Peppers

A little research on the internet suggested to me that the best way to use up all the aji amarillo chiles would be to dry them.

A little more research on drying peppers offered two options. The first option is to dry them laid out in the sun. Well, in west Michigan in fall, that's not an option as most days are cloudy and many rainy. The other option is to string them.

So today I strung all the ripe peppers (there are many more coming!) and hung them in a west facing window over a heat vent for drying.

Walking to the Bitter End

In my travels for work, I've spied a quaint looking little coffee shop on West Fulton that I have always wanted to check out. A couple of coffee shop junkie friends of mine, Len and Joanne Baron, had told me that this is one of their favorite haunts. So with some time on my hands and an eagerness to spend the morning with my daughter, Abbey and I were off to explore, by foot and by stroller, by 9:15 this morning.

It was a grey day, but very warm for late September in west Michigan.

We left our house and headed down Sweet Street hill to Plainfield Avenue, and followed the Avenue south, passing lots of other pedestrians along the way. Saturday morning seems to bring out more walkers.

We hooked a right at Leonard Street and walked over to the east bank of the Grand River, where we turned south along an abandoned railroad track. At the south end of the track is Canal Street Park, a nice, linear park that follows the east bank of the river for almost a mile. When we got to the park, Abbey popped out of her stroller and walked along side of me.

Part way through the park we stopped at the "ground" that Abbey spied. Since the slides were all wet, and Abbey is a finicky kid, we didn't spend a lot of time there. But I did dry off one slide of her choice with my bandanna so that she could get in a little sliding and some climbing around on the play structure.

From there, Abbey continued walking by my side to Sixth Street, and across the historic Sixth Street Bridge. I was impressed that Abbey had walked a little more than a half mile straight on her short, little legs.

At the west end of the bridge, we came across an elderly couple from East Grand Rapids that were looking for the fish ladder. We invited them to join us, as we were on our way there. We followed the walking path along the west bank of the river south and stopped at the fish ladder along with dozens of other folks. While lots of salmon were trying to breach the dam, there were few in the ladder itself.

We continued following the walking path south along the west bank of the river past the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum and around the elevated walkway that gets a good glimpse of the "horsies" on the carousel inside the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

Once at Fulton Street, we headed due west for seven blocks to our destination, the Bitter End coffee house.

The coffee house certainly has character. The outside has an attractive facade, and the inside has wood panelled walls with lots of curiosities hung upon them. While the atmosphere was very nice, I wouldn't say the same about their product. My latte was stirred, flat and had mediocre taste, and the baked goods were severely Saran-wrapped, generic fare. Abbey's steamed milk lacked any froth.

Perhaps the brewed coffee is better, and maybe the espresso suffered from the lack of passion exhibited by the withdrawn, sleepy barista who prepared it. I'll give it another shot some other day before I write it off as "just another coffee shop."

The other curiosity was that more than half of the dozen or so tables were filled, each with one person (most male) clicking away on their laptops. Nobody talked to anyone else. It was almost like being in a library.

Abbey and I sat outside, and we had a nice little chat with a high school age girl who plays the flute.

After our coffee was gone, we buzzed back to the east on Fulton Street to the downtown GVSU campus. In the quiet courtyard, I let Abbey out of her stroller for some more walking. We enjoyed the fountains and colorful flowers in this protected area.

Abbey found some wire benches and asked what they were. I explained that they were for sitting, so she had to try one out.

Then it was back in the stroller, under US-131, and across the river on the blue pedestrian bridge. On the east side of the river, we stopped for a while to watch a crane lift girders up to the top of the new Marriott going up downtown.

Then we followed the pedestrian pathway on the east side of the river north behind the Amway Grand, DeVos Place and the post office. North of the post office we passed lots of people fishing and even a DNR Conservation Officer checking licenses and creels. One party had three salmon lying on the sidewalk. Abbey suddenly got a sad look on her face and said "They're not moving!" I offered up a quick explanation about how the people are catching the fish to take home to eat, and realized by the look in her eyes that I have a tree-hugging daughter who still has to come to terms that the fish she eats was once a living creature.

