Squash Saga

Guess what this is about!

A couple of years ago I noticed a different type of squash in my local produce store: red kuri squash. I’d never heard of it before, so of course I bought one and looked it up on the internet. I found out it’s an edible-peel squash, similar to delicata. Roasted, sliced, and buttered it was excellent, and the peel was indeed edible.

I assumed red kuri squashes would join the familiar acorn, butternut, kabocha, delicata, and spaghetti types in grocery stores, but that single appearance was the only one that year. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought to save any seeds, so that was that.

Until I saw one the following autumn in a different store, and bought it without hesitation. That time, I saved seeds.

Red Kuri Squash seeds and wooden Potmaker

The wooden device behind the seeds is a Potmaker. You wrap strips of newspaper around it to form a cylinder and then crush the end into the base to make a bottom. Add soil, and you have a perfect tiny pot in which a squash seed can germinate. When the time comes to move the small plant to the garden, you plant the paper pot along with the plant. The paper softens when wet and the plant’s roots grow through it. Squashes and pumpkins don’t transplant well, so these paper pots are perfect for them.

I ended up with three plants, which spent weeks on top of the hot water tank under a fluorescent light I rigged up for them. Every morning I trotted down to the basement and turned on the Squash Light. (Sixteen hours of light per 24 is said to be optimal.) May and June were quite cool, so it was almost July before I planted out the squashes. I put two in what I call the Ex-Veg Patch, in a small area I prepared by digging in compost, bagged manure, and fertilizer. The third plant went into a big pot which contained pretty much the same dirt-plus-extras combination.

The two plants in the open ground came to nothing. They started out promisingly, but the one in the pot (which was the smallest to start with) grew much faster and soon was much larger. It first produced a whole lot of male flowers, and once the vine was eight feet long, a few female flowers appeared.

Big yellow squash flower — Male flower on the left, female on the right. Notice the baby squash at the base.

Proto squash? — Male flower on the left, female on the right. Notice the baby squash at the base.

The plants in the Ex-Veg Patch stopped growing at two or three feet. One swiftly withered and died; the other bloomed valiantly, but with male flowers only. I suspect plants don’t bother producing female flowers if they aren’t in a situation where they can grow well. This result reminded me why the Ex-Veg Patch is Ex. The nearby maple trees suck up most of the nutrients in the soil, which means only herbs and other plants that prefer lean soils grow well there.

The plant in the pot continued to grow, eventually reaching about 12 feet. It formed four small squashes, but only one of them went on to grow and mature. A two-week cold period in August (inevitably dubbed “Augtober”) must have convinced the plant there was no point in trying to support four squashes. Or maybe it just realized it was in a pot and didn’t have enough resources.

As I watched the lone squash expand like a yellow balloon, I got to worrying about it being eaten in the night by local rodents. (Yes, rodents. Enough said.) So I surrounded it with small pieces of chicken wire to discourage them.

Red Kuri Squash at yellow stage with chicken wire protector 2024 — Armoured squash. Yellow in July, gradually turning orange by late August.

Red Kuri Squash at pale orange stage with chicken wire protector 2024 — Armoured squash. Yellow in July, gradually turning orange by late August.

By early September, the squash vine was looking tired. Some of the leaves had withered, a few had powdery mildew, and it was obvious the plant was done. The squash by this time was 7 inches in diameter, dark orange, and ready to harvest.

The squash is now safe in the kitchen, where it will repose until needed for culinary purposes. I don’t plan to rush with cooking it, since it’s quite an attractive presence, and I’ve grown fond of it.

As always happens when you’ve expended a lot of effort on something rare, the local store once again had red kuri squashes a couple of weeks ago. We actually bought one, and I was thinking I needn’t have bothered growing my own. But it seems they are not going to be part of the regular squash offerings after all, just a single appearance again. So it’s a good thing I went to the trouble. Besides, growing the squash plant and watching it go through all its stages was interesting. I do plan to save seeds again.

A Bookish Coincidence: Two Reviews

Prologue. (I’ve never written a prologue for a blog post, and I’m sure it’s against some Rule of Blogging, but I’m doing it nevertheless.) In a recent post on the Writers Supporting Writers blog, Chuck Litka declared that he doesn’t think reviews make any difference to book sales, and only the most bookish readers bother with them. Some of the comments disagreed. I gave the matter a bit of thought and realized that my main reason for posting a review to Goodreads for almost every book I read is as a writing exercise. I’m currently without a work-in-progress (apart from idea-mulling), so marshalling and expressing my thoughts about the books I read is a way to exercise the old writing muscle. I intend to post some of my reviews of indie books here as well, if I have more to say about them. The featured image of someone reading in a library will signal these review-ish posts.

