GroHappy

The old bamboo

At Green Chimneys I have a pretty packed day: eight sessions with 11 students between 9 am and 3 pm once a week. Though Tracy thought I was mad to agree to such a schedule, I had a simple reason: I rarely ever get to deliver all the sessions. Between absences, doctor appointments, special events, etc. someone is always dropping out.

Last week I found myself with some time on my hands and I didn’t feel like weeding (I had spent the previous day doing that in my garden.) Next to the barn there was a pile of bamboo that Tracy had ordered to build some trellises for squash and frames to net the corn. A few scraps were on the side. I picked a scrap up and for some reason wondered if I could build a flute.

So I took out my Swiss Army knife and started the process. I opened the saw and cut off an end so that the stick was about a foot long with one end open and the other end plugged. I brushed off the end against the ground and opened up an awl that was on the knife. I picked a random spot near the plugged end of the bamboo and started to apply pressure. By turning the awl back and forth, a hole started to form. Soon I had a hole that was large enough to blow across.

I put on my best flautist face and blew. Nothing. Perhaps a few fingering holes would help. After I bore in a few holes I took another shot at it. Nothing. As I had no idea what I was doing, I wasn’t too bothered. I then looked up.

One of the boys in Tracy’s class had quietly walked over to me and was staring at me and my “flute.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m attempting to make a flute.”

“Does it work?”

“Let’s see.”

I then gave the flute my biggest blow and best sour-lemon face. Out of the end a loud, ear-splitting shrill noise emerged. I had built a flute. I then plugged the far end with my finger and a different sound emerged.

“That is so cool,” said Ted. “Can I make one?”

By that time the other boys in Tracy’s class had defected over to my patch of the garden and were also interested. “How about me? “And me,” said two other boys. I looked over to Tracy and she shrugged her shoulders. So I told the boys we could all make a flute but we would have to do it one at a time as I had only a single knife. I then told them to select a piece of bamboo.

“But think about what you want because the larger the piece of bamboo you choose, the lower the sound will be for the flute you make.”

One student asked, “Why is that?” So I then started to talk to them about the physics of sound and why some noises have a high pitch while others do not. I worked with each of them to build a flute while I explained the principle of how a flute worked. They were careful as I showed them how to use a knife and were quiet and patient as we built different flutes. By the end of class everyone had a flute in hand and smile on their face. No one cared that the sound was that good, but they were all able to get a tweet out of their homemade flutes.

After they left I apologized to Tracy for Shanghaiing her class. “Oh no. What you did was great. You were teaching them to be careful. Giving them math lessons as well as music. It was great. Anyway there was lots of male bonding going on and I can’t compete with that. So why try?”

I thanked Tracy for her understanding and looked at the pile of bamboo next to the table. I picked out a nice piece for myself and thought I would have another go at it during the week. Perhaps I will be able to make something that humans, rather than dogs can hear.

Digging out the garden

With over three feet of snow in less than a week, there is little time to think about gardening. My wife and I are from the school that likes to make many small trips outside to incrementally shovel rather than waiting for all the snow to fall so that it must be removed in one shot. But that is what happened last week as nearly two feet of snow was dumped in our area between 10 pm on Tuesday night and 7 am Wednesday morning. There was nothing incremental about it. Just large blades full of snow that were slowly and carefully removed.

When we go outside, there is a silence that is unique. There are no cars, no planes, nothing. Not even a barking dog.  The snow deadens all sound so the only thing you hear is your own breathing and the scrape of the shovel on the ground. At night it seems even more quiet and spiritual as the spotlights reflect on the falling snow. It is a magical time.

There is little time to reflect on that as my driveway and garden need to have vast quantities of snow removed. For me this is ironic as for once I had a good start this year on the fall (and winter) garden with us harvesting salads for two to three days a week through Thanksgiving. But then the cold hit and the raised beds froze up. And when we started to get a bit of a thaw, we started to get hit with snow every week.

It’s been a battle to keep the beds uncovered and this week I gave up trying to keep the back hoop clear, which has delicate little rosettes of miner’s lettuce growing nicely; at least they were last time I saw them in mid December. This winter’s experiment will be how well a hoop house can hold back snow.

The trouble with this much snow is that there is no place to throw it anymore. Three sides of my greenhouse have four feet of snow snuggled up next to them with over two feet on the roof. I’m hoping it will melt down over the week. It won’t.

One of the things I learned over the years is to leave the garden gate open before its snows because if you don’t and more than 6 inches fall, you can’t get it open. So I pry the gate open and put yet more snow on top of the strawberry beds as well as those that don’t have any vegetables growing. One of the beds is being used to winter-over some bushes I didn’t have time to plant this fall. We’ll see how well they do under five feet of snow.

