November 5, 2010

Written November 4 for publication on November 5
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We went today to visit Becky and the grandchildren in their newly remodeled house. It is lovely, and the kitchen is the finest I have ever seen bar none. Becky and Spencer spent their legacy from her grandmother very wisely, in enlarging their house to twice its previous size. Becky has a combined office and project room, and Spencer has a separate office. I strongly approve. Every woman should have a project room, and no husband and wife should have to share an office.
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There is a plethora of built-in bookcases, but considering how short a time they have been married (ten years) and how much they both read, I expect that more bookcases will be needed eventually. But that’s okay; they have the space to put them in.
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Because they are thrifty, Becky does not have to have an outside job, though until the children began arriving she worked as a travel agent. Her last job was at Church headquarters, arranging trips for missionaries and General Authorities, and every now and then she still goes in when for some reason they are shorthanded there. But most of the time she can count on being home.
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She enjoys her children, and that shows in their self-confidence and their intelligence. They’re both perpetual motion machines, but they do not pick on each other very much, and both children were eager to show me both children’s rooms and the family room, which is put together in such a way as to allow a lot of romping when the snow is too deep for them to play outside.
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I remember a time, many years ago, when James and Becky and Alicia were all out of school because of a severe snowstorm. Hospitals have to work snowstorm or not, so James and Becky were spending the day with us, as they did every day after school for several years. They wanted a snow fort but couldn’t get it to fit together, so finally I took them all my loaf pans so they could make snow bricks. That gave them a good fort, and they divided up as to who was attacking the fort and who was defending it. Creating two armies out of three children sounds a little strange, but they managed and had a wonderful time. I expect that one day Becky will find herself handing out loaf pans for an identical project.
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Owen is barely two, but while we were in the front yard he started digging a future flower bed. He disdained using the child-size shovel I had given the children in favor of using the adult-size shovel, and actually managed to dig up some dirt and dump it into the bucket in which dirt is being carried away until it is time to bring it back.
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Meanwhile back at the ranch . . . .
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When we were leaving my doctor’s office to go eat a belated breakfast, as I had been required to go fasting to the doctor, T accidentally hit me in the head with a corner of the car lift gate. Then when I got out of the car I tried to hug both grandchildren at once and managed to fall over and roll two or three times down a grassy bank. Becky helped me get back up. As I fall an average of four or five times a week, that was nothing new, but by the time I got home, I was in dire need of Tylenol for the shoulder.

I don’t know why it is that any time I do anything to my shoulder it’s always the same one, though I shouldn’t complain. At least it’s my left shoulder, and I’m right-handed. But anyway, I medicated and bedicated. (T and I love to invent words, though he’s much better at it than I am.) Then I got back up because I have a book review to write.
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This one is Panty Hose, Hot Peppers, Tea Bags, and more–for the garden. Its subtitle is 1001 ingenious ways to use common household items to control weeds, beat pests, cook compost, solve problems, make tricky jobs easy, and save time. It’s from Yankee Magazine and is published by Rodale. It’s available from most bookstores including Amazon, except that it’s not on Kindle yet. I consider that a nuisance, because the more I use ebooks the less I like paper books. But I must admit that a paper book is easy to mark one’s place in, and this one has a lot of ideas for recycling. Most such ideas can be used only a highly limited number of times before you run out of uses, but this one does tend to give you ideas that can be used repeatedly. Some of the pictures are funny, and as usual with books from Yankee Magazine, it includes suggestions I wouldn’t put in my yard for anybody to look at, but there are more than enough good, usable ideas–ideas that can be used for the smallest in-home garden or the largest outdoor garden–to be worth much more than the cost of the book.
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Just for example, what can you do with a plastic bucket? Suggestions from the book: Bury it in a place convenient to your planting bed, and use it for small weeds, deadheaded flowers, and so forth. When it’s full, lift it out and dump it into the compost bin and then return it to its location. Another: Hang the bucket from a tree branch to store garden tools, gloves, and so forth in. It’s high enough that the sprinkler system is unlikely to reach it, and it is out of children’s reach. If I did that, I would be careful to bring it in before rain or snow.
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Here’s one from me: Punch or drill holes in it for drainage, and then use it for winter storage of plants you have to bring in or that have outgrown their pots. Right now I’m afflicted with two very beautiful, healthy, productive tomato plants in Aerogardens that have outgrown the light. I need to get out there–maybe tomorrow when my head stops jangling–and transplant them into buckets with holes in them. As I have only two hanging hooks and there is a spider plant on one of them, I must decide whether to pull down the spider plant and relocate it, or to set the tomatoes on the back of the barbeque grill a previous owner built out of brick in a place where it couldn’t possibly be used but where I have plenty of light from the fluorescent fixtures Manny installed when he was repairing the room we now call the barn, or get Manny when he finally gets here to install some more hanging hooks. I’m tentatively leaning toward the last idea, but I’m also tentatively leaning toward bringing in those upsidedown tomato planters and using them instead of buckets.
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The most important thing about those books from Yankee and Rodale together is not exactly what they tell you to do, but the fact that they get your imagination running so that you can think up your own ideas based on theirs. That also is the theme of the magazine Better Homes and Gardens. When I first subscribed to it, I wrote the editor an angry letter complaining that most of the ideas were unworkable unless you had a lot of money or unless you lucked into a deal identical to that the person featured lucked into. A year later, I wrote a letter of apology; I had realized that the idea wasn’t to COPY what was done by the person featured, but to use that idea as a jumping-off point for your own ideas. I knew BH&G had brainwashed me when we were redoing the annex to the kitchen and I found myself looking at a piece of furniture and thinking, “Now, where can I repurpose this?”
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Read this book. It will give you many ideas on how to repurpose many, many things.
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For questions or comments, email me at gardenwindow@aol.com.

