A Grande Cocoa Mocha Bold Aroma Compostuccino Pile

I was complaining about the cats messing around in my garden and compost pile, and my DSIL (dear sister-in-law) told me to go to Starbucks and ask for their grounds to put on the garden.

Starbucks kindly gave me a nice big bag full of wet grounds, dotted with little pucks made from compressing the coffee in a French press coffee maker. Carrying that squishy bag, I wanted to play in the grounds, it was such a fragrant vanilla arabica experience with tactile mooshing and skooshing. Forget the cats; once again I felt those artistic kindergarten feelings when I could have painted all day just for the joy of putting colors on newsprint. Maybe if you mixed the grounds with glue you could sculpt it-- now there's a handmade Christmas present project for you. You could blend it with concrete for a natural stucco finish. Or use it for a coffee-scented facial scrub. Maybe you could just boil it to get the last ounce of goodness out of it. Ahhhh...

I didn't try anything creative, I just breathed the aroma, squished the pucks into sand, and spread the mess on my compost pile. You would think all the grubs and beetles would have been zooming around in hypercaffeinated fits, but I haven't noticed them doing so. The cats are staying out of the compost pile but visiting the soft dirt in between the rows.

It's so nice of Starbucks to give away their grounds, and they have even printed a special label that says you should mix their "green" material with "brown" materials such as leaves and grass. I want to go back for some more. The dirt in our back yard is the color and consistency of cocoa powder, so any amendment is an improvement. Can you imagine how pretty it would be if it were all a rich roasted espresso? I'm not asking for a great lawn, I'm just looking forward to a time when it's not so crunchy underfoot and the bare spots don't puff like talcum powder.

Fashion for the Suburban Farmer

I want to dress for yardwork as if I didn't have to DO yardwork.

Joe's old shirts are wearing out. They're faded and fraying and the buttons keep falling off. They have been the mainstay of my yardwork wardrobe and now I have to look around for something else. Microsoft caught me doing the yard one day (photo from bing, left, or maybe it's Google Earth). See the straw hat, the chambray shirt, and the sweat pants. Yes, that little blob. That's a straw hat, chambray shirt, and -- oh, just trust me on this.

We had a gardener for awhile but he and his crew got very sloppy, mowing off sprinkler heads and then offering to fix them for an additional charge. They always wore white dress shirts and Dickies work pants. For a while I asked him to just take care of the front lawn, but as time went on I decided I could use the exercise, share the activity with my boy, and [the primary reason] put the money towards ever-increasing health insurance premiums. So I "downsized" him.

With characteristic ignorance, I figured I could take care of the front as well as the back yard. Why not? He only took about 30 minutes once a week, less in winter, not at all if his scheduled work day fell on a holiday. Me, the one who doesn't even like houseplants. I'm allergic to silk flowers and plastic ficus trees. My idea of great lawns are those made entirely of apple-green crushed rock that you see in senior communities, punctuated by a yucca and a boulder. Plus maybe a big tyrannosaur welded of old tractor seats and scrap iron, a couple of colorful pinwheels turning cheerfully in the afternoon breeze, and seven ceramic gnomes in charming Eastern European farm garb-- but nothing requiring clipping, mowing, fertilizing, mulching or water.

So with nary a thought for equipment, chemicals, seed or the toads hibernating under the shrubs, my first concern was, "What am I going to wear?" This was not merely a bit of feminine frivolity. More than once my DN (dear neighbor) popped his head over the back yard fence to check on things when I was out there in my nightgown. When one is out in the front yard, sweating like a sow in a sauna, taking all morning to accomplish what the gardener used to do in half an hour, one hopes the neighbors will not call the sheriff to report a suspicious-looking bag-lady digging around the community. But I knew I'd never look like Martha Stewart culling carrots on cable tv.

I still have some of my husband's Hazmat B suits. They are made of Tyvek, that white plastic that they make indestructible envelopes from. I considered suiting up like Squishy the Marshmallow Girl but decided I'd rather not.

Garden shirts were an easy choice. Joe's solid color shirts fit me like smocks. (I made his plaid flannel shirts and old jeans into a quilt.
I just love it. No Goodwill would have wanted his old oil-soaked work jeans, so they form a sturdy backing and make the "rag" edging you see here. When I toss this quilt over my son, I tell him it's a hug from his daddy. Thanks for letting me mention it.)

