Lehman's Country Life

Even if cold weather is little more than a dream for some of you while you’re still having searing temperatures, it will come! For some of us, cold weather really never left this year, but either way, cooler or colder weather is coming and we need to prepare for it. It may seem early to be thinking about it, but better a little early than a little late.

Have you made a list of what needs to be done? Here’s mine:

• Check furnace or chimney and stove closures, seals and seams, etc. Replace filters on furnaces.

• Clean out coat closets. See what needs to be replaced before cold weather. If your household is like mine, cold weather gear is gratefully dumped on the first warm day of spring and heaven knows what kind of condition it’s in.
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This is a true story: One afternoon, I wandered out toward the road that came in behind the house and there was a baby duck (okay, a duckling) walking along the road, quacking and crying with every step. Momma duck was nowhere to be found, and I felt sorry for the little guy, so it wasn’t long before he was quietly settled in a cardboard box in a corner of the kitchen.

We lived not far from a feedlot and flyswatters are a basic necessity to that kind of area. It didn’t take long for the little duck to realize that a flyswatter meant food. It got to the point that when he saw us pick up one, he would march right up and wait for his snack. If you ever wanted to find him, all you had to do was take down a flyswatter and smack the floor with it and he’d come running. He ate so many flies, that’s what we named him  – Flies.

I never had to call the kids to come and swat flies because
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“Hurry, bring the water in,” Mom called as we dawdled at the pump on that bright morning. We were watching Daddy pile up tools nearby – shovels, a crowbar, hammers and nails. He and another hired hand were going to clean out our well.

Mom called one more time, then Daddy looked up. “Better get that water to your Mom,” he said, and we scrambled. Daddy never gave orders much to us kids, but when he did, it was time to move.

We pumped hard, bringing up great gushes of pure, cold, sweet water to rock the bucket hung on the lip of the pump spigot. The two buckets were filled quickly and we ran them to the house and came back for another filling.

“That’s enough,” said Mom,
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On almost any Monday morning, you’d catch Mom in the kitchen, first filling the old wringer washer with hot water, turning it on, then filling the swishing tub with dirty clothes that hit the suds one by one with a satisfying plop and blurble. Like a hungry monster, the washing machine pulled the clothes downward into the steaming, soapy water. After a moment, they’d rise like undersea monsters, pale colors and shades of white, mounded like the smooth back of some creature… then they’d swish and swoop downward, only to rise and do it again.
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Mom was born a few years before the Great Depression. Grandma, a widow, raised nine kids on a farm by herself. She didn’t have food stamps or a welfare check or earned income credit. She did have fresh food, good water and a zest for life. Real milk, fresh eggs, nuts and berries from the forest, wild foods and home grown vegetables were their fare. There was not much else, but who needed it?

I remember fried chicken for Sunday dinner at Grandma’s. It was about the only time meat was on the table but Grandma never ate it. She said she didn’t like chicken and I could never understand why. It was much later I learned the reason she wouldn’t eat it.
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When I moved to town from the country a few years ago, this backyard was one of those pristine, closely clipped lawns with a lovely flower garden in the midst of it. Not anymore. The flower garden this year grew corn and beans and squash, and wild sunflowers graced the back of the garage. Smaller oil type sunflowers grew on the south side of the patio, mixed in with millet and whatever else was in that cup of birdseed I scattered there.

Lambsquarter grew to amazing heights in the well prepared soil of a raised bed. It’s loaded with seed right now and bent over from some serious rains. It still looks lacey and delicate from a distance – never mind that the stem is as thick as small fencepost. How I’ll get it out of the garden, I don’t know yet. I might have to hire a tractor to pull it out.

And under the lambsquarter? Purslane! Lots of it. I had to pull some away from the peppers to give them some sun. Dandelions are scattered here and there over the whole place, but mostly under the plum tree, where I’ve instructed my groundskeeper (nephew!) to never mow. He’s learned to not pull “weeds” unless I have told him to and he knows to never put poison of any kind on the grass. Or what remains of the grass.

