The boys

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The house is full of boys.  Two fifteen and an 11-year old, so  Monica took Mother's Day and bought a train ticket to New York City.  The boys chipped in spending money as their Mother's Day presents.  

I put them to work clearing off the last of the firewood mess from the driveway - knowing that putting them to work would warm Monica's heart.

After that they took their pocket money down to Pete's, the store down on the corner, and bought junk to eat and drink.  And alternating between shooting basketball and fighting to the death in Minecraft, they whiled away their afternoon.

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Kingfisher

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We live half a mile from the Pawcatuck River, but I'd never seen a kingfisher on the property until today.  At dusk I was burning some brush in the fire circle and the bird came flying in circles over our yard - making the racket that excited kingfishers make.  It lit in one of the oak trees and continued to call out in its squawkish rattle.

A gray tree frog began answering the call.  (I think the gray tree frog's call and the belted kingfisher's rattle have a rhythm in common).  As soon as it heard the frog, the kingfisher's crest flared up and it glared downward in the direction of the sound.  They called back and forth for a minute before the bird flew up into the moonlit gloaming and noisily made its way back toward the river.

I returned to breaking up the branches of forsythia and maple and sassafras that form the brush pile.  Our pair of bats were out, maybe keeping the mosquitos in check until more dragonflies can arrive.  Nico and his friend Sam were running in the yard, battling with foam swords.  Loud thwackings and laughter.  I told them how we used to spit up into the air when the bats were close to get them to mistake our spit for moths - because I think boys should know about such things.

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Frost Warning

There was a warning about frost last night.

So the herbs were tucked away in their mini-greenhouses, just in case.

testing out the cold frames

Asparagus

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Is there a more springlike green than the glow that imbues sautéed asparagus?

Here with olive oil, garlic and backyard morel.

When I lived in Munich, I didn't really understand why the Bavarians were so excited by the first Spargel of the season.  It was just a vegetable, after all, coming into its season, but they treated those days as a veritable religious holiday.  Now, so many years later, and in possession of an asparagus bed of my own, I am a convert.

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Is civilization just a bubble?

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Does anyone else notice the sour smell of failure emanating from the prostrate body of our civilization?

I've been planting trees, so I have that much optimism in me.  And I have great faith in humans' ability to muddle through whatever crises and disasters we encounter and create.  We are, after all, a species that colonized the Arctic with nothing but the materials at hand, that thrived in deserts, jungles, savannah, delta marshes and mountain slopes.  It will take utter cataclysm to wipe us out.  Of course, that's never out of the question.

I've written here about my pessimism -- a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, five years ago.  Civilization is a much more fragile thing than a species, and there are epochal challenges rising.

Now certainly, as the man said, "prediction is hard - especially about the future," so I have to take my misgivings, my readings of graphs and tea leaves and blog posts with the proverbial grain of salt.  But it is not all of that which fills me with pessimism -- rather it's the yeasty smell of a civilization-wide speculative bubble.

I've seen a few economic bubbles -- Tokyo real estate in the 1980's, the dot-com enthusiasm of the late nineties and the recent real estate crash.  Today a higher education bubble has inflated so gradually that people are barely aware of it.  (To say nothing of the global financial industry, which seems to have papered over global economic contraction with a vast bubble of its own.)

The economists will tell you that a bubble is caused by "exaggerated expectations of future growth," when the market value of a thing becomes deranged from the "intrinsic worth," and it all ends in a crash or the bursting of the bubble.  But it's not market failure I'm thinking of.  What the economists don't dwell on (because it would be embarrassing) is the amount of jargon-laden lecturing and hand-waving that goes on during a bubble about why the normal fundamentals can be waived as obsolete and how the trajectory this time is just upward and upward because - well because this time it's different and the critics and doomsayers are just lacking in faith, imagination and knowledge. 

But none of the arguments and reassurances put forth within the bubble really make sense.  If you are not caught up in the enthusiasm it can look implausible and delusional from the outside, and you can wonder about the powers and dangers of wishful thinking.  

