books through the garden window

inlaws and outlaws

Anne Wingate — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 05:45:13 +0000

I love my daughter-in-law. We’ve only had a few days together, because they live in Mississippi and we live in Utah, and neither of us can afford much travel.
We had a family reunion some months ago. My husband, who hates to fly and hates even more much noise and confusion, presented me with what to me was a very generous sum of money, and my brother, who has a large house, threw it open to the family and took those of us new to the family to family landmarks such as a very old family cemetery. K and I both fell walking from the car to the cemetery, but we recovered, although we had to stop at a small store to get some wipes to clean up the blood on my scratched leg. Meanwhile K was coming down with a cold and running out of steam.
My generous son-in-law provided a room and a suite at an exremely plush motel; this was partly generosity and partly a slight problem involving the sheep dog, who wants to get all the humans together and then make them stay where they have been put. It is, of course, instinctive and she can’t help it, and doesn’t understand why people insist on getting up and wandering around the house when she has them all neatly arranged in one place, and clearly it is her job as a sheepdog to keep all her sheep together.
But back to K. I wish she lived next door. I am autistic, and it is very difficult for me to bond with people. But I bonded with K even before K and Patricio were married, just from talking with her over the phone. The odd and assorted (some of them VERY odd) females that he has collected in the past didn’t, shall we say delicately, light up my galaxy. But my galaxy is much happier now that it has K in it, and Patricio has been threatened with the wrath of God (and of Patricio’s mother) if he does anything to mess up this marriage. But I don’t have to worry. If he misbehaves, K threatens to tell me, and that is threat enough. (Okay, Amelia Peabody Emerson I am not, due to lack of funds, but our personalities are similar.)
As I was saying. I love K. The other day I went to bed with exhaustion and headache, telling T not to let anybody talk to me unless it was family members. It developed later that he misheard and thought I said not to let any family members talk to me, as I have been known to do when I had a migraine, so he was quite surprised when passing my bedroom door a couple of hours later to hear a peal of laughter from me. He concluded that it was one of my daughters, and was quite surprised when he learned later that it was K.
Besides being a thoroughly likeable females, and I’m emphatically not one of those women who like everybody who isn’t male, I don’t really like very many women, and I like and even love far fewer. Fortunately, the list of people I love now contains all my surviving inlaws and some of my deceased inlaws.
How else can I praise K? The accent in the state she came from is very pronounced, but she’s already losing it and developing a Southern accent. But that’s a small thing. What is big, and important, is that she can accept love.
Because of some incidents in her past, she finds it very hard to believe that people really love her, and several times at the family reunion she was found in a corner facing away from most of the hubbub, crying. I’m not going into details here, but Patricio and I, along with some of my brothers and one of my sisters-in-law, were snuggled around her reassuring her that now she’s a member of OUR family, and OUR family loves her.
And we do. All of us. She’s bonded neatly with M, and one of my brothers asked me how Patricio, who in the past has always picked losers, managed this time to pick a winner. I didn’t want to go into details, so I just told him it has to do with his last (as in most recent) heart attack.
But I don’t think he’s likely to have any more heart attacks any time soon. When on the phone with one or the other of them, I frequently hear background noise from the one who isn’t on the phone, and the noise is always positive or only kidding -negative.
if you can squeeze every penny until it protests that you’re hurting it while buying groceries, and then pay $100 for a book one member of the family speaks of in the same tone of voice s/he would speak of the Second Coming, you probably belong in our family.
Our family is a very special place to be. When one of us has hauled in what the rest of us regard as a dog, eventually the dog goes away again–not because he or she has been frozen out, because none of us would be that rude, but because that person just clearly didn’t belong in our family.
If you can stop in the middle of a crying spell because your eye has just caught a book that looks interesting, you probably belong in our family. If the mention of a rare book in a used book store suddenly has the whole family herded together almost as well as the sheepdog would do it, you likely could belong to our family. If you have Banned Book Parties during Banned Book Week, and if you have Shut-up-and-Read parties on Harry Potter Night, and if it interests you to know whether or not Neandertal genes contributed to modern human genes, there is a strong likelihood that you are in ouir family.
But enough of that. I love my daughter-in-law. My previous daughters-in-law or pseudo-daughters-in-law clearly did not belong in our family.
Uh, I think I started out to review a book, and I was going to talk about inlaws (the ones that belong in our family) and outlaws (people who do not understand why I looked appropriately stern when taking my daughter home from middle school with a three-day suspension for fighting, and then got to the car, sat down with my forehead on the steering wheel, and howled with laughter, finally explaining, “I wondered how long it was going to take you to slug her.”
We have no outlaws in the family at present, and may it remain so. Patricio is sleeping–still not much at night, but at least he is sleeping, and I think when he can get out in his new neighborhood and get to know people who don’t, shall we say, know the past dogs he has hauled home, I think he will relax, his tension hormones will drop, and he will be able to write again. .The outlaws trigger heart attacks, and I’ve lost count of how many he’s had, and he’s 23 1/2 years younger than I am and I have congestive heart failure, which alas also runs in the family, but I haven’t had any heart attacks yet.

Book, Anne. Book, book, book.

I just paid fifty-odd dollars for a DVD of the completely National Geographic. I’m glad I did it and I’d do it again. I’ve found that when it comes to art, sculpture,. music, books, movies in any format, in the future I regret the ones I didn’t get a lot more than the ones I did get, whether I could afford them or not.
And maybe that serves not only as a review of 121 years of National Geographic, but also as a review of our family. One of my brothers said, “We can’t help coloring outside the lines, because we can’t see where the lines are.”
I vote for never again seeing where the lines are. I saw a picture of Patricio in his “best” job he ever had financially, no mustache, no beard, no sprawling, no black T shirt–and no Patrick. This was about a year before he had his first heart attack. I then came up with a recent photo of him, beard, mustache, “club” as they called it in George Washington’s day but “pony tail” nowadays, both arms sprawled out and a quizzical look on his face. Nobody would give him a job like the job that nearly killed him. But it was a picture of my son. Before, he hadn’t met K. After, he had met K and was on his way, though he didn’t realize it yet, toward marrying her.
I greatly prefer the second picture. Patrick–and most of our family–like to sprawl. We like wash and wear hair. We like clothes that feel good on us, emotionally as well as physically.
Oh yes–nearly forgot to say it. No, M isn’t my d-i-l. She’s my s-i-l, and she fits perfectly into the family. Happy birthday, Mary, and I’m so glad you’re part of our family.

Wonderful New Site

Anne Wingate — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 20:18:11 +0000

. . . if you’re a writer! Authonomy, sponsored and paid for by HarperCollins’ branch in England, allows both new and published book writers to post their books, partial or whole, and allows other writers to vote and comment on them. The top five books each month go to the editors and are fairly likely to be published; furthermore, other book companies and agents snap up books from this site. So you get a combination of help from other writers and an improved chance of getting an agent and/or a publisher you can work with in the future. This is far more fair and reasonable than the old slush pile, in which a wonderful manuscript can lie buried indefinitely. If you know how many times books like GONE WITH THE WIND and HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE were rejected, you can see why the opinions of other writers to push a book toward the top of the stack is likely to be helpful to writers and publishers alike, to say nothing of the reading public. I just read part of a book written by a woman with severe mental problems about her childhood and her mother, whose problems were even worse. The book is a knockout and will probably find a home, but in the bad old days when HarperCollins used a slush pile, it probably would never have been read by anybody with the mental acumen to notice how good it is.

Now, I am sittingat the garden window, as I always am when I’m using my desktop computer, and I have just moved my Aerogarden cascading petunias in from the “barn.” I was enjoying them through the window from my office to the “barn,” but my stepdaughter bought me three lovely new flower pots to put my scented gardenias in. I had put them in two-inch pots and they have been throwing a tantrum (and their leaves) all over the place, so I need to move them from the kitchen window, where they keep getting chilled, into the barn, but I didn’t have a place there to put them. So I had been wanting to move the petunias indoors, but I can’t put them in my bedroom because they warn not to put them where oxygen therapy is being administered, and that’s where my oxygen concentrator is. But all that gets into my office is the end of a 50-foot hose with my nose on the end in the office, so I decided to bring them in there. I wanted to put them in the living room, but my husband emphatically did not.
So first I put them on a two-drawer filing cabinet just below the window to the barn, but that interfered with my office shadow boxes, so I moved them to the top of a four-drawer filing cabinet in what was, when this was a bedroom, the clothes closet. They look very nice there, and the Aerogarden setup illuminates my scanner/fax/copier, which had been very hard to see, and also my shredder.

Ah yes, my shredder. My husband has just been given, for review, a lovely new top-of-the-line shredder. He began the review process by writing a very funny parody of “The Night Before Christmas” about how the shredder makes confetti out of all kinds of obnoxious pieces of paper, and then the confetti becomes mulch and then compost in my garden. And then he gave me his old (as in about two months) shredder, so now I have my own shredder and that is going to be very useful for mulch and compost, to say nothing of the condition of the top of my desk.

Now I want to tell you about a very nice new book by Steve Bates called SEEDS OF SPRING. I have already done a review of it on Amazon and you can go and read it, but I’ll just add a few more things here. Mr. Bates kindly gave me a signed copy to review, and the cover is beautiful. The book itself is philosophy–gardening as a metaphor for life, seeds of plants as a metaphor for seeds that make our souls grow bigger. The practical problems he encountered are in many cases unfortunately familiar to me, although I don’t have to worry about horses, and the philosophy in most places is similar or identical to mine. So I appreciated the book, and recommend it to anybody who has weeds in their life. Steve Bates won’t put Roundup on them, but maybe he can give you some ideas on how to pull them out of your psyche.

Until next time . . . . Bye!

