I know you are all sick of reading about bathing a hen; I’m back from a vacation in Cornwall, UK and helping my daughter move back to OSU for her Junior year. With a gazillion photos to sort through, I’ll do my best to show you the highlights of our travels as well as keep you up on the growing of my gardens.
Why Cornwall? It is a land of legend, infinite beauty, the birthplace of many famous people, and is home of the pastie (a turnover with savory filling made by wives for lunch for their mining husbands). It was also supposed to be the warmest place in the UK in September, and the best place for birding as all the migrants fly near there. What no forecasting website let me know was that the hurricane that had hit the US East coast had moved north near Ireland, and gale-force winds were hitting most of upper Europe. Cornwall was no exception. The winds hit on the third day of our trip, and let up towards the end, so birding wasn’t so great ( you had to look quickly :). )
Our first lodging in Cornwall was at the Jamaica Inn (http://www.jamaicainn.co.uk/ ). How great is that! For you literary types, or those who love Alfred Hitchcock films, you’ll recognize this Daphane Du Maurier title which had been made into a movie. (Hitchcock also made movies of two of her other works, Rebecca and The Birds).
The Inn had been infamous for smuggling
Jamaica Inn sits on the Bodmin Moor in East central Cornwall. When we flew into Newquay (pronounced NEW-key) airport and rented our car it had just begun to rain with a little thunder thrown in for atmosphere. The drive through traffic was slow (the highways have cow crossroads with signal lights!) and as we approached the Inn the fog rolled in.
The museum in the rain.
There had been an accident on one of the highways so traffic was backed up. As we gratefully parked in the main parking lot of the Inn, an older man in a yellow traffic vest that had been out on the street came over and suggested that we park in the small lot in the front. He explained about the traffic, and joked about us being ready to meet ghosts at the Inn. I told him that with a meal, dry clothes and a warm bed, let the ghosts do their worst! He laughed and replied that ‘strange things happen around there.’ I moved the car, navigating a forty-five degree turn in a narrow, brick sided gate without scratching the car (England is infamous for this sort of thing), and re-parked. Glancing back at the road, I noticed that the man had disappeared. We never saw him again! Strange things, indeed.
The neighborhood isolated by fog
In three nights we stayed in three different rooms because of the Inn being full.
Main entrance
We moved from the smallest and oldest room, one which the owner vowed had the most ghostly activity, to a larger, slightly less ghostly room, to finally a large room in the ‘new wing’ with a great view of the Bodmin Moor. The staff knew us as the ‘traveling Americans’. The owner told us that only the night before the guest in that first room had stood up from the bed and felt a hand push him back, twice. We walked through the dark pub, up the winding stairway to our room, named after one of the characters in Du Maurier’s book, and entered our room. It could very well have been the source of many unusual phenomenom. Being in the old section, which dated back 400 years, the floor slanted inward so much that you could imagine yourself shipboard stuck on the roll of a wave. It was great. After a visit to the pub, I don’t doubt that the previous guest had fallen down.
A man who disappeared on his birthday on the moors.
The Inn is hundreds of years old, and definately has an atmosphere.
Original stonework and chains
At the Rancho Guajome Adobe in Vista, I havethe feeling that the house is like an older woman who was dressed in her finest, hair done up, back straight and proud, welcoming guests to yet another party at her fine home. At the Jamaica Inn, with its slanted floors, swaybacked roof and settled walls, I had the impression of an old, mostly toothless hag, one eye squinty, the other pierceing you with its gaze to see what you’re worth, and cackling at your dismay when you shudder. Wonderful!
Dining in the dark; makes you want a mug with a glass bottom!
There was a microclimate that surrounded the Inn; it was always colder, foggier, rainier and windier than even the coastal areas both North and South. We’d awaken to crummy weather and defiantly brave it to visit a garden or ruin, and find the weather a lot better once we left the area! Our last night there was the beginning of the intense gale-force winds. Flag poles were outside our room and they beat a strong tattoo all night. In the morning I pushed the window open against the wind to have a look, and wasn’t surprised at the flag that had beat so furiously in the storm.
The Jolly Roger
The moor is not the wild, heath-covered marshy area one would expect anymore. It has been cut into squares for farmland, lined with hedgerows or stacked stone walls. It still is beautiful. The radiant green of British and Irish fields can’t be explained, just loved.
Bodmin Moor through our window.
We didn’t have time to hike to the standing stones there, and tried twice to walk to the Dozmary Pool, the legendary home of the Lady of the Lake who kept King Arthur’s sword. We had heard that the ‘bottomless lake’ of legend does, indeed, dry up, and there is another lake that claims the sword as well, so we didn’t feel too badly about missing it. We walked across a field, sinking into wet spots, imagining Jane Eyre collapsed on a moor, and all the other stories and legends surrounding these fascinating places. I was glad to be close to safety!
