Growing – Hugh's Blog

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He’s 94, but his eyes are still clear, and he drives his car, albeit these days only to the store and church and, sometimes, to the doctor. His deft fingers that once repaired watches are still steady, and his eyes crinkle as he tells you a story, and the closer he gets to the punchline, the deeper the crinkles.

He’s been a preacher longer than I have been alive and still preaches in the small church in the town where he lives every Sunday. He comes from a long line of preachers. His ancestors were hard folks with a hard religion, preached without electricity from brush arbors in rural Arkansas and Mississippi and Tennessee in a time that needed hard folks. I’ve never heard him preach, but his people are Bible-beaters with clenched fists that punch the air to make a point.

He buried two wives and a daughter, and when he was a young man, his government put him in a green uniform and sent him from the hills where he grew up to a destroyed city in Japan, where he helped clean up the aftermath of the atomic bomb. After you see death on that scale, not much surprises you anymore.

And every Saturday, he fires up his ancient computer and makes a PowerPoint presentation with the Bible verses he will use in tomorrow’s sermon, along with the key points of his message. And at night, when he misses his wife and his daughter, and the house is a little too quiet, he will get out the old box of photos and scan them into his computer, and then share them on Facebook, tagging my wife to show her how pretty her mother was when she was a teenager.

I learned about the weekly Powerpoint ritual a few years back at Thanksgiving. He had driven in from two counties over, where he was living at the time, to eat with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I said how impressive it was that he was proficient with a scanner and Facebook. One of his granddaughters mentioned the weekly PowerPoint presentations.

I told him that I had never quite gotten the hang of PowerPoint. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “It’s not hard. I could teach you if you want me to.”

The thing I fear most as I grow older is not the inevitable decline in physical ability, or even the loss of my mental faculties, although that is a concern. No, the thing I fear most is that bit by bit, I become less open, less accepting, and more fearful of that which is different or novel to me. More than anything, I fear stagnation.

I know many people who were at the cutting edge of the Civil Rights movement or who fought literal fights to get women ordained in their churches who then quit progressing. I was in a meeting once with a revered, legendary civil rights activist whose story has filled many a book, and watched him poke fun at people for announcing their pronouns and heard him call the term Latinx “silly.” It was sad, really. One day, he decided he had gone far enough, and the world passed him by.

Progress is a moving target, of course. What was seen as progressive in 1964 is basic human decency today. Yesterday’s radical is today’s Rotary Club member. Just like Great White Sharks, who must be in constant movement lest they suffocate, we must ever be moving forward, ever open, and not content to rest on what we did once, long ago.

The Gap

My Aunt Louise could not swim. At all. She was afraid fo the water. We used to joke that she was scared of deep dishwater. Ten-year-old me loved the water and would grab any excuse to be at the beach. Some things, I guess, don’t change.

So it baffled me that she couldn’t swim.

“My mom was afraid of the water, and forbade me to go near the water until I learned how to swim. It’s hard to learn to swim if you are not allowed in the water.”

I can see that it would be. Most things, like swimming, require you to be not good at them first.

I hate not being good at things. Ira Glass has a famous interview where he talks about the gap we experience when we begin to learn a new skill. There is how we envision it in our head and how it actually goes. The gap between those two is what we have to overcome.

Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

I hate that part – the fighting your way through the suck. And yet, I don’t think there is any shortcut. You must do a lot of bad work before making good work. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of horrible, embarrassing blog posts before I ever wrote anything I was proud of. My first sermon was supposed to be 15 minutes long – it lasted 4 minutes, and honestly, I sorta stretched that last minute out.

Glass mentions that some people get intimidated by the gap between their taste and their reality and quit. And that’s tragic. But equally tragic is the people who do not recognize the gap. Who write mediocre things and think it’s perfect. Who don’t put in the hours because they think their game is already good.

So thank God for recognizing it’s not there yet.

The web today prioritizes video. Kids these days grew up with a video camera in their pockets. It’s their first language. But it isn’t the first language for me. I’m a writerm, both by training and inclination. But I try to not get too caught up in the medium – at the end of the day, the message and it being heard is what matters to me.

So, I decided to learn video storytelling. But first, I need to understand the platforms. So, I’m shooting a short (less than 90 seconds) video daily and posting it to Instagram, which then cross-posts to Facebook. I’m also uploading them directly to TikTok and YouTube, so I understand the workflows there.

