More mystery, murder and morass of personality---love it!

All Mortal Flesh
by Julia Spencer Fleming

The villain of this latest rollercoaster ride is a "statie"--an investigator from the state police who specializes in cases of coverups and crooked cops.  And of course Russ Van Alstyne, whose wife was killed in his own house after she kicked him out, is the prime target.  You have to hate her.

And on the Claire Fergusson side of the fence, she's been assigned her own investigative nightmare--a deacon sent from the diocese to help out with the church work...or keep an eye on her.

With all these distractions, will they manage to find the real villain?

I'm happy to write that she's taken the murder off screen, which is where I prefer to leave it.  But there's plenty of action left for the narrative.  I'm not exactly back in love with the series yet, but still I had the next book in my ears less than a day after this one finished.

Recipe Reduction 137..136

Alton Brown's Fried Chicken  (sorry no pictures!)

I borrowed his technique but not his ingredients. Wish I'd done it all!  He includes garlic powder, paprika, and cayenne pepper, but my husband didn't want all those spices in the gravy.  So I left them out. And he decided not to make gravy. I feel cheated.

Good technique--overnight marinade in buttermilk.  And free-range chicken, of course. It was tasty.

White Beans and Cabbage
by Heidi Swanson

My, was that quick!  Of course I made the beans on Sunday, cut up the potatoes yesterday, and forgot the hot peppers.  I'll throw them in now but it won't be the same.

And the result? Boring with a capital Bore.  She wants you to cook diced potatoes, mash in a layer of cooked beans and onion, brown on both sides (which is impossible because you can't flip the stuff), then add shredded cabbage and cook, DRY, a little longer.  Note my emphasis on DRY.

This is a glorious example of how to take three splendid foods and ruin them.  No keeper, no!  I can't delete it fast enough for me.

I must have thought it was about running

Running to the Mountain
by Jon Katz

The story of a man who started out writing a book about Thomas Merton and ended up writing one about himself. His journey (A Journey of Faith And Change according to the subtitle) involved the purchase of a cabin in the mountains, removal of all the vermin who occupy an unused cabin in the mountains, and proceedings to making it habitable and himself capable of inhabiting it.

Sound confused? Yes, it is--it's a pretty confusing process, remaking a living space and human being at the same time. He succeeded pretty well, it seems to me. If you're thinking of reading it, go ahead--you'll find it chock full of deep, shallow, and gobsmacking wisdom.

I grew a little impatient with his self-exploration, especially in the last one-quarter. But that's not saying it was too long.  It's his story--his journey--and I have to let him decide the amount of time he needs.

Recipe Reduction 139...138

Baked Ranchero Eggs  with blistered Cheese and Avocado-Lime Cream
by Smitten Kitchen

Very good, solid, yummy recipe and eminently suitable for a weekend brunch with guests.

What I did, not so good. I cooked it to a perfect degree of almost-doneness, eggs just a tad soft in the yolk, and then... I didn't eat it!  I saved it for weekday breakfast. Reheating eggs, especially poached eggs, is pretty much impossible. Scrambled eggs can survive it--not well, but just tolerable. These were leathery and dry at the same time.

Sauce was good.  It's a keeper with the disclaimer--don't have leftovers!  That's what dogs are for.

Teriyaki Cauliflower Rice Bowls
author unknown

I threw together some quick-and-dirty teriyaki sauce, noting that it contained a lot of soy sauce, a lot of sugar, and a lot of honey.  Pour half of it over the sweet potatoes and bake them--which would have been quick and easy if I'd turned the oven to the right temperature.

Stir-fried some cauliflower and garlic and ginger, and put it all together with frozen edamame and frozen corn.  Huh--not much to it. But it was good!

Of course, cardboard would be pretty good with all that soy sauce and sugar on it.

Gardening in my Roots, Sick Day

It was prime weeding time on account of the rain Saturday--neither too much nor too little. And I felt horrid (head cold) and did almost zilch.




Okra is up--you can't beat that stuff.  I'm anxious ot see if these are the seeds I saved from last year's crop or the new ones.  Everything else is struggling--except the cold weather crops, of course.  The tomatoes and peppers that weren't damaged by frost seem to have big collections of buds on top, or something. I have no idea what that means.  There are a few peppers developing on plants with very few leaves.




Bok choy is going to seed--I'm eating it now.

But the snap peas loved it!  They finally reached the top of the fence.

Why do we garden, anyway?

The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden

by

William Alexander

I failed to read the subtitle carefully. He's on the quest for the perfect garden, not the perfect tomato.  I rushed through the first half of the book wondering when it was going to get around to comparisons on tomatoes. Not that I'm obsessed with tomatoes; I was just thinking the book was going to concentrate on them. It never did, although he did use the final accounting of how much he spent versus how much he harvested to come up with the estimate for the cost of a single home-grown Brandywine.

By the way, I'm not the expert here, but I don't think the picture on the book cover is a Brandywine tomato. The one I grew--yes, only one--was pink not red, larger, and flattened. I expect the publisher sent an aide to the supermarket to snap a shot of whatever was available.

Back to the point--I enjoyed the book. The Battle of Bambi was succeeded by the Saga of  Superchuck, a groundhog so much in love with garden produce that he shrugged off electric shocks of increasing voltage.

Mr. Alexander ended up philosophical about the business.

Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there's always next year. Experience doesn't count. Just because the carrots have been knobby, misshapen, and somewhat bitter four years in a row doesn't mean they're going to be knobby and misshapen next year....
Blessedly the voice of experience, the voice that should be crying, "Oh, puh-lease!" never pipes up in the garden. And I, for one, hope it never does. It is not wanted there.

A Family Collection:

Life on the Farm and in the Country, Making a Home; the Ways of the World, a Woman's Role

by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Selected articles written by Laura Ingalls Wilder for The Missouri Ruralist newspaper. The idea of this collection was to let us know what happened in the time between settling on Rocky Ridge Farm as a farm wife and producing beloved classics of children's fiction.  I can't say that the collection succeeded in its mission, but it did give us a glimpse of what she was really doing all those years. Farming is hard work, but living close to the earth is worth the work.

Some are instructive in a practical manner; some promote women's importance to the economy; all have moral overtones, but oh, so gentle is her prodding!  And in that elegant, nineteenth century prose!  (although they were written after the turn of the century)

Spring has come! The wild birds have been singing the glad tidings for several days, but the are such optimistic little souls that I always take their songs of spring with a grain of pessimism. The squirrels and chipmunks have been chattering to me, telling me the same news, but they are such cheerful busy-bodies tht I never believe quite all they say.

She continues with an exhortation to picnickers to clean up their litter, but you get the idea. She's working hard and enjoying her life. When you're doing what you want and living as you please, maybe you don't feel so great a need to write your life history. That came later, when she grew older.

One more quote:

I have a feeling that childhood has been robbed of a great deal of its joys by taking away its belief in wonderful, mystic things, in fairies and all their kin...  A young friend with whom I talked the other day said that life was so "much more interesting" to her since she "began to look below the surface of things and see what what beneath." There are deeps beyond deeps in the life of this wonderful world of ours. Let's help the children to see them....

Recipe Reduction 141...140

 
Plantain, Avocado and Black Bean Bowl
from A Modern Way To Cook

I'm told that trendy, big-shot chefs tend to use a lot more acid on food than we ordinary people do.  But anyone who'd put an entire lime's juice on a two avocados is just plain sick, don't you think?  I'm certain she meant "add lime juice to taste", but that's not what the recipe said.  It was hideous.

Once I scraped the bitter avocado off the top, the rest of it--leeks, black beans, and caramelized plantains--tasted okay.  Barely okay.  It needed the avocado, but done correctly with just a drop or two of lime juice, a minced onion, and a few leaves of cilantro.

Also, this was the first of my timed recipes from A Modern Way to Cook.

According to her: 20-25 minutes.

