Good Things List No.75: Summer Vegetable Garden Lessons, Good Sunflower Oil, Jadeite Bowls, Book Reviews and More

A monthly list of good things to see, buy, read and watch.

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Happy August! The month when half (three-quarters?) of the country goes back to school and the other half continues on with summer until September (that would be us here in the west!).

Which has always been weird from a media standpoint – all the back to school advertisements start 6-8 weeks before we go back to school. Want to go shopping for a bathing suit or tank top in August? Good luck – hopefully they will have your size on clearance, lol.

All that to say – it’s still fully summer where we are and the garden is finally producing it’s summer bounty (I waited all July…). That, too, seems behind much of the country. August and September are the prime preserving months for me here in western Oregon and I’m ready with my lids, canner, and freezer baggies!

With that in mind, I thought I’d share what my vegetable garden looks like this first week of August, some things I’ve learned and a couple of fails – and I’d love to hear about what you’re harvesting and anything you’ve learned this season, too.

I’m also sharing about High Oleic Sunflower Oil – my favorite when I need a stable oil with a high smoke point that costs less than avocado oil – with the truth about it (yes, it’s a good option and not an “industrial oil” when you buy the right kind) and a few different options.

Plus, the pretty nesting bowl set I bought, six book reviews, and a couple of cute movies I saw this month.

Let’s get to it!

Good Things

Late July Vegetable Garden

Grape Arbor: I’ve learned a few new things after growing table grapes for a number of years (always something new to learn, right?).

First, see how the vine I let grow along the top of the fence is LOADED with grapes? This is the first year I’ve done this after a reader mentioned getting more of a harvest on side trained vines vs. arbor trained. Guess that’s true!

The second thing is I’ve noticed the birds just hang out in the shaded arbor leaves – they fly off every time I walk by. AND the grape clusters in the arbor area have lots of missing grapes, even though they aren’t ripe. So they’re just hanging out and snacking!

I still love a grape arbor – the look and the shade – but now I’ll prioritize growing side vines and making sure the arbor has only one vine when we prune.

The Long Narrow Beds: These beds always grow tomatoes, pole beans, cucumbers, and peas. I alternate the two bed sections each year, but that’s about it for rotation (Charles Dowding questions whether a strict 4 year rotation is needed for vegetables in no-dig gardens and has been conducting trials).

The tomatoes don’t look as bushy as years past, but I did start harvesting paste and cherry size tomatoes the end of July, which is pretty normal. (Oh, see the holes in my red plastic mulch? That’s from the ground squirrels – they bite and tear it up for some reason! Here’s how to grow tomatoes and why I use red mulch).

Sadly the ground squirrels (California ground squirrels are apparently the type in our area) have eaten all the leaves from my row of cucumber plants. I tried to cover them with chicken wire and they just used it as a ladder to climb up to get to the top of the vines!

They were eating the lower pole beans as they were starting to grow, but the beans have started producing, thankfully! I’m growing Emerite (of course), Fortex, and yellow Monte Gusto – all filet style pole beans. That means there are NO strings ever and you can harvest them small and thin or let them grow larger and they’re still tender. I never grow any other kind!

Rectangular Beds: The peppers in the farthest bed (and largest hoop structure) have been producing for weeks! They love being grown under their perforated plastic hoop house (the ends are open all summer).

One of the best things I did this year was to cover all the growing beds with insect netting after removing the spring row covers (remember how you can grow clean -and larger- broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower by growing under cover?), even beds I haven’t typically covered, like lettuces. I did it to thwart the ground squirrels, but have benefitted from super clean produce! No flea beetles, green worms, white flies, or aphids. I do have slug damage, but not as much.

The other great thing that has worked out has been the shade cloth over the lettuce bed (it’s not as big as the netting, so I just added it on top). Believe it or not, I’m still harvesting good lettuce from the second June sowing – it hasn’t bolted much and is still sweet (the variety is Merveille des Quatre Saisons).

It’s not as pretty to look at, but the benefits make up for it.

