Putting Up for Winter, Peaches and Lavender

 As if our own garden doesn't keep us busy enough, the local farm stands are offering wonderful, local produce that are too hard to pass up. It is officially peach season! I stopped at Ikenberry's to buy a bag of peaches to make a peach galette for dessert on Saturday. I ended up buying a larger amount so that I could make some jam too. As much as I hate weeding and laboring in the garden, I love canning and saving food. 

In the late 1970's we were renting an apartment in the city of Albany, New York. Steve was in college and I was working in an office to support us. I longed to live in the country. We took drives and dreamed to one day make that come true. Back then, I subscribed to Mother Earth News. It peaked my interest about country life, especially putting food up by canning. I knew nothing about canning and quickly learned that it is not complicated. I started canning produce for my father from his garden. I remember making tons of pickled beets for him. I canned cranberries from the supermarket at Thanksgiving and gave them as gifts. We bought produce from farm stands and I canned that too. I would can anything I could get my hands on.

We also listened to Prairie Home Companion on the radio every weekend. I recall Garrison Keilor singing a song about canning that I will never forget. The thought of those stained glass colored jars all lined up on a shelf waiting to be opened on a cold winter's day to feed family around the table still fills my heart with joy.

Peaches and jalapeno peppers ready to simmer

Sitting pretty until I take them to the basement

Dried lavender buds stripped from their stems

 Another wonderful harvest from the garden is lavender. We have three lavender bushes around the edge the garden. I never picked the blooms this year so they all dried on the stalk. It was now time to cut all the stalks back. After that was done, we gathered them up and took them to the patio. It was a pleasant evening with a soft breeze cooling the air. Steve fixed us each a drink and we sat with a bowl between us and stripped all the buds off the stalks into the bowl. I have the bowl in the house now, where the humidity is lower and the buds can dry more. I stir it a few times a day to help the drying process along. The aroma of the lavender is released each time I stir it. The house smells wonderful! Usually I will make little sachets with the lavender but for now I can't think past the bowl.

Progress on Apothecary Rose and Finished Stitches

 

I am slow on getting this rug completed. It is a large three feet by four feet and getting heavier each time I put more wool on it. I need to use the floor frame to work on it and that is too cumbersome to lug around for hooking with friends. So, I prefer to work on this at home. I just need to set my mind to completing it and put in a good two or three days of hooking and it will be ready to steam and bind.

I did finish stitching the "Hens Pin Keep" pattern by Stacy Nash. At ten by ten inches, I think it is too big to be a pin keep. I love the pattern and I will look for a frame so I can hang it in the dining area in place of a snowman sampler that is currently on the wall. I am beginning to swap pieces out with the seasons now. The same is true for some of the rugs.

I also finished stitching "Tribute to Summer Sampler" by Stacy Nash. I meant to hang this in the kitchen in place of two other Stacy Nash pieces that I switch out for the seasons. I have one for fall and one for winter. This was meant to be in place for the summer. It turned out too small to hang in that particular spot so I haven't rushed to frame it yet. I love the border and the simple hues of color on this one. It will serve equally as well hung in another location. Stacy's pattern front shows this framed in a gold frame which I think looks very pretty. I will probably do the same. Neither cross stitch has been ironed or blocked yet.

These are the things that have kept me busy when it is too hot to be outside or I have some quiet time to relax. : )

The July Garden: A Saga of Weeds, Bugs, Drought and a Mystery

 

If I had to title this post a week ago, I would have titled it "A Garden of Death". I was feeling that fed up with the weeds, the bugs, the unrelenting heat, and the need to water these beds while fighting an assault of gnats. I feel a little differently about the garden this week. 

The first encouragement came in the form of rain, five days of it. The softened earth enabled me to start getting the weeds up. The plants responded to nature's watering much better than to that of hose water and more produce began ripening for us to use. The ripe tomatoes went into wonderful Panzanella salads and BLT's , we ate freshly cooked beets and green beans, and put fresh basil on everything. I canned salsa and sweet pickle relish and I am getting ready to can jalapeno peach jam. (Steve grows the jalapenos and the peaches are local from Ikenberry's.)

