gardening

Independence Day Stories

To help staff celebrate Independence Day this week, the New Yorker is publishing a double issue, the July 8 & 15 2024 issue. I discovered this while I was updating my New Yorker fiction page. The page here is a growing index of the New Yorker short stories published each week. I try to extend the table one week forward and one week back every week. Right now, it goes from 2019-2024.

When I saw that it was a double issue, I was elated briefly, expecting that it would make it an easy two weeks to read all of the stories. Then I looked at the issue’s landing page and found that there are four stories for the issue–the first quadruple story issue in my index.

One of the stories is an unpublished story by E. L. Doctorow. His biographer said that the story “The Drummer Boy on Independence Day” was written in the 1950s but never published. The other three stories are “Kaho” written by Haruki Murakami, “Opening Theory” by Sally Rooney and “The Hadal Zone” by Annie Proulx.

The Hadal Zone is introduced with the blurb “Arwen’s last thought before sleep is that he is in a twisting cyclonic fall down through the ocean trench to become a compressed speck of matter. It feels good.” That’s a curious topic because, coincidentally, Randall Munroe published a video this month “What if you drained the oceans?” answering the question of what would happen if you would put a drain at the bottom of Challenger Deep. Munroe is known for the nerdy xkcd.com and has published several books including a series themed “What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions” that was the inspiration for the video)

brown rabbit photographed in lawn

My “What if” question today is what if I would get a trap and capture the rabbit terrorizing my garden. I’ve got several tomato cages surrounded by fencing devoted to protecting the pepper plants. I planted some zinnia flowers and the rabbit really likes those too. I put a fence around some of them in the hope that a few will recover enough to produce flowers.

It is a pretty bold rabbit. Yesterday I was weeding in the evening, and it came out and watched me. …presumably waiting to find something to eat. I’m more vulnerable to him this year because I have more plants that are rabbit friendly. Peppers are definitely rabbit food. I knew that from last year but was wishful that they would be spared this year. Zinnias are rabbit food and last year’s sunflowers were gone before they got started. I’m glad tomatoes, zucchini and other squash vines are all crossed off in the rabbit diet guide.

I’m glad that I don’t have groundhogs. A cousin who lives in Pennsylvania has a group of groundhogs that have decimated her garden. They have a broader palate than a rabbit. My sister’s garden nemesis is crows which like to play and pull out all of the seedlings. Not to eat them, just to be irritating.

a pepper plant protected by a wire fence

This is one of the plants from a couple weeks ago. I haven’t had any rabbit damage to the peppers now that they’ve got the fence around them. I was concerned that the rabbit might try to dig under the screen, but it’s not that motivated. There are a couple of plants that the rabbit didn’t see because they were hidden in the weeds. Now that they’re more visible, they’re more vulnerable to attack.

The New Yorker is a really solid magazine. I enjoy it every week. One of my projects last year was to make a book containing the comics organized by the artist’s name. It was fun making that. It could be a companion to the book the “New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons”

Some artists are prolific contributors to the New Yorker, adding a comic every two or three issues. There are other artists who only publish one or two comics. It’s been a fun project to learn how to recognize the artists without needing to see the signature. Edward Koren, Roz Chast, William Haefeli, Sarah Akinterinwa, Liana Finck, P.C. Vey, Frank Cotham and Lars Kenseth all have unique styles. There are many other artists with their own characteristic styles that I haven’t listed.

I would like to be skilled enough as an artist to make a mashup of a couple of these artists’ styles (without the cheat of using an A.I. engine to help.)

Landscaping Success Story

For several years I’ve known that my lilac bush has had some shrubs hiding within it. If I needed proof, in September, I saw a Rose of Sharon blossoming in the middle of it.

Rose of Sharon hiding in lilac bush

I knew there were also some maples and a couple other bushes intertwined. I had despaired of getting rid of them because they were so similar to the lilac branches and hard to identify.

However, I had a lucky break when I went out to do some other landscaping.

Most of the leaves of the lilac were gone but the other bushes still had their leaves. That let me pick out the branches to get rid of without damaging the lilac.

Lilac bush after other shrubs removed

All of the green amidst the branches were weed shrubs that I wanted to get rid of.

It didn’t take too long to clip off all of the unwanted branches. I wasn’t able to get rid of them permanently. They’re pretty well established with big roots. However, I consider it a win to be able to cut them back as much as I did. I wasn’t expecting that.

Lilac bush after other shrubs removed.
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This is what the lilac bush looked like after I was done.

It was a success that I wasn’t expecting.

My original goal for the exercise was to clip off all of the dead stems from my peonies which I was able to do in a separate part of the yard.

In the middle of the peonies is a sumac bush that I’m trying to discourage. I didn’t see it this week. I cut it back a lot not long before the weather turned cold, so it might not be able to grow back until spring.

All through the summer, my landscaping and garden would have different shrubs starting to grow. I would dig down around their roots as far as I could and then pull them up. I think I was successful at killing most of those before they got too big.

Gardening philosophy

My mom suggests that giving garden plants a lot of water in the early summer keep them from developing a sturdy root system and that will hurt the plants later in the year.

My philosophy is that by watering them more, they are strengthened and grow bigger faster so that they are more productive in the harvest season. My plants will be lusher and have more foliage to grow produce with.

The trade-off is that I may need to continue watering more, but the resulting plants will be more robust and more productive

I have experience with that for several years with tomatoes. I go out and water them almost every day unless it had just rained. I joke that I go out to water them when the forecast is uncertain to help make sure it rains.

My tomatoes last year were so much more successful than what other people had reported. That is true again this year. Now my pepper plants are growing strong as well. I have a more and bigger bell peppers than in the past. This year’s jalapenos are also very successful.

While it isn’t proof that watering them is a win, the extra effort stemming from my watering philosophy seems reliable: it yields more produce.