Home, Home Near the Range

Okay, we now live in Montana, near scenery almost too beautiful to believe as well as near the hardscrabble ranches of families subsisting on their wits and willingness to work, very, very hard. (I met just such a beautiful family yesterday, on a gorgeous ranch that basically they built from scratch!)

But some days, Alex and I just plain take it easy at our little town bungalow.

He's getting over back spasms from lifting a few too many concrete slabs (more about that later). Right now, I'm protecting myself from a few too many UV rays (living here at 3,600 feet or so) and am gardening in the shade or when skies are overcast. Or I'm simply sitting it out for an hour or so under the carport-turned-patio, with an Alex-made latte in hand. Ah, retirement for a city girl (who worked hard herself, in newspapers for 30 years, thank you very much!).

One view of clematis that we inherited, as I sip morning coffee delivered to the "patio."

Hamiltonians walk by in flipflops or zip by on skateboards+dogs or cycle by on old-fashioned bikes+dogs or peddle along the flat streets on new-fashioned bikes pulling babies behind in aerodynamic carts. At times, it's really a tableau of the best of small-town life. And when I see kids cycling alone, I remember the freedom that I had as a kid in the '50s, to go it alone or with a girlfriend, all day sometimes, no grownups monitoring our every move. It was, and is, another world.

In our backyard, we also inherited a long fence-row of raspberry canes. Suddenly, the berries are beginning to ripen at a feverish pace (see guide to "Growing Raspberries in Montana Gardens" at the Montana State University site, http://www.montana.edu/.) Below, one morning's pick...

Fresh raspberries for breakfast (or dessert!) from our yard.

We've invited our nextdoor neighbors, Pat and John, to please help us relieve these canes of so much fruit. Already, we've all filled Ziploc after Ziploc of the berries someone planted long ago. The bounty takes up an entire shelf of a freezer in the basement, with another shelf crammed with rhubarb also from the yard; I diced and froze it weeks ago. There's a sudden embarrassment of riches! And it's a tiny hint of how real Montanas subsist and live. (I plan to whip the berries with cream tonight for  cupcakes that I'll take to a party.)

But when we tire of the ease of our new town life, we jump in the old Subaru and go find a dusty road with elevation. This one is facing west, looking at the Bitterroots from the facing mountain range -- the Sapphires.

Dirt, gravel and mountains -- just what you want in a scenic drive.

Another dirt road on another lazy day takes us up high into the Bitterroots along Lost Horse Creek. Dust, if I may say, is a Montana fact of life, in town as much as it is up here. The alley behind our house is pure white dust, and any fast moving car or, more likely pickup truck, sends it billowing up and over our fence. I figure we're coated with and breathing lots of this stuff and, perhaps, it's making us more Montanan. Silly, I know, but (and not to get religious, just a bit spiritual) remember, "for dust you are, and unto dust shall you return."

Alex fishes Lost Horse Creek while I amble down the road taking pictures (I do have a Montana fishing license but, so far, have been way more interested in poking around with my camera).

There are velvet antlers on these young bucks just a ways away...

Velvet on antlers, at left.

One deer takes an inevitable look back for a second or two...

...then, jumps and quickly gets into deep woods.

I've blogged before about beautiful "cricks," as creeks universally are called here. But just look at this rock through the clearest of water in Lost Horse Creek:

Lichens on rock, in Lost Horse Creek.

We head home after a few hours and sip wine on our sunset-shaded patio, watching one or two of the four varieties of hummingbirds here come to our feeder (photos, below, are from a site called mt.gov, specifically http://fieldguide.mt.gov/displaySpecies.aspx?family=Trochilidae:

Black-chinned

Broad-tailed

Calliope

Rufous

The Broad-tailed and Rufous are "potential species of concern," says mt.gov. We've had one Rufous sighting, we think. Mostly we see Black-chinned. These are spectacular creatures, as we know from also watching our Ruby-throated hummingbirds back in Missouri, as they dip into a wonderful feeder that my son gave me.

BTW, I promised more information about the backaches that Alex experienced on a recent renovation job. It's just a hint of what he, and to a lesser extent, I, are going through. The total rehab of our Hamilton house is almost complete, and before-and-after photos will be my very next post!