November 3, 2010

November 4, 2010

Manny never did arrive Monday. I am not surprised; he usually has to take his wife and/or his mother-in-law to the doctor on Monday. I’m writing this on Tuesday for publication on Wednesday, so I do not yet know whether he’ll get here today or not. I hope so, because I have things for him to do indoors as well as out. (Later: He called to say he is taking his wife for some medical tests. He hopes to get here tomorrow.)

The garden looks much the same as yesterday, except that more leaves have fallen from the apricot tree. I’ll use them to mulch the strawberries. There are two strawberry beds: one of the rectangular beds, and a strawberry pyramid. Papa–my father’s father–had a strawberry pyramid, and I loved it, so I was glad to finally get one of my own.

I just picked the first two tomatoes from an Aerogarden in the barn! Delicious–I ate them straight from the vine, as they couldn’t possibly have been contaminated by dirt or anything else. They didn’t even need salt, much less salad dressing or mayo. And I still haven’t finished the last ripe tomatoes from the yard, and have two buckets of green tomatoes, most of which will ripen over the next month.

The composter is full now, and Manny intends to do one or the other (or both) of two things: (1) Shred the contents with his lawnmower; and/or (2) Use the chicken wire that came off the barn when Manny was repairing it to create compost bins and put it in the second bin, so the stuff that piles up over the winter can go into the first bin. The third bin will be where the finished compost goes until it’s time to use it.

When he was pulling down the old grapevines, he had a humongous pile of branches. First he cut out all the wood, because he heats his house with wood and when he runs out he has to burn cardboard. So, of course, we save all our cardboard for him. But he managed to get three wheelbarrows full of wood out of the grapevines. I thought about asking him to save me enough of the smaller branches for me to make a wreath with, but I decided he needed the firewood a heck of a lot more than I needed a grapevine wreath. Besides that, we haven’t put up Christmas decorations in years. We don’t have room. Trying to run three businesses out of a 900-square-foot home is a pain and a displeasure. I’ve got to remeasure now, though, since we turned the screen room, which I had not been counting as part of the house, into a real room that is part of the house. I expect we’re up to about 1200 square feet. That’s still small for two large people and three businesses, one of them an international charity. Yes, we’re the business office of Project Gutenberg. I’m assistant to the CEO, who is in Alaska. People who call here wanting to talk to the CEO are informed that they have to talk to his assistant or to the CFO, who doesn’t really want to talk to anybody.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . . I just got through faxing a statement to Amazon Legal’s copyright agent. Some idiot stole my copyrighted edition of Swiss Family Robinson, which I spent two years creating. Here’s what I told the agent: “I spent two years creating [it[ from five out-of-copyright abridgements. I carefully cleared out all contradictions, errands that people had gone on but not returned from, errands that people had returned from but not gone on, and all other problems. I wrote some continuity. . . . The idiots even included my introduction, with my signature.” I’m asking for all profits plus $500 punitive damage. I figure they will find it difficult, but possible, to dig up $500, but if they complain too much I will raise it to $5000. I disapprove of blatant theft.

Today I want to talk about All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space! by Mel Bartholomew. It tells you how to reduce your gardening work to a minimum while getting a maximum amount of food and flowers from a small space. You begin by dividing each planting bed into one-square-foot areas, or just laying out one-square-foot areas on the ground. Then, instead of digging or tilling everything including the places where you will walk, you dig or till only the areas where you will plant. If you combine that with Lasagna Gardening ¸which I told you about yesterday, you should have very few weed problems.

One of the important tricks is to start at the same time several small plants, some of which will stay small and be harvested early, and others that will grow much larger and be in the garden most of the season. Companion gardening is very important in square foot gardening, because you can’t put plants that dislike each other in the same area, nor can you put plants that call for little water in with plants that want a lot of water.

The author shows you several garden plans that will maximize your results while minimizing your work. For example, instead of planting a whole row of lettuce which you will then have to thin, you take one square and plant a lettuce in each corner and a tomato or pepper plant in the middle. After all, how many lettuce plants can you eat at once? It makes far more sense to plant several a week than to plant a whole row at once.

Another of his tricks is to study the directions carefully. If you’re told to put the plants six inches apart in the row and put the rows twelve inches apart, why do you have rows at all? Why not put the plants six inches apart in each direction? That’s what I did this year with my corn, and I had a bumper crop. Next year I’m going to try the Three Sisters planting style. That is to plant the corn, and then about two weeks later plant beans so they can climb the corn stalk, and another couple of weeks later plant pumpkins, which will grow between the corn stalks and shade the ground so the roots of the corn, beans, and pumpkins will stay cool and the nitrogen fixing quality of the beans will help feed the corn, which likes a lot of nitrogen. Tribes all across North and Central America used this technique for thousands of years, so it cannot be considered untried.

There’s really no way to write a spoiler for this book, because you have to read it to make complete sense out of Bartholomew’s philosophy, which has thoroughly proved itself. So get the book from the library first, and I will be very surprised if you don’t then decide that you need a copy for your personal library. This is one of those books that I keep buying and then giving away, but I think I’ll keep the current copy.

Please send questions and comments to gardenwindow@aol.com and I’ll answer if I can. I don’t know all about gardening, but I do know how to do research.