Good Things List No.96: Spring Garden, New Hoses, Gratefulness, Books Read & More

Good things to do, buy, read, and watch: catching up on the spring garden, moving to a new soaker hose, plus book reviews and a documentary I’m still thinking about.

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And just like that we’re into one of my favorite months of the year! May brings so many things to enjoy – blossoms, first garden produce, planting, new shoots everywhere, family time at Mother’s Day, lots of birthdays (including mine!), and ending with the unofficial start of summer, Memorial Day.

This year it’s also seeing us fly to another country for a two week vacation and hopefully getting the floor installed on our side porch so we can usher in the summer in a new space.

I hope this month finds you doing some things you enjoy and that this list of good things may help you find something to add to your own list!

Good Things List

Spring Gardening Catch-Up

Um, yes, I do love seeing the new greenhouse full of seedlings. It’s been a joy to go in there and pot up and plan. You can see I’m not into “Pinterest worthy” greenhouse interiors right now, plainly utilitarian and I’m loving it.

Most of the seedlings you see I started from seed (my daughter helped me when I had a cast on from my broken wrist – see more below) but I had a lot of failures this year and NONE of the hot peppers seeds sprouted, which has never happened before. Almost all the sweet peppers did, though. So weird. No matter how long you garden (30+ years for me!), there is always something new.

The last week of April I took a couple hours each day to get one bed planted and covered with row cover (I use this in the spring, then switch to insect netting when it gets warmer).

We use pvc pipe inserted into metal brackets (the kind that hold pipes) attached to the insides of the raised beds we made to make the hoops. Our beds are covered all the time now to keep the ground squirrels from eating the food and digging out the seedlings.

(And no, I haven’t gotten a chance to apply a new layer of cardboard and wood chips, why do you ask?)

This is inside the bed pictured above right after planting. You can see the seedlings of broccoli, lettuce, and cabbage are small – it’s what I’m working with after the late start. However, after learning from Charles Dowding the last couple of years, it seems okay as he always puts his seedlings out small like this.

New Soaker Hoses

Over the years of this blog (since 2009!), I have gone on about preferring soaker hoses to finicky drip systems. They are just so easy to use and snake through beds, changing them each year as needed for different plant arrangements, especially in vegetable beds (and especially using this easy irrigation system).

However, the last couple of years the regular rubber soaker hoses just haven’t been working well for me. Last year I did a test in the spring of all the hoses and kept all the rubber hoses that worked well. By the heat of July those same hoses were NOT working anymore and hardly any water seeped out of the hose! It’s like the heat closed up the tiny holes of the old rubber or something. Sigh.

So I’m replacing all my old rubber soakers with the newer cloth-type soaker hoses. They won’t last as long if left out each year (lets be honest, I’m not removing 20+ muddy hoses in the fall while plants are still big and in the way), but they will work all the way up until then (I’ve been using them in some flower beds for a few years). The bonus is that they are much easier to snake through the beds and adjust as needed.

Healing & Full Use of Arm

I’ve only mentioned a couple times that I broke my wrist in mid-February (tripping onto a beam in a friend’s house construction area, sigh), but I wanted to take a minute to just say what a good thing it’s been to have the cast off and the healing going well! I’m so grateful to the ER doctors who knew how to do a reduction (it’s a crazy thing with weights and pulleys) that allowed me to avoid surgery. And to my orthopedist who gave me the no-surgery option with some “manipulation” (maybe another word for torture? Lol). I am now over a month out of the cast and can do almost all the things I did before with just residual weakness (and a bit of tenderness, especially if I’m lifting weights). Definitely a good thing!

April Books Read

Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, Stephanie Barron. Even though it’s an older book (1996 hardback, 2008 paperback), I hadn’t heard about this Jane Austen mystery before and I loved it – it may make my best-of list! The author writes it as entries from a “discovered” journal of Jane’s when she was visiting friends and a suspicious death happened (before being a published author). The voice, tone, and actions are all similar to Jane’s writing and the story was pretty believable. Apparently there are a lot of books that continue this series, so I’m looking forward to diving into more of them.