Yes, that's fog behind the museum
The Jamaica Inn does brisk business as a tourist stop, particularly for busloads of ghost-seekers. They visit the Du Maurier museum, the gift store, and have lunch in the dark pub.
On the telephone booth, the only spot of color in the courtyard.
There are figures from the book lurking the corners, some of which speak to you when you press a button, and stocks in the front yard.
The harried heroine of Jamaica Inn, and touch of Poe with the cask of Amantillado
A ghost log sits next to the guest register for reporting any supernatural activity, and it is quite full.
The ghost log
I was mildly disappointed in not being spooked; however, if any ghost had tried to wake me up they would have been disappointed, for I was too tired to care!
Spooks!
Any adventure is enjoyed even more after you are safely home. I loved staying at the Jamaica Inn, soaked up the atmosphere, the grey stones the fog and all the corny spooky stuff set around the Inn. The name Jamaica Inn allegedly came from all the rum that was smuggled through. A plaque on the floor of the bar commemorates a spot where someone had been murdered. I wouldn’t have missed staying there for the world!
This year I grew watermelons. I planted organic seed in my raised vegetable bed, protected from gophers by aviary wire, grown in excellent soil and fertilized with organic fertilizer, watered often, and the vines produced three melons the size of grapefruit. The chickens enjoyed them very much. However, a non-organic watermelon from a six-pack stuck in the ground under a bamboo, decided to take over the world. Not only did it’s foliage cover a good portion of the upper soil, but it grew and has grown enormous beasts of watermelons. One we call King Watermelon.
King Watermelon is in the foreground, laying in wait.
My daughter and I watched a YouTube video on how to tell if a melon is ripe. One way is to watch the tendril opposite the stem of the watermelon, and when it turns brown the melon should be ripe. The area where the stem connects to the fruit should also turn a little brown. Also, under the melon should be a pale spot where it rests on the ground, and when that area turns from white to yellowish, that is another sign. King Watermelon had no spot. We checked every few days for weeks as the beast grew larger and larger, it’d tendril tenaciously green. Then suddenly, it was brown. Much celebration. My petite collegiate daughter crept up on King Watermelon and swiftly cut it’s stem. Then staggering with it, brought it into the house where we weighed it. It was an incredible 28 pounds. It is a wonder that any other plant in the area got any irrigation! Normally we’d slice the melon on the countertop, but King Watermelon was so large that he had to go into the kitchen sink, and he barely fit! It was there that he was butchered, in consideration of all the juice that might come out.
So large it had to be 'butchered' in the kitchen sink!
The insides were perfectly sweet, juicy and crunchy. I couldn’t believe how perfect it was.
Beautiful inside; sweet and crisp.
My daughter cut and cut, saving some for our dinner (all that extra water before bedtime wasn’t a great idea, though), and wrapping the rest. The chunks had to be stored on cookie sheets to distribute the weight on the shelves and protect from leaking juice. We had watermelon the next day too, and fed some to our very grateful and thirsty tortoise during the heat wave. There is a lot of King Watermelon left. It is scary to look into the refrigerator and see it all. Even cut up and wrapped, that melon still has an attitude. And I think he won the battle after all.
Wrapped sections for infinite eating.
And there are more melons ripening with each passing minute. Gulp.
Today I drove to Oceanside along Canyon Drive, a road I haven’t been on in years. There is a McDonald’s restaurant there. It was built by my parents; in fact, acquiring that franchise was the means by which they were able to move from New Jersey and their two record stores to California in 1966. The store wasn’t built that year, but soon afterwards. I remember playing in the dirt piles from the excavation of the basement, and visiting the long-gone gas station on the corner where the manager gave me promotional posters of drawings of movie stars. KFC was already across the street and still is there. It is an ancient KFC, possibly built by Spaniards along with the nearby Mission San Luis Rey. There was a drive-in behind our store. Sterling Homes was across the street, which was miserable, crowded, dilapidated military housing for Camp Pendleton, which has long since been bulldozed.
My first job was in that McDonald’s, putting together the paper collars that went around Big Macs all summer long when I was a young teen. I stood on a stool and hefted the heavy bags of shake mix to fill the machine, stocked supplies and ran errands. My father gave me ten dollars for that summer. Later I became an official employee when I was sixteen, in my blue polyester pants and zipped uniform shirt with stripes on the sleeves, and ball cap. Dad gave me rides in to work because I didn’t drive, and in breaking those long car silences he opened up to me just a little.
I worked there a third time, just after I was married. By then my parents owned all four Oceanside McDonald’s franchises, working extremely hard and putting money back into the businesses and their employees. Workers received Christmas and birthday gifts, bonuses, and a sympathetic ear. They loved my parents, who spoiled them all. Most were Marine wives, under twenty years of age with several children, an occasional bruise and a long way from home. I was hired to ‘help’ my father since he had heart trouble, but I knew they wanted me under their eye and protection (and control), with the idea that I’d want to inherit the business. I didn’t.
