Sow There!

This sounded interesting, and for Christmas shopping, anything that doesn't involve the mall parking lot is worth checking out.

A Green and Local Holiday Fair will be held from 2-8 p.m. Dec. 9 at the Chico Grange Hall, 2775 Old Nord Avenue, about a 1/4 mile from W. East Avenue. The closest landmarks are the Masonic Family Center and Cleanrite.
The event is free to the public and will include live music by violinist Brynn Monteith.
Items already confirmed for the fair include: Hand-blown glass pendants, holiday cards, handmade wreaths, knitted hats and scarves, soy candles, aprons and dog fashions.
For further information, call 895-9925. Vendors are still able to sign up to get a booth.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year I worked for the paper on Thanksgiving, so Tommy and I were not able to travel down to the Bay Area to hang out with the extended family.
Instead, we held a small gathering at my house on Saturday, with Mom, my best friend and her son and neighbor Curious George.

Thanksgiving is a sumptuous affair at my Auntie Jeanne and Uncle Lars’ house in the Bay Area, so I had
no expectations that our gathering would in any way measure up.

Auntie Jeanne’s get-together is like the Thanksgiving dinners you see in the movies, with candles burning, soothing music on the CD player and bowls full of expensive delicacies.
My Thanksgiving started out Friday night with me frantically calling around asking friends for turkey cooking tips. I already knew (through previous trial and error) that one must remember to remove the neck and the gizzards from the bird before cooking.
Also, because we did not intend to put stuffing in the turkey, I learned from my mother to put an apple in the orifice of the bird to keep in the juices.
We also decided to cook with an oven bag. This was a delightful misadventure. After thoroughly massaging the bird with room-temperature butter, Tommy held the oven bag while I hoisted the bird into the plastic.
Not accustomed to lifting a slippery, 14-pound mound of meat, the bird slipped, tore through the oven bag and landed with a big thud on the kitchen linoleum.
Luckily, we had a good laugh about it.
We pulled the white plastic patio table from my best friend’s backyard and crammed six mismatched chairs into the living room.
Six clean cloth napkins were found in the back of a kitchen drawer but we had to settle for six unmatched wine glasses for the table.
The turkey turned out OK. However, I didn’t realize that it would cook faster in the oven bag. The meat literally slipped off the bone, which meant Tommy did not need to practice the turkey-carving techniques he had learned from page 137 of my cookbook.
Funny how preparing a big meal isn’t as stressful when you know ahead of time that it won’t be perfect.
However, some things with Thanksgiving are always the same. At crunch time — when everything is theoretically ready to serve at the same time — we had six people in the kitchen trying to carry things to the white plastic table.
As is the custom, the kitchen felt as accommodating as the galley in a commercial airplane.

Backyard art
In the afternoon we all made stepping stones in the backyard.
Tommy is in the process of making a new garden bed by carving into a spot in the lawn. We’re pretty excited about it and envision a new home for an herb garden near the ailing birch tree.
One requirement is that I have some stepping stones to be able to access the bed for weeding and harvesting.
Mom and I went to a big-box home supply shop and bought two 50-pound bags of quick-dry cement ($7.50 each). I also went to the dollar store and bought a bag of glass balls people use at the bottom of a fish bowl, and Mom brought some colored aquarium rocks.
Tommy dug circular holes in the dirt near the compost pile about three inches deep.
Next, Tommy and Leif mixed the cement in a 10-gallon bucket, quickly learning that the bucket had a crack in the side.
After the cement was mixed, we poured the soupy mess into the holes and started decorating.
Leif made an imprint of his 10-year-old hand and decorated it with the glass baubles. Mom used a stick to carve “peace” in the wet cement and outline the letter with aquarium rocks.
I wouldn’t say creativity was flowing, but we did the best with what we had to work with.
My best friend found a box of neon-colored refrigerator magnet letters left over from when Leif was a toddler.
We sorted them out on the couch and found enough letters to spell things out in the quickly drying cement.
We could have been more high-tech about the project. Several Web sites on stepping stones suggest using molds made from pie tins that have been sprayed with cooking oil or petroleum jelly. Other decorations could include broken pottery, marbles, coins, broken costume jewelry, or other strange items found in the garage.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most people have family traditions at Thanksgiving. Some revolve around food, such as the traditional turkey or other large slab of meat.
Then there are the foods we eat only at this time of year, such as yams and pecan pie.
Some families make green Jell-O with miniature marshmallows, which I really don’t completely understand but I know it happens.
In my family, one of the traditions is to invite orphans and travelers to our holidays.
I’m not sure exactly where this tradition came from. However, it likely started with my grandmother.
Gram was born in 1925. When she was a teen, her mother could no longer afford to keep her. As I remember it being told, her brother was taken into the home of his high school football coach back in Minnesota.
My grandmother went to work as a maid in the home of a family.
I don’t know all of the details of those hard years, but when Gram was about 17, she met my grandfather and would soonafter get married and start making babies.

