Sunday, May 15, 2011

Raspberries to move to a new home, maybe a lasagna garden, Blackberries of days gone by.

We rough tilled the garden last week and dug shoots of raspberries out of the path of the tiller as we went along. I set them aside still in their dirt and I offered to them to Lady who had wanted some for her own garden space. This week her husband stopped by and he took them home, they had done real well as they were still in the dirt. I hope she has a wonderful new patch. We have been allowing the goats into the lawn, daily to eat what they will, the grass needs mowing and as we have a great big lawn this kills to birds with one stone, lawn care and browsing for the does and the babies. I love when you get a win win. Well I am not sure that Poppie would say it is always a win win, as the lawn wraps around the house, and leads to the garden at the top of a little hill. The goaties sometime get bored and wonder right up that little hill. We have been clapping our hands loud or tapping two sticks together and the sharp noise turns them right around but if we are not there they take liberties, and as there is nothing yet planted, and growing, they attack my fruit trees and raspberries, very bad. We are talking about putting a little fence at the end of the lawn, to basically fence them away from the garden and have also contemplated putting a raise bed on the garden side of the little fence. We would establishing a lasagna garden along the long fence and replant the raspberries to the little fence line. That would get the raspberries completely out of the main garden and give the raspberries a new home, and give me a place to use the manure and wastes from the goat pens, so big win win. I think I will lay cardboard in the next few days and the kid will enjoy helping, what kid doesn't like to throw "papers" down and splash water on them. I will then put some of the vast amount of pine needles and cones down as part of my first brown layer. It will give me a great start to the new raspberry bed with no topsoil needed right away, alas, win win.

This berry talk has made me fondly remember getting to drive down from Grangeville in the summers, of my childhood, to go swimming in the Salmon river. We always went down to a little area known as Graves Creek, we drove out across the prairie in the early part of the day, along the Graves creek  road on Graves Creek there were wonderful wild black berries. We took our buckets and the lot of us, kids and parents, dove in to those berries, buckets in hand, and went to picking. We thought of the cobblers and jellies that would come from our labors, not realizing that the little purple faces that came out of the patch told the tale of how much more could have been made. We call that canning them in the patch, preserved but no middle man involved. We always picked for several hours and when we were hot, and tired of picking, we put the berries in the cooler and continued down to the Salmon river and went to swimming. We actually didn't know how to swimming at the time but we went to the little sand beach, at the end of the road, and inter tubed and tried to swim while our parents swam. Sometime friends would come and all of us kids enjoyed our time together. I once almost drowned, the dads had floated the river earlier that day and the moms and kids meant them there to pick them up. Us kids were playing with the tubes, they had floated with, because the river can get pretty rough, it is called the river of no return after all, they had tied ropes to their tube. I was floating on the tube with my body wrapped around the rope, I unlike the dads, could not really swim with out my life jacket. I flipped over and I could not get the tube to flip back over the rope prevented me from doing so. I was under what seemed like forever before one of the other kids tried to take the tube away and inadvertently saved me from drowning. There were so many kids playing no one had seen my close call.

We always had a picnic after the swimming and then drove up Graves creek to our home. Sometimes we had fished during the day as well, but not always. One night as we were driving along looking for rattle snakes and dad saw a great big one, he got out deciding he wanted to kill it and take its skin and rattle, he actually had done it before but this night he didn't have anything with him to kill it. He went to the back of the station wagon and got out one of his big poles, he screwed off the big handle about 18 inches long. He took the handle and scrunched the large rattlesnakes head into the screw end of the pole. The head was in the pole for a long time, in my memory, he actually only let it dry out before he removed it. The snakes were always on the road, right about were the black berry brambles were along the road.  It took years after we moved from Grangeville for my mom to say to my dad, out of nowhere, one day. "years ago when we were picking blackberries down on Graves Creek where were the rattle snakes during the day? I know they were on the road at night getting warm on the road, but where were they during the day?"  My dad, with a sheepish look on his face, looked at my mom, who is terrified of rattle snakes, and said, "Mom, they were in the black berries by the creek so they wouldn't overheat." I saw the color drain from her face as the reality of how many times she and her babies had dove into the black berry bramble with the snakes.  I won't repeat what she had to say to him...... tomorrow.

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