Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
1. If you like 30 Rock and you liked The Muppet Show, you’ll enjoy this blog post that compares the two. The pictures of parallel characters are great.
2. The gardening is going well. The tomatoes in the long bed got staked Saturday (the last day we’ve been able to work in the yard; stupid rain) and we planted cabbages and still more tomatoes.
3. Good times with student writing workshop commentary.
The short answer: Buying things for the yard. (And working in it, too, but mostly buying things.)
Mr. Isbell expanded the front stoop into a patio and I bought some chairs:
(And a new hose! and hose storage!)
And I bought a lot of marigolds and potting soil:
I did finally get the yellow dot fabric from two weeks ago cut out last night, but someone decided to impede progress as much as he could:
Look at that stubborn face. He wasn’t about to move.
I’ve always thought that potatoes need a lot of space, but look at what the internet has shown me: I can grow potatoes vertically!
The full story is here, along with a lot of step-by-step photos. Of course, I don’t have room to store my harvest in the apartment…I suppose I could dig a root cellar.
We got the cold-weather greens in the ground yesterday afternoon. This was in my head the whole time, much to Mr. Isbell’s chagrin:
(Sorry to get this in your head, too, but I had to do it. There are SINGING FLOWERS. And John Denver, who is probably high as a kite and who kind of looks like a Muppet himself. )
1. I worked half of the week (yay!), so no bread baking, but I did make cookies twice: These hazelnut blondies and the coffee-almond bars I linked to Tuesday. Tomorrow I’ll make cinnamon bread again.
2. Speaking of Tuesday, navy wasn’t the best color choice for the fleece top to wear around the house–there’s an orange haze of Toby hair all over it after ten minutes. Oh well; a conductor in college once said that cat hair on your clothes was just “a memento of something you love.”
3. How soon can I plant cold-weather crops like kale and spinach in the ground? St. Patricks day? I’ve always just transplanted seedlings, but the seed packets say “sow 4-6 weeks before the last frost.”
I’ve been pulling weeds in the flowerbed we cleared out last fall and finished up yesterday, just in time for five inches of snow. But the bulbs I planted are coming up, so spring is near. I had let the weeding go all fall, so there was a lot to do, and as I cleared out the bulbs I knew I had a ready-made blog post from The Secret Garden:
She found many more of the sprouting pale green points than she had ever hoped to find. They seemed to be starting up everywhere and each new day she was sure she found tiny new ones, some so tiny they barely peeped above the earth…She wondered how long it would be before they showed that they were flowers.
After removing about a cubic yard of both snails and rocks, digging out vine roots that were probably older than me, spading up dirt that hadn’t been touched since the Reagan years, and generally doing a lot of work*, I have a flowerbed! 
There are daylilies, grape hyacinths, regular hyacinths, and jupiters beard planted now, with zinnias, nasturtiums, and tomatoes to follow next spring. 
Just don’t be like my neighbor, who asked,”Are you going to plant anything in there?” Simply being able to see the dirt took three weeks, dude. And yes, there ARE plants. They’ll fill in
*I can’t take credit for even half the work, because it took a village to get this flower bed. My excellent mother helped so much; I think my clumsy spading technique was too painful to her to watch, so she did most of that. And Mr. Isbell pulled out vines like it was going out of style.
I’ve learned a few things from my little 10×10 garden this year–I hate snails, you must pick yellow squashes the day you see them because the next day they are the size of Godzilla, etc. Perhaps the most important thing I learned is I probably shouldn’t cram in 7 tomato plants, three squash plants, an eggplant, lettuces, and two rows of beans next time.
With that in mind, I’ve been working on getting a flowerbed that runs alongside of the front lawn cleared out, so I can plant tomatoes and daylilies in it and use my 10×10 patch for lettuce and squash. (Not yellow squash, though.)
Of course, I use the term “flowerbed” loosely, because it contains about an even mix of dead snails, live snails, and vining groundcover. Thank goodness for gardening gloves. But, on the upside, I can think of poems about things rotting and the earth while I’m out there, avoiding the live snails.
“Fall Song,” by Mary Oliver
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
1. The tomatoes have finally decided to ripen:
2. Toby is back to normal, watching birds and wanting to play.
(Here’s the view right outside that window–attack of the tomatoes!)
I’ve finally stopped complaining how far behind and puny my garden is, because you can’t really do that if the tomato plants are as tall as you. The ripening is still a little behind schedule, but at least the plants look healthy, if not completely out of control.
I planted mostly tomatoes:
And some zucchini, because about 85% of vegetarian recipes involve zucchini.
I have a feeling I will regret the zucchini in a month, but right now I’m still excited.