Many ladies finding themselves with occupied uteruses undergo a lengthy period known as “nesting.” As far as I can tell, for most, this involves scrubbing walls with toothbrushes, ceaseless knitting, and looking dreamily at onesies on the internet.

For me, it means hanging insulation and hoisting sheets of OSB into the air. Introducing the Shack (In-Progress), because according to the wisdom of evolved creatures, once you have a place to shit, the next logical step is to have a different place to sleep.

(Please rest assured that this will never turn into a baby-mommy-blog of any sorts, and should I lose my edge by virtue of my newfound rotundity, I’ll go rub myself and our incubatory spawn up against a birch tree until we’re all sharp again.)

(Also rest assured that while the shack is being build, we are not, in fact, sleeping in our shitter, but in the old camper from farback.)

But the shack! Let me tell you about it. The shack is fully enclosed, as you can see here, a task which required a footrace against the onset of winter to complete, and which we won, but only because we’re cheaters.

Our lovely little woodland dwelling is fully framed with a loft on the inside (soon to be expanded to an entire second floor and a finished third-floor attic space), mostly insulated, and as of this week, will be wired for as much raw power as our poor abused battery bay bank will allow. Next is woodstove installation, interior walls and shelves, kitchenette installation, exterior roofing and siding, and maybe a nice welcome mat and a step up. We hope to be living here within the next month or so, which, of course, is contingent on the endless maneuvering of materials and supplies up and around the hill in the middle of winter. I’ll leave your imaginations to determine how we do this.

The plan, inasmuch as we ever plan anything (q.v. spawn-sowing, above), is to consider this Shack 1.0, allow ourselves the occasional colossal fuckup, and, if we can move in without severe loss of limb or life, build a slightly larger, slightly sturdier shack one of these days, and convert this one into use for guests, or food storage, or possibly an incarceration center for children who disappoint us with demands for indoor plumbing and video games.

Meanwhile, here are a few in-progress stills from the past month and a half.

About to erect the second wall:

Roofing trusses being installed:

The enclosure:

The other night I was shaken awake a few hours early to be informed that my Native was heading to the bathroom.

Now, this is not an issue of conjoined-at-hip extreme co-dependency, but an act of courtesy we always extend the other before leaving camp, so that the remaining mate is not left to wake up in the middle of the night with morbid fantasies of backwoods bedsnatching.  And if you’re living like animals, you do your business with them, outside.  But you see, it used to be that if we needed to contend with the moving and shaking of matters excremental, we’d either disappear briefly into the woods with a shovel and some tissue, or, in my case, learn to internally compost and wait for the next trip into town except in the most absolute emergencies.   But no longer.  Now it’s just a short trek away, with no hole digging or filling or finely balanced squatting in a snowbank required.

And before I continue: sorry, really, but a scatological post was inevitable.  (Welcome, googlers in search of poo smut!)  Everyone poops, even those of us who live like kings.

Introducing the monolithic, palatial, Hope Diamond of outhouses.  Just look at it.  And now, when we find ourselves in the middle of the night with business to do, we can take a magazine instead of a shovel and do it the way of the civilized.  It’s so luxurious I almost feel like I’ve turned into some kind of yuppie.  Next step: a gold seat, and maybe even a decorative flush-handle.

Cooter Hollow’s Fully Abbreviated Guide to Building Your Own Outhouse in the Woods:  Just Sit, Shit, And Wipe It

1> Dig:  We started last summer when we rented the excavator, using it to dig a hole several feet deep and wide enough so that even after the great flood came and attempted to eradicate most of our work, we still had enough of a chasm to hold quite a few years’ worth of the nast-o.

2> Contain:  We bought a 33-gallon garbage can, into the bottom of which was drilled several weep-holes, placed it into the hole, and filled around it. (Have I mentioned my obsession with the word “weep-hole?”  Suddenly this isn’t a blog post at all, but poetry.  Poetry about shitting.)

3> Make a foundation:  We used two layers of concrete blocks, also largely dug into the ground, to provide us with a level(ish) surface onto which to build our foundationary platform.  Which is heavy.  Because if you’re going to enjoy time on the Hope Diamond of Shitters, you don’t want it rolling down the hill before you’ve finished your magazine article.