The downside of the garden mainly consist of two things that irk me the most: the weeds that grow in the gravel surrounding the beds and the worms and bugs that destroy the produce. I try to pull the weeds by hand since they are growing around a food source. The weeds are relentless! They consist mainly of purslane, spurge, and oxalis. The purslane and spurge are the worst and HATE them.The only thing I can do is pull and pull and pull. The main pests right now are the tomato horn worms, Japanese beetles, and some invisible bug that makes a perfect hole in the tomato. The worms are camouflaged  by day and easier to hunt after dark by using a black light flashlight. The black light makes the worms glow brighter than the leaves, hence making them easier to spot and pick off. The Japanese beetle population has been reduced by hanging those beetle bag traps a short distance away from the garden. They really work! I did discover one surprise about the bags, though. We had one bag hanging rather low to the ground and some animal came along and bit the bottom of the bag open. I guess it wanted to eat the bugs that were inside. Sigh. We can only keep trying.

Our current dilemma is trying to figure out what is taking bites out of the tomatoes. The round holes are clearly worm or bug made, but we also have nibbles with bite marks made by something with teeth. The garden is surrounded by electric fence for larger animals so it must be something smaller. The bitten tomatoes seem too high up for a rabbit. We have set the game camera out for two nights and spotted nothing on it. Maybe mice climb up to the tomatoes? Do mice even want tomatoes? Whatever it is is very sneaky. I try to pick the tomatoes at first blush but the bites are showing up on green tomatoes, not ripe ones. We may never solve the mystery and by next year's garden, I will have forgotten all about them.

Even though the garden is aggravating, the reward of having pretty jars of preserved goodies and fresh produce on our plates has begun to bring some immediate gratification. Cost wise, growing and preserving from seven raised beds is way more costly than buying the items off the shelf. Not to mention the labor effort, especially of pulling weeds. I really don't know why we do it other than that we always have.  I also have a short memory of all the bad things in gardening. During the winter I will romanticize our lovely garden and start dreaming of what to plant and how lovely it will all be. It will be just like the photos in the plant catalog. I am so gullible when it comes to dreamy, beautiful photos.

In retrospect, it boils down to one thing that keeps us gardening- the salsa. Steve is like a little kid with  his hot pepper powders, sauces, and salsa. He eats salsa or hot pepper sauce or jarred peppers of some sort almost every day. He puts them on everything. Seeing him so happy with such a simple thing makes me willing to do it all over again next year.

A Week with Violet

 

 I had the pleasure of having our youngest granddaughter, who is six, with me for a week. Steve was away so we had all the days wide open for fun. We got an early start to each morning and kept busy from start to finish. I know how much energy children have but I forgot that it goes and goes all day and does not wane. So, my biggest challenge was keeping up with all of Violet's ideas. 

Violet loves to draw, cut, glue, fold, build and create. She was content to let her imagination free with all the craft supplies at hand. I noticed she liked to fold paper into three dimensional box shapes so I asked her if she knew what a diorama was. To my surprise, she did! I found a shoe box and she decided to make an ocean scene inside of it. She wanted me to craft along with her so I made two fish to hang in her diorama. We spent an entire morning adding more and more ideas to the scene. I showed her how to create tabs to use in gluing shapes to the bottom and how to use thread to hang things from the top. We added shells, lobsters, and a hermit crab made of Sculpey clay. Finally, in the basement we found a pile of tissue paper leftover from Christmas. Violet crumbled that up into foaming ocean waves and glued them all around her scene. 

The next day we went to the library where they had a special program called, Didgeridoo Down Under. It was a wonderful program with an educator who played the didgeridoo, talked about all things Australian, and had a lizard and a snake for everyone to touch. Violet thought it would be fun to make a didgeridoo so we stopped at the hardware store on our way to lunch and bought three foot pieces of one inch PVC (which the performer suggested) and some brown spray paint. We practiced trying to make the right sounds come out of our didgeridoos and we decided we need a lot more practice. In the meantime, we have future plans to decorate the plain brown pipes with Aboriginal art. When Steve got home at the end of the week, we showed him our didgeridoos. He was amused with them and picked one up to play. He got the right vibration sound to come out immediately! We were jealous. He chalked it up to his playing the saxophone.

The following days were filled with more crafting, another diorama of a farm scene,  lunch at McDonald's, lots of swinging on the swing in the basement, games of Uno, watching the movie "Hook" (during which I closed my eyes and snored), looking at all the jewelry in my jewelry box, trying unsuccessfully to change out Violet's newly pierced earrings, reading books from the library, cooking a dinner, and baking cupcakes.

