Dog Days of Summer

Three Sisters Garden in July

Garden Notes

It happens every year, August hits and I am ready to harvest and move on to other things, like working on the Civil War Underground Railroad quilt (lying dormant since May) and practicing the piano. But, there is a lot of work to do before I hang up my gardening apron for the season.

I picked a colander of Anaheim peppers yesterday, roasted, peeled, diced, and froze enough for three pots of green chili. I expect to do the same in another week and then a third time before I start donating peppers to the local food bank. I have loads of jalapenos, which I will pickle, and then I need to figure out what to do with the poblanos, which my son insisted I plant. Maybe a multi-pepper salsa...

The tomatoes are coming in, so that means I will be making tomato sauce next week and the week after to fill the freezer with sauce for the winter. I use tomatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and herbs from the garden, only needing to buy celery and balsamic vinegar to add some punch to the sauce.

The zucchini is doing what it does best, and I've been making zucchini bread as well as adding it to a wonderful pasta salad recipe in which I parboil diced carrots and zucchini and add them to diced artichoke hearts, cherry tomatoes, feta cheese, peas, diced bell pepper, and spiral pasta with a vinaigrette and a splash of lemon juice. I have my eye on a high-altitude chocolate zucchini cake that sounds amazing.

Our Three Sisters Garden seems to be doing okay--we planted the corn first, and the tassels are darkening nicely, meaning we can pick corn maybe next week. The pinto beans have lots of pods--I've never grown pinto beans before, but I read that you need to wait until the pods dry out before you harvest them. The yellow squash went in last and is just now flowering. This was an experiment this year, and I devoted only one raised bed to see how the Three Sisters would do. If you're interested in Three Sisters gardening method, here's a good description: Plant a Three Sisters Garden: Corn, Beans, and Squash | The Old Farmer's Almanac, although I planted pinto beans instead of pole beans mainly because I wanted to see if I could!

The native flower garden is looking a bit tired, probably from the repetitive strings of 90+degree days that Colorado has endured this summer. I am letting most of the plants wither instead of deadheading so that they drop their seeds and spread their goodness for next year. It may look tired, but the pollinators are still working the blossoms that are left...and I did see a Monarch butterfly this morning. So, happiness all around.

Reading Notes

I'm in the middle of quite a few books right now, so not much completed to talk about...

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler - very short but very enjoyable. Literally, three days in June - before the wedding, the day of the wedding, and the day after the wedding. Great premise in which the story of Gail, the main character, her ex-husband Max, and their daughter Debbie unfolds as Debbie gets married. 

I haven't actually read a lot of Tyler--I had mixed feelings about Vinegar Girl, her take on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew--and I read The Accidental Tourist so long ago, I can't really remember if I liked it all that much. But Three Days in June was a fun respite from the long books that are currently filling my reading life. And I did really like the ending! That makes all the difference.

My friend Pam Mingle recommended a couple of Mrs. Mallory mysteries because she knew I would enjoy them and she was right. I started with Mrs. Mallory and the Fatal Legacy, by Hazel Holt. Here is the GoodReads blurb:

When Shelia Malory ran into her old college chum, Beth, now a bestselling novelist, she expected a pleasant lunch, some reminiscing, and a little harmless gossip. What she didn't expect was her friend to wind up dead shortly after their meeting. Now Sheila must act as literary executer, which means sifting through Beth's papers and letters, writing her biography, and preparing her short stories for press. But in her attempt to keep her friend's work alive, she discovers something deadly...the means and motives for murder!

And Mrs. Malory will have to read between the lines to find out the truth, before someone else dies for this legacy...

Hazel Holt was actually Barbara Pym's friend, colleague, biographer, and literary executor, making this mystery a bit meta.

It was a fun, easy, relaxing read set mostly in London, circa 2000. Seemed like the same world that Rosamunde Pilcher's and Josephine Tey's books describe. 

Travel Notes

Gearing up for two trips, one in September and one in October. 

We'll be going to the Port Townsend Wooden Boat festival again this year just after Labor Day. We are adding time to visit a couple of cool looking gardens north of Tacoma as well as the Glass Museum in Tacoma, plus birding sites between Tacoma and Port Townsend. Look for a travelogue mid-September!

In October, I am going to Baltimore for the JASNA Annual General Meeting, and then my husband is joining me for sightseeing in Baltimore after the AGM and then three days in Gettysburg where I can put all that Civil War reading I've been doing to good use. Fingers crossed for a travelogue in mid-October.

Enjoy the rest of these Dog Days of Summer.

Homegoing and Vinegar Girl

These two books don't have much in common except that they are part of a set.  Homegoing was one of the Tournament of Books selections this year, and Vinegar Girl is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which modern popular authors tackle retelling some of Shakespeare's plays.

I knew I wanted to read Homegoing from the moment I heard about it and saw its wonderful, vibrant, promising cover. I've made a conscious effort to read more slave stories as a way of trying to balance the >50 years in which I read none, but apart from that I loved the premise.  Basically, two half sisters in 18th century Africa who have never met are the genesis for two narratives--one girl remains in Africa as do her descendants, while the other is sold into slavery and her descendants are part of the American experience.

This was a fascinating way to travel both lines through history, and I really enjoyed hearing about both sets of stories and people equally.  The writing was excellent--powerful, straightforward, and flexible, meaning that I was impressed that the author, Yaa Gyasi, was able to give each character a unique voice that made him/her memorable as an individual.

Homegoing rates as one of the best books I've read so far this year.  Interestingly, in the Tournament of Books, Underground Railroad was named the champion, and Homegoing came in second.  It's all opinion, but while both are 5-star books, I preferred Homegoing.  Maybe it's the span of time, the richness and variety of characters and stories, some that intersect and some that don't.  I found Homegoing the more satisfying novel, though both were equally thought-provoking and powerful.

Compared to Homegoing, Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler was pretty fluffy.  Here's what I wrote for my GoodReads review:

Wish that I could give this weird book another half star [I gave it 3]. It's a weird book because the basic storyline is pretty hard to work with as anyone who has seen Taming of the Shrew will tell you. Tyler does an okay job with modernizing the premise of a "Vinegar Girl" (i.e., a sharp-tongued, no nonsense woman) needing to get married, which is not an easy task--really, no one "needs" to get married these days, but Tyler came up with a reasonable reason. My main problem with the book is that Tyler's setting is contemporary Baltimore but the total feel of the setting is "Leave it to Beaver" land. The setting is so anachronistic that it's unsettling.

For example, there are no 2017 parents who would send their children to the preschool where Kate works as Tyler describes it--the parents sound modern, but the teachers and aides are completely unrealistic. Makes me wonder if Tyler has been in a 21st century preschool. And the notion that "everyone" started treating Kate differently when she announced her engagement because she was no longer doomed to be a single woman is preposterous.

But, and here's what saves the book for me, Tyler dealt in a wonderful way with that awful speech that Kate and her husband make at the end of Taming of the Shrew...it was so fitting and fun to read that I forgave Tyler for the weirdness of her anachronistic world.

Since I compared Homegoing to Underground Railroad, it's only fair that I compare Vinegar Girl with the other Shakespeare Project book that I've read so far, Hag-Seed.  They are light years apart. Hag-Seed was an interpretation of The Tempest and it made me look at the original, its themes and characters and plot, in a new way.  Vinegar Girl was a modernization with nothing really interesting or new to say about Taming of the Shrew. It was a fun read but not really memorable.