My mom has said that when she was growing up with three siblings, the family always had foster children in the house. My mother assumed that it was because my grandmother had been without a home as a child and wanted to give back to other children who were in the same situation.
When we were growing up, we always had sort of an open door policy for holidays, especially Thanksgiving.
Even if guests couldn’t come for the whole meal, often there would be family friends who would stop by later in the evening for pie.
Periodically there were people we knew who did not have a place to go on the holiday. This might be a traveler from a different country, or someone who had relatives in a different part of the United States but could not afford to travel.
One year, when I was in my early 20s, I met a guy through a mutual friend. He was from England and was a “traveler.” He had long, straight black hair and wore a black leather biker jacket. For some reason, I found out that he was hoping to travel down to the Bay Area but had no car. I was going down for the holiday and offered to give him a lift.
He couldn’t hook up with his friends on Thanksgiving, so naturally I invited him to join my family.
My family was completely unfazed that I would invite someone to Thanksgiving, even someone with a British accent and long, rock-star hair.
He was incredibly charming and a welcome addition to our family gathering.
He ended up befriending my cousin Rannvi, who attended college in Santa Cruz, and he decided to spend a few days with her near the coast before continuing his journey to visit his other friends.
My cousin remained friends with him over the years and occasionally he’ll drop her a post card.
Hosting visitors didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary to me. In fact, it was just a staple of growing up.
My grandmother traveled throughout the world after she became a teacher and had the summer months off. She would meet people on her adventures and often some of them would come to California and stay with her.
Invariably, a bunch of us would go to San Francisco, a must-see destination for someone visiting from Poland, Italy or France. Those were some of the most fun adventures, because we would see the familiar San Francisco sites we had seen many times, but view it through the eyes of our guests.

Oddball fall
This is a very strange year for the fall garden. We’re not the only ones confused with the peculiar weather.
UC Davis Farm Adviser Joe Connell said flower bulbs that normally bloom in spring, such as daffodils, have already begun to grow, with stalks above the surface of the soil.
Because of the warm fall, the trees are taking longer to lose their leaves.
I’ve already reported on the big clump of irises that have bloomed twice so far this season.
Joe said many people have said their roses have pushed out an extra cycle of blooms this year. He’s personally also still been harvesting tomatoes from his plants.
But even though there hasn’t been substantial rain for about a month, Joe said there shouldn’t be a great need for supplemental watering.
Most plants are going dormant right now, vastly decreasing their need for water.
He recommended some extra watering for evergreen trees such as large redwoods that won’t shed their leaves during the cold months.
Also, extra water care should be given to any plants recently added to the garden, such as plants for fall and winter color.



