Recently visited Orange County, CA. At one stop in Newport Beach, the kids flushed hundreds of gulls.
I’ve lived with composting since childhood. It’s hard for me to imagine a life of throwing away perfectly good compostables to be buried forever in and with plastics that will be around until the sun swallows the earth in its death throes.
Having said that, I’m supremely lazy with my compost. I don’t break up the deposits into similarly sized pieces. I dump and dump forever, never turning it. I plan on using the soil, but there’s always something left to break down, and then exclaim at the amazing and unplanned tomatoes and bell peppers that grow OUT of it every year because there are so many tomato and bell pepper innards in the kitchen waste.
In some circles it could be termed more of a forgotten science project.
This spring however, in a fit of gusto, I decided to turn the pile. I know why I should do this more often—aeration, redistribution of microbes, ensuring proper moisture—but most of…
I was recently reminded by one of the rock-star school teachers that I actually have this blog! Life got crazy and I let it slip my mind.
This past Halloween, the kids made it through the whole of the pumpkin carving process on their own. Considering a responsible parent must supply the dullest knives imaginable in order to ensure all fingers remain attached to the body, this is something of a magnificent feat.
Mr. Brewmaster always goes ambitious, and this year produced the Lord Vader-o-lantern. His creations consistently leave our humble o-lanterns in the dust.
I recently spent the end of my summer vacationing in Arkansas. You heard me right.
Convincing my husband to go along with this was a simple matter of playing the family obligation card—we were participating in a joint vacation with my father from California and visiting his middle sister, possibly my father’s last trip home—and the issue was settled. My husband is nothing if not a Man of Family Values. That’s not to say he fits the political profile of those touting Family Values as their reason for spouting often ridiculous rhetoric. Absolutely not. Which is why this trip was anticipated with some anxiety on his part, being born on foreign soil, disturbed with the antics of the Christian right, and generally unsure if visiting “the South” was beneficial for sane Northerners like ourselves.
Now, the family aspect made the trip worthwhile in itself. My dad grew up in Fort Smith, his father one of nine. Most of the family…
And just like that, all the digging, weeding and watering bears fruit.
Zucchini
Zucchini is a favorite of mine to grow because it is so blasted easy! The first year I grew them, I crowded them with tomatoes, to which I gave higher priority. Not only that, but my kitchen compost carried with it an extremely fast growing mystery squash, whose color and shape matched nothing I saw in the grocery stores, until it sat on my counter for a few months (at which point it turned yellow) and I cut into its stringy flesh to discover one of my favories—spaghetti squash!
Did any of this daunt my zucchini’s?? Definitely not. They gave me an abundance of fruit, large and small. And I vowed thereafter to cut them as babies, because there are always so many, and the babies are delicious.
Cucumber
This year Jared took a gardening class at a greenhouse next door to his school, and brought me…
Probably the coolest, and dare I say, most fragile room in the MIT Museum. The Arthur Ganson exhibit is a steam-punk’s dream land, each piece full of moving mechanics.
On Mother’s Day this year we opted for a quiet day in Cambridge. I reminisced on my old haunts, and also befuddled myself with my complete lack of memory on how to get from one old haunt to another.
Because Jared’s birthday was the day before, we swung by the MIT museum to check out the robotics exhibits, amongst other things. Now he wants to go to MIT. Assuming he does his part and gets accepted, I suppose I should do my part and start saving every little penny. It’s definitely a far cry from his earlier sentiment of a couple of years ago, when he teared up at the thought of going to college at all because it meant he would be leaving home.
We finished off the day at Full Moon for a delicious, albeit loud (they boast a play room in the dining room for the little kids), meal. I loved it!…
In the grip of a run of stunning hot and humid days. Even the weeds and vines are dying off. And yet some plants are engineered to last. Like the day lily.
When I moved to New England and into my own house, I vowed not to be a “waterer”. Each year I look for landscaping flora that will survive on its own. The daylily is one of the few.
So, Toby, the giant mutt guard dog, was sitting in the open doorway, as I was going back and forth from the kitchen to the grill. I come behind him for a pass through back outside, and he’s watching the cat. Who is sitting on the porch 2 feet away with a chipmunk in her mouth.
I let out a squeak.
Which startles Kitty.
Who drops the chipmunk.
Who runs away.
Who Kitty chases back out into the yard.
Who is watched by a painfully still and barely whining Toby. The giant mutt guard dog.
It’s that time of year, the time to think of FLOWERS.
I know it’s twice as expensive as Lowe’s, but I have to do it. I have to get the bulk of my impulsive yearly flower and herbs from the neighborhood nursery, in my case, Nessralla’s Farm. It’s not fancy, and I can’t buy every last thing I ever wanted, but I’ll always remember my first forays into the greenhouses in late spring with the kids, new enough to the South Shore to never run in to someone I know—the owner gave each of the boys free gardenias 2 years in a row. Yes, I can be bribed.
What a wonderful gig, to grow things and dole them out.
What’s crazy about this picture…in the summer, the viney whatever they are’s will completely engulf this fence post in green strangulation.
It is the grayest sort of day today, and I suppose I needed a reminder of sunny, vital fecund summer. Okay, so this past summer was rather rainy and drab as well, but clearly there was enough there to grow things. A lot of things.
It’s been such a period of change—house renovation, lay-offs, more house renovation, father with terminal cancer, still more house renovation—that sometimes I can’t tell if history is blurry because so much is happening, or because I’m drinking too much.
But I can say with authority this summer we had a GARDEN! And in that garden, we watched life, and sturdy persistent seedlings, and an unexpected bumblebee hive. And it was affirming.