Patti Gibbons Art

I spent most of Saturday doing chores. 9 am killates, followed by breakfast,  the farmer's market,  dry cleaners,  drug store,  art supply store. By 2 pm I was done. Done from the running around, done from the 96 degree heat. At my last stop my cell phone rings. It is my friend telling me she is at my house and can I meet her  at Michaels. Seems she bought 150.00 worth of canvases, LARGE ONES, at 60% off, and decided that she did not need them.  They were holding them for her there and she needed to either sell them to me, or else return them. Did I want them? HOW BIG? The convertible would not hold the canvases, so I used the CRV, Larry's car, the one WITHOUT A/C (and it isn't that we don't have the money to fix it, it is just that he never has bothered to get it fixed...) and crankily headed over to Michaels, an arts/crafts "box store" that I try to avoid. In the end, it was well worth it.  Six 24" x 36", and two 36" x 48" heav...

I felt like I was giving birth, digging up the garlic with my little spade this morning before the heat of the day hit.  I pushed away the fall leaves, dug carefully around the head, making sure I did not dig into the head. I then lifted under the roots, breaking them up a bit,  and lifted the entire head out of the ground, gently knocking excess dirt off, without disturbing the head. The garlic is of the hard neck variety, and is called "Music". Planted late last fall, this was my first garlic crop.  The cloves came courtesy of a good friend - Woodstock Occupy Congress Ross -  who had the cloves and  nowhere to plant them..so they he made a special ride up from NJ to  plant them in one of my raised beds while the light was fading one cold autumn day. He left them to my care, and I felt like a mother hen, mulching them for the long cold winter, and then fretting in the spring when the greens were up and we had multiple frosts.  Somehow it all wor...