Here I am working on the foundation.  Note the masterful drilling technique.  Not shown:  generator, power tools, lots of screws, a Native who more-or-less knows what he’s doing, and a very confused dog.

4> Make some walls and a roof.  I told you this was going to be abbreviated.  Ours is four feet by four feet, and eight feet tall, framed with two-by-fours and sheathed with OSB, which should give you some idea of how it was put together.  Lots of screws and a mate who knows what he’s doing will help you here.  A very confused dog, while not as helpful, is not without her peculiar charms.  The door was made of rough-sawn hemlock homemade by an Alaskan Mill chainsaw attachment.  Nice, right?  It’ll be sided with the same, when more critical projects have been completed.

5> Build the throne.  Again, nice, right?  We bought a half-sheet of pressure treated finished sanded birch to use here.  Because, splinters.

6>  Attach seat.  Ours has little snaps to affix it to the throne, so that we can bring the seat inside with us and not run the risk of sticking to it on particularly cold mornings.  To be honest, an ass hitting a cold seat is an order-mag preferable to a cold ass sliding over ice or trying not to dip into three feet of snow whilst in mid-squat.

7>  (To be completed): Humanure.  When the long winter lets up or projects turn the way of sawdust production (more on this very soon), we plan to apply regular handfuls of the same over our, erm, yield, to keep the smell down and the compost working.  But for now, the entire mechanism is so new, and the experience so satisfying, and the weather so single-digity, that the sound of one’s own output softly plopping into the ravine’s dark bottom is the sound of bliss itself.

And there it is.  We’ve been busy with projects of all levels of comfort improvement around here, so on days when we don’t return from it all too zomboidal to lift the finger-nubs, I’ll show you more.  And if you want to know really how all this was put together, let me know and I’ll inveigle my Native into sharing the seedier details with you, like screw lengths.  And sheathing techniques.  His talents at sheathing are second only to his talents in areas not meant for a family website.

In the spicy mustard salad days of our early courtship, when we still shat indoors and water came from taps, I would travel by train to visit my Native on weekends. On the first or second of these visits, after the compulsory dances of the newly wooed, he offered dinner: I’ll make us some smoked salmon.

Now, I like the cold pink stuff as much as the next woodland creature, and was charmed by the notion that he’d peel open the fridge and suck open a pressure-sealed package and present it as “making” dinner. It was a measure of his caliber as a scrappy itinerant loner type, not someone in the business of charming women. I was sold.

Let me tell you what he did instead, voyeurs of the internet.

• He went outside, bottomsless, probably, in the middle of January, and dug a little 16″ Webber grill out from beneath multiple feet of snow (original grill pictured in the neglected background of the photo above).
• He then grabbed a bin full of small pieces of apple wood he’d scavenged from a colleague, and hatcheted it into small chunks, each maybe an inch or two thick, which he then stacked in the grill.
• He produced one of those scary red High Danger Extremely Flammable Seriously Don’t Fuck With Me bottles one sees in movies about terrorists, and applied its contents generously to the grill’s insides. Then he poured some more, just to make sure.
• He let the fire burn for a while so that he could go inside, retrieve a fillet of salmon freshly bought, and season it with salt and sugar.
• He positioned the fish on the grill, closed the damper way down so that enough air could pass through to keep it smoking, but not enough to keep a flame burning.
• Then we went back to dancing for a few hours until it was ready, at which point we dug in savagelike, fingers greasy and lips smacking.

Here he was, my brand new guy, playing with fire with no pants on in the middle of winter to impress me with fish. There was no doubt: this was the guy I was going to shit in the woods with forever.

