Maggie's Farm

42 degrees last night. Maybe my roses, broccoli, lettuce and snap peas will last longer? But not good for my squash, basil, peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant!

Skook.I put mine in over a month ago [a gambler only gardening] and they are 2.5 ft high and flowering so I am invested in them and offering libations to the deity that they survive! Diluted kelp spray is a good general tonic and growth promoter for everything but impatiens [wh it stains]. My main challenge as an organic gardener is growing summer squash, pumpkins and acorn squash with huge pops of squash vine borers, squash bugs, cucumber beetles and mildew. Butternut squash resists almost everything as does that great heirloom cubing prolific zucchetta rampicante [3 foot baseball bats that are fun for kids to play with, but still tender and tadty and resistant to bugs and disease; but searching for something safe to commit borer genocide with. Beneficial nematodes and diatomaceous earth did no good. I love squash, any kind.

Blackberry typos, S, I meant vining zuccheta...

My kid in special ed looked disgustedly at an article on Paris and said earnestly to me "Mom, I think she needs to be kept in jail until she has 90 days sober and her roots are two inches long. And she REALLY needs to be on meds! Maybe if she had a good church to go to, like ours, she might get her act together...." Just a kid's point of view...

What medication could that be, Buddy? The kind of meds she might need are not the kind that anyone abuses. They don't get you high, just modulate your response... Unless she has conned some hack into prescribing her stuff to get high on, and the jail MDs doggedly refuse to enable? Just hypothesizing, trying to understand, not libelling anyone, just curious....

Skook,
Not to make you jealous, but my next door neighbor has a brand new Harley that my teens eye longingly...He bought it about a week after they brought their firstborn home from the hospital...There were some extreme words exchanged about it at first (houses very close). He is a nice looking kid, and kind to the little girl but fidgets sitting still and clearly feels the weight of his new responsibilities. Looks a lot happier polishing his Harley when wife and kid are away for the weekend visiting her relatives. I do feel sorry for many new daddies who, like him, work 14 hour days to get the family the house in the safe neighborhood, but don't have a lot of fun, and are still too young to have got frivolity and self-indulgence out of their system. He is lucky, tho, as the wife seems to give him a long leash and the kid is the world's easiest and most genial baby.

Yup, the squash bugs are vile. May check out the latest Extension Service optimistic prattle...Have always been an organic gardener, with the lone exception of roundup for poison ivy (1 tiny spray bottle lasts years if I remember to keep it corked) and yellow jacket spray. I try to endure the yellow jackets as they keep my cabbages caterpillar free (when little, my kids wept for the "poor baby caterpillars being carried away for yellow jacket's dinner") but am really scared of them by late August when they attack us on the deck...Squash sorely test my "no chemicals on edibles" philosophy...

I don't know how farmers make a living. The small family ones, and the organic ones especially. The latter always used to be my dream for an escape from the current necessary job. I have half a dozen semi dwarf fruit trees on my suburban lot that blossom beautifully and produce gorgeous fruit that is always completely devoured by squirrels the night it ripens. Intelligent squirrels who rip open nets, are not repelled by pepper spray, etc. I was only half shocked when the neighborhood's handsomest teenaged sociopath laughingly shot 40 squirrels in a neighbor's yard and left the corpses for neighbor to clean up. Half wished he had aimed his BB gun at my squirrels....

Buddy and Habu, Something to ponder...but at least when somebody here thinks me a jackass they don't know my name...and I would hate to embarass my kids by writing about what I know best: them, my eccentric and outright crazy relatives, friends and neighbors. I have already had the experience, as a college journalist, of writing a little too cruelly, joking at the expense of people in my dorm (wearing unbecoming clothes in a school show). I was shunned for weeks in the dining hall, and have been wary of becoming a pariah because of my careless verbiage again!

I would write if I thought I had a story worth telling and had a good editor to keep me in line, and help me figure out how to write without embarassing my offspring or getting sued for libel!

That squirrel shooter could be a whole story, for example, as I have watched him grow up. But his mother is an acquaintance, and that muzzles me.

I haven't figured out how to disguise people without destroying the very things that make them so interesting...

I was in awe of a local professional I admire no end who told me that he had written a book, a novel, in his spare time. Someone who is a credit to his profession, devoted to his family, and has a whole slew of interesting hobbies and interests. But we discussed how even when one can find the discipline to write, who is going to publish and read it?

You all are kind--perhaps when my kids are past adolescence and no longer so easily mortified by unconventional or eccentric parents I might be bolder..

Have to get up at 5 tomorrow to drive a ways to see my most accomplished child in a ceremony somewhere famous. Heart bursting with maternal pride, but must respect her need for privacy. The mother's dilemma: during these years, our own dreams and ambitions have to take a back seat to the care and education and training of the puppies....