I'd love to be able to dress like the menopausal matron in the Jack In The Box commercial. A casual but chic floral dress and professional hair. Check out her pink high heeled pumps: you could aerate the lawn with a couple of paces, then relax on a lounge with a smoothie. My cousin Donna learned not to wear flipflops on the farm when a cow stepped on her foot, but I find flipflops very useful in the backyard for collecting goathead tacks in the soft foam (and then sitting there extracting them so they don't get distributed all over the yard). I have to be covered up because I get blotchy and itchy in the sun, and the clothes have to bear up against rose thorns, cattails and evergreen spikes, mud, knees on concrete and the occasional abrasion when I fall off the ladder. I try to be cute with my breast-cancer-pink gloves, but I'd never wear one of my outfits to, say, a teacher appointment or the grocery store. Maybe to a dogfight. Did I mention they can't cost anything?

Some days it takes a lot of mental resolve and promises of Dr. Pepper to get me out the door, especially when it's 102*F. Do you think I would like gardening more if I didn't look like a refugee? Would I dread it less if I didn't give a rip what the neighbors thought? How do YOU handle this?

Jack Says Tomato, I Say Kumquat

We picked up a burger and chicken strips at a Jack In The Box drive-thru window day the other day. BJ was able to start munching immediately but I waited until we got home.

Let this be a lesson to you. Eat your fast food fast and whatever you do, don't look at it.

First of all, I didn't want cheese and I SAID no cheese. But there it was, yellow and plastic and forty-nine cents extra. Secondly, the Jumbo Jack is supposed to have a tomato in it. The rubber pinwheel you see on the right in the photo below is arguably more of a red pickle slice. I'm having a lull in tomato production due to heat wave blossom drop, but there was a little tomato I hadn't yet salsified that I was able to insert in this burger for a bit of juice.


There is no comparison, is there?

I realize there is a tomato blight going on back east, but it's hitting organic tomatoes. Commercial, hybrid tomatoes such as those purchased in bulk by restaurant chains are protected by sprays, so why is Jack skimping on them?

Let me further warn you that Jack's Fruited Ice Tea tastes overwhelmingly instant. I haven't started my own lemon tree or raspberry vines yet, but I guarantee that I can make you a better drink with a bag of Currant Pekoe.

You see what the problem is here, don't you? I've been thoroughly, utterly, unredeemably spoiled.

More Than You'd Ever Want to Know About the Wolf Peach

I've been collecting chunks here and there of tomato lore and thought I'd share, but in trying to tag things with urls and proper documentation I get awfully sidetracked. Few sources agree with one another unless they have cut'n'pasted from each other, and just repeating something doesn't make it true.

For instance, Thomas Jefferson's grandson credited his Grandpa Tom with introducing the tomato to America (here's his Garden Book) but one source says he grew them in 1781 and another claims it wasn't until 1809. While Wikipedia states that tomatoes were sighted in the area we now call South Carolina in 1710, a site devoted to the tomato asserts it was Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson who brought the tomato from abroad to Salem, New Jersey in 1808.

Solanum lycopersicum, or the tomato plant, belongs to the nightshade family, which includes chili peppers, potatoes, petunias, tobacco and eggplant, all native to South America. For this reason it seems silly to say that anyone "introduced" them to this country when they were here all along, just a little to the south of us. The Latin name comes from "lyco," wolf, and "persicum," peach; it is actually a berry. The state of Tennessee honors the tomato as their state fruit; New Jersey claims the tomato as their state vegetable. In Arkansas, the tomato is both the number one fruit and vegetable. Take your pick, literally and figuratively.