November 15, 2010

Anne Wingate — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 02:43:02 +0000

Written November 14 to post November 15
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My internist wants me to get my shrink to increase my antidepressants. But I’m already on two different kinds, and I suspect it might just be the ongoing pain that’s keeping me so depressed–the cortisone injections into both knees have worn off, and my right knee hates me. I told her I was arriving at the hospital at 7:30 AM on Monday. I told her I’d still be there Tuesday morning and possibly Wednesday, if she wanted to stick her head in and say hi. If she doesn’t, I won’t feel neglected. T isn’t going to visit me in the hospital because he’s got some sorting out to do, and I will not feel neglected by him either. I will have 2000 books (on my Kindle) and the shawl I’m crocheting. I couldn’t take my CD player because I’ve got a bag and the carrier that goes with my walker filled up all ready, and keeping track of my Kindle is hard enough without trying to keep track of a CD player too.
*
I hate the sound and smell of a bone saw, due to the number of autopsies I saw when I was a CSI and the fact that they were normally being used to saw off the skull cap when I was there, but if the surgeon and his PA need to use one I will firmly tell myself they are removing the source of the pain, and I can live with the smell and sound.
*
My brother who broke his neck falling off a horse ten years ago now has developed very serious aftereffects. He has calcium lumps building up inside his spinal column. They are pushing on the spinal cord, which is pushing back. He is partially paralyzed on one side, and in severe pain. He has pain meds, but unlike me, he can’t work if he’s taking narcotics. So he’s compromised: he works half the day and then takes the pain meds. The doctors are trying to figure out what to do. Obviously they’ve got to remove the calcium lumps, but that must be done very carefully and delicately to avoid more damage to his spinal cord. Monday I’ll be too busy worrying about him to have time to worry about me.
*
We put him on the Temple prayer roll for the Salt Lake Temple, which means the in effect he’s on the prayer roll of all the Temples. So he has prayer groups all over the country and in other places praying for him, besides everybody in the family.
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I’ll be on Dilaudid the first week and a half after the surgery. (When I was in CSI there was no stronger pain killer, and Dilaudid was given only for last-stage cancer patients. There are now both stronger and longer-lasting pain pills, and Dilaudid has lost its position at the top of the ladder. But it’s still pretty strong, and I gather I’ll need it. The physical therapist explained that the bone will be cemented to the metal and plastic, so it will be POSSIBLE for me to put my whole weight on the joint immediately after surgery, but I definitely won’t want to. He says the source of the pain is mainly the muscles, sinews, and ligaments that have been slowly pushed out of shape over years trying to get back into the right shape after the surgery. It took them years to get out of position, but it’ll probably take less than three months to get them back into position, assuming I behave myself and do my exercises as required.
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Presumably, next late spring I’ll be able to sit down or kneel on the ground in the garden and get back up without help. That will be WONDERFUL. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do that. But I have promised T that I’ll still take my cane and cell phone whenever I go to the garden. After those two bad falls I had last month, he didn’t have any trouble extracting that promise.
*
I promised to post a book review as part of each post. This one is Microgreens: A Guide to Growing Nutrient-Packed Greens, by Eric Franks and Jasmine Richardson. When we think of microgreens, we most often think of bean sprouts and alfalfa sprouts. But there’s another stage between sprouts–which are by no means limited to those two most common–and adult veggies. They’re baby lettuce and baby greens of many kinds, including some that you couldn’t eat if they were full grown. Most of them take less than two weeks to grow in a standard flat. Have you ever looked at the price of them in the grocery store? Ouch. Have you ever thought about ordering them in a restaurant? DOUBLE OUCH! But they’re delicious, and at the baby stage they have many more nutrients than they have before or after. Of course you do still need full grown vegetables also, because baby greens haven’t had time, even if you are growing them in soil, to absorb very many minerals. But they’re overflowing with vitamins. They make great salad, or great garnish on many kinds of salads and other foods, and you don’t have to eat much to get your day’s supply of greens.
*
This lavishly illustrated book, which I stupidly bought from Kindle before my husband brought it home from the library, shows the different colors that different foods come in. For example, if you eat amaranth as grains, you get sort of grain-color or red; if you eat the leaves as a spinach substitute, you get green. But if you eat them at the mini-green stage, they’re a lovely shade of magenta, with a mild but spicy flavor.
*
You probably know that broccoli sprouts are delicious and very highly nutritious, but did you know that they’re also edible at the baby green stage? So are radishes and many other crops in the cabbage family. In fact, there are vegetables from at least fifteen different families available at the microgreen stage, and as I said earlier, some of them are inedible as grown plants. Very few humans, for example, can digest alfalfa at any stage larger than that of microgreens, but they have nutrients that defend against several serious diseases.
*
Microgreens is a very clearly written book that tells you exactly what microgreens you can grow, how you go at it, where you get your supplies, what you can do with the space you have available, how to get your soil just right (hint: buy litmus paper), and everything else you need to know.
*
To tell the truth, I’m not quite through reading the book yet. But I have to stay up till midnight to take a couple of meds, and then be back up at six to get to the hospital on time, and I’m likely to finish the book before I go to bed.
*
To sum up: If you want to please your taste buds and the part of your body that tells you what nutrients you want, and if you want to be a farmer and you live in fifth-story apartment, you can meet your goals if you follow the instructions in this book. I can tell you that as soon as I’m home from the hospital, a whole lot of minigreens will begin growing in my barn.
*
Well, maybe I’ll wait a couple of weeks, until I can walk without saying OUCH OUCH OUCH OUCH at every step.
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Hey, somebody! I’m all prepared to answer questions and nobody will ask me one. Remember the comments and address site is gardenwindow@aol.com. Foi, don’t you want to know what will make Molly’s coat glossier and make J come home on time for supper more often?
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Izzybella, don’t you want to know what greens your dad might like? (Hint: Get him bleu cheese dressing for it, and he won’t care what the veggies look like or taste like.)
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Clover, do you want to know whether clover with a small c is edible by humans? Hint: It isn’t in this book, but it is. You just need to know when to serve it. (Somebody send this column to Clover.)
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Freaky Angel, don’t you want to know what veggies you can grow in a shady backyard that are easy to grow and Lunatic Writer will eat them?
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SOMEBODY I DON’T KNOW, ASK ME A QUESTION OR MAKE A COMMENT. Let’s be friends, okay?