Just a little further north we came across something unique enough to take our minds off of the motionless fish. A man sat at a picnic table in Canal Street Park playing a penny whistle.

We stopped to listen for a while before he introduced himself to us. Dave Stuart O'Neil plays an assortment of Celtic instruments. He then pulled out a small, single-drone bagpipe and played Ode to Joy for Abbey. He wound up our little mini-concert by playing a song on a beautiful wooden whistle he said he uses mostly for weddings.

From there we rushed home--up the east bank of the river to Monroe Avenue, Monroe to Leonard Street, then up Taylor Avenue to Grove Street. Grove took us to Plainfield, which we followed back to our neighborhood, taking a detour up Hanover Street to Forest Avenue to Sweet.

Abbey was glad to be back home with her Mommy, and I was glad to prop up my feet after a six and a half mile urban hike.

Thursday Walk

Yesterday evening I called up my friend Eric Doyle to see if he wanted to go for a walk and a beer. The plan was to meet at 8:00pm at the corner of Sweet Street and Plainfield Avenue.

I walked down the hill, and not seeing Eric at Plainfield, proceeded on down another block to Coit Avenue where I found Eric walking south. The sun had set just before we met and dusk was in the sky. It was a cool night, but not cold. Perfect for walking.

We headed south on Coit to Plainfield where the old Creston Library stands. This quaint, triangular building is being renovated into a cafe by a well-known local restaurateur. We snooped around the construction site a bit, checking up on the progress.

From there, we walked down the wide sidewalks of busy Plainfield Avenue. After crossing Leonard Street, we looked for the shortcut that Belknap neighbors take to get to Plainfield. This shortcut is for pedestrians and brave cyclists only, as it is a steep, dirt social path worn into the grassy hill of Belknap Park just south of Coldbrook Street. The path climbs the steep, grassy hill and ducks through a thicket of trees near the top before emerging along side of ten tennis courts.

From there, we wound around the side of a well-maintained ball diamond. A night game was being played under the lights on the other diamond to the east.

On the southeast corner of the ball diamond we found another social path that heads southwest through the woods towards North Division Avenue, a path to be explored another time.

Once along back of the diamond, we climbed the steep northern face of Belknap Hill along "The X." The X is more rightfully known as EarthworK, a large-scale earthen sculpture constructed by artist Robert Morris in 1974. EarthworK was Morris’ first in the United States and is an environmental piece consisting of two asphalt walkways that cross on the hill.

At the top of the hill, we took in the view to the north and west. We walked another block to the small pocket park on Fairview Avenue. We looped west through the park to take in one of the City's best views to the west from Belknap Hill, and to inspect the decrepit historic stairs that used to connect the neighborhood to the factories below.

We continued south to the better set of stairs at Fairbanks Street. We descended the 400' hill, crossed North Division Avenue, and walked into the North Monroe neighborhood. North Monroe is full of older industrial buildings, some still being used for industry, others being used for offices or condos. The area has seen a great deal of reinvestment in the past few years.

We walked past the latest major reinvestment in the area, the Icon on Bond, so that we could check up on the construction. Five floors of this soon to be nine storey building are already framed in.

A block away we walked into the Cambridge House for a quick break. We were surprised at the lack of people in the bar on a Thursday night, traditionally a rather busy time.

We took a look at the beer list, but it was rather short and lackluster, so we opted for Irish whiskey. They have quite a nice selection at Cambridge. We both settled on Tullamore Dew Crock. Eric had his on two rocks and I took mine neat.

Cambridge provides a generous pour, so we stayed there for quite a while enjoying the whiskey.

Afterwards, we walked over to the Sixth Street Dam where the fishermen were out in full force. The kings and the coho are running hard right now, so you'll find people out there fishing for salmon all night this time of year.

