Good Things List No.85: Late Spring Garden, Affordable Walking Pad, 6 Book Reviews and More
A monthly list of good things to see, buy, read and watch. In this month’s list we’re talking about the state of my spring garden and projects we’ve completed, a surprisingly sturdy walking pad for less, six books reviewed and one of the first theater movies we’ve seen in awhile.
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It’s June and the beginning of summer, which is my favorite season here in the PNW (I grant you that might not be the case if I lived in Arizona with their streaks of 100 degree days!). We’re already getting days of sunshine, blue skies, and temperatures in the 70s – perfection.
Now if our wind would just die down. It’s been so strong the past few days (25 mph) that it’s snapping the new shoots and tiny starts of grape clusters off our grape vine. Thankfully they are pretty hardy and should produce more to take their place.
I hope you enjoyed May – I spent it planting, mulching, grilling and eating outdoors for the first time this season, and celebrating my birthday with a special dinner with our kids in Portland.
Here’s to good things for June!
Good Things List
Late Spring Garden
This time in the garden is pretty perfect, isn’t it? Things are planted and growing looking lush and healthy. The plants haven’t had to endure heat waves or bugs yet and the harvests are starting to come on strong – we had a salad yesterday of garden lettuce, beets, onions, spinach, and peas topped with pork and feta cheese.
Pictured above is the main vegetable garden with it’s beds covered with insect netting (the taller hoop house is covered with perforated plastic, which is how I grown peppers here to get them fully-colored-ripe). I switched over from row cover cloth to the insect netting about a week ago when our night temperatures were consistently 45-50 and daytime temps were in the 70s.
While I started covering the raised beds all season to protect the produce from ground squirrels (who have decimated a bed overnight, leaving only the stems on everything from kale to carrots!), I’ve learned that insect netting allows me to grow almost perfect produce with hardly any bug holes. AND I’ve grown brassicas under cover for years to keep it from the cabbage moths and aphids (the ONLY way to get clean broccoli, in my experience).
This is the insect cloth I use – it’s pretty heavy duty and easily lasts a number of years. It’s 10 feet wide which fits perfectly over the hoops of my 4-ft wide beds (8 feet wide wouldn’t be big enough to hold down with rocks).
We completed a couple of garden projects in May – the first was dismantling the broken concrete patio I had created when we first moved here years ago. We used it a lot the first few years since we didn’t have another place to hang out outside, but now that we have a firepit and a gravel dining area closer to the house we didn’t use this patio anymore.
I also learned in those years that our deer eat almost everything but some perennial herbs and the only thing that 100% deters them is a fence. So this fenced vegetable garden is now a prime spot for growing more food and flowers.
Brian helped me break up the concrete pieces (we had filled the gaps with concrete – read all the details on how to create a patio from broken concrete here) and I moved a literal 1.5 tons of cement plus a lot of gravel with a wheelbarrow out of the garden. Yes I felt it very much the next few days, ha!
And now we have a new, long bed that’s since been planted with corn, potatoes, and summer squash. I’m loving this and hope we can keep our squirrels from the corn so we can actually harvest some!
We also built a simple deer-netting and t-post fence around the fruit trees which finally allowed us to free the trees from their little circles of wire (we used this 750-pound heavy duty fence). Not only did the individual wire enclosures inhibit growth (and the deer ate anything that poked through, creating column-shaped trees for some), they also made it impossible to weed and feed inside the circle and it was difficult to harvest.
I’m so grateful to have this deer protected space now! Our fruit trees can grow freely and we now have more room to plant other fruits. I’ve already planted a couple of blueberries that were given to us and I have plans to add mulberries and more blueberries.
I thought I’d share an update of our berry patch in it’s chicken wire enclosure. It’s working really well and we have a lot of berry leaf growth, though not many flowers or green berries.
The bed on the far right held black raspberries that died, sadly. A friend gave me starts of yellow raspberries, which I love, so I’m excited to add those to the mix.
Affordable Walking Pad
Have you heard about small, more portable walking pads? They are like mini treadmills that only use walking speeds. Some are bigger with handles that you can use at higher speeds, I think, but the main idea of a walking pad is to use it at a desk or something to add more movement to your day.