November 13, 2010

Anne Wingate — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:48:19 +0000

Written November 12 for publication November 13, 2010
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Pain is exhausting. Last night I went to bed at 8:30. I first woke up a little after midnight and went to talk with my husband, who was hard at work on his book, and found him up and dressed. I was surprised and said so, and he pointed out the time and said he wasn’t UNdressed yet.
*
I woke up again repeatedly during the night, and at 5:30 I was awakened by the pain in my knees and got up knowing I was up for the day. I’m off ibuprofen until after the surgery, so there is nothing to combat the inflammation of the knees and the fibromyalgia. As Dr. Seuss put it, “Old age is not for sissies.” I remember when my GRANDMOTHER was 67, and come to think of it, I’ll bet that’s why I’m upset about being 67. I can’t remember knowing when she was younger than that, though of course I knew her when she was younger. My Turney grandparents were both in their 40s when they died, but my Guice grandparents were considerably older than they were.
*
I found myself thinking of what my physical therapist told me yesterday, in my first meeting with him. He explained that because the parts of my new knee are being cemented together, I’ll be able to put my full weight on the knee at once, but I won’t want to because of the pain. Although bone surgery is always painful, the main cause of the new pain will be the muscles, nerves, and sinews trying to get into the new position in a hurry. The deterioration in my knee has pulled them out of position gradually, over many years, and it will take several months for them to get back to the right size and the right position. For the first three weeks I will wear, 24/7, a gadget on my knee that will keep ice water flowing around the knee to combat inflammation. It is warmed enough by the pump that it won’t numb the knee too much or risk frostbite, but it’s an ingenious idea.
*
My neighbor Wilbur, who has had the same surgery I’m getting, doesn’t have this; instead, he’s got a gadget that is extremely heavy but keeps his legs’ circulation right. He had to go to a convalescent center, because with the first knee his wife tried to take care of him and nearly killed herself with the labor of putting the gadget on and then taking it off and taking it off the bed umpteen times a day. She feels bad about putting him in the convalescent center, but killing herself caring for him would have been stupid in the long run.
*
That reminded me of my wisdom teeth. My dentist in Georgia had told me I had severe arthritis in my jaws, and had tried several things, including injections directly into a cramped muscle. This was not amusing. Finally he put me on a combination of Valium as a muscle relaxer and Darvon to combat the pain. As I was also drinking heavily to combat the pain, I haven’t the slightest idea how I survived the situation.
*
When we were ready to return to Texas, I stocked up on three months’ worth of Valium and Darvon so I wouldn’t have to look for a dentist while we were still getting settled in. But finally the time came, and I drearily went and found a new dentist. He absolutely refused to write the prescriptions; he said, “This can’t be right. Let’s take some X-rays.”
*
The X-rays disclosed that my jaw was in a half-locked position; it was forced there by all four wisdom teeth, which had roots that were as tangled as the roots of a pot-bound plant. He put me into the hospital, because the necessary surgery would be done under general anesthetic. It would be impossible otherwise.
*
When I woke up, the first thing I said was, “My mouth fits.” Then my dentist came in, looking worse than I felt, and told me that it had taken him four hours and all the strength and delicacy that he had to dig out all those roots. In places they were literally tied in knots. He told me I had to be extremely careful not to fall and to eat only soft foods, because in places my jawbone was as thin as a sheet of typing paper. He told me that the bone would fill back in, but it wouldn’t do it overnight. As I recall, it took about six months.
*
From what the therapist told me, when my spinal anesthetic–because they want me to be awake during the surgery, but not feeling pain–wears off, I’ll feel much the same way, except it will be my knee that fits. There’ll be a lot of pain and I’ll be on strong painkillers for several weeks, but I’ll be able to feel that my right knee is now in the right position. (He told me they could see from the X-ray not only THAT my kneecap kept slipping to the left, but also WHY it was doing it.)
*
So, although I’m expecting a brief period of worse pain, I’m very excited about the surgery. For years I have been unable to get up off the ground or the floor by myself unless I had something very study and waist-high to lean on as I got up. Otherwise, somebody has had to haul me up. By planting time this spring, I should be able to get down and up by myself. It wasn’t the muscles weakening, but them and the sinews and tendons that had gotten so far out of shape that they could no longer serve their intended purpose. It’s as if I were trying to use a pulley when the rope was off the spindle (or whatever you call it).
*
I have one of the best bone surgeons in the country. He is one of the inventors of a special artificial knee designed for women. It’s not just a matter of size–they come in many different sizes–but a woman’s knee is subtly different from a man’s knee, and they aren’t interchangeable.
*
I just got an email from my brother Lee. He broke his neck falling off a horse about ten years ago, and now his spinal column is growing extra calcium lumps on the inside. This is pressing against his spinal cord, which is pushing back, and he’s in serious pain and has some paralysis. He has pain meds but unlike me, he can’t work when he takes them. He’s starting anti-inflammatory meds, and his doctor is in consultation with a major spinal surgeon. Obviously they’re going to have to remove the calcium, but it’ll have to be done very gingerly so as not to harm the spinal cord. I asked him to have his wife keep me posted, because I don’t want him wasting what energy and thinking time he has left to send me emails. I just put him on the Temple prayer roll, and while I was about it, I also put my son and daughter-in-law and myself on it. All of us can use some extra prayers right about now.
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This is Friday. This afternoon Julee and whoever her current helper is–usually it’s Sally–will be here to help me get the house ready for me to be an invalid. The therapist said that for the first three weeks I shouldn’t sit up for longer than an hour at a time, I shouldn’t walk anywhere I can get out of walking, and I shouldn’t stand still for more than two minutes at a time. So Julee and Sally will make the bed—I’ve got the mattress cover, the sheets, the pillows’ hypoallergenic covers, and the pillow cases all out on a stripped bed–and then Sally will clean the kitchen while Julee and I will finish moving things in the bedroom and possibly in the barn, which was designed as another place for me to lie down when I was recovering. Then I’ll do a megalaundry Saturday, so all the clothes in the house will be clean. Julee will have to come over several times during the next two months to remake the bed; the size of the room is such that T can’t get at the bed. Janice (Wilbur’s wife) has offered to do it, but I don’t want her to because she’s in her eighties and I don’t want to put more work on her when she’s already doing both her work and Wilbur’s plus working in the Temple starting at five AM two days a week. I’ll JUST be up and around from my right knee in time for my left knee to be replaced, so Julee and Sally may do the bed making for up to four months. Expensive, but not as expensive as knocking my transplant out of place.
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Monday I’ll be in the hospital early in the morning, ready for my knee to be cut open and put back together. So you’ll have a column Monday posted Sunday night, and then it’ll be probably Thursday or Friday before I’m back. But I promised you a minimum of three columns a week, each one including a book review, and you’ll get it, even if some of next week’s columns wind up in the following week. Publishers, where are you? I’m literally out of garden books after tomorrow. Library, here I come.
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Today I’ll be talking about Easy Garden Projects to Make, Build, and Grow: 200 Do-It-Yourself Ideas to Help You Grow Your Best Garden Ever. It’s edited by Barbara Pleasant and the Editors of Yankee Magazine, and published by Rodale Press.
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My galaxy isn’t lit up by the picture on the front, which features a child’s red wagon planted with tomatoes and nasturtiums, and a wooden ladder painted distressed blue with potted plants sitting on all the steps, the bucket holder, and the top. I don’t happen to own a child’s red wagon. They’re not cheap, and if I had one I’d use it to haul things in, because it would rust out in two seasons if it was used as a planter. I do have a couple of wooden ladders that could go into service to hold potted plants, but at times the wind around here is so strong that it would blow all the pots off the ladder and possibly also blow the ladder down. If I decided to use a ladder in the garden, it would be as a trellis, with vines growing up it. The vines would hold it in place by the time they’d been growing for a month, but I don’t think my husband would go for the idea. He doesn’t get the idea of distressed wood, for one thing, and he’d think the use of something for what it clearly wasn’t designed for would look cheap and ugly. He likes the idea of repurposing and has even suggested some repurposing himself, but not this kind: it reminds me of something a black friend of ours said in chewing out his niece for the looks of her front yard: “It looks ghettoish.” T considers this kind of blatantly garish repurposing to “look ghettoish,” and that is not what he wants for our yard. One side yard and most of the front yard is now one large rock garden, designed and created for us by another black man–Johnnie; that’s all he’ll let us call him–and T would scream bloody murder if anybody tried to move one pebble out of place. He considers the rock garden a work of art–I do too–and it is completely different from garish repurposing.
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Johnnie started by creating a small rock garden in front of the garden shed T uses to store his books in, and when Manny wanted to move several of the large stones T instantly vetoed it. Manny’s suggestions were for the sake of safety, and T says there are ways of obtaining the safety without meddling with a work of art.
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Let me mention here that we have a multicultural household, if you count temporary workers as part of the household. Our contractor, Manny, is Mexican–he has permanent resident status and is working on getting his citizenship–and most of his part-time helpers are Hispanic but born in the United States. Julee and her assistants are white. Earnest, who put in the sprinkler system, and Johnnie are black; we hired them because Earnest is the closest friend of our friend Frank, who also is black. Earnest recommended Johnnie for the rock garden project. And so it goes. We don’t seem to hire individuals so much as we hire families and/or communities.
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This year I couldn’t have had a garden without Manny and his team. They built planting beds, planted, dug, tilled, came up with good ideas, and generally did what I could have done in five summers when I was twenty. Next summer I’ll be able to do more for myself–fortunately, because the legacy we have been using to remodel our house and yard is almost spent. T says that with inflation going the way it is going, we had better spend the money while it’s still spendable, but on real work, not on junk. And so that’s what we’ve done. (We met Manny in the doorway of the bank.)
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But there are some good and easy projects in this book, and by next summer I should be able to do some of them. Being rather clumsy, I have been forbidden to use a power saw by my husband, a neighbor who is a lawyer, our stake patriarch (that is an LDS priesthood position), several other neighbors, and all my children and their spouses, so I can’t use a power saw. Our neighbor who is a retired fire captain and EMT didn’t forbid me to use a power saw; he just laughed and laughed when I tentatively suggested it. But this book takes into account the fact that a lot of gardeners aren’t in a position to use a power saw, and provides projects that either don’t need wood cut or need only four or five cuts that can be made at the lumber yard for a dollar or two each.
*
Chapter One is about creating good soil, and I want to quote the subtitle: “The importance of soil stewardship extends to even the smallest garden. Growing good soil is as enjoyable and satisfying as growing favorite plants.” As more and more cities go for rooftop gardens–there are several in Salt Lake City, including one on the Conference Center that was designed by our neighbor Peter Lassig before he retired from being chief gardener of the entire LDS Church–more and more building superintendents are finding themselves buying or making soil. *
Once when I was a child, I saw my grandfather digging soil out of what had once been a minnow pond. When I asked him why there was dirt in the minnow pond, and why he wanted to get it out, he told me that the dirt used to be leaves, which he had put there in the fall, and now it had turned into dirt. Astounded and amused, I said, “PAPA! Leaves don’t grow into dirt!” Of course I was wrong. Leaves do grow into dirt, and grow is the right word, because all kinds of small plants and small animals, some so tiny you can’t see them without a microscope, grow like mad in a proper compost mixture–besides the leaves, there was a lot of chicken manure in the minnow pond–and they grow together, eating the nutrients and turning them out in a form plants can use. So yes, you do make soil, and that is one of the most important garden projects.
*
Even in a small apartment, it is possible to have a small worm bed and feed the garbage to the worms. The worm castings are perfect fertilizer, and with the addition of a small amount of vermiculite and a small amount of builder’s sand, they’re perfect potting soil. If you are fortunate enough to have an east- or south-facing balcony, you can grow more vegetables than you would think–lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, a whole salsa garden. And of course, there is always the AeroGarden. I know I sound like an ad for, but I love them.
*
The second chapter is about plant propagation, including seeds and other methods of getting crops going. But this same chapter goes on to discuss different places where seeds may be started, ranging from old drawers to straw bale beds through numerous different things where others would see only trash but this writer seeds a plant starter. Some of them seem a bit silly to me, such as “an old bed frame . . sunk into the garden and filled with colorful pansies or petunias.” I hope we don’t even have to think about old bathtubs and old toilets. They are in terrible taste no matter how cutesy they are. But fortunately, the authors agreed with me.
*
The book goes on to discuss plant supports ranging from formal to totally informal, including stepladders with the pots supported by something that will protect them from the wind. Like other books, they suggest a sunflower teepee play house, and like other books, they suggest running scarlet runner beans up the sunflower stalks, totally forgetting that beans and sunflowers don’t get along.
*
Then we discuss ingenious ways to water. It is undoubtedly true that most methods of watering waste water, and these ideas come up with interesting and sometimes unique ways of providing enough water to the plants with as little waste as possible. Harvest season and planting season both can be stretched by using some new ideas with some very old ones, and if both are stretched there is time to double or maybe even triple crop in the same amount of time it would normally take to grow one season’s worth of plants. This is followed by discussing ways to attract wildlife to your garden. Admittedly there is some wildlife we all can do without–skunks, for example–but we all enjoy birds, and intelligent people enjoy toads. But the book proceeds to give us ways to get rid of the wildlife that we DON’T want in our garden.
*
Plants that produce heavily, or work as perennials, are then discussed, along with ways of taking care of them without wearing yourself out.
*
And speaking of wearing things out . . . Julee and Sally left several hours ago, I finished putting away the things Julee had started sorting on my bed, then I read the rest of Biblical Archaeology Review and the first 2011 seed catalog to cross my doorstep, finding several plants I’d never heard of before and several more that were less expensive through that catalog than any other source I’ve seen so far. So I put them in a drawer and came in here to finish this column.
*
Good people, I’m tired, and on Monday I have to be bathed, dressed, and in the hospital by 7:30 AM. This is Friday and this is the Saturday column I just wrote. I don’t do a Sunday column, and Sunday I’m going to be resting preparing for Monday. So I’ll see you when I drag my weary self home from the hospital Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or whenever it turns out to be. I have two new books I had forgotten about, so I will be preparing reviews for you while I’m flat on my back reading. Meanwhile my husband will check me out ten more garden books from the library, and I have appealed to publishers and gadget producers to send me books and gadgets to review.
*
“Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.” I chose that as my motto when I was a senior in high school, and I recently learned, to my pleased surprise, that my oldest daughter chose the same motto, without consulting with me. But I have to rest now, so that I’ll have time to learn more and then share it with you.