My job was as S.T.A.R., someone who developed local store marketing, booked and trained crew on giving birthday parties, arranged crew birthday and job anniversary celebrations and employee picnics. It was a legitimate position, but I couldn’t help feeling the taint of nepotism. It was when I was returning from Costco with a station wagon full of picnic supplies, now dressed in dark blue polyester pants that fit better than the generic employee uniform, a blue manager shirt with name tag and small blue tie, that I was stuck behind a line of cars. There was a four-way stop on Canyon, linking an area with grocery stores and small businesses with tiny inexpensive apartments, then on to the Samoan church and then McDonald’s. I was about the fourth car back, with that many cars in all four lanes converging on the stop signs. I heard honking from various cars as they pulled through, but I couldn’t see at what they were honking. I imagined a lost dog, terrified in the middle of the street with cars blaring as they sped by. Finally I was next in line, and to my horror I saw what all those cars, with white and black drivers alike, were honking at: a small black child, about two years old, standing in the middle of the four-way intersection, crying for all he was worth, snot flowing down his face, and cars edging past him as they honked their horns for him to get out of their way.
I pulled over and jumped out of the car, waving and shouting angrily at the other cars which still wanted to get past. I grabbed the child and ran back to the side of the road. He was past the point of comprehension. I wiped his face, bounced him on my hip (motherhood was another year and a half away from me) and looked around expecting to see a parent searching for him. There was nobody except the indifferent traffic. The child was no help; even calmer as he was, he wasn’t old enough to put together sentences. I couldn’t help but believe that his mother would be frantically looking for him, and bet that he had come downhill from the apartments rather than uphill from the businesses. So I began to walk.
The first apartment complex was foreboding. I met a black man getting into his car and asked if he knew the child. He didn’t. He wished me luck and left. Not knowing what else to do, I figured I’d better call the police, and in those days before cellphones, went up to the nearest apartment door and knocked.
To set the scene, if you don’t know me, I was then about 23 years old, a short 5’3″, very pale white complexion with light brown hair, wearing a wholesome McDonald’s blue manager’s uniform with tie and sensible non-slip shoes: a Norman Rockwell kind of appearance. I was holding a very dark black child still whimpering with a continuous stream of green snot running from his nose. The door was opened by a tall, lean, suspicious black man in his twenties, and farther in the apartment was another black man who looked, as I reflected later, as if he’d spent most of his life in prison. There was a funny smell in the air. In my own guileless manner, of course I immediately asked, “May I use your phone to call the police?”
There is a certain comic beauty about that moment. There was a look exchanged between the men. I went on to explain that I’d found the child in the intersection with cars speeding past honking at him, and I’d walked up the hill looking for its mother and couldn’t find her.
This explanation changed the atmosphere in the room from one of tension and readiness, to a sympathy and righteous anger that firmly moved me over the line from threat to -if not comrade, then at least not one of the oppressors. There was a melting in their general attitude. I then walked into the apartment of my new friends in these days before cordless phones and called the police. I reflected that that phone had certainly never called that particular number before.
The woman with whom I spoke was not interested, saying that the mother would probably show up soon, but they would dispatch someone and I should wait outside for about half an hour for a squad car. It made me wonder how many lost children were being found every day in Oceanside. I thanked the men, with whom perhaps four sentences had been exchanged, and still holding the child on my polyester-clad hip walked back out into the apartment’s parking lot and heard the door click firmly behind me.
I realized that what I had just done in all innocence and without a second thought in my righteous anger would have been my mother’s worst nightmare: what she had been warning me about since birth. I had walked into the apartment of two possibly dangerous men and if something had happened, no one would have known where I was. My car was down the street. But that never occurred to me. What is more, they were black and my mother had been raised to mistrust non-whites. The race issue didn’t bother me (my best friends in Kindergarten were Michelle Chen and Rosie Lopez, and a Mexican and a Samoan in high school), although I had limited exposure to people of color in the seventies and early eighties in the Vista school system, and at UCSD and UC Berkeley. There were economic barriers as well as fear of the unknown between races. In my high school in the late seventies there were perhaps five blacks, and at the end of middle school when Vietnam fell, and Camp Pendleton hosted a tent city for the refugees who had gone from people of wealth and position to paupers overnight, we saw our first non-American born Asians. I didn’t think about it at the time except I was obviously looking for a black mother, but when looking back I realized that I, a young pale white girl, was the odd girl out in that apartment complex.
Shortly after, the mother came running up the road. She’d left the baby sleeping in her apartment with her boyfriend and had walked down to get groceries. The child had woken up and found the boyfriend asleep and the mother gone, and had tried to find her down what little he’d remembered about the much-traveled path to the grocery store. I had the distinct notion that the boyfriend wasn’t going to be on the scene for much longer. I gave up the baby, a batch of hamburger coupons, and drove the two to another apartment complex farther down the road. Then, wiping drying snot from my shirt, wondered if my boss would ever believe my story when I had to explain why I was a good hour late returning to work.
