Amy Smith Linton
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The Would-Be Farm: Jonquils or Daffodils?

6/14/2020

2 Comments

 
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It's a very good Scrabble day when I can play "jonquil."

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​In the world, I rarely call these flowers anything but daffodils.  
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Be that as it may, my sweet mother-in-law calls them jonquils, and when she proposed a big honking field of them at the Would-Be Farm, I said heck yeah!  

​
Pat is a wonderful gardener, and even in her early 80s, she can out-shop, out-weed, and out-sew me pretty much any day of the week. So when she said she wanted Jeff and me to be reminded of her each spring at the Would-Be Farm, I enlisted her actual aid.

Long story short, we ordered something like 200 bulbs from Holland last fall. Thank you John Scheepers.  We hopped a plane (back in the days when people did that kind of thing without thinking about it much) once the package arrived in the North Country.

We made a girl's weekend of it, staying at my sister's civilized house, eating yummy meals, and playing dominoes at the end of the day.
And we flew South, happy but full of anticipation and the usual worries: Would squirrels eat the bulbs? Would the plants freeze to death?  Would deer eat the bulbs? Would an early thaw fool the plants? 

Springtime is brutal on hopes.  When bright flowers do indeed rise from the cold clay -- oh glory.  
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The Would-Be Farm: Wildflowers

6/12/2019

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They show up. How cool is that? 
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I may have planted these columbines.

I might have planted them last year.

​They might have been growing for decades, regardless my interference or ambitions. 

One of the downsides of being an absentee farmer is that things happen –– and don't happen –– without our being there to witness it. 

​Sometimes we do.
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Les Fleurs de Quoi?

10/4/2018

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"Chrysanthemum" comes from the Greek for "gold" and "flower."  

You know these flowers: big tidy pots of blooms that last for ages. They show up for sale in the front of high-end grocery stores and at the big hardware warehouse stores. Mums, as we call them in English. Mums at Halloween, autumn colors for Thanksgiving. In Australia, mums are the traditional flower for Mother's day. 

In China, they are the symbol of autumn and purity. The chrysanthemum is the official flower of Chicago. Who knew? 

In India, a girl wearing chrysanthemums in her hair is said to bring happiness to her family. And in Japan, they represent longevity. The royal family sits on the chrysanthemum throne. But also –– so I understand after reading one of the Sano Ichiru mysteries by Laura Joh Rowland –– it's a symbol of homosexuality in samurai times. Yeah, don't think about it.

But in France, they are the flower for tombstones. People put them in the graveyard on All Saints.

For years, I have mistakenly believed that Charles Baudelaire's famous book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal –– a chunk of which I translated in college, for pity's sake –– was both "the flowers of evil" (a metaphor) and also an actual flower: chrysanthemums.
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Whenever I saw the cheerful round faces of chrysanthemums, my busy brain would supply the subtitle, "Les fleurs du mal!"

But nope. Baudelaire anyhow wasn't referencing these particular flowers in his poems about the pursuit of novelty and erotic decadence. 

How odd: such an infinitesimal and utterly trivial prejudice against an innocent flower, but I have held it for decades. Of course, it's worth remembering that one might also translate the title of that book (which I don't recommend, btw, as fun reading) as "the flowers from evil, or from suffering."  Or something.

Anyhow. They are long-suffering and colorful blossoms, no matter what I've mistakenly held against them. 
References
https://www.teleflora.com/meaning-of-flowers/chrysanthemum
​http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2003/02/02/stories/2003020200110400.htm
https://www.gardeningchannel.com/top-flowers-for-indian-weddings/
http://www.cerisepress.com/04/10/four-translations-from-les-fleurs-du-mal-by-charles-baudelaire​
2 Comments

Putting Artists Out of Business

2/2/2018

3 Comments

 
"Years ago," wheezed the oldster, arthritic knuckles whitening on the handle of the deluxe walker. "Years ago, artists had to use rubylith to separate each color for a color print."

Honking into a worn handkerchief, the dusty wheezer raised watery eyes and continued. "Hours I spent over a drafting table, X-Acto blade in hand, separating colors. The eye-hand coordination alone --!"

After a long pause, the lecture continued. "It took years to learn the tricks of the trade. Nowadays, all it takes is a ninety-nine cent app. Putting artists out of business. I don't know how they make a living any more."

