Boarding School

_

Porter has been in a private school since 4th grade and Nico since 1st.  The boys are smart, well-mannered, charming in their own ways, and their test scores help the place buff its image as a good school.  It may, as one local Blueblood scoffed, be the kind of school that turns out Peace Corps volunteers, but it can also run rough with currents of privilege and class.

My own background is from a kind of rural intelligentsia - teachers, shopkeepers and farmers.  But they were educated to whatever degree life allowed, and they owned books, which they read and could quote.   From white settler stock (English, German, Dutch, Scots) they were mostly modest people of local consequence and not given to class anxieties or feelings of inferiority toward those "better off" than themselves.

I mention it because I wouldn't have set them into a private school - given our modest means, small house, and '97 Saturn station wagon - if I thought they would be afflicted by the more poisonous aspects of class and its divisions and oppressions.  And they don't seem to be - they can sort the friends from the knuckleheads, and not confuse wealth with a person's quality.  They can recognize our own privilege (the travel, the education, the network of relatives and friends) -- even in comparison to their wealthier classmates.

The boys' school only goes up to 9th grade, so this was always going to be Porter's last year there.  Still, it came as a surprise to me when he choose to pursue boarding school.  He applied, interviewed at schools, visited and so on -- aided by a guidance counselor schooled in these things, of course.  And the Cate School in California wants him to join them and they have the resources to make it happen.  So in August we'll settle him in - one of eleven sophomores joining a class of about 55.  It's one of the best high schools in the country (and certainly one of the most expensive) and will give him the springboard into whatever combination of education, social milieu, and avocation he chooses to reach for.

He follows a family tradition of pursuing the best education within reach, and I wouldn't let him go if I didn't think he was grounded enough to take the best of it and leave the worst.

_

Rhubarb wine recipe (updated)

Brian Kaller over at Restoring Mayberry is touting uses for rhubarb today, so I thought I would chime in with last year's excellent sorbet and this spring's experiment in winemaking.

12 pounds of rhubarb

I'm trying my hand at rhubarb wine, because I have an under-used rhubarb patch and some extra bags of sugar I bought to feed the bees.  I cannot vouch for the process, because I haven't tried the wine.  I adapted the simplest recipe I could find on the web -- rhubarb, sugar, yeast and a bit of nutrient to keep the fermentation going.

chopped into a bucket

I'll post the full recipe beneath the fold, but here are the basics for a 3-gallon batch.  

You harvest a dozen pounds of rhubarb and chop it up into a bucket.  No need to peel it - though I found peeling a strip off made it easier to chop up.  You add 6.5 pounds (about 14 cups) of sugar as you go and make sure it's well covered at the end.  Then you let it sit for a day or two while the sugar leaches out the rhubarb juices into a rosy syrup.  

Strain the syrup through a cheesecloth.  You can rinse the rhubarb with some water and add that water to the syrup as well.  Maybe you can find a use for the discarded sweet rhubarb - I snacked on some and composted the rest. 

6.5 pounds of sugar

You put that syrup into your fermentation jar, top off with enough clean water to make up the 3 gallons, add your wine yeast and a couple of teaspoons full of nutrient and put on a stopper with a fermentation lock.

Mine's been bubbling vigorously for two weeks now.  When it stops bubbling I'll decide whether to rack it (siphon it to another jar minus the sediment) or just bottle it.  Sometime next winter or spring I'll know if the experiment was successful or not.

a 3-gallon carboy with a fermentation lock

UPDATE: June 19.
A few days ago I racked it into a couple of gallon jugs and bottled three bottles of it.  That's just the scientist in me wanting to add a few variables.  I tasted it and it wasn't vile - tasted like a slightly harsh hard cider.

UPDATE: December 29.
Opened the first bottle at Solstice. It was very nice - crisp and dry - with only a slight hint of rhubarb undertones, if you searched it out.  Crystal clear as well.  The experiment is hereby deemed a success!

Full recipe below the fold:

Marbled Salamander

I met a marbled salamander in the tall grass,

and picked her up before the cats did 

(though it was a young rabbit they were more concerned with).

I put her into the pile of wood that will someday be a fertile hugel, 

and told her to eat as she liked, 

but if she could help herself especially to any slugs I'd be grateful.

