Zach (our elderly black Lab) was paying careful attention to something in the corner of his dog pen the other day--from a prudent distance. When I investigated, I found this fine fellow, only a couple of feet from the place where the bunny nest was (the bunnies having grown up and gone on to greener pastures).
Looks like a rattler, doesn't he? But as you can see, he's lacking a rattle. He (or she) is a diamond-backed water snake, one of our non-poisonous natives. (Bill, who is in New Mexico, identified it when I sent him the photo). The dogs have had rattlesnake shots, although I'm not sure I trust the stuff. And Zach has had intensive anti-snake training (from Bill, a few years ago), so I was glad to see that some part of that training still lingered somewhere at the back of his doggy brain. The snake went on about his or her business. Nice bit of wild life entertainment on a hot summer afternoon in Texas.
Garden update. I planted a couple of short rows of pinto beans this morning. It's a little early--fall beans should go in next month, but I'll be gone during August, so I thought I'd put in a few now, more later. As I mentioned in a comment on the previous post, I discovered (oh, the wonders of the Internet!) that you can take tomato cuttings and root them in water or soil, to extend the tomato season--in my case, to get a jump on the fall garden. I've started seeds of some fast-maturing varieties (55-65 days), but am interested to give this new (to me) technique a try. The beds are finished, the garden is fenced (photos next time), and the compost is decaying nicely. This is not the first garden we've had here, by any means: Bill and I have been "homesteading" our place for a couple of decades. But I let it go when the book travel began taking so much time, and focussed exclusively on herbs. Feels good to be back in the veggie garden.
Book news. Nothing new here, just moving forward. Oh, and backward, too. I took out a plot thread that didn't go anywhere, and will use it in the next book, and compressed a couple of scenes in the early part of the book so I could expand them toward the end. I try to use each scene to move the plot(s) forward--but I usually find by the end of the book (I'm getting close to that now, at 78,000 words) that some of the early scenes need adjustment. How in heck did we do this before the computer? Can you imagine Charles Dickens, writing his installment novels, with the early chapters published before he finished the later? EEK!
And a quick political note. A couple of people have emailed me, suggesting that gardens shouldn't become "political." Well, hey. Everything is political, in one way or another--the way we dress, what we eat (and don't), how we spend our money, the cars we drive, the houses we live in. Every now and then, gardens have become political, too, especially during WWI and WW2, and during back-to-the-land movements, when people felt it important to get in touch with fundamentals. Gardens are politcal again. And yes, it's about more than changing the light bulbs.
Reading note. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel, and not a form of communion with other people as well as with other species--with nature.--Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food