The City Mouse in the Country

      In some ways our first garden was successful.  We did manage to grow a few tomatoes, some wonderfully sweet strawberries.  Fresh basil, rosemary and thyme are used in a more than a few fresh dishes (see our recipe page for a couple of wonderful dishes ).  Although they were small, we even managed a few cucumbers.     Sadly both insects and deer got to my Brussel sprouts.  Although our zucchini flowered like crazy, for some reason we were robbed of this wonderful fruit .  We also failed to produce a single pepper despite our plants growing strong all year.     It's easy to blame this on a lot of things.  Not having the plants watered enough or the right container or 1001 other things that could have gone wrong.   I'm concentrating on the positive.   My lovely wife Susan loves to make and eat simple tomato sandwiches.  Sadly raw tomato does horrors to my digestive tract, but I can eat them after they have been cooked in some way.     I proved to myself that I could grow som

    Generally speaking about Six PM every night it's my job to feed our cats.  Officially we have three.  Unofficially we have seven or eight.       Even though we don't have a barn...we have barn cats.   Our neighbor has horses and he encourages the barn cats because they do a great job of preventing mice and other rodents from getting into the feed.       When we moved into this home some two odd years ago, we were frankly asked if we wanted the previous owners two cats trapped.   "No," my Susan said, "they were there before us."        Since then we had one of the original two outdoor cats pass, while the other one is a semi permanent fixture on our back porch.  She sneaks in sometimes and once I woke up from a nap only to find her at my feet purring away contently.  Our youngest cat, Bobble (so named because his head was bigger than his body when he was a kitten), was meant to be leashed trained because of future plans of traveling the country in an RV,

  I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. - Thomas Jefferson            I sit outside on our front porch, a tall cool glass of home brewed iced tea in my hand.   I'm looking over our "front 40" - basically a few raised garden beds and containers holding our strawberries, cucumbers, tomato's, peppers, Brussels spouts and zucchini.  There is not much I can do for them now, just let them grow and hope that we get a harvest of something soon.   I'm actually a bit anxious about the garden, I want to have something...anything for the effort.     You can plant a seed and try to take care of it as much as possible, but so much is out of your control.     Although to be honest, for the most part I am actually very content, and I can't help but think of an opening line of a poem I once read.  Sadly the rest of the poem has slipped from memory.  The opening line was simply.  "