The garden is all planted! All the seeds are sown, and, except for a few indoor starts that are still a little small, everything has been planted out. James and I are tuckered out. But it’s the satisfied sort of tuckered out that comes after you’ve done work you love.

In an attempt to trick the squirrels who love to dig in freshly turned beds, we prepped the remaining beds Saturday but didn’t plant anything. And then it rained. Before the rain we noticed the squirrels had dug in a few places. Sunday we planted the beds. Our plan kind of worked! We lost one sunflower, two black-eyed peas were dug up but not eaten, and maybe a zucchini seed was dug up, but I can’t tell for sure. I will wait until they all begin sprouting before deciding to push another seed into the ground.

The seeds we direct sowed Sunday:

• Dark Green Zucchini (from the library seed exchange)
• Goldini Zucchini (say it out loud a few times and I challenge you not to giggle)
• Holstein Black-eyed Peas (saved)
• California Black-eyed Peas (from the library seed exchange)
• Go Big Okra (also from the library)
• Brown Resilient Bean (saved)
• Flax (for fiber and seed)
• State Fair Zinnia (saved) and Peppermint Stick Zinnia
• Scarlet Runner Bean (saved)

We transplanted:

• Catarina Pepper (a chili pepper)
• Cayenne Pepper
• Paprika Pepper
• Banana Pepper
• Genovese Basil
• Sacred Basil
• Naked Pumpkin (a pepita pumpkin)
• Cabbage
• Kale
• Hopi Black Dye and Arikara Sunflowers
• Tithonia
• Dyers Chamomile
• Dyers Coreposis
• Catmint

And of course as we are sowing and planting, I’m checking in with everything that is already planted and growing. The weather has been cool with plenty of rain and the peas are growing by leaps and bounds. They are so happy! The tiny lettuces are happy too. Well, everything is happy, including me!

The beans we planted last weekend are beginning to come up. No lima beans yet though. The squirrels keep digging in that bed and I keep pushing in more beans. So there will either end up being few to no limas, or a thick patch of them. The squirrels have also dug up three of the five butternut squashes and I have pushed extra seeds into the soil. Like the lima beans, I will end up with only a couple squashes or more than I bargained for. All the other winter squashes the squirrels have left alone. I wonder what it is about the butternuts? I noticed there are only two of the five Arachne muskmelon plants left, but the remaining two look like they will be left alone. And sadly, the perennial zinnia that a squirrel had dug up and I replanted, has not made it. Oh well.

Some of the potato plants that have already been hilled once, got some additional hilling and one of them already has flowers on it. Other potatoes received just a little bit of hill. Some of them have decided to come up outside the row they were planted in. As we were working on the potatoes, James and I talked about how they seem like a lot of work for not much return. We never get pounds and pounds of spuds like I see in garden articles or even other garden blogs. I’ve tried growing them in raised beds, barrels, hilling with straw, and digging and planting them in trenches and then hilling them with leaves, or compost, or straw. I’ve tried a few different varieties of yellow potatoes and none of them ever produce much, if anything. I’ve tried red potatoes and those were a bust. The only potatoes that ever produce are Adirondack blue and it’s never been enough that the undertaking seemed worthwhile. All that to say, if the potato patch this year doesn’t perform a miracle, we won’t be planting potatoes next year.

As we’ve been planting the veggie beds, we’ve been digging and cutting down sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes). We have a large patch at the back of the garden, and for years they have been fairly well behaved. They sprout up in the garden path and we dig them out and that’s that. But this year they have decided to make a full fledged assault, and have managed to march out and sprout up as far as ten feet from their bed. I feel bad cutting them down, but they are aiming to takeover and I cannot give an inch. It is not the right time of year for them to be tasty for people, but the chickens like them well enough, so we chop the roots up a bit and let the girls enjoy a treat.

The prairie rose in the chicken garden is also aiming for world domination. The rose is about knee high and spreads underground. The rose is native to, well, prairies, and produces abundant hips that I can never figure out the right time to pick. The rose is not fussy and extremely hardy when it comes to weather and being stepped on by accident. The flowers are a pretty pink single bloom that the bees love. For a long time the chickens managed to keep the runners that sprouted up randomly in check. But, no more. There are rose shoots coming up all over the chicken garden and even in cracks in the alley pavement outside the garden fence. The rose is now doing battle with the rampant orange day lilies along the alley fence line and it’s a toss up who will win.

Meanwhile, Marlon, the new peach tree, seems to have settled in well because there are peaches the size of my thumbnail! I am already imagining biting into a fresh-picked juicy peach. But the tree is a spindly barely six-foot tall baby and so much can happen between now and August. Oh goodness, if the fruit hangs on, I will be swaddling the tree in netting to keep birds and squirrels away.