I messed up little by cutting my leeks the week before, so my stopwatch didn't include the amount of time it would take to trim, wash, and slice the white parts of two leeks.  My guess is, for an experienced cook, 5 minutes, but for me, at least 10.  So...adding on that 10 minutes, here's my time:
    39 minutes and 51 seconds.

That's a 60% margin of error.


Chinese  Nine-Vegetable Hot and Sour Soup
Adapted from The Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health

It's certainly very healthy.  Actually the soup is nutritious; it's me whom it makes healthy.  It makes a huge pot of yummy soft vegetables; I'll be eating on it for two weeks.

But as a recipe, it's not a keeper.  Too much stuff going on in there. Cabbage and bok choy?  Carrots and sweet potatoes?  I like my simple recipes better.

Love lost

To Darkness and to Death

In my review of #2 in the Rev. Claire Ferguson and Ross Van Alstyne Mysteries, I reported that I was in love with the series and wouldn't be able to discuss it critically. Here and now I announce:
I have fallen out of love.

I thought the whole point of a mystery, as opposed to a thriller or a plain old book, was the mystery. The puzzle; the discovery; the slow unraveling of clues, means and motives. As Dorothy Sayers once wrote, crime in the purely intellectual sense. In my idea of a mystery, the actual dirty deeds occur in the past or offstage; the plot concentrates on the detective and the detection process. There's not much mystery when you know exactly what happened.

So you can imagine my disappointment at having to suffer through chapter after chapter in the minds of the killer and his victims, feeling real-time the pain and suffering and stupid decisions they make. I know life is tough. I know good people do bad things, often for totally inadequate reasons. I know anger, pain, and frustration.

But I don't want to read about it. I don't mind experiencing peoples' emotion, but I don't want to be dragged through the mud with them.  Bleah!

Gardening in my roots

Today's episode is subtitled, Riding the rollercoaster of springtime weather.

Against all predictions, Friday was a repeat of last Friday.  The rain was supposed to pass through by noon and the temperatures start to plummet. But instead, at 4:45, when I was thinking about going home, I noticed it getting dark and windy outside. Looked at the radar--

Whoop!  A HUGE line of severe thunderstorms were bearing down on my house.  I headed out immediately.  All the way home, I watched the huge, dark clouds pressing in from the west and north. Tornadoes were on the move....

Then it split, skirted around my house to the north, and didn't drip a single drop on the garden.  The temperature did eventually plummet, but the first night it was still very windy, so no frost.  I thought I was home free.

The next night the wind stopped and the skies went clear and the thermometer stopped at just below 32.  I had turned on the sprinker that evening for a while, but I hadn't checked its coverage.  And yes, of course, frost.  At least four tomatoes and three peppers are damaged beyond recovery.   The rest made it--so far.

All is not grim and weary. I have first salad!


And a small harvest of bok choy. I felt like a murderer.

Sticking to the formula; still works for me

Royal Flush
by Rhys Bowen


Nothing special to say--how about, another lively romp in the high society past?  Fun and forgettable, like a warm chocolate chip cookie. Who'd want to live life without chocolate chip cookies?

Deeply in love with this series

Out of the Deep I Cry
by Julia Spencer Fleming

She's trying an experiment here and it works. Barely. She's switching back and forth from THEN to NOW and letting us see the events of the past that led to the tangled problems of the present. With careful crafting and superb plotting, she succeeds--sometimes the THEN events are presented before the NOW effects that they explain; sometimes after; but always holding back just enough to keep the suspense moving.

I admire the way she includes tough topics in her stories but doesn't over-simplify them.  Vaccinations, autism, loss of livelihood, greed--is greed the right word here? No, not greed exactly, but I can't explain without giving away too much of the plot.  It's one thing to want things other people have, but it's a different thing to think you have a right to those things but feel that someone or something is preventing you from acquiring them.  It's a feeling of entitlement. Is a feeling of entitlement the root of all evil?

Another thing I love about her writing is the depth of the emotions she lets her characters express. An autistic child's mother's fierce protectiveness; an old woman's grief over long-ago events; a man's self-hatred that extends to all the people he is powerless to protect....