Yeah, artists mostly don't make a living.

In honor of all of us antiquities who remember cutting ruby to separate colors, here's a timelapse video of the Rubylith process...

But those 99-cent apps are really fun:
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In this highly digitized age, it's nigh on impossible to grasp the amount of work that went into, for instance, the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. This link describes the Technicolor process.

Such an effort to give the viewing public ruby slippers!
3 Comments

The Would-Be Farm: Mystery Plants

1/23/2018

6 Comments

 
Given that I am often looking to eat the plants at which I am looking, plant identification is more than just an amusement.  

There's a certain urgency in figuring out if it's wild carrot (puny, but tasty) or hemlock (deadly).


At the farm, I spend chunks of daylight bent over my reference books, or –– in deference to the small, specific spot of cell coverage –– sitting on a rock in the middle of the field bent over the iPad.

For the first time I can remember –– would that be a telling detail? –– I am having vocabulary troubles.

Plant identification, like most biology, starts with the correct terminology to describe any plant's growth habits. Is it a dicot or monocot? How do the veins grow in the leaves? How do leaves grow on the stem, what do the leaves look like?

Bracts. Pinneately compound whorled. Lobed petolate. Oval sessate...The words seem slippery, and I keep having to flip back to the definitions again and again.  
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During the all-too-brief week we spent on the Would-Be Farm in early July, I decided to postpone the research by getting clear (clear-ish) photos of the latest crop of mystery plants. This is not rocket science, but I am only just skidding into the new century of digital memory. 

When I was a googly-eyed junior in high school, being all moony and swoony over my equally googly-eyed boyfriend, our biology teacher, Mr. V. would shake his head at the sight of us two and mutter under his breath, "Two smarts equal dummy." 

​Oh, Mr. V., even just the one sometimes equals dummy!

Here's a few of the unknowns:
I figured I'd have tons to time to do the research during my months away from the farm. After all,  some of these plants are bound to be edible. So far, not so much research, but the winter is still young...
6 Comments

The Would-Be Farm: What is That?

6/13/2017

7 Comments

 
We spend a good portion of our time, we humans, trying to identify and categorize all manner of creatures, including one another. (Is that a boy or a girl? What kind of accent/haircut/outfit is that? One of ours or one of theirs?)

And, even when we can't identify, we sort things as either "good" or  "not-good."  

Any little kid can tell you that dolphins are nice and good, while sharks are mean and scary. 

via GIPHY


Many of our judge-y assessments are arbitrary and useless (dolphins are cute, sure, but they can be real jerks), still, I'm not above them.  

Demonizing a whole species (yo, squirrels! and yeah, you too, eight-legged freaks!) doesn't really make sense, but there it is.

​I won't argue about why 
the Lychee and Dogmeat Festival is so despised when Meat Week doesn't rouse the same ire, but in the interest of full disclosure, even a brief foray into research on those two carnivorous events has rendered me a touch yarkish. 
Anyhoo. ​

​Judging is arguably how we survived for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution: correctly id-ing food vs. non-food, sorting bad guys from among the good folk of the world, drawing clever parallels between similar things.
An open mind could result in a quick and messy death back then: Thag the cave-human couldn't hesitate in deciding if that Sabertooth lion was a puddy-tat or a predator. 

On the other hand, a closed mind might make Thag take against, oh, ferinstence, fire.  

​"Oh, I am NOT having any of that –– cooking. Eating raw root-vegetables worked for my folks, why should I go messing with a good thing?"

Meanwhile Goram, Thag's slightly more nimble thinking neighbor, is gorging on nips and tatties, and Goram's kid's are growing like weeds.

​Guess whose offspring will be studying genealogy a few hundred generations later?

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NOT a sabertooth. Just a Lynx. Sort of a housecat the size of a Springer Spaniel. Able to leap 12 feet or so and make off with whatever you put on the counter.
"What's past is prologue"* even with as spendthrifty a pen (keyboard) as this one.  

*This quote from of course, The Tempest. Act 2, with Antonio and Sebastian piffling away on shore.

And with the prologue passed, the point of my piffle:
While strolling through my tiny kingdom, I find myself not just trying to name the plants, but also sorting them by my lights as bad or good.  ​I spent a studious half-hour or so on figuring out what these four plants were. Each with a maybe yellow flower, each growing rampant on the Would-Be Farm. Each a familiar mystery.
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Right to left: the nettle is easy, but as it turns out, it's not common nettle, but Tall Nettle. The second is Garlic Mustard, then Cypress Spurge. And finally, with the dandelion-y leaves, Marsh Yellowcress. 