You may recall I mentioned recently the mystery bird call for which I downloaded the Merlin Bird ID app to try and identify? I hadn’t heard the bird nearby in weeks. Well, Sunday we heard the trilling call! I grabbed my phone, opened the app and held it out, hoping a chicken wouldn’t squawk. And guess what? Merlin heard it and told me the call belongs to a red-bellied woodpecker! I have since verified that Merlin is correct. I am thrilled to finally have a name to put with the call. I still haven’t seen the bird, but now I know who to look for, perhaps I will be able to spot them too. I still don’t completely trust Merlin since it identified my chicken as a northern cardinal, but the app isn’t all bad after all. One just needs to later corroborate the result with reliable bird sites on the internet.

But the internet is increasingly unreliable. Or at least Google is. Have you heard about the AI search results people have gotten? Someone asked how to make a pizza and Google AI suggested adding glue to help keep the cheese from sliding off. I also saw that someone had asked about cures for depression and along with medication and therapy, the AI suggested jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It’s one thing to laugh about glue on pizza, it’s something else entirely for Google AI to suggest jumping off a bridge to someone suffering from depression. How any of this is remotely acceptable, I don’t understand.

Does the Merlin app use AI? I don’t know. But now that I have my red-bellied woodpecker identified, I have deleted the app from my phone. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my information to come from reliable and verifiable sources created by real people.

Reading

• Book: The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. Al-Essa is a bestselling Kuwaiti author and founder of Takween, a bookshop and publisher. The Book Censor’s Library takes place in an unnamed country in an unnamed time in which the regime has outlawed imagination and has educated it out of the population. The Book Censor is new at his job and receives only books that are nonthreatening and unimaginative to read and approve. But one day he takes on reading Zorba the Greek and his life is changed. He turns into a reader and begins taking banned books home. He is recruited by a shadowy group that saves books and is trained to be the next Guardian of the Library. This is a wonderfully bookish book with echoes and references to 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and all sorts of other books. It is a celebration of reading and the imagination. But while it ticks all the book nerd boxes, it is not a happy story.
• Article: Animals self-medicate with plants—behavior people have observed and emulated for millennia. You may have seen the recent news about scientists observing a wild Sumatran orangutan using a plant to self-medicate a wound received in a fight with another male orangutan. It made the news because the scientists claimed it was “the first systematically documented case of active wound treatment by a wild animal.” But the ancient Greeks have written about animals self-medicating as have the ancient Egyptians, and it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to most indigenous peoples, or most people who have any sort of relationship with animals. The fact that a modern day western scientist hasn’t officially observed it and written a peer reviewed paper about it until now, doesn’t make it a great discovery.
  Article: Not Your Childhood Library. A great story in the New Yorker about how public libraries have become more than a place for books, evolving to serve the unhomed and others in need of a social worker and assistance. The story is extra wonderful because it is about what is happening at the Central branch of the Hennepin County Library System located in downtown Minneapolis. Before I decided to go to library school almost twenty years ago, I volunteered at the information desk of this library. It was eye-opening then. It is admirable what they are doing at Central, but also, it is tragic that this job has fallen to libraries.
  Article: Four Ways to Reduce Your Digital Carbon Footprint and What Are the Most Powerful Climate Actions You Can Take? Yes, change needs to be systemic, but I also believe the system is made up of people and if enough people make changes, then the system will be forced to change or collapse so we can create something new. So if you want to know what you can change personally that will make the biggest impact, these articles are for you.

Quote

“Books could hear, bite, multiply, have sex. They had sinister protocols to take over the world, to colonize and conquer—word by word, line by line, poisoning the world with meaning.”

~Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor’s Library, page 10

Listening

• Podcast: Green Dreamer: Jessica J. Lee: The Entangled Histories of Human and Plant Migration. Lee is the author of the new book, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders and Belonging (on my TBR!). The conversation was super interesting about how humans have brought plants with them as they have moved around the world. Some plants have been stolen. Others, brought to new lands by colonizers, have themselves become problematic colonizers. The discussion ranged from what is invasive to how plants change their status from useful to weed and sometimes back to useful again.

Watching

• Movie: Dune, Part Two. The desert scenes are visually gorgeous, the sandworms are well done, and the story is told in a way that makes sense. The acting is also good. While violent, the movie does ask questions about colonization and who has the right to lead, and rule, the planet of Dune and the people indigenous to the planet. Given that there are a lot of Dune books, this movie ends, but doesn’t. I suspect there will be a third movie sometime.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

This is a holiday weekend in the U.S. and James made delicious pizza. But also, pinto bean-oat burgers with radish-carrot slaw, arugula from the garden, and garlic aioli. The pretzel buns I made for winter solstice were reprised. Of course there had to be a sweet treat too, and those were chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganache.