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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I’ve been thinking for days about Michael Ruhlman’s tribute to his dad — it’s just a tiny note in a really beautiful piece, but Ruhlman points out that his father died in his house, among family, and with his ex-wife by his side. We should all be so lucky, or perhaps, we should all aspire to lead the kinds of lives and build the kinds of relationships where our family and loved ones will want to be there with us for that last mile. Another dear friend just buried his beloved, last week, an incandescent woman who went far too…
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Here they are, the first tomatoes of the season. Sasha’s Altai, Prairie Fire and a couple of Galinas. The catalog copy is right — the Sasha’s Altai are delicious — I took one bite of my lunch this afternoon and thought, as I do every year, why would anyone eat a tomato out of season? I really mean it — I’d rather wait all year and eat delicious tomatoes for a few months, than eat those hard things from the store (canned tomatoes are a different matter altogether). I didn’t really get my act together as far as basil goes…
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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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Well, it’s been about six weeks since the garden went in, and things are going great guns out there. I’ve been through the cool weather crops — spinach, arugula, turnips (mostly greens), and broccoli rabe — I spent last weekend pulling up two rows of bolted arugula that was 2 feet high with pinkish flowers, as well as pulling a bushel basket worth of turnip greens. So now we’re on to warm weather crops, which here in Montana include fava beans. I haven’t harvested any of them yet, some of the pods feel like they’ve only got one or two…
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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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I’ll have some garden pictures soon — it’s been a strange summer in the garden. Summer started so late, and then got hot fairly quickly, so some things, like the peas didn’t really work this summer. I got a few peas, but the vines burned up before they could really produce much.The arugula bolted as well — it was a thick hedge of 2-3 foot tall plants with pretty flowers, but by that point the leaves are so bitter they’re only good cooked, and frankly, the arugula was crowding out the peppers in that bed. So, out they came and…
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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…