Tall Nettle (Urtica procerea) is a stinger: tiny hairs on the stem will give you a dose of formic acid and histamine that feels a bit like the bite of a fire-ant.  Dried, it's used to treat scalp problems, while traditional herbalists would suggest applying the stings to arthritic joints –– sometimes the cure is worse, wait, no, it does in fact work.
Nettle also nutritious: steamed or cooked as spinach, nettle is full of Vitamin A and calcium. So while I want to say it's a bad plant, it's got its good points too.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a garlic-scented member of the mustard family. Shocker, I know, with a name like that. Pretty solidly a baddie, although it's edible from top to toe. I will be grazing on this plant next spring, knock wood.

Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) is a recent (1860-ish) immigrant to the country. It's an ornamental that spreads rapidly. Its seed-pods detonate and can broadcast seeds up to five feet. Whoa. It's poisonous to horses and cows (but not sheep. Go figure.)  
​While the milky sap is poisonous to humans, it has been used to remove warts. That's something.
Cypress Spurge has some other traditional medicine uses, but I'm going to keep my gloves on and pull it as a weed. 

Marsh Yellowcress (Rorippa palustris) is a mustard and a cress, which is all to the good. It's native, it likes the boggy wetlands that stripe the farm, and it is edible raw (ooh! peppery!) or cooked (add a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. nom nom nom). 

Is it ironic that I am basically re-discovering the common knowledge of my hunter-gatherer ancestors?
7 Comments

The Would-Be Farm: Revenge on Burdocks

5/12/2017

2 Comments

 
Ah burdocks. I wrote about these plants before; we are still waging war on them at the Would-Be Farm.

In springtime, they are among the first plants to push green leaves out of the ground.  They are unmistakable, lush and green. They grow everywhere, including in a ring around the area where we burn them in the autumn.

This spring, I harvested a few. And by "harvest" I mean "dig up, kill, and eat without prejudice."
Burdock is widely used in Japanese cuisine. I didn't have sake, soy, or much else, so I cooked it as I might have done with a carrot or some lotus root.

I put them into a bucket of water and then first scrubbed the clay dirt from the roots before peeling them like carrots.  I sliced the roots into slivers, and sauted them with apple slices and maple syrup.

It was a little tough, a little subtle, and It didn't make our top ten list of exotic delicious items from the farm (Pureed hickory-nut frozen dessert, anyone? Maple syrup perchance? How about apple-wood smoked fish? Or milkweed greens? Or wild free-range turkey? Ahhhh.), but Mr. Linton allowed that –– all things considered –– we wouldn't starve if we were left with only burdocks to sustain us. 

Happily, there are other crops on hand. We had our first mushroom from last year's plantings.
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Shitake mushroom!
The single mushroom –– shitake –– was delicious, even to me, and I do not like mushrooms as a rule. 

And <insert sound of heavenly choir> the asparagus yielded a sampler this spring.
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Other good news from the Farm: several of the plants that looked dead at the end of last summer's drought have returned from Underworld. The spirit of Spring springs eternal.
2 Comments

The Would-Be Farm: First Green is –– Pink.

4/25/2017

3 Comments

 
Mr. Linton and I have managed to get to the Would-Be Farm for a few Aprils in a row. The cruellest month* offers a couple of attractive trade-offs. We might see snow, but there are blessedly few biting insects. 

This time of year, it's possible to watch spring take hold of bare bones of the land.

From Basecamp (with a roaring campfire going, because it's a raw 45° F and the wind is gusting to the mid 20's out of the long barrel of the valley), the hillsides change color almost by the minute.
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​The tree-trunks begin early April the same grey-brown as the bare granite. The carpet of autumn leaves has been bleached tan. Only the odd pine tree gives color along the horizon.

Then comes a faint pinkening. The first buds, contrary to Robert Frost's lovely poem, are scarlet.
The tone of grey morphs so subtly –– and so improbably –– into this first color of spring that it's quite possible to see it for half a lifetime before recognizing the hue. 