I’ve had two big fails though:

• For the first time ever, the broccoli I started from seed never produced a head and only a handful of small shoots from 4 plants. It’s bizarre, as they look healthy and haven’t bolted.
• And I’ve tried TWO seedings of carrots, one in April and one the end of June and I have exactly 5 carrots to show for them both. All the watering and covering with cardboard and whatnot have not produced any more. Ugh. Thankful for Costco’s inexpensive organic carrots, lol.

And I’ve decided to remove the center clematis from this round rock wall bed after many years – it’s just too big and literally shadows plants that need sunlight. I’ll be able to grow a lot more things here I think!

Yes, There Is a Good Sunflower Oil

I get asked a lot about the type of oil to use in recipes like 100% whole wheat sandwich bread, vegetable fritters and more, so I thought I’d tell you about my favorite oil for high heat recipes and baking, which is often vilified, or at least grouped in with the vilified “industrial oils” category.

First, it’s great to use a variety of non-industrial oils when you need oil because they each have different types of fats that we need and balance is a good thing.

And each has a different smoke point which makes them more or less appropriate for some cooking techniques than others:

• Olive Oil. I typically use olive oil for no cook applications like salad dressings and only low-heat sauté recipes where you may sauté veggies for a few minutes before adding other ingredients like this corn, pepper, and onion sauté, since it’s smoke point is 350-430 degrees for extra virgin olive oil. Using olive oil beyond it’s smoke point actually creates toxins and trans fat.
• Avocado Oil. I like this for higher heat recipes like stir fries – it’s smoke point is 520 degrees and the flavor is more neutral than olive oil. However, it’s kind of expensive.
• Coconut Oil. I use this sparingly for a couple of reasons. First, the best kind, unrefined virgin coconut oil, has a distinct coconut flavor that I just don’t want in many foods. Second is that it’s smoke point is just 350 degrees and it’s solid at room temperature, so if I need a liquid, I have to melt it. I tend to use this mainly in place of butter when I need the recipe to be dairy free.

Which leads to my most used oil after olive oil: High Oleic Sunflower Oil.

This article explains that there are THREE different kinds of sunflower oil – and the oil that is used in processed and ultra processed foods listed as “sunflower oil” is the least healthy kind (high-linoleic sunflower oil). This is the kind that is lumped in with classic industrial oils like corn and canola.

What we want is high oleic sunflower oil, of which most are expeller pressed (or cold pressed), meaning they weren’t pressed using chemicals, but manually (machine).

The inexpensive Trader Joe’s version of high oleic sunflower oil pictured above used to say “expeller pressed” on the label – I’m not sure if it was removed to have a simpler name or if it’s pressed a different way, but this food education site says it is expeller pressed.

Here are a few other quality sunflower oil options that are expeller pressed: Whole Food High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Spectrum Naturals High Heat Sunflower Oil, and La Tourangelle, Organic High Oleic Sunflower Oil.

In the end, I encourage you to really think about rhetoric people just spout over and over without backing. I’ve never bought the idea that sunflower seeds – which I can see and taste the oil in – is anything like getting oil from corn, or other grains like canola/rapeseed where no oil is visibly present. Because that didn’t make sense, I started looking into it and found out that, no, in fact, they aren’t the same.

I hope this has been helpful to your understanding of it, too!

Jadeite Nesting Bowls (new)

I got the cutest set of jadeite nesting bowls this month and I love them. They coordinate with a few of other jadeite ceramics I have, and most importantly replace a bowl that got broken that I used SO much for salads and side dishes.

The nesting set was a bit of a splurge for me, but I saw that I’d pay this much or more for just ONE vintage jadeite bowl, so I went for it. And I’m not sorry, lol.

July Books Read

I just noticed that this cover collage is all over the place, genre-wise! Historical fiction, Sci-Fi, Thriller, Romance, and a Literary Retelling – what can I say, different moods call for different genres, ha! At least there’s something for everyone!

