Tag Archives: squash

The garden in August.

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Today workers came, to repair and paint various places on the exterior of the house, including replacing part of a pillar near the front door, that is rotting because of all the dirt and plants around it — uh-oh. The plants needed to be removed, and I wanted to do that myself, and save them to put elsewhere. While digging I accidentally cut into an irrigation hose, but the handyman took it in stride and said he would fix it, so I didn’t need to have Alejandro over here just for that.

amaranth

Once I was out there digging and pruning, I didn’t want to stop. But I had to leave after a while and drive halfway across the county to the dentist. That was a pleasure, too, because I listened to the beginning chapters of Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, which our women’s book group at church chose just yesterday as our selection. I am loving it so far; the writing is a feast for the ears; I ordered a print edition so I can read it with my eyes as well. The only other thing I’ve read by Hardy is The Mayor of Casterbridge, which I also liked a lot, but it has been a while.

And at the dentist, I had to wait, so I read on Kindle on my phone, poking around into various books I have there. There was no drilling today or anything uncomfortable. Mostly I got to talk with my dear dentist, whose family and mine have been slightly connected and acquainted since she was a child. She’s also an excellent dentist, and a mom who likes to talk with me about our families. I’m so thankful for her and other members of her family who are also dentists ! and that they have stuck around, so we can still be in the same community after all these years, and I can have dentists I trust.

When I returned from that outing the workers had gone for the day. But I got to work again, and filled my neighbor’s green bin with all that had been left over after we filled mine a few days ago. Even though that area by the front door is in upheaval, and there is a lot of work to be done all over the property, I felt, rightly, that the garden is thriving overall. The figs are coming on, and the zinnias, and what do you know, I discovered an amaranth plant!! I did throw out all the old amaranth seeds into the planter boxes in the spring, along with others in the bottoms of packets, so evidently one of those managed to sprout and survive.

Fig tree behind the giant milkweed leaves.

The tarragon is extravagant:

Willowherb

The two weeds that are thriving right now are spurge and willowherb. Spurge is ugly and covers the ground like a mat, but willowherb is tolerable, as it looks like it could be something one meant to grow, and it hides among the ones you did plant — until it goes to seed, when it still doesn’t look bad. And it’s always easy to pull out.

Two plants I had to trim severely.

In the remainder of the week I need to repot a few plants, and to plant kale and chard in the front where zucchini did not make it. The basil is abundant and wants to be made into pesto. So far I have about six butternut squashes on the plants that are overflowing on to the driveway; it seems that I should have more fruits, because there are eight plants there, in full sun, but oh well, I will be happy to have a few. In the back, the kabocha and delicata squashes haven’t done well. I have a solitary delicata, which is very small…

After our little heat wave a couple of weeks ago, it has cooled down to about 80 on the warmest days, and the smoke has not returned. I’m loving August, and so glad that I am not one of the people who has to go back to school, when there is still a lot of summer left. September is my favorite month, but August may be my second-favorite. But I know many of the U.S. bloggers I read do not appreciate this month. Whether you are trying to stay cool, or cozying up in the Southern Hemisphere, I hope you find a way to enjoy the season.

Carpets fresh and clean.

bees, creativity, home, my garden, , , , , ,

The most encouraging news of the day is, the sun is shining, and the garden is growing. There is already a little Delicata squash on one of the two plants I started from seed in March.

I hired a man to clean about half of my wall-to-wall carpets. Last night and this morning I pushed and hauled furniture around so that I could thoroughly vacuum all the places beforehand. “Kyle” came this morning and was a very conscientious worker with a good deal of experience, and also lots of information for me about the various fibers he’d be cleaning, and how carpets wear, and how stains are removed. He told me that he usually vacuums himself, and was reluctant to skip that step. He asked if I had a good vacuum…? I do, but I let him do that part everywhere again with his machine, for his peace of mind.

Hall carpet just after installation.

I am so happy to have this job done. I don’t have pets, and all the grandchildren have been trained by their parents to remove their shoes in the house, so my rugs get along without frequent shampooing (this is an understatement which I won’t elaborate on); but I had reasons for deciding that this was the time.

While this thorough maintenance was happening over the course of several hours, I cooked up a pot of split pea soup; I roasted eggplant, toasted walnuts and made a batch of quinoa. The flannel bedsheets went into the washer and were replaced with the summer type, and I checked off several other tasks around the house, some of which have been delayed a couple of weeks, and some for months. It’s uncanny how every time I whittle down my to-do list, a few more things break or come due for maintenance.

Checking off the carpet cleaning, which should have been done years ago, felt really good. But — there was a little problem, which immediately added another task to my list. A solution that Kyle used, on a spot barely visible before, reacted with something I evidently used sometime in the past, and left a bleach mark in the middle of my hall. I usually only use water on spots, because they are most often just garden dirt, and I have no memory what it was I put there. Anyway, I will be contacting someone who can patch it, and I’ll have to take a piece from the back of a closet in order to match it. It will probably look fine, and anyway, people are not taking time to notice the carpet when they are walking down the hall. It will give me the pleasure of checking one more thing off the list — yay!