Canal Street Park extends nearly a full mile north from the dam along the river. Upon reaching the northern end of the park, we followed an abandoned rail line another block along the river to Leonard Street.

We hooked east and deliberated whether it was time to go home or if we had time for a quick beer at Graydon's Crossing. My stomach won out and we stepped inside of this nice, new English-style pub on the south end of Plainfield Avenue near Leonard. Again, the place was rather devoid of customers.

I had a craving for their hearty onion rings, so I enjoyed those with a pint of Guinness, while Eric sampled a Dragonmead Inquisition Pale Ale, made in Warren, Michigan.

We parted Graydon's at about 10:30pm and walked north up a quiet Plainfield Avenue, back past the old library, and parted ways at the corner of Coit Avenue and Dale Street, I walked east on Dale, back to Plainfield, and then on up Sweet Street hill to my home.

The total loop was about four miles, with a couple of good hills in the mix. Was it enough to wear off the calories of the Guinness and onion rings? Probably not. But it certainly was an enjoyable way to spend a September Thursday evening.

Lasagna

If we could grow noodles, darn near all of this lasagna would have come out of our garden this year.

Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration.

But the tomatoes, chard and zucchini all came from the back yard.

While Julie and I enjoyed the fresh taste of the lasagna, Abbey decided to just pick through it patiently. She got more enthusiastic about eating a little later when Daddy took out the "brown chocolate."

Harvest

August kept us busy with corn and tomatoes. We've probably canned about two dozen quarts of tomatoes by now and had our fair share of corn on the cob--all you can eat three nights a week for almost a month. Not to mention the beans!

Then came labor day and Wheatland, so we haven't been picking or eating as much out of the garden with all the other goings on.

So yesterday was my first time back to Perkins in more than a week. We were canning more tomatoes, so I figured I would pick what's there...close to another half bushel! While I was there, I picked the two remaining orange pumpkins, bringing this year's total up to eleven. No real big ones, but Julie made some tasty pumpkin soup out of one picked earlier. And there's still three or four coming along.

I also picked five butternut squash, seventeen acorns, and eighteen butterbush. Needless to say, we'll be sharing a few of those.

Since the deer pruned the peppers over the fourth of July, we'll be having a late September crop of those, and they're coming in really heavy. If you have any recipes that would be good for mild aji amarillo chiles, let me know. I probably have close to 100, as they're prolific little plants.

Mamadou Diabate

Julie and I had the opportunity to see Mamadou Diabate and friends perform at this year's Wheatland Music Festival in Remus, Michigan.

Mamadou plays the kora, an African harp made out of a huge calabash gourd covered with a cow hide. He comes from the west African country of Mali, and hails from a long line of jelis, a musician caste with the important role of protecting the people's history in song.

It's really amazing to think about a guy coming all the way from west Africa to a hay field in Michigan to share the music of generations of Malians with a bunch of 21st century Midwesterners. I had this same thought when I saw Gerard Edery and the Ivory Consort performing songs from Spain from the 10th through 13th centuries, when Jews, Muslims and Christians forged a common musical language in songs sung in Ladino, Hebrew, Arabic and Galician-Portuguese. I got the chance to thank Gerard personally for bringing forth these songs, but did not get tha chance to thank Mamadou.

We purchased one of his CDs and we have found ourselves listening to it at least once a night every night since the festival. Most of the music has no words, and the songs with lyrics are not in a language we understand. Nonetheless, the music evokes all kinds of feelings.

There's more about Mamadou, the kora, jelis and clips of his music on his website. Check it out and consider ordering a CD of your own in support of this artist.

Grand Crossings

Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell came up with a good idea this past summer. Seeing at the high gas prices and looking forward to the annual Labor Day Bridge Walk up at the Mackinac Bridge, Mayor Heartwell decided that Grand Rapids should have a bridge walk of its own on Labor Day.