In the August of one of my most successful years of vegetable growing, as the squash vines wither to reveal the graceful shapes of winter stews, and the cabbage moth caterpillers chew collards into lace, I am able to review and make notes on triumphs and things not-as-good-as-one-would-hope. Gardening is as much a practice as medicine, but healthier. What works one year may not work the next; for instance, there are melon years and no-melon years. A gardener can worry about the soil, the water, the sunlight and the bugs, but come to discuss the problem with enough other gardeners and there is sure to be at least one who didn’t have a good melon year either. Whether there is astrological truth in it or not, it matters not except to bring relief from the strain of worrying if there were no melons because of a fault in the gardener.
Here is my list of things that didn’t go as planned, and resolutions to improve next year:
1. Trim back foliage to make sure there isn’t something drinking all the water.
Ginormous Swiss chard root
2. Check for volunteers, especially those hitchhikers from the compost who decide to sprout.
One of three avocado volunteers in the collards
3. Don’t think you’re going to pinch the tomatoes back so that they grow onto a large trellis, especially since you don’t make the trellis. Tomatoes need some light to produce and ripen.
waArkansas Traveler just ripening
4. Warn visitors early about the rubber snakes.
Soybean and rubber snake
5. Count backwards from Halloween the estimated ripen days on the seed packet, and don’t plant too early. That way your pumpkins won’t be ripe in August. Also, plant herbs such as dill and cilantro early and thick long before cucumbers, so that you have the seed heads ready when it is time to make pickles.
Ripe pumpkins in August
6. There only needs to be one zucchini plant.
Monster zucchini
7. Prepare to stake everything. With wire-lined raised beds you can’t plunge a stick down into the soil next to a wobbly plant. You have to attach the stakes to the sides of the bed, or drive them down outside of the bed and make T’s. Whatever the choice, it is best done before the plants are mature.
Quinoa: pretty but floppy
8. Plant lots of kale. It is extremely tasty sauteed, and drying the oiled leaves to make kale chips (see recipe section) makes a nutritious and addicting snack.
Kale is yummy
9. Again, keep volunteers under control. This kabocha squash took over three vegetable beds and two pathways. However, it is producing some mighty fine squash.
Kabocha squash volunteer coming from the bed behind this one, around and into the end bed.
10. Rubber snakes are remarkably effective in preventing crows from eating seeds. However, besides warning visitors, don’t forget where you’ve tossed your rubber snakes if you are reaching into a leafy dark space at twilight!
I found a weed I loathe even more than Bermuda grass. I know that’s hard to believe. Bermuda grass has chased me out of my vegetable garden, and was part of the reason I laboriously built raised beds. It is even now working its way through some of my new planter beds and needs annihilation. I’ve seen Bermuda grass emerge from the top of a five foot hollow metal pole and cascade over the top. It survives under mulch, under rocks, under pavement. Think that is impressive? That’s nothing. Johnson grass has it beat.
I thought that the tall grass growing under the bird feeders was from the bird seed. I let it grow to see what seeds would come from it. The plant looked like corn stalks, and had a little tassel at the top. Pretty innocuous, huh? Then I started looking up on Google images what all the bird seed ingredients looked like in plant form. This stuff didn’t match any of it. Uh-oh. Then I started looking up invasive grasses. Bingo.
Looks like corn, or other weeds. Evil!
I read blogs where ranchers complain of having it on their land, and the general response is to burn, salt and run away from the land. Trying to be organic, I sprayed the tops of my Johnson grass with pure white vinegar, then covered them with black plastic during one of our hottest weeks. When I pulled it off the stalks were slightly pale, but boy they were angry. So I took a day and started digging them up and found tremendously thick roots that spread everywhere with such force that one had burrowed up into a log and I had to use a screwdriver to dig it out.
Johnson grass is the ultimate monster, it spreads by seed, by rhizome, and by any microscopic piece of the root left anywhere near the soil.
Roots worming through and around the wire
Last winter my daughter and I had built a new heirloom bulb bed, lined with black landscape fabric to deflect weeds, and on top of that aviary wire to deflect the gophers, mice and moles. Guess what emerged? The other day I spent a morning carefully digging out all the Johnson grass in and around the bed, following the roots and unwinding them from the wire which they embraced, while trying not to kill my bulbs. I thought I had won, but only two mornings later, there stood a four-inch tall sprout of Johnson grass! Aaaarrgghhh! So I dug it out, and dug more out, and more and more. Today I decided that I had to start from scratch, so I dug out all the bulbs and scratched out the soil (which I’m afraid to reuse because I know there will some miniscule rhizome just waiting. I think I’ll have to spread the soil out and cook it in the summer sun for a few years or so, just to make sure), and was glad I did. This was a task I was so eager to do in the hot sun while other chores stacked up, too! Not only was the JG entwined with the aviary wire, but it had solid, rooted rhizomes as fat as my thumb wriggling around under the black landscape fabric, consequently under five inches of soil, too.
