Spring

Scenes and Behind Them

In iconic spring fashion, the season went from picking wintergreen in full weight woolies to stripping my t-shirt off picking acorns in just a few weeks, and she never slowed down. Now it’s summer. A lot happens in no time. Here are a few personal moments that marked spring for me - It’s longer than the usual monthly scenes and behind them because it’s the whole season, which doesn’t fit in an email and you’ll have to click some button at the bottom of the page to see it to the end, if you care to.

In early spring, I noticed a stretch of young hardwoods at the top of our north-facing hill that were hosting a whole constellation of Cecropia moth cocoons. I’d never seen that many in one place before. To encounter a giant silkworm cocoon is to corporally face the nearness of the mystery without being able to see or know it. Good practice. To encounter a quarter acre of them was more than I could face, it seems, and I haven’t been back to that corner of our hill since. The last few weeks, the black nights have been winged with huge velveteen moths working at the air in every sweep of the headlights.

I finally coppiced one of our basketwillow hedges on time before they broke dormancy, the day before leaving for Florida to visit family, and sunk them in a cold, wet trench to hold until we got back, and bless their hearts, hold they did. When I got back, I broke them down into 18” cuttings/live stakes and put them in the fridge until I was ready to plant them.

We set Fish up with one of those robot cat feeders when we went to Florida, and since he’s just a simple, hungry boy like his mom, I thought he’d barely notice we were gone as long as he was fed, but maybe hugs are like water; he couldn’t get enough when we got home.

The willow stakes were happy to have us home, too. I got ‘em staked in the ground just before the rootlets got long enough for major breakage. I put them in a big swale around the edge of a newly cleared opening at Coal Burned Spoon Sanctuary that will be part experimental meadow, part native edible plant nursery growing space, and I thought a feathered edge of basket willow between the treeline and the opening would be nice. I’ll post an update photo in the summer scenes post, but I am happy to report that as of this week, 100% of the stakes have taken and are leafing out like crazy. Willows are really good at living.

Local eco-type Black walnuts were collected last fall, and some were processed for food, but we set some aside for planting and had them stratifying in the fridge all winter. The crew at Coal Burned Spoon Sanctuary built us these incredible air-prune beds for growing trees in the nursery. The Black walnuts had just barely begun to split their shells and sprout when I planted them, which means stratification was successful, and the time was right to get them in the ground. It’s nice to think about the lifestyle and time scale of a long-lived nut tree. Really looking forward to planting these guys out and following their lead.

I also planted a bunch of local ecotype elderberry cuttings, sweet fern root cuttings, sumac root cuttings, milkweed seeds, and Indian cucumber seeds in the nursery beds with plans and space for more summer-collected seeds and cuttings and fall-collected nuts. All of these will be planted out on the edible trail network at Coal Burned Spoon for future guests, both human animal and other animal.

I also inoculated a bunch of logs from my land and from Coal Burned Spoon with spores from a gorgeous medley of mushrooms like oyster, lion’s mane, maitake, and chicken of the woods to be incorporated into the edible landscapes around the cabins and amenities.

At home, we were lucky to acquire a second! roadkill deer for the year. Hate to see a doe in milk hit like this, but am so happy to have her meat and like to imagine her fawn was adopted and enjoying life with siblings now. A girl can hope.

I’m still trying to learn how to fly-fish, which really lends itself to my natural knee-jerk impulse to pull over and walk a ways along any water I pass, like this one, just downstream from Coal Burned Spoon, that turns out to be the headwaters of The Crooked River, one of just a handful of natal waters left in Maine for landlocked Atlantic salmon.

Good to see a four-legged wood turtle at the home river, as in the last two years, I’ve only found three-leggeds.

After all these years of giving up my dreams of being a herpetologist, snakes still make me squeal more than any other animal in spring.

Recommitting to swimming in wild water after a few really lame summers of wanting to hide, and therefore hiding my body from the elements it needs - sun, water, appreciation, etc… feels better, dare I say, good. Doesn’t hurt that the bathtub looks like this.

Best meal of spring was this mother's day picnic with my mom on her mom's and her mom's graves with marinated wild vegetables, morels, homemade ricotta, good bread and wine.

These three cookbooks are kept me so hungry this spring and continue to now that the garden is really coming in with some of their staple vegetables, which are high summer vegetables, here. I got started in the spring, though, with things like the buttery flatbreads and wild herb dressing below in a meal I made for my friends at Great North Sound Studio while they made music.

Keeping a slender vase of Sweet cicely on the table so I can pluck the young seed pods as an anisette digestif after dinner is something that delights me for one week each spring while they’re tender.