It seems futile but I carefully remove layer by layer of snow from the cold frame and hoop house. They both have yet to collapse. The hoop house clips have held on to the Agribon and protected the now desiccated Swiss chard, romaine lettuce, beets, and assorted greens. My salads still may recover though it is hard to believe as both structures are bracketed by two feet of snow on all sides. With the sun and temperatures low and the frames pointing north, they will get little light or heat for weeks to come.

During the past week the neighborhood birds have ravaged the feeders as the snow has long since covered any food on the ground. The birds are perched in a nearby Japanese Maple like so many Christmas ornaments. Bobwhites, cardinals, pine siskins, chickadees, doves, finches, sparrows, bluebirds and the appropriately named snowbirds are just some of the ever changing decorations. They appear much larger than they are as they fluff their clothing to stay warm. The woodpeckers and blue jays don’t perch with the others; they have their own places to go.

They queue on the tree, which is near a feeder, as they wait their turn to grab a few sunflower seeds before flying back. It is a chaotic and un-orderly process as the larger aggressor birds take their time feeding, scaring other competitors away. So the smaller birds wait and bide their time hoping for a chance to grab a few seeds so they can survive another cold day.

Garden sounds, discordant noises and the iPod people

Being an early riser I have always loved to walk the garden in the morning. I don’t know why, as if like the fable, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” a huge vine will manifest itself the day after I have planted it. But I believe that I enjoy being out and around early because it is before my senses—particularly hearing—have been bombarded and compromised by the day.

Living on a dead-end street, we get infrequent traffic and on weekend mornings there is little ambient car noise from the surrounding streets. This time of year you hear the active rustle of leaves as squirrels scamper about looking for the next nut. The birds are up and chirping—nuthatches, doves, woodpeckers, titmice, thrushes, snowbirds and others are queuing up in shrubs and trees around my suet and seed feeders. A little after 7 am, the bells start ringing at a nearby religious retreat for matins and soon a train whistle rises over the hills from over four miles away.

I appreciate all of these little sounds as they add another layer of sensory experience to being in the garden. One of the things that is reinforced in horticultural therapy is that any exercise should stimulate multiple senses. So in the fall the shaking of seed pods or moving your hand through a stand of drying grass are ways that we can engage our ears and then our minds. Unfortunately this aspect of gardening is being lost and squandered.

We just had a beautiful warm fall weekend that encouraged you to be in the yard. I was out raking leaves. I love the sound of the rake against the ground and the leaves being pushed into a fluffy pile. A slightly different sound, not as hard and indicative of shuffling, occurs when you walk through a pile of leaves. Even though my wife says my hearing is going, which it is, I cherish these little differences when I’m outside.

After a bit, I decide to strike up a chat with my son-in-law Alan who was splitting wood. Initially he doesn’t respond but after a loud yell, he stops his work and removes a white ear piece. “You call, Erik?” I then looked over at my daughter Sarah and her boyfriend Dan who were stacking wood. They too have little white buds within their ears. It’s the invasion of the iPod people.

Alan and I had a nice little chat but as soon we were finished he reattached his ears to his iPod and got into the groove.

Now I noticed that a few of the neighbors were up and clearing their lawns of detritus using leaf blowers. My quiet raking and activities during the rest of the day was drowned out by these loud tools, which average 100 dB at their source (a little less loud than a power lawn mower.) Perhaps that is why my fellow workers were plugged in as they realized the inevitability of a sonic assault. More likely is the increasing desire by more and more people to tune-out (nature) and plug-in (their iPods.)

It appears that people are choosing not to listen to the sounds of their gardens, which are regulated by the Music of the Spheres, but rather to the sounds of technology, which are dictated by the fashions and actions of the day. And when the sounds of technology are discordant, as are leaf blowers, chain saws and other noisome devices, many people decide to mask the reality of the situation. Not so different from the 17th and 18th century use of perfumes by the European affluent to cover body odor from the lack of bathing (a far cry from the ancient Romans.)

Like the morning fog, the early sounds of the garden are burned off by the noise of cars as well as the tools of mass destruction and noise. With the increase of these sounds goes the sensitivity of my hearing and discerning the quiet little things that happen within the garden. The squirrels are in the leaves but I can’t hear the rustle. The birds are in the trees but I can’t hear the movement of their wings. Only with the night comes a respite but in the fall there is little to hear. The peepers of spring and frogs and cicadas of summer have long been asleep. But out of the blue comes the plaintive sound of a train whistle, reminding me of a happier and less noisy morning.