We’ve since become prolific smokers of fishstuffs, and our method has evolved somewhat in the years that’ve followed: the fancy smoker pictured above was gifted or re-gifted to us a few months ago, and is a godsend, even if we don’t get to play with flammable gases. It allows us to regulate the temperature and do more smoking and less cooking. We do a real marinade rather than just slapping seasoning on it (salt and sugar’s good.  Lemon pepper if you’re feeling gutsy, or seasoned salt if the meat looks like it needs it.  Maple syrup if your Native used all the sugar and didn’t buy more.). We know it tastes best when left overnight at a cool temperature, and not devoured straight off the grill. And we know the more you eat, the more you can dance. And I imbue all this knowledge upon you so that if you should be in need of a woodshitting mate of your own, you’ll have an idea how to romance one.

A few days ago, I was interrupted by a tap at the Jeep’s window while working in the Mobile Office, enjoying the wifi from the hippie soccermom café across the street without suffering the overweening helicopterror of its mothers.  Startled by the disruption, I turned to find a coyote dangling on the other side of the window, tongue out, head down, swinging slightly, suspended from the arm of a neighbor, who’d just successfully trapped it and wanted to show it off before returning it to the trunk of his car.  And don’t worry– I’ve shot my load on sanctimony for the season*; the trapper is doing what trappers do, or some similar zennish statement of effect.  I get it, see.  But the pendulous coyote got me thinking again of food, and of the things I should’ve grown but didn’t this season, and thinking that if I don’t commit them to the indelibility of pixelled prose, they’ll surely be forgotten again next year.  And so, here’s the

Partial And Probably Growing List of Things I Need to Get Growing Next Year, No Damned Fooling This Time:

1> Take Stock, Dumbass!
I made a perfect kale and potato soup the other night, to discover that I had no stock.  Meanwhile, so many carrot bits and onion bits and other vegetable bits went into the compost and into pigbellies, and so many mushrooms retreated groundward when I had no time to deal with them.  Why didn’t I spend at least a night or two simmering it all down to stock?  Probably because I was too busy thinking of just the right sex-metaphors to bring random passersby to my woodland vagrant website.  And now, shamefully, I have to spend the winter buying supermarket stock for my otherwise pristine and garden-borne slurpfests.  It’s enough to make me want to give up on the whole lot and become the sort of lady who enjoys pedicures and fruity booze.

2> Head in the Ground
Can I even grow ginger here?  Common wisdom seems to suggest that while it can survive cold winters, it prefers more warmth than I have to offer it.  But I made quarts of chutney loaded with the stuff, and think it could be the new thing to fret and pout over.  Next year, ginger, you’ll grow for me or I’ll kill you trying.  It’s on.

3> I will Never Be Fruity Enough
Sure, I made chutney.  I thought it was a little hippie of me, then I remembered that I urinate in the woods.  Daily.

I recently came into some apples, extras from a neighbor’s cider press.  Not apples from my own trees.  The saplings I planted haven’t done much, and next year I may spring for a tree from a shop, maybe a tree that’s been designed to be transplanted into unforgiving habitats, instead of a tree that grows like a root in its own soil but disappoints you after you take the great effort to bring it home and find just the right spot for it.  Apples and ginger.  A girl could spend her adult years getting fat and bloated and good and drunk on the stuff.

4> Stinkbottomless Pit
I planted little pickling onions of the sort that’s best served in a Bloody Mary or three, and didn’t plant horseradish.  Because I’m apparently a certifiable tool.  Next year.

5> We Really Like Whiskey Slushy
Every time I plod on about my troubles getting a mint patch started, I’m met with matchingly annoying tales of woe about how mint has taken over your garden.  Too much mint?  That’s fucking terrific.  Go drink a frozen mint julep while I sit here enjoying my endless bounty of oregano and all my ferns.  I’ve planted mint from transplanted roots, transplanted clippings, from seeds, and from expensive catalogue plants.  Not a damned thing stuck.  Next year I’ll figure it out, in all the time I’m not spending slaving over the ginger.

6> Getting High From Potatoes
Why does nobody around here sell sweet potato sets, and why does nobody grow them?  Do you now know this is vegetable candy we’re talking about here?  This is not unlike finding out that one can grow chocolate-covered cocaine, and that it’s legal and non-addictive and maybe even full of vitamins, yet nobody bothers because the growing season’s a little precarious.  Chocolate-covered cocaine potatoes, next year, are mine.  And I may or may not share.