Thick rhizomes under the landscape fabric
I’d use dynamite, but the weed would take advantage and all those bits would come up everywhere. An evil Sourcerer’s Apprentice.
Yes, that is a root sticking through the turned-over aviary wire
My fight against Johnson grass will apparently go on for some time. It is coming up in my pot filled with Christmas cactus, and in the midst of a thorny rose bush, and many other places, disguising itself as other weeds. I’ll not only have to keep digging it out, but cutting the stalks of the plants I can’t dig out without destroying a valued garden member. The question comes to mind: if I set Johnson grass against Bermuda grass, which would win? Whichever does win, it deserves burning and salting!
The Library: Cookbooks, Non-Fiction, Reference (including the complete 22 volume Oxford English Dictionary), and Fiction (Not shown are Christmas books, health and gardening books and some favorite children's books)
I need to confess: I read. Perhaps all of you are nodding, thinking that you, too, read. I’m very glad of that. However, my confession is something along the lines of AA. I read to a fault. I read between 3 and 5 books a week. Yes, all of them are over 200 pages, and no, none of them have embracing couples on the front. I read myself to sleep. I read myself awake sometimes. I’ll take a break in the afternoon and read, and wind up several hours later with very angry cats nagging me for their dinner. I have a stack of bedside books, books in the library, a book in each car in case of emergency. I’ll read until I have less than half an hour to wash, dress, feed animals, grab food and drive somewhere. I have read long through the night when I have needed to be up in the morning early.
I feel sometimes that I’ve been consumed by the books.
Living room: Humor, Do-It-Yourself and Old Books
I read too quickly. I could not recite the plots and names of the characters in the books that I read, and that is a major fault. I have a good friend who reads steadily and slowly, and can call to mind all the characters and all the plot points in all the books that he has read. I envy him that.
I read mostly fiction, but I always keep at least one non-fiction going at all times. I particularly enjoy well-crafted and researched historical mysteries. I have learned more about the history of the world, the nuances of human struggles and the colossal efforts to survive in the face of war, disease, political and religious oppression, starvation and exhaustion, than was ever even hinted at in any of my schooling. For instance, the Sister Fidelma mysteries are written by historian Peter Tremayne and concern the changeover from the ancient Celtic traditions to the strict and woman-hating traditions of the newly approved Roman Catholic Church in 7th century Ireland. In the Celtic world, women could be judges, teachers and could own property. There were universities throughout Europe. The Picts were still present, and their written word Ogham took the form of slashes on sticks, which were bundled together to form long documents and hung on walls to form libraries. The first witch hunts began when the Roman Catholics wanted to obtain land and power from the women and subjugate them. A man who proved a woman a witch could have her property and belongings, and the tests for being a witch were hard to survive (drown and you are innocent, float you are a witch).
From C. J. Sansom’s Mathew Shardlake series I learned about 16th century England and just what the dissolution of the Catholic church meant for the monks and the parishioners, and how life must have been like under a king who regularly took young wives, and had them killed when they didn’t produce a son.
Bedroom Part One: Series, storytelling, folklore and fairytales, some reference.
From Anne Perry I’m learning about Edwardian and Victorian England, the oppression of women, of the poor, of the inadequacies of the medical practice (they just discover chloroform so that operations can take a little longer, although most patients died of infection afterwards, anyway). About the threat of disease from the lack of sewers and the incredible labors it took to build the new sewers, and new railroads.
Elizabeth Peters has shown me Egypt at the turn of the century, in a series of mysteries that are as funny as they are educational. The Amelia Peabody series is priceless; three of our chickens are named after characters in those novels, so you can see how important it is to us! (Emerson, Miss Amelia and Evelyn).
In non-fiction I prefer travel writing. I’d love to travel the world, lingering in each place to absorb the language, the customs and the landscapes. If only I could do that while also staying at home! Travel writing allows me to vicariously see the fascinating corners of the world without suffering from airports, taxis, buses and car rentals, or trying to find vegetarian meals in a meat-loving place. I enjoy some Paul Theroux, Freya Stark, and many more who have helped me cross Africa on foot, hike through Tibet sipping hot tea with goat butter, fight the overwhelming fecundity of the sweltering, buggy Amazon rainforest, and sail through terrible storms and dead calms.
I also love to read non-fiction about animals, such as the books written by Gerald Durrell, or about wolf re-introduction (thanks, J & J!), or what survives in extreme weather. And about gardening and the love of nature and home such as Sue Hubbell’s A Year in the Country.
There is also satire such as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Incredible writing, a double-take kind of humor that makes you love your fellow man as you laugh at and with him.
