More Summer Reading — Seaside Observations
July 2, 2008 | 8:55 am
I can’t help but talk about it, as it’s on my mind. Two reasons (ha! as though I ever needed a reason to think about, talk about, or read books!) come currently to mind: I live in a resort area so am constantly seeing people who are on vacation; and my writing group is looking for new members, and one of the questions we’re asking applicants is what they like to read.
From what I can see, nonfiction is trumping fiction at the beach. Note that this is a small and casual survey, what I’m observing rather than what I’m asking about. But in this election year in the United States, it’s interesting to see some early involvement, with political titles all over the place.
Writing group applicants, on the other hand, are reading fiction; but it’s a skewed sample since they’re interviewing to be part of a group that does fiction and poetry.
I’ve seen a few Kindles, Amazon’s ebook reader, and people seem to be managing with them even outdoors, so the screen resolution and lighting must be superb. Sony Reader, an earlier model, is absent; but there are still few enough ebook readers around to make that observation somewhat moot. I like seeing the ebook readers: unlike many of my colleagues, I don’t think that the sky is falling on the book publishing industry, and I believe that the future is filled with opportunities for people to continue reading: and that’s what matters. How they’ll do it is a matter for the technocrats; all I care about is that we all continue to read, that authors continue to write, and that the world may always, to borrow a phrase from my own book, fly away on its bountiful imagination.
РJeannette C̩zanne
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Words, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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Lasagna garden update
July 1, 2008 | 8:47 pm
7/1/08
“Lush” is a good word to describe my lasagna garden. Everything is growing so vigorously that I need to rethink the spacing I used for each plant. This was drawn from Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening” method, which for years I’ve used as a guideline regardless of what type of garden I assemble. The system worked fine until this lasagna garden, now growing out of its britches!
As well, I inadequately planned for mature height of the vegetables, so some are becoming shaded out by others. Oh well, another year of live and learn!
Meanwhile, I’ve already harvested many salads worth of lettuce, and am currently plucking snow peas. Half the broccoli plants are already forming heads. Tomatoes are bushy and have started setting fruit. Celery is burgeoning. Beans, in three different waves, have sprouted faster than ever before, and are doing better than their bretheren planted in different gardens around the yard. Pepper plants are small, but I haven’t grown this variety before so the size could be normal. One is being overwhelmed by a Jerusalem artichoke planted too close.
The only disappointment is carrots, which are always a disappointment. They take so long to germinate that I tend to give up on them and plant something else in the space. If I just turn away and forget about them, they usually produce a crop I can enjoy deep into autumn. This year, those in the lasagna garden are doing better than the ones in a container set on the deck.
Based on these results, I recommend lasagna gardening to anyone!
P.S.: Remember those hay bale tomatoes discussed last week? They’re still scrawny and weak-colored, but they have formed as many baby tomatoes as the lasagna garden plants, both ahead of their equivalents in the Topsy Turvy planter and indoors. Go figure!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, spring — Carolyn Haley
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It’s How You Play The Game
June 25, 2008 | 12:27 pm
Once a week or so I head over to the forums page of geocaching.com to see what people are talking about, join in a conversation or two, that sort of thing. Last week I responded to a geocacher who was expressing frustration that people weren’t doing his new cache “correctly,” and frankly, I had to laugh.
In fact, that very frustration is one of the themes in my book, Open Your Heart with Geocaching: you cannot control what others do. This particular geocacher has a challenge/response component to his cache — in other words, cachers need to answer a question in order to log the find. Some enterprising souls decided that they don’t want to answer the question, found the cache through alternate means, and logged it. The cache-hider, perplexed, asked others on the forum what he should do. Delete the “illegal” logs?
I feel for him, truly I do. As anyone who has read my book knows, I, too, am a bit of a control freak. I, too, have a challenge/response cache, though I’ve been fortunate in that folks doing it have been a fairly self-selected bunch and don’t seem to mind.
But the reality is that you can never control how others play the game. You can never tell them that this is “the” way to do it. For some people, that’s the challenge: outfox the cache-hider! As my spouse often says, “it will end in tears.”
It’s not a bad life-lesson. We’d probably all feel a lot less frustrated if we ever accepted that the only people whose actions and behaviors we can control are … ourselves. I cannot make other people behave the way I want them to (and, believe me, I’ve tried!), and that will surely end in tears, one way or another. What I can control is myself: how I behave, how I react and respond to others’ behavior.
