New Hampshire Green Leaves Blog

Summer’s End

Labor day is almost upon us. Although summer still officially lasts for about three more weeks, Labor Day makes it seem like it’s the end of the season and the start of fall.

It’s been an abnormally dry season though some relief in the form of rain has begun arriving in the past few weeks to help the sweet corn along for the farmer’s market. There was a population boom of bumblebees in contrast to the scarcity of the insect last summer. Fire flies made a tentative reappearance though June bugs still seem to be in short supply.

It was a good summer for babies. A pair of Canada geese has been raising a brood in the tiny nature preserve near where I live. My sister-in-law took this adorable photo of a baby merganser goose-stepping across the road following his mother.

I’ve seen fledgling robins and heard young chickadees, nuthatches and chipping sparrows pursuing their parents begging for a last few morsels of food before they will have to fend for themselves.

Although the weather was on the dry side, a number of plants did well for themselves. The Black eyed Susans in my garden have bloomed prolifically.

The recent rains brought out a small mushroom nestled among the roots of a white pine.

My Jack-In-The-Pulpit bloomed its characteristic ‘jack’ and is now forming a berry cluster which will turn bright red.

While on a morning walk in late July, I encountered a Monarch butterfly feeding in a patch of milkweed on the corner of a parking lot.

It was a thrill to see this badly endangered butterfly still hanging in there. Now the milkweed has produced pods and if they can escape getting weed-wacked, I hope to collect a few when they ripen and try getting them to grow on the bank in back of my home.

Hope you had a happy summer.

Foot Work

One of the toughest parts of the human anatomy to draw for me is the foot. Getting those toes, nails, heels and arches to look right is tricky. This is why many art instruction books show the bones underlying not only the human form but that of any animal. There’s really no way around it. To get the outer part looking right, you need to know what lies beneath.

The human foot is made up of 26 bones, 30 joints, and more than 100 muscles, ligaments and tendons. No wonder the darn things are so hard to draw!

Our feet are highly specialized because they help us accomplish that amazing balancing act known as walking upright.

Our habit of walking on our heels and toes to do this is referred to as plantigrade locomotion. Other animals also use this method such as other apes and monkeys, raccoons, opossums and bears.

The above photo was taken by one of my brothers, showing an excellent bear paw print in new fallen snow with his hunting glove beside it to give some scale. Bears can also manage the trick of standing up on their hind legs and walking a bit, but this is not their preferred mode of walking.

Other four-legged animals have differently shaped feet, depending on their own style of walking. Cats and dogs, for example, don’t walk plantigrade as we do. Instead, they use the digitigrade form of locomotion. This involves walking on their toes. Many people do not realize that their pets literally tip-toe about. If you look at the ‘toe beans’ on the bottom of a cat’s paw, you’ll see the row of toe pads and underneath them is a pad which actually covers what for us would be the ball of the foot. The heel is further up on what many people take to be part of the leg but is really the foot of the animal. This photo of a kangaroo makes this a little clearer.

Like us, the kangaroo has a highly specialized foot. When at rest they are plantigrade like we are. But when they begin hopping, they rise up on their toes. Interestingly when they move at a slow walk, they use their large tails as an extra ‘leg’.

Hoofed animals, like horses or deer, carry the digitigrade form to an extreme. They don’t just walk or run about on their toes. They actually walk about on their toe tips. Hooves are just highly modified toenails. Ballerinas, eat your hearts out!

My art efforts for the foot are modest to say the least, even with the use of gestural drawing, which is useful for starting out, while learning to master the form of your subject. As always, practice makes perfect, so it’s a good idea to stock up on sketch books, so you can observe the evolution of your own drawing style. In addition to art anatomy instruction books, here are many tutorials on You-Tube to follow, to help you draw better looking feet.

Happy drawing!

Medieval Art

With the garden finally planted and growing, thoughts of artwork return. While my art instruction books focus on present day art styles, I find it both interesting and helpful to look back at the art of previous centuries.

Medieval paintings and drawings are always worth studying. While the artwork looks crude and even amateurish by today’s standards, I think that’s an unfair assessment. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, whatever schools or art styles were being taught likely vanished for the most part to be replaced by the art of the Germanic barbarians who moved in with their own traditions and set up shop. Absorbing the bits and pieces of what the Romans left, the budding new nations of Europe began developing their own style.

The lack of perspective is often remarked on. The figures on the castle ramparts seem way out-sized compared to the castle itself and the tents in the background nearly as big as the castle itself. But perspective wasn’t the goal here. The action itself was, so all players in this drama had to be seen clearly with their roles in the battle apparent along with their status, indicated by their mode of dress. Interest in any realistic perspective didn’t show up until the Renaissance.

Views of everyday life can be found in countless illustrations.

This image from the Hunterian Psalter, an illuminated prayer book from 12^th century England shows a family performing their chores. The wife uses a drop spindle for weaving yarn while the husband digs with his shovel in the field (barefoot no less!). At the wife’s feet sits a cradle with a placid faced infant firmly swaddled.

While the figures were meant to illustrate moral lessons or incidents from the Bible, they were drawn from ordinary life. Below is an image also from the Hunterian Psalter showing wine being produced.

Wine pressing must be hard work as the wine stomper appears unclad and looks like he is sampling some of the unfinished product to quench his thirst at the same time.

The next picture is from the Luttrell Psalter, showing sheep penned up, perhaps being sheared, while two women carrying water vessels pass by.