I remember the first book that I read alone when I was five. It was a collection of fairytales. I still have it although it looks much smaller now. I remember getting through it the first time and feeling so accomplished, and then reading it again and realizing how quickly it went. Little did I know that I would be a slave to the written word from then on. My parents read when they could, and greatly supported reading. We’d attend the Carlsbad Library Book Fair, and I’d always order thin, wonderful books from the Scholastic Book Fair at school. I loved Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Tolkein, and The Three Investigators (so much better than the Hardy Boys!). I worked at B. Dalton Booksellers on the El Camino Real mall, then met and married another book lover who was a manager there. He became a book scout and I was once again going through stacks of books at sales again, trying to find treasures. After a divorce and a career as a Park Ranger I became a middle-school librarian for eight years. Heaven! All those old favorites, added to purchasing books at a time when young adult literature was exploding. So many well-written and well-researched, imaginative books! I still follow young adult authors because what they write is often so much more rewarding and intellectually stimulating than popular fiction. In fact, some of my go-to fiction when I need something familiar and comforting is from the young adult genre. Tamora Pierce and Sharon Shinn, to name a couple.
Bedroom part two: Reference on Writing, several complete series, and misc. In room behind is poetry and art, as well as all my daughter's books. And there are more books in other rooms, and in boxes in the garage, and in a stack next to my bed.
I’ve never been a bestseller-list follower, nor a lover of award winners or book club choices. I have had almost-conversations with women who are also good readers, and we have almost no books in common. A couple of notable exceptions have been the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Anne Shaffer, and finished by her daughter-in-law Annie Barrows when the author was ill, and the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency series. The former because it is warm, humorous, and yet describes the horror of living on an occupied island during WWII. The latter because it exposes a completely foreign (to me) way of life of a village in Africa and the warmth, simplicity and traditions of the people there. Both of these make me feel warmly towards the human race, which is something I need encouragement to do. Books that dwell on hopelessness, horror, unrelieved pain and despair, I just won’t give a time of day to. Also those mysteries that are violent and graphic for the sake of selling copies. No, thank you. Just keep my mind working and my interest peaked, thank you.
So I read and read. Have I mentioned audiobooks yet? They are on top of the reading books. At one point I had an audiobook for the car, one for the house, and one in the wings just in case. I usually have one or two in the car now. I listen to audiobooks of authors I probably wouldn’t sit down to read, or of books that are deemed important, award-winning or classic that I’ve either read and forgotten about, or never read for one reason or another, such as Pulitzer prize winners. There are audiobook readers who are superb at what they do, such as Barbara Rosenblat, and some where I’ve had to shut the audiobook off because the reader was so terrible. Usually authors really mess up their own work, so I try and avoid those. I’ve had audiobooks playing in a CD player attached to an extension cord out in my yard so that I could listen while weeding. The problem with that is you can’t easily leave the area even for a second because you’ll miss something, and your hands or gloves are too dirty to touch the CD to pause it. Areas of my yard have an afterglow of memory of the audiobook I listened to when I was working their: my side yard is very much the 1100s in Shrewsbury, England on the border of Wales where Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael is grinding herbs and solving mysteries. My backyard has a memory of the cold sea from listening to Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News.
I volunteer at the Fallbrook Library bookstore The Bottom Shelf once a month or more (there are set times and I’m also on the fill-in list). Three hours guaranteed guilt-free shopping in a dynamic used book store: dangerous! So many incredible books! Old friends, and new friends, and books from other countries and on topics I’d never thought of. How I love filling the shelves and keeping an eye out for my favorite authors! In come people with their lists. Decades-old index cards on keyrings that have tiny lists of titles from alphabetized authors, small notebooks, and school paper falling apart at the folds. I have my own lists carefully saved in my purse, as well as a regular notebook at home with authors and their complete works listed chronologically by publication date with notes about the series and author and how I liked them. I also post my books and some reviews on Goodreads, which is a virtual personal library list. I wish that I could remember all the books I’ve read in my life so that I can list them all and be complete. Perhaps book people are also list people. Gotta have a list. I buy books at a quarter, read them and return them. Can’t beat that.
Reading is a treat, a reward, a hobby, an education and an escape for me. I don’t watch television; I haven’t had it hooked up for about 16 years except to play DVDs and VHS tapes. I often wish that I could directly link all the books to my brain so that I can absorb them all and have all that knowledge. Oh, and have a memory that will handle it, too! I share books with my family and friends. I read aloud to my children until they were in high school, including the Complete Sherlock Holmes, all the Redwall series, most of Musashi, and stories from James Herriot, and many, many more, usually with me falling asleep while I’m reading and finishing the sentence with some garbled words my dream self interjected.
I have many faults, but few vices. I don’t drink often, smoke, or take much medicine or drugs. I may read murder mysteries but I can’t even feed a tomato hornworm to the chickens. But I read. Books, not electronic devices. I love the feel of a book. And I hope I always will.