The Aztecs mixed up the original salsa recipe, with corn, salt, peppers and what they called tomatl. Spanish conquistadors took the seeds back to Spain and Morrocco, calling the plant tomate. When the plant was taken to Italy it was called pomo dei moro, or "apple of the Moors." This was more romantically (or mistakenly) changed to pomo d'oro, or "apple of gold," and appears in a Neapolitan cookbook of 1692. The French misheard the name as pomme d'amour, or "apple of love," and viewed it as an aphrodisiac. I couldn't find any historical relationship between pompadour and pomme d'amour, but perhaps this photo of one of my over one-pounders will establish the connection:


An influential English herbalist, surgeon-barber and possible plagiarist named John Gerard claimed in the 16th century that the tomato was poisonous and unsuitable to eat, and this belief persisted to the end of the 18th century. People grew tomatoes as an ornamental accent (why? roses are much prettier) but believed that eating tomatoes would turn your blood to acid and the peel would stick to your stomach, causing cancer. The above-mentioned Col. Johnson ate a whole basket of tomatoes on the courthouse steps while interested spectators hoped to see him foam at the mouth and fall over dead. They were disappointed. While some authoritative sources and many message forums claim that tomato leaves and stems are poisonous, especially to animals, a recent article in the New York Times recommends cooking with tomato leaves for that fresh flavor of sunshine. Author Harold McGee goes to great lengths to dispell the poison mythology obscuring the flavor possibilities of the leaves, saying that maybe we should add them to our kitchen herb collection. Cows and deer have been observed munching tomato greens with no ill effects (to themselves, anyway; the garden probably suffers). Some guy with an MD after his name says that you'd have to eat a pound of leaves to experience toxicity. Mr. McGee says he fried some leaves and found them very tasty, but I think I'll pass.

Here's a recipe for Fresh Tomato Cake that looks interesting. Let me know if you try it! If I make anything I know I'll be eating it myself for years. I tried mixing some beautiful tomato juice from my own tomatoes with some Lemon Strawberry juice. Why not? V-8 Fusion is a blend of fruit and vegetable juice. It smelled wonderful but had kind of a tomato bite afterwards. I offered it to the boy and enjoyed watching his eyes light up as he sniffed the delicious bouquet of lemon, berry, and some indescribable something (also known as juice de la wolf peach), but when he took a gulp his expression changed mightily. I suggest you do not try this on a loved one, as it will be hard to re-establish trust in the relationship.

Well, I'm getting tired of tomatoes, but I don't think they are evil. If you think I'm overthinking the topic, you can confirm it here. In any event, it's a lot more interesting reading about the descendants of Jefferson and Sally Hemings but that's a whole 'nother vegetable entirely.

Looks Like an Easter Parade

I've been fussing about the wrong thing! Turns out there's a terrible tomato/potato blight back east, worsened by cooler weather. Our sunshiney days and 105 temperatures have blasted the shoulders of the fruit, but have not killed the plants.

I took a bundle of newsprint grocery ads out there to cushion the low-hanging tomatoes against the hot dirt, and to show them what a red tomato looks like. Last week I also made a bunch of bonnets to protect the green baby tomatoes which hadn't been burnt to death (yet). I used cardstock paper, cut out circles with a slash to the center, and fastened them with a staple around the nascent tomato like a little lampshade. On some of them I got fancy and cut scalloped edges and drew eyelet lace and other decorations. If we're going to rot, we'll rot in style.

I wanted to see if they'd work before I posted here. Happily, by keeping the sun off their heads, some tomatoes are ripening nicely so far. The Super Steak fruits ripen with a watermelon pink tinge and yellow (or white onion-skin sunscalded) shoulders; the other kind (whatever it is) is ripening with a more orange-red hue and a greeny upper half. Can't wait for a taste comparison! In the crisper drawer of the refrigerator I have a storebought Roma tomato, a deep red, very firm specimen which has sat there for nearly two weeks like a well-behaved rubber ball. Romas keep better than garden tomatoes, but sure don't taste like anything.

If all the hatted tomatoes survive, we are going to have more than we know what to do with. Come see us and bring chips: I see huge tubs of salsa in the future.

Cancel That Call to Mr. Ripley

It turns out that six and seven beans per pod are quite common. A pod yielding eight beans (pinto) was the all time record. Believe it or not!

I'm starting to think of the garden in past tense. Most of the bean plants are yellowing or dry as a stick, so my mom suggested that they have gone through their life cycle, or it has just been too hot. I'm debating whether to put in another row or take a break.

Now allow me to demonstrate for you the literal meaning of being a "bean-counter."

