Here’s my first cabbage — isn’t it beautiful? There are three more out there starting to head up, and this is one of those items I wish I had a more traditional plot for — I can see the glory that would be a couple of long rows of pretty cabbages. I think next year I can grow a few more, but the hoarder in me wishes I could grow a whole winter’s worth of lovely cabbages and then store them in the root cellar I don’t have. As I told a girlfriend the other day, I think deep down…
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Stretching out before me. Glorious. I’m fried, and the prospect, now that I’ve turned off the work computer, of having three whole days ahead of me to putter in the garden, get back to my novel, and yes, get back on track with blogging is a glorious prospect. I have tomatoes coming out my ears and I’ll be posting some pics. I just got a pressure canner so I might try putting up some salsa or tomatoes. I also just bought half a pig from my Milk Lady, which I’ll tell you all about. And I hear there’s some rain…
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It happens every year, and it’s always something of a surprise — about mid-August you can feel that chill in the air every morning — fall is just around the corner. So soon. It was only 2 months ago that it stopped snowing, and now it feels like there’s snow in the air. Overnight temps have been down into the low 40s. But the hardest part has been that it’s not getting light so early any more. It was easy getting up at 5:30 when it was light outside — and I like getting up so early — it gives…
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Here he is — Owen with his leg free for the first time in about six months. He’s a little freaked out, as you can see, and the poor leg is pretty irritated from tape and bandaging, but we think the achilles tendon repair is going to hold (knock wood). The bandages actually came off yesterday, but the vet and I are such chickens about it that he hung out there yesterday and spent the night in a nice, contained little crate. He’s still favoring it, but he’s cruising around the house and yard pretty well, and as you can…
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I’d post a photo but since I picked my first yellow cherry Galina yesterday and popped it right into my mouth, well, that would be impossible. I’m thrilled with my tomatoes this year, something I didn’t think would be the case since I couldn’t even get them in the ground until June 17, which is 2-3 weeks late. But the new bed along the fence, combined with the alarming-but-effective pruning of all side suckers, has me looking at a bumper crop of tomatoes. The early bush ones are starting to pink up — the Sasha’s Altai and Prairie Fire —…
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We each have that one professor — you know what I mean, the one who no matter what he teaches, you’re signing up for it. The one who you really really want to impress — or maybe impress is the wrong word, it smacks of falseness, of pulling something over on a person — with Wyatt it was that you wanted him to recognize perhaps not your intellect, his was so astonishing that to hope he’d think you were in anything like the same league was ridiculous, but what you hoped was that he’d recognize that you had potential, that…
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Well, actually not in town, at least not that I’ve heard, but they’re out and about in the mountains. My pretend children and their dad were up in Suce Creek last weekend where people were coming out of the trail saying there was a sow grizzly with a yearling back up in there, and on Wednesday, the Mighty Hunter’s darling son spooked one up when he was hiking Livingston Peak (which is the back side of the Suce Creek drainage. “My knees were shaking,” he said. “It was big.” The weather’s been so weird this year that the whole season…
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I always see a fair number of bikes in town in the summer — it’s pretty flat here, and town isn’t that big, and of course, we’re all locked in our houses for six to nine months a year, so once nice weather hits, there’s a lot of biking and walking. But I’m definitely seeing more bikes this summer — more old bikes that have been pulled out of the garage, more bikes with trailers. The bike shops over in Bozeman report that they’ve been slammed this year by people refitting older bikes. All good. The other thing I’ve seen…
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I don’t know why it’s taken me five years of gardening in these beds to see the light as far as mulch goes, but I’m a convert. I mulched the tomatoes in the new beds first — it gets really hot against that fence, the remote thermometer routinely reads in the high 90s and 100s during a sunny afternoon, and tomatoes don’t like to have hot feet. So I mulched with a couple of inches of straw. I was shocked at how effective it’s been. Even with the recent hot weather I’m only having to water every couple of days…
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The weather has finally gotten nice, and the garden is so lovely that I find I want to spend all my time out here. I’m blogging from the garden right this very minute. My new fence adds just the right privacy — I no longer feel watched by my neighbor — and I seem to have been out here all the time lately. Of course, spring came so late that I was effectively trapped in the house from October until June. So now, it’s all outside, all the time. I’ve been eating breakfast and dinner using my dining tables Perth…