Recipe Reduction 145...142

White bean garlic stew
from fat-free vegan

Something wonderful happens to garlic and carrots when you cook them gently for a long time.  This stew called for whole cloves of garlic but after an hour simmer, they came out soft and gently flavored--loverly.  it should have been a perfect bowl of gorgeous vegetables--beans, carrots, onion and tomatoes--

But acid. Aka sour. Just a little. I think it was my tomatoes.  Not my tomatoes, mind you--if I could approach every recipe with a freezer full of home-grown tomatoes to work with, I'd consider myself a successful gardener. No, these were the discount brand of canned tomatoes at a big-box store.  Next time, I'm buying Hunts.

Red Beans And Rice
a taste of home

Funny thing about this recipe--I compared the ingredients to my standard recipe from a long ago cookbook by Talmadge, and they were almost identical.  Out of fifteen ingredients, only three differences.  Is this a plagiarism or simply a convergence?


I made some adjustments, like using less water to cook the beans and then not throwing it away with all its yummy flavor.  I put in more garlic and used a little smoked tabasco paste instead of the hot sauce it called for.  The reason for that last substitution was embarrassing--when I pulled out the three bottles of hot sauce from my cupboard, none of them looked or smelled fresh. There was Tabasco Sauce, Frank's Red Hot, and Louisiana, but they were all brown and smell tired. How long had those bottles been in there?

Years. At least.  It's not we don't use it, it's just that we don't use much of it. One bottle lasts a long time and we had three.

The Red Beans came out good. Not great, but as always, better than store-bought.


 

Chili con queso

Horrible and I can't even guess why. I already had a recipe for queso, so this failure isn't worth writing about.  Stupid of me to save it; stupider to try it.  It's gone.


Hot and sour cabbage
 from The Seventh Daughter by Cecilia Chiang

Good!  Nothing more than toasting a few dried chiles in oil, adding shredded, salted cabbage and wilting it, then tossing with some home made chile oil.  I'll make again.

But I can't help wondering if this was supposed to be a fermented dish...?  She tells you to keep the cabbage covered with the oil and store in the refrigerator, but wouldn't that make more sense if you were going to let it ferment for a while?  I suspect the original dish wasn't refrigerated at all.

Been there, done that, doing it again someday

Route 66 Backroads:

Your Guide to Scenic Side Trips & Adventures from the Mother Road

by Jim Hinckley

Not a guide to Route 66, but a guide to the side trips off Route 66 where you get to see the good stuff.  It's an interesting way to plan a book, and I could see it being indispensable.  If, for example, you were a person who decided to travel the entire route in a leisurely series of one to two week travels, you'd want to have this book along to goad you into getting off the interstate, the feeders, and the few stretches of the original road. You'd want to see museums, botanical gardens, lakes and volcano craters.

And it's gorgeous, too. Don't try to sit down with this and read it through, but definitely pick it up whenever you're planning a trip in those areas.  My list of places I must go somewhere has doubled overnight.

Shallow and quick and so very entertaining

Her Royal Spyness
by Rhys Bowen

Yahoo, I finally backed up to the first book in the series! I had to read this one in print; no audiobook available at the library. That does make me wonder how many of them the library has in audio form...oh. None.

No rush, then. I'll read them in print or try an Audible subscription again.  I suspect that if you read one book, you've read them all, and the rest is just variations on a them. Very good variations, that's for sure, and I'm looking forward to the rest. Just not in a rush about them.

Gardening in my Roots, blah edition

We barely escaped freezing temps last weekend. A rapidly-moving front on Friday dumped a pleasant amount of water on the garden, but it was followed by two overnight lows in the mid-thirties.  I still have three unplanted pepper plants and one tomato--I brought them inside. 

Everything survived, even me.  (I was out driving home when the front came through and I may have narrowly dodged a tornado!)  But I can't exactly say anything looks happy.  Except the grass.  It's cropping up in huge clumps in places where I never saw grass before.