Since the beginning of this project, I have collected enough pinto and Anasazi beans to cover one cookie pan each about a bean deep. This works out to three cups (or 17.5 oz) of Anasazis. I'm too discouraged to measure the pintos, mainly because today at the grocery store I bought a one-pound bag of KIDNEY BEANS for 98 cents. I put a lot more than $2.14 worth of effort into my beans but if we depended on that little garden for survival we'd have been dead long ago.

More green tomatoes went into the compost pile. Well, not entirely green, but splotched with brown gooshy rotting necrotic gibbosities. I know, a good back-to-the-lander would have cut off the firm parts and made green tomato chow-chow, but why waste time decorating something I'm just going to throw away eventually anyway? The three tomatoes that ripened were as spectacular as a fond mother could want, but not counting the cost of water they come to four dollars apiece, plus tax. Any problems with my math I will be glad (no, that's not the word) to address in another post.

On the other hand, it has been cheap entertainment. You can be a farmer or you can be a gardener. The farmer is more concerned with yield and productivity, while the gardener enjoys the process and the prettiness. To the first it's a livelihood, to the second it's a hobby. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. I mean, I planted stuff and things grew and made me happy. I just didn't know I was supposed to mulch and add complicated mixtures in 3-5-1 ratios of complex elemental molecules of secret gardening formulae and poultry-extracted compost, as I now find out while googling why my tomatoes are rotting on the vine. Turns out I was supposed to do a bunch of soil preparation and move to a cooler climate.

Well, live 'n learn, unless you're a tomato with sunscald. Now where do I sign up to get paid for not planting next year?

Tiny Carrot Almost Worth the Toil and Trouble

I'm confused. It's hot, but we're "avoiding the triple digits," because it's "only" 99 today and dipping down to 93 on Tuesday. I put the air conditioner on 80 and when I come in from outside, it feels icy. How am I ever going to know if I'm having a hot flash?

I can hear Gramma Jan's voice out there: "You've got to do something with your life besides pulling weeds!" Amen. But what?

Look at this tomato.It was a mutant twin, just barely starting to yellow up from green, but the bugs got it. They bored deeply into the fruit and disconnected it from the stem, so it would just sit there and rot. Not content to eat and destroy, they left wads of poop behind as well. Reminds me of the restrooms at the public park.

Why did I plant a garden again? The poor economy, right? The influence of Dmitry Orlov, perhaps? A hormonal spaz attack?

I'm not discouraged, but I'm reconsidering. Many years ago I worked with a lady named Margie Hong. For some reason she felt I should know that when her mother was given three months to live, she went out and planted a garden. If I had three months to live, I would probably spend the time decluttering and deciding what to wear. I don't think I'd plant a garden.

The kiss of the sun for pardon
The song of the birds for mirth;
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on the earth.

-- Dorothy Gurney

Help! All this pardoning is giving me heatstroke! And I don't believe I've told you yet what I think of the birds and their singing, either.

Whatsamatter with me? I spend all these years trying to protect my child from the degrading and dampening influences of the sorting and separating that goes on in public schools, and the minute I grow a few beans I start grading them by size and productivity and prettiness. I take pictures of beans with a ruler, for crying out loud! I've tried to shield BJ from competitiveness and aggression, and then when I get out there in the garden I'm stomping June Bugs and pouring ammonia down ant hills. You'd think our lives depended upon a handful of beans. Ortho Brands taps into this primal territoriality with their slogan, "Defend What's Yours." This ain't a hobby, friends, it's a war.

Well, that was probably the best rationalization for being a lazy bum that I've done for at least 24 hours or more. Here's the second carrot I've extracted, complete with requisite ruler:

In fact, I think I'll think I'll give this image a title: "Carrot and Stick." It practically names itself. Check out the size of that carrot, too. Once the stringy root, top, and dirt were scraped off there was one-and-a-quarter inches of carroty goodness. Microwaving shrunk it another half-inch. [Don't forget: "IRVINE RECYCLES."]

You know what they say, "Two's company, but three's a collection." Actually I just said that, you can google it. Finally I was able to serve a collection of vegetables with our barbecued chicken. Tomatoes, carrot, and beans. BJ choked down an inch of bean and the very tip of the carrot, his shoulders heaving and nostrils flared for extra oxygen. Poor child, gardening is so very hard on him.