In December 2023, I acquired seven books from the Smashwords store during its year-end sale. Some were half price and others free, but I can’t remember which were which. This post is about two of those books, both published in the 2010s, which I read recently. (With a few exceptions, I work through my TBR list in order of acquisition.)

Book Description: With Solomon’s Magpie Robert Crompton returns to his favourite haunts in Cheshire to disentangle a story told by Solomon Whitaker, boatman, basket-maker and brewer. Solomon heard the tale from his mother and he went to the trouble of learning to read and write so that he could set it down. Generations later, fifteen-year-old Judy must try to create a readable version of the story. But there’s a problem – a large portion of it is missing, and it is clearly the most important bit.

My Review: Heartwarming and interesting in equal measures, this book is a multilayered feast that combines family and community history with coming of age and a good dose of humour. It’s related almost entirely through the point of view of Judy Whitaker, from her school days to when she enters advanced education. In fact, education is another of the themes of the book. Judy’s parents are science teachers and try to steer both her and her brother into careers in science. How that works out (or doesn’t) forms part of the story. Good teachers appear at crucial junctions, and not very good ones are noted as well.
Christianity is mentioned in a rather critical manner. There is a subplot that involves Judy’s Uncle Freddie, who is a clergyman and the Principal of a Christian college, which appears in several chapters, along with some of its students. Judy’s attitude toward the brand of Christianity featured at that institution is quite caustic. Some readers may find this problematic, but I did not.
The story’s main element, however, is an incomplete and almost incomprehensible document given to Judy by her paternal grandfather with a request to make sense of it. How she accomplishes this and what it ultimately reveals is an absorbing tale. It’s set in the county of Cheshire, around the turn of the millennium. No one has a mobile phone until near the end of the book. People still write letters. And the family secrets are rooted in the 19th century.
Judy is a somewhat eccentric individual, perhaps an introvert, although that term isn’t applied to her in the book. She dislikes people who explain that which is obvious (or should be), and those given to small talk, which Judy calls “yammering.” Frustration makes her think and sometimes utter words starting with “f.” (I must say I found this a bit annoying at times, but it didn’t ruin the reading experience.) She has an imaginary friend called Twirl and a not imaginary but much younger one named Tracey. Once she engages with the mystery of great-grandfather Solomon’s document, she develops a kind of psychic ability that takes her into the past of the countryside surrounding her home. I grew quite fond of Judy and wished her well at the end of the book.

Book Description: Science teacher Alex Kavanagh’s love life is imploding, his job repels him, and there’s friction with the teenagers who bully him at the bus stop. Even his super-power – being pedantic – doesn’t help much. Enter his ex, Lucy, in what seems to be a chance meeting. Her betrayal marked the point when his life went nuclear. But – holy protons! – he still loves her. Two problems. First, she isn’t who he thinks she is. Second, she’s going to leave him forever in seventy-two hours.

My Review: There’s a lot packed into this short book—belated coming of age, family dynamics, life choices, a lost (and found) love, and physics. The main character is a geeky teacher and physics nerd who gets excited about the behaviour of fundamental particles. He gave up on his PhD studies when his girlfriend Lucy dumped him, and returned to his parents’ house. When life is too much, he escapes into the nose cone of a rocket ship at the local playground, after the kids have gone home, of course. One hot June day Lucy reappears in his life and a transformation occurs.
Alex’s awkwardness and struggles with everyday life are realistically rendered, along with the Manchester setting. I appreciated the immersion into a world I have never experienced and probably never will. The arrival of Lucy amps up the romance aspect of the story, and her departure adds an element of mystery, or maybe just “spooky action at a distance.”
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and was impatient to discover the denouement. While satisfying, it’s ambiguous enough to keep the story in my mind for a while.

These books have a remarkable number of similarities. Given that I selected them without looking for specific features in common, it’s surprising how many there are:

Young people figuring out what to do with their lives
Education
Science as a career
English settings: a small village in Cheshire, and the city of Manchester and environs
Time period is the turn of the 21st century
Neurodivergent main characters: “Asperger’s” appears in the metadata of one book, “autism” in the other’s
Family dynamics: sibling relationships and extended families
A hint of the supernatural, or maybe just weirdness
Point of view: in both cases it’s extremely close third person.

