After several weeks of drought, we finally are getting rain here. It began last evening and continued all night.  We’re expecting more tonight, tomorrow and maybe even Monday.  We can use every drop.  When I look out my office window, the main garden plants have all grown visibly.  The tomato plants must have grown six inches since yesterday.  The broccoli heads are visible from here. It’s time to start freezing when the rain lets up. 

When my poetry group met for our monthly meeting, perhaps the last one over ZOOM as we’re discussing meeting in person again, I realized how little I write in the period when I’m reading and annotating manuscripts for my annual poetry workshop here.  Normally it takes me a while to figure out which two poems I’m going to have critiqued at our group.  This time, I realized I had written only six poems since the last meeting. I have been working in the garden mornings and working on mss. in the afternoon.

Every year I order some herbs.  I start basil, summer savory, sweet marjoram plus chervil [that didn’t germinate this spring] and two kinds of parsley.  Over this winter with bitter cold and no snow cover, I lost all my thyme, tarragon and oregano.   I planted various herbs I’d mail-ordered in the herb garden and the pineapple sage in the pollinators garden.  Already some of the plants I put in there are blooming: the tall Alliums I planted last fall, the Calendula and cosmos I started from seed, for instance.

The mss. vary in quality.  All the poets submitted five of their best poems to be accepted into the workshop, but naturally, the poems selected for the conferences should need work or what’s the point of discussing them?

This week, I made a pasta primavera with a lemon cream sauce.  I chopped peppers from the supermarket, broccoli and spinach and herbs from out garden.  It was delicious.  it worked well because while chopping vegetables was work, the whole process took half an hour.  I was beat as it was warm when I was planting.  Yesterday, potting and another simple supper – gravlax we make and freeze about once every six weeks, rye bread, Allouette cheese and a spinach salad.  I make great spinach salads, adding Kalamata olives, some crumbled crisp bacon, hard boiled eggs sliced and red onion and heat the vinegar slightly before adding it to the oil.

Woody almost never lets me make dessert unless we have company, but he had bought some peaches that were a little sour, so he agreed it could make a baked sort of crisp.  It was pretty easy and absolutely delicious. Tonight, Tash is making a celebration for Dale’s birthday.  We’ll bring a garden salad and wine and candles.  I have to wrap his gifts today.

 Woody’s gym is gone since into the pandemic closed it.  He ordered a wall-mounted piece of equipment called a TONAL, an AI strength-training contraption, that resembled what he used at the gym.  It just arrived. He was working on the drip irrigation system for all three vegetable gardens and into my herb garden.  He has to extend the system for the main garden to water my new pollinator garden – three narrow raised beds in a row. His next task is to stake or tie up all the tomato plants in his and my gardens. In no hurry.  Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!  Maybe it will get rid of all the tree pollen that has been making us sneeze, cough, our eyes itch, our throats raw.