I just have to say that was one beautiful mouthful of carrot. It tasted like a carrot, not like dirt or plastic or watery fiber, but like I imagine a carrot should taste if a carrot tasted like a carrot should. I mean that. Or I think I mean that, or something like it. I did mention at the beginning of this post that I was feeling confused.

And I think next year I'll be planting a garden again.

He Was A Magnificent Tomato

Well, you can only be sentimental for so long till you find yourself with a rotting tomato.

After a day or two of admiration I sliced up that first-off-the-vine and composed what I thought was a sandwich symphony: 97% fat-free [or rather, 3% fat] sliced ham with Dijon mustard, romaine lettuce and the truly terrific tomato.

At his widest, Mr. Tomato was bigger than the bun. He smelled of sunshine and labor and all the earth's great goodness. Check it out.

This gustatory creation was presented to Son for delectation and delight.

He took one bite.

Suddenly he got that stricken look as if he had just remembered an important meeting he was supposed to be attending in another state.

I said, "What's the matter now?"

With watering eyes, the dear child laid bare for me the source of his distress. "Mom," he said, "it tastes like a tomato."

Observations on a Pod/The Little Bean That Could

Do you remember Gregor Mendel and his pea plants from high school biology? I keep thinking of him patiently trying to understand the colors of pea flowers without benefit of the Internet. On the homefront here I have been wondering what seeds I should be collecting to replant next year. If I save the darkest ones, will I get darker beans? If I plant the biggest beans will they produce bigger beans? Should I save and replant only beans that come from pods holding six or more seeds in the hopes of greater production? How can there be so much variation when they come from the same plant, or even the same pod? And furthermore, how did Jack climb up a bean stalk when my plants aren't a foot off the ground, even when staked? Oh, that's right, BJ reminds me, they were magic beans. Cost a whole cow.

So far the bean pods we've collected have contained no more than six beans each, with an unscientific average of about four per pod. Maybe next year I can be more precise, but I'd better get a huge grant to compensate for that amount of boredom. Yesterday, however, one pod revealed seven beans. Another held eight beans. Two record-breakers in one harvest! Take that, Jack!

As the plants have matured, they seem to get a little longer and fuller. I'm saving the ones from pods five inches or longer, although their bean yield is from three to six. (It ain't the size of the pod but the the number of beans in the pod that makes you a pot of beans!) Pintos with five or six seeds and pods of 5 inches or longer outnumber the Anasazis by 90%, at least in the picture below. But Anasazis are so much prettier, and you might say they are more dependable averaging 4 bpp [beans per pod]). By the way, I can't tell by the pod what color the beans are going to be inside. When the beans are cooked, I can't tell the difference by taste or sight either. Another bit of trivia is how cool it is when you split open the pod and see how they break on opposite sides, and they fit back together like a puzzle (the purply Anasazi bean to the far left, above, illustrates this). The ruler says, "IRVINE RECYCLES."

I've been collecting single beans. And I've been noticing that usually, not always, but usually single and twin beans are bigger than beans from fuller pods. Within the fuller pods, there may be a couple or three larger beans and the beans on the ends are teeny. The octopod beans were all quite tiny. I will let you draw your own parallels to the famous Nadya.

Can you guess why I'm especially drawn to the single babies?

My son started out in public school at which, in the center of a cluster of classrooms, was a special room called the "pod." Maybe that's why the bean pods remind me of school. The fewer the number of beans in the pod, the better and bigger the beans. The more beans, the smaller their average size, and some seem to suffer from crowding. Because my brain is wired to make goofy associations while insufficiently occupied, I'm wondering if you could say that home school is like smaller pods. Give each little human bean more space and more attention and s/he will have more room to grow.Note the size variation in these pintos.

BUT it's a lot more work to shell the dried pod from a bunch of single beans and the yield is less. It is more efficient to open up one pod and spill out six smaller beans than to repeat that effort four times for the same bean weight. The plant's energy, and your water and expense, should go to making beans, not chaff. One good handful of pods fills a 16-oz. cup, but when all the wrappings are off, the actual beans hardly register on my little diet scale. [NOTE: Diet scale is used to weigh macaroni when Son makes mac'n'cheese, as he won't eat leftovers and can't finish the whole box yet. Repeat: yet.] So is a bigger bean a better bean, really? How do you tell?