7> Garlic Sunrise.
OK.  I need professional help with this, maybe.  It’s supposed to be like Mint.  You’re supposed to sneeze on a plot of well-turned land, and wait for garlic, especially around here.  Unlike Mint, I have successfully gotten garlic to grow for the past two years.  However, the fruits of my labor are these tiny and underachieving bulbs of maybe 3-4 (perfectly-sized) cloves a pop, the cloves themselves growing to full size and looking healthy all season.  I’ve read conflicting advice on the matter:  some say this is indicative of the wrong land, or the wrong seed garlic.  Others say to replant what you’ve grown, that it takes a few years for garlic to thrive in any one piece of land.  So, which is it?  What am I doing wrong?  Why can’t I have that nice braid of plump bulbs hanging from my windowsill like any self-respecting woodland dweller?  I am seeding new cloves of a different variety and some of my meager collection from this year, and hope that one of them turns out next year.  Because I’ll need it, to mask the scent of my chocolate cocaine plants. (Dear DEA, FBI, and ATF computer keyword scanners:  it’s a metaphor!  You know, a joke?)

There are other lessons, to be sure, but this is about all a fractured ego can handle for one day.  Soup and sauce, among my favorite things to slurp**.  What’s increased self-sufficiency without being able to make a little noise when you eat?  Way less fun, that’s what.

* but apparently not on innuendo that drives all sorts of pornseekers here. Hi! Were you looking for the post on my BIG MELONS?  Or the one about my LABIAL HERB GARDEN?

** see?

When it comes to the planting and growing of stuff, I harbor a little bit of a spooky lifey anti-choice fundamentalist nut. (Not that I’d disclose anything about my political positions…)

But I spend so much time preparing and starting seeds for the weaker and spindlier seedlings to be chucked in the compost bin. Then I had what I thought a glorious idea.

I see all over the place these hanging tomato and pepper plants for sale, and agree with a lot of the logic of it: one should let vines be vines, rather than obsessively working to defy gravity. If they’re off the ground, they’re less susceptible to succumbing to frost and blight. This all makes sense. But I don’t like doing things the easy way, so I spent a week chugging soda, then after recovering from the resulting birth of twenty pounds of intestinal bile, I whipped up the mighty ghetto creations you see in the photo above.

The single Hungarian wax pepper you see here is this year’s only product of this experiment, which probably has something to do with the notion that I am, after all, populating them with the weakest, barely fit for survival seedlings. It might also have something to do with the fact that these get planted long after the rest of the garden goes down. And there’s the issue of water, and while we get plenty of water hanging out in the ground, these guys actually need care. But still, it was a mighty pepper, living the American dream, making something even though its opportunities are limited.

On the theme of limited opportunities, yesterday marked pig-slaughter day, a day of great Neanderthaloid pleasure, from my vantage. While I hadn’t expected anything resembling solemnity, a modicum of respect for the animals whose flesh they were taking, or the local vegetarian who took part in raising them, might’ve been appreciated. Later, after the day turned to party, because such days should always turn to parties, the butcher was asked to have a turn shooting skeet– because such parties are more fun with recreational bangery. “I already got to shoot today!” boasted the butcher with mouth swollen into the expression of pure joy. Now, were I a fighting type, there would’ve been fists, but it’s a good thing I’m not, because that does not add much fun to most parties. And so I’m seething at you, dearest internet, because while it’s rare and great to enjoy one’s work, the part of the work involving taking a rifle to the head of an animal really needs to be treated for what it is. Otherwise, the pigs might as well have been factory-farmed, and the dishonored rednecked knuckle-dragging discredits your entire operation. I’ll have no part in this next year, and expect My Native to be able to butcher his own meat (Hi, baby.).

Finally! A righteous and angrily rantish blog post. I knew I could do it!

I first tried to grow melons while still in the moving truck on the way up here. Living as we do does not allow for many impractical hobbies, but the successful growing of melons (an impractical, inefficient addition to the garden) has blossomed into a full-on obsession, full of much hand-wringing and not without tears.