 

 

Contractor Don Sylvester, at left, spent a day mightily jack-hammering out this old parking pad next to our house. Alex helped him load it (ouch), piece by piece, into Don's truck for runs to a reclamation site operated by a local concrete company. Alex was "down in his back," as my grandmother used to say, for just a couple of days. Lucky! Stay tuned for the glorious results, here and elsewhere in the yard and garden, but especially in, and to, the house! Next post, I promise.

Went fishing, found bear

Taking a break from house and garden, we went fishing the other afternoon along Skalkaho Creek. It was Mel Holloway's suggestion. He's the friend who drives all over the Bitterroot, shooting great photos of wildlife, both human and animal. He posts at lease one of these pictures a day on Facebook. He thought Skalkaho would be a relatively good, close trip for us.  We'll, Mel, we took in the spectacular pine-scented air, stopped around mile-marker 18 and saw beautiful sparkling water...

Clear water on gorgeous rocks, in Skalkaho Creek.

...and a few small trout (didn't catch any)...

 ... plus random birds and insects...

But the biggest treat was a bear. Driving in an easterly direction, Alex slammed on the breaks as a juvenile cinnamon-colored bear clambered up from a ditch and then started slowly crossing Skalkaho Road. Let me tell the rest in pictures.

Of Gardens and Mountains

They tell us that our valley is the "banana belt" of Montana.  Gardening in this 100-mile-stretch, from Missoula at the north to near Sula at the south (our town of Hamilton, roughly in the middle) is protected by mountains on all sides. They say it is warmer than most other open and Arctic-swept regions of the state.

Mountains are everywhere you look in the Bitterroot Valley. (BTW, so are restaurants, cafés, coffee shops and other merchants, many more than this older map suggests.)

Nevertheless, until the last couple of days, we've had a very cool month of June 2012.  We may be listed in USDA Cold-Hardiness Zone of 5a, same as Illinois and parts of Iowa (for plants surviving lowest winter temps of -15 to -20 degrees). But it just takes one unusual weather event to make a big difference.  Banana belt, shmanana belt. We decide to look for some protection. I've brought five tomato plants -- started from seed in St. Louis. They need help on these 38-degree nights.  I punt.  I did pack three Wall O Water "season extenders" (http://www.wall-o-water.com/). And so, on a sun-warmed south side of our old garage, I plant the five tomatoes and position their cages so that every other one takes one of the plastic tubes designed with walls of empty cylinders. When they are firmly in place, I fill each cylinder with water; sun warms it and keeps plants and soil snug overnight.  I hope that a little residual heat helps the two unprotected plants. So far so good! Two of the five plants are fruiting. The others have flowers. They've been babied for weeks, but they seem not to have missed a beat.

Wall O Water around a tomato plant, against the old garage's south side.  We just took the walls down a few days ago when daytime temps soared into the low 80s and nighttime ones were upper 40s, now 50s.

An article in the local Ravalli Republic (also Lee Enterprises-owned, my fellow Post-Dispatchers) talks about the struggles of local small farms, in this and other years. Says Bitterroot Organic's Mike Duda, "If you're serious about growing in western Montana, then you have to have infrastructure. Hoop-houses, greenhouses and cold frames are essential for even serious kitchen gardening if you want to be successful in this kind of a climate." (More at http://ravallirepublic.com/business/local/article_983d7c2a-bb44-11e1-8372-001a4bcf887a.html.) I think the water-walls count.

And we plan to further bolster our version of micro-climate. First, we pull knee-high weeds out of a little, slightly raised bed just south of the tomatoes and along the alley (believe me, I joined Alex in doing a lot of this work).  Then we buy bags of a local favorite, Boost, from the helpful cows at Huls Dairy (www.hulsdairy.com/products.htm) and spread the aged manure on top of weed-free(?!) soil.  An incredibly nice guy we meet named Wes volunteers to rotor-till it in for us (on Father's Day morning, no less).

Pulling knee-high weeds out of the plot.

And we extend an existing fence to screen the alley and, we hope, protect plants a bit more from cold, west winds. I stain the cedar boards. Alex designs and puts the fence together over a series of days.

