Grubbing raspberries with homemade margaritas for my reward

After my morning yoga class, I made another foray to one of our local nurseries, then it was home to the work in the garden.  After I'd planted my new treasures, I had to turn to grubbing raspberries.

Until the last couple of years, I'd not had much experience with growing raspberries.  When we grew them at our Dunn County place, the Gumbo Lily Ranch, I was busy with my career and raising my children, and raspberries are my husband's favorite, so he was in charge of these.  He likes to say if there would only be one fruit, it would be, in his view, raspberries.  We planted these the very first spring we were living in Red Oak House, and I had no idea that these spread by suckers (I guess I thought these spread by the billions of tiny seeds found on the fruit).  My sister Beckie Walby has her patch in a much more intelligent location, against her house, bordered by grass.  Ours are along a side fence and, in front of these is a perennial bed.  So, off I go to grub the suckers out of my perennial bed with my spade.

Ours produce fruit in late summer and early fall.  My sister's come in earlier in the summer.  This spring we've added a raspberry bed on the east side of the house and here we planted two different kinds, one a golden raspberry from our dear friends Jan and David Swenson's patch and the other from my sisters' patch (in the hopes that we will extend our raspberry harvest).  I hope my neighbor doesn't cuss at me when those suckers grow up in his grass as much as I cuss the ones that pop up here and there in my perennial bed.

A few days ago I planted a shrub rose, yellow, my favorite color.  I haven't had a shrub rose for several years now and visiting my friend Rhoda Hilden reminded me how much I miss their beauty.  Stay tuned for photos.

I think yellow is such a happy color, and many of my flowers are yellow.  As I described in my blog talking about our household decor and our acquisition of one of our Navajo rugs, the yellow one, I am immensely cheered by the color yellow.  Close your eyes just one moment and think of a lemon.  Sunflowers are, as I'm seeing on various knick-knacks, "sunshine on a stem".   But, I assure you, gentle reader, yellow is mixed in both inside and out of the house with many other splendid colors.

Today is Cinco de Mayo, and as I worked in the warm sunshine, I kept in my mind the delicious homemade margaritas that Beckie is making us for a Mexican feast at her house.  Everyone (of legal age, of course) loves these, and I know for her they are a labor of love.  If I'm going to spend Cinco de Mayo anywhere but in Mexico or the American Southwest, it should probably be at Walbys, where the food is always delicious and the margaritas are perfection.

When I was a kid living in El Paso, Texas (my father was stationed at Fort Bliss Army Base), we would have pinatas for our birthday parties and one of my mother's best friend, Mercedes, was Hispanic.  I loved going to her house in a beautiful part of the city (we were in a nice but ordinary suburban part of the city).  In school, we all studied Spanish as it was one of our classes along with math, science, English, and social studies.  Sadly, once we moved to North Dakota, where Spanish was not taught at our local school, my Spanish skills slipped to almost nil.  Now we joke that at least we know "uno cerveza", an essential skill (look it up), however, I do wish I could speak Spanish as I did as a child.  I made a stab at it this winter but failed miserably.

As my husband and I were winding down this day's work in the garden, I announced that tomorrow morning for the first time this year, I'm having coffee and breakfast on our patio.  He heartily agreed that this was an excellent plan and so we shall.

Time for a cold glass of Chardonney

It's time for a cold glass of Guenoc chardonnay on the patio of Red Oak House after a perfectly delightful afternoon in the garden, time to savor the goodness of life.

Late morning was spent at the local garden shops and then it was home to plant my new treasures.  Is there anyplace as happy on a May day than Plant Perfect or Cashman's Nursery or the Lowe's garden section? Yesterday I planted a new yellow shrub rose, yellow being my favorite color and the more hardy shrub roses being appropriate for North Dakota's oftentimes severe climate.

