Green Acres is the place to be, dahlinks!

The other day I found this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbk81X6WHA4 the 1966 opening to Green Acres! Born in 1959 and a true product of my (Boomer) generation, I literally grew up on Green Acres (along with Laugh-In, Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters, & I Dream of Jeannie); Grandma Tanya letting me stay up and watch them on my mother's bowling league nights! The Green Acres theme song was my "party piece" when I was a kid- I WAS Eva, & I twirled around our (LeFrak City, Queens) NYC apartment singing that song in my very best Hungarian accent, and I can still sing it in my sleep, dahlink! (I also held my elbows and blinked hard a lot, hoping I'd wind up somewhere else, and twitched my nose incessantly; in the 3rd grade decided I WAS a witch and even wrote a book of spells. And I thought Jethro was handsome and had Elly Mae paper dolls. And I loved Lily Munster's outfits. My mom & I used to sit on the Castro Convertible fold-out sofa bed and watch Laugh-In with tears rolling down our faces, and, like anyone else who was alive then, I can still recite tons of Laugh-In routines. She let me stay up late for the Tom Jones Show, too. We both loved the lingerie tossing! TJ was quite a honey! :-)
And today, in a perfect Life Imitating Art scenario, my very own Tom Jones, a.k.a. Chef Dan, put on his Beverly Hillbillies "Farmer Dan" hat and built us a Raised Bed "garden box" in which Green Acres Goldstein planted tomatoes, peppers, & basil! And I still am Eva, dancing around the Elkhorn Inn in my high-heeled, marabou-feather-bedecked satin mules! (Yes, I own a pair of Frederick's of Hollywood marabou mules, and yes, they are fire-engine red, and yes, Dan got them for me, along with several other Extremely Cool & Embarrassing Things, and yes, I truly believe that Every woman needs to own at least one pair of marabou mules (they are only $29 for goodness' sakes!), so even if she only has one (or two or three) husbands and not-so-many diamonds, she can still dance around the house crooning "do you vant a gin-and-tonic dahlink? like Eva Gabor!
Today was a Green Acres day, and while Dan was building the Garden Box, Iceman cut back the grass & Elisse-tall weeds, and lo and behold, the climbing roses were all in bloom- with no help from us at all, LOL! My two silly little Columnar Apple Trees actually survived our nutty winter, and one even has a little apple on it! The peach trees are full of tiny, little peaches, and the grape vines (which had to be drastically cut back) even have a few tiny little bunches of grapes! I put the windowsill herb boxes outside, and have two little Hardy Chicago Fig tree saplings on the windowsill, waiting for Farmer Dan to dig holes for them, too! And tomorrow, (assuming it doesn't pour), FFA Aggie Goldstein shall go out there (and not in heels this time) & plant the rest of the veggie & herb plants, and my tiny carrots and red "watermelon" radishes, and the corn, sunflowers, squash, & beans (on my cool, new Gardener's Supply Cucumber Trellis) in an "Indian garden"!  I doused my new seedlings with Root Shield, to hopefully ward off the stuff that so often kills 'em, and I have my QVC RootBlast to put in with them and  TerraSorb to hold in water & a shpritz bottle of Sevin to hopefully whack the damn Japanese Beetles... I am DETERMINED to get my garden back to what it was the year before last!
I actually spent the better part of the day on the computer, in my continuing vain & fruitless quest for replacement cushions for our balcony's outdoor furniture, discovering beyond the shadow of a doubt that it's cheaper to buy entirely new sets of patio furniture than to just buy cushions, and that NO ONE makes chair cushions for last year's short-backed chairs any longer. You can now ONLY buy high backed cushions, which are a good foot too high for last year's chairs. This is 'planned obsolescence' at its most disgusting, especially during an undeniable economic collapse, and it literally has us buying entirely new sets of (made-in-China, of course, because there isn't anything else that's even Possibly affordable) furniture. I was on dozens of websites, sent dozens of emails, and finally called the manufacturers of the chair cushions we want to replace: short backed seat cushions are simply not being made any longer, so if that's what you have, you have no choice but to throw them out and buy new furniture. Lowes wants $600+ for cushions (which won't fit our chairs, anyway, and for which we'd have to wait 2 weeks!), which I find rather obscene, but Pottery Barn wants $1200 for a single chaise, and chairs are $300-$700 a pop, and that totally blew my mind. I guess I'm 'out of it', but that during a depression of epic proportions I literally can't fix up our balcony properly- and we're not talking fancy-shmancy, either) for under $6000 (which is not happening in life) left me with my jaw around my knees. But BigLots may have just come to the rescue! Again! :-) More tomorrow!

Kibbutz Goldstein-Clark...

Can you sing the theme song to "Green Acres" in Hebrew?

The vegetable garden has grown quite a bit since Dan first built it in 2004, & I am ever threatening to put up a sign in Hebrew that states "Kibbutz Goldstein-Clark, Volunteers please go to the Office", in the hope that at least one confused Israeli tourist will stop in...

