Gardening on Granite- A Blog on Wordpress

 It has been 3 1/2 years since I left Nashville and returned to New Hampshire, the state of my youth. My blog now is "Gardening on Granite", and though it is mostly about gardening ,I plan to expand into posting during the cold months. There is much history here to talk about .Many places to visit. And of course we cook.

I have a lengthy post from 2021 about the Heritage Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts. This botanical garden has trial gardens for all forms of hardy hydrangeas, and there are many photos.

In the past year I have also become the gardener at a National Historic Site in Goffstown, New Hampshire. This is the old J. M. Parker General Store which now houses the Goffstown Historical Society. There are many posts and photos of the garden.

I invite anyone who might be interested to visit my new blog!

To the reader who contacted me about Jimmy Gallager's Band-

You should contact the department of Tennessee state parks and talk to them. They put up the kiosk at the entrance to the Harpeth River park off McCrory Lane in Pegram that mentions the band. I did some looking around on the Internet when I wrote this. I think Gallagher had some Vanderbilt connection as well, and had a hand in writing the Vanderbilt Commodores fight song. if memory serves.  I hope this helps!

A Word to Readers

This blog, though still on this site, now comes from the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire. In the future I may start a new blog, but for now it stays on site here.

Update as of September 22. My new blog is https://gardeningongranite.com

Natural Wood Sculptures-Great Hill, Nottingcook Forest, Bow, New Hampshire

As a plant hunter and all around Seeker, I look down when I walk, and when I poked around on Great Hill for the first time I saw several fanciful creations of time and wind and weather!

A Dinosaur foot!

A Sundial.

A Starfish-

Perhaps some forms are elemental and recurring. Even eons after extinction. In the desire of human kind to tell time. In the tidal flats of the sea-

Everyone Loves Fried Chicken!

The dog and I walked at Edwin Warner Park early yesterday morning. People had had a picnic at one of the covered sheds the day before.

Someone small left their shoes-

And in the trash bins, fried chicken still sent its aroma out over the park, and new picnickers appeared, some just there for the food, and others for a game of beach ball.

And some for private conversation-

This is the closest I have ever come to Black Vultures. They were not shy. And they have pearly white legs!

Bug Hunt

To the American cockroach, Amazon Prime is the Quantas, the Acela ,that widens their world. Secreted in cardboard, they are invited into the best of homes, and they disembark with joy, and learn to hide at the first human screams.

In come the exterminators, the traps, the boxes of Borax.

Yet they persist.

Even in places that should be pristine, they skitter the halls at night. A few years back, when I worked at a rehab place down town, I would cross the skybridge over Charlotte at night to get dinner at the esteemed cafeteria at the Baptist hospital. One night as I was waiting for the elevator to dining, while I was contemplating a giant crack in the hospital's marble floor, I saw the King of Cockroaches out in the open. He was at least 3 inches long, and he was fast, but I was younger then,  and I gave him a fatal stomp. Perhaps his descendants fear that I will come back one night, with vengeance. But I do not go downtown anymore. Now any one who lived in the last half of the last century, if they worked in hospitals, must have heard the jokes about the huge roaches at Cook County (Or was it Bellevue? With urban legends, who knows?) These cockroaches were faster then the tube systems, and more reliable, and the hospital drafted them to carry specimens to the lab, at speed!

Now, I will even buy hairpins from Amazon, and the postman and UPS are always at the door. The possibilities for cockroaches in my apartment are enticing. I am a reluctant dishwasher, the dog does not always finish off his kibble, and there is debris everywhere .

How safe they must feel!  I stalk them with neither slipper, nor rolled up newspaper.But when I see one ,I know that I will find his carcass on the floor in the morning, and his death costs me no more than several thousands of dollars a year in litter and Tasty Treasures canned cat food, and hair balls vomited on my imported cotton tablecloth from Provence.

For I have a small indoor pride of half-breed Siamese cats, and they are as terrifying to me as they are to the roaches, since their two pursuits are the nightly Bug Hunt and the smashing of antique olive dishes.

To the roaches they are as fatal and relentless as the lions of Tsavo.  The pride hunts at night, and when I go into the kitchen ,I will see them crouched and waiting, for they have sensed something under the stove, and they will not be deterred.

I find the cracked brown cockroach in the morning, Doubtless the Siamese would prefer field mice, but the mice do not dare come through these walls. To the cats the mice would be as desirable as an antelope, but they must settle for baby jackals instead.

The nightly Bug Hunt is not only for cockroaches. The weatherstripping on my foyer door is not perfect, and the cats will wait on the cool tile, watching for June Bugs that bumble in under the door, seeking light.

And their pursuit of bugs is even more adventurous when they start going aerial, and chasing flies.
These cats always get their bug.

The moral of this is that cats are the best bug exterminators known. Get one or two. The cockroaches will be destroyed.

As will your sofa, your books, and your apartment-

Penny Books

A penny is close to free,which is why I buy books on Amazon, where older cookbooks and out of fashion fiction can be had cheaply.

But since the bookseller must make a profit,even the most slender sized paperback costs $3.99 to ship,which brings a penny book up to four bucks even. I do not know what book rate shipping costs,but I do know it cannot be much, and one is not paying for speedy delivery. Penny books, and even not a penny books from third party sellers, ship on turtle time, and after a while one can feel like the young Ronnie Howard character in "The Music Man" awaiting the Wells Fargo wagon-

I could pay 11.99 and get my book shipped "free" on Amazon Prime, but a book is not an emergency ration. I should be able to wait. If I am inpatient I can track the order, and be comforted that three days ago the book landed in Little Rock, though no one knows where it is now.

Amazon Prime delivers in two days. Except when they don't, In November I ordered a cookbook about cast iron skillet baking. Two days later, according to my mailman, the book was in the mailbox.
But it wasn't. Not that day, not that week,not that month. I kept calling the post office, that most passive aggressive of government entities, and gave up after they told me to file a report. I suspected that my mailman had tossed the book into a ditch rather than deliver it to a deadbeat who was constantly receiving certified threat letters from the IRS.

One month to the day the cookbook had been stuffed into a phantom mailbox, the book showed up at my door. I guess that exonerates my mailman,who I really think should be grateful that he spends his days having something to deliver,since we all now know that Amazon is the only thing keeping the USPS in business.

Back to the difference between penny and free-

One can find free books in the discard bins at Mackay books, but who wants 20 year old math textbooks?

Estate and yard sales do not dare charge more than two or three dollars a book,so great is their horror at the prospect of the unsold-

And junk shops! One would think books one stop away from the landfill would be reasonable. Yet the other day, at The Little Thrift Shop here in Bellevue, a shop that is a towering pile of unknowable junk, they would not budge on a slightly mildewed copy of Ackroyd's 5 pound biography of Charles Dickens. " It cost me a dollar a pound,though they threw in the mold for free-