Rubra Pasqueflower in full bloom, so beautiful it deserves another pic

I love digging in the dirt.  As I mow the tiny bit of grass we have here, I think of my Slope County family, my Grandpa Andy Silbernagel, and my Daddy, and my brothers, spending countless hours on the tractor, summer-fallowing the fields and planting the crops.  They would come into the farmhouse with their faces completely black, dog-tired, weat the food we'd prepared, and collapse in the recliner to read and watch TV, and get up each morning to repeat this ritual.  My paternal granddaddy, Earl Crook, grew a small crop of peanuts in Mississippi.   His wife, Lena Belle Ellis, would always have a huge vegetable and flower garden, at their home I remember near Vaiden, Mississippi.  When I close my eyes, I can conjure up the exact picture of me following her and my mother in that multi-colored wonderland.

At the Slope County farm, down near the well and windmill, we had one vegetable garden, and then another just beyond the barnyard buildings, plus a huge field of potatoes about a mile from the farmstead.  As a small child, my Grandpa Andy would pay his grandchildren a penny for each potato bug we could catch and drop into a can of gasoline, as much to get us out of his hair as to control the bugs.  As a teenager, I was pleased to be assigned to go and hoe the large potato field as this meant that I got to drive a pickup solo, something I couldn't get enough of!

On days like today, we'd be eager to get off the school bus and tear outside to check on our baby calves and see if there might be new kittens, everywhere we looked on the prairie there was new life.

Today, my husband fished with his pals on the Missouri River, and he came home with a bucket full of walleye, cleaned it, and had nothing but happiness in his heart.  We will share that with friends.  We never ever take for granted the clean water that flows through our city, the Missouri River.

Jim's fishing buddies Red and Jeff taking a picture of Red with his fish

What a blessing it was to grow up surrounded by the people who grew our nation's food, and to live in a city where everyone is busy and happy with spring work.  I toast them all today with my Chardonnay.

Going back in time to the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Today, after dealing with an Internet scammer that chose my daughter as their latest victim, I just want to go back to my childhood, when the biggest problem facing us was the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The US Army was preparing my mother for this by telling her where it was she should take her preschool children should the nuclear crisis strike, and telling her how she would reunite with her school-age children, my older brother and sister.   Where my father fits into all of this I'm not clear on, but I suspect he and his buddies were on high alert.

Meanwhile, I planted flowers in my patio pots at Red Oak House, and my husband transplanted the tomato seedlings to larger pots in their final stage until these are transferred into the garden.  Oh, and we grilled some delicious steaks from our brother-in-law Randy Striefel (I don't even want to think about how hard he works to raise those cows!) and there was a beautiful sunset at my house in North Dakota.

So, it is true, it is all about perspective.  That, and BE SUSPICIOUS.   Always be suspicious.

The lifeblood of the Bad Lands

Because I love the Little Missouri River more than any other river, I bring you this news from the ND Governor's Office, from my husband's The Prairie Blog.

Governor Weighs on Little Missouri River rules

This river is the lifeblood of the Bad Lands.

Its waters heal me.

I pray that those who make these decision do so with the utmost reverence for this solid truth.

Photo by Lillian Crook.  Her hand.

The gift of a Krider's subspecies of Red-Tailed Hawk: a gift

This past Sunday, the last in April, Jim and I were in Medora where we took a morning walk around the village and down to the Little Missouri River.  Standing on the banks of that lovely river, I looked up to see a hawk soaring overhead and, by its almost complete whiteness, I instantly knew it was a rarity: a Krider's subspecies of a Red-Tailed Hawk.

An adult Krider's (much darker than the one we saw)

I've seen these a couple of other times.  The previous sightings were much more like this photo, with a pink tail.  However, this one was most likely a juvenile as it was starkly white with just the tiniest of dark wing tips.   I excitedly described to my husband just what a rarity was this sighting.

You can learn more about these at this one of many different sites.

It passed over us, heading upriver, with barely a beat of it's wings and we were in awe in the gift we'd just been given.

Today's Red Oak House gardening news including giveaways

My husband is outside on the patio as I write this transplanting some of his thriving heirloom tomato seedlings into larger pots.

Soon we will commence our annual argument on the timing of the relocation of these precious plants into our garden.  This is, after all, North Dakota, and some years we've had a hard freeze on Memorial Day.  I am the more cautious of the two of us and he is equally as stubborn, but the eternal optimist, and prefers planting these on about May 15th.