The "yard" next to the Inn was nothing more than a rock-hard field of coal-lumps, but the Old Aggie in me had visions of a vegetable garden out there, and I began trolling the Internet for the Companion Gardening info I vaguely remembered from John Bowne Agriculture HS. I really had No Clue about the amount of Heavy Labor creating a garden out of a coal field would entail, however, and had I had to do it myself, the lot would still be a field of rocks. To shut me up, essentially, Dan built us a garden there with railroad ties, filling it with several tons of Real Dirt & a lot of eye-rolling hope that something might actually grow... In the spring of 2004 we put in a bunch of strawberry plants, as well as tomatoes and peppers and everything else we could find at Wal-Mart, Lowe's, & Eller's Quick Stop, and I Miracle Gro'd the dickens out of it, and that first summer we were literally giddy from our "harvest"! We not only had tomatoes and peppers, but cantaloupes & cucumbers & potatoes & onions & herbs! I planted giant sunflowers, and they shot up to the sky and rewarded us with something truly lovely to look at from the front porch. I'd be out there weeding the tomatoes in my high-heeled clogs & cars would slow down and honk... What a novelty- a crazy woman gardening on Route 52! Our friends G & M gifted us with a DVD of Green Acre's first season, which was actually pretty much on the money; as a child my "party piece" was to sing the theme song of GA in my best Hungarian accent. (See? Life imitates Art...)

Our friend Kathleen, who has the Gillum House bed-and-breakfast in Shinnston, WV, brought us a dozen oregano plants, we set them in as a border, & they took off like wildfire. It got to the point where we were harvesting a Silly amount of oregano, and by the fall we had so much damn oregano that Dan was creating what would become some of the Inn's "signature" recipes: Oregano-Stuffed Roast Cornish Game Hen, Oregano-Stuffed Roast Turkey... His turkey recipe was indeed inspired: after brining, he stuffed it with whole branches of oregano & garlic & then roasted it, & it was truly Divine... I entered his turkey recipe in Park Seed's Recipe Contest, and he won first prize: a $50 gift certificate with which to buy more plants!

But in 2005 the Japanese Beetles arrived with a vengeance, and literally ate everything in sight. They spent all summer screwing on the roses before devouring all the flowers and leaves, and they demolished the vegetable garden. I was literally in tears, hunting on the Internet in vain for JB Killers and spraying everything with "organic" insecticides (hot pepper/tobacco/dish soap concoctions), as well as Sevin & any other poison I could find. Nothing worked. Our harvest was dismal.

2006 was a continuation of 2005, only worse. My mail-order climbing roses barely survived the Beetle Feeding Frenzy, and the sweet corn was stunted & grub-filled. In May of 2007, with the fruit trees in flower (the apple tree across from the Inn looked like a magnificent, giant white snowball), the roses in bud, & everything green and gorgeous, we had:a ludicrously late frost, 4 inches of snow, & a week of 10-degree weather. the tulips & daffodils went into "suspended animation" and were fine, but we lost roses, butterfly bushes, and eventually our little dogwood tree. I was in tears and close to despair; It seemed like The Garden was nothing more than a toilet down which we were throwing 100 dollar bills & false hope. In desperation I ordered a giant can of Milky Spore and got it down in mid-May, but I didn't have much hope as it's supposed to take several years to get the JBs under control.

But lo and behold,.we didn't see a Japanese Beetle all year!

I assumed it was the Milky Spore, until the fall, when I read some Bird Watcher posts on a WV Yahoo Groups chat room, and discovered that No One in southern WV had seen any JBs... & it occurred to Dan & I that the hated late spring frost may have killed the beetle grubs!

We will know this spring...

The bottom line is that this last summer we had THE best garden ever! I put Cozy Coats & Tomato Cages around our tomatoes and set them out early, and we were rewarded with a bumper crop of tomatoes all summer- 8 different kinds! (The best were the cherry tomatoes which were literally as sweet as candy). . We had hot peppers out the wazoo, eggplants, okra, baby field greens, enough basil to make 8 quarts of pesto, and sweet corn what-to-die-for...

A garden is about dreaming and planning, as well as hoping & praying & weeding & digging & spraying, and so the dismally cold & gray winter is spent pouring over brightly colored Burpee & Park Seed catalogs (and websites), dog-earring the pages of the things you dream about seeing flower in the spring and harvesting in the fall...

We've learned in the last 5 years that some things just will NOT grow here- I've given up on petunias, for example- but that others do amazingly well- oregano & basil, for two. Last year I planted basil all over our property, and we had a Pesto Processing Party, freezing 8 quarts of what I call the "essence of summer". The marigolds, impatiens, & vinca did splendidly, too...

Back to the catalogs & dreams of spring.. and as Eva would say: "Vould you like a Gin & Tonic, Dahlink?"