It was a delightful week. After it was all over, I thought about when I was a young mom and I had four Violets to keep up with. We were together all the time, for home school and play. It brings to mind all the young mothers with children that I see in the stores or at the pool. I recall that season of life and I realize these moms need prayers, kindness, and plenty of support to get through those busy years. It needs to come not only from family and friends but from strangers too. I pray that for my daughters, three of whom are young moms. A smile or word of encouragement from a stranger can go a long way when a young mother is having a bad day or is bone tired. I need to be mindful of this when I am out and about.

 

The Hokey Pokey

We did the Hokey Pokey in the pool at aquacise class. As we played, I was acutely aware that we were twenty or so happy older people of all shapes and sizes singing the Hokey Pokey and dancing in the water. So many thoughts raced through my head: 1. It reminded me of weddings I attended as a kid. 2. Is the Hokey Pokey a thing anymore? 3. I remembered playing it with my pre-school class way back in the 1970's. 4. How silly do we older folks appear doing this? 5. It doesn't matter and I don't care. 6.  I have heard that as we age we become children again. This proves it. 7. No matter how much weight and sorrow we carry in our hearts and on our shoulders, all humans need to play. It is good for us. 8. I barely know these people. I only see them in the pool each week and we exchange small talk. But I see humanity in their faces and I love them all. 9. Laughter is the best medicine.

In a matter of a few seconds, my mind was drawn back into the moment. I pointed at the sky, sang the Hokey Pokey and 'turned myself about'.

    

Mimosa in Bloom

 

     People tell me the Mimosa tree is a "weed tree". Supposedly, it sprouts up everywhere from its seed pods and it is difficult to eradicate once you have one. Personally, I think it is heavenly. The one pictured above grows on the side of the road behind our house. Every July, we walk up the hill and cross the road to stand beneath its foliage. The branches spread out horizontally creating a wide, tropical canopy. The flowers fill the air with a very sweet scent. Hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees dart all over the foliage and flowers. They move so fast that it is impossible to track a single bird's movements.
     I thought it would be lovely to have a Mimosa tree at our place. I inquired about it at Rainfrost Nursery in Bedford last year but they didn't have any cultivated varieties to sell. The clerk said they might be able to get one called a Chocolate Mimosa (It sounds like a yummy drink!) and I gave her my name and number but no one ever called to say they got them in.
     Recently, I spotted a Mimosa seedling in one of our shrubbery beds. It is the first time in the twenty-one years we have lived here that a seedling has sprouted on our property. Now I am faced with the dilemma of whether or not to try and keep it and transplant it to a better spot. I am wary of the warnings and the trouble it may cause years from now. I hate to kill the little thing, which only adds to my dilemma. I could let it be for now and perhaps transplant it up near the road in the fall. That way I haven't killed it but I haven't committed it to the yard either.  I would much rather have a Mimosa tree up there than all the Black Walnut trees that self propagate. Talk about a nuisance tree! If I was forced to choose, I would choose a Mimosa over a Black Walnut any day.   

Thoughts on June

 

June left behind a mixture of emotions this year. While nature gave us beautiful blooms and dramatic landscapes, our church had to say goodbye to our beloved priest, Father Paul Logco. After one short year with us, his bishop called him back to the Phillipines. Father Paul is a kind and gentle shepherd, one of the kindest people I have ever met. He loved his congregation and we all loved him in return.

Although we were heartbroken with his leaving, it was important for us to send him off properly. We arranged a dinner and party with one hundred and seventy people attending. Father played the guitar and sang for us after which he received a standing ovation. He received another standing ovation after serving his last Mass with us. Many people cried openly as they hugged and said goodbye. 

Last summer, when Father Paul had first arrived, we invited him to our home for dinner. During that evening I asked him what made him decide to become a priest. He said that when he was young, he saw the love that a priest had for his people and the love he received in return. He wanted to know that kind of love. He certainly achieved that goal in our church. 

Father Paul was very sad as we said our last goodbyes. He said it was so hard to leave his beloved people. I know God has special plans for him. He stands out among all the pastors I have known throughout my lifetime. His heart is sincere and kind and loving. His teaching of Scripture is clear and true, and he is humble. In this world, we can all do with such an example in our lives.

 We miss you dearly, Father Paul.