Playing the game — whether geocaching or life — involves a lot of give-and-take. We can lament when others appear to do nothing but take … but perhaps we can balance that karmically, too, with an overabundance of giving!
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Geocaching
Posted by: Geocaching, geocaching books, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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Hay bale basics
June 23, 2008 | 9:07 pm
June 24, 2008
This year I’m repeating last year’s experiment: growing tomatoes in hay bales.
Those of you who’ve read the book will recognize this project. For those who haven’t, the idea is that as the hay bale decays, it will feed the plant. It’s a self-contained compost parcel. All you have to do is water. Last year I inserted drip cones into the bales so water went directly to the roots rather than ran off the top of the tightly packed surface. It worked so well, I repeated the setup this year.
Last year, I planted two tomatoes, two zucchinis, and two peppers in three haybales, and got one humongous zucchini plant and one extravagant tomato plant, both of which bore lots of fruit. The zucchini did well right away, but the tomato took a while to settle before taking off. The other plants languished. The hay bales were only half rotted when I tore down the garden in the fall.
This year, I planted just two tomatoes, each in its own bale. They’ve been struggling since day one; now are noticeably yellow, suggesting malnutrition, though they have grown several inches and produced flowers.
It’s a head-scratcher. What’s so different between last year and this?
First, I got the hay bales from different people. I don’t know what kind of hay it was/is, but this year’s bales are looser, seemingly fresher. So perhaps last year’s had started decarying before I got them.
Second, hay bales are actually compressed stacks of sheaves, giving a directional component. Last year, I had to carve holes against the grain to insert my plants; this year, I went with the grain, so the sheaves separated without a fight. This probably changes water retention, and creates a different challenge for the plants’ root systems.
Third, we haven’t had as much rain this year, and last year’s bales sat out in it, plant-less, for several soggy weeks. Another reason to suspect better-rotted bales to start.
This year, not sure what to do about my struggling tomatoes, I worked some pelletized plant food into the bale at the base of the plants then lightly mulched the area. Tomorrow I’ll probably cut off the lower, most severely yellowed leaves. Then I’ll wait. Not much choice, for there’s no book out there devoted to hay bale gardening, nor an experienced guru in the neighborhood. The Internet contains lots of information, but I found it contradictory when I researched the subject in the first place, so tuned it out.
The problem seems obvious: The hay isn’t rotting fast enough to feed the plants adequately. Next year I’ll try to get the bales earlier, or else give the plants a better start by making a bigger hole in the bale and jamming it with soil and compost so the plants have something to draw from during the early phase. Or take some of that Internet advice and soak it with a hose first.
All this negates the original appeal of the system, which was elegant simplicity. I might as well put the plants in a regular garden if the hay bales are just going to serve as large, messy containers!
I’ll let you know how it comes out at the end of the summer.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, Learning something new, Difficulty, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation — Carolyn Haley
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Changing the World One Book at a Time: Conference Information
June 18, 2008 | 11:00 am
This notice comes to me from my colleague Charles Patterson, author of a startling and well-worth-reading book called Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust:
Want to Change the World? The San Francisco Writing for Change Conference Can Help!
Gay Hendricks, coauthor of You’ve Got to Read this Book!, will be a keynoter at the Second San Francisco Writing for Change Conference, Saturday and Sunday, August l6 & l7 at the Hotel Kabuki.
The SFW4CC is the first conference devoted to nonfiction writing about any kind of change, from the personal to the planetary, including the environment, politics, health, culture, and spirituality.
The theme of the conference this year is “Changing the World One Book at a Time.”
New and published writers will be able to learn from bestselling authors, editors, and agents, and get feedback on their work.
Registration is a mere $395, including meals.
For information and registration, visit www.SFWritingforChange.org.
Quite up the Open Your Heart alley, I’d say, and you may see some of our west-coast DreamTime authors there. In any case, consider going — because who can afford to not think about changing the world?
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Something completely different, Opening the heart, Being Peace — jcezanne
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Payback
June 17, 2008 | 3:12 pm
For me, this week is what gardens are all about.
Everywhere the eye falls, beauty and burgeoning life! And reward for one’s effort. Seeds I planted have sprouted. Seedlings I transplanted are blooming in steady succession. Ditto wildflowers. All around, a zillion shades of green, lush as a rainforest. Skies constantly changing, often a heartbreaking blue with dramatic cumulus clouds — which might build up into towers that erupt into showers or thunderstorms. The constantly changing weather usually provides a breeze that keeps the bugs away, but plenty of them to feed the birds and butterflies. Lots of color among those flying critters, too.
