How Does Your Garden Grow Part 5

I've been avoiding this...but I realize you have been waiting anxiously for the next installment so here it is.
A miserable failure thus far! Leave it to me to pick THE hottest, THE driest, record setting summer EVER to try to grow a garden and blog about it to boot.

Simply put my garden is a

fruitless

woolly mess

...and it is freaking me out just a little because it's growing these weird looking alien-like appendages

I saw nothing remotely like this in

Ed's "Vegetable Gardner's Bible".

To date I have harvested the following:

• A plethora of radish and eggplant(one I don't like and the other I don't know what to do with)
• One very small basket of yellow squash
• Two cantaloupe
• A handful of tomatoes
• No beans
• No cucumbers
• No bell peppers

• A swarm of grasshopper

• One very nice sized rabbit

• and three unexpected skunks

So I am cutting my losses and my water bill, waving the white flag....

But wait!

1. The weatherman says Oklahoma has not recorded 100 degree days after August.
2. We have had several days of rain lately.

3. I spotted a nice looking bloom on the cantaloupe vine and the tomato plants are still living. 

I'll give it just one more month....

Besides, the grass in the alley has never looked so good!!

Just a Small Town Girl

Here's why I will forever be a small town girl

In a small town......

we honor those who gave us our freedom and continue doing so everyday

We have parades with horses

and dogs

                           and little league baseball teams

and old men in funny hats driving clown cars.......

but it's all good!!

In a small town girls can wear cowboy boots
 

Girls in shorts can 

Little Girls can

and even girls in a tutu can wear cowboy boots.....

and it's all good!!

The town has a main street and even a town square. There are barber shops for swapping stories, predictin' the weather and debating politics!

Now even I have to admit that an outhouse is a bit unusual!


But I love a small town... where folks wave at one another or bring a casserole when you've lost a loved one. 

A place where you can hear the whistle of a train in the still of the night.



Reading + Reality

  I recently had a unique opportunity to visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina.... the setting of several of my favorite books.  I was worried that the towns and scenery I pictured in my mind would be so different from reality that I would be dissapointed....I was so NOT dissapointed, but rather over the moon! 

Can't you just see Scarlett and Rhett?

While on the Outer Banks of North Carolina I saw places  that just had to be where the author was standing when they wrote the books...

  "The Beach House" by Mary Alice Monroe

"One Summer" by David Baldacci  

and "Summer Rental" by Mary Kay Andrews all came to mind.

How about the big three from Nicholas Sparks:

"Safe Haven"

"Nights in Rodanthe"

(don't cry)

 "Message In A Bottle"

The scenery, sites and smells truley made me feel I was part of the book "Folly Beach: A Lowcountry Tale" by Dorthea Benton Frank while staying there.

It was a surreal experience for which I am extremely gratful.

Now I think now I will shift my reading preference to books that take place in Paris, Italy, France........