Tuesday, October 16, 2007, 02:21
Spuds Galore. . .
It all started while I was at a craft sale on Saturday with my books. And a very good craft sale it was, too. I sold 23 books. I have never sold 23 books at a craft sale. It is a craft sale where I usually sell books, although not that many books. One other time in the last four years I sold 20 books at a craft sale, so it really was a "record day" in the book peddling business.
That's what the editor emeritus at the newspaper calls me, by the way -- "the book peddler." My vehicle is easy to recognize ever since I put on the black and white magnetic signs with the little Rural Route 2 barn logo. From time to time when I am parked in a parking lot somewhere and I come back out to the truck, someone will ask me, "What does that mean? Buy the books?" And I say, "Funny you should ask." And then I tell them about my books.
Anyway, as anyone who is married probably knows, some strange things can happen when husbands are left to their own devices for the day. I went to the craft sale. Randy went to the Foods Resource Bank harvest festival. It was a beautiful day for a picnic and hay rides and combine rides. After being wet and cold and dreary all week, the sun was shining Saturday out of a clear blue sky and the temperature warmed up to 60 degrees.
This year the three churches in our parish planted 50 acres of corn for Foods Resource Bank. In spite of the drought, the corn ended up producing enough to harvest. Not as much as it would have if we had gotten rain all along, but still, there was corn to harvest -- anywhere from about 40 bushels to the acre to over a hundred bushels to the acre where the corn received "drift" from the irrigators on the potato fields. When everyone had eaten all they wanted at the harvest festival, Randy took some food to a good friend of his who is working the potato harvest.
By the time I arrived home at 4:30, Randy was not home yet. I unloaded all of my books and my boxes and my table and carried in the groceries I had bought and put them away. A little while later, Randy came home.
When I looked out the dining room window, I could see something in the back of Randy's red pickup, but I wasn't quite sure what it was.
Half a Ton
"What is that?" I asked. "Is that . . .it's potatoes, isn't it."
It was indeed potatoes. The back of Randy's truck was heaped with potatoes. About 700 pounds of potatoes.
"Not as many as I had before," my husband replied.
He informed me that he had given about 200 pounds of potatoes to the nursing home in town and maybe another 200 to a family that lives not far from us.
Apparently that's what happens when you take food to someone who is working the potato harvest and someone else with a front-end loader gets the bright idea to fill the back of your truck with potatoes.
We had already gotten potatoes before from the man that Randy had taken lunch to out in the field. We really didn't need more.
Food pantry
I telephoned the local food pantry. Yes, they would take some potatoes -- maybe 200 pounds. Could we meet them at the church on Sunday afternoon?
In the meantime, Randy had gone to the neighbor's to give them some potatoes. When he came back, I went outside to talk to him.
"Good news," I said to Randy. "The food pantry will take a couple hundred pounds."
After such a glorious day of warmth and sunshine, when we went outside to feed the horses Saturday evening, I noticed clouds gathering on the horizon. All this past summer, clouds never meant a thing. But now this fall, clouds on the horizon means that it just might rain.
"Maybe we'd better cover the potatoes with a tarp," I said. "If it rains and they get soaked, it will take a long time to dry them out. They won't keep very well if they're wet."
Randy got a blue plastic tarp out of the lean-to, put it over the potatoes and secured it to the truck. And good thing, too, because Sunday about noon, it started to rain. Not very hard. Just a steady, light rain. Enough rain, though, to soak the potatoes if they weren't covered.
Delivering the load
By later in the afternoon when we were supposed to go to the church to drop off the potatoes, there was a break in the rain. The lady at the church had rounded up some children to help put the potatoes in grocery bags, and in no time at all, they had 25 bags of potatoes weighing anywhere from maybe 5 to 15 pounds each.
On the way home, we stopped at another neighbor's house. They had also gotten potatoes before, but they had given them away to family members who make lefse. They are in their 80s, so they only needed one bag of potatoes.
Then we stopped at our church and left another three bags in a cool back hallway in the basement. If the potatoes keep until then, we'll be able to use them for our meatball dinner in January. The meatball dinner last year was a huge success. I don't know what it is about meatballs and "real" mashed potatoes, but we had people coming out of the woodwork.
Another pantry
After all of that, there was still a sizable pile of potatoes in the back of Randy's truck. So I called another food pantry operated by a church in a town that Randy drives through on his way to and from work. I explained that we had potatoes and asked if the food pantry would want some.
"Oh, yes," the lady said. "We make up boxes to give to people, and we usually don't get enough potatoes."
I explained that Randy drives through town on his way to and from work, and she said she would meet him at the church at 5 p.m. on Monday.
The little food pantry in my hometown has helped nearly 40 families so far this year. That's since January. And we haven't reached Thanksgiving and Christmas yet when the weather turns colder and people need money to heat their houses and to try to buy Christmas gifts. The food pantries receive even more requests in the fall.
Some of the families who needed the food pantry, according to a paragraph in our church bulletin, needed help because of medical bills. Some needed help because jobs had been lost. My hometown has a population of about a thousand people. I'm sure the food pantry in the other town has similar requests. Plus there's a large food pantry in the city where the newspaper is located.