So that's what about 2,000 people did in Grand Rapids this morning. We followed the Mayor as he walked a little bit more than five miles and crossed seven of Grand Rapids' downtown bridges. Julie and I got there five minutes early, but still there was no sight of the Mayor on the other side of the crowd waiting at the bridge in Ah-Nab-Awen Park (see map at end of this post, #1).

We were to meet a number of other people at the bridge walk, but given the crowd, we were only able to find our friend Pam, who had the sense to call earlier this morning to set up a meeting place. But we soon lost Pam as Julie, Abbey and I had to hang back in the stroller crowd.

Approaching the bridge, we bumped into Steve and Nora Faber and we walked most of the morning with them. As we crossed over the river and walked north behind the Grand Center (map #2), we could see the thronging crowd crossing over the Michigan Street bridge in front of the building that's become known as "the giant flash cube on the river" (the thruway passes right by this building, and the curved surface ensures that the sun reflects in drivers' eyes every sunny morning).

As we approached the western side of the Michigan Street bridge (map #3), we could see the bottleneck of walkers passing below us along the river walk. We quickly came to appreciate being in the back of the line with the strollers, dogs and wagons, rather than with the rat race up front.

After passing under Michigan Street, we followed the river north along the river walk, passing the fish ladder and dozens of people searching for steelhead in the Grand River (map #4).

As we passed the fish ladder, Julie and I spied two of the three Tom Otterness sculptures we had missed on our previous downtown hike, "Medium Bear" and "Walking Fish."

From the fish ladder, we proceeded north to the Sixth Street Bridge (map #5). This is an historic steel truss bridge that used to help the furniture factory workers cross the river between work and home. It was built in 1886 for the whopping sum of $31,000.

The walk then wound through Canal Street Park, an area I frequently pass through when I walk to downtown (map #6). This park was developed in the late 1990's when some of the furniture and other factories in the neighborhood saw conversion to apartments and condos.

While we were waiting there for a potty break, along came Alan Adsmond, a friend of ours from the North Country Trail Association. Alan is an AT thru hiker, and his wife Lou wrote a fabulous little book of recipes about the meals she packed in boxes and sent to Alan and his son to keep them nourished on their thru hike.

After meeting Alan, we continued to walk north, around to the east of the historic Water Department building at 1101 Monroe Ave NW. This building always has nice plantings, as they have no shortage of water in the summer.

Upon passing the building, we saw a shark headed southbound on Monroe (map #7). "La Grande Fische" is actually a recumbent bike in disguise, and it did a good job of catching the eyes of those walking by.

After crossing the Leonard Street bridge (map #8) at the south end of our neighborhood, the walk turned south and headed back towards downtown on Front Avenue, through a rather uninspired industrial area. We recrossed the Sixth Street bridge, then followed the river walk south to Michigan, walked around the Grand Center to the east, and over the Pearl Street bridge (map #9).

We passed the Grand Rapids Public Museum along the river walk (nice photo of the walkway on the Museum's home page), and then crossed another historic truss bridge (map#10) that connects the area by the GVSU Eberhard Center with downtown west of Monroe Mall. Just north of this bridge is where the new Marriott is being built.

We noticed, for the first time, that there is a little gargoyle-like grim reaper sitting up on the east side of the bridge. I took a photo, but the lighting only returned a silhouette of this critter. He's pretty cool, so we'll get a pic on a future walk.

From the bridge, walkers could easily see the newly refurbished
Michael Singer & Sasaki Associates, Inc. work entitled "River's Edge Environmental Sculpture." Built in 1995, this sculpture had been neglected for many years. It has recently been refurbished and overgrowth removed. Lighting for the work has also been installed on the bridge, making it interesting to view at night.

We then crossed the busy Fulton Street bridge (map #11) and bumped into our neighbors Noah and Megan Kruis. This is also where Steve and Nora departed for home.

