by James Glaser
September 19, 2003

Every day now I see the chipmunks and squirrels running around grabbing anything edible and taking it off to their nest. I am doing that too, but some times I find that I am second in line. Something has been in the green house eating my tomatoes. It isn't like a outside garden where animals run around taking a bite out of everything, what ever is in the green house is taking one whole meal off of one tomato each night. They eat everything except for a little ring of fruit around the stem.

What ever animal is doing this is pretty polite, because it is only taking one a night and I am still getting about twenty tomatoes each day, more than enough for Charmaine and I. There is a old wood boat out in the yard that I made into a planter. It is perfect for my watermelons (Minnesota Midget) and muskmelons. I have been very good about watering these plants and I put on lots of "compost tea" which made the vines really take off. In August I started taking off new blooms in hopes of getting bigger melons and that was working just fine, until something ate every muskmelon, but one. They left the watermelons alone, now I have visions of a much bigger greenhouse.

My sister Jean, gave me some raspberry plants last year and this year they have taken off. Right now they are producing again with berries the size of a nickel. Two crops a year is nice. I will be tying up the canes in a week, so the snow doesn't break them.

Last week some friends called to say that their grapes were just perfect and if I wanted I could come over and pick them. The clumps of grapes were all filled out and any day now the birds will be working them over. These vines climb up a tree, maybe fifty feet, so I left plenty for the birds to eat. Right now those grapes are on the stove and will be this winter's jelly. At the beginning of the summer it looked like a great year for chokecherries and plums, however a late frost took them all and I had to pick plums in town and the are no chokecherries this year.

Looking at the flower gardens now tells us we have some work to do. They look great all the way from early spring with the tulips of every color and they stay looking good all the way through August, We still have a lot of Black-eyed Susans and many daisy type flowers and then I have some blue flowers that keep blooming all year