All the seasonal creatures are here, busily reproducing. Some birds are already on their second round. The early flowers and shrubs have gone to seed or started setting fruit, while the midsummer flowers are nearing their peak. The late summer flowers (and vegetables) are one to three feet tall and budding.
Right now my yard is abloom with peonies, iris, columbine, some variety of primrose I’ve never identified, a variety of wild sunflower I’ve never identified, blackberries, Deptford pinks, daisy fleabane, yellow and orange hawkweeds, early daylilies, Johnny-jump-ups, creeping phlox (fading), creeping thyme (opening), wild strawberries (fruiting), forget-me-nots, rugosa roses — and, in the pots, Profusion zinnias, Wave petunias, marigolds, celosia, and impatiens.
The week preceding and following the solstice features lupines. I never saw them until in my 30s, when I traveled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire about this time of year. We motored passed a south-facing slope that was solid purple — so dramatic, we turned around and went back, got out, and stared. A field guide informed me they were wild lupines, which I now see on other sunny slopes in the higher elevations of my adopted home, Vermont. In southern New England, they only appear as garden cultivars, in lovely candy colors but none quite the same royal purple as the native variety. Pinks and lavendars and whites came with my yard but all attempts to plant wild lupines have come to naught (and the cultivars are persnickety, too). Happily, the altitude is just right for neighboring sunny slopes to grow lupines profusely. They last 1-2 weeks, and I look forward to them all year.
As Rodgers & Hammerstein say in their musical, Carousel, “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over”!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardns
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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Summer Reading List
June 10, 2008 | 8:02 pm
It’s officially summer. No, we haven’t yet passed the solstice, but we’ve broken 90 degrees even here on “cool” Cape Cod, so that makes it summer in my book.
And, speaking of books, summer brings … summer reading!
What are you reading this summer? Something light and filled with fluff? Or are you buckling down to that “important” book you’ve had on your TBR (to be read) pile for months and months? I’d love to hear your recommendations for a great read, be it to take to the beach or just to relax with at the end of a hot day!
In the meantime, here are mine:
- Strapless by Deborah Davis: the subtitle is “John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X.” The author explores the scandal that surrounded the artist and Virginie Amelie Gautreau, the “it” girl of the early 1880s Belle Epoque Paris, through the portrait that he did of her — and explores, also, the concepts of beauty, infatuation, and conformity. This is a nonfiction account that reads like a novel and manages to be both fun and profound.
- Creating a Life Worth Living by Carol Lloyd. Those of us who live for our art, whatever that may be, often chafe at the need to “make a living” in a way that pulls us away from that art — and may well pull us apart in the process. Lloyd gives us a crash course in career survival by encouraging us to articulate our dreams and then invent the means to support them.
- Travel That Can Change Your Life by Jeffrey Kottler. It’s not about the destination in this book, but rather about how you can make every trip the best trip of your life. The author, a psychologist, urges the reader to “discover how you can make the most of your vacation, business trip, or getaway by seizing the moment to create a profound personal transformation.”
- The Remains of an Altar by Phil Rickman. Anyone who has read by book knows how much I adore and admire this author, and this latest paperback addition to his Merrily Watkins series does not disappoint. Rickman’s ability to give the place in which his novels are situated equal billing as characters in the stories is legend, and here the Melverns play a prominent role. If you haven’t read any of his books, you may want to start with earlier ones, though that’s not necessary: one of the finest novels you’ll read this summer!
- All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot. I recently revisited this old series of books about a Yorkshire country vet and found it as wonderful as it was when I first read it years ago. Amusing, hilarious, tragic, and filled with anecdotes that stay with the reader long after the book is closed: check out your local used-book shop for this one and rejoice that you don’t need to put your arm into a cow to make a living!
So there it is: my summer list. What’s on yours?
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Reading
Posted by: reading, reading books, Reading toolkit, Words, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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This year’s experiments
| 12:52 pm
As mentioned in previous entries, my lasagna garden is a big experiment. Each year I do several experiments, and probably will continue until I hit a combination that gives the vegetable and floral results I want with minimal expense and labor. Therefore, expect to see me experimenting for a long time! : )
This year, along with the lasagna garden, I’m continuing last year’s experiments with tomatoes in hay bales and a Topsy-Turvey planter, to see if those successes repeat. If so, I will expand next year. I am also trying an indoor experiment: a tomato and red bell pepper indoors.