There are a few very peculiar specimens in my garden, thanks to Roger Boddaert. They have nothing to do with edible forest gardens, drought tolerant plants or permaculture. They simply are fun. One of which is the Dutchman’s Pipe (Aristolochia), named that because it’s very odd buds look something like… well… the pipe a Dutchman might smoke, I’m guessing. I’m thinking that the Dutchman was either blind or drinking heavily to put something that looked like this in his mouth! Another less imaginative name for this variety is Calico Flower. They look like hanging squash when they are immature.
Many buds waiting to open
There are many varieties of this vigorous vine, each having different sized flowers. Mine has flowers in Summer and Fall, and they are sizable.
Flower Opening
The vines can grow 30 feet high, and the plant can easily cover the side of a house. They originate in the Southern United States, preferring moist soil.
Flower opening more
This is the larval host plant for the blue and black pipevine swallowtail butterfly, which don’t migrate this far west. Perhaps something else will find it useful.
Opened flower is flat
The flower develops as a miniature version of its large self, and then continues to grow into these sack-like buds. When ready, they fold open to become flat, with the seed pod in the back. The flowers catch the wind and twist on their stems like decorations. Or like those things in the original Star Trek that flew across the cave and attached themselves to Spock’s back. So another fun and kind of creepy plant, which will provide shade, food for butterflies, and a lot of conversation starting. Gotta love it!
I have four vigorous zucchini plants. Why four? Because in winter with a lap full of comforter and gardening catalogs, the January eye peers back at July’s garden and the plants are smaller, the harvest never enough. What if something happens to one spindly seedling? Then there would be no zucchini, and summer without it just wouldn’t be the same. So four tiny sprouts went into the ground and four large plants are what I have. The zucchini harvest began several weeks ago. My daughter and I have happily eaten sauteed zucchini, seared zucchini, broiled zucchini and have even made sun-dried zucchini chips. It has been too hot to make Rosemary Zucchini Soup (see my recipe section). Zucchini bread uses far too little zucchini for the amount of calories it contains. The problem with zucchini recipes is that they use far too little zucchini! Zucchini has many health benefits, and is low-calorie, versitile, and is the butt of many summer-harvest jokes. I say this while considering who I know that I might unload some of the harvest upon.
Zucchini Chips ready to sun-dry on the roof
We’ve both been harvesting under the enormous leaves this year’s zucchini plants have produced, and have kept up with it with few surprises. Until today.
In summer the days can run into each other with a speed that is breathtaking. We’d gone two days without checking. Then this morning after a second morning of trying to teach our old dog General the new trick of not hunting the chickens, which we were allowing out of their coop, we were on our way back to the house. It was hot already, the morning mist having burned off as if with an acetyline torch. My daughter carried strawberries in her hat and I was headed up to water stressed plants stranded without irrigation. Then I caught a glimpse of something along the edge of the raised bed. It was green. It was wedged against the corner and pressing against the edge of the wooden end. It was trying to break free. Trembling and exchanging fearsome glances with my daughter, I lifted a spiny leaf: There lay a six-pound zucchini.
This might not impress you. Perhaps you’ve recklessly gone on a summer vacation and forgot to mention to your neighbors that they should keep a cool eye on the big plant in the veg bed, and returned to find a green Moby Dick sucking up all the water in the garden. Perhaps you know already that the world’s record zucchini weighed 65 pounds. The world’s longest was 69.5 inches long, which is 6 and a half inches taller than I. Yet to find a six pounder trying to break down my much-cherished raised bed was something of a shock, especially when there was only a two-day gap between checking. This zucchini is only slightly less weight than my daughter at birth. Yet, I feel strangely deprived of maternal instincts toward it.
Big Zucchini
How luxurious it is to complain about too much food. I’ll make steaks out of this big one, and perhaps donate the smaller ones to the Fallbrook Food Pantry. And begin to harvest the squash blossoms more vigorously!
I don’t have much luck bringing food to events. When I need to bring food to a party, I seem to have some strong internal drive to fix the most inappropriate thing, and go through agonies to make it. Some mischievous elf in my head sends down strange images to my consciousness telling me what to make as soon as I volunteer. The food is good…. it is usually a recipe that I’ve made before and think is interesting and different. I’ve brought cornbread made with blue cornmeal to picnics, and people have shunned it thinking it was blueberry flavored, or an ugly homemade unfrosted cake, and gone on to the easily recognizable chain-store brand cookies lined up in a clamshell container.
