More Politics

Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times, chronicles at more length my sense that we all were really fond of the exciting primary season and now feel let down. I don't agree with him though that this is going to be a "same old" election--way too much at stake.

Garden and Politics

I still garden too. The pictures here are of the herb garden around the patio--I've expanded it a bit, tidied it up, and actually made a plan before planting. I was greatly helped by a nice little book from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden called Designing an Herb Garden--well worth the modest investment. The garden looks, as you can see, much tidier than last year although I suffer from a reluctance to be firm with plants that get too big. The nepeta completely took over for a while but has now been cut back; I'll divide it in the fall and see if I can't keep the nice long lasting blue flowers without smothering everything else. The flowers attract bees and I once saw a hummingbird there as well. I think the lavender, although not given to smothering other plants, will need to be reduced in number (one plant is fine here) and pruned a bit as well.

I'm particularly happy with the plants on the little end; they're based on the "Mediterranean Garden" section of the book and are mulched, of all things, with crushed oyster shells which I buy at a chicken feed store. It seems to work fine; those plants are busily getting too big as well. I didn't want to mulch the whole thing with oyster shell and so settled on buckwheat hulls, which are the same size and texture--it looks handsome enough and the two different colors don't (I think) look too odd--but buckwheat is an impossible mulch which I do NOT recommend. It's very light; the weeds seem to enjoy hiding in its shade until they are well grown; the wild purslane is particularly happy there. I used some of it in a salad next year--which reminds me that I intended to order the cultivated variety. Not too late, I think. The nasturtiums are Empress of India; unfortunately I have only two, having planted something else of a different color. Next year I think it will be all Empress, mixed in with the border to parsley.

I'm so thrilled by the potato plants that I tried to sneak some potatos yesterday with little result--I got two very small ones. I notice that last year I didn't show them on the blog until late July; I guess I need to be patient.

Politics

That endless primary was like a drug--lots of news, all the time; every time you got really bored there was another group of voters flocking to the polls. Now we don't have much except Hillary and Barack being really, really, nice to each other. They either get along well or are brilliant actors. I am really shocked, though, by the news that Bill hasn't even made the necessary polite phone call. It seems remarkable; CNN talks about it a lot. One story I enjoyed today in the Times is about young people adopting "Hussein" as their middle name.

Roger's Garden

Since he seems unlikely to post on it himself, I thought I'd turn to Roger's vegetable garden--hardly as thrilling, to our average reader, as more details on a future wedding, but still worth talking about.

Roger has become a phenomenal gardener over the past two years. Not only has he planted a whole new landscape design, he has also built the only vegetable garden in any front yard in our neighborhood of 85 houses or so. He has become, as a result, the subject of much neighborly attention, most of it apparently enthusiastic. The elderly woman across the street who likes to watch the world out her window comments on how often and how hard he works; someone we don't know donated her unused irrigation system supplies when she saw his in action; everyone who walks by stops and looks--more than they do at the nicely landscaped yard across the street. I'm sure when the zucchinis come along we'll have lots of takers.

Roger is just through a bout of jury duty, where he noted the difficulty of making conversation with a group of people you don't know when you are forbidden to talk about the only thing you have in common--the case. One woman told him she was a gardener, admitting to lettuce and tomatoes. Roger gallantly resisted saying the he grew those, plus beans and peas, swiss chard and spinach, carrots, beets, cabbage, peppers (three kinds), onions, corn and, most gloriously of all from my perspective, potatoes.

The eccentricity of this lot works in our favor there since gardens in Connecticut are very prone to the terrible blight of the potato beetle. Most vegetable gardeners I know won't try potatoes because the beetles move on to other hosts once they have eaten your potatoes up. They have an interesting life cycle, living underground over the winter and then going walkabout in the spring to find themselves a good meal. One extension service I read said that rotating crops will do no good unless you can rotate to a spot more than a mile away. So I go out every morning fully prepared to find them but so far so good--something has made a few little holes in the leaves but the plants are very vigorous (they are the front in the top picture) and we can expect a good crop.

Roger, in addition to being unusual, is a kindly gardener who lets volunteers grow undisturbed--so we have a potato in the middle of the swiss chard, several tomato plants at various points, and a forest of sunflowers. I doubt the tomatoes will breed true--they were probably the kind of hybrids (F1), that revert to the parental types when allowed to breed. But it's worth waiting and seeing.

The only current crop in an edible state is the snow peas which are rather spindly--some grew well and some just lay about. Fortunately the pole beans, another great favorite of mine, are marching vigorously along. You can see the sad peas in the front and the happy beans in the back of the trellis picture.

Suddenly, Summer

The rose is named Fourth of July.

Summer is certainly here, even without the solstice to mark it. The other day I decided I wanted to make tabbouleh and after wrestling with the spelling for a while found a recipe in Epicurious (which uses"tabouli"). I had tomatoes--and was surprised to discover that everything else fresh--scallions, mint and an absurd amount of parsley--was available in the garden. It was very good; think I'll make it again tonight. The mint, oddly enough, is being strangled by an aggressive Montauk daisy; I bought a little bit more and put it someplace else.

The farm stand I frequent has his own strawberries plus beans and peas and peaches from various places only a little further south. We wait expectantly for corn, which won't be in locally for a month or so.