This Sunday we Orthodox will celebrate Pentecost, and I am getting excited thinking about the day. We decorate with greenery of all kinds; in our temple it’s often whole trees that are brought in for the feast, and in some parishes around the world they cover the floor with grass and wildflowers.

Pentecost in Poland

The thought of decorating the church floor takes me back to my new problem of an ugly spot on my floor. It makes me think about how many times I covered a stain on some garment or bath mat, etc, with embroidered flowers. My mind did immediately go in that direction when I saw the small bleached area in the carpet, wondering (very briefly) if there were a comparable fix that I could accomplish in a homey DIY way. It’s not easy to give up doing those creative things, especially when Chesterton’s words linger in my mind: “Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance… But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative….”

See the golden bee curled up in a ball?

I’m so happy that I can still be creative in the kitchen and garden. That is about all the creativity I have time for anymore! The borage (pictured just above) is blooming and the bees are loving it; they don’t mind having to hang upside down to drink. So many things are blooming, but I will just show you one more, the mock orange. Two bushes were planted on either side of my patio so that their scent would drift across the space where one might sit of a spring evening. Alas, spring evenings aren’t conducive to being outdoors in this neighborhood, neither does this particular mock orange have a strong scent; I have to put my nose right in the flower to detect it. So nothing is lost! And the loveliness of these flowers to the eye is great wealth. Thank you, Lord.

A batch of cookies and summer loves.

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Crape Myrtles are in full bloom in my neighborhood, including on my own property. Mine is not more than five years old, and in the last year it seems to have doubled in size.

I’ve been walking down to the creek bridge and beyond several times a week, and all the trees and plants growing in and on the banks of that stream also seem to have mushroomed, so that I can barely see the water below the bridge.

I love the summer, because it’s only in the occasional heat waves of the season that I can feel fully at home and in sync with the earth. In this climate with marine influence, where the evenings get cold and breezy even in the summer, it’s a treat to fully sink into the warmth and stay there all evening; even when I climb into bed I am relaxed, and don’t have to pull several layers up to my chin against the chill. Of course, this sounds crazy to those of you who live in high-humidity summer zones!

Even when it was over 100 degrees last week, I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden morning and evening, and then work on other projects in the middle of the day. I have plenty of paperwork and sorting yet to accomplish. If I ever finish that — Please God, help me! — I could sew, or read, or get back into writing book reviews …

When I read on my phone, I’ve started taking screen shots of quotes that I don’t want to lose. And I often look up words I don’t know — On Substack there are so many good writers with vast vocabularies — and take screenshots of the definitions.

Spider in the plum tree.

One morning as I set out on my usual walking route, I passed by the house down on the corner, where a vegetable garden has been carved out of the lawn, next to the sidewalk. For months I have been admiring the health and size of the plants, and that morning I spied a dozen beautiful yellow summer squashes peeking out from under the leaves, several of which should have been picked days earlier; on my way back I debated about whether to inquire about them. If the owners didn’t want them for some reason, I would take them… and if the gardeners had suddenly been incapacitated and couldn’t pick their own squash, I could offer to do that for them….

It sounded reasonable… and one hates to see beautiful vegetables going to waste… but what if I got involved with people I found disagreeable? Or who were needy beyond my abilities to help? I stood on the sidewalk and thought a while, then walked up to the door and knocked. The result: I made a new gardening friend.

Dee gave me three overgrown squashes, though none of the size I’d have preferred, and she invited me to come back for more. She enjoyed talking about her garden, and told me about her family that she lives with, including her recently widowed mother, who she said is the cook of the household. I wondered if that cook prefers overgrown zucchinis…. On one of the less sweltering days I did cook the squashes into a spicy, satisfying stew, which I was glad to have..

That’s my own chard and collards in the picture above, the leaves that were not eaten by insects or mollusks; I picked almost all of my greens and now my own little squash plants are spreading out in the planter boxes. Recently I transplanted the tarragon out of a pot into one of those boxes where it will get more regular watering, and it is thriving.

I used several sprigs of it to make Anytime Apricot and Tarragon Cookies from the Dorie’s Cookies book. They were in the chapter called “Cocktail Cookies,” and the recipe includes no sweetening beyond the dried apricots and tarragon.

I baked those savory shortbread cookies to take to friends who’d invited me for lunch, who I knew didn’t care for sweets very much. But they are winemakers, so I thought they might like the kind of savory cookies one could nibble on while sipping a glass of wine. We all thought they were really nice; it was amazing how much subtle sweetness we tasted in them; I think the level of saltiness helped bring it out.

I got together with several women who are collaborating to share homemaking skills; for our first meeting we focused on knitting. I had two cotton dishcloths I’d knitted a while back, which I decided to join together. I tried crocheting them together but I couldn’t figure out how to do that while at the same time chatting with everyone, so I just sewed them together with a blanket stitch.