I have been saving a third bean category. All the weird damaged and shrunken little beans, the ones with bug holes and the underdeveloped ones that made a bump in the pod but didn't grow to fill it. I'm going to plant them and see what happens, because they deserve a chance too. I made a judgment about a one-seater pod that had been drilled by a borer, and I thought it was too damaged to grow and certainly not worth cooking. I threw it on the compost pile and within a few days, it sprouted. So I grabbed it and stuck it at the end of the row where the broccoli is still alive but only taking up space. And here is a picture of the little bean which I had discarded.

Tragedy Stalks the Garden (stalks, get it?)

It isn't all fun'n'vegetables here in Ruburbia.

What bizarre genetic miscoding is making some of the tomatoes mutate into double and triple weirdnesses? Check this out:



One tomato has a little nose. I don't have the heart to put googly-eyes on him, it seems too cruel.

I had to discard four green tomatoes yesterday due to bug damage and some kind of brown disaster that made them sag and gush. There are dead June Bugs all over the place, and a googling results in info like this and this. So I'm looking forward to spending college fund money on a spray bottle of Spectracide and battling the problem all winter.

The ants are moving in closer and closer. I've tried a syrup of borax and sugar and water; corn meal, which is supposed to puff up in their tummies; and soapy ammonia and water. I really don't want to use some brain-damaging petrochemical-based non-organic whozit spray, but those indomitable little beasts are nasty. I want to know how they know to bite me instead of my shoe. They won't chew on my flipflops, but they'll swarm up to my ankles and arms before I realize they're even there. Try reaching into a tangle of bean leaves and find out the ants are picnicking underneath. And of course they are most active in the early morning and evening, which is when I want to be active too, not at the height of noon under a blazing sun.

But ant bites are nothin' compared to stepping on goatheads. Also known as tribulus terrestris, or puncture weed, they can flatten tires and draw blood (personal experience). Some knuckleheads think they have aphrodisic qualities and Bulgarian weightlifters reportedly used them to win the gold medal at the '88 Olympics. In Africa they were dipped in poison and strewn in the path of one's enemy.

Tribulus terrestris

So guess what we have so far produced the most of in our garden? Any Bulgarian weightlifters want to harvest them for me? Because, you'll never guess, swarming around the base of each sinister little sprout are a million red ants.

I told my mom I pulled at least twenty spikes from the bottom of my shoes every time I went out there, and then I thought I might be exaggerating so I sat down and counted as I pulled. One, two...fifty...sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two! IN ONE SOLE! Only fifty-nine in the other.

I took a picture just the day-before-yesterday, when you'd think I would have collected most of them after all those trips to the garden. There's at least 26 on this one sole.

Disgusting, huh? And the stickers look pretty ugly too.

Believe me, I don't dress up out there as it is soooo dusty when you're trying to mow and all that dirt blows in your face and down your shirt and makes mud. 'Cause you're sweating. And ladies aren't supposed to sweat. They are also not supposed to cuss, but you try stepping on a goatshead while being eaten by ants while June Bugs and a fireball sun decimate your garden and the only creature benefitting from your toil seems to be the neighborhood cats, who are using the garden for a sandbox.

I didn't even mention that one row of beans completely dried up, yellow, dead, papery and mummified. Mummification, of course, brings me back to June Bugs, which are of the scarab family, which were revered by the ancient Egyptians who saw them as a symbol of resurrection. Except for me that means I get to deal with the grubs all winter and watch 'em bust out next Spring. How did the ancestors ever do it? People who protest against the use of pesticides, herbicides, and radiation of food should just grow their own garden and experience the feeling of some little bug eating the food you've sweated over. Or go sit on a goatshead.

Maybe I should get into seafood farming 'cause I'm feeling so crabby.

Thriving Survivors

Several years ago my sister planted many rosebushes in the backyard. They have done well with minimal care--except for Queen Elizabeth, who produced only one bud and died. Not to mention all the roses at the back fence which expired when our expensive landscaping overloaded the sprinkler system (turned out just as well, as last summer's fire would have fried them anyway).

I'm not a rosarian--that would be Julie and Jared--and I'd have to google "polyanthus" and "floribunda" and "grandiflora" to figure out what I was talking about (but a "hypanthium" is a rose hip--you can read that on a tea package), so I've posted these pictures to show how PURE LUCK is the amateur gardener's best hope.