Since I spend so much time on the computer and am looking to get more movement in my days, I started researching walking pads and realized they run from $100 all the way to $1500+. I narrowed it down to basic, classic walking pads that could fit under a desk and not be so heavy that you couldn’t move it, which fell into the lower end of the prices.
In the end I settled for this inexpensive walking pad that has surprised me with it’s sturdiness, quality, and how smooth it runs. While it’s a little heavier than I thought, it has wheels on the front so I can lift it on the back end and wheel it into a closet when I’m done. It comes with a remote to easily change the speed while walking and to pause it.
So – am I using it at my desk like I’ve seen others doing? Well, I totally forgot that I get motion sickness if I try to read in the car and found that even doing easy tasks like photo editing while walking made me so nauseous that it took an entire day to feel normal again! (Just looking at it sitting under my desk would make start to feel sick!) So, plan B: I took it upstairs and now use it to break up my days with 10-15 minute walks while listening to an audiobook or webinar. And it’s working great this way!
May Books Read
The Frozen River, Ariel Lawson. You’ll be seeing this historical drama/thriller about a midwife in 1790’s New England on my best books list this year – it captivated me! It’s got the historically accurate details I love along with a based-on-a-real-person midwife to admire and a storyline that’s gripping and well-told. We learn about women’s rights (and lack thereof), daily life, childbearing experiences, and more, all centered around a body found in the river at the beginning of a hard winter. Besides the mystery, hearing about how the law worked during the early years of our nation is also very interesting.
Be Ready When The Luck Happens, Ina Garten. I’m sure like me you’ve heard a lot about this book. I waited for months for the audiobook from the library to be able to hear Ina tell her story and it was…okay. I mean, interesting for sure and some stories were really fun (traveling through Europe as young marrieds in a camper with little money – I don’t think I’d be that brave!), but overall I was saddened to hear how much time she spent on her business even though it mean she and her husband had to live apart. And then constantly talking about what they could and couldn’t afford…while living in the Hamptons (!), entertaining constantly, and buying businesses. I just didn’t connect at that point anymore (of course that’s completely my bias, and it seems judgy – I know that you can always feel like you don’t have enough money, but a lot times in our country it seems to be a mindset when you actually do have enough).
Art Lovers Guide to Paris and Murder, Dianne Freeman. This is one of my favorite historical “cozy mystery” series newest installment set in Paris during the 1900 World’s Fair. I always suggest listening to the audiobooks of this series because I love the narrator – she really brings the heroine to life. This one includes a murder that looks like an accident in a crowd of people and involves family and interesting secondary characters. If you haven’t listened to this series yet, you are in for a treat!
The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory, Thomas Fuller. Brian and I listened to this account of a California all-deaf high school’s 8-man football team that goes from many losing seasons to an undefeated season. It’s not only uplifting and heartwarming, but it also shines a light on the deaf community and the disadvantages and advantages they have in playing sports like this. We learn about the boys on the team and their stories and how that all wove into the the success on the field. Highly recommend.
Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, Emily Nussbaum. This is a fascinating book about the history of reality TV which starts all the way back in the radio era with “candid microphone” – which became Candid Camera on TV. There were sections I had to share with Brian they were so interesting, like the game shows of Chuck Berry. The Survivor origin story is particularly gripping – both the contestants AND the crew literally starved the first season as they were woefully unprepared and underfunded. I did skip though the last section of the Bachelor and Housewives era…these have never been my thing. But the historical television I remember from my kid’s point of view was super compelling reading (though I do NOT remember some of the suggestive/lewd questions from the Newlywed Game, ha!).
Big Dumb Eyes, Nate Bargatze. Brian and I will watch, listen, and now read anything Nate puts out – we love his humor and his point of view. In this book he not only tells funny stories like you’d expect, but he also includes some really heartwarming tales about his family and growing up. This is a fun one to listen to with others so you can laugh and talk about it.
Watching
The Accountant 2, Theater. This was the first movie we’ve even been slightly interested in going to see for months. It seems the theaters are ruled by horror and gross themes now, sigh. We had thought The Accountant was good and this sequel was a fine movie – it’s violent (but not like Deadpool or John Wick), but the autistic lead makes for an interesting movie.
We also followed up listening to Lonesome Dove by watching the 1989 mini-series. It was okay – I was surprised how dated it seemed (the filming techniques especially). It was fun seeing the town and cattle drive brought to life, though.
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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