Summer Mornings in the Garden

This will always be my favorite time of day, no matter the season:

I especially love summer mornings in the garden. I snapped this shot at around 7:30 am from the middle of the potato patch.

The squash and cukes are doing great. (They were also planted on pig manure.) We will have a bumper crop of pumpkins. I hauled in enough zucchini yesterday to give some to my neighbor, Theresa. I know her family loves them. The peas Anna brought me yielded eight pints for the freezer after shelling and blanching. Those will be wonderful in soups this winter.

It has been a good gardening year, once we got past the 30-degree lows in mid-June.

I finally decided on garden furniture for the herb garden. I will wait until next spring to get it unless there is a sale. Stutzman’s Amish Furniture in Polson makes tables and chairs out of recycled poly lumber. They had some on display at the Amish store when Robin and I stopped for ice cream last week.

*********

The one-year anniversary of the podcast is coming up in September. I’ve enjoyed hosting it and plan to continue, but I am frustrated by the lack of e-mail etiquette I’m encountering. Some of my guests come to me through the guest form on the website. Others, I e-mail directly because they may not know the podcast exists. I have reached out to half a dozen people about being guests on the podcast. I am very specific in my requests. I explain who I am and what the podcast is about. I offer to interview them over Zoom at their convenience. I suggest/ask for potential dates and let them know I am happy to work around their schedules.

It is like pulling teeth. I will get an affirmative response with no other details. ("Sure, I'll be on the podcast," and that's it.) Followup e-mails about scheduling go unanswered.

I get that I am not Joe Rogan, but if you express interest in being on the podcast, I expect you to meet me halfway. I now send one followup e-mail, but that's it. My time is valuable and I am not in the business of making people feel super special by pursuing them.

I see a huge divide between people who are successful and people who are just muddling along, and it isn’t always because of lack of opportunity. The people who operate at a high level and get things done are the ones who answer my professional e-mail inquiries with a professional response, even if it’s a “No, thank you.” (I’ve received a couple of those.) Being on a podcast is free publicity, which makes this even more of a head-scratcher. Why wouldn’t you want to get the word out about what you’re doing?

*********

A few months ago, I accidentally broke the tension stud on my Necchi industrial. Of course, there are no donor machines of that model and I could not find a suitable replacement stud among any of my machine parts. I took the stud to a machine shop here in town, which kept it for several weeks before telling me they couldn’t replicate it.

I did an internet search for machine shops in Spokane and one popped up that looked promising. I called the shop yesterday morning and explained what I needed. The guy on the other end of the phone said, “Text me a photo,” so I did. After a few minutes, he texted back and said that he thought he could replicate the part. He also gave me an estimate of the cost. (See what I mean about being professional?) I’m going to drop off the broken part the next time I’m in Spokane, and hopefully I can have that machine up and running again before long.