Write to me at gardenwindow@aol.com, and let’s see if we can get a conversation going.

November 12, 2010

Anne Wingate — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:17:45 +0000

Manny has “the gombu”–a phrase Naomi brought home from the Philippines. He caught it from his wife. I’m glad he is staying home with it, because the last thing in the world I need right now is someone else’s ailments. A knee transplant has to be 150% sterile, because germs getting into the transplant area never go away. There is just enough flesh to catch a germ, but not enough blood flow to fight it. Even the operating room has reverse air pressure, like a third-level diagnostic lab.
*
I’ve been trying to get my office and bedroom halfway cleared up, but today we went to the physical therapist and got instructions and my new walker. The other one doesn’t work indoors.
*
Any other medical devices I need will be issued at the hospital for me to take home, and we will be billed for the 10% we pay.
*
Without insurance, the one knee I’m getting done now would cost about $33,000; presumably the other knee would cost about the same. This one is $175 copay per day for the first five days, then no copay; the next one, which is in January, will have a $200 per day copay for the first five days.
*
I’m too sleepy to think. I can’t even read a Barbara Michaels book without going to sleep over it. So I’m going to go take a nap, and then come back and talk about a book called House Plants for the Purple Thumb.
*

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .

This book was published in 1975, and does not have an ISBN. I’d suggest looking for it at Amazon and eBay and Craig’s List and any other used book source you can think of. I’ve had it for twenty years, and I have checked every houseplant it lists that I have ever owned. Many of mine grew beautifully in Georgia but simply refuse to grow in Utah. I hate to think how many iron cross begonias I’ve killed off, but the one I’ve got now, which is in a much cooler room with a lot of other plants, is getting less water but seems–knock on wood–to be a little bit happier.

But I’m going into the hospital Monday for surgery, and don’t know when I will get home. My husband refuses to water my plants. So I’m going to drench them all before I leave, and hope they’re still alive when I return. I’ll probably be there two or three days, and usually I water at least every other day.

The book begins by describing the Purple Thumb Syndrome–the kind of person who can kill a aloe vera, when all you have to do with an aloe vera is nothing. I’ve got three perfectly happy aloe veras in my Egyptian display that haven’t been watered in six months. Last time I watered them they instantly, like overnight, grew two more inches, and if they get any taller they won’t fit the display and will have to be trimmed or else put into larger pots and watered often, so they will have baby aloe veras that I can put in the display.

I had a purple thumb until I hired a babysitter named Virginia Williams. Mrs. Williams could drop a seed into a rusty tomato can and it would grow overnight into a beautiful plant. I tried to figure out how she did it. Well, she talked to them, for one thing. Beyond that, she seemed to have an instinctive understanding of what would grow in the climate and soil she had, and didn’t try to grow things that wouldn’t grow.

That’s what the rest of the book teaches–how to know what you can and can’t grow in your own, present, situation. It doesn’t matter what I could grow in an area of heavy humidity, when I live in a desert. I have to grow what will grow in a desert, or I have to bunch together a lot of AeroGardens, which are hydroponic and produce their own climate if enough of them are together, and then add a few plants that will grow in the climate the AeroGardens create.

If you have the room, you can grow tomatoes, lettuce, and many herbs in the average house, desert or high humidity. You can grow squash and green beans, if you have the room and the light. When we created “the barn” out of what used to be a screen room, we allowed a lot of room for plants, because I wanted a lot of room for plants. Now I can look out the window between my office and the barn and see my indoor garden, when my outdoor garden is covered with snow. My tomato plants have long since outgrown their planter, and I have to transplant them into something larger, but I don’t know whether I’ll have time to get to that before Monday or not. It is late Thursday now, and I have a couple of women coming tomorrow to help me get my bedroom, kitchen, and office ready for me to come home in a condition such that I can be on my feet about two minutes a day. Then after they leave I have to finish the laundry, which I probably won’t do until Saturday, and knowing me, I’ll probably sleep all day Sunday. I don’t dare go to church, because as sure as I did I’d catch a germ, and it would attack my knee just as it is trying to heal. So I’m stuck. I wanted to go browse today at DI–Utah’s version of Goodwill–and my husband was willing, though not eager, to take me, but when I thought about it instead of just yielding to impulse, I realized that it would not be a good place for me to go when I have to watch my immune system and protect it from invasion.

And by the time I’m almost healed from the first surgery, it’ll be time for the second. I probably won’t get back to DI for five or six months. That doesn’t make me exceedingly happy, because I enjoy browsing, but that’s the way it is whether I like it or not.

I cooked a party-size five-cheese lasagna today, and will be eating pieces of it from now until time to go off food and drink before surgery. I bought a lot of frozen dinners for me; T will probably live on burgers and pizza until I’m back into cooking. I had to be sure I didn’t get anything with broccoli or other cole (cabbage family) crops in it, because for a month I have to be on blood thinners. I do not understand the reason for this, considering that after my last surgery I had to have three units of blood because I bled like a stuck pig, but the doctors think that was a clash between two meds and it won’t happen again. I hope it doesn’t happen again. I don’t want to ask Bec to come over and water my plants again, as she did while I was in Texas for the family reunion, because she is expecting again, and although I know she’s quite strong and carries her two-year-old around, I don’t want her to be carrying gallons of water up and down the stairs. Maybe I’ll ask the lady across the street if one of her daughters can do it.

I seem to be somewhat off the topic. Back to purple thumbs. If you pick your seeds carefully, to go with your soil and your climate, things are likely to go well. Learn to talk to your plants, maybe even to sing to them. Sometimes I go sit in the barn and crochet, letting the plants enjoy how peaceful I feel when I’m crocheting. You have to understand that plants do have emotions. I don’t understand this, but I have read in reputable publications that there are plant emotion detectors that work like lie detectors, and if you have good thoughts toward the plants the plants are happy, but if you think, say, that you might set one of the plants on fire, the needle goes crazy, because you’ve scared the plants. No, I promise I won’t set my plants on fire, so they won’t die of fear. I will go to the barn to do my physical therapy, and that will hurt but it will also make me feel peaceful because it’s moving toward being able to do my own gardening next year. And I will crochet in there, and if there is a bad stationary front overhead, so the valley is very smoggy, I will turn on my oxygen. Of course I have to turn off my plant lights and pumps if I do that, because AeroGarden warns not to use them where oxygen therapy is being given and I don’t want to risk an explosion, but the plants will feel warm and nourished because I am breathing comfortably, and after all, they LIKE to breathe extra carbon dioxide, even if I don’t.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something else about plants. Until then, remember–for questions and comments, you can reach me at gardenwindow@aol.com. I don’t know it all, but I do know how to do research.