The first year in this climate – when we paced about in a civilized dwelling, with running water and a bedroom that wasn’t also our kitchen – I didn’t get a garden down until the middle of June. Which meant that by the first frost a few months later, the melons I’d planted had just started to flower. Last year, I was marginally better at timing, but didn’t pay close enough attention to variety and ended up with something that was more suited to the tropics. By the time the season was over, I had a handful of little nuggets the size of golf balls. Cute, except I don’t golf.

This year, I was determined to get serious. I bought six (6!) seed packets of various species that all promised to deliver fruit within a short growing season, and all of which I validated with Master Gardener Google by typing in the name of the species plus the name of my state, and reading the resulting bloggers joyous yarns of success. Because we all know that people who write about their gardens on the Internet are never prone to hyperbole or bullshit.

So I had my six varieties of melon, but this wasn’t enough. In March, I started various seeds in peat pods – the largest pods I could find, so as not to disturb the roots. Somewhere else on the Internet I read that the seeds sprout healthier seedlings if soaked in milk, so I tried that with a handful. I think I even spat on a few. Gently. I will be eternally grateful that I never chanced upon the website insisting that melons grow well when packed into unforgiving bodily apertures. For the love of everything juicy, I’d have put them there.

Of course, by the time they were ready to go into the ground, I’d killed half the seedlings by leaving them out on too cold a day. I lost several more to the basic stupidity of starting plants from seed when you live in a place so small that the kitchen is your bedroom. The milk was a bust, or maybe I just let them soak long enough for it all to curdle; who can remember this many hours later? And the last few, well beyond recognition from my futile attempt at labeling, made it safely into the ground on one of the last few days of May. Because there were only a few left, I sowed the remaining seeds directly and forgot about them.

In what will go down as the surprise of the century, every plant I labored over died straight away, and those I seeded and left alone took right off. The harvest wasn’t especially bountiful, but it wasn’t a particularly forgiving season, with too much rain, a hailstorm, a flood, and very little of the season known as “summer.” I netted a few sugarbaby watermelons (not bad), some banana melons (a let down), and most deliciously, a couple of small-in-size-alone charentais, which are hereby known as Breasts of the Nubile Gods. By the time I was finished lapping and slurping and sucking and happily sighing, I was wishing I still smoked.

Next year I hope will be better, as I bypass all of the needless pre-season fussing (unless we find that long-lost big bag of money and build a greenhouse), get seeds down in time, and shoot anyone who tries to dump too much rain on them. But before get too far ahead of myself: I have grown melons, and eaten the melons I’ve grown, and Yea, It Was Good.

From the department of Awkward Nostalgia, allow me to present an early photo of Yours Most Truly, the very fruit of the loins of the foxy young lady to my right. I share this not to show off my incomparable capacity for adorableness, but to get to the bottom of my Melon Problem. In this photo, we’re sharing the last of a melon whose harvest from my grandparents’ garden is one of my first fond memories. You think this has anything to do with it?

It wouldn’t be a hard stretch of the brain to imagine Cooter Hollow as some sort of magical place where Cheap Chinese Generators go to die, or at least succumb to our own peculiar style of enhanced interrogation. Historically, when we’ve needed a generator, it’s because the one before it finally keeled over, unexpectedly, and is generally timed to our periods of maximum insolvency. Savings accounts have still yet to be discovered here, although there’s a big bag of money lying around here somewhere, if we can just remember where we put it.

But Cheap Chinese Generators are fine for many things, including being taken out of the three-car-garage twice a year when the power goes out, and strapped to the top of your car with the family dog when you go camping. But up here, we beat on them more heavily than that. For a year and a half, we powered our camp directly from one, every day, which makes a Cheap Chinese Generator cry for its mother, then proclaim its brothers to be against America. Trust me on this.