Reaching the far side of the bridge, we were fortunate enough to catch the start of the West Fulton Labor Day parade (map #12). We came up to the corner of Front Street as the drummers set the beat for marching. We walked along with the band for a few paces, then turned north into the beautiful, new GVSU downtown campus.

From there, the hike wound northerly, back behind the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum underneath some beautiful red pines. In my opinion, the Ford Museum has some of the best executed public park spaces in Grand Rapids.

When we got to the end, all the completion certificates had been handed out to a crowd that was much larger than expected. But the Mayor's secretary was on hand taking people's names and addresses, so we left Abigail's name so that she could get her certificate in the mail.

...to the Grand

Last Wednesday night, Julie, Abbey and I finally had the chance to once again hike around downtown Grand Rapids. The excuse for this urban hike was to find the thirty-five sculptures that are a part of the exhibit Tom Otternesss in Grand Rapids - The Gardens to the Grand. The exhibit was arranged by the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park as a way to extend their promotion of sculpture beyond their physical location and into the downtown Grand Rapids community.

We started our walk on the banks of the Grand River at Canal Street Park on Monroe Avenue NE, taking in the river and the fishermen as we headed south. A jog over to Ottawa Avenue took us to our first three sculptures.

The third sculpture is one Abbey and I saw a few weeks earlier when we took the bus to the Grand Rapids Art Museum to see the Ansel Adams exhibit. I had wished I had the camera then, so I was sure to bring it along for this hike.

Here Abbey is pictured with "Male Tourist" and "Female Tourist," who are outside the Kent County Courthouse snapping pictures of the much larger "Free Money" sculpture, an eight-foot tall relief of two cartoon-esque characters dancing on a moneybag.

We wound our way through downtown--past the courthouse, art museum, Kendall School of Art and Design (which, oddly, did not have any Otterness sculptures nearby), Fountain Street Church, and the library.

When we passed near the library, we stopped to snap a few more pictures. We caught Abbey arguing with "Man with a Book" about the exact symbolic significance of the white whale in Moby Dick. "Woman with a Book" tried to defend Man with her point of view, but Abbey held her at bay.

After breaking up the heated debate, we strolled across veteran's park to the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (aka UICA) in Heartside. It was at this point that we turned around and headed north.

Cutting across to South Division, we passed a band jamming on the sidewalk surround by a couple of dozen spectators, adding a carnival atmosphere to our walk.

We headed northwest through Monroe Mall, past the site of the future art museum, and then began winding our way back and forth across the river four times towards our car. The sun had set before we crossed the river the first time, making it tricky to locate some of the less prominently displayed sculptures. As a result, we missed seeing three of the thirty-five--"Educating the Rich on the Globe," "Medium Bear, and "Walking Fish." I particularly wanted to see the latter two, which were allegedly placed somewhere near the fish ladder.

In all, this was a great little walk, trying to find a wide variety of sculptures big and small. We put in a total of 4.16 miles in a long, leisurely evening. Having not hiked through downtown in quite a few months, it reminded me of what a great pedestrian city Grand Rapids has come to be.

If you're interested in trying to find the thirty-five downtown sculptures, or even the five at Meijer Gardens, you'll have to hurry. The exhibit ends September 10, 2006. For more on Tom Otterness, check out this enhanced podcast with pictures (8.9MB zipped).

Below is a map I worked up on TrailRunner, a beta version of shareware in development. Cool program fir use with your iPod or cell phone.

Paradise to Hell

Clayton Klein, an 87 year-old Michigan man is walking from Paradise to Hell for the second time in a year. The Conway Township resident has gotten quite a bit of local notoriety thanks to the creative name for his hike.

Klein is not walking from the Biblical paradise to hell, but from the town of Paradise in Michigan's upper peninsula to the hamlet of Hell in the far southeast corner of the state. Truth be told, he's actually walking across the State of Michigan from north to south, starting at Lake Superior north of Paradise and continuing south to the Ohio boarder south of Hell.