November 11, 2010

Anne Wingate — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:21:28 +0000

This is written on November 10 for publication on November 11.
*
November 11 is Veteran’s Day. I am a Navy veteran, and so is my former husband. Therefore, this is an acceptable day for me to ask for help, especially from all other veterans who might know the answer to my question.
*
Do you know my granddaughters? I don’t. Actually they’re my step-grandaughters, because my daughter-in-law married my son some years after the State of Michigan stole her daughters from her on the perjured testimony of a convicted child molester.
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They’re sisters, but they don’t look alike. Jasmine is mixed race, black and white, and looks black, whereas Robin looks all white. We think they were adopted or taken as foster children by a family willing to take them both. Therefore my daughter-in-law was not allowed to appeal the decision; she was told that it was too late to do so, although statute law said otherwise.
*
But I’m going to forget about step-anything. They’re my granddaughters, and I want my daughter-in-law to at least have contact with them, if she can’t get them back. She loves them and misses them, and I love my daughter-in-law. When we had our family reunion this past spring, my poor daughter-in-law wept several times because seeing our happy, boisterous family made her miss her daughters that much more.
*
If you know Jasmine and Robin, please tell them that their mother still loves them, and she has posted her maiden name in every site that she could do so, in hopes that one of them would look for her and find her.
*
Now I want to speak directly to them; if you know them, please bring this to their attention.
*
Jasmine, Robin, I’m your grandmother, and I miss you and I want to see you. So does your granddad, and your new dad; he has no other children, and he wants very much to be known as your dad. But none of us miss you as much as your mom does.
*
Your mom and dad gave me a purse-size electronic picture album and when I get it out to show to people, your pictures come up first. I’m very proud of you, because you learned to do housework so that when you grew up and married you wouldn’t be too ignorant to know how to care for a household. I think a mother who doesn’t teach her children how to do housework is guilty of child abuse. You were reading well early in your childhood, and I expect your school grades have been uniformly good. You had different biological fathers, but you have the same mother, and she is intelligent and a good reader and writer, so I’m sure you have talent and ability. I hope, before I die, that I will get to meet you at least once. After I die, I’ll find out where you are and I’ll keep watch over you and do whatever I can to lead you to your mother. If anybody has told you that she no longer loves you or wants you, that isn’t true, and I think you know that isn’t true.
*
As I look through the garden window and see into the neighbors’ yards, and see their children out romping in the snow and playing with the dog, I wish very much that I could see you in the backyard. We don’t have a dog and you’re too old for a swing set, but you’re old enough that you would enjoy the garden. It would make me very happy to be working in the garden with one of you on each side of me. We could transplant the lilies to the front yard, and then start the blackberries in the empty beds where the lilies are now. I wonder why I thought of that. Maybe because lilies and blackberries are like the two of you cuddled together?
*
I don’t know you yet, but I love you because you’re my granddaughters. I show your pictures to everybody, and I don’t say “These are my daughter-in-law’s children.” I say, “These are my grandchildren.” If anybody doesn’t approve, that person knows to keep his or her mouth shut.
*
And what does all that have to do with books through the garden window? Well, today I’m talking about Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening. Families in which the members are companions are successful families, and the two of you were close companions to each other and to your mom. The social worker didn’t think it was appropriate for you two to be making dinner because your mom had a migraine. I would be ashamed if I were a mom whose 13-year-old daughter DIDN’T know how to make dinner if I was in bed with a migraine, and if I were the daughter who didn’t know how to make dinner I would be ashamed of myself.
*
Plants know how to take care of one another. But it’s important to put the right plants together. If the right family had been kept together, you’d have your mom and dad and you’d know you were part of OUR family, and we’ve been in Texas since before it was legal for Anglos to move to Texas. I want you to see your great-great-great grandmother Rebecca’s grave, which we showed to your mom this spring. I reminded her then that now she’s a member of OUR family, and we love her.
*
Now about companion planting. It can be complicated, because some plants go well together and some plants don’t. One thing that confused me before I read this book is that I know crops should be rotated, but I also know that asparagus and tomatoes go well together, but asparagus can grow in the same place for thirty or more years. Then, reading this book, I found out that tomatoes are unusual in that they don’t have to be rotated. So after I get the asparagus planted, I can put the tomatoes beside them every year, and they’ll do well.
*
I also learned that yarrow, which I grow because it comes in so many different colors that look so pretty together (like the two of you), are beneficial to just about every other plant. It’s worthwhile, if the highway department cuts down yarrow when it’s mowing, to grab the cut-off yarrow and put it in your compost, because then the compost will be even more useful in helping fruit and vegetables to grow better and be healthier.
*
I HATE wild morning glory, otherwise known as bindweed, because it tries to strangle every other plant it gets near, like that evil man strangled your family. But this book tells me that wild morning glory is beneficial to corn. Maybe that’s why an area of the yard that in the past had been devastated by bindweed yielded good corn. It also told me that a squirt of vinegar in the center of each bindweed plant would kill it. I know that most weeds that are killed by vinegar grow right back, but apparently several successive squirts of vinegar into the bindweed will eventually get rid of it. Yay! Next year I won’t let wild morning glory take over my northeast flower bed.
*
Well, we can’t do much by squirting an evil man with vinegar, but when you and your mother finally get back together, I think your love for one another will be strengthened, especially as your new family–aunts, uncles, cousins–gather protectively around you as the bindweed protects the corn.
*
This is a comparatively old book, from Garden Way Publishing. The ISBN is 0-88266-065-9. But it’s available used on Amazon, as are several other books on companion gardening by the same author, Louise Riotte. There’s even a related book available on Kindle:
Carrots Love Tomatoes – Kindle Edition – Kindle eBook (Jan. 2, 1998) by Louise Riotte
Buy: $9.66
Auto-delivered wireless
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So I’ve learned a lot from this book, and I have marked a lot of places that have suggestions I will try next year.
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But if I had to make a choice, I would turn my back on companion gardening if I could just get hold of my companion granddaughters.

November 10, 2010

Anne Wingate — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 03:33:22 +0000

*
Written November 9 to publish November 10
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It snowed last night, although it is about all melted by now. Jim, his daughter, and his dog are out enjoying what is left. She is three and probably doesn’t remember seeing snow last year, and of course the dog never saw snow before. He can’t figure out what this icky white stuff on his paws is. I am vividly reminded of when we had a cocker spaniel. He loved snow, and when he came in from romping in it, my husband and I–two fat old people–had to sit on the floor with a pan of hot water to wash the snow and salt off his paws and feathering. He was a throw-back to an earlier breed of spaniel, according to the vet, and he had longer legs than most cockers, but they were still plenty short enough for him to get snow all over his belly.
*
No more pets. I would be too likely to fall over them, and they would be too likely to chew on my oxygen cord. But I’ve had pets all my life, and I miss them very much. So I’m glad Dozer, who no longer spends most of his time dozing, is close enough that I can see him through the garden window. The Burdetts, who used to live where the Barlows do now, had a beautiful white dog half German shepherd and half wolf. He was a very nice dog, but I had to go outside to see him, because I have no window that allow me to see to the north of the house. In fact, my window goes into the barn. Which, to be sure, is also a pleasant sight.
*
I’m under a week now from becoming a bionic woman. I do not expect to enjoy the surgery or the immediate aftermath, but I expect that next year I’ll be able to work in the garden and get up off the ground by myself, without having to yell for T. But he will still require me to use my cane and take my cell phone so I can call him if I do need help. After landing with the base of my brain on a concrete block time before last that I fell in the garden, without my cell phone with me and without a neighbor visible or in hearing distance. I have no problem with taking the cell phone and eschewing yard work when T isn’t home. The only time I can go into the garden without the phone is when I am going out to talk with Manny, but I don’t expect Manny to be with us more than another couple of weeks. We’re that close to out of money, until one of us sells a book. It’s been a long, dry spell, and I hope we sell one or more soon. I’d really like T to get a contract for his first trilogy in his trilogy of trilogies. Considering his health, they aren’t going to give him a contract for all nine, and he’ll have to select someone to continue the series if he dies before it’s finished. But I can understand that and so can he.
*
He’s so close to the end of the second book that he can taste it, but he keep writing chapters that he thinks will go in that book but turn out to belong in a different book. Funny–he wouldn’t let me postpone painting my office until I was ready to have it painted. But he’s darn sure given himself permission to wait.
*
Well, I promised to review a very useful book today. It’s Newspaper pennies cardboard and eggs for growing a better garden. Again, no birth control pills to make transplants take better–just sensible recycling ideas, from old muffin pans to start seedlings in to old Venetian blinds to shelter sun-sensitive plants such as lettuce. It’s by Roger Yepsen and the Editors of Organic Gardening, so it’s a sensible and useful book. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s bristling with paper clips, which means that I spotted many things that I could use almost immediately–and that was before we had Manny. I can see now that I was insane to think I could do all that by myself. It took months for two very strong men to do it. I’m a fibromyalgia and arthritis-ridden small, weak woman, even if I was once a cop. That was a long time ago.
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I think I’ll mention the topics of some–maybe all–of the paperclipped pages.
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A homemade sandwich board to filter sunlight for sensitive and newly-transplanted plants.
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Soil-surfing potatoes. Shows how to build a potato mound slowly as the potatoes grow, to increase both baby potatoes and full-size.
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Toward better tomatoes. Gives a number of hints for getting more and better tomatoes from the same plants.
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Succession planting. This is a critical step in getting the most food that is possible from your garden–having different plants in the same bed in the spring, summer, and winter, and doing it safely. For example, do not follow early snow-peas with green beans, because they are attacked by the same vermin and diseases and you don’t want to encourage them from last spring frost to first fall frost.
*
Planting asparagus without a backhoe. I will be planting asparagus this spring, so this is very important to me. But thank heaven for electric Mantis tillers. I can’t start a gas tiller, even a Mantis, and when the neighbor finally got tired of starting the tiller for me and lent me his tiller, I couldn’t dig deeply enough with it. With the Mantis, I can dig down six inches, hoe the soil aside, and dig down another six inches, which is as deep as I need to go. In fact, as the rules have changed since this book, which is practically brand new, was published, I have to dig only eight inches instead of twelve, and I can eat the first asparagus the spring after I plant. Some brave souls tried it out, and found that in fact they didn’t kill their asparagus or reduce its next year’s growth by doing so.
*
A compost pile that really cooks. In late summer–this is from me, not from the book–cut down a tree while it still has its leaves on it. The larger, the better. Then run the branches through a compost grinder. You’ll be astonished to see steam coming out of the pile even through heavy snow.
*
Steep compost tea in a pillowcase. No, for the plants to drink, not you.
*
Free seedlings from the compost pile. This is particularly likely to happen with squash and tomatoes. If you use open-pollinated plants, they will probably be true to type, but if you use hybrids, there’s no telling what the plants from the seeds will look like.
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Making a compost sifter. This keeps you from putting uncomposted material into your garden. If you are interested in archaeology, a rocker sifter will work as well with compost as in fill.
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Skip compost with these ingredients. Lists things that can go straight into the garden without bothering to compost. This includes everything from used loose tea leaves to eggshells to bowls of breakfast cereal to dead bouquets.
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If your blueberries have the blues, check your pH. This tells how acid or alkaline your soil is, and blueberries like VERY acid soil.
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Plant tomatoes in good company. I notice that I have circled basil, marigolds, and dill and borage as good companion plants for tomatoes. This is particularly good as all of these herbs are edible (except some marigolds), and if you’re going to make pickles you can hardly get by without growing your own dill. If you buy dill in those itty bitty bottles, it takes forever and $$$$$ to get enough dill.
*
Growing better with age. It mentions many veggies that can handle anything from a light frost to a whole winter, but it doesn’t mention that American persimmons are totally inedible until after the first hard freeze. Paul Ray Storey talked me into eating a persimmon before the first hard frost when we were in the sixth grade, and I am now 67 and I could still strangle him for it. I loved persimmons until then. Now I do not love persimmons. I can’t even eat Japanese persimmons, which are perfectly edible without a hard frost. Thank you, Paul Ray, and kindly ask Ted Lee to give you a kick in the behind from me.
*
Artichokes for cool climes. In places like Utah at 4200 feet, artichokes aren’t perennial. They have to be grown as annuals. Considering how little of an artichoke is edible, I probably never will bother.
*
Basil rescue mission. What to do with basil that is trying to grow out of hand. I don’t like basil well enough to care, but my oldest daughter does.
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Purples and golds to go with your greens. This is a gem. Do you want a colorful salad? If you do these things–which include eating a lot of flowers–you will have the most beautiful salad on the block.
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A kinder, gentler jalapeño. I talked about this a couple of days ago.
*
Snitch a rose cutting. Actually, I’d rather ask, though I doubt I would be forbidden. But I already have all the roses my garden will hold, thanks to my dear stepdaughter, whom I would claim as my daughter except for the fact that she already has an excellent mother of her own. (Perhaps I should mention here that I was not involved in T and Naomi’s divorce and T was not involved in Fred’s and my divorce, so Naomi and I are free to be close friends. So are Fred and T, but their minds are so different I can’t imagine what they would talk about if they wanted to get together, which–as Fred can’t afford to fly and T gets airsick–isn’t going to happen.)
*
Get the light right. This is especially important if you live in a valley and often have stationary overcasts during the winter. My barn gets sixteen hours a day of the closest thing to sunlight that I can create, and even then it’s equivalent to only about four hours of sunlight.
*
Keep lavender from languishing. Oops. I think I meant to mark the other side of the sheet. Tea Time is a gardener’s reward. Most herbal teas grow well in shade, so they’re doubly useful–as a decorative plant in spring, summer, and fall, and many delicious teas all year round.
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Overhead herbs. Oops again. That reminds me that I need to hang the stevia so that all the sap will run into the leaves.
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A sturdier tomato cage. From trash to tomatoes. This is recycling at its best.
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Build a bean house. This looks very useful. I will try it next year, maybe.
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Harvest the leaves, not just the grapes. This supposes that you like Greek cooking. My husband doesn’t, and it’s absurd to make dolmades just for me.
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A backyard bog. No, thank you. I don’t know why I marked this. But that’s the last paperclip.
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If you mark pages with paperclips, your book will undoubtedly sprout a selection of pages I didn’t mark. That’s okay. That’s what this book is all about.
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Remember, for questions or comments, go to gardenwindow@aol.com. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know how to do research.
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See you tomorrow. November 15 I will vanish for about a week, but presumably I’ll be back soon with a brand new knee. I hope by then I also have some brand new books to review, because I’m running low.
*

