vituperation

I don’t trumpet it around here often, but I’m something of a genius when it comes to mechanical things. An incident yesterday will serve as a prime example of my talents. Be warned, though — I use several highly technical terms in this entry, so it may be confusing to those of you who are less than savvy when it comes to engines. I’ve highlighted the more specialized terms below so you can search Google for answers if you’d like to learn more about them.

Back when we first planted the garden, we didn’t really know what we were doing. I used a hoe to furrow the rows (and holy cow, talk about back-breaking, try rowing eight 75-foot rows with a hoe sometime). Robyn followed behind, dropping seeds in, then I came around again with the hoe to cover things up. We planted everything two or three inches deep.

We had mixed results with this method, which weren’t so hot. The corn, onions, sugar snaps, and black beans popped right up. The green beans and squash were sporadic, with a plant popping up here and there. The black-eyed peas, cukes, melons, and okra didn’t come up at all, though in retrospect that may have been more due to the weather than to us planting things wrong.

After we planted, of course, I took the time to learn about planting. Turns out you should generally try to plant seeds about three seed thicknesses deep. At the time, I figured that’s why so much hadn’t germinated, so I used the cultivator I bought for weeding to re-till those rows and replanted with a spiffy new walk-behind seeder that did all the hard work for me.

Our onions never looked all that hot. They put up some leaves, but they never looked all that strong. I did some reading on growing onions and found out they have to be planted a certain way to do really well. Then, once they get going, you have to pull dirt away from the onion bulb itself for it to keep growing right, and blah blah blah. Too much damn effort for something so cheap and plentiful in the grocery store. Plus, one planted onion bulb yields exactly one onion. That’s not much payback for all that work.

Think about it for a second. One bean seed gives back hundreds of beans. A single kernel of corn turns into (usually) two or three ears. A watermelon seed can yield three or four fifty-pound melons. Tomato seeds — not much larger than a period on a piece of paper — produce hundreds of tomatoes each.

But an onion bulb? One onion that’s a lot of work to get.

Yesterday I decided to pull up the row of onions and replace them with green beans. We’re getting enough green beans to eat right now, and some to freeze, but if they keep going at their current rate there’s no way they’ll produce enough to feed us all winter. Part of that is my fault. The first green beans I planted, Kentucky Wonders, are pole beans. Normally, pole beans are planted in groups so they can climb together.

I, of course, didn’t learn this until after I’d planted them all in a row.

Couple that with the fact that half of them didn’t come up, and that makes for a lot less green beans than we need. The second planting, the fill-in I did back in mid-April, was Contenders, which are bush beans. Those are only doing so-so, in part because they’re getting mooshed by the chicken wire I ran for the pole beans.

I went down the onion row, pulling up each and examining it. Several, which we kept, were ping-pong ball sized, and smelled really good. Robyn chopped up some of the leaves (scallions) and froze them, I think, and everything else went into the trash.

The cultivator had been resting in the wood shed ever since I used it last week to till up some weeds between the beans and peas. Lots of things seem to rest in the wood shed these days: chicken feed, fertilizer, gloves, and various gardening tools. Obviously it’s about time to build a garden shed.

I rolled the cultivator over to the end of the garden and checked the gas and oil levels. Everything looked great. I primed the engine by pressing the little rubber push thing ten times, and flipped the switch to the ‘on’ position. I grabbed the handle of the cord thingy you pull on to start the engine and gave it a yank.

It didn’t come out far at all, and the engine didn’t even make a half-hearted effort at turning over. I tried again. And again. And again, with the same results: the cord thingy pulled out about 18 inches then hung up. Normally it pulls out about 30 inches, and it’s that last twelve that kickstart the engine.

Take it apart and try to fix it, my mind whispered. It already doesn’t work, so you can’t make it not work more.

Faced with such irrefutable logic, I wheeled the cultivator across the yard to my fancy work table, herein referred to as “the tailgate.” I lowered the tailgate and set the cultivator on it. I tried pulling the cord thingy again, with the same results. After a moment of peering around at the cultivator engine, I went into the shed and got the tools I thought I’d need to take it apart.

Thirty minutes later I was surrounded by cultivator pieces. Screws, handles, plastic things, metal things, and other parts lay scattered around the tailgate. Every time I removed a part from the cultivator, I tried to start it in hopes that that piece might have been the problem, even if it didn’t come from anywhere near the cord pull thingy.

The cultivator wouldn’t start.

I realized I needed one of the star-shaped bits for my drill to detach the engine from the part that spins the tines that do the actual tilling. My drill bits were in the house, sitting on the dryer from a few days ago when I had to reattach the exhaust hose to the thingy that vents the hot air out.

When I was about ten feet from the truck, I heard a horrendous clatter from behind me. I spun just in time to see the cultivator fall off the tailgate. I’d heard it falling over, because I am an idiot and left it standing up. Its position on the tailgate was just such that when it tipped over, it was weight enough to flip on off the back. It dragged the handle with it too, because they were attached by the cord from the on/off switch.

Cursing myself, I went over and picked the cultivator up. I set it on the tailgate and untwisted the tangled up cord connected to the handle. Then, on a whim, I tried to start the cultivator one more time.

It fired right up.

The engine smoked for a couple of seconds because of the oil that ran around inside when I was turning it this way and that, then ran perfectly. I put the cultivator back together, checking regularly to make sure the engine still worked, and used it to till up the row so I could plant my green beans.

It’s good to have skills like this, because I can always fall back on them if I ever lose my job.

I made a fine pie earlier this week…

…out of green tomatoes.

I didn’t follow a recipe, just winged it, and it turned out really well. In essence, it’s an apple pie using green tomatoes. Here’s more or less what’s in it:

• two pre-made pie crusts
• four medium green tomatoes, peeled and sliced thinly
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 2-3 tbsp all-purpose flour
• 1 pat butter, and some brown sugar for sprinkling

I half-cooked one of the pie crusts for about 10 minutes at 375. While it was cooking, I mixed all the other ingredients except for the last one on the list in a big bowl. Put ingredients in half-baked pie shell, topped with the other pie shell. I poked vents in the top crust with a knife and put dabs of butter on it. Finally, I sprinkled it with brown sugar and baked it at 375 for 35 minutes. The top didn’t look quite done then, so I put the whole thing under the broiler for a minute to finish it off. Real cooks would probably want to cover the crust edge with foil to keep it from getting so brown.

It was mighty fine pie, and tasted almost just like apple pie. If I do it again, I think I’ll throw a tablespoon of lemon juice in to give it a little of that apple zing.

Really, it was good, despite the idea of green tomato pie sounding kind of gross.

Tuesday’s rain brought okra…

…cantaloupes…

and watermelons…

With these three, that means that everything in the garden (excepting the black-eyed peas, which won’t come for a couple more weeks) is producing things that we’re eating or will be eating soon. Not too shabby for a first-timer.

There’s always one dumb one that can’t figure out how to get back in.

One of the buffs is developing the most unusual tail feathers.

“You stay here. I’ll check it out.”