There are differences too, of course. The main character of Solomon’s Magpie is a teenaged girl for most of the book; in Cold Fusion 2000, the m.c. is a 28-year-old guy. Cold Fusion has a strong romance element; Solomon’s Magpie has nothing of the sort, not for the point-of-view character, anyway.

As a reader, I found these books entertaining and interesting. As a writer, I noted the way the authors made their main characters relatable by use of close third person point of view. Both sides of me were satisfied with the reading experiences they offered. Both titles are available as ebooks from the usual outlets.

Featured image from Pexels; cover images from Goodreads.

First Tomato

After a couple of fall-like weeks, we’ve had a three-day heat wave, which has speeded up the ripening of tomatoes.

This was the first tomato to develop earlier this summer. Its unique “nose” made it easy to keep track of as it grew and finally turned orange and then red.

Now it’s had its moment of fame. Next stop: cutting board and dinner plate!

Flight

The other day I heard honking and looked up to see a flight of geese. It was a fairly large group, but not flying high enough to be migrators. They were probably a gang of non-migratory local Canada geese moving from one water body to another.

But seeing and hearing them reminded me of other occasions when a faint but persistent melody has made me look up to see a huge group of birds, in “v” formations, flying fast and purposefully, northward or southward, depending on the season.

Then I recalled a few words from Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Continent’s End,” and had to look it up in full. The poet looks over the Pacific Ocean and speaks to it, addressing it as “mother”:

“The long migrations meet across you and it is nothing to you, you have forgotten us, mother,
You were much younger when we crawled out of the womb and lay in the sun’s eye on the tideline.”

The poem isn’t about migration, but that line had stuck in my mind and came up when I saw the birds.

Then I remembered Henry Beston’s book The Outermost House, in which he speaks at length and eloquently of birds and their migrations.

“What a gesture of ancient faith and present courage such a flight is, what a defiance of circumstance and death—land wing and hostile sea, the fading land behind, the unknown and the distant articulate and imperious in the bright, aërial blood.”

And I thought of a chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, with the title “Wayfarers All,” in which Ratty is almost seduced into taking to the road, following the migrating birds and the wandering Sea Rat to the languorous South.

“The mere chatter of these southern-bound birds, their pale and second-hand reports, had yet power to awaken this wild new sensation and thrill him through and through with it; what would one moment of the real thing work in him—one passionate touch of the real southern sun, one waft of the authentic odour?”

And then I wrote this:

Witness

I hear cries in the air, made faint by distance, and look up
To see skeins of winged shapes traced on the sun-shot sky.

Birds, flying south with the waning summer, following the urge of millennia,
Responding to the ancient impulse for survival, for life, for persistence.

They fly high and intent, forsaking the lands of summer where they emerged from the egg.
The young ones, birds of the spring, fly wing-to-wing with the elders, those who know the skyways to lands they have never seen.

They sleep in flight, half the brain resting while the wings beat on,
Pursuing the journey perilous but necessary, exhausting but essential, beyond preference or individual whim.

Where will they land and rest in safety? Where will they find food to fuel those beating hearts and wings?
Are the lakes and ponds still there? Or will they find poisoned mud, burned trees, wetlands drained and paved by those who name themselves “wise”?

I stand rooted here, gazing skyward on the edge of autumn, eyes burning with tears unshed,
For the faith, for the beauty, for the hope I will see them return in the spring.

Image from Pexels

Out of Season and Out of Words

Two plants that normally bloom in spring have produced single flowers in August. I have no idea why, but since the flowers are both blue, I thought they were photo-worthy.

Blue Siberian iris (Iris sibirica) flower August 2024 — Siberian iris blooming on a short stem in August. Normal bloom time is May.

Blue gentian (Gentiana acaulis) flower August 2024 — A single gentian flower of a type (*Gentiana acaulis*) that normally blooms in March.

These late summer days aren’t the best for marshalling thoughts into blog posts. I have some posts in draft I hope to whip into shape by September. In the meantime, the out-of-season flowers will have to stand in for the out-of-words blogger.

Is anyone else experiencing end of summer indolence? Or perhaps you’re in the southern hemisphere and feeling revved up for spring?

Lazy Sunday Photos

No real topic today. No argument or points to be made. Just a few photos of what’s blooming right now. Click on photos to enlarge and see captions.

Pink snapdragons, squash leaves, poppy bud, and rain gauge August 2024

Pink annual poppy flower closeup August 2024

Red poppy with white edge and small wasp

And finally…

Pink and white lilies August 2024 — Pink and white oriental lilies, variety names unknown.