The beets are the biggest disappointment so far. Something is eating the leaves as fast as the leaves can form. I don't think it's bugs--look at this--

Maybe the only reason I got a decent crop of beets last year was that the row cover prevented critters from getting to them?

The beans survived the cold, but they're not looking good at all.  I just replanted a lot of them; maybe it was too early for them.  Will see. But what we won't see, is an early harvest of radishes. It's true that the purpose of the radishes was to be a nurse crop for carrots, but still I expected to eat a few of them.  I'd chosen a white 'icicle' variety in memory of my mother--it's her favorite--but these must be the slowest growing radishes in all creation.  I've pulled up four and there's no more than a pencil-tip of root down there. 


The carrots they're nursing:

 

I hope to have a better report next week, but Friday's prediction looks like a re-run of last Fridays'.

Recipe Reduction 147...146

Lunch Jars

This was one of those adorably cute articles about the different lunches you can stage in mason jars and then eat cold or 'cook' by adding hot water. I don't know what kind of idiot I was to think I'd ever actually want to go to so much trouble. Each one makes only two servings and each one is very high on the hassle meter. 18 to 21 ingredients, each--really?

I ended up doing the Thai Rice Noodle Jar but I couldn't get 'instant' rice noodles and ended up with regular, which take 8-10 minutes to cook. I left out four of the thirteen ingredients, too, and....

Darn! I was all prepared to hate it, but it came out pretty good. Maybe I should go back and look at some of the others.

The burrito jar would taste great, but having to char an ear of corn on a grill makes it a non-starter for me. It's okay for rich people who have a stovetop with a built-in grill. Also it has you making guacamole by adding olive oil to an avocado. What kind of idiot would put oil on avocado? Is this a recipe for people on high-fat diets?




The grilled vegetable/quinoa bowl would take an hour to prepare. Plus it calls for feta, which I hate, balsamic vinegar, which I hate, and Dijon mustard, which I dislike. It uses 1-1/2 tablespoon (plus more for drizzling) of olive oil per bowl. That's 180 calories just from fat alone!

The kale pesto jar is even fattier, 2 tablespoons per bowl. Nope.


Tempeh Tacos

Tempeh is not my thing. I think I have one more recipe using tempeh and then I'm done with the stuff. The idea is that you use it as a filler in a recipe otherwise loaded with flavor, and since it has no flavor of its own, you think you're eating some nice chewy goo, like a hamburger or a bowl of farro. Me, I'd rather have the farro.

#2 in my addiction

A Fountain Filled With Blood
by Julia Spencer Fleming

Since I'm in love with this series, I won't be able to describe it rationally. I liked this book even better than the first--dogs! Helicopters! Russ' mother! And I don't remember being off-put by excessive lovelornity or too many coincidences. Coincidences happen; but in mystery fiction, coincidences happen.  Lots.

It's normal and to be expected, but too many coincidences can ruin an otherwise enjoyable mystery. Not the case here.

I am curious if the author plans to age her characters. The first book occurred in winter; this one occurs the following summer.  In the next one I've started, it's winter again. So are her characters a year older?  (If no one tells me, I'll be content to wait and see.)

Recipe Reduction 148

Yesterday morning I did something I shouldn't have. I had discovered that I wanted to skip a few of the saved recipes--one was a duplicate but the others were just things I'd lost interest in trying. Also, there was one recipe that was going to be too expensive.

So I deleted them and replaced them with new ones I'd pulled from A Modern Way to Cook.  (The expensive one I moved to a new folder: Things to Try Maybe Someday.)

And that was bad.

Wasn't the whole purpose of the exercise to teach me a lesson? To teach me to not keep on accumulating baggage that fills my space and leaves no room for new ideas to try? Well, maybe not--it wasn't a punishment, it was a motivation. Quit saving the dumb things and start trying them!

But discarding things without even trying them, and filling the bucket with new things, definitely wasn't the point.

