Gardening in my Roots, early May

 My cucumbers have some enormous leaves!  Not started climbing up their fence yet, but it's waiting for them.

This odd pepper plant has the pepper sticking upright. I thought it was just an ordinary chile pepper!

Tomatoes (this is just one) are very leafy...but no fruity.  The roma tomatoes have some green fruit but not a single ripe one yet.

And last, a monarch enjoying the butterfly weed that I planted last year. It reseeded itself (the weed, not the butterfly!) and came back with more than before.  If only I can keep the weeds out of the wildflower bed, it'll be lovely.

review: Sisters in the Wind

Sisters in the Wind

What a strange, strange book. At halfway point I was raving about how great this was—full of plots and subplots and mystery underneath the adventures of a young woman who is taken in by a couple of her dead sister’s friends after an explosion destroys the shop she was working at. Just as she was about to leave it, because “they” (the mysterious they) were getting too close.

I hope that didn’t give away too much.  I’m afraid to explain why I didn’t like the ending because that would definitely spill some serious beans. But I didn’t hate the ending, either, so I’ve recommend this book wholeheartedly. It’s in the YA category, but very enjoyable for an adult. It’s told in flashbacks from her various foster homes, interspersed with flash-forwards to current time. But I didn’t find the discontinuity at all annoying—it was done beautifully.

 

Review: Olive, Mabel & Me

 

Olive, Mabel & Me: Life and Adventures With Two Very Good Dogs

By Andrew Cotter

Very amusing little account of the author’s mountain hikes with and without his two Labradors, and its interruption by the Covid pandemic and shutdowns thereof. It appears—although that’s not the subject of the book—that during the pandemic he turned from covering sports events to filming and posting sporting event parodies starring his two dogs. But his book is more about his various climbing adventures with them.

 Don’t expect anything deep or revealing, but just a heartening reminder of why we love dogs so much and they, inexplicably, love us more. Even when we drag them out on long, cold hikes. In the snow. (Which they love)

 

 

review: The Serviceberry

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Everyone should read this book now. And maybe read it twice. Or even put it on a regular rotation—say, once per year. It’s short so that’s not going to take up too much of your time. Oh, but what it will take of your thinking!

Taking the humble serviceberry as an example, Ms. Kimmerer roams to economics and examples of how small local solutions can bring on very much happiness. Because, as she says, and we should all know, an economic system based on ever increasing growth, ever-increasing depletion of finite resources, is doomed to fail. “…it is an engine of extinction.”

And she gives lot of little examples of how we can progress beyond that fallacy and eventually arrive at an economy based on mutual respect and reciprocity.

On top of all that “philosophizing”, she writes some heart-achingly beautiful prose. It’s just lovely, like all her writings. (Except the gut-wrenching ones.)

Gardening In My Roots, end-April edition

 Some things in the garden are doing really well, like the peppers (hooray!), but others are just struggling. These beans are good, not great,

A little basil in between the tomato plants,

And a first harvest!  Actually, I've been getting snap peas for a couple of weeks, but this is my first and very delightful banana pepper.

Review: The Heart-Shaped Tin

Love, Loss and Kitchen Object

I really enjoyed this…until I didn’t. Let me explain.

She started off writing about personal things, like her mother and ex-husband and family and all the memories that get left inside of ordinary kitchen objects. It was deep and thoughtful, and almost singing in the way she wrote about things. And some things were imbued with dark or sad energy, and she wrote about having to get over her dislike of them or the way she had to repurpose items left by her husband to prevent them from depressing her every time she saw them.

It's organized with one chapter per item—short enough to read two or three chapters a day and stop/start at any time. And I found it all very pleasant.

About two-thirds through, some of the chapters became very impersonal and seemed to be mostly all research, or stories from the lives of different people she’d met. Still interesting, but it started to get old. And toward the end, with one notable exception (the story of the Heart-Shaped Tin), I started to get bored.

So I apologize for my short attention span. It’s still a very, very good book.

 

Gardening In My Roots, still mid-April

 

 

 

 

 Most everything looks pretty miserable, but the tomatoes and peppers were delighted to receive a layer of compost. It hid all (most of) the weeds.

Those yellow things are marigolds. I'm trying to attract pollinators.

No tomatoes yet but I do have a good number of baby peppers.