None of it is very good. But I’m taking some comfort in that at least I recognize that it sucks.

In progress

I hate to share in-progress pictures. Partly that’s because many of my projects are done in budget-sized increments, and how do I decide when I’m really “done”? But I also recognize that sharing progress pictures makes things seem more doable. And I tend to think most things are doable. Or at least, more things than most people think are.

So here is what’s been occupying my time after work for the last few weeks. It’s a picture of the back of our house, as seen from the new birdfeeder I installed in the backyard (more about that in a sec). The deck I built in 2020 with The Boy, but the stairs by the chimney and the short walkway I just added last week.

The reason for adding them was that below the chimney, I am putting in a water feature – a shallow pond (from 4-16 inches deep) for the wildlife and birds, with a small bubble fountain in it to make the birds happy. There are wetland plants that will go there as well, and to the right of the chimney, out of the shot, will be a small sitting area, where the red chairs that are currently on the deck will go, so I can sit in the shade of the afternoon and watch the fountain.

Ok, so that’s out of the way – let’s see what is blooming this week:

I love common yarrow. It’s evergreen (here, anyway – your mileage may vary), the pollinators love it, and the ferny texture fills in well. Every garden I have will have some yarrow in it.

And coneflowers! A native (well, this yellow variety is a nativar – don’t @ me, people), also beloved by pollinators, and nearly bulletproof. I just loved the juxtaposition of the yellow with the purple verbena – also a native plant, also bulletproof and beloved by pollinators.

The magnolia is still blooming, proof that God loves me and wants me to be happy.

This is the native “species” purple coneflower – lovely as can be. Surprisingly hard to find in nurseries, as people live the colored nativars. But I like this one best.

This is elderberry. Also native, it’s an aggressive bush here. I understand people pay for elderberry plants, but there’s no need. If you cut a branch off around the size of a pencil and then stick it in the ground, it will root. It fills in quickly and spreads, so it’s ideal in a place where you need quick screening. But the birds love the cover AND the berries, and the butterflies love the flowers. A great wildlife plant.

I wanted a bird feeder out in the yard, away from the house. The feeder by the house – really just a saucer on the deck rail – you can see it on the far left of the deck in the back of the house picture – is really only drawing Cardinals and Thrashers. I figured a feeder further from the house might draw more.

And it’s working – here are some Chickadees and a Tufted Titmouse that came to visit.

So Thursday evening I builta quick and dirty platform feeder: It’s just a 10-foot piece of ¾ inch EMT conduit driven in the ground as a post, then I drilled a 15/16 hole in a 2×2 for the crosspiece. It’s held in place by a 10d nail that goes through both the crosspiece and the 2×2, so it makes it easy to remove if needed. The platform feeder itself is just some 1×2 from which I made an overlapping double frame that sandwiches a piece of 2×4 fencing for support and a piece of window screen for drainage. On the right, you see the Blink camera. I hung the hanging feeder under it to balance out the weight, else it tends to lean a bit. Were I to do this over, I would use a piece of 1-inch EMT instead of the 3/4.

The squirrel baffle is just a piece of 4-inch PVC that is 2 feet long. I put the top of it six feet off the ground, and then drilled a hole through both it and the EMT and ran a piece of coathanger wire through it to hold it in place. Thus far, no squirrels have attempted it. We will see how it works.

Building a Birdcam

Over the last few weeks, I have been pretty focused on building a camera set up so I can monitor the wildlife that visits my yard.

I have a pretty exacting set of criteria.

It needs to be affordable. I know affordable is a squishy term because what may be affordable to me may not be to you. But I really wanted this to be a less than $100 project, at least to start out. I am a big believer in starting a new project with the minimum viable setup, and then, if we decide it’s worth pursuing further, then I can spend some money. But to start, less than $100.

Then it needs to be simple. I didn’t want to run wires, set up networks, or learn new technologies to set this up. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is that just like I didn’t want a large upfront investment of cash, neither did I want a large upfront investment of time. I was willing to spend an afternoon setting this up, at least to get started.

And then, what result did I desire? I wanted to be able to have videos of the animals that visited my yard that I could download and share on social media. A bonus would be still photos, but if I had video, I could always capture stills from that. I knew these wouldn’t be award-winning photos, but I wanted to have proof of concept before I figured out something better.

And I wanted to not have to go out to the camera and retrieve an SD card from the camera like I would if I used a trail cam. I should be able to do this over the internet.

