Tag: books

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06/02/2022

New book in the mail! The Social Wasps of North America by Chris Alice Kratzer. It looks very useful.
Awards for bravery all around tonight. Shacks walked right past Briar and she stayed put.
Purple coneflower finally opening up!
Ironweed is budding, seems early??
This is one of two dill seedlings in the herb bed.
Pretty sure now that this is the Mexican sage from Judy.
Whoa, standing cypress about to bloom!
The just-planted two leaf senna doing okay.
The older two leaf senna seems to have gotten nibbled. I’ll have to consider if I should put some Vaseline around it against earwigs or a wire cage over it maybe for rabbits.
A non native moss rose (Portulaca). Dog behind.

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New stuff

Read this good book Mom had. “A new garden ethic” by Benjamin Vogt. Definitely recommend it! Arguments for planting native plants and considering all our little friends and neighbors both animals and plants.
Paula, we’re borrowing this.
Seeds from home! Mom collected the common persimmon before I arrived.
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Quarter Gram = 1.76 kg

I left this zucchini too long and it was 1.76 kg (about 3.9 pounds). Gram the cat weighs about 14 pounds last we weighed him.
Paula’s moss rose has a lovely flower!
Briar yawns. Photography of plants is borrrriiiiing.
Several inches of rain is settling down dirt over geothermal pipes nicely. Once it’s not slippery mud, I’ll go spread it out more and continue leveling and shaping.
You can see seedling ‘Will Rogers’ variety red zinnias on the right, and harder to see are ‘burning embers’ Linnaeus marigold seedlings near the peach tree, for quick orange.
Briar looks over green and yellow bed. A triangle of Fordham giant chard with lacinato kale in the middle. The two scraggly plants are coreopsis recovering from being potted up for a month. Around it are dwarf marigold seedlings for more quick yellow.
‘Country gentleman’ sweet corn is flowering.
Supervisor exhausted by his earlier brush with the monster zucchini.
Book “Bean by Bean: a cookbook” by Crescent Dragonwagon. Lent by the Bean Queen herself, thanks Heather! Lots of interesting bean trivia. More focused on cooking than bean varieties (ie differences among Lima, green, cowpeas, lentils, etc, not varieties within those).
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Last book report for tonight I promise: “Gardening with Prairie Plants” by Sally Wasowski

Gardening with Prairie Plants was SO BEAUTIFUL. Mom gave it to me a few weeks ago and it was just filled with magnificent pictures of prairies and prairie gardens throughout the Great Plains. I really also liked how it paid attention to the different regions (wetter and drier, north and south), so it has lots of good info on plants native to each region. It mentioned some medicinal and edible uses of native plants too though it refers to other more complete sources. Did I mention the prairie photos? Definitely added to the favorite references spreadsheet.

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Another book report: “Grow Cook Eat” by Willi Galloway

Grow Cook Eat by Willi Galloway had a lot of useful tidbits I hadn’t found elsewhere, such as soil temperatures for germinating (the Johnny’s seed catalog seems to have air temperature? or so I assume, as it’s not specified) and some sections on mustard greens and bok choy. I have added it to my spreadsheet of useful books.

For those interested in cooking (aka not me anymore), it also had a lot of recipes and talked about eating parts of plants that aren’t usually discussed, like radish seed pods and various flowers of vegetables.

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Book report: “The Beautiful Edible Garden” by Leslie Bennett and Stefani Bittner

I am on a garden-book-reading spree it seems. I just finished The Beautiful Edible Garden (got it as an ebook from Pioneer Library Systems, our local public library). It had a lot of suggestions on how to arrange edible plants into an existing decorative garden. Mostly not relevant to how we have the yard laid out, but probably helpful for others. They did recommend a three-group crop rotation of brassicas, legumes, and nightshades, and ignoring herbs, lettuce, and alliums. So that was similar to The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible which I read a few weeks ago and liked.