Garden Update

We are still in a drought here in Kalamazoo. The city of Niles, 60 miles away got five inches of rainfall in one night, and we got none. I water my well-mulched garden every day. Kellee says that if she had to give a back-to-school report on what she did this summer, she would say, "I went to Cedar Point for two days and I spent the rest of the time watering." My brother George had to dig a posthole the other day and he said he was two and a half feet down and the ground was still dry and powdery. So where do the earthworms go?

But enough complaing about the dryness. Here's the produce report.

I've been getting cherry tomatoes all week, today I got my first real tomato, of the glamour variety. A Brandywine is almost ready. With 42 plants and just me eating them here, I guess I'll have plenty to go around, so don't hesitate to ask Have also gotten a few Chinese eggplants, yellow saucer shaped squashes, one zuccini, and lots of greens (kale, mustard greens, arugula, Chinese cabbage, parsley).

Kellee's garden is lush, brimming with hot banana peppers, celery, tomatoes, green peppers, and there is even a buttercup squash that looks almost ripe. Cukes too. I meant to steal some of her beet greens to see how they compare to my other greens. She made tomato cages out of lengths of woven wire fence, wrapped 3/4 of the way around the plant---they don't fall down like my cages. Somebody gave her a new garden sprinkler that's fun to watch, two gold rings flying around, one inside the other, each spurting dozens of thin streams of water.

Yesterday, Mike Messer harvested the most gorgeous broccoli, and he's getting some good hot peppers going. Unfortunately he just got diagnosed with lung cancer. He feels weak but he's still watering every day. I give him a ride to the store some days

Susanna's garden was planted late, so not much is ripe. Then some critter ate her peppers, then some other critter ate her squash plants. The eggplant and tomato are still standing bravely, and there's some chicken wire stretched over the rest. She went out of town this week when we're expecting ninety- to a hundred-degree heat, said maybe she'll be back in ten days. I watered everything for her today, including the chickens (I refilled their chicken swimming pool), but I may lose heart with watering both her and my garden every day. She and Loring went off the Clifftop Folk Festival in West Virginia.

Of course it will rain again. Someday. Why would a person think it will never rain again? Oh, one bright spot: because it's so dry, the mulberries are sweet and flavorful this year, not watery like usual, and there have been no big rainstorms to knock them from their branches. There's a mulberry tree right outside Mike Messer's place. I try to walk past the tree without indulging, but can't, and once I start eating the berries I can't stop until I've eaten even ripe berry I can reach, until my hands are purple and my lips and teeth, and before I can ever manage to get to Mike's door, he's already outside, watching me stuff myself.

What to wear?

I'm continually changing clothes. I get dirty in the garden. Sometimes I teach, run, bicycle, practice martial arts, muck out donkey stalls. At least three times a day I change clothes and shoes (yes, I have special biking shoes and running shoes, and there are the many pairs of cheap canvas shoes I wear when I'm going to get wet or dirty, pairs of which are always wet, drying, decaying.) I'm always longed to have a life uniform, some kind of outfit I could wear for all my activities, including writing, some kind of coverall with my name sewn red-on-white above my left breast. After seeing Uma Thurman kick all that ass in her yellow coverall in the Kill Bill movie, I bought myself a mechanic coverall, but, while I think it looks sporty, it is too stiff in the shoulders for many activities. I wonder what fabric Uma's yellow coverall was made of. And yellow is probably not going to work for me because of the garden dirt and donkey dung. Does anyone have any suggestions for my new life uniform? It need not be stylish, and the really low cut jeans aren't really going to work for me, but I'd love to hear any suggestions.

Other Blog

The first meeting of the Screen Porch Literary Guild finally took place. If any of you writers want to look at it, it's http://screenporchlit.blogspot.com/ I'll make a new entry every time two other writers drink with me on my porch.

Is it hot enough for you?

I would never, probably, slice open my neighbor’s pony and drink its blood, but this heat and dryness gives a person some crazy ideas, don’t you think? No telling what we might do if we couldn’t get hydrated. Ninety-nine the other day, now ninety-six (okay, the actual day I'm posting this, it's only 91). The kitchen’s just around the corner, but it’s hard to get the energy to fill a bucket and take it out to the bird bath. My garden is shrieking. The earth is cracking. David Magson said the factory floor where he works was ninety-eight-point-four degrees; he said that when it got to ninety-eight-point-six, he was giving up and going home. My niece Kellee was out of town—I hate to think what Cedar Point amusement park was like—and I had to water her ducklings. They were so hot her dad and I started putting ice cubes in the kitty litter tray they use as a swimming pool. The stream behind her house seems to be drying up. The donkeys dig sand pits with their hooves and then roll in the sand when it’s like this. A lot of the woods plants are shriveling, especially the ferns and the jewel weed. It’ll rain eventually. No doubt it will rain. It would be crazy to think it might never rain again. Why would a person even humor the possibility that it might not ever rain again?

I am here, July 2

I’ve almost got my garden in, at last. All that’s left to plant is Swiss chard seeds and some dried out asparagus starts I bought in April. They may not grow, but I’ve got to give it a shot, even if a shot means digging twenty foot of foot-square trench into landfill studded with bricks and slag. Some years it takes forever to do what seems it should be ordinary; it makes you realize nothing is ordinary when what you had declared ordinary becomes a phenomenal accomplishment. A man was shooting at me in my garden the other day, while I was watering plants with a bucket. He didn’t realize he was shooting at me, I surmised after I marched over there; he was shooting at the privacy fence that has spaces between the slats. He just sat there on his deck in the trailer park shooting and shooting and shooting without a thought in his head. His children were eating watermelon, spitting seeds, giggling as their father ignored me. "There are holes between the slats," I shouted at him over the fence. "Your bullets are whizzing past me." I was just a head sticking up above the privacy fence, and I was mad, and that might have made me even more comical. The quizzical way he looked at me made me wonder if we had a language barrier. Finally he put his gun down on the table and shrugged his shoulders. He said, "Well, why are you there?"