I don’t have hopes of becoming an expert knitter, but I like to be with these women. And their babies! (At church there is a new family with a little guy just turned one, and he is the friendliest love bug. He loves me! And I never tire of holding him.)

Our host had an awe-inspring jar of kombucha scoby on her kitchen counter, and two of our group were happy to take home a quart of it to get their own kombucha production up and running again. My own fermenting experiments stalled decades ago with yogurt-making, and a succession of three yogurt makers that never satisfied. I never tried making sauerkraut, because that was a food I have been prejudiced against ever since it made a regular appearance on our table when I was a child; I did somehow manage to enjoy kimchi when my son “Soldier” brought it into the family’s already international culinary repertoire.

But I have made Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste!  Lemon verbena is one of my garden treasures, but I haven’t pruned my plant often enough or used its leaves much, and it has gotten very leggy. So when I saw a young and well-shaped specimen in the grocery store, I brought it home and now have two such treasures. When I pruned the older plant, I took all the leaves to make Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste. There were more or less potent recipes online; I used the one with the highest ratio of herb to sugar, 2 cups to 1/2 cup.

I stuck the paste in the freezer and hope I will remember to bring it out to add to tea, sprinkle on desserts, use as a glaze, etc. Maybe I’ll also remember to tell you here if I do.

After I asked my friend Cori what were her summer reading plans, naturally she asked me back. I should have anticipated that and not asked her to begin with — because I have no real plans, and feel like an imposter. I have been reading less than usual. I see that of the nineteen books I pictured here five months ago, I have read just two. Only one of those I got to the end of was from the stack I was going to “try extra hard” to read this year. Well, the year is half over, so it doesn’t look promising for those selections. I took new pictures of the “summer books” to show Cori, because it was easier than typing out the titles.

Four of those I have at least started reading, and the Undset book is my current reading-while-falling-asleep choice. I have, typically, read several books that I didn’t anticpate back in February, and some of them were not worth talking about, or even reading to the end.

But let me just mention a young adult novel I did read to the end and liked a lot, What the Night Sings. Written by Vesper Stamper, who was one of the speakers at the Symbolic World Summit I attended earlier in the year in Florida, this is a coming-of-age-in-the-Holocaust story, illustrated by the author. First I listened to the novel, and then I borrowed the hard copy from the library, because I wanted to see the illustrations, which are many, and are very well done, as is the whole story. Stamper’s Berliners, is at hand, too, waiting for me.

If you have read — or even scrolled — this far in my ramble, I’m impressed! There is some reason you stayed so long, though there were doubtless some topics along the way that didn’t interest you. Whoever you are, I appreciate you very much.

Flora, fauna and future of the garden.

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“From December to March,
there are for many of us three gardens –
the garden outdoors,
the garden of pots and bowls in the house,
and the garden of the mind’s eye.”

-Katherine S. White

I received a Christmas gift of flower seeds, which made me realize that I really do need to get busy and finish the upgrading of my greenhouse that was begun by my neighbor Bob in October. He supplied it with electricity and installed grow lights, but it remains for me to set up the heater, thermostat, fan and timer.

Then I can get seeds started a little earlier than would be otherwise possible during this season when the greenhouse sits in the shade of my two-story house. In the meantime, neighbor Terri and I can talk about our gardens past and future. Yesterday she gave me this heavy Pink Banana squash she grew last summer, evidently a good keeper!

I can eat one thing from the garden currently: collards — and I found a wonderful, vegan recipe for collards in coconut milk that I will try to post here. Fruit from the arbutus or Strawberry Tree got spoiled by the rain this year, but before that, at least it didn’t have anything like the mysterious pests or diseases of last year, which was a big relief.

Not my photo!

I received New Year’s gifts in my garden, not plants flowering or fruiting but birds visiting. Their energy and personality are even more welcome when the landscape is dark. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day a pair of Northern Flickers came by; they got my attention fast, such big birds acting like woodpeckers on the pine tree, but nothing like any woodpecker I’d ever encountered before. They hopped around the garden for hours, pecking in the bark mulch, so I had plenty of time to leaf through all the pages of Peterson’s guide until I found them. This was the most exciting Bird Event (repeated this morning!) since my first sighting of Hooded Orioles at the hummingbird feeder some years ago.

A different sort of event was when a bird flew into my slider and sat stunned on the mat for such a long time that I was able to take its picture. I had been thinking that these were some kind of sparrow, but once I got such a clear image, it was hard to fit the little creature into that family.

Attached to a suggested blog post in my WordPress feed that very evening, I glimpsed a photo that looked very much like mine. It was a blog post about Pine Siskins — what do you know! It’s Pine Siskins that I have been enjoying here for a couple of years at least.

They feed alongside sparrows, finches, and warblers, while chickadees and bushtits enjoy the suet feeder nearby. Juncos and titmice, jays and doves fly in and away. Occasionally a towhee visits… then the Cooper’s Hawk swoops down for the kill and adds drama, only three feet away from me across the glass. If I don’t take a break from watching these busy birds, I won’t get any seeds planted. Yes, that could happen….

…because the world is full of delights.