November 9, 2010

Anne Wingate — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:52:38 +0000

It’s pouring rain, and there’s a 100% chance of rain or snow all day. I’m writing this on November 8 for publication on November 9, and I doubt that Manny will get here today. But I wish he would, so he can exchange those two light fixtures and finish whatever else electrical he has to finish, so I can put the stuff that belongs on the floor of the hall pantry back there. Right now it’s in the garage, because it all covers the entrance to the crawl space.
*

I learned last night that those flowers I thought were Michaelmas daisies and related to chrysanthemums are Michaelmas daisies and related to chrysanthemums.
Not bad detective work. Since they’re perennial, after they get through blooming for this winter I’ll move them backward a little, so they don’t block the sidewalk at all.
*

They’re really asters, but they’re called daisies because they look so much like daisies. The blue ones are still called asters.

But I plant dahlias, and they start blooming about the same time the asters and Michaelmas daisies do, so even if they’re behind the asters and daisies they are much taller, so they still dominate the fall garden, along with the small chrysanthemums.
*

I just showed the pink dahlias, but they are actually many different colors, including some colors I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The chrysanthemums aren’t really that big; this picture is a close-up.
*
It makes me very happy to have beautiful flowers. Alas, the petunias are gone for the year. I planted only three petunias–one white, one pink, and one blue–and they bloomed like mad. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn I had planted a whole flat of each color.
* And the yarrow!
It grows in a whole rainbow of colors. I have it in the big bed between our driveway and the Barlows’, and also in Alicia’s garden. (If you’re new to my blog, which I prefer to call a column, you may not know that one large flower bed in the backyard is a memorial to our youngest daughter, who was shot to death some years ago. Because her grave is so far away that we can’t visit it due to our health, we have created a cenotaph to her in our backyard. It includes a bronze plaque that Manny put on a pyramid of tile.)
*
And why am I bubbling over about flowers, when today is so cold and wet and nasty? Well, I suspect it has something to do with the same reason that Sh put up all her Christmas decorations in the middle of November. Knowing that two or three more babies are headed into the family has made everybody happy. B will be a little jealous, but with a little extra attention from other family members when Sh is necessarily busy he should be fine.
*
But I promised to talk about Jerry Baker’s book Old-Time Gardening Wisdom today. He first learned about gardening when he went to live with his grandmother during World War II, and since then he has expanded it so much that he knows what should be done about soil, grass, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, and you name it all over the United States and parts of Mexico and Canada. Most people forget that Mexico is mostly in North America, not Central or South America, but it is, and the desert doesn’t take any notice of national boundaries. The Sonoran Desert is in two countries, and you can die of thirst in a hurry no matter which country you’re in. So don’t steal cactuses, no matter how nice they might look in your yard. If somebody dies of dehydration because you stole a cactus, that will be on your conscience forever even if you don’t know about it.
*
I just checked my email, and learned that I won the auction on three scented geraniums on eBay!
*

Scented Geraniums – 3 varieties -Apple, Lime, Nutmeg

This is my first purchase of scented geraniums. I suspect that they’re not winter-hardy here and will have to be kept in the barn (my plant and project room, actually part of the house, for you newcomers) during the winter. But I expect to enjoy them.
*
If anybody decides to send me flowers while I’m in the hospital or flat on my back at home (either in my bedroom or my barn; I’ll be back and forth between the two), and nobody is required to send me flowers and I won’t be upset if nobody does, but if anybody does, African violets or scented geraniums would be most acceptable. So would gift certificates from Nichols Garden Nursery or Burpee or PayPal or Amazon, because I can purchase plants or plant-related things from any of them without leaving the house, which is going to be just about impossible for about a month after each surgery. Which, by the way, means I have to plant my poppies and blackberries and two or three other flowers today, or sometime this week, probably tomorrow because the chance of rain or snow drops to 20% tomorrow. They’re supposed to be planted just before the first snow, but I don’t know whether I’ll be portable when the first real snow decides to hit. Last year I missed the deadline, because I knew it was going to snow but I didn’t know that snow would then remain on the ground until April. Usually the first snow melts.
*
Uh, back to Jerry Baker. I want to emphasize that this is not one of those silly books that recommend things like birth control pills for flowers and denture cleaner to clean the toilet. The birth-control pills might be just ducky for the flowers, but you have to buy them, and you have to have a prescription to do so, and it costs a heck of a lot more than fertilizer does. Although the denture cleaners are OTC, it’s silly to substitute them for products that are meant to clean the toilet.
*
One of the points Baker makes is that the first thing you have to know is the condition of your soil. I bought pH testing strips on eBay, and they were, to my astonishment, shipped from China and marked as electronic parts. Look, folks, I’ve already had the Customs people visit me once for mislabeled things, and I do not knowingly purchase from outside the country unless I know the company and know it will label things properly (no “personal gifts”) and pay the import tax if any. What I don’t understand is why the litmus paper couldn’t have been shipped from somewhere in the United States anyway.
*
But there’s a lot more to know about your soil besides its pH, which shows how acid or alkaline it is. You need to know what its composition is. To learn this, you fill a covered jar with water and a tablespoon of soil from the area you’re testing. Shake it up once, let it settle, and then shake it up again and let it settle for three days. Then study it. If you look on page 10, you will see how an ideal soil layers itself. Floating on top of the water is a small amount of humus–decayed plant material. Then you have about a cup of plain, clear, water. Below that is a short layer of clay, then a wide layer of silt and a wide, but slightly narrower, level of sand. If your soil looks like this, you’re in luck, because you have a “good sandy loam, which is perfect for growing fruits and vegetables.”
*
But in soil as in all other parts of life, perfection is rarely come by. Baker then proceeds to explain what other stack-ups mean, and what you can do to correct them. Although he prefers to use organic materials as much as possible, he isn’t totally rabid about eschewing all chemicals; the fact is that everything on earth, live, dead, or never living, is made up of chemicals, and the question isn’t whether you’re going to use chemicals, but how natural the chemicals are. It’s better to use aged chicken manure than it is to buy fresh cattle manure from a feed lot, because fresh manure will burn your plants and manure from a feed lot is almost always heavy in salt, as in sodium chloride, as in it kills most plants. So avoid anything from feed lots. Also, avoid anything made from human waste. Although it is theoretically sterile, the number of volunteer tomatoes that come up from it indicates otherwise; furthermore, it is likely to have heavy metals in it which would make food grown in it unsafe for human consumption. Even if you get it free it isn’t worth the cost.
*
The rest of his book explains what-all to do for this soil and that soil, in light or shade or light shade, and what can and should be planted where, realizing as many garden books don’t that in some cases you don’t have a choice. You’re stuck with what your home has available, and you can amend it as much as possible, but you can’t wave a magic wand and turn it into perfection.
*
That’s the main reason I consider this book important. It is honest. It tells you what you can and can’t do, and if you can’t do it you aren’t made to feel guilty because your situation doesn’t allow you to do it.
*
After all, who needs an extra load of guilt dumped on him or her, when we’ve all got quite enough guilt without having our pleasant gardens accuse us. So sit under your own vine and cucumber, and don’t cry because you can’t sit under your fig tree because it has to stay small enough that you can take it indoors each winter.
*
Tomorrow we’ll talk about a book that promises to “transform a good garden into a great garden in one season.” I notice it is bristling with paper clips. That means that it is bristling with useful information. So stay tuned! And please recommend me to all your friends. You can find me on the blog listing in Kindle on Amazon for only $1.99 a month, of which I get 30% which has to go to buy books for me to review if the publishers don’t get on the stick and start SENDING ME BOOKS TO REVIEW, GUYS AND GALS, SO PLEASE WAKE UP BECAUSE MY HUSBAND WILL STRANGLE ME IF I START BUYING 24 OR MORE GARDEN BOOKS A MONTH TO REVIEW!

