The Magic of Gardening

Garden cleanup continues, as does harvesting. I brought in five tomatoes and one potato that I accidentally dug up while weeding. The plant was a volunteer that was hiding. It yielded up a respectably-sized Classic Russet, though, my favorite all-purpose potato.

Potatoes are amazing. You put a gnarly-looking piece of sprouting vegetable in the ground, and a few months later, you get lots of potatoes!

There will be beans:

Not as many as I had hoped, but more than I had three months ago.

My friend Marcie brought me some beautiful carrots:

I made carrot salad with them. Yum yum.

Tomatoes fresh off the vine always trigger a specific memory for me: When I had leukemia, I underwent three rounds of chemotherapy at the Cleveland Clinic. In between my second and third rounds, I came home to Montana for the month of September. I had been told by my doctors not to eat fresh vegetables or fruits while I was being treated (just one of many stunningly awful pieces of nutritional advice I received). When we pulled into the driveway, I got out of the car, walked into the backyard, picked a ripe tomato off the vine, and ate it. I’ve done that with the first tomato of the season just about every year since then.

[“Patient is noncompliant” is written all over my medical records, in case you were wondering.]

I cut out some of the spent raspberry canes in order to give the other plants some breathing room and more sun. The pigs got what was left of the broccoli and hoovered it right up. I am allowing the lettuce go to seed and I started another tray of seedlings in the greenhouse to transplant into the garden in a few weeks.

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This book arrived in the mail the other day:

It’s an index to all the Laura Wheeler-designed quilt blocks, compiled by Rose Lea Alboum. It’s important to note that this is just an index, not the actual patterns—which I knew before I ordered the book—but combined with the CD of Kansas City Star patterns I got a few weeks ago, it is a useful resource. I flipped through it the other night and earmarked several more obscure blocks that I’d like to mess around with.

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I am trying not to overload the blog with critical social commentary, but I do have a few more things to say. A friend of mine shared this on Facebook yesterday, attributed to another FB user named John Ferguson:

“Pay the people who are working an extra $400
Watch the unemployment go back to 3%.”

While I disagree with the idea that government should be acting as a nanny state and handing out money in exchange for votes, this does remind me of the basic truth that you tax what you want to discourage and subsidize what you want to encourage. So if you want to discourage job creation and entrepreneurship, you tax and regulate the living daylights out of small businesses. And if you want to encourage people to avoid working, you subsidize their expenses and make it possible for them to do so. This turns that on its head. I wonder what would happen?

I know it’s more complicated than that—believe me, I know how complicated it is—but there is another truth I am reminded of, which is that you don’t simplify a system by adding more layers of complexity. (Health care, anyone?)

I talked to another general contractor last night who is trying to get a foundation put in. People have started calling our home number, which tells me that they are desperate, because most contractors the husband works with know to call his cell phone number directly. I don’t mind fielding these calls—I am happy to run interference for him—but the fact that we’re getting more of them and that I am hearing the same story about not enough help tells me that I am not far off in my assessment. I tell anyone who calls that the husband is not accepting any more jobs for 2020, because he’s not.

And in today’s edition of “We Hate Tourists,” I went to town Wednesday to run some errands. If I had been a cop, I could have issued about a dozen citations to people for stupid and reckless driving, and three-quarters of the tickets would have been given to people with out-of-state plates. If you want to drive like an idiot, please stay home and do it. I have never seen it as bad as it has been this summer.