(Poor rabbit, 

but I'm developing a gardener's callouses.)

photos by A Brown

Gray Tree Frogs

lichen on maple

With a chainsaw I was cutting fallen branches
when a patch of lichen moved
and changed into a frog.

A gray tree frog

They have been gathering here,

trilling and maybe arguing with that kingfisher

who returned again today.

The neighbor's little backyard pond,

must have spawned this noisy lot

who now return. 

photos by A Brown

Rhubarb's gaudy decay

_

I carved into the rhubarb

to make a backyard wine.

Discarded leaves, 

their pigments 

and their poisons

gaudily decay.

photos by A Brown

The boys

_

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.

_

Kingfisher

_

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.

_

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

_

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.

_

Is civilization just a bubble?

_

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.

_

Dandelion Wine (updated)

_

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!

UPDATE: June 19

It kept bubbling for quite a bit longer than 3 weeks, more like 5, but I finally bottled it a few days ago.  It's a pretty yellow color - though cloudy.  So now we wait.

UPDATE: December 29
One of the bottles blew it's cork at some point in the autumn, but the rest survived.  We opened one on mid-winter night.  It was cloudy (since I hadn't learned to rack wine properly on this, my first try) and sweet -- more port-like than wine like.  A decent sipping desert wine, maybe, but I'm going to give it to the spring equinox before I open another of the bottles.  It was far inferior to the rhubarb wine that I also opened that night.

_

Spring Images

_

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

photos by A Brown

_

Phenological notes . . . 

The soil is as dry as dust and I was watering flowers that I had transplanted out of the herb garden. A hummingbird, first of the year, came to flit along the spray and drink from a stray purple blossom, but whether he wanted nectar or a drink of water I couldn't tell.  And two of the little plum trees that I planted began to blossom.

_

Banning neonicotinoids

_

Good news for the bees!  Europe has banned the use of neonicotinoid pesticides for two years until scientists can show that they are not the culprit behind the collapse of the bee population.  In the US, of course, research into pesticides has been mostly out-sourced to the companies themselves, and although they are obligated to do actual science, they have little incentive to be aggressive or thorough about it. 

Worldwide sales of the pesticides total in the billions of dollars. Two companies that make them in Europe, the German giant Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, a Swiss biochemical company, have said they were willing to finance additional research, but that the current data do not justify a ban.

In the US the EPA was willing to sit on its hands and wait to see if any scientific insights spontaneously developed or whether bees would recover or go extinct.  I have a feeling a ban in Europe will tend to stimulate a greater sense of urgency for the chemical companies and their agricultural clients.  If they think their product is truly safe, then I think they'll want to settle the question sooner rather than later.  If they suspect their product is an epic environmental disaster and they were hoping to kick the day of reckoning down the road, then I expect nothing but lobbying and complaining from them.

Europe’s struggle with the question of neonicotinoids and bee health is being closely watched in the United States, where the pesticides are in wide use, and where a bee die-off over the past winter appears to have been one of the worst ever. Beekeepers and environmentalists are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its approval of the products, which they claim were allowed on the market with inadequate review.

Bees are in short supply.  The Rhode Island Beekeepers Association couldn't fill the orders of everyone who wanted to purchase queens this spring.   I was fortunate to order early and eventually got the three colonies that I ordered.  Two seem to be successfully installed, and the third I'll check on in a few days to see if the queen has been accepted yet.

Now I just have to figure out how to keep them alive until the EPA stirs itself to life.

_

_

Phenological notes:

In this morning's dawn chorus I heard the towhee's drink-your-tea for the first time this spring.  No frost this morning of the 23rd, but frost struck the two nights before - hard enough to kill a couple of tomato plants I'd set out.  Maybe this will be the last one.

And the peach sapling is in bloom.

_

_

The herb garden bird bath is frozen this morning.

Wage-earning declines

_

At work we've been engaged in a lot of advocacy on low-wage work, which is becoming the economic model for more and more of the US economy.  The progressive in me finds it outrageous and heartbreaking the way that wealthy corporations and billionaires, in collusion with a co-opted media and corrupt political class, have systematically destroyed first the working class and then the middle class of this country.  It's all fairly straightforward, however they may try to dress it up with economic theory, political theater, media doublespeak, and individual rationalization: an exercise in raw power to steal more and more away from the lives of average Americans in order to draw more toward themselves.  

