Even more tales from the garden

 I hope you're not all bored with garden talk, because all I do is pick and preserve produce these days. 

This is the mystery fruit that appeared in July. It didn't look like anything listed on my gardening spreadsheet. (Yes, of course I have a gardening spreadsheet, as well as planting records that go back to 2015). Friends on facebook were divided as to whether it was a melon, which needs to be picked in the summer, or a squash, which should be left until late fall. I later remembered that one of my friends is a research scientist at USDA (the US Department of Agriculture, for those of you outside the US), and he determined... it was cucurbit. Which was not immensely helpful, as that plant family includes squash, melons, and cucumbers, so I still didn't know when to pick it. Eventually I guessed it was a melon, from a second fruit that an animal had started consuming, so I picked it and crossed my fingers that I had guessed correctly.

And it turned out to be a melon! The inside looked like a cantaloupe but tasted like a muskmelon, and the thing weighed more than ten pounds, so I've been eating it for almost two weeks. It has a nice flavor, so I saved some of the seeds and can hopefully grow it again.

This creature lives in my raspberry bushes. Wikipedia tells me that praying mantises are carnivores, so so I guess I don't have to worry about him going after the berries that are ripening right now.

I've been considering getting a food dehydrator, but they are really expensive and hard to find used. I just learned that I can use my car for this purpose. It works surprisingly well, and I have dried tomatoes, figs, and chili peppers. For all my efforts to save money, I am essentially drying food with a $10,000 dehydrator, but it's not like I was using my car for driving this summer anyway.

I grew butternut squash instead of sweet potatoes this summer because I realized I like squash a bit more, and both should store well in the winter. However, since squash grow above ground, I lost a few to a hungry groundhog. I decided to pick them all, even if they were not quite ripe and hope they'll all be edible. I'm working on a solution for the groundhog situation but it will take some time to implement.

Memories

Even when I was a teenager, I was enamored with the idea of being a minimalist. I read stories about people who owned only 100 things, and I still look with fondness upon the time when everything I owned fit in the Pontiac Grand Am I owned.

But of course, even then I had stored a few boxes at my parents' house, full of photos and yearbooks and childhood dolls. After I bought my house, my parents happily passed off those boxes. While I had looked through some of them, I had also added mementos from my years since then.

Ideally, I'd like to own just a small shoebox of precious things, items that I don't display but can't bear to give away. Today I decided I was ready to tackle the two large boxes of mementos. Six hours later, I had a huge pile of recycling, many electronic photos of the items I didn't want to forget but didn't want to keep, and a small number of things to save. 

It wasn't an easy day. I still can't look at things from my marriage and wedding without crying. I can't bear to write about those things, but here are items that spurred some happier memories.

This is the rubric from my sophomore-year speech class. We had to make a persuasive speech, and the teacher wrote, "I can't write enough about how good this speech was!" In truth, I agreed. Doing research for the, "Benefits of Vegetarianism," as I titled it, was what convinced me to give up meat. I like to that the speech was so good I persuaded myself. And I'm still vegetarian, thirty years later.

My brother and I attended a public elementary school that followed a Montessori pedagogy. Part of the child-centered learning took place through "stations" all over the classrooms. Kids could wander over to the geography staion and make a map using the map puzzle pieces, or color and label the parts of the tongue at the science station. Over time, you were supposed to complete a balanced number of activities. The comment on this report card from third grade says, "Renee didn't complete enough items on Science check-off list. She still spends too much time reading library books in class." I wish I could go back in time and tell my teacher it all turned out okay - I eventually learned enough science, you just had to average over graduate school.

When I lived in Germany the first time, I made a dear friend who also loved to sing. Whenever we'd get together we'd teach each other songs and learn the harmonies. The internet didn't exist, and neither of us had money to buy songbooks, so I remember carefully photocopying folk songs and making a little book. Later that year we traveled to the UK and sang in many a station while waiting for the next train. We weren't busking, just killing time. I wonder if the other passengers enjoyed it or wish we'd go away...

Scenes from a garden

August is the season when you just give in to the tide of green things growing.* Sure, the squash has taken an extra 3 meters of yard space and the tomatoes are so tall that they are breaking their support stakes.** Everything is growing like gangbusters because even the plants know that the summer will soon be over and that their lives are brief. I can tolerate the garden disorder and the huge piles of produce because I know that in a few short weeks, September will be here and I'll have to console myself with the few fall crops of peas and turnips. But for those who garden vicariously, here's what it looks like at my house.

The back (aka vegetable) garden has burst forth from the garden borders and has annexed parts of the lawn.

Ah, the halcyon days of last week when I was still excited about the first tomatoes.

Now, the tomatoes are winning.

The front flower garden looks as worn out from the heat as I am. 

Figs! It looks like a bumper crop this year. I harvested my first couple of quarts this evening.

I have canned pickles three times, a good excuse to eat lots of burgers this winter.

*To my cousin AinA, I just read your blog post summarizing the garden failures of 2020. I swear I'm not trying to rub it in.

**Many thanks to my friend S who tended my garden while I was on vacation and saved at least one cherry tomato plant.

Summer Project

I can count the summer a success, because my big project is done. I made a dress! This is so far above my previous sewing projects (trousers and skirts) and the amount of hair pulling and teeth gnashing involved reflected that. 

The mother of my friend L collects vintage patterns, and L generously loaned me a few. This had the benefit of motivating me to make an 1950's dress and the disadvantage of starting me on a pattern with minimal instructions. Let me tell you, in the 50's they assumed that everyone knew how to sew and the didn't bother filling in all the boring details on their patterns. I spent many a night binge watching collar attachment videos on youtube, cursing the non-Euclidean geometry involved. But with encouragement from friends and the magic words from one video to just "force the pieces" together, it all worked out. If you can consider "picking out my mistakes over and over" as "all working out."

Now I'm all excited about a vintage blouse pattern. We'll see if my success with collars was a one-time event...