I hope everyone is having a lovely, lazy Sunday!

A Few Giggles for Book Lovers

Bluebird’s blog is always worth a visit, but I had to reblog this one!

Happy National Book Lovers Day

Writer Brain and Editor Brain

This recent post by author Damyanti Biswas describes two different types of reading experience. It’s interesting, and also reminded me of an idea about writing I have been mulling for some time.

In traditional publishing, the writer and the editor occupy two different bodies, at least as far as a given written work is concerned. Things are different for indie authors who do their own developmental editing. They need to switch from one mode to the other, depending on what stage of the work they are in.

I wondered if this might be the origin of my problem with much of the advice to writers I see in blog posts, especially the stuff about story structure. When I’m thinking about a potential or even actual writing project, story structure and the minutiae of word choices are the last things on my mind. At that stage, I’m trying to imagine myself into one or more characters, to be them, to deal with problems and dilemmas from within those fictional individuals. I’m thinking about scenes that will bring those people to life so a reader will “get” them and be interested in them and whatever situation I create for them.

When the work is complete, there will be a structure to the story. It may even be a structure that is described in how-to-write books. But at the beginning of a writing project, that is in the distant future.

Let’s face it, most of those advice-giving posts are written by editors. Many of them are also authors, but those posts are written by editor brains. They are most relevant to readers who are also in editor mode. Beginning writers and those in the early stages of a project need something else, something that will fire up their imaginations and make them want to sit down and pound out words, to pour a spate of words onto the page or screen that will eventually become a complete and polished piece of writing. This is a state of creative chaos.

fractal blue and green and yellow shapes suggesting tentacles

(All right, I realize that not everyone writes in this way. I’m not a pantser, but I don’t make a detailed outline or do a lot of pre-writing. Think quick sketch rather than preliminary study. So if this screed sounds alien and wrong, just ignore it.)

Here I will take a sidestep an mention research. I need to do research when I lack knowledge of something that matters in the work I’m about to write. In a first draft, I note discrete facts for later checking, but when I need basic background material on a time, place, or phenomenon, I read as much about it as I can before I start writing. I immerse myself in the information and even take detailed notes. Once I’m sure I’ve subconsciously absorbed enough, I move on to writing. Curiously, I rarely need to consult my reading notes after making them.

Writers are advised to set a work aside for a few weeks or months after the first draft is finished. This is when one makes the transition from writer brain to editor brain. Returning to the work, one is prepared to see what needs to be changed. Problems with structure, pacing, voice, and style are visible, unobscured by the feverish mist of creation.

At risk of becoming a dispenser of advice to other writers, I would suggest that reading books and articles on how to write may not be the best way to prepare for writing a work of fiction. If inspired, just write. If seeking inspiration, don’t read about story structure and darlings that must be dispatched. Instead, read the inspired writing of others, including poetry. Listen to music. Observe nature. Eavesdrop on conversations in public. Notice patterns and coincidences. Fire up your imagination, not your inner editor, and write like no one’s watching.

fractal gold flower black and glowing blue background

Does anyone else relate to this view of the writing process? Do you use different parts of your brain for writing first drafts and for editing? Please comment!

Images from Pixabay, unless otherwise noted.

Pink and Blue

It’s hydrangea time again. This year the pink-flowered one is right next to the blue-flowered one, because it grows in a pot, and I moved the pot this spring.

This hydrangea (and it’s a single species (Hydrangea macrophylla) despite the colour difference), is of the type known as “lacecaps,” as distinguished from “mopheads.” They are the same species, but the number of fertile and sterile flowers differs: the tiny nubbles in the middle of the flat lacecap flower cluster are the fertile flowers; mopheads have spherical clusters of mainly sterile flowers.

The thing about these two plants that pleases me more than it should is that the pink one is a clone of the blue one. Several years ago, when I had only one plant, I feared that it was going into a decline, so I rooted a cutting from it, intending to plant it in the ever-elusive Better Spot. (Every garden has a Better Spot; it varies depending on what plant is intended for it, but it’s always elusive.)

As it turned out, the hydrangea recovered, because I took the trouble to remove the lilac suckers that were invading its space and furnished it with its own soaker hose. So the cutting remained a potted plant, although the pot it occupies now is a lot bigger than the original one. But the soil in said pot has added lime (left over from a batch prepared for tomato plants), which is why the plant’s flowers are pink. Soil pH determines whether aluminum ions are taken up as the flowers form. I don’t know of any other plant whose flower colour can be changed by fiddling with soil acidity, but it certainly works for hydrangeas.