Gardening Detour

About twenty years ago we ordered a number of small booklets on gardening from Storey Publishing. One of them was about cold frames. I built a cold-frame based on one of the plans in there soon after we got the book.

When I took my very first college art courses at City College of San Francisco there were a number of courses in design. I always was puzzled as to just what design was. Over the years I began to realize that good design was a combination of aesthetics and utility. Something that was well designed did the job it was supposed to do and it did it well. If it seemed elegant then it had aesthetics as well. When you use something that is well designed you take a real pleasure in it.

That was the case with the cold frame. It was collapsible so that I could take it apart easily each year when the weather had gotten too warm to need it, then put it back together in late fall. Finally it started to fall apart, not through bad design but just through the rot that occurs when wood spends too much time in contact with earth and water.

The tops, which were just old windows I'd picked up off the street, eventually fell apart. So last fall I constructed new wooden frames for some all metal and glass windows I'd also picked up off the street. As I built them I wondered if it was worth the expense of wood and time.

For all my admiration of the cold frame's design I found that I never used it well. We left crops in the garden so late in the fall that by the time I'd harvested them and put up the cold frame it was almost too late to plant anything. What I did plant often stayed dormant until spring, then quickly went to seed. The one good use I made of it was a way to harden off new seedlings and transplants in spring.

But last fall I managed to get a number of choi seedlings in along with a few volunteer transplants from other parts of the garden. Against my better judgement I also planted some mache in late November even though the instructions said that they should not be planted when the weather was not reliably in the mid 40s or higher.

What wonders a very mild winter can cause. The cold frame has been bursting its top with chois. An heirloom lettuce threatens to do the same, as does ah heirloom celery. In other sections of the cold frame rows of mache herald the beginning of spring with the bright lime green of early foliage.

We've had some of the choi for supper the last couple of nights. There's always a sign of incredible optimism, a sense that all's right with the world, when we're able to have the first food from the garden for the year. I'm sure that optimism will continue as new birds arrive daily and plants begin to spring up.

Now back to the drawing board.

Winterizing

I knew that it couldn't be true -- 6 to 10 inches of snow this weekend for Philadelphia. It's still October. We often don't get snow until January! And yet that's the current forecast.

But the House Sparrows at my studio window feeder looked like they might be preparing for snow. The sketch above is based on sparrows at my window. When there are a lot of them feeding frantically I can assure you that they don't sit still for long. Most of the time they're fighting. Just as I start one another sparrow lands on or near him or her and starts fighting. Often I can only get one line down, like the breast in the female at lower left, before the bird is gone. I need to try to remember the rest of the bird. Or, wait until another bird takes a similar pose.

This may seem either silly or masochistic. But it actually is fun. You're forced to really think about how the bird is put together. For instance you may need to put a head on a sparrow, as I did at lower left. Inevitably some things will be wrong. But just as true is the fact that you might capture some sense of life. And you do get more familiar with the birds you're sketching.

For this I'm using a Bic 537R ball point pen. It's extraordinary how much the ink runs when water touches it. Normally this would be a catastrophe. But here I like it. It's a very quick way to change a drawing into a painting, or at least a wash drawing. And you never know what surprises you might get.

Just as the sparrows are winterizing I've been doing the same, along with my wife, around the house and garden. Today just in time for the cold and snow I finished making some new windows for our cold frame. These are metal windows that I picked up off the street years ago thinking that they might come in handy. But they need a wooden frame to work as tops for the cold frame. I spent the last few days using a Stanley handheld multiplane to dado out grooves in some 2x2s to put the window into. They're not perfect but they look like they should keep the cold out. So my many choi seedlings will I hope be able to grow to a usable state. And my poor little basil seedlings, planted very late as you can guess, may survive long enough to give a bit of basil flavor to November and perhaps December meals.

Between this type of winterizing work, preparing frames and mats for the MRAC show, and getting end of warm weather birding in before it's too late I haven't done much in the way of art. When that happens I often feel like I need to do some sort of doodling, sort of thoughtless art, to warm myself and figure out where I want to go.

Recently I've done some of that with the runny ball point pen and a Stillman & Birn Gamma sketchbook. But that sketchbook isn't made for strong washes. So I finally broke down and bought a Delta sketchbook with a much heavier paper. I really wanted to try it out. So that's what you see above: the same Bic pen, watercolor and the Delta paper. This shows the immature Little Blue Heron that I saw at Morris Arboretum this summer along with a Painted Turtle, happily looking in the opposite direction as the heron. I've always tempted to do something with it. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to take that composition out for a spin.

I do really like the ability to test out compositions like this. Eventually it or some of the other recent similar experiments should end up as paintings or prints.