This is what I was expecting from the first of his books that I read! It’s almost all anecdotes from his life and his time as a small animal veterinarian. (Very few lectures or chapters explaining the complex answers to frequently asked, seemingly simple questions.)
It was very entertaining.
I think I need a new category to describe interesting plants I find on the property. Here's one:
It's native to the southeast U.S. and forms a nice little tree. But apparently in order to have berries you have to grow a female tree, so if I save these seeds and plant them, how many would I have to cultivate--and for how long--to get a tree?
Maybe I'll try planting the stem I cut off.
I’m sure there are plenty of reviews that will tell
you all you need to know about the content and plot of this book. But here’s
one from the perspective of a reader for whom this is just a little bit out of the
comfort zone.
There’s a lot of killing. And just like in the previous book, I just don’t think it’s realistic that Elvis Cole and his partner, Joe Pike, get away with killing people, breaking and entering, and other shady stuff. How are we supposed to believe they wouldn’t have to endure a whole lot of police interrogation? And there are descriptions of some hideously gruesome and brutal murder/torture scenes. I skimmed the worst one.
But there’s some redeeming introspection and depth to the Elvis Cole character that made it sort of worth while. I got to liking him, even while I thought his motives were a whole lot unsupported by what he was seeing and hearing. And there were unanswered and unanswerable questions. Like life.
It would be worthwhile trying a third one. To me. But I’ll squeeze in a couple of cozy mysteries first.
How could such a beautiful book be so damn depressing? I don’t know whether to recommend it or to warn you away from it! If you love nature and human kindness and old-time small town life, you’ll find it all here—told in slow, sensible and glorious prose. No fancy turns of speech here, and no sentences you have to read twice to get the sense of them. Just stories.
And it’s all so very sad. This is an elegy to the death of a way of life and those who loved it. Only a small family of backwoods people survive unscathed, and probably only then because the book ended before an economic development company acquired their lAnd and bulldozed it over.
But of course god heals all in the end. It’s kind of an elegy to “life sucks and then you die”… but it’s a beautiful life sometimes while you’re living it.
Our South
Black Food Through My Lens - A Cookbook
by Ashleigh Shanti
I can’t really give a rating for cookbooks because I can’t say that I’ve read every word or cooked very many, if any, recipes from them. But if I could, I’d give this one a 5-star review. The introduction and head notes are very interesting and there are a whole lot of recipes in here I’d love to try. I probably won’t, but if I get back into “cooking mode” it would be worth buying a copy of this just to have the options close at hand.
This is the “after” picture. I never thought to take a “before”. The dead stuff and Johnson grass and ragweeds taller than my head—not to mention the okra taller than the ragweed—kept nagging at me until I finally spent a week or so with the digging fork, shovel and hoe and got it under control.
Turnip tops-->
And the garlic was planted when I discovered the row from last year that had been buried in the undergrowth. When I dug it up, some of it had started to sprout so I just separated the bulbs and replanted it. I still have a lot left—maybe I’ll slip another dozen or so into the ground tomorrow.
Garlic
I also planted broccoli, spinach and lettuce but it doesn’t appear to be sprouting. I’ll keep my hopes up.
A sweet potato that I failed to dig up last year has persisted through the summer,
All the other green stuff is horseradish, which planted itself several years ago and sends up leaves in the spring.
And every year at the appropriate time I get a huge sprouting of okra, cilantro, and arugula that I planted years ago. The okra and cilantro come up in the garden beds, but for reason unknown the arugula has been gradually moving itself north toward the compost pile.
and, in the barn, a tiny toad lurks...