When asked to bring a cake, I make some complicated thing that never looks as good as the picture in my head. My cakes are very tasty, but my decorating skills are, shall we say, possible candidates for cakewrecks.com. I’ve done a cake for a grand opening of a park where I simulated a pond with cattails made of broken pretzel sticks, or that is what it was supposed to look like. I made not one but three types of jelly roll cake with three different fillings for a bridal shower, and the day was so hot that the cakes kept sticking and sliding and I had to keep running up and down the stairs to the garage refrigerator to chill them. I actually sat down and cried because I was so frustrated and had spent the entire day baking in a heat wave with a mess to show for it. I ended up arranging the individual cakes in a flower shape and sprinkled dried rose buds and edible glitter around. It looked pretty, if amateurish, but I knew they’d taste wonderful. It was so hot in the car I thought I would be redecorating my Prius with homemade lemon curd and chocolate filling. I had to stick the large pan in the surprised hostess’s refrigerator, which took up a lot of space. Then when it was cake time, I found that the jelly rolls had already been sliced up and plated so that you couldn’t tell the flavors apart and all the rosebuds thrown out, without the bride-to-be or anyone else even seeing it. I could have just made a sheet cake and everyone would have been happy.
I’ve brought vegetarian main dishes that no one but my children and I seem to want to eat, even though they aren’t creepy tofu-y mock turkeys or anything. Labeling a dish ‘vegetarian’ is like putting a curse on it, although many dishes other people bring don’t have meat in them either. To be ‘vegetarian’ means scary, weird food of unknown origin that probably tastes like sprouts or tofu or whole wheat.
I know when my offerings are rejected, it isn’t really the food… the food tastes good. That is, if anyone dares eat it. It is just out of place, just as I am at most parties. My food and I belong at small gatherings of friends who are expecting a new experience. Who want to try something different and talk about it. Who enjoy subtleties of flavor and the goodness of fresh herbs and spices. Who don’t judge on how good a dish appears, but how it tastes. Who are forgiving and especially have a good sense of humor.
Which brings me to another example of something not to bring to most parties: roasted radishes. Especially to one where there is a lot of drinking going on. Everyone will wonder what they are and no one will touch them because there is perfectly predictable Albertsons layered nacho dip and bagged chips right next to them. Since roasted radishes aren’t the prettiest looking things, they will be the last edible thing on the buffet table besides the really, really cheap half-finished bag of corn chips, and when everyone is really, really drunk, some unpleasant personal comments might be said about their appearance. The radishes will be cold and soggy by that time, too, and not the best thing for someone with a lot of alcohol in his or her system to put into his or her mouth at that point. However, if served at home as an interesting appetizer along with something less scary-looking, these are just great. No, really, they are. You should try them. I was impressed enough to try to force them on strangers at someone’s home, so you should be, too.
Roasted Radishes dressed up for a party
Growing radishes is very easy and quick, and roasting them gives you something to do with them. Radishes only take a few weeks to mature, so they are often the first thing up and ready in the garden. Give this recipe a try the next time you roast veggies; many people who don’t really like radishes enjoy them this way.
I’m about to do the drive from Fallbrook, CA (in San Diego County) to Corvallis, OR again. Almost exactly a thousand miles. I’ll be back home in six days (I’ll be blogging as I go, though!). However, the day before a trip I get a little crazy. I whip myself into a cleaning and organizing fury. Part of it is that I like to come back to a clean house. Part of it is that I have a lot of animals and I want to make sure that they are all as set up as possible with food, water and clean bedding, even though they’ll be taken care of on a daily basis while I’m gone. Part of it is that I get a kick out of multi-tasking and coordinating, and I burn off a lot of pre-travel worry this way. I shop and stock up on animal food, I do laundry, hauling wet sheets and rugs out to the clothes line and back in again. I cook, take out recyclables and trash, pack and blog. I soak and scrub cat and dog dishes, I sweep the walkway (why? I don’t know. It will be gunky by the time I get back), I clean out the last of the honey that is dripping from crushed comb and give the bucket to the bees to clean up. (Straw on the bottom keeps the bees from becoming stuck in the honey and drowning.)
Bees cleaning up honey
I water everything. I wash the dogs and their bedding. I leave unnecessary notes.
It is wise to keep out of my way on the day before a trip.
Work will go on in the yard while I’m away. I’ll tune in next week to find out the answers for….
Will the lower pond be filled, and not look like green tea?
Pond algae
Will these palm trunks become a bridge?
Bridge pilons
Will these fancy new stairs made from cement chunks lead to something?
New Steps
Will the jasmine hedge still be blooming?
Jasmine Hedge
Will the giant sunflower ever look up? Will the vining vegetables take over the property?
Garden Growing
Will whatever is eating the stairs leave any to walk on?
Chewed Steps
Will the subterranean irrigation lines be buried?
Irrigation lines
Will the kumquats ever get cuter? (Impossible. Too fun a name, to say and to spell. Go ahead, say it: “Kumquat, kumquat, kumquat.” See? Cute name for cute fruit.)
Kumquats
These and other questions will (in all probability) be answered next week. Stay tuned for the answers… same bat time, same bat station.