James: A Novel, Percival Everette. I love a good literary retelling – emphasis on good. And I thought this retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the character Jim’s perspective was good, though in the end not amazing. First of all, the author kept the setting, voice, and feel of the original book – I was transported back in time. Second, I appreciated the fresh look at Jim and his fellow slaves – they are wary and scared of whites and how they are treated, but they are much more educated and knowledgable than they let on. To the point that the children are “taught” how to speak in an ignorant manner so that the whites keep up the opinion they have of blacks and everyone stays “safe.” It put a different spin on the book and Jim’s interactions with Huck Finn. That said, the book did bog down in a couple places for me and was more violent than I had thought, with a more violent non-ending where we don’t know what happens to James.

Rogue Protocol, Murderbot Diaries 3, Martha Wells. Brian and I continued listening to this sci-fi series about the self-proclaimed “murderbot” told from it’s perspective in diary form. We love the humor and sarcasm, as well as the well-told stories. This quote pretty much sums up the vibe from the “SecUnit” (security unit):

“I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.”

In this third novella, our hero (ha!) heads to a failed terraform station looking for evidence against the corporation that employed it in book 1. It wants to just watch media soap operas, but gets pulled into drama as the humans it hitched a ride with start fighting with themselves and then fighting three combat bots. He triumph’s in the end, naturally. Next up is #4!

Before We Were Yours, Lisa Wingate. Many readers have recommended this book to me as a lover of historical fiction. I have to admit I put it off for a long time because I knew the content would be hard (kidnapping and child abuse). Once I started listening, those flashbacks were my least favorite parts – they are just as hard as I imagined them to be. I enjoyed the present day mystery and other storylines much more, unsurprisingly. This book tells the story of siblings in the 1930s who were being raised on the river as ‘boat people.’ When their mother has to go to the hospital, they are taken from their boat, lied to, and housed in a terrible orphanage. The woman who ran this whole operation of taking children and selling them to desperate childless parents is based on a true story. The woman was heralded as the inventor of modern adoption and her terrible methods that resulted in abuse and even a number of deaths didn’t come to light for many years. It’s a sad story of our history.

Just For The Summer, Abby Jimenez. Well, after that I definitely needed a light romance to cleanse my reading palate, ha! This book tells the story of two people who make a “deal” to date for a summer, but of course you know where that is going. This author often has some heavy topics and this is right up there, featuring child neglect, depression and mental illness. Even with that, the banter between the hero and heroine is funny and sweet and fairly realistic. It’s not something that will stick with me a long time, but it was a fun, quick read. (It is open door, but with few scenes that were easy to skip.)

Eruption, Micheal Crichton and James Patterson. This was a book Brian and I listened to together and Brian was pretty excited about it as a big Crichton fan. Sadly, it’s just not a very good book. The characters are shallow and widely drawn (sometimes to the point of caricature), the dialog is terrible (and I’m being kind here…), and the plot not very believable – especially the ending. The worst, though, is the narrator of the audiobook, Scott Brick (who I previously had heard was good…) – he literally makes everything people say WAY overdramatized. Like everyone is either about to cry or blow their top. We pushed through to the end, but it was painful, lol.

The One With The Kiss Cam, Cindy Steel. I was in the mood for another light romance and this one was a bit silly, but also entertaining with good humor and a relatable story. The heroine has issues with trust and boundaries and she’s trying so hard but can never really get ahead. The hero brings fun and adventure to her life and consistently shows up. There was fun banter and teasing moments between them even while they go through individual struggles, both personally and with family. A sweet closed door romance.

Watching

The Long Game, Netflix. Brian and I loved this golf story of a Mexican high school team in the 1950s in Texas (yes, lots of prejudice and racism), based on a true story. Very sweet and inspiring.

Fly Me To The Moon, Theater. I saw this with my mom and we both thought it was really cute! Just a lighthearted movie that pokes fun at marketing, selling, and the idea that the moon landing isn’t real. There was very little swearing, no violence, and just a chaste kiss – the rest of the movie focused on telling the actual story (what a concept – no long, drawn out chase scenes 😂). Really recommend if you’re looking for a movie like this to see!

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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