What gives me the most qualms about the future is that we are surrounded now by that smell of inflated bubble.  We are encased within the familiar, heady atmosphere of sparkly, ungrounded optimism with its subtle acrid taint of flop sweat and curt defensiveness.  Climate change, energy depletion, the increasing fragility of the food system and our life support systems, economic contraction -- each one alone could threaten to derail or destroy our civilization, and yet each one - to the extent it even rises to a moment's prominence in the public discourse - is waived aside with airy assurances that all that needs to be done is being done - or will be done when it is necessary and convenient.  Critics and doomsayers are ignored or mocked as worrywarts lacking in faith and clarity of understanding.  

I've diagnosed these bubbles in the past.  Then I could stand aside from such speculations with wry complacency -- not so much when it takes down the food system.

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Dandelion Wine

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Dandelion Wine

Photo A Brown

My first attempt at wine-making will be dandelion wine.

There are scores of different recipes for making use of these unloved weeds.

But many of them seem to make things very complicated - or rely on grapes and other additions.

(If I'm going to use grapes, why not just make grape wine, I wonder?)

I adapted one of the simplest that I could find 

(from a place called the Twin Eagles School) 

-- dandelions, citrus, sugar and yeast:

•              1 gallon dandelion flowers

•              Juice and thinly sliced peels of 4 oranges

•              Juice and thinly sliced peels of a lemon

•              Small (approximately one inch) piece of ginger root

•              3 pounds sugar (6.25 cups)

•              One packet of yeast

"On a spring or summer day when it is sunny, go out and gather a gallon of dandelion flowers. Separate the yellow flower petals from the green sepals (the small green leaves under the flowers). The reason for this is because the green sepals are bitter in flavor and you don't want to put that flavor into your wine.

Put flower petals in a 3 gallon crock and pour a gallon of boiling water over them. Make sure that the dandelion flowers are fully covered and soaking in the boiling water. Cover and steep for three days.

After three days strain the flowers from the liquid and squeeze flowers to get all the juice from them. Pour into a cooking pot. At this stage in this dandelion wine recipe, add the ginger root, lemon and orange juice and peels to the liquid. Next add in sugar and gradually boil for 20 minutes.

Pour liquid back into crock and let cool. Now add the yeast. Pour into a fermenting jug snugly fitted with an airlock.

This will ferment anywhere from six days to three weeks while your liquid begins its' process of magically transforming into wine.

When the fermentation stops, transfer to sterilized bottles with caps or tightly fitted corks. Let stand for six months. During this process your wine is going to season. This is when the true alchemy of this dandelion wine recipe comes to completion."

 The only adjustments I made were to forgo the ginger, since I had none on hand - and I topped off my gallon fermenting jar with a couple of cups of honey water, since the recipe as written didn't quite make up a full gallon.  

This recipe calls for a lot of dandelion petals, but by the end - once I'd learned to pluck only the biggest, plumpest blossoms - and gotten down the proper petal-removing twist - I could harvest a quart of dandelion in 20 minutes.

It put not a dent in our supply.

The rule of thumb is that after you've bottled the wine, you can try it out at the winter solstice, but not before.  I'll have to post an update then!

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Spring Images

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Beech leaves unfurl

Peach tree in blossom

One of the newly planted cherry trees didn't survive the spring's drought.  But the little peach tree has been in full pink blossom for two weeks.

A morel among the violets

The black currant bushes are abuzz with bees.

If we put in a sun porch, I hope to move them successfully from their place.

Black currant in full plethora

Sassafras flowers

My father remembered his grandparents drinking sassafras tea as a spring tonic, so in the last April days before the sap fully rises and they flower and leaf, he had me dig up a couple of saplings for their aromatic taproots.  I cleaned them off, boiled them in well water, mixed in some of the backyard honey, and we had a refreshing tea.  To me it was like an earthy sasparilla, to Dad it was nostalgia, but a skeptical Porter thought it tasted too much like medicine.

Porter vs dandelions with a trowel