So there we were, a couple of weeks ago, at the Expensive Japanese Generator shop, in line for a shiny new bauble, not connecting the necessary dots to know that with the hurricane expected the next day, there would be a run of people with a thousand bucks to burn to ensure they didn’t miss an episode of their favorite reality television program. But of course this was the case: others have discovered savings accounts, or at least, credit cards, and we were stuck without. As we’re not folks to return empty-handed from such an excursion, we dropped our bucks instead on things to read and things to shoot, like good societally ejected would-be intellects. And with that, we returned to our paralyzed– but not yet dead– Cheap Chinese Generator.

The next day, of course, all hell broke loose, if “all hell” is defined as all the roads, bridges, culverts, and any other way out of town. Also, the electrical substation in town, many homes, and many many acres of land. (Cooter Hollow itself is high on the mountain, remember, and survived the worst of it). My Native proved himself some sort of Generator Whisperer, or at the very least, kicked it in just the right place, and it’s been running smoothly since, taking care of business up here, as well as traveling around to help friends and neighbors keep the e. coli from coming out to play in their frozen foods.

And, just so this post is not entirely without a proper documentarian treat, our power situation is now: The Cheap Chinese Generator, which charges a bank of 4 deep-cycle batteries through this inverter charger. I’m sure My Native will be calling within minutes of this post to let me know that this information is misleading and rickety and bad, and will insist I issue a retraction. Stay tuned!

(Also, look at those beans! I don’t know if they’re any good; they’re called Vermont Cranberry beans, they seemed to grow well, and I will never pass on the opportunity to grow pink food. The Big Garden has been sorely neglected through our little natural disaster, though I’m limping back into it, and seem to have grown my weight in edamame.)

I was setting up shop last Saturday to deal with the first real fruits of my ceaseless labor, and while sorting through the endless piles of cucumbers that have harvested, decided to pull out a jar of last year’s pickles to mitigate my guilt. The jar was labeled “10-10-10,” with a subtitle of “finally, the last of this year’s pickles.” But it was not the last jar of last year’s pickles. My friends, I will die drowning in a cucumbering waterbath, or suffer slowly from vinegar exposure.

Because I nearly had to check myself into a treatment center last year from all the cucumbers, I made a very big deal of putting down only 10 plants this year, and yet I’m rolling in them already, giving them away to neighbors receiving them with the enthusiasm of crack-covered candy, while feasting on endless cucumber-and-dill salads.

That said, my first day of real food preparation resulted in:

8 pints of kosher dills
5 pints of blueberry jam
2 pints of salsa verde
freshly blanched and frozen zucchini, snow peas, snap peas, beans, various hopefully freezable greens, and additional blueberries, for the purpose of pies and pancakes.

And while all this was not met without some vague feeling of Accomplishment, at the same time, I wondered if this was time I mightn’t have better spent on great intellectual and artistic pursuits. Or at least write my memoirs on the nearest treestump. I mean, I have all kinds of food made by my hand, but I’m nobody’s grandmother; what am I doing making so much jam, anyway? Has anyone, ever, in the documented history of the universe, single-handedly made his or her way through five jars of blueberry fucking jam? There are days like this, where I awaken to the realization that I’m living like a crazy person.

This ego-driven existential crisis continued for about a week, right up to the day my local barman served my weekly dose of whiskey and said: I found a cherry tree full of Chicken of the Woods, and thought of you. You should go get some.

I had never heard of such a thing, but my friends, it is a mushroom unlike any other. I’m generally as auto-didactic as it comes, especially with this rural survival beat, but when it comes to mycology, I’ve long been hoping for an old wise native to give me a tour. I love mushrooms more than most people, but for every delicious one that grows in the wild, there’s a twin waiting to turn into an axe murderer if you deign to sniff it in the wrong spot. So I’ve demurred, big pussy that I am.

Let me tell you a thing about Chicken of the Woods: it’s rabidly good. Another thing: it’s easy to identify, and unless you’re a total boob, your chances of happening upon its toxic twin are slim. They live on dying, but standing, hardwoods. They resemble oyster mushrooms, but an orange or honey color. The Evil Twin is on conifers. Get them while they’re fresh. They’re great sautéed with oregano, onion, garlic, and capers and thrown into a red sauce over pasta, in which form they’re vacuumed mouthward even by the perpetually dismissive piss-and-moaning seven-year-old part-time resident of Cooter Hollow. They’re almost as good gently roasted with lime, chili pepper and celery salt and cooked into quesadillas. I’m sure they’re equally good in ways I’ll be discovering for years, in fact.