Klein will do the walk in about 22 days, stopping once along the way to go home to mow his lawn.

For this second walk, he timed his trip to coincide with the annual Labor Day Mackinac Bridge walk so that he doesn't have to "cheat" by riding over the Straights in a car.

The Detroit News featured Klein's walk in last Friday's paper, and is also the source of the link to the photo of Klein.

The Meeting

When I posted about our Dam 2 Dam hike over the Fourth of July holiday, I forgot to share a little incident that happened. On the evening when we hiked far up on the bluffs that overlook the Manistee River, we came upon a place known as "Far Away from the Maddening Crowd." Little did we know that an historic event was to happen on that knoll that night.

As I sat there reclined, stirring my lentils and rice over my alcohol cook stove, along came a tiny pink bear named Zamboni, a Keebler elf named Ken, and a voluptuous, beautiful woman named Abigail. Abigail was followed by her family and entourage who carried two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five dressed sheep, sixty pounds of roasted grain, a hundred cakes of raisins and two hundred cakes of pressed figs.

It had turned out, you see, that I had fallen through a time and space portal and found myself in the Old Testament era land of Carmel and at the meeting if Abigail and David. Fortunately Abigail had arrived before David, so I was not subject to the wrath of a scorned king and his army.

Instead, I watched as David and his knights (no relation to Ken, mind you) rode onto the scene. Ken babbled on with endless commentary as Zamboni road away on one of King David's most prized silver steeds.

David Meeting Abigail by Peter Paul Rubens (circa 1620)
as photoshopped by Andy Mytys (circa July 2006).

'Maters

To all you many people who track my blog, I have to apologize for not posting much of late. Too many late days at work and too little time in the garden, and I don't have the time or the content to post. But I am working up a new concept to take the place of the garden news that will be coming this fall. Stay tuned!

Late August is here and the thrill of fresh garden tomatoes has done what it usually does when you have hundreds of the fruits piling up in the fridge and more turning red on the vine. So when you can't keep up with that home-grown goodness, it's time to get the canning jars out.

As you can see by this basket full of San Marziano's, we have plenty of tomatoes to put up for the winter. This basket holds just the roma's from five plants. One plant had twenty-seven red tomatoes ready for picking a week ago, and I picked about the same number from that same plant today.

In additon to this beautiful basket of romas, we had a less attractive but much larger basket of standard red tomatoes (Super Sioux and Legend) from three plants here at home and six plants out at Perkins.

So far, we have a little more than twelve quarts put up. We'll be in good shape for the winter if we can pick and save enough to get another eight or so quarts. Long, dark, cold days are little easier to handle when you have some good pasta doused with last summer's tomatoes with some parmigiano reggiano shaved on top.

Corn

It's been a dry August so far. Knowing the corn would soon be ripe, I began watering the corn every other day last Sunday in an effort to get the kernel size up.

I picked the first ears tonight, and the effort seems to have paid off. In most of the ears, the kernels were big and juicy, although a little more starchy than I had hoped. I'm not sure if I waited a few days too long to pick, or if it's just the variety of seed I used.

The corn is not the only plant happy for the water. The zinnias are doing exceptionally well this summer with plenty of long-lasting blooms and very little mildew to date.

I did learn by observing my neighbor's zinnias that I may have been able to get larger blooms had I spaced the plants a little further apart. I guess I'll be a little more brutal when I thin seedlings next year.


The dry August also has the pumpkin and squash vines turning yellow and drying up. We already have some small, orange pumpkins, but we also have a few other bigger ones still growing on the vine. It's getting easier to count the squash, including these two young acorns that have a few more months to go.

Thinking About the Hills

I've been thinking about the hills a lot lately. In particular, I've been thinking of the mountains in New England.

Two thoughts have been running through my mind. The first is a growing obsession with doing a one-day Presidential Traverse. The Presidential Traverse does not have a formal route, but typically includes tagging the summits of a half dozen or so of the high peaks. The traverse I am considering is 23 miles long and includes 9,050 feet of elevation gain. Once on the ridge, most of the hiking is across loose talus on an exposed ridge that includes Mount Washington, the highest peak in New England.

