Yes, We Have No Cucumbers
The garden giveth, the garden taketh away. We’ve been eating spinach and salads for at least a month and two thirds. It’s reached the point where I am researching spinach recipes and Woody is tiring of my suggestions. We’ve now started eating broccoli and we have cabbages ready also. This is the season of glut. Then there’s usually a pause in harvesting between spring crops and summer crops. One chilly night, all the cucumbers died. It didn’t get near freezing but it seems we have trouble nowadays growing cukes. We used to be flooded with them.
My paste tomatoes are thriving and Woody’s main crop tomatoes are strong and healthy. too. He had some extra plants and gave them to Tasha Friday. I still have some planting to do: marigolds, extra parsley I started before the first batch took off. My hot peppers are doing great. Woody’s sweet and frying peppers are a bit slower but okay. Pattypans, leeks, zucchini, basil, and in fact all the herbs are thriving.
Nina and I work well together so far – everything I couldn’t get done just sat there and she is rapidly catching up with the 13 weeks I was without an assistant. I just could not do my work and the assistant’s usual work so everything piled up and up. Nina has already done 5 submissions of many poems and filed almost everything. It’s amazing how much she has managed to accomplish in the short time she’s working been for me.
,
The Proto-IndoEuropean book is dense, technical and slow going, but I’m still finding it interesting. Woody took two boxes of books to the library sale. After I learned they only sell books from the last decade, I stopped going. What I wanted was, first of all, books that are no longer in print. Second, cookbooks of all ethnicities and ages. Sometimes a cookbook from the 50’s or 60’s contains recipes that have fallen trough the cracks of time but are still interesting-- not those awful Jello salads with raisins and fruit cocktail suspended in the chemically flavored goop. Not marshmallow yams or fish in aspic. (Note: yams are an issue in this house. Woody likes them; I still remember my mother’s horrid concoctions.) But there are always some excellent old recipes that have just disappeared from modern usage.
Tonight we’re going to Gigi and Ralph’s in her old family house in Harwich Port where she has her gallery. Gigi was the first artist in a town arts facility more than 10 years ago. She has had a wonderful studio with windows on two sides where she paints and stores her work. The new director is more interested in events than in art and insisted every artist must teach and have open studios for people to visit. Gigi explained she had no formal a training but is self-taught and would have trouble teaching someone else. She was given an eviction notice. She looked at studios but couldn’t find a good that was affordable. She is turning part of her old family house into a studio but has therefore to cut down on the Cross Rip gallery space.