“I want my own patch!” Angus said every spring. “I am going to have carrots, lots of carrots. They’ll be mine.”
“Me, too,” my other son, Charles, would chime in. “But I am going to have lots of vegetables, like tomatoes and radishes.”
Every May we stand, looking at six raised beds in a part of the yard that was a driveway when we bought the house. The first thing we did that April, 1996, was move the 10-foot-high arborvitae hedge that ran between a little garage and the house to the far side of the driveway, to create a sheltered, south-facing spot for a vegetable garden.
This time each year I write my annual column on Vermont’s trout stocking efforts. It stays consistent from year to year as the state’s stocking efforts have very little annual variation. A mix of browns, brookies, and rainbows totaling 4,000 to 6,000 get placed in the New Haven River, with the brookies going in the upstream portions.
ADDISON COUNTY — Three hundred sixty callers dialed in on Tuesday night for an hour-long Addison County telephone conference with Vermont’s lone congressman, Peter Welch. Fielding questions from county residents, the Hartland Democrat tackled issues ranging from those far afield — like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — to those closer to home, including concerns about energy efficiency, the effect of health care legislation, and dairy industry and immigration reform.
When it comes to projects around the yard, my husband Mark has an annoying habit of doing things in what I call “the hard way” — or what other people might call “the right way.”
He refuses to admit this is a problem. He insists it’s reasonable to draw up detailed plans, gather the proper materials and tools for the job, and take the time to make the project look good and last a long time.
There’s no reasoning with him.
Authoring this blog has had the benefit of keeping me from getting in ruts (figuratively, not literally) on my runs – I can’t keep writing up the same routes, so I am constantly on the lookout for new places to run, or potentially interesting variations on old favorites. Today’s run is an example of the latter.