Posted by Heather Hacking at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Hey hon, I have a surprise for you,” isn’t always the most welcome message to receive on one’s work voice mail.
I’ve been through this before. If I had taken a tally, there would be mixed results.
It’s too bad Tommy didn’t go into a career in forest management. His DNA would be perfectly suited for prescribed burns.
Don’t even get me started on his method of eradicating ant mounds with WD-40 and a Bic lighter.
When it comes to gardening, his belief is that less is more. And it when it comes to pruning and weeding, more is less.
When I think about it, he’s like this in a lot of ways and I could never imagine him ever having a shaggy, outgrown hair style.

We went through a few tense times before he knew the difference between what I considered weeds. To Tommy, a weed is something he did not personally see planted in the ground. This means all those interesting volunteer plants, self-sown plants or yet-to-be-determined plants were plucked from the ground when he was in a dedicated weed-pulling mood.
Other times, he was just tired of looking at something. This meant death to some Shasta daisies that were decidedly not early bloomers.
He tried several times to kill the lantana that grows by the water spigot. But thankfully, that plant would somehow survive on the moon.
The big lilies hidden in the side yard were “trimmed back” twice before I even noticed, but somehow bloomed better than they had in 10 years.
Woe were the narcissus bulbs he mistook for wild onions. Those only merited a shrug because they never did well in that location anyway.
When I got the phone call this week (with him panting as he spoke), I was a little nervous. He announced a “new project” that required major deconstructive surgery on the sage and oregano bushes and the use of a pile of bricks piled up in different parts of the yard.
I impressed myself with my ability to stay calm and listen to the whole thought process he had been through before dedicating several hours of time with a shovel.
The idea was to tear out part of the “lawn” near a garden bed and extend the planting area about three feet.
The good news is that the area was mostly crabgrass anyway. So even if the experiment doesn’t work out, we can just buy some new lawn seed and the area will be improved.
Plus, his idea holds merit.
It was cute to see him waving his arms around and pointing the shovel at areas of freshly-turned soil. I had already envisioned planting a spring herb garden where we recently ripped out two lackluster tomato plants.
With the enlargement of the garden bed he proposed, I could see adding a path through the center so I could navigate through the plants for the usual snail smashing and harvest.
Mom will be visiting soon, so I even made arrangements for her to bring some supplies to make stepping stones using quick-dry cement.

Eye of the beholder
Progress has been made with the umbrella plant I recently acquired from my friend Mandi. It’s a monstrous plant and I have no space indoors where it would be happy. I put out feelers to see if anyone could adopt it.
The funny thing is, everyone wanted it.
This plant is huge and would block my doorway if I tried to put it on the front porch. And yet, everyone who heard about it wanted it.
Funny how that is. You can look at something from six or seven different angles and get no lasting feeling of attachment. Then, suddenly, when everyone else seems interested, it suddenly becomes more attractive.
I’ve considered selling raffle tickets, now that its popularity has been proven.
The umbrella plant is also known as a schefflera.
A reader named Phyllis sent an e-mail about a schefflera plant her husband had given her as a gift on their first Valentine’s Day together.
Every year it grew larger and Phyllis would take it outside, give it a nice rinse and repot it. After many years, the plant became too large to cart from one end of the house to the front yard.
“My girl is so heavy she sits in a large pot on wheels now,” she wrote.
It’s about 15 feet tall and she gently ties back the larger branches. She keeps it in a cool room with filtered light in her “big, old farmhouse.”
It’s good to know there is somewhere to go if I ever need to make a low-budget film based in the tropics.
Over the years, Phyllis has used the plant to hang Christmas lights.
One Web site I visited said schefflera can be propagated by taking a stem cutting and removing the lower leaves. The stem is dipped in rooting hormone and put in soil until it produces roots.
This would greatly increase my profits with the raffle ideas.
I have no idea if this is as easy as it sounds, so any testimonials from readers are welcome.

