The Garden Giveth...and The Garden Taketh a LOT of Work

Now that I’ve fully recovered from whatever bug I had, it has been a very busy and productive week. I finally got back to work on revisions for THE HOUR OF MY DEATH. I wrote two poems, revised an older one. We canned 11 pints of our tomatoes and froze another 5 lbs. of beans.

Processing the harvest is consuming much of our time. We both feel we have now canned enough tomato sauce and stewed enough canned tomatoes for the year, but now beans are coming in. We need about 20 pounds for the winter. So far, we’ve frozen 13 lbs. I will also dry some tomatoes.

My poetry group is supposed to meet this Wednesday. I’m dubious that we’ll have enough poets as it’s so close to Labor Day.  Many of us have friends here renting for a week or two or a month. We’re seeing two of them tonight. Some people go away for this weekend or have to work extra shifts. I’ll poll the group Sunday.

Woody keeps saying he doesn’t understand why we’re doing so fabulously well on tomatoes, zukes, patty pans, etc.; especially tomatoes puzzle him. It has been a hot dry summer until recently. We actually finally enjoyed rain during the night one night this week. I wonder if it’s not the lack of chipmunks, who love to go down the row of tomato plants and take one bite out of every tomato they can reach. Also there seem to be fewer rabbits. I wonder if a disease is depleting those populations as happens some years; or if we have a new predator around. We haven’t heard the coywolves pack at all lately and there are no longer any packs of feral dogs that we had many years ago, before the coywolves came to the Cape. It could be a fisher cat, a largish weasel that, is on the Outer Cape these days [and nights].

Woody is making one of his specialties tonight, steak fajitas--tacos with leftover tenderloin steak (we can longer finish one steak between the two us).

I have to start thinking of bringing out the dehydrator. Dry some tomatoes and maybe some herbs.

I haven’t had much time to read [or do much of anything else than I listed] but I’m partway through Wake, Siren [Nina MacLaughlin] and Joseph Lee’s book about exploring his Indian [Native American] heritage from Martha’s Vineyard. I had started Antonia Frazer’s biography of Lady Caroline Lamb, but I got bored about a quarter of the way through and may or may not go back to it.

These are sad and terrible times to live through, the dismantling of everything the government did that was good, useful, healthy and instead such cruelty and open evil. A total disregard for people who are not billionaires.  We simply do not count. The possibility that the Republicans will manage to rig the next elections, as they’re trying mostly successfully to do. New horrors and loss of liberty every day.