having furniture made from pine logs.


The McCormick Rose was but a symbol of the civilization and elegance Margaret brought to Prescott. She transformed the rude log cabin into a frontier mansion, making a home for Richard and herself, an office for him, and accommodations for guests. She threw levees, entertained quests, and bade visitors and strangers welcome. Margaret wrote of her “own dear home” to her friend Emma in New Jersey, “We danced in the house” and “served cold roast beef & veal, pies & cakes in variety, almonds, raisins, jellies, coffee, lemonade, & wine.”

A considerable horsewoman, Margaret accompanied Richard on many of his trips throughout the Territory, becoming acquainted with many of the pioneers, impressing them with her grace.

Prescott at the time was a jumping off place for what Richard McCormick called a “terra incognita”, an unknown and unmapped land, a land fit for only “daring trappers and adventuresome gold seekers.” The log cabin Governor’s Mansion was a mansion only in comparison to the tents, shacks, lean tos, and wagons making up the rest of the settlement.

In another letter to her friend Emma, she wrote that she “was never so happy in her life,” and that Richard “acts much more the ‘lover’ now, than he did before we were married.”


On her return from a trip with Richard to San Francisco, she gave birth to a stillborn child. Thought to have been recovering well, she suddenly lapsed into a violent sickness and died one day short of her 24th birthday. She was buried with her stillborn child in her arms under an oak tree near the mansion, her grave strewn with wildflowers.

The Prescott Arizona Miner in May 3, 1867 wrote that Margaret was “a greatly loved woman,” whose death had “cast gloom over the community,” adding that “no woman in the Territory was more happy.”

Cuttings of the McCormick Rose, a poignant touch of Arizona's pioneer history, are available at the NAU Research Greenhouses (523-9100 or 523-9103).

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

THE VON FURSTENBERG PRINCIPLE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (10/5/09)

Diane von Furstenberg, the doyenne of New York's high fashion designers, said in an address to budding designers, "The more you can grow yourself naturally, the more you can control your destiny." While speaking to the high fashion industry in New York, she could just as well have been speaking to the gardeners, down and dirty, in anti-fashion Flagstaff, about growing their gardens naturally.

The correlation between natural and destiny is simple. Years ago when rafting down the Tuolumne River, I asked the rafter, a graduate student in philosophy at Berkeley, about the principles of rafting. He said, "You can't fight the river. It's too powerful. If you try, you'll get dumped. It's not quite like going with the flow, more like reading it and using the current." It might be called The Von Furstenberg Principle, using the current.

Modern industrial agribusiness, on the contrary, has used the same principle of exploitation as used by the coal mining and the oil drilling companies. Exploiting natural resources as though they were inexhaustible, unaware that earth is a limited sphere, they're legacy children who've never replenished their heritage, but have simply used it up, inevitably leaving themselves without resources, barren and sterile.

Sustainability, on the other hand, uses the model of replenishing, putting back as much, if not more, than is taken out. It might be called reinvesting in nature. Rather than exploiting the earth, it seeks to renew it in part by recycling and nourishing.

The introduction of too much synthetic fertilizer has resulted in soil salinization, as in California's Coachella and San Joaquin Valleys where vast tracks of land have become sterile. Too much salt in the soil is toxic because it hinders the ability of plants to take up water. In short, they die of thirst while being watered.

Salinization is not only a product of synthetic fertilizer itself, but also of water. Some of Flagstaff's golf courses are already suffering recurring bare and brown spots and dying trees. Watered, as they are, with reclaimed water, the courses are slowly being salinized because reclaimed water is saltier than spring water. With repeated usage the soil inevitably becomes salt toxic resulting which might result in courses of Astroturf with cell towers for pine trees.

What happens in agribusiness and on golf courses can also happen in pots on the deck or vegetable and flower beds in the yard. As Thomas P O'Neill, Jr., the late Speaker of the House of Representations, often said, "All politics is local." So it is with sustainability. It's local as well as global.

Dirt is not an infinite resource, as the farmers in the Coachella and San Joaquin have found out. With synthetic fertilizer blowback, garden soil can be turned sterile. It's best enriched using compost, animal manure, and organic fertilizers, such as blood and bone meal. Only horse, cattle, and chicken manure are useful because dogs, cats, and human beings eat their fellow animals and thus are likely to carry pathogens or nasties in their feces.

The purpose of sustainability is not only to grow our own food and cook it slowly, but also to rehabilitate the earth for those who follow us.
Industrialization has not only overtaken agribusiness, it also dominates the fast food industry which is nothing more than assembly line food.

Sometimes, advocates of sustainability sound like Luddites, followers of Ned Lud who at the end of the 18th century destroyed machines in reaction to industrialization. More than Ludditism, sustainability is a solution, not a reaction.

The irony of sustainability is that it requires both the high tech of rehabilitating water and the low tech of fertilizing the soil with organic material. The high tech is the sophisticated technology capable of rehabilitating water. Rehabilitation requires vast amounts of electricity which, in turn, requires sophisticated technology of using the sun and wind to generate enormous amounts of electricity. Paradoxically, the ravages of 19th and 20th centuries industrial exploitation will be redeemed by a 21st century Von Furstenberg Principle, a high-brow technological rehabilitation of finite water supplies and a low-brow fertilization of soil with animal waste and organic refuse.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009