The Luttrell Psalter, from the early fourteenth century, is famous for its countless illustrations of everyday life. Some of the drawings, though, are definitely out of the ordinary depicting demons, strange animals and odd grotesques of every sort.

Here we have two gray faced beings battling each other, one getting a pot smashed over his head, perhaps a moralistic admonition by the artist about the evils of drinking. Other figures range from a spunky bishop pinching the nose of a demon,

to creatures so odd, it’s hard to make out what the illustrator was portraying.

One thing’s for certain, there was no lack of imagination and talent in the Middle Ages. One could do worse than to look at these colorful and often whimsical images for sources of artistic inspiration.

Happy drawing!

Gardening in 2022

The raised beds are planted and have started growing. I still have a few more rows of waxed beans to put in but otherwise everything is in. Now all that remains is keeping the local wildlife from chowing down on what’s coming up. Lately I’ve spotted a red fox on occasion short-cutting it across my lawn. With any luck he’ll keep the population of garden chompers such as woodchucks, squirrels etc down to a minimum.

Along with the tried and true peas, lettuce, carrots and potatoes, I’ve put in a row of beets and swiss chard and will watch what they do. Last year I tried some onions but apparently have no talent for growing them as they stayed the same size through the whole summer, never growing an inch. I’ve put a bush cucumber in a pot and covered it with mesh wiring to ward off hungry critters.

For flowers, I’ve planted the usual petunias and pansies. I also bought a packet of an old-fashioned climbing petunia seeds as well as some black velvet nasturtiums which I’ve sprinkled around in various corners.

Weeding is always a trick as some weeds such as goutweed, bermuda grass and zagreb coreopsis (this last one is my fault, it looked so pretty at the greenhouse but now it’s trying to eat my flower garden alive!) send out runners and propagate like crazy. If I can, I try to dig up the whole plant but if it’s mixed in with other plants I do want, then I trim back the greenery rather than risk disturbing the roots of the good plants. I allow most of the clippings to fall back into place and dump any roots I pull up underneath the pine trees.

Bumblebees which have been very scarce for at least the past five years have suddenly re-surged. I’ve been seeing the plump queens all over the place this past spring far more than I’ve encountered in quite a while, so I’m guessing last year’s nestings must have been very successful. Being sensitive to insect stings I find myself dodging a lot but it is nice to see these important pollinators returning.

As always, I keep my fingers crossed when gardening, hoping for a good year.

Memorial day parage — **Memorial Day 2022**

Starting Seeds

Nearing the end of April, crocuses and daffodils are popping up and forsythia bushes are in full bloom. You’d never know it was spring with the two inches of snow I woke up to this morning.

Thankfully it melted away by midday. This is the time of year when I pull out the old packages of seeds I bought last year (and before) to see if they will still sprout. Since I have small raised beds rather than large fields, it’s inevitable that I will have seed packets with a generous amount of seeds still left in them.

So how long do seeds remain viable? It varies, of course, depending on the species and how the seeds are stored over the winter. A cool dry place is often recommended. Most seed companies will have dates printed on the packages and on rare occasions how long the seeds will remain viable. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to write the date of purchase on the package.

When it comes to annual flowers, they are generally good from one to three years. Perennials, slightly longer, at two to four years. There’s plenty of info on the Net about vegetable seeds:

Bush & pole beans – 2 years

Broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower (along with most brassicas) – 3 to 5 five years

Carrots – 3 years

Sweet corn – 1 year

Cucumbers – 3 years

Leeks, onions – 2 to 3 years

Lettuce – 3 years

Melons – 3 years

Oriental greens – 3 years

Parsley – 2 years

Parsnips – 1 year

Peas – 2 years

Peppers – two years

Radishes – 4 years

Spinach – 1 season

Squashes – 3 to 4 years

Swiss Chard and beets – 2 years

Tomatoes – 3 years

Turnips – 4 years

These are averages and you will likely find some of your favorite seeds either don’t last as long or else far exceed the average given above.

This leads one to wonder what the oldest seed ever sprouted was. So far, it’s been a 2000 year old date palm seed found in the Middle East. Older plant material has been recovered and viable plants grown but not from their seeds, rather from genetic material recovered from inside the seeds, preserved in the permafrost in Siberia for around 31,000 years. Pretty impressive!

With the list above I know when it’s best to toss the old seed and buy new ones. Saving seed from the plants you grow is tricky. This is because many seeds offered in catalogs are F1 hybrids or first generation hybrid. This is nothing new. Farmers and plant breeders have been hybridizing flowers and vegetables long before genetic engineering came about. Crossing two different breeds of the same plant (such as tomatoes) will produce a new plant with characteristics which are combinations of the parent plants and often are more vigorous. The down side of course is that they do not breed true and seeds collected from the hybrid will revert back to one of the grandparent plants which may not have the traits you’re looking for in your favorite veggie. If you want plants which breed true, you need to purchase seed listed as ‘open pollinated’ in seed catalogs.

If you’re only interesting in growing tasty food or attractive flowers, it doesn’t really matter whether you grow F1 hybrids or open pollinated varieties. But if you’re into seed saving then you’re going to have to go with the open pollinated. As concerns about food security grow, there has been an increase in interest on how to save seed, ensuring unique varieties are preserved for future generations of growers.

Whichever choice you make, have fun growing your own fresh flowers and vegetables. Once it’s done snowing of course.

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