We started our backyard gardening with one raised bed a few years ago, and last year we added a second. My general approach to gardening is beneficent neglect. I prune and water and weed when I wander past, but I don’t do much other than that. You might expect that to be a formula for pretty pathetic yields, but it works surprisingly well for us.
That said, the garden was looking pretty puny when we left for a weeklong vacation at the end of June. Our housesitters were going to water it daily, but I wasn’t expecting much from it. Then we got home and it was all green and thriving, and it was because the housesitters had installed an irrigation system in our absense. I highly recommend inviting a professional landscape designer to vacation at your house while you’re out of town.
The irrigation system kept the garden alive during our long, hot, dry July. Our region has resumed its deciduous rainforest climate over the last few weeks, and I’m beginning to worry that the plants are going to take over the entire yard.
In the Garden
We didn’t plant lettuce this year, but a volunteer plant from last year popped up anyway. It went to seed, and I decided to see just how large it would get. The answer so far is: very, very large. It has its own quadrant of the garden bed.
I hadn’t planned to plant as many tomatoes as we have in past years, because none of us likes tomatoes. So naturally our tomato plants are always prolific producers. Our neighbor Farmer Ted was giving away tons and tons of tomato starters, though, so we took six of them. They did nothing at all for weeks and weeks, and then suddenly they were ginormous. I’ve had to prune a couple of them because they keep escaping their cages and flopping over onto the pepper plants. Speaking of which: I am in love with the tiny bell peppers we’ve been growing, Pete and I canned some delicious spicy banana peppers, and something keeps eating our jalapeños before they have a chance to grow.
I tried to grow yellow squash in a bucket last year, and it didn’t work at all. This year we put the squash in the garden bed instead, and they were doing great until they started getting hit by pickle worms. I think the eggplant might be suffering from being so close to the zucchini, though. The leaves are blocking a lot of sunlight. We’ll space things out a little more next year.
The cucumber is in the same bed as the squash. Apparently cucumbers grow ninja-style, because some days I go out there and find a full-size cuke where there was only a blossom a day earlier. The cucumbers were doing wonderfully until the pickle worm found them. Now about 50 percent of them have holes in them. At least we got to make a few pickles before the plant was attacked.
I heard a lot of positive reviews of Kristin Hannah’s “The Nightingale,” so I put it on hold at the library and then forgot about it because a ton of other people had also put it on hold and it took a long time for me to get it. It was worth the wait, though. It’s set in World War II, and it focuses on the women left behind when the guys head off to fight. I cried.
I picked up “Niceville” by Carsten Stroud because Stephen King said it would be a good summer read. I disagree with Mr. King on this one. It’s the first of a supernatural/crime trilogy. It didn’t capture my interest enough to make me want to read the rest of the trilogy.
I thought “The Art of Racing in the Rain” by Garth Stein would make me cry, but it did not. The book’s narrator is a dog. It’s somewhat charming.
I’ve been hearing about how good Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” is since it came out in 2010. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale, which is right up my alley. But it features crazy horror-beasts, which I try to avoid. I finally picked it up, though, and it is gripping. I was eager to read the rest of the story, so I found a copy of…
“The Twelve,” also by Justin Cronin, and it was a disappointment after “The Passage.” I’m still going to read the last book, though, since I’ve come this far already. 
Sometimes I can’t find anything available to borrow from the library via the Kindle so I just grab something and hope for the best. It turned out great in the case of Hugh Howey’s “Wool.” It’s a broken-Utopia / post-apocalypse story that was originally written as a series of novellas called “Silo.” It’s an inventive take on the genre. 
My dad’s girlfriend frequently picks up random books at yard sales, so I find something different there most summers. “The Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean Auel has been sitting there for a few years now, and I finally decided to give it a try. It was weird and great, and the sequel is on my library wait list.
“The Girls” by Emma Cline is another one for which I’ve read a lot of glowing reviews, and it is very well-crafted. It’s also very dark, and I didn’t much enjoy it.
Judy Blume’s “In the Unlikely Event” was another desperation pick from the library’s eBook selection, and I didn’t love it. I didn’t find the characters all that relatable, for one thing, but mostly it was because it read very much like a Judy Blume book that just had some adult language tossed in. That doesn’t seem like it would be a bad thing, necessarily, because Judy Blume is very good at what she does, but it didn’t work for me. 
I can’t remember where I heard about “Circling the Sun” by Paula McLain, but I’d like to thank whomever told me about it because I loved it. It’s a fictionalized biography of Beryl Markham, who out-interestings the World’s Most Interesting Man by a long shot. She grew up in Kenya — you’ll recognize some of the other folks in the book if you’ve read or seen “Out of Africa” — where she trained racehorses and was one of the first bush pilots, and she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Markham wrote her own biography (“West with the Night”), and I’m looking forward to reading it as soon as it’s my turn on the library’s wait list.