And with that, suddenly I bounced right back from my (admittedly) uglily hubristic country-living chagrin and became again in thrall by what we’re up to. After all, anyone’s grandmother can make endless jars of jam, but when the zombie apocalypse comes, I’ll be fending them off with spears of pickles in the eyesockets, and eating like royalty from the trees.

In case you’re wondering why I’m not returning your phone calls these days, here’s a quick tally of what’s going on in the gardens this summer. I plan to post notes in the coming weeks on the status of some of these, if there’s time. For the most part, my evenings are set to a soundtrack I like to call Blanch and Freeze, whose lyrics are primarily comprised of top-of-lungs obscenities hurled over a rhythm of the splash of boiling water hitting my skin. Here’s what’s to blame for it.

In the Cooter Hollow smaller garden:

Stuff that sticks around awhile: Asparagus | Oregano (which is threatening a hostile takeover of the whole fucking place) | Chives | Lavender | Thyme (which just went in this summer and is looking haggard, especially as it has to ward off the threat of oregano) | Blueberries

Stuff for the season: Snap peas | Tomatoes | Pickling cucumbers | Slicing cucumbers | Mustard Greens (spicy enough to knock your head right off, especially if yours is a sensitive Nordic native head. Timeo Danaos! )| Arugula | Radishes | Sweet onions | Garlic | Dill | Basil | Cilantro | Kale | Spinach

The lower garden being guarded by the mountain lion is divided into two massive plots, each large enough to feed the entire village. One side contains:

Melons (oh, what I’ve gone through to grow melons in these parts. You shall know soon enough. It may involve soaking the seeds in my own digestive bile, but god, they’re growing.  More to come.) | Snow peas (Dear snow peas, I love you, but please stop flowering. I’ve had quite enough of you for now.) | Snap peas (the same goes for you, snap peas.) | Zucchini (Dear zucchini: please go play with the peas.) | Mustard greens (See above. They’re too much for him, but I can’t get enough of them.) | Sweet onions | Red onions | Bunching onions | Pickling onions (yes, I’m growing Bloody Mary onions. Why wouldn’t I?  Next year I will put out horseradish, then treat you to a drunk gardening tutorial) | Watermelon radishes | Beets | Arugula | Carrots | Swiss chard | Dill | Pickling cucumbers | Edamame (8 or 9 rows of the stuff, and next year, I might consider scrapping the rest and writing a memoir about my Year Eating Nothing bug Edamame, which will be the shortest book ever written, containing only the word Yum. Except I’ll be drunk on Bloody Mary, so probably won’t be able to get that far.)  | Tomatillos | Tomatoes | Vermont cranberry beans | Black (turtle) beans | Pole beans | Peppers (assorted) | Eggplant (kind of) | Bok choi | Brussels sprouts | Corn (several rows, presently in various states of patheticness) | Broccoli raab | Basil | Cilantro | Mixed spicy salad greens | Kale | Kohrabi | Basil | Squash | Broccoli (and if the turkeys don’t leave it the hell alone, I’ll rethink my position on slaughtering animals)

The other side is loaded with potatoes. Many potatoes. Also, Colorado Potato Beetles, but mostly dead ones, thanks to my ninja skills.

Just a little garden, really.

Flattening and ditching the road left all kinds of new roots exposed, and after one evening (whose details are too sordid to be repeated here), we walked home in the dark to find these new roots yellow and aglow with some sort of bioluminescent beings disturbed. I’m now attributing it to honey mushrooms, but still, if you ever have a need to rip the ass-end out of a small strip of land, try looking at it on a night darkened by rainclouds, and see what happens. We don’t practice fairy tales around here (despite our ceaseless search for a pot of gold), but it almost gave us room for pause.

Also, hopefully I needn’t remind you, but please, don’t rip the ass-end out of a strip of land unless you have real need for it.