I could do almost all of this with a simple trail cam, like this one. The two big things I didn’t like about the trail cam idea is that I had no idea what I had taken pictures of until I pulled the SD card and took it inside to my computer. The other is that the video quality wasn’t all that great. (I’m aware that higher dollar cameras have solutions to both of those issues, but not under $100.)

In the end, I bought a Blink outdoor security camera. With the required sync module included, I paid around $75, but the price fluctuates on this all the time between $50 and $125. They go on a huge sale on Amazon Prime days as well. The camera is small – about 3×3 inches. It’s battery-powered and uses wifi, so no cables are needed.

The Blink outdoor camera is designed to be a security camera, so it’s motion-activated. I have it clamped to a board in front of a saucer of sunflower seeds, and so when a bird (or lizard or squirrel) gets in the saucer, it automatically records up to 60 seconds of HD video and then uploads it to the cloud. From there I can review it when I want, download it to edit elsewhere, or share it on social media directly from the app.

Each day it syncs with the sync module and downloads the day’s history, so I also have a local copy of all the videos recorded that day.

It’s not a perfect system. I almost went nuts until I figured out how to urn off the notifications. It says you will get 2 years of use from a pair of AA lithium batteries, but by the 3rd day, I got a warning that I was using it more than planned and my battery life would be shorter. The stills are not as good as I would like, and the framerate is a little slow for my purposes.

But overall, I’m really happy. I have begun to upload some of the more interesting ones to YouTube. I’m investigating feeder types, to attract even more birds. I’m putting in a water feature over the next few weeks, because birds love moving water, especially in our heat. I’m going to set up a solar collector, to get around the battery life issue.

And, God help me, I’m looking into setting up an always-on livestream on YouTube. Which does involve cables and money and new technologies.

But wherever this ends up, it all started with $75 and an afternoon.

Antique Roses and Native Plants

It’s been a long day, and I’m beat. But the yard is really starting to wake up, so here is what’s in bloom this week.

Since the overwhelming goal of my gardening efforts is to make a happy habitat for all the animals that live here (including those of us with two legs), I have some plants that serve no purpose other than they are, to my eye, beautiful.

Like my antique roses. These are ancient, hardy roses that grow neglected in cemeteries and along fence rows, that nobody waters or prunes, and are all well adapted to grow and bloom with zero care. Zero care is sort of a specialty of mine.

Like this Mutabilis rose. It goes back to before 1894, blooms from spring to fall, and has beautiful flowers that start pale pink (like this one), and then get darker and darker until they turn crimson. I just planted this one a few weeks ago, and this is the first bloom.

Then there is Peggy Martin, the so-called Katrina rose. They call it that because a woman who had a huge rose garden had to evacuate because of Katrina, and her yard was underwater for two weeks. When the water went down, the only thing still alive was her Peggy Martin rose. If it won’t die with being underwater for two weeks, I am unlikely to kill it.

It’s a vigorous climbing rose, so I planted it at the corner of the vegetable garden, so it can run along the fence. I planted it over the winter, and it is blooming galore. The blooms fade fairly quickly in the hot sun, but more just come along.

Also, I planted it before I finished the fence, because of lumber prices. But now it’s starting to grow, and I have to hurry up and finish the fence to have something to trellis it on.

This rose isn’t an antique but is extremely special. When The Boy lived with us in 2020, he loved the color orange. We were in Kroger, back before the pandemic, and he saw a “miniature” rose with orange blooms in a pot in the floral department. He wanted it so bad. We bought it and planted it in one of the flower beds.

The whole time he lived with us, he watched it like a hawk, with near-daily reports to us on the blooms that appeared. When we planted it, I didn’t have high hopes of its survival. Such plants are usually pretty tender, sold to folks who manage to kill them pretty quickly. But he liked it, and it was less than $10, so why not risk it? Well, it survived the two winters since and is now in full bloom and I miss that kid something fierce right now.

Because of reasons, I didn’t put in a spring vegetable garden this year (lumber prices, for me to finish the raised beds, mainly). It’s not a huge deal – we can plant tomatoes here as late as the end of August and still get a crop. But anyway, the sage in my herb garden is blooming.

I love coneflowers. These are all varieties of purple echinacea or Purple Coneflower. Yes, one of them is white. It’s a variety bred for that trait. Coneflowers are native here, which means the pollinators love them and they are near bulletproof, but there are some native plant types that will lecture you about planting native plants that are bred to purpose (so-called nativars), like my white Purple Coneflowers. But we won’t invite those people over, anyway.

The pure species, with some tickseed in bloom behind it, and a slew of rudbeckia seedlings.

I need to do a whole post on our chickens. But here is our coop – my Mom says it’s the nicest chicken coop she has ever seen, but to be fair, she doesn’t get out much.

Last fall, a new neighbor moved in next door and cut down all the trees in his front yard. (I have opinions about this, but that’s another post). As a result, the whole north half of my front yard is now in full sun, so I put in blackberries and blueberries, among other things.

Ms. June is an 89-year-old lady who lives up the street, and who has an amazing shade garden in her backyard. She gave me these Indian Pinks, which are just showing out. I don’t have a good picture of it, but I also got a Japanese maple from here, which the Indian pinks are planted under. In 4-5 years, that’s gonna be nice.

The Half-Acre Habitat

I know how to get six-pack abs. I have had them – for about 2 weeks. But since I like to eat, that is hard for me to sustain over time. But in terms of what is sustainable over time, things like being flexible, having good cardiovascular health, and good blood pressure and glucose readings are far more sustainable markers of health.

When you see people who have defined abs, cut muscle striations, and low body fat, what you see are people who went to extreme lengths to look that way. That’s fine if that’s your goal. I don’t want to harsh anyone’s thing. But it’s not mine. I have better things to do with my time than to calculate protein grams and intermittently fast and figure out if this is the day I spend 3 hours in the gym or the day I spend 2 hours in the gym.

For most people, such a life is attainable – but not sustainable. I want both. And not just in my health goals, but in my whole life.

That’s also my approach to my yard. I do not have a manicured lawn. I do not have a raked lawn. I don’t even have a lawn – I have a yard. It’s mostly green. Its primary use is as a habitat for the creatures who live here – including us.

So I have vegetables and greens we like to eat. I have flowers for the bees and butterflies. I have plants that grow food for the chickens, which then provide us with eggs. There are plants here that exist for no other reason than bugs like to eat them, and the birds like to eat the bugs, and I like birds.

I haven’t really talked about my yard here much. When we lived in NC, I had a raucous, out-of-control cottage garden on a fifth of an acre that was in bloom 10 months out of the year.

We moved here and bought a house on a half-acre lot, which makes gardening harder, not easier. Then there were two years of foster parenting, two years of the pandemic, a bunch of people I love died, and a long year of pretty deep depression (all of which overlapped at various points), and so, we are 3.5 years in our new home and it’s nowhere near where I had planned for it to be at this point.

In the old house, we lived there for a bit over five years, and at the end of our time there, the one thing I wish I had done was document it more. What flowers are these? When did I plant the peach trees? What was I thinking when I planted those? How long did that mulch last? Are these plum blossoms early this year, compared to last year?

Since this blog is, at its core, about how to live a good life, and I need plants for me to have a good life, I plan to do a walk around the property each Saturday and take photos of what’s in bloom, as well as things that catch my eye. I might tell you about a thing I’m working on, or I might just let the pictures speak for themselves.

Anyway – welcome to my little half-acre habitat.

Pass-along plants

As a gardener, I love plants. All sorts, really, but especially pass along plants – plants given you by a friend or a neighbor, plants that have traveled a ways and that have stories behind them.

I now live in Central Mississippi, but for 13 years lived in Raleigh, NC.

I didn’t know anyone when I moved there. I mean, no one. My parents and brothers and all my friends were 12 hours away by car. This was in the very early days of social media, and to say I was feeling isolated is true, and yet a serious understatement. Eventually, though, I would get married, build friendships, and meet some of the nicest people I have ever known. Some of those people were Karen and Toney.

They took us in: Metaphorically, anyway. They were about 10 years older than my parents, and served a sort of dual role as both parents and grandparents for us while we were there. The holidays we couldn’t afford to go home we spent at Karen and Toney’s. We were invited to all their family celebrations – when their grandkids had birthday parties, or when Toney (who was a musician) would have a local gig, for example, and they threw their lot in with us as well by bringing us food when we were sick or fundraising for the nonprofit I had founded. We were and are, in every sense of the word except biology, family.

Their daughter, Allison is my age, and she too is a gardener. And every spring, she would hold a plant swap at her house. You were encouraged to bring anything you had to share (either plants or food), and she would share anything she had extras of, and everyone went home with plants and with their bellies full.

And one of the things I went home with were these Purple Bearded Iris.

These are the old heirloom Iris germanica, but my grandmother, like all old southern women, would have called them Flags. These Iris were given to Allison by her grandmother (Toney’s mother), and they were given to the grandmother when Toney was a boy by their neighbor who had had them “forever”. As Toney is now in his 80’s, these flowers can be tracked back at least 100 years.

So I got them from Allison, and planted them in my crazy cottage garden in Raleigh. When we sold that house, I dug some (but not all) of the Iris up and put them in a paper bag, where they sat for 7 months in a storage unit until we moved into our new house in Mississippi, and then I stuck then in a corner of our front yard, where they would get lots of sun and I would walk by them every day.

And now they look like the picture at the top of the page when they bloom, which is from the middle of February to the end of March.

This summer I divided mine up and gave some to two neighbors and a friend in the suburbs. They have, under my watch, went from my house in Raleigh (where some still are) to my house in Mississippi, to three other houses here, and the story lives on, as do the plants.

I think one of the things I love most about pass-along plants is that they go against the very concept of our modern economic story: There is no scarcity, no money changes hands, their only currency is joy, and rather than becoming scarcer when they are given away, they become not just more plentiful, but safer as well. Because if I hoarded them and kept them all for myself, one bad freeze or a wetter than average year could kill them and then they are gone. But this way they are spread out in at least two different states and in many different yards, all increasing the odds of their survival.

I think there is a lesson in there for us all.

As an aside, if you like the idea of pass along plants and want to know more, I highly recommend this book by Felder Rushing and Steve Bender. You get a list of plants that “share well”, as well as the story behind them. It’s good for your garden, but also good for your soul,

Do you have any pass-along plants that are meaningful to you? I would love to hear that story in the comments.

Planting as resistance

I went tree shopping today.

We live on half an acre, in a former suburb. The house was outside the city limits when my neighborhood was built, but it would be annexed just five years later while the Korean War was smoldering.

It was nearly a blank slate when we bought it nearly three years ago, with a beautiful southern magnolia in the front yard and seven pine trees scattered around the lot and not much else. It was a great house with good bones, not looking its seventy years. It had been a church parsonage for its whole life before we bought it, which meant it had been cared for but never loved. We decided to love it.

Along came the pandemic, and then we endured hell as foster parents (not from the kids – from the system) and then my Dad died from COVID and then we had a damn insurrection in Washington and through it all, the old house began to love us back.

It’s easy to anthropomorphize things like a house. Heck, I just did it in that last paragraph. But it did seem like the house was happier being cared for, like it liked having the perennial bed planted in the front yard, liked the new deck we put up after cutting down the overgrown wisteria crawling all over the back patio. It’s like it knew we were looking out for it when we fixed the leak in the roof and replaced the sewer pipes.

But it isn’t just because we love the house.

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” – Leonard Wolf, in Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939

So I went tree shopping today. I’m currently looking for a particular crab apple tree, one that has edible fruit and long blooms and is disease resistant and can put up with our severe summer humidity. I love crab apples – I planted three at our last house – but here I am going to try growing apples as well, and I need the crab for a pollinator, in addition to its being beautiful and a gift to the wildlife.

By next spring, we will have 2 apple trees, a crab apple, six plum trees, a peach, two figs, 10 blueberry bushes, four blackberries and two muscadine vines. The apples and crab will go in this fall, and the peach is currently sitting in the driveway waiting for me to plant it.

It’s not just the fruit. It’s that planting things that will endure are acts of resistance to a world gone mad. It’s a form of resistance against all the forces that try to harm us, that try to drag us down, that try to dehumanize us.

Growing fruit is a long-term commitment to a place. We will have figs and blueberries next year, but it will be at least 3 years before we have peaches, and perhaps five before we have apples. But they will feed people long after current politicians are long- dead, they provide us nourishment and flowers and pollen for the bees and food for the birds and perhaps most off all, they are our vote for a future that looks very different than the present.

They are living, growing monuments to hope, to the future, to a world that will long outlast the one we have now. They let me remember who I am and what I hope for in the midst of a world gone mad.And while I don’t think you have to plant trees – maybe you plant iris instead, or flowers, or raise children – I’m all in favor of planting something.

Do you have practices that sustain you in the midst of all this? If so, tell us about them in the comments below.

Photo by Jacob Farrar on Unsplash