No more cheating! 
(Except about the imitation feta cheese recipe. When I saved it, I thought that feta cheese was this magical ingredient that would transform my meals into masterpieces. Now I think that feta is a trendy, overused rip-off of some European cheese that might possibly be good--but you can't get it in America without paying import fees. I'm sure the stuff they use in restaurants is as fake as imitation margarine; I know it tastes like stale cardboard. I don't want the junk in my kitchen, so why imitate it?

Very Veggie Scramble

I was getting all ready to complain about the too-short cooking time--three to four minutes in a skillet was supposed to make broccoli florets tender? That's impossible; eight to ten minutes was more like it. But I read the recipe wrong--I was supposed to mince the florets, which would have let them cook faster. They'd have turned to mush, but tasted the same.

Here's my ugly result. I think it would have been better to just mix the veggies in with the eggs, instead of attempting a 'filled' omelet. Filled omelets are better when you have something creamy or gooey in the middle. And the broccoli was all wrong. I'm deleting this recipe, but sometime in the summer when I have tender 'frying' peppers in the garden, I'm making myself a spinach-pepper-onion-mushroom omelet and maybe a little cream on it....mmm.

A short YA in the WWII days, and no spoiling

Girl In the Blue Coat
by Monica Hesse

I've just read the best prologue I've ever read in my life.

A bit too long to copy here; plus, you're better off reading it with the book in your hand. Because how could you not go on to read the book, after a prologue that good?

Before reading the prologue, I was feeling unmotivated. Yet another World War II novel? I was listening to Rose Under Fire on the IPod already, how could I take on yet another? And those books hurt, too. Hurt bad.

But this was more of a mystery than a horror story (aren't all WWII books horror stories?). And part of the mystery was the main character's suffocating guilt--she's a teenage girl, what could she have done that was so horrid she can't forgive herself for?

Recipe Reduction 150..149

I love this woman. Look at this quote from L.V. Anderson writing for Slate:

...adding sugar (or honey or maple syrup, as the case may be) to carrots is mind-bogglingly wrong-headed, because carrots are already sweet. Adding more sugar takes them to a weird, nauseating no-man’s-land between dinner and dessert—vegetal in appearance and texture, candied in flavor, disconcerting all around.

She's saying exactly what I've been thinking all along, and furthermore, I think this goes double for butternut squash and triple for sweet potatoes. No candied yams for me!

Unfortunately, along with all these cooking tips, I've acquired at least five new recipes.

Surprise Cinnamon Rolls
by L.V.Anderson for Slate's You're doing it wrong series

Surprisingly puffy! The dough rose and puffed and fluffed under my fingers as I was trying to roll it--I barely got one complete spiral in. They flunked in appearance but aced the flavor category. Yoo-hoo!  I'll share the recipe link    http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/05/30/the_best_cinnamon_roll_recipe_contains_a_surprise_ingredient_no_one_will_ever_guess.html with one comment--you should double the butter/cinnamon/sugar filling. And don't melt the butter. She said room temperature and she meant it. 

(some dummy melted the butter and it all ran off onto the counter.)


Orange Oat Pancakes

Well...I cheated. The recipe said to mix rolled oats with whole wheat flour
and other wholesome things, then fry like a pancake. But my gut feeling was that the oats were going to be chewy and the flour would have a raw taste and the
result would be dry and horrid, probably going straight to the compost bucket.

My modification was to mix everything up and let it sit on the counter for a
couple of hours. I had to add a little extra water--



Ugly, but good.


It would be clever to make up a big batch of these and freeze them. Convenience food for the health-conscious.

An embarrassing thing about my pantry--when I pulled out the single-serving container
of applesauce I'd been saving for a recipe such as this, I saw that the second ingredient was high fructose corn syrup. Right there on the label!
How old must that have been?

Needless to say I chucked it and microwaved an apple chopped with a little water.

A Celebration of Dog!

Add caption

A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me

by Jon Katz

He includes a warning note at the end--don't go out and adopt a Border Collie after reading this book. As if the book itself wasn't one long warning about adopting Border Collies. Especially deeply disturbed ones. As he remarks early on,

It  had taken a couple of years for Devon to become a nervous wreck; how long would it take to reclaim him? Was it even really possible?