​I mean, really -- red?
A closer look provides the evidence. American elms splash out in red buds, delicious to the porcupine. 
​
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I know, blurry. Here's maybe a better image:
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And in the beleaguered new apple orchard, after a winter spent as an hors d'oervers station for the local deer, the first tiny signs of vegetable life look like droplets of blood. Or maybe like those wee scarlet spiders that live in old leaves. Spider mites. 

A pinhead speck of cardinal-red on the sticks of apple saplings, but not crawling. Tragically out-of-focus when I snapped their picture on the single afternoon when they first appeared. Overnight, they grew into what you expect in a bud:
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Apple tree survives winter massacre! Eternal spring hopes: hope springs eternal!
Mr. Frost ends his lovely poem with "Nothing gold can stay."

I agree, except as I see it, it's nothing pink that can stay.


*April is not just "the cruellest month/breeding. Lilacs from dead ground" –– it's Poetry month. 
3 Comments

Because Science

2/7/2017

2 Comments

 
What's easier than saying, "oh phoey!"?

Not to be all Pollyanna, but frankly, it's effortless to belittle other people's passions, to simplify other people's problems, and make sweeping generalizations about groups of people that seem different from oneself.


I've done it. We all do it.

​But it doesn't make anything better.

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

For instance, scientific research.

I recently witnessed someone lathering on about Pointless Research and the Waste of Our Tax Dollars, et cetera. I believe the phrase "Real Job" was used. 

​This topic chaps my butt. What –– we've learned enough already and ought to stop?


​And as if their great-grandparents didn't say the same damn thing about the egg-head scientist working on penicillin, chemo-therapy, seat-belts, gel insoles. Jupiter!
I have faith in the unlikely but happy uses to which scientific research is put.

​Witness Biologist Thomas Seely of Cornell University, who won the 2016 Golden Goose Award for his "honeybee algorithm," a description of how bees organize themselves to gather nectar in the world.

What makes the research "Golden" is how Seely's insight has been used to great effect by systems engineer Craig Tovey* to to improve internet traffic flow. Pure science going toward a practical application.
Honey
Honey Bee and Flame Vine
Footnote: 
*Craig Tovey was also named in the Award. He was working at Georgia Institute of Technology, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, collaborating with the government of the United Kingdom and big team of other scientists and engineers.

I skip these details on the off chance my readers will finish that above paragraph, but the amount of cooperation and the network of public funding this research involved? It's kind of staggering. 

Bees and the internet, who would have foreseen that? 

This seems science-wonderful: a biologist working quietly among the hives ends up helping improve the speed with which we check Facebook statuses, hunt Pokeman, read e-mail, and basically get through our connected lives.  


The final funding kicker: Craig Tovey connected to Thomas Seely after another team-member heard a National Public Radio feature on Seely's work.

And that? That is one hard-working fractional tax dollar at work. 
Flame Vine and Honey Bee


References
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-secret-life-of-bees-99559587/
www.goldengooseaward.org/awardees/honey-bee-algorithm
www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/24/136391522/natures-secret-why-honey-bees-are-better-politicians-than-humans
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/22/how-honeybee-research-improved-your-internet-experience/?utm_term=.01028bb510d3
2 Comments

Like a Red Red Rose

10/12/2016

2 Comments

 
A rose is not the only pretty red thing in nature, even if it's one of the first comparisons that come to mind. Blame Robby Burns and the Brothers Grimm. 

And, granted, "My luve is like a red red dragonfly" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. 
Red dragonfly
(Although I might have awarded style-points to myself had the odonate insect pictured above been a damselfly. It isn't. Here's how I know. Which leads me farther off this unbeaten track to, "My luve is like a red red odonate, which sweetly buzzed in June.") 

But color.

"My love's eyes are nothing like the sun, coral is more red than her lip's red." (Thanks, Billy, for that sonnet, number 130).  She didn't have access to a cosmetics counter, poor creature, or the fiver to spend on such cheering frippery as a fresh tube of lippy in, say, "Poppy."
Red poppy
And cheeks as red as apples?
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Please. 


Still, it's red I'm seeing. Literal red –– scarlet and blood-red, crimson and carmine, vermillion and cardinal and ruby –– not metaphorical red, though describing it brings me full circle back to what's the reddest thing in the world. 

Check the color on these babies:
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Of course, who's going to swoon over a line like, "Shall I compare thee to a crabapple"?
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