The Garden Patch

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I've been thinking that my life lately has become a bit like a patchwork quilt. I've just been taking the pieces as they come and stitching them together one by one. Sometimes the pieces don't fit too well and most times my stitches are not fine. But I hope that it is turning into something pretty that gives me warmth and that when I look back, I can remember how the pieces came to me.


I suppose I'm thinking about quilts, because one of Grammy's quilts has come back home to us. After Pat Brown read Robert's article in the Wilson County News about his grandfather, she decided to give the quilt that Grammy made for her mother and fellow church member, Julia Brown, to us. It has come home to the place where it was made. Thanks, Pat!

I remember listening to a Bobbie Gentry album called "Patchwork" when I was a teenager. I loved many of the songs, especially, "Benjamin" and "Jeremiah." I got the album out the other day. It was still wrapped in the plastic it came in. There was an insert in the album that had the words to the songs. I don't think I had ever opened it up, but it had all these pretty images relating to the songs on the album. 

What a good surprise!

The patches of my life now include watching "The Bee and the Clover" go up. That's the name I've given to our barndorminium. It comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson's—

To make a prairie it takes a clover

and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do

If bees are few.

I'm also watching the prairie grow up. Right now it's covered in yellow—common sunflowers, Maximillian sunflowers, yellow asters, and camphor weed. Another patch I'm stitching together involves learning the history of the place where I am now living, Floresville, Texas. I am cataloging the collection at the Sutherland Springs Historical Museum and recording the novel bits I find in a blog called Cabinets of Curiosities. This week I'm trying to conserve a trunk full of old dresses from the 1910s and 1920s that have just been rediscovered. I'm still working with Philip Kelley to patch together the sometimes cryptic meanings of the Latin and Greek inscriptions in the correspondence of Elizabeth and Robert Browning. I still have things to write about Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's indebtedness to Euripides. But those pieces are not finding a place in my scrap basket just now. I am thinking about self-publishing a book of poems I wrote called "Slow Walking Texas" and a sequel called "Slow Walking the Creech Prairie."Hopefully, the latter can be a tool for those who come to stay at "The Bee and the Clover."

But back to the garden patch—

My daughter-in-law, Kat Creech, and I made a trade last weekend. I took her sixty pots of prairie grass for her backyard pocket prairie and she gave me all the seedlings that she had started, but didn't have room for. Here they are.

 

Almost seventy pepper plants

and sixty tomato plants.

I not sure where they will all fit, but we'll find a spot, and, if they make before frost, we should have salsa for the whole county.

We also bought a few herbs, so I can finally make the herb garden that I have been intending for a while. 

The queen butterflies have found a favorite place at the Blue Mist plant along the fence of the herb garden.

 In the big garden the sweet potatoes are blooming.

 A new black crowder pea plant is almost ready to pick. 

We've already picked gallons from the peas we planted earlier.

The okra looks like it is about to bloom.

The broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and  cauliflower that I bought at HEB are doing well.


There are all kinds of eggplants ready to pick. I think I need some new recipes.

The new tomato plants have tomatoes. We'll be picking them before long.

There are a few jalapenos. Either the deer or the grasshoppers love to nibble on the leaves.

And I found this little tiny watermelon that planted itself showing up its little stripes.

I think it's stitching together nicely.



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