Service learning
At least one high school in our area does a service learning project where the students raise money, go shopping and put together packages for families for the "Christmas is for Kids" program. They, too, receive many, many requests from needy families who cannot buy clothes or other items for their children for Christmas.
The applications are coordinated by an independent agency, and the families are only identified by numbers that are put on the bags. The students have a lot of fun shopping. And they have a tremendous amount of fun wrapping the gifts. I don't recall how many families sign up all together. It's quite a few, though. More than what you would think in a county with a population of about 40,000.
Booming economy?
The economists on Wall Street have been trumpeting how well the economy is going and how much money everyone has and how many millionaires and multi-millionaires live in this country.
The politicians also have been spending taxpayer money like there's no tomorrow, especially on a war that seems to be accomplishing little else than getting people on all sides killed. At the rate the politicians going, we are headed for a serious economic crash.
The Today Show gets in on the act, too, and keeps booking people who are yammering about "investments" and what you should do with all of the money you are going to be saving up for retirement and that you need a minimum of a $250,000 saved for retirement just to pay your medical bills.
I think there are certain politicians and economists and television show producers who are completely out of touch with reality. Just ask the students who raise money and buy gifts for Christmas is for Kids. Just ask the people who manage and administer the food pantries.
The second food pantry took maybe another two hundred pounds of potatoes when Randy stopped after work on Monday. There's still a sizable pile in the back of the truck although it is not nearly as large as it was in the beginning. Randy says he wishes he had taken pictures right after the truck was loaded with potatoes. But he didn't.
Well -- at least a couple of families in the area will have potatoes for a few meals and for Thanksgiving dinner, if they want them.
And speaking of Thanksgiving dinner, which is usually at my sister's house, maybe I ought to offer to bring the potatoes this year. We certainly do have enough!
LeAnn R. Ralph
Saturday, October 13, 2007, 04:38
Holey-Moley
I would hate to see the size of the mole that's digging in the yard. From the number and the depth (or maybe I should height) of the tunnels, it has to be one monster mole.
The mole started digging this fall in the yard down by the horse pasture fence. I have had to move Kajun's water bucket twice to get it off the uneven mole tunnels so it will sit steady so he can drink out of it. I keep Kajun's bucket tied to the fence post, and the mole has been digging all over the yard down by the barn near the plum tree and right up to the fence posts. So far he has not actually ventured into the horse pasture.
The tunnels are like a maze running everywhere, back and forth and up and down around. There is hardly one square foot of grass that doesn't have a mole tunnel in it. And the tops of the tunnel stick up above the ground a good couple of inches. Walking is definitely an adventure, and if I am carrying a full bucket of horse water, it is even more of an adventure.
The mole has tunneled his way around Isabelle's training paddock, too. The paddock is about 800 square feet, and the ground is bumpy and uneven with mole tunnels throughout the whole paddock.
I know moles dig up the yard to eat the white grubs that live in the dirt. And I must say -- we've got to have a ton of those white grubs if the mole is digging that much. I found one of the grubs when I buried the barn kitten that had died in the garden. A big, fat, white grub an inch or an inch and a half long.
Who would figure, after the drought of the last three years and how dry it is has been many feet down, that the grubs would be in numbers sufficient enough to encourage that much digging from a mole?
A few years back when I had muskmelon planted in the garden on the west side of the pasture fence, a mole was digging in the garden. That was at a time when were getting rain, and the muskmelon were growing very well. One day while I was down by the barn, our Springer Spaniel, Charlie, strolled out to the garden, stood listening for a moment, and then began digging furiously. I was about to get after him for digging up my muskmelon when he stopped, lunged, grabbed something and shook it vigorously.
Charlie had caught the mole digging in the garden.
And it was one big mole. Longer than my hand, dark gray, and very fat with huge pink front paws designed for shoveling dirt quite efficiently.
I felt bad for the mole. But I was glad that the thing was out of my muskmelon.
But I also discovered an interesting thing at that time -- moles must not taste very good. Charlie did not even act like he was thinking about eating the mole.
So far Charlie hasn't shown any signs of going after the mole that is digging by the pasture fence. Either it has not been actively digging when Charlie has been down by the barn, or else the other experience with a bad-tasting mole was enough to convince Charlie that he didn't want to hunt moles anymore.
I know that once the mole has eaten all of the grubs it can find in the yard it will move on elsewhere. And I know that in time, the lawn will settle back down and the tunnels will collapse in on themselves. Until then, I guess I will just have to make the best of my bumpy yard.
Deer ticks
Randy and I took the dogs for a little walk along the dirt road before supper Friday evening. We cut across the ditch and walked along a pine plantation for a couple of hundred feet before making our way back out to the road. The area must have been infested with deer ticks. Friday evening I found two of them crawling on me. It's not the ones I find crawling on me that I worry about, though. It's the ones that are crawling on me that I don't find that makes me worry. The deer ticks are so small, I cannot feel them crawling on me. I can always feel wood ticks crawling. Wood ticks are not very big, either, but they are quite large compared to the deer ticks that are about the size of the mark made by the tip of a medium point gel pen.
LeAnn R. Ralph