Maggie's Farm

In Yankeeland, we are getting towards the end of the time for dormant pruning of fruit trees and grape vines - and anything else that appreciates dormant pruning. I was busy this afternoon, trying to catch up before it's too late. You have to do it yourself nowadays to do it right, because the Mexicans don't have a clue.

Forget fertilizer. Assertive pruning is the best thing that can be done for deciduous flowering shrubs and fruit-bearing plants.

When you finish, the thing looks terrible, but it will thank you later with its production and vigor.

I follow these guidelines, pretty much.

For healthy, happy shrubs, I prune out, from the bottom, about a quarter to a third of the oldest growth every year. I prune or shape only ornamentals from the top. Deciduous shrubs, when pruned from the top, make you look like a gardening idiot, unless it's a hedge-type thing.

(And hey, Dylanologist: That huge splendid Crepe Myrtle in your front yard - I'd thin the heck out of it about now - from the bottom. Too many small shoots. I'd leave only 6-10 of the big ones. Just my opinion, and unsolicited at that.)

Some of our readers enjoyed my trip to the Flower District a week ago, so I thought I might show some of the outcomes of the big flower show. After many years of helping out, us husbands learn to appreciate the artistry and thought that the wives put into their work.

The Garden Club of America has no male members, nor will it ever have any. A bunch of radical, flower-growing feminists for sure. Have no fear: I'd hate to see the Lefty gals try to take over the GCA. They would all end up with flower clippers embedded in their unlovely bodies by the hands of these steel magnolias.

I have winning samples from several of the competition classes. Forgive my poor photography - I will never get past the snapshot level. This creation is 8' tall.

 This one is also 8':

 This one is about 30'':

 and this one is about 36":

 and here's another of the giant red ones. The gent obscures the red tropical flowers spilling out of the paint can:

A Christian urologist responds to an entitlement-minded guy who complains about the fee for an elective surgical procedure - a vasectomy reversal. Price, Value and Grace, at The Doctor is In. Wow. A sample:

I greatly appreciate your note, and understand well your frustration at the high cost of reversal surgery. To you these fees seem unreasonably high, an insurmountable barrier to the deepest need and desire of your heart.

By any objective standard, my fees for this procedure are reasonable. My current expertise in this area has been acquired through a long and arduous education and training experience, augmented by nearly 30 years of experience in performing this microsurgical procedure, which is extremely demanding — perhaps one of the most difficult procedures in all of surgery, regardless of specialty. There are perhaps no more than a few dozen surgeons in the world who bring this kind of experience to the restoration of fertility after vasectomy — yet many surgeons with far less experience, using cruder and often unsuccessful surgical techniques, are charging as much or more than this for the procedure. Top specialists in this field — which you know if you have researched these costs — not uncommonly charge two, three, sometimes four or more times as much as the fees I have quoted. Do I believe that many of these charge far too much? Most definitely — but most have earned that right through rigorous training, long hours, and hard work. They most certainly have the right to charge what they will — as you have the right to have this procedure, or not.

So I make no apologies for my fees. You say I do not live in your world, which is most certainly true; you also do not live in mine. Could you sustain the $40,000 a month which it costs to keep the doors of my small, efficient, one-doctor practice open? Do you believe these fees go merely to line my pockets, to keep me in Porsches and luxury yachts? Believe what you will, of course — but as the apostle Paul says in 1st Timothy (5:18), “The laborer deserves his wages.” The God who judges you also judges me — and before Him I am confident that these fees are just and not extortionary.

How many people do you know who complain about the price of medical care, but not about the price of a new car, or a new large-screen TV, or a new boat, or their estate-planning lawyer? Read the whole piece.

It's Friday, and early Spring in lovely Hartford, CT. How do I know? I hear the spring song of the Song Sparrow and of the Cardinal, and they are telling to me to think about planting some Sugar Snap peas soon. And soon our local Box Turtles will be clomping out of their cosy winter dens in the leaf and mulch piles, in their Wellies, looking for slugs and early shoots in the garden and hoping I will toss them a rotten tomato from the kitchen.

What to do on a dark rainy day like this, besides work? Well, we can reminisce about Fridays of old at Sippican Cottage, while waiting for Dust My Broom's Friday Blues and Beer series.

And we can reminisce about the 20th anniversary of Plato and Shakespeare scholar Allan Blooms' The Closing of the American Mind with R.R. Reno at First Things (h/t, View from 1776). An important book, and a best-seller, somehow. A few quotes from the Reno piece:

Bloom’s book was a real sensation and a surprise bestseller. Looking back, I can see why. The Closing was more than a highbrow attack on contemporary academic careerism (a la Jacques Barzun), a middlebrow defense of great books (a la E. D. Hirsch), or a populist exposé of tenured radicals and puerile campus ideologues (a la David Horowitz). The gist of Bloom’s polemic—and the book was nothing if not a long, erudite, and hyperbolic polemic—was a brief against the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He said out loud what liberal elite culture could only regard as heresy: The supposed idealism of the 1960s was, in fact, a new barbarism. Whatever moral and spiritual seriousness the long tradition of American pragmatism had left intact in university life, the anti-culture of the left destroyed.

The result? Higher education has become, argued Bloom, the professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit, and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day. Bloom identified moral relativism as dogma that blessed what he called “the civilized reanimalization of man.” He saw a troubling, dangerous, and soulless apathy that pleasured itself prudently with passing satisfactions (“Always use condoms!” says the sign by the dispenser in the bathroom) but was moved by no desire to know good or evil, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness.

I remember reading Bloom in 1987, feeling as though he was describing what I was experiencing as a young graduate teaching assistant. Bright, energetic, ambitious Yale students could master material with amazing speed. They could discuss brilliantly. They could write effective, well-researched papers. But they possessed an amazing ability to understand without being moved, to experience without judging, to self-consciously put forward their own convictions as mere opinions. On the whole, they seemed to have interior lives of Jell-O.

West 28th street in Manhattan has been the flower district for 100 years. I have always enjoyed the way NYC retailers and wholesalers have clumped together for the convenience of their customers and for the convenience of the trucks that deliver to them. The Diamond District, the Fulton Fish Market, the Hunts Point vegetable market, and so on. Heck, there is even a Financial District. Who knew?

Such districts have not been created by fiat or by planners, but have grown organically with the relentless logic of market capitalism.

You can find any flower or plant material you want in the Flower District, in almost any reasonable volume. 300 Bell Song tulips? No problem. As the second largest flower market in the world (after Amsterdam), the market serves retailers from MA, NJ, CT, NYS - and further. The vans arrive to load up on their day's purchases at 5 AM.

At 6 AM, you will also see a smattering of garden club ladies hunting out stuff for their next creation, which is what brought me and Mrs. Barrister and her pal down to the district from central CT in snow and sleet at o-dark-thirty this morning. I was chauffeur, but I do get a kick out of looking at all of the strange stuff. Some look like science fiction creations, especially some of the strange Protea which, it seems, have been all the rage in recent years. There is one Proteus that looks like eyeballs on a stem. The Greek sea-god was a shape-changer.

Her friend wanted these and these, and found them. And some other stuff like the winter Buckeye branches Mrs. B was looking for, plus a ton of pussy willows just for home.

As the city changes, the flower district is slowly fading, from over 60 establishments 20 years ago to around 40 right now. But it remains a bustling, thriving place in the early morning.

Now I will get out the old plow and do the driveway and the front of the barn so we can let the horses out. Snow day! I'll "work from home" this afternoon by the fire with a few warming glasses of something nice.