This year I was pleased to find a patch of panic grass sending its pale yellow flower and seed heads in an orderly scramble upwards. Less pleasant was an invasion of bindweed or wild morning glory. I love the little flower, so let it grow for awhile when it appeared… oops. It hasn’t quit spreading yet and I know that once it gets started, it’s very hard to get rid of.

Mallow, with its whitish to purple blossoms and little green “cheeses,” grow in almost every corner there is – and in my backyard, there are lots of corners! Along the back fence grows a weed that I have never found the name of. It’s rather pretty with tiny yellow flowers early, then three clusters of seeds that explode when they’re ripe, sending them across the lawn to settle in for next year. I’ve been very stern with them, keeping them in that one area, but it takes a lot of weed pulling to convince them.

So now you’re thinking I must be some kind of nut, else why would I purposely let my backyard go to weeds?
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We’re all aware of the Sock Monster. That’s the sneaky beast that gets into our laundry and makes off with just one of a perfectly good pair of socks, leaving us with baskets or boxes of unmatched ones. They’re too good to throw out and we think maybe… just maybe, mind you, the mate will show up out of nowhere.

Won’t happen. At least, not until you throw away the one you have. Then you’re still stuck with a half a pair of socks… and what to do with them without feeling guilty for throwing out something in such good condition?

An old trick is to put the sock on your hand, spray it with furniture polish and detail the furniture. It’s easy to get in all the little corners with your fingers that way and when you’re finished, toss it in the laundry. If you’re like most of us, you have enough replacements to last a week or more – certainly until you do the laundry.

“Ok,” you’re saying, “But what about the rest of them??”

Use Farmhouse Furniture Wax instead and use an orphaned sock to buff the wood. Cotton socks really do a great job of that.

Here are some more ideas:

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With the price of gas so high, you’ve probably seen a few hundred articles on how to save it. The frugal among us have known for years that you don’t gun the engine just so you can slam on the brakes at the next stop light, and you don’t drive unnecessarily, and you don’t drive around with the car (or truck) loaded with things you’re not using or transporting from here to there. That just makes good sense.

But now it’s getting serious. The price of gas keeps… well, I was going to say “crawling,” but it’s more like leaping upwards. This upward bounding might slow down and even stop, (we can dream) but the chance of the price going back down, at least to any appreciable amount, is pretty small.

So… we’re stuck with high and higher gas prices. Is there any reasonable thing we can do to help our fuel budgets? “Reasonable” may be in the eye of the doer, but there are definitely things we can do to cut back how much we’re spending for transportation.

Try these out:
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“…It takes time to grow food. You can’t grow food in a panic. It takes planning.”

So said Michael Levenston of City Farmer, on the eve of the year 2000, otherwise known as Y2K – the year of panic.

That wisdom is just as relevant now as it was then, although perhaps in a slightly different setting. We don’t expect (at least most of the time) to wake up tomorrow morning to a world that’s suddenly reverted fifty years in technology.

There are other concerns right now, though. One would have to be blind to not notice that the price of groceries have gone up drastically over the last few months.

We can’t control the price of food, but we can control how much of it we buy. A home garden can make a definite difference in how much you need to buy.
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Gene Logsdon said one time that the way he planted walnut trees was to put walnuts in the ground and cover them. That makes a lot of sense, but it’s not a popular method and the reason is time. It takes years and years for a walnut tree to grow big enough to cast a good shade when it grows from a seed (nut).

Most people would never plant a tree that way.We plant dwarf trees that mature and bear fruit or nuts in a few short years. The faster, the better. It’s even hard to find full size apple trees in nurseries, and with the narrow hybrid selection of apples on the market, who can grow a real apple tree from a seed? Who would wait that long on a tree?

I was thinking about knitting a table cloth (One really does have to do with the other, honest!), and I was thinking that it would take a long time…
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