Now I just need to find a partner or two and make arrangements to be in New Hampshire in late June when the days are long. And I suppose I need to re-start my running routine that has slacked off this summer.

The second growing obsession is with winter peak bagging. A few weeks back, I sharpened my crampons. This morning I saw my boots sitting there patiently in the corner of the closet. The cool evening air tonight has me thinking about snow and winter wind.

I wonder what peaks should be on the list for this year. I wonder what other likeminded souls I might be able to talk into climbing a few mountains in winter.

Anyone feel like going climbing... or on a long summer walk?

Colorful

Some nights are more colorful than others out at Perkins Garden. Tonight was one of the more colorful.

This year, August has brought along with it clear, blue skies with bold, fluffy clouds. The dry, cool, clear air brought out the gardeners tonight. And at dusk, it brings out dozens of huge dragon flies that hover about the garden, reducing the mosquito population by the hundreds each hour.


August means that peppers are coming in, and these early gypsy peppers are getting ready for snacking. Gypsies are some of the sweetest of the bunch.

Flowers, red tomatoes, pumpkins turning orange, happy gardeners working away. Nice night.

Revolution

"Tell me have, have you seen the revolution
Could it be seeds growing inside of you
Let your heart and this peace be the solution
Take the love that you have
And pass it from side to side"

Jeb Puryear

They're Here!

This past weekend, the first of the (non-cherry) tomatoes turned red. So I picked ten or twelve at home and another ten or twelve at Perkins on Sunday night. When I came home from work today, just twenty-four hours later, I found another dozen red ones in the home garden.

Clean out the bottom drawer of the fridge and make room, because here they come. It's time for tomatopalooza 2006!

Thankfully, the weather forecast is for a cool weekend. Saturday we'll break out the big pot and the canning jars and get some of these 'maters ready for eatin'... in February 2007.

Other stuff in the garden is coming along nicely as well. Yesterday we ate a few small ears of corn out of the home patch. They were a bit starchy.

This past weekend we were also popping mouthfuls of soybeans. Soybeans are much more tasty fresh out of the garden than they would seem. They make a great snack. Just steam briefly, cool, and munch away.

The kale and chard are still going strong, and a few similar crops are on their way... cabbage and cauliflower. We have some nice, big heads of orange cauliflower coming in (and a cool front just in time to help them grow!). The cabbage is a ways off, but the heads sure are startin' to look pretty.

"Hey you! In the Garden down there!"

The last few days I’ve been thinking about how God speaks to me. Lots of people talk about lots of ways that they hear God’s voice. I don’t hear a spoken voice. Here’s my deal.

Most days, God shouts at me.

I’m not a very good listener. That’s why it’s good that God shouts at me.

I meet and know a lot of people who are rather intuitive and who hear God speaking directly to them. That’s not the case with me.

It seems that the way in which God has chose to speak to me—or perhaps the way that God has taught me to listen—is much more indirect. God speaks to me through grace.

In a way, God seems to be saying “don’t do as I say, do as I do.”

When I say God talks to me through grace, I mean that I see God in the blessings in my life—big and small. And when I pay attention to the fact that God is talking to me, I realize God is shouting.

The crazy, colorful blooms on the sunflowers at Perkins are not a whisper. They are a loud shout. So are the ten-foot tall sunflowers in my neighbor’s plot. I am amazed at them, and wonder at how they spring forth so tall and confident among an otherwise messy field that a few crazy souls are attempting to cultivate.

Sunflowers are a blessing. They are God’s grace in physical form.

So are pumpkins that grow from fingernail-sized seeds into twenty-foot vines with huge leaves and numerous basketball-like fruits. Vines that love the burning sun and humid July heat, heat that makes the rest of us wither and retreat to dark shade, hoping for a cool breeze.

