Archive - Jun 2010
June 17th
A friend asked me the other day how long it has been since I graduated from high school. I did the quick math in my head (I graduated in 1982), and came up with 28 years. I hesitated saying the number out loud because it didn’t seem possible. Twenty-eight years? I did the math again and, darn it, I still came up with 28.
This week in our gardens we’re picking:
Fava beans
Asparagus
Scallions
Radishes
Peas
Herbs of all sorts
Greens of all sorts
Garlic scapes
Edible flowers (nasturtium, squash, viola, lavender, chamomile)
Is it too late in the season to plant vegetables?
Absolutely not! You should still be able to find transplants of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, melons, squashes and herbs at the local nurseries and farmers’ market. Set those out soon however, and hope for a late frost! If you haven’t gotten around to planting potatoes yet, now is as good a time as any. Several years back my neighbor Ross Sunderland planted a few rows of red potatoes on the Fourth of July that yielded beautifully by summer’s end.
There is a lot of concern these days about invasive species. And rightly so. There seem to be thousands of species out there in the world just waiting to invade. And it’s not just nuisance aquatic species like Didymosphenia geminata (a.k.a. “rock snot,” or didymo for short) and Myriophyllum spicatum (Eurasian milfoil) that are causing trouble in the neighborhood.
MONKTON — Sure, Pete Sutherland is busy. When the Monkton folk musician isn’t stringing together teaching gigs, concerts and artists’ residencies, there’s a good chance he’s setting up shop at a benefit barn dance, strumming away at any of the myriad string instruments he handles almost effortlessly.
The benefit dances and charity concerts come with the territory, he explained.
“If you’re going to be a community musician, you have to make time for that,” Sutherland said.
On a recent family trip to Oklahoma, I developed a whole new admiration for, and horror of, the airline industry. No other business I know of can provide so little for so much and still be in such high demand. (As a cell phone owner, I don’t say this lightly.)
Airline travel has become increasingly expensive, inconvenient and exhausting. It offers little incentive to keep customers coming back. Yet the airports are packed.
June 14th
MIDDLEBURY — With nomination petitions due this week, relatively few candidate petitions had been filed with district town clerks or Addison County Superior Court as the Addison Independent went to press on Friday.
But at least one local Vermont House district was shaping up as a fierce election battleground: Addison-4, the two-seat district that includes Bristol, Starksboro, Monkton and Lincoln.