Like Jean, I'm sure we don't save money on our own gardening especially since Roger has invested heavily in an irrigation system both for our new landscape plantings and for his vegetable garden. But it does taste much better and, like Wren (one of Jean's commenters), I like the fact that there are no mouldering bunches of half used cilantro and parsley in the fridge. We have already finished off the spinach and radishes--spinach gets bitter when it boults, which surprises me. We have herbs, especially parsley, and snow peas at the moment and are looking forward soon to little carrots and beets. The potato plants are spectacular this year and the baby beans very enthusiastic. It's a nice time in the garden, June, before the bugs come and things turn brown or too big. I do have aphids on the roses but they don't seem to do much harm.

I can't help mentioning that we are bound to have too many zucchini (courgettes to the foreign reader)--that's the inevitability of location, not skill. Maybe we should try some of the striped ones.

Not much new in the way of politics except for the fact that I'm already tired of how easy the press goes on McCain. Surely that can't last all the way through.

Still Staunch

That's apparently the motto of my college reunion class--at least it's the phrase they chose to print on our souvenir umbrellas. As you can gather, Roger and I attended my 50th. I'm not very much of a reunion-goer--the only other one I have attended was the 25th--but I found myself a bit taken aback by the fact that there is only one more time when the class year gets special recognition (the 55th); after that all of us old folks are just lumped together as "Garnet Sages". Garnet being the college color.

It was a bittersweet event. Out of a class of about 200, 38 had died and one other, who I was particularly looking forward to seeing, had a brain tumor diagnosed just days before the event. Also college wasn't the happiest time of my life--I greatly enjoyed Swarthmore itself but my eccentric mother managed to torment me the whole four years with threats of removal--often couched in the most terrible terms and always delivered unexpectedly by letter. Some of the pain of being told to go home just when you had started having fun rose back up to haunt me. Still, in all, it was fun to be back and fun to see people.

Swarthmore has a built in Arboretum named Scott so the campus, a particularly lush bit of land in the Philadelphia suburbs, is exquisitely landscaped and the elderly trees are tenderly cared for, giving it at times the look of a corner of Kew. It felt very different from when I was there; a former faculty member who came to give a talk said that the tone was set by the head gardener and the current one likes lots of complicated plantings while the former loved open vistas. Still we liked the complicated plantings and picked up lots of little phamphlets of advice to bring home with us.

No point in going through every detail of the weekend except to say that we had fun, got to visit the Barnes Foundation for the first time, ate and drank well, saw old friends and made some new ones of people I hadn't known well. Both Roger and I felt that the best talk we heard was a joint one by a former English Professor, Sam Hynes and my former roommate, now one of the most famous graduates in the class, Carol Gilligan. They talked about moving from being academic to writing fiction; Sam reminisced about the period when W. H. Auden was a faculty member. It was fun.

The weird bird hugging me is a Phoenix, a college symbol although I can't remember why.

Back here we have been sweltering in heat which is very hard on the cats. I think I am going to get them "lion cuts" which involves essentially shaving them while leaving their ruff and tail alone. I'm told it makes the cats much happier. And Helen, there are no beetles in our radishes, Anja just has a passion for anything that comes in from the garden. She intruded herself into that picture without invitation.

Like Jean, we are having good success with our garden and will post in more detail soon about that.

Back to Blogging

Time to start posting again--the trouble is, once you've put it off for a while, there's too much to say.

Theo and Tiger, as the world now knows, were engaged last weekend in Washington. I'll let them tell the full story but thought I'd fill in a little background. Theo planned it all out in advance--telling both us and Tiger's mom. Tiger had to be in Washington for the Rules Committee meeting that took place on Saturday; Theo followed her, arranging a dinner which she thought was going to be with a girlfriend. The rules committee ran way over its scheduled 3 PM ending time; on top of that the summer bad weather arrived, bringing thunderstorms with hail--not such good news for flying in. The combination allowed me a day of rich and interesting worry--I couldn't resist calling Theo in the late afternoon; he told me his plane was almost diverted but made it through and that he was hiding out in a Starbucks waiting for the committee to get its business done. Roger and I were at a play that night with cell phones off so Theo had to resort to a text message to let us know that everything had worked out fine.

I hope the happy couple will post themselves and tell us a few more details. The picture was taken on the Big Night.

Politics: Phase one seems to be over; TV is full of commentary on how historic this nomination is, when they are not commenting on how odd Hillary's non-concession speech last night was. Barack is being very magnanimous ; I guess he can afford to be. This is certainly going to be an interesting election.

And the garden: Roger has decided on a full service plot this year. We've already had spinach and little lettuces and radishes; the potatoes look very healthy; we have peas well started and beans just beginning. Corn, tomatoes, swiss chard, okra, beets, carrots, and even cabbage are on their way. Last year's bean poles will be devoted to flowers--I thought that would make for an attractive view from the sunroom. I've got both moonvines and morning glories started from scratch--with an additional moonvine bought from a garden center.

The last picture is from Paris--where we were just over a month ago; it was taken in the Luxembourg gardens where we had coffee with some Parisian-based friends.

Ah, Philly

Philadelphia, the home of my alma mater, took its turn in the presidential campaign spotlight these past few weeks. Apparently I picked the wrong time to go to Penn, because both Hillary and Barack came to campus and The Colbert Report set up shop on campus as well.

And last night, Colbert took a close look at another battle wracking Philadelphia on a daily basis.

Pat's all the way.

I want a cheesesteak.