Our friend Clay writes beautifully about his garden in his recent blog post "Our Garden".  Do give it a read and you may be inspired!

Jim says we have a couple of June Pink tomato seedlings to give away.  If you'd like to be the recipient of one of these and can pick it up, contact him at jimfuglie920@gmail.com

There is nothing like the taste of our garden tomatoes come August and we will turn these into juice and marinara and other tasty delights.  Stay tuned.

A study on a bowl of eggs

"Wash every bowl, every dish, as if you are bathing the baby Buddha--breathing in, feeling joy, breathing out, smiling. Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do every day. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes becomes hold and sacred if mindfulness is there. With mindfulness and concentration, everything becomes spiritual."

Thích Nhất Hạnh

On this May Day of 2017, this quote strikes me to my very core so I share with you, gentle readers.  

My other meditation today has been the gift of fresh eggs from my sister Sarah, who received these from her friend Diane, who raises chickens at her home in the Bad Lands south of Medora.  Evidently, Diane has trouble keeping up with the abundance of eggs her chickens produce.  In gratitude, I brought these home and placed them in a lovely turquoise bowl made by my friend, the potter, Mary Huether.

When I was a girl growing up on the Slope County farm, we had chickens, and the care and feeding of these were delegated to the Crook children. One year, my Aunt Junette and I drove over to Hettinger to meet the train and pick up the year's chicks.  The cacophony in the car on the ride home was memorable.  We put these chicks in cardboard boxes, under warming lamps, and placed these noisey holding crates on the second floor of the farmhouse, on the landing on the top of the stairs between my brothers' bedroom and mine.  How we got any sleep is beyond me.  

The chicken house was about forty feet from the farmhouse.  In the morning, we would open the chicken house door so that they could scratch about in the small fenced-in yard around their house, and in the evening we would gather the still warm eggs and shut the door so as to keep the varmints from eating our chickens.  This meant that no matter how many meetings or basketball games we had going in town, someone had to get home by dark and get that door shut.  Sometimes when we knew we would be home late, we would shut the chickens in early.  

Learning to gather the eggs out from under the sitting hens was a challenge as getting one's hand pecked wasn't much fun.  Off the chicken would fly clucking and fussing so much you would have thought we'd have stabbed it.  My aunt taught me how in deep winter the yolks would start to fade and if one introduced some green feed in with the regular chicken feed and scraps, the yolks would return to a luscious bright yellow.   The first time I attempted to make a pie crust without the benefit of the oversight of someone more knowledgeable, I had to give up and just feed the entire mess to the chickens. Fortunately, with practice, I've improved on my pie dough skills and we love to eat chicken pot pie here at Red Oak House.

For a few years, I carefully gathered and washed the eggs, and sold them to town folks.  This was my first paying job.  

We had a notoriously cranky rooster who would chase after us with his heel spurs pointing straight at us, and we all learned to never go out the farmhouse door without a rake in hand to fend him off.  This rooster found himself on top of the list of chickens to be butchered.  Now, if you've never butchered chickens, you really haven't worked hard.  I'll never forget watching my father and brothers catch the chicken, take it over to the chopping block, where they would wack the head off with the axe, blood would spurt everywhere, and, it is true, the chicken would continue to "run around", just like the old saw.   Meanwhile, in the house, my mother and aunt would be waiting with huge scalding tubs of water.  They would quickly dip the now still chicken into the water, and a horrible stench would permeate the air.  All of us on the crew would proceed to pluck each chicken, remove the entrails, and cut the carcass up.  This went on all day long.  In spite of the smells and blood and hard work, the fresh chicken we would fry up for supper was delicious and we would give thanks for the abundance, finding the spiritual in the smallest thing, as described in the quote above.  

Once we were teenagers, punishment for breaking curfew would be cleaning out the chicken coop.  My mother was ingenious in this respect.

It is true that savoring homegrown eggs and chicken spoils you forever for the sad substitute purchased at the urban grocery store.  Today I've pulled out a number of my favorite egg recipes and this week I will be ever so grateful to be eating farm fresh eggs.  

And that is my study on a bowl of eggs.