Riverbend Journal

  Many years ago, perhaps nearing 15 or so, we used to raise garlic every year in a small raised bed garden we had behind the house we lived before this one. A coworker at the time had given me a couple bulbs of his softneck garlic and I stuck them in the ground to great success. Over a period of maybe five years, we kept replanting and eating that garlic and ended up with a decent sized bed of it. But then we moved and left that behind. After that, we mainly just consumed and preserved excess from my mom's garden until she passed away but she never raised garlic. After her death, we took over the gardens and made them our own but being 40 miles away, we often lacked the energy to drive down there in late fall to loosen up some soil and stick garlic back in the ground for another year's crop. So, we just got back into the rut of using store bought garlic again. Last fall with our first garden season under our belts from the new garden behind our house, I decided it was about ti...

  On our first full day in New York City, we had a plan to get most of the tourist things out of the way. So we hopped on the subway 33 plus a few more stories down from our room and found ourselves on the south side of Manhattan in the Wall Street area where we tracked down a deli by the name of West Bank Gourmet Deli and secured some food for the day. The pastrami sandwich on rye which I got was so delicious and the owner/manager of this deli was so nice and pleasant to us. He certainly wasn't the stereotypical New York experience that everyone talks about or lampoons. "No soup for you!" From there, since we were nearby and had some time to kill, we walked up to see the statue of the giant bull in front of the New York Stock Exchange but as you can see above it wasn't there. It had been the last time I had been to New York City so we had to google what had happened to it. Fortunately, we found it had been moved to a park on the way back to our ultimate destination s...

My current nemesis For perhaps the same reason our fruit harvest have been abundant this year, we have been suffering an invasion of moles beyond what I have ever experienced. Our front lawn has been completely torn up by their digging and rooting underneath the surface.  Moles have been around pretty much every year that we have lived on this piece of property. Half of it has trees and is unmowed so they have plenty of places to thrive. They have occasionally snuck up to our front lawn and dug around but eventually the ground gets too dry and they move on to better locations and the wounds in our lawn will heal over. I tried periodically over the years to spread chemicals on my lawn to degrub it which is what they were after but it never seemed to work reliably. They would still come up and dig several holes and tunnels before moving on to better, more grub productive places. But this year, they never moved on. When we first moved here, there was some that were living underneath o...

  I guess because I enjoy sour cherries so much, I have kept track of my harvest progress since I planted my first tree 25 years ago. I planted it in our back yard which had too much shade but was the only place on my quarter acre that it could go. It grew slowly and produced a handful of cherries for a couple years and then we sold that house and moved. I still wonder if that sour cherry tree is there, a lot taller and producing buckets of sour cherries for the current occupants. The place we moved to has 3 acres and so I wasted no time in planting another sour cherry tree. I'm not sure if it is the location or something else, but it was and still is extremely slow growing. In fact, its slowness towards life frustrated me that I eventually bought and planted a second sour cherry tree and then a third. The conditions for the second sour cherry tree evidently were the best for it has grown at a tremendous pace and is already 4 times the size of the first one. Nearly every year the h...

  When I last wrote about our trip to New York City, I left off as we came back to our motel at the end of the first half day to relax our ears from all the noise outside and 33 floors below us. Alas, for a time it wasn't to be. We started hearing a lot of honking going on below us and when we looked out our window, we saw the above scene.  A crowd of people were upon a bridge looking westward for no apparent reason other than to block traffic. At this point, one lane of traffic was squeezing well into the oncoming lane and both lanes were getting through albeit it at a snail's pace. But soon even that changed. The crowd size doubled or perhaps tripled in a matter of minutes and soon the people were completely blocking one lane and half of another leaving only a single narrow path barely wide enough to allow a vehicle to pass. In fact, vehicles were having to go one at a time into the crowd, laying on their horn continuously and inching ahead only inches at a time. Eventually ...