Sow There! loves get-rich-quick schemes and friends who think of me when they think of plants. For more inane prattle, check out my blog at www.norcalblogs.com/sowthere.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Judging from the arrangements of items for sale at stores, the holiday season is here.
I’m not that old yet. However, within my lifetime, I distinctly remember a time when people predicted that if the holiday season started any sooner, we’d have Christmas displays in stores before Thanksgiving.
Somewhere along the line, that time came and went and now even before Halloween we’re bombarded with glittering displays reminding us it’s important to sock away a few bucks a day for the official “giving season.”

I must say I love most things about the holidays. My family retains the holiday feast traditions, and there is a lot to be said for spending time with relatives and having the house filled with warm oven smells and tables filled with expensive hors d’oeuvres.

But there is a considerable amount of stress related to the preparation and arrangements for these get-togethers.
Halloween, at least for me, doesn’t come with these related stress factors.
In fact, Halloween is downright leisurely.

Tommy and I hooked up with several friends and made the trek to the corn maze/pumpkin patch in Orland one recent weekend. I didn’t do a complete survey of the fourth-graders who meandered the maze with us. However, I suspect they had an OK time and will remember the adventure as a quaint excursion from their childhood.
Next there was a pumpkin-carving barbecue. We set tables on the patio and had a little bit of daylight where 10 of us fought for elbow room to carve pumpkins. There was a mild competition for who would be the most skilled with the one pumpkin-carving kit we bought. But in the end, even the most awkward attempt at carving artistry turns to glowing mastery when the sky turns dark.
Next on the list of festivities was trick-or-treating.

After a little pleading, we were granted an invitation to join the 10-year-old next door and his best friend on a darkened walk through the neighborhood.
Again, memories from childhood often shine brighter than reality. Or maybe Halloween just isn’t what it used to be.
By the time my age reached double digits, my parents would allow me and my friends, accompanied by my older sister, to roam the nearby neighborhood like a pack of dogs. This was before cell phones and my parents would make us check in every once in a while, often to take some of our candy to continue to distribute to the kids who kept ringing our doorbell.
We knew most of the neighbors, and ran into kids from school on almost every block.
But this year I learned we don’t live in the most kid-friendly neighborhood.
Our neighborhood was only recently annexed to the city, so there are almost no streetlights and sidewalks are intermittent. This might be part of the reason there was only a trickle of trick-or-treaters in our part of the Avenues.

With the tree-lined street and shrubbery of these older homes, shadows and darkness did add to the “scary” factor, but after a while the scariest thing about it was whether someone would step in a pot-hole.
It was a little sad for the kids, because there were only a few houses with porch lights on on each block.
Adults in our group refrained from commenting about the “good old days” because then the kids might want to just go home and resume playing X-box.
Or maybe Halloween trick-or-treating is just waning as our town becomes more complicated.
As adults, decisions were made to bypass certain houses where loud belching and coughing could be heard. We also ended up giving directions to a woman dressed as a dominatrix. She was likely looking for that house we had just bypassed.
I think the kids still had fun, though, even though they aren’t raised to fully enjoy simple pleasures.

A simple pleasure
Leaf-stomping is one of my favorite rituals of autumn. When Tommy and I take walks at night, I zig-zag across the pavement seeking out that perfect crunch. There’s something delightful about putting your foot down and hearing that sound — be it a snail, dried leaves, plastic packing paper or ornamental pistachio seeds.
The leaves are not quite at their prime yet, as it takes a yet-to-be-discovered formula of time on the ground and weather conditions to create the perfect snap, crackle and pop.
Usually, the prime leaf-stomping time is fleeting and often missed if a quick rain turns all the fun into mush.
For people thinking about landscape additions, now is a perfect time to pick out trees for fall foliage displays. Wandering through different neighborhoods on a weekend and asking residents if they know what tree is glowing in their yard is one way to narrow down the choice.
Another is to visit the nurseries now while the leaves are changing color. This way you can pick out exactly the color choices you would like to see in your yard next year.
Planting trees and shrubs near the dormant season is good because the plant puts effort into establishing the root system, rather than foliage.

Posted by Heather Hacking at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)