(From a personal standpoint, at least, my outrage is made less corrosive by a lack of envy.  The amount of self-delusion and anti-humanity necessary to be a CEO or billionaire in this world seems a kind of pitiful little hell - even though they remain oblivious to it.)  Still, the pain they cause is very real, and people do suffer and die because of it.

But the non-progressive in me sees hope in the destruction of an unsustainably consumerist middle class (if only it would be quickly followed by the destruction of an unsustainably rapacious upper class).  There is no doubt that the lack of jobs is creating havoc in people's lives, but there is another way to read a chart like this one:

On the one hand, the plunge from the year 2000 to today represents tens of millions of people ejected from the workforce against their will, and a crash in what workers can insist on in a "weak labor market."  This has been devastating to families and local economies.  On the other hand, it also represents a statistical return to the mid-eighties.  The mid-eighties weren't a time of economic distress - in fact times were pretty good.  But the percentage of people earning wages was lower. Not all teens were declaring taxable income (though many of them might have been mowing lawns or shoveling snow, and the old Mom and Pop businesses made use of their family members); there were more women who were occupied in the domestic economy rather than earning a wage and outsourcing that work (to food companies, etc.); more elders were retired, being grandparents, serving as unpaid caregivers, and so on.

There are better economies that can be built that don't entail half the US population trading their hours for wages.  And there are better lives that can be built when more people disengage from these wage-payers, who increasingly are heartless mega-corporations who mean none of us well.  A service economy of low-wage workers is a rat eating its own tail.  If the downward trend on this chart can mean we stop slaving for them and start working for each other again -- then I have to say, I'm all for it.

It's going to be painful, but as the doomers say, "collapse now and avoid the rush."

_

_

The violets have been out for a few days.  Last night I made a couple of little salads for Monica and I with violet flowers, dandelion, wild sorrel, and some young dock leaves.  It satisfied a craving for green.  

Though some non-native plants have come into flower (forsythia, daffodils, a couple of dandelions, and chickweed) the only native bloom other than violets I've seen is one of the bleeding hearts under the black maple which is just in process of opening a bud.

_

_

In Georgia last week it was cold where they raise the bees and so the virgin queens stayed home and didn't take their mating flights - (they call them virgin queens rather than princesses).  And what you are buying when you buy a "package" is a mated queen with enough random worker bees to help her raise her first wave of brood.  But the cold weather meant a shortage, and although I'd ordered three packages, I could only pick up the two.

On Saturday I installed the bees in the waiting hives -- each queen in a tiny cage with a few attendants.  If you let her out too soon the confused worker bees will kill her.  So the entry to the cage is plugged with a candy paste.  By the time the bees eat through it, a matter of a few days, they've adopted the young queen as their own, and she sets about laying her eggs in the new comb.

I checked on the hives today, and shook the bees off the cage in the first hive.   The queen was not yet freed, so I undid the cork and let her out to disappear into the swarm.  She has a bright red spot of paint upon her.  In a few days I'll look for her or at least look for signs of eggs.  That will mean we are launched.

In the other hive the queen and her attendant were dead, still inside the cage.  No idea why she failed, though it happens.  I may be able replace her if I can secure a mated queen in the next few days.  It becomes a race against time.  The bees, queenless, may drift next door to the other hive.  Even if they stay put, the clock is ticking on these worker bees.  They only live for six weeks, and already it is nearly a week since they were packaged in Georgia.  Another few days to get a replacement; another few days in the cage before they will accept her; and only then will she begin to lay eggs for a replacement generation.  How many of the workers will survive over the following weeks to nurture the larvae to be nurses for the expanding brood chamber?  Even when things go well, the population reaches a nadir in the transition from the dying original workers to the queen's new offspring.  This delay makes that nadir all the deeper and more precarious.

_

_

The bees arrive on Saturday.  

The maple trees have been making pollen.

I took a little brown tree frog away from the cats.

 _