Oh, and the fence may help keep deer out of this patch. When we saw them browsing our yard last summer, always they came in from the alley. We're so clever, we'll outwit those critters -- haha! (Did I mention that the north side of the yard is wide open?)

We begin to plant -- peppers, eggplant, zucchini, crook-neck squash and lettuce even though it may be getting daytime hot for tender greens. We also start a small compost bin from old wire fencing that we find in the garage (this view is looking south, at neighbors' Pat and John's sweet little cottage over the fence).

We visit several local garden centers and decide that K & S Greenhouse in nearby Corvallis is our favorite (http://www.ksgreenhouse.com/). It was recommended by our friend Mary Alice Holloway. We love the veggie starts and herbs there, but spectacular containers and hanging baskets of annual flowers steal the show.

Blooms-a-plenty at K & S Greenhouse, Corvallis, Mt.

We also visit other gardens. Our friend Eric Milner is following the tradition of his parents -- mostly his mother Doris  -- with a huge vegetable garden in a clearing on the family hill overlooking the valley.

Eric's ambitious, deer-proofed vegetable garden, watered from snow melt in an adjacent ditch, with tomatoes secured in great old wooden cages.

And on a Saturday in town, we see a garden of a totally different kind. Volunteers with the Ravalli County Museum at the Old Courthouse have installed a Lewis and Clark native-plant garden in shady spots on either side of the museum entrance.

Native shade plants, the likes of which Lewis and Clark saw, even collected.

Shade-living natives on the other side of the museum entrance.

 I sat in on a meeting last year when changes for this and two other sites were being discussed and, having just seen the amazing Lewis and Clark collection inside the museum, I asked if anyone had thought of a native-plant garden outside. Bingo! Museum director Tamar Stanley took that little idea and ran with it, getting natives donated by the local Great Bear Restoration (http://www.great-bear.biz/natives.html).  Western snowberry, golden current, blue elderberry, chokecherry, serviceberry and thimbleberry are the shrubby, berry-producing, back-of-the-border plants; Rocky Mountain maple is there, to grow and hide a utility shed; and among a dozen or so other hardy flowers are the little pale-blue blossoms of wild blue flax (Linum lewisii).

All was unveiled to the public on a recent Saturday as the nearby farmers' market got underway.

Beet greens peek out of Alex's bag, at the Hamilton Farmers' Market (http://hamiltonfarmersmarket.webs.com/) -- now in its 20th year and our new place to shop for freshest vegetables, that is, until our own Montana garden starts producing!

Here, baby, here

We arrived at our little house in Hamilton, Mt., on Sunday night, tired, happy, sad, and a mix of other emotions. We've slept, off and on, for a couple of days. Today, we rise and shine. The morning is a cool, overcast one. We scope out the garden that came with our new place. We are pleasantly surprised.

My car backs up to a tall stand of Oriental poppies. I knew they were there, I just didn't know how big.

Our little, old carport is surrounded by blooming things. We sweep all of winter's last crumbly leaves from a weathered concrete floor and unpack our fold-up camp chairs. With a glass of wine each and a a section of tree trunk to serve as coffee table, we sit and survey the many blooming irises, as well as coral bells, rhubarb, raspberries and the poppies, of course. Someone here gardened, the old-fashioned way. It's lovely.

A humble carport becomes our getaway. The hazy blue color to the rear, left, actually is a mountain. It's called Downing.

To add to the Montana plants, we packed just a few of our own in my 2003 Subaru. Crazy, eh?

But they survived -- all of the hostas, Japanese painted ferns and variegated Solomon's seal packed tightly around a resin planter containing the roots of a six-foot-tall Meyer lemon tree. Had to bring it, swaddled in burlap. It's our favorite. It will live outside this summer and probably in the south-facing window of our bedroom this winter.

Below is part of the small St. Louis yard from which native Solomon's seal, in the foreground, was dug and brought to Montana.

Canna and Solomon's seal in the foreground, herbs in the sunniest spot against the house.

