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.
 

Review: Dying Cry

By Margaret Mizhushima

She’s done it again! Another great adventure for Mattie and Robo. And of course, her new husband Cole and his family get to play a part. There’s something very enjoyable about revisiting characters you know and love and getting to see them tackle new adventures. Snowshoeing; avalanches; riding snowmobiles although they called them something else; and even the gruesome spectacle of the dead body was rendered most enjoyable.

I’m ready for the next one!

 

Review: Where’s the Next Shelter

By Gary Sizer

One of the better of the AT thru-hike books I’ve read. He has a lot of health problems along the way—dizziness, for one, and he more-or-less trashed his feet by wearing hiking shoes that were too small. Apparently that’s a common malady among new hikers. They don’t realize that their feet expand by a size or so, so they end up with blisters and pinched nerves and stuff.

Poor guy. What I liked best about him, and this, is that he doesn’t let the suffering and the human interactions dominate the book. There are a lot of minutes for appreciation of the world around him. And some triumphant moments when the obstacles are conquered, the peaks are surmounted, and he can sit on the top and wonder. (Or hurry down to warmer, less exposed climes below the tree line)

Gardening in my Roots, mid-April edition

 First cucumber is up!  (Amid a lot of weeds)

 

And first pepper has arrived

 

I have no idea what this is, so I'm going to cook it and eat it

Review: A Beginner's Handbook for Rural Texas Landowners

 A Beginner's Handbook for Rural Texas Landowners: How to Live in the Country Without Spoiling It

by Jim Stanley

There is a lot of great information here! A good bit of it I already knew, but it was still good to review and learn some new stuff, too.

My only complaint is that during the second half of the book, he started to emphasize every point with the lessons from and legacy of Aldo Leopold. Not that the guy didn’t have interesting stuff to say and not that he didn’t say the stuff quite well, but it just surprised me. It made the book more of a “feel good” rather than a “how to” manual.

I was also surprised that his list of evil invasive plants didn’t include my personal nemesis, Chinese Privet. And I was surprised, and pleased, that his take on feeding wildlife and birds seems to be pretty sensible – feeding wildlife encourages overpopulation; feeding birds is mostly harmless since they still eat a normal diet outside of the feeder. (I think I got that right)

Good information on brush encroachment and methods of controlling Johnson grass. I hope it works for me.

Review: I Want to Go Where They Went

 I Want to Go Where They Went: Stories from My Life as a Small Animal Vet 

by Jeff Schmidt DVM

Really good. I’ve read a lot of these veterinarian memoirs and this is right up at the top of them. He had some crazy clients, some weird dogs (like the one who was brought in for eating strange things), and some nutcase cats. Including one that savaged the vet repeatedly. How did he stand it?