And we’ve already had the computers go out once from the weather. I’m going to post this extremely early, in hopes of getting it posted at all.

November 8, 2010

Anne Wingate — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 02:00:02 +0000

I’m writing this on November 7, before we go to visit the other set of grandchildren. This is my last chance for a while, because a week from November 8 is when I get my first knee surgery, and after that, until the doctor tells me otherwise, I won’t be allowed to sit up for more than an hour at a time. We can still visit the other set of grandchildren, but this set lives too far away.

We have to leave their house before 5:00 PM because they have something in Sh’s family that starts then, so we’ll leave early enough to drive around Utah Lake. It’s almost exactly the size of the Sea of Galilee, so T often calls it that. The Jordan flows north from it into Great Salt Lake, just as the original Jordan flows north from the Sea of Galilee to the Salt Sea (more often called the Dead Sea). (I should explain that the set of grandchildren living in Salt Lake City are the offspring of T’s daughter B and her husband, Sp. The set we are visiting today are the offspring of T’s son, J, and his wife, Sh, and of course we’re visiting the parents as well as the children. They live in a brand new subdivision and therefore were the only family members who didn’t use their legacy to improve their home. Their home is already as improved as it can get.
*

But with their son, B, ill–he has only half of chromosome 17–they have a use for every penny. I’m inserting some information about his problems.
*

“How common is Smith-Magenis syndrome?
*

“Smith-Magenis syndrome affects at least 1 in 25,000 individuals worldwide. Researchers believe that many people with this condition are not diagnosed, however, so the true prevalence may be closer to 1 in 15,000 individuals.
*

“What are the genetic changes related to Smith-Magenis syndrome?

“Most people with Smith-Magenis syndrome have a deletion of genetic material from a specific region of chromosome 17. Although this region contains multiple genes, researchers believe that the loss of one particular gene, RAI1, in each cell is responsible for most of the characteristic features of this condition. The loss of other genes in the deleted region may help explain why the features of Smith-Magenis syndrome vary among affected individuals.”
*

Right now B has a service dog who can tell when he’s likely to begin a tantrum or a convulsion, and the dog even knows whether to sit on B’s feet or to go get Sh or J. She’s a retriever, and when she dies he’ll have to have a replacement. He may never be able to live on his own, and he will always need a service dog. A lifetime supply of service dogs is enough to eat a large legacy, though T is working hard to make it a larger one.
*

It’s sad when a child who clearly is intelligent can’t read, speak, or be toilet trained at the age of eight. But although we were told that he wouldn’t learn to speak until he was about ten, and might never learn to read, he is speaking at the age of eight, has learned a lot of words by “see and say,” and can sound out all the vowels and some consonants. Also, he can figure out how anything works. When I got my exercise rower, all the children played with it for a while, but B is the only one who figured out where to put the handles when he was through with it. He’s very fond of taking things apart and then–if possible–putting them back together again. He is retarded in the sense of being slow to learn, but he is not stupid. T got him a chess set for his birthday–he plays with it a lot but is not quite ready to learn yet–and he is getting an extremely nice abacus for Christmas. J and Sh were already talking about getting him one, so when T called to say he had found a good one in a catalog and ask whether he could get for B, they were delighted. In addition, I’m giving each set of grandchildren a copy of volumes 1-4 of Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories. They’re antique, and it took me quite a while to locate two sets.
*

E, by contrast, is extremely bright and advanced in her school work. She’s rarely jealous of the extra attention B has to have, and often tries to mother him herself as best she can. She dances, sings, plays the piano, and does umpteen other things.
*

The doctors said that Sh couldn’t have any more children, but as much trouble as it takes to care for B, I’ve wondered whether she could manage to take care of another child anyway. At least J has been able to provide her with a very large project room, with her computer and her sewing and crafts spread out as she wants them spread. And today we learned that another child will soon be on the way! They were thinking of adopting, and then a neighbor came and told them that the Spirit told her to offer to be a surrogate for another child for them!!! So they did the necessary tests to be sure there wouldn’t be any genetic clashes, they’ve started the daily shots, and the day after Thanksgiving the eggs will be removed from Sh, combined with J’s sperm, and implanted into the surrogate. This makes the baby (–ies) due around the end of August, if he/she/they goes/go to full term.
*

Now, why in the world did Sh decide to put up her Christmas tree in the middle of November? I can’t imagine, can you? I can see reasons to hope this is a boy, and I can see reasons to hope this is a girl, so I guess I hope it is twins. And the kind neighbor deserves twenty extra stars in her crown for this. I wondered when I entered the family room why Sh looked like the cat that ate the canary, with yellow feathers floating all over its face. No, really, she looked like a completely comfy early-middle-age cat with a big smile on its face. I found out later that T had known for two months about the surrogate, but nobody wanted me to know until after all the tests were finished and specific plans were made, and then J and Sh should tell me themslves.

*
Well, E and B will be good siblings. E was jealous for a while about all the attention B got, and B will be jealous for a while about all the attention the baby (–ies) will get, but he’ll get over it just as E got over it. And so part of J’s legacy from his grandmother is to get her another great-grandchild. I’m rather proud of this family. None of us have gone out and done anything stupid with our legacy; we have all chosen wisely. T and I probably look like we did the silliest thing, because we’ve spent so much money on the yard, but we’ve had the worst yard in our neighborhood for twenty years, and finally getting it looking good is important. Besides that, we’ve been paying Manny and he has been supplying money to relatives both here and in Mexico. I think that the relatively small amount we’ve paid him has gone to support or help to support at least five families.
*

Both of T’s offspring have large maps on the wall. Sp and B, who love to travel and can get special fares and accommodations because of B’s connection with travel bureaus, have marked on their map every place they have been. J and Sh haven’t marked anything on their huge map, but both sets of children can find places on the world map, and are very scornful of people who don’t know where places are. B gets a “You’re kidding me; nobody is that stupid” when he is told that most people can’t find whatever place he has just pointed to. T gave all the children except O, who is only two, day planners. When B found out that his day planner had MAPS in it! he was overjoyed. His sister, meanwhile, was asking if she could make notes of her appointments with her orthodontist in it. Sh told her that she could do that, and she could write down homework assignments, and whatever else she wanted to write in.
*

I remember that when J was about the age his daughter is now, we would take the children to the airport–this was when anybody could go through the security gates–and send him to find some particular gate and come back and describe it. He always succeeded. He was later the Utah geography bee champion, although he washed out quickly in Washington, D.C., when they asked him something he hadn’t come across.
*

Sh and J don’t have time for a garden, but B and Sp do. They couldn’t have one this year because they spent the summer with Sp’s parents while their house was being remodeled, but they will have one again next year. Considering that B is due to hatch in the spring, that’ll be a lot of work, but oh! If you could see her kitchen! She is prepared to do ANYTHING in it.
*

I may get a second copy of Getting Started in Permaculture to give them for Christmas. When I first saw the book advertised, I was very puzzled, because to my mind, permaculture is planting perennials, and there really aren’t very many perennial vegetables, although most fruits, in the right climate zones, are perennial. Let’s see–rhubarb, asparagus, Jerusalem artichoke, horseradish, mint . . . that’s all I can think of except green artichokes, which are not perennial in this area . . . and I have all of it except the asparagus, which I’ll start inside during the winter so it’ll be ready to go outside in the spring. I’m planting 300 Mary Washington seeds, and as the years go by I’ll pull out the female plants, which are easy to spot because they have red berries on them, until I have an all-male asparagus bed. And no, it wouldn’t be cheaper to grow Jersey Knight. I bought 300 asparagus seeds for three dollars. Compare that to thirty-odd dollars for ten Jersey Knight. I’ll pull out the female plants, thank you.
*

But permaculture turns out to be about preparing garden beds that you don’t have to dig and/or till every year. (See my reviews of Square Foot Gardening and Lasagna Gardening.) If you combine permanent beds that you have made weed-free, and normal crop rotation, your garden should produce more and more every year, while your work decreases every year (until, of course, you get the produce inside, where you have to can, freeze, bottle, or dry it).

*
Friday Manny picked about a quarter of my Jerusalem artichokes. He showed me the bucket, and of course they were covered with soil and some of them were stuck together. I had to run back inside to do something else, and when I got back out, all the artichokes had been separated from the soil and washed. The bucket was sitting neatly in the barn. The rest of the crop will stay in the ground for the winter. If we mulch it heavily enough (and where is the mouse in my pocket that makes a we; I mean, if Manny mulches it heavily enough) they will be fine all summer and into the spring. Oh how I wish that we had the money to hire him fulltime and permanently! He had to leave early Saturday, because Teresa had a bad reaction to the flu shot she got the day before, and although she managed to talk Manny into not taking her to the e-room when she had the first two attacks, the third one was so bad her mother, who lives with them, called an ambulance, and the EMTs are not as easily talked around as Manny is. So they hauled her off in an ambulance and her mother got on the phone and screamed for Manny. I knew when I walked into the barn that Manny was talking with his mother-in-law, because he was speaking Spanish, which he tries to avoid because he’s working on getting English into his subconscious.
*