I also started three types of tomatoes from seed indoors in St. Louis -- heirloom Black Cherry and heirloom Green Zebra plus several of the prolific hybrid called Sungold. I had great luck with lettuce, but harvested most, and so-so germination with eggplant. I brought the eggplant and tomatoes, already hardened off by going in and out of the St. Louis back door. We'll see how well they do (and I do) in a garden in Montana. There's a huge raised bed here in need of major weeding, composting and roto-tilling before any Midwest transplants go in the ground.

Tomatoes made the trip pretty well. At least they're upright and have a few tiny flowers. They've gone outside and been brought back in here, as well. With tonight's low of a frosty 33 and upper 30s or low 40s predicted for the rest of this week's evenings, they'll live on a windowsill in the mud room.

But first, the real reason we're here -- the mountains. These are some that we saw along the way.

A first siting of mountains as we head west toward Bozeman.

Near the Big Hole River in a huge valley also called the Big Hole, southeast of where we live.

Mountain men, or man. We dine next to one -- a wary cowboy -- at Bitterroot Brewery.

And now I have to go!! The truck has just arrived!!! Lots of hauling off to be done -- of bicycles (old), harpsichords (2, built by Alex!), clothes, chairs, tables and the like. The one piece I'm worried about is the old Kentucky hutch -- also called a dry sink -- given to me by my mother. Here's what it looked like, blanketed and shrink-wrapped in St. Louis. I am hoping that it made the trip unscathed and unscratched...

The hutch before the big move. After?? For these and other domestic details, stay tuned.

Gone, baby, gone

A card I found while cleaning out drawers -- perfect for our forthcoming trip!

We've rented our St. Louis house for six months, perhaps even a year, and we talk about the wonders of it -- a tenant who loves to garden and keep a clean house. The rent money, too, will help us as we move half of our stuff to Montana!  But for the moment, we're sitting on the St. Louis back deck, sipping Mojitos made from our garden's too-plentiful mint and watching sun tint evening clouds a perfect pink.

I call this Little Sky, just off our back deck in St. Louis and high above last century's brick houses.

We also go at least one more time to nearby Forest Park. It was overgrown, unsafe and nearly a goner when I moved here in 1980. Now, it's been restored (http://www.forestparkforever.org/) and can be quite breathtaking. A recent picnic on benches by the Grand Basin is about as close as we get to big sky here.

Medium Sky -- the Grand Basin, and Saint Louis Art Museum atop the hill.

 We are hungering for mountains.

This was the view from a picnic last year in the Sapphires, looking across the valley to the Bitterroots.

I actually like Big Sky better from the valley floor. It can dwarf you as well as energize you, like no other view.

Rainbow, sun and storm clouds all at once, on the valley floor near Victor, Mt.

One last time, I serve on jury duty in St. Louis; I'd got out of twice before, for other Montana trips.

Juror 241, at your service.

My nephew, Andrew Homan, is manager of civic education for the Indiana Bar Foundation. I write him of my fate, from the jury-assembly room...

We sit, we read, we serve.

...and he emails back that he's probably the only person who'll tell me he hopes that I get picked.  I have served several times before, once as foreman in a criminal trial. Somehow, this time, out of more than 300 potential jurors and six or seven trials, I am among the 15 or so who never get picked by the shuffle of a computer. I read the "Hunger Games" straight through and, on my lunch hour, enjoy parts of a renovated downtown...

A stainless-steel bench in the new Citygarden, downtown St. Louis.

A shadier spot in Citygarden, for lunch of a sandwich and coffee.

A walk to see shiny new buildings next to classic old St. Louis ones of red-on-red brick.

At times I feel as if we're leaving St. Louis just when it's getting good. How funny is that? We're not really leaving. We still have a renovated, recently tuck-pointed, re-roofed and mostly furnished, handsome brick house here, circa 1911, with a tiny, tiny gem of a garden out back. We shall return!

A bowl of salad fixings started from seed (as were the tomatoes and eggplants, in smaller pots on either side, all going to Montana) sits on my St. Louis back deck, above a small circle of lawn, variegated Solomon's seal, ferns, hostas and a pond, with a big stand of what else?  'Becky' shasta daisies (Leucanthemum x superbum) just beginning to bloom.