Nobody will Tell You This But Me: A true (as told to me) story, Bess Kalb. This is a memoir of the author’s grandmother and mother written as if it’s “told” to her granddaughter (Ms. Kalb) in her grandmother’s voice – after the grandmother’s death. She uses all the voice mails her grandmother left her to illustrate the force that she was in her life. I didn’t realize until halfway through that Bess Kalb is a comedy writer for Jimmy Kimmel (when she talked about getting the job). It’s an interesting concept for a book and her family’s Jewish history is often amazing (coming over with no money on a ship, making it rich in real estate, etc.), but it didn’t grab me like I thought it would – and it didn’t really ever strike me as humorous.

Fever, Mary Beth Keanne. This is a historical novel based on the life of Typhoid Mary at the turn of the 20th century and told from her point of view (I apparently enjoyed older books this month – this is from 2013). I found it fascinating, both the history of it and how it humanizes Mary Mallon and illustrates the shocking way they treated her at times. Medically, it was a time that most people didn’t even know what bacteria was, let alone that they could be ‘silent carriers’ so you really sympathize with Mary who was forcibly removed from her place of employment and home and given no way to make a living like she had (she was a chef, really, making wonderful food by most accounts). In the years after there were many other carriers identified, but none where “detained” (i.e., imprisoned) for years but Mary. Some current reviews of the case wonder if it was because she was Irish and a woman. Sadly, she died alone in the tiny house built for her on an island in New York after years of being held.

George and Francis Roll the Dice, Dianne Freeman, narrated by Sarah Zimmerman (Countess of Harleigh Book 7.5). I was thrilled to discover two new books in this series I read last year – this short novella and the full length novel below. I especially enjoy these as audiobooks with Sarah Zimmerman as the narrator – she does such a good job here. This is a fun short book that shares the honeymoon that George and Francis finally get to take in France, which is their first time alone, really, since marrying (Francis has a daughter and George a ward). Of course, they don’t really get that relaxing vacation as there is a gambling venue at their house and then a murder. It’s fun to see more of their relationship and how they continue to work together to solve mysteries.

A Daughter’s Guide to Mothers and Murder, Dianne Freeman (Countess of Harleigh 8). This is the most recent full-length installment of the Countess of Harleigh Mysteries this time set in Paris during the world exhibition and one of the first Olympic Games, 1900. (I learned through this that most people didn’t even know the games were going on – quite a change from now.) This was the first book in the series that I pretty much knew what was happening from the beginning – there were quite a lot of clues thrown about – but I still really enjoyed it. The characters are interesting, the setting is really fun (with some theater and even Sarah Bernhardt thrown in), and I always like just imagining how people might have lived in a different time (cars were new and so we’re shown just how harrowing it was for women, and their hats, to ride in open-topped cars for the first time). I’ll definitely read the next book if there is one in the series. (Oh, and I found this delightful story of how the author got the first book in this series published.)

The Maid’s Secret, Nita Prose. I finally got a chance to read the most recent book in the Molly the Maid series and thoroughly enjoyed being back in the sweet, charming world of Molly who is neurodivergent and takes her work and friends very seriously. There are many references to things and people from the first books, so you probably need to read the books as a series. This story is about the Faberge egg we learned about in the second book – when it’s found to be the real thing on a televised Antique Roadshow type of show and Molly becomes a star and possibly rich. Of course things don’t progress as they should and there is a mystery to solve, as well as a wedding to plan and a journal to find. The storyline flips back and forth to Molly’s grandmother’s time and present time, which explained more and helped us understand other things from previous books even. Always a fun read for me.

Watching

The Social Dilemma, Netflix. I had heard a lot about this 2020 documentary and thought it would just be the perils of social media on society. But it goes more in depth and behind the scenes to share what the people creating all the platforms were thinking, which is shocking. Even more shocking is the data they have on us and how they use it to manipulate us to go down rabbit holes to BUY. AND this was 5 years ago – think of what they have on us now. Ugh – makes you want to spend more time reading books, lol.

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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