We'll see. I used to want one myself but I never had the space for it to run; now, I don't have the energy. My little Alisha might have been part Border Collie--she was certainly speedy in her prime and she could climb a chain link fence, something I never dreamed any dog could do until I caught her at it.

Jon Katz's dogs can do many more amazing tricks...or should I say, nefarious? I don't dare give them away, but they're mostly hilarious--since they're happening to someone else. I'm remembered of the kitten I had--I left the faucet dripping for him one day, and when I returned there was water all over the room. And there was the day I left the linen cupboard door cracked....

However, some tricks aren't so funny. Especially when the animal is doing something likely to get him killed. Before reading this book, I recommend any dog lovers take a serious look back at the mistakes you've made in your dealings with pets. We know we should never hit an dog; never punish after the fact; never yell at it; but who of us are so perfect that we never did? I've done all those things, was sorry immediately and got it right the next time; my dogs forgave me easier than I could forgive myself. Jon Katz is a good-tempered man and a strong pack leader, but even he makes mistakes. Be a dog and forgive him; he'll soon be trained, with patience and reward.

Gardening in my roots, redefined

 



If you're not a gardener, or if you're rich, you may think gardening is all about crouching on your knees and leaning over into a green maze, plucking a weed; selecting a handful of leafy lettuce; tugging a carrot up by its top. Would you recognize what I did yesterday as gardening?


It started with old fence wire, pliers, and wire cutters.  I have some used rolls of fence wire left over from when we took down a fence, and I use it to fashion trellises. Yesterday I made a round and an oblong one that will support two plantings of cucumbers, then I made an open-ended oval to support lima beans.  To anchor them I scavenged four of the 6-foot metal stakes they use for barbed wire fences, and I hammered these into the ground with this big--and extremely heavy--stake pounder device. Then I cut little pieces of wire and firmly joined the fence wire to the stakes.

Before 'planting' these devices, I dug up weeds and smoothed the soil in the beds.  So that's the shape of my garden right now--metal, and dirt.

Under the first two I planted cucumber seeds--flat, pointed slivers about a half-inch long. (I would have planted lima beans too, but I forgot to order them. Coming soon.) So what's the purpose of all this complex apparatus?

Ah, but that's what makes me human. I can look out and see only disturbed dirt, but I can look back and remember the sheer bulk of plant matter these tiny seeds might produce. Lima beans have huge leaves and the vines get big really fast; when weighted down with water, they can topple a puny trellis in the slightest of winds. And we don't get slight winds here, not very often--we get gale-force winds. In fact, as the vines grow, I may consider adding another couple of supports.

So that's gardening--a lot of labor up front, and then if you're lucky, you spend time on your knees leaning over into a green maze, selecting a handful of leafy lettuce.

Great SciFi for a change

The Sparrow
by Mary Doria Russell

I guess I knew this was a first in a planned series but I'd forgotten.  About seven-eights through, I looked at the number of remaining pages and swore at the authors, "If you've taken me this far to leave on a cliff-hanger, by dang it! I'll...."  Thankfully, not having to carry through on my threat, I finished and was able to breathe again.  (I'd been on oxygen deprivation for a while.)

Other than that all I'll say is that it's good science fiction, maybe even great. Read it.

She and I don't agree on the degree to which you can pervert the concept of convergent evolution into the architectural construct of "form follows function." It almost killed the book for me, but then I got hold of myself and gave her the artistic license to design her own alien species as she pleased.  I personally think that if we ever encountered alien life we wouldn't even recognize it as life. Why carbon-based--why not silicon?  Or some totally different chemical combination we never considered? Why bipedal? Why two-eyed and not four or eight? Humans are sometimes very stupid in their lack of imagination. The hive aliens of Ender's Game were much cooler.

But I'm being silly.  And the rest of the science in her fiction is totally believable.  Like all truly great science fiction, this is a book about real people--emotions, fear, life, the universe and just about everything.