Seven-foot tall corn plants are God’s grace. Even complete with Japanese beetles to be caught and aphids to be out done, the corn is amazing and beautiful. It has nourished—provided grace if you will—to hundreds of generations of people in the so-called new world for thousands of years. It did so before Christ, and it did so to those who knew nothing of him.

These are some of the ways God has been shouting at me lately.

The shouting happens nearly every day. Some days it seems to be with great frequency, almost unending. Sometimes I hear. Sometimes I listen. Rarely do I understand. In the best moments, I am guided to wonder.

Lately I see God’s grace in the routine growth of the plants at Perkins, and the passing of the summer days and all the weather summer brings. Yet God also shouts at me through other acts of grace throughout the year.

Perhaps the biggest wonder is why—when I recognize this—I don’t just set aside the activities at hand and listen a little better, perhaps trying a little harder to understand more completely what is being said. Why don’t I just drop what I am doing and listen? Why does my busy mind and our busy culture, rather than God’s shouting out, direct my actions? Is all the business of everyday life really more important?

I desire to do a better job of stopping, listening and wondering. I need to try harder. It starts with stopping. It starts with stopping the other voices that shout at me and beg for my attention for their own sake.

I don’t desire to echo God’s shouting. The world about me does enough shouting. I desire to share the acts of grace through which God is revealed. I need to make it a habit of doing as God does, as God acts, sharing grace.

Stop. Listen. Wonder. And share.

Sunflower View

As the sun passes overhead day by day and summer marches on into August, new things keep appearing in the garden. This week it was the first sunflowers.

I've always liked how sunflower blossoms follow the sun across the sky.

Because of the way we planted our sunflowers along the north side of our community garden plot, they seem to be keeping watch over the garden.

They get to watch the peppers begin to fruit, the tomatoes turn red, the beans climb, the squash run, and the corn reaching for the sky.

But most immediately, they are keeping watch over their smaller cousins, the zinnias, as they bloom at their feet.

Simple Confusion

After a week or so of trying, I finally fixed my pulse sprinkler. Now these sprinklers are a pretty basic type of garden equipment, and have probably been around for a long time. Clearly, they were invented long before the time of modern plastics, as the best ones are made of brass.

It turned out that a pretty large chunk of rust had made its way from the Perkins plumbing system into the sprinkler head. But this is not what I thought was the problem.

Being a community garden, implements are often shared. When the sprinkler stopped returning, I assumed that someone sharing the sprinkler had clogged the linkage up with dirt. Mislead by my assumptions, I disassembled and reassembled the sprinkler countless times to no avail.

It's interesting how our assumptions about our community can mislead us.

After a few days of mulling the problem about, I came back at it with fresh eyes and tried new solutions. Initially I experienced no more success.

Then I saw the little nozzle nut staring me in the face. I cracked it open and there it was—a piece of bright maroon rust jammed in the opening. Simple as that. And nothing to do with my garden community.

Just a random physical event.

These old sprinklers are simple, almost elegant in their design. Yet when things go haywire, it’s amazing how our complicated brains can cause us to stumble around in the dark.

Simple, yet confusing to the easily mislead mind.

My How You've Grown

"My how you've grown!" The line fit's both Abbey and the garden these days. The pumpkins and the corn love the heat so much they are growing a noticeable amount every day. Each time I visit the garden, I spy a new pumpkin in the patch.

Abbey is also growing in many ways. It's not just her size that is changing, but her personality too. Some days she wants to spend time with her Daddy, other days she almost seems to wish he would just stay at work or go off to Perkins by himself.

Her interactions with Julie and me are increasingly animated and more deliberate. Sentences are slowly getting more and more complete. When I asked her to smile big for the camera tonight, she opened her mouth so wide it wasn't a smile, but a big, gaping hole.

And these days when I ask her for a kiss, she is more likely than not to end the kiss by blowing in my face.