Here, then, are the stunning survivors.



This is Lady Anonymous, a grandiflora mountebankseiis. I just made that up because I forgot her name and when I went out to see if she still had the tag, I got scratched by the bountiful overgrowth and a white spider climbed into my hair. I'd like to be accurate but this one is going to have to wait until Fall when I trim it back to the canes.

It took a couple of years for her to feel comfortable, and then she really went to town. Her color is antiquey purply-pinky-possibly-mauvish, kind of like this deepening into this.







Next is one I was calling Candy Cane, but as turns out it is really a floribunda named Peppermint Twist, which is grafted onto a hardier root stock. Her name ought to be Sybil, because she has a split personality (or rather, a bad pruner). The peppermint roses are striped red, pink and white and have two- or three-inch stems.









































The root stock is crimson and blooms in masses, and I know I ought to cut the suckers off ("suckers" in this case is the actual word for the unwanted shoots from the base, not a derogatory term), but their blooms are very pretty too. Notice how improper pruning gives you that two-for-one effect.





























The most sentimental rose in my garden is Joseph's Coat. He is photosensitive, beginning as a peachy yellow bud and turning bright red as the sun hits the opening petals. By the time the bloom hits middle age, it is cherry red and fades to orange and then orange creamsicle (candy canes, popsicles, fruity candy colors, tea roses and bean plants: gardening is great for the appetite). Sweet little nose provided by the young BJ.




This next one is a patented hybrid called Knock Out. They might have included a public service announcement about the depth to which its thorns can penetrate your hands. At Harbor Freight Tools (one of my many favorite stores), I bought some leather welder's gloves. They are sturdy and long enough to cover your forearms. You can also buy rose trimming gloves but they cost a lot more and are basically the same thing. And you have to remember to use them.

May all your thorns have roses.


Sorry to leave out three bushes which are just barely hanging on, and Betty Pryor, who isn't pretty but is still alive. I don't have pictures of them. This is awfully unfair, and maybe I better get out there and water them again (it's only 98 at the moment).

This is one rose that every garden fence should wear. It's a happy trailing bushy thing with minimal thorns and is apparently bug resistant (the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph are not). This is the one you saw in the post, "Resilient Roses." I've saved fabric scraps and cut rings from old socks to tie it up along the fence, because it goes crazy and sends long shoots out along the ground and in every direction. I'd really like to recommend this one but I can't remember its name! Julie, can you help me out here?

I've sprayed my buggy plants with this recipe:
1 squirt dish soap
1 teaspoon cooking oil
filtered water to top of spray bottle

Spray in the evening and totally saturate the plant, as the oil is supposed to suffocate the bug. Spraying while the sun is beating down makes deep fried spots on the leaves and petals. Learned the hard way.

Also I've read that milk and water sprayed on plants will counteract mildew but I haven't tried it. And you should dip your cutting blades in a bleach and water solution to keep from spreading disease between plants. I give my saws and nippers a good spray of WD-40 every now and then. I don't notice it improving the yard, but it keeps them from rusting.




That's all my rose lore. I know there is a universe of roses out there if you want to google it, and this may serve as a list of time-tested and drought-tolerant varieties that you'll enjoy too. One last view of the driveway.

The Corn Is As High As a Chihuahua's Eye

I didn't have sense to plant the seeds in the ground and wait; I sprouted them under a wet paper towel on cookie sheets in the kitchen. Instead of sprouting, some molded. Interesting life parable there.

Our corn kernels came from a trip four years ago to a family farm outside of town. My son got to roll around in a stock tank filled with cattle feed (this seemed to be very popular with little kids for some reason) and when he undressed that night, the kernels had seeped into his pockets. These kernels were as big as CornNuts and sat on the dryer in the garage, mixing with lint and dust. I didn't know if they'd sprout (duh! why not? old age is a time of miracles!) but they did, and we planted 'em. Only one did not come up.

My mom said to plant a bean and a corn sprout together so that the corn stalk could provide support to the twining bean. I felt like a regular Pocohontas doing this, except I didn't drop a fish in each mound. I wonder if I could get rid of these burpy old Fish Oil capsules for that purpose.

Now there are five ears of tasseling corn that have appeared, and I hope there are more on the way. Doesn't this one look like a muppet?

Mama says they'll be okay for roasting ears if picked while tender. I do not plan to grind the corn with a matate when you can buy a box of cornmeal for 99 cents. We'll dry one for seed and try this again next year.

I Bean Very Busy

I can't say enough about beans! I love beautiful beans! I love opening the dried cases and popping out the seeds like tiny jewels! Beans sprout quickly (which is probably why all the first-graders do that experiment with the black-paper-in-a-baggie), they leaf out quickly, and they produce with gratifying promptness. Their flowers are humble but interesting: the green beans have a purple flower, the pintos are white, and the Anasazi are peach. I can imagine a small city courtyard with beans vining up a trellis in lush profusion.

In my first post I uploaded a picture of the first row of beans in their little riverside condos. Here's the row a month later (two straggling tomatoes destroy the symmetry in front).








The little bean pods can be harvested green, even if they aren't green beans (I managed to mix up my sprouts and had to wait until I figured out the flower color/dried bean connection). The flatter pods give the impression of snow peas.

They are very good stir fried with a little soy sauce. The boy says, "These are almost bearable!"




I've frozen some (with a quick hot-water blanching; I read about this somewhere). I've also used them for color in a pasta salad.

Recipe: Boil, drain and cool 1/2 lb. of multicolored rotini pasta. Add chopped tomatoes (these were storebought), bean pods, and whatever raw vegetables you think sounds good. Slosh generously with Italian dressing (or whatever comes to hand). Threaten son with prolonged loss of computer privileges if he doesn't try at least one bean.

The First Tomato

Yesterday I picked the first tomato. The variety is Sweep Steak, purchased from OSH in a six-pack, planted 3/31/09. Here's its kindergarten picture (it's the one hiding in the back).
















Adolescence: Let's say Mr. Tomato is in high school here, kind of shy and still hiding.

Interestingly, although he seems to be getting less sun, he turns a deeper red faster than his more extroverted friend here.









Yesterday, I picked him. You probably know that there is a little joint about a finger-width up the stem which breaks easily, so you don't have to use nippers for your harvest. Let's call this the graduation photo. Isn't he handsome?












His top side is scarred and split, but look how he smiles through the pain. I know he would not win a beauty contest, yet I love him so much I don't know if I can bear to eat him.

As a farmer, I am an anthropomorphizing doofus. Do not even ask if I have considered raising chickens.

The Resilience of Roses

I have a terrible habit of trying to extract meaning and metaphor from everything. Plant life is especially abundant in apparent similes for human travails.

In 2004 I had trimmed the roses back to the canes and that spring they responded graciously by not dying. (See left; notice how small the photinia bushes are to each side.)

Lesson: When pruned or cut back, respond by growing. Bloom if you can, it's the best revenge.




This year in April the roses massed over the photinia as if all one plant. By May the weather was in the 100's and all those pretty pink petals turned crispy.

Lesson 2: Keep growing. Lean on others but try not to choke them. And the dewy bud is beautiful but potpourri lasts longer.

Lesson 3, less Hallmarky: The most inept and neglectful gardener can enjoy spots of beauty with hardy and independent plants.

The Milagro Bean Field

I like beans, especially with bacon or ham, because they are a family dish. People who don't like them must not know how to fix them!

My mom remembers weeding beans when she was a child, and her mother would always have a pot of beans simmering at the back of the stove every Friday, when family members would stop by their house for dinner. I remember my grandma sitting at the table sorting beans one by one, and I thought she was counting them.

We lived too far away for more than a visit one week or two each year, so I like to imagine beans linking long-ago Indian ancestors through my grandma and mother through me to my son. As with most of my cooking, though, beans make him gag.

Two months ago I had an excess of energy and sprouted some beans (pinto, anasazi, and green beans) and corn kernels. My parents have always told me about growing up on farms and how their parents did things. They are long time subscribers to Farm and Country and Mother Earth. My sister and nephew are the horticulturalists in the family, and I don't even like mowing the yard. But with all the turmoil in the world and recession and dithering in Washington, I thought I should plant a garden. Within a month of my great effort, Michelle Obama put in the White House garden, so apparently we're part of trend.

In the picture you'll see the first row, back in April.