I swear, if anything happened to Manny, that whole family–including brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, grandchildren–would implode. I said that to Manny yesterday, and he nodded soberly, with the usual twinkle in his eye not visible. He’s about 4’11″, maybe 135 # (I know he’s lost 34 pounds since he started working for us, because he told me so), strong as an ox, determined as a mule, and devout as a nun, though since he’s LDS he wouldn’t appreciate that comparison. But anybody who carries the weight of responsibility that he carries has to be devout to survive. And HE has bad knees, gout, and diabetes. But he hasn’t got time to stop and feel sorry for himself, because he’s too busy caring for everybody else’s problems. He’s embarrassed when he has to come and ask me for pain meds, but I keep telling him not to be embarrassed. I mean, he asks only for Tylenol and ibuprofen. It’s not as if he were asking for codeine or dilaudid, not that I would give it to him if I had it. Some things it’s a violation of federal law to share. He says the Lord always provides, even if it’s just enough for that moment. So he knows not to worry about tomorrow’s problems, because tomorrow’s problems belong to tomorrow, and the Lord will take care of them in due time.
*

My husband, T, doesn’t do yards; we’re even because I don’t do vacuum cleaners or brooms. But he knows enough to know how much Manny is doing, and he greatly admires and respects him. So Manny and Teresa are always in our family prayers. I’m not able to work much in the yard; theoretically, by next spring, with two new knees and a lot of physical therapy, I should be able to do far more of my own yard work.
*

Half the apricot leaves are on the ground now, and I can’ see any of Alicia’s garden. I’ve got to move the hops while I still know where they are. They’ll be growing on part of the clothesline, on which I no longer hang clothes. I just want them long enough to make some hops pillows, and after I’ve done that I’ll probably let at least one of them, maybe both, die. As to the leaves, I need to put four inches of mulch on the strawberry bed, and I don’t know whether I have enough or not. I hope so. We quit taking the newspaper quite a while ago.
*

We’re doing permaculture all around the edges of the backyard. On the north side of the fence we’re planting red grapes, then there will be a narrow walkway of cast stone, and on the other side of that we already have planted the raspberries, and I’ll plant the blackberries this winter in the barn, so they too can go out in the spring. Manny built a grand wooden frame to hold the bramble crops (that includes anything like blackberries, raspberries, dewberries, and so forth). So we’ll have two sets of permaculture fruit with a walkway between them. Then in the back (west) side of the yard will be the green grapes–considerably more of them than of the red grapes, and yes I know that red grapes have more nutrition. I just happen to prefer the green grapes anyway. Maybe I’ll make some raisins, and/or some grape leather. There’s enough space in front of the grapes that I can plant several crops–the Hopi blue corn, the carrots, the chard, the lettuce (though I might plant it in the front south side, because it’s very shady because of the neighbor’s tree and our tree), and I don’t know yet what-all else. The south side of the backyard will be for the asparagus in the west side of the yard, where it is not shady, and the green beans will be in the east side of the yard, where it is shady about half the day. This is the last time for three years that I can plant beans there; next year I’ll have to rotate it, and I haven’t decided how. The tomatoes will be with the asparagus, because the two get along very well, and there’s enough asparagus that I can plant tomatoes in a different part of the yard next year and still have plenty of room. Peppers of course–both sweet peppers and fireless jalapeños. I love jalapeños, but I prefer to be able to taste the peppers instead of having my mouth on fire. There are at least two fireless jalapeños now, but I’ll probably plant señorita peppers from Nichols Garden Nursery. I might or might not also plant some hardy kiwi fruit.
*

I recommend that you spent part of your winter reading at least one book on permaculture–this one for preference, if you’re unused to the idea of permaculture, and others if you’re more familiar with it or have learned all you need to from it. If you are tempted not to bother with reading it, consider the weeds and how they grow. Would you rather weed or read? You’ll find a number of plants that you can grow in the interstices of garden walks. I’m planting two flats of walk-on-me thyme. It oght to do very well where the weeds now live, and smother out the weeds. I’m also growing some Scottish moss for the same reason. The book suggests more plants you might use, depending on where you are.
*

Tuesday I’ll be talking about Jerry Baker’s old-time gardening secrets, many of which he learned from his grandmother. Like most gardening books, it’s very enjoyable.

November 6, 2010

Anne Wingate — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 22:05:09 +0000

I’m writing this on November 5, so it will be published November 6. I know I promised three to five columns a week, but I’ll be in the hospital from November 15 till probably the 18th, and I don’t know how sane I’ll be when I get home. So I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m a little nervous about having a knee transplant, but if it’s necessary it’s necessary, and I’m very thankful that such things are available. If my poor great-grandmother had been able to get a hip transplant, she wouldn’t have spent the last ten years of her life bedridden.
*
When I was a child, one of my mother’s magazines–I think but am not certain that it was Better Homes and Gardens–always had a personal essay on the last page, by a man who talked about neighborhood doings. I think he did the column for close to thirty years or more, and I read the last one and was very sad that it was ending. I hoped then that someday I could write a column like that. But there didn’t seem to be any place to do it, until Amazon provided me with this chance. So I’m combining reviews of books and gadgets with neighborhood business and reviews of neighbors’ (and my own) gardens.
*
Richard dropped by today to pick up his election sign. He lost by a two to one margin, but he said he was going to keep the signs and see how 2012 looks. I hope 2012 looks better than he does right now. His health is deteriorating due to uncontrollable diabetes, and although several years ago he was making his living by rock-hunting, now he can scarcely walk at all..I had bought some of his rock collections at the planetarium without having the slightest idea who collected, identified, and assembled the collections. I’m trying to remember how long he’s been in the neighborhood, but I’m just not sure. I think it’s been about fifteen years.
*
Today instead of talking about a book, I want to talk about a gadget. It is called an Aerogarden, and it grows things incredibly fast. It’s small enough that last year we kept three of them on the “window desk” in the living room, though since then we’ve gotten rid of the window desk to make room for chairs for guests. But at present we have four: one is growing lettuce, one is growing tomatoes, one is chock full of petunias, and one needs to be replanted. I still haven’t decided whether I want to start it next week or wait until I’m home from the hospital. The lettuce and tomatoes are drinking so much water that someone is going to have to attend to them every day that I can’t, and T won’t. I’m going to see if Cathy, across the street, or one of her daughters can do it. I use two gallons of distilled water in the barn every day, because I don’t want to burn out the pumps with the heavily lime-laden water we have here.
Aerogarden is available at its own Website and others from Sears to Amazon to eBay. Some fellow bought up a couple of hundred of them in the fall expecting to sell them at eBay for more than they were worth. Apparently a couple of years in a row Aerogarden had sold out before Christmas. Unfortunately for him, last year Aerogarden didn’t run out, and even if he managed to sell them later at a reduced price he’s bound to have lost money on them.
Their planting sections range from three to seven. I have four that have five spaces and one that has six. But that’s for plants you intend to continue to grow to maturity and then keep growing. There is a Styrofoam inset that allows you to start up to 65 plants at once, to put outside. This year I experimented. We are beset by magpies, which I think are in the crow family, and also by crows and ravens. They will brazenly follow a person who is planting right down the row eating every seed that was planted. So although I had never seen or heard of anybody starting corn and then transplanting it, I decided to do just that. So I started the corn inside, kept it in until it was about two inches high, hardened it off, and planted it six inches apart in all directions. The crows and their cousins didn’t want the sprouts; they wanted the seeds, which they didn’t get. The corn grew very well and we got a good crop. So I know what I’ll be doing next year.
*
But I’m also growing some blue corn and some dwarf blue corn, so I have to stagger the planting so they won’t all be setting off pollen at the same time. I don’t think crossing Hopi blue corn with peaches and cream sweet corn would produce anything I would want to try. I understand that the blue corn works best as cornmeal, not as sweet corn, and the miniature corn can be used for popcorn by actually popping it on the cob, in the microwave. I’ll let you know what happens.
*
But I’m not starting things only in the Aerogardens; for one thing, if I put the lettuce, tomatoes, and petunias outside they would at once succumb to the weather, and the remaining garden I think I will plant with asparagus. But I’m also planting in starting trays, and I think that will work well. I got one of those heating pads for starting plants on (making sure they don’t get wet, of course), and I’ll be starting a good many things in them. I’m planting three colors of Chinese rosa rugosa, and a whole lot of walk-on-me thyme to fill in the interstices in the rock garden, which are now inhabited by weeds.
*
I’ll be spending the winter in physical therapy, so hopefully I’ll be able to get out and do more of the gardening myself and less paying other people to do it. The Aerogarden can be used for kitchen herbs, for people who use many fresh herbs; for flowers, to decorate a sickroom (unless oxygen is in use; the manufacturers ask people not to use the machines where oxygen is being administered, which means I can’t use it in my bedroom because that’s where my oxygen concentrator is). But the hose goes all over the house with me, and I don’t worry about using the hose around the Aerogarden. If I’m in the barn and need extra oxygen, I have to turn the gadgets off before I can turn the oxygen cylinders I keep there on.
*
This is odd. When I turned 60 it didn’t bother me. Neither did 62 or 65 or even 66. But 67 really bothers me, and I don’t know why. Of the women on both sides of my family, all those who lived past 61 have gone on to live into their late 80s or early 90s or even, in two cases, past 100. So my prospects are good. I have my beautiful, cheerful, barn for a project room, and I will be doing my physical therapy in what amounts to a garden. We put up enough lights, with both a cool-color fluorescent bulb and a warm-color fluorescent bulb, to get as close as possible to sunlight, so I shouldn’t try to hibernate this winter as I have done in the past. I have magazines out there, and all my gardening books and supplies, and my weaving, and my crocheting, and my quilting, so WHY IN THE HECK AM I UPSET ABOUT BEING 67?
*
If you know, let me know. For comments and questions, go to gardenwindow@aol.com. I can’t promise to answer everything, but I’ll do what I can.
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I don’t publish a column on Sunday, so I’ll be back with you on Monday with a book about permaculture which is interesting though not as interesting as I had hoped it would be. Most weeks I’ll also critique an antique gardening book. Project Gutenberg is loaded with them, as is Australia’s version of Gutenberg, and I’m writing a novel taking place from 1810 to 1812. I’m enjoying reading the cookbooks and gardening books that fit into that time frame, and I’ll share them with you. Almost all of them are free and can be downloaded from Kindle.
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See you Monday. Anne