The south end of my house is mostly windows. While this makes for a drafty living room during the winter, it also provides a basic greenhouse. We are midway through long-term home renovations, and a standing question is whether to include a greenhouse in the plan — indoors, outdoors, or half-and-half. Our growing season is so short that some kind of season extender is needed.
But a true greenhouse and three-season or year-round gardening introduces complexities and expenses that one does not take lightly. Hence, a simple experiment to see if the tropical vegetables I favor do better indoors or out. I’m tired of playing the protect-from-frost game and still losing half my crop!
The nursery owners I purchased the tomato and pepper from were kind enough to mention that these need to be pollinated if grown indoors. Hmm. That’s something I never thought about, because outdoors, the birds, bees, other bugs, and the wind do the job so I’ve never had to consider it. The tomato seller advised me to lightly brush the flowers with a Q-tip, about 10:00 each morning; the pepper seller said I needed two plants so they would pollinate each other. Not sure how that works without the birds and the bees.
I’m only a week or so into this, too early for the plants to flower — though they have grown many inches in their pots, more than their outdoor equivalents. I started with fresh potting soil, using the Miracle Gro brand which claims to be impregnated with plant food that will last for three months.
After watering the transplants lightly for a few days until their roots set, I installed the drip-watering cones I used successfully last year in pots and hay bales, and now will water the tomato and peppers once or twice a week by inserting a full liter-sized soda bottle into the cone and letting it drip below the soil into the roots.
Other than that, watch and wait, watch and wait . . .
. . . the true test of hope and faith that challenges gardeners around the world each year.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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GeoWoodstock
June 5, 2008 | 8:11 am
Well, yet another year has come and gone and I didn’t go to GeoWoodstock VI, held last month in California. As I said last year, “next year!” Hmm.
Here’s what it’s about:
GeoWoodstock is an annual get-together for geocachers from all over the world. In five short years GeoWoodstock has become the world’s largest geocaching-related event. It is a relaxed, friendly, and free gathering. Typical activities at past GeoWoodstock events have included meeting people, prize giveaways, geocoin sales and trading, travel bug swaps, and of course, caching like crazy. There have been large and small cache runs, and records have been made for the most caches found in a 24-hour period.
It’s not exactly Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, but it’s supposed to be a lot of fun, and events such as this one are terrific for bringing together what is often a disparate community practicing a largely solitary activity. If you’re considering geocaching, consider attending an event or two — even GeoWoodstock. Because while it’s wonderful to be alone on the trail, it’s a good idea to balance that with the reasons we become community.
Jeannette Cézanne
Open Your Heart with Geocaching
Posted by: Geocaching, Opening the heart — jcezanne
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Lasagna garden underway
June 3, 2008 | 7:46 am
June 3, 2008
In this corner of the world, the rule of thumb is: Don’t plant before Memorial Day.
This year, that holiday came a little early, and it happens I was out of town so was unable to plant. Good thing, for we had frost three mornings of the following week!
But then summer erupted. The last weekend of May was a marathon of outdoor labor, resulting in completed yardwork projects and a fully installed vegetable garden and flower planters.
Because I grow only enough food to feed two people during the season (vs. canning and preserving a big harvest — maybe someday!), my garden is small. In previous years, it comprised several plots scattered around the property, each with different soil and light conditions. This year I consolidated into one big experiment: The lasagna garden (see blog entry of 4/22, or various discussions of this in “Open Your Heart with Gardens”).
Our only location that gets full sun is atop a rise to the north side of the house, adjoining a field. That hillock is composed entirely of sand, which is why a lasagna garden made sense. It proved to be as easy to plant as the book said: Just pull aside the top surface, insert plant, re-cover, water. I packed it with tomatoes, red bell peppers, snow peas, carrots, lettuce, celery, green beans, and broccoli, then inserted marigolds and some herbs for companion planting and deer deterrent.
Although we live in the country, we get few deer in the yard. I bought deer fencing just in case, but am hoping to avoid installing it. I read somewhere that the strong scent of marigolds either masks the scent of other plants, or repels deer altogether. We’ll see. Different people testify to different results. It only takes one, though, to clear out a garden bed, so if you hear a loud scream through cyberspace some morning, you’ll know what I woke up to!
In the meantime, the peas I planted in April are already climbing their little trellis, and the carrot and lettuce seeds I put in a few weeks later have sprouted. Sparsely, though, owing to the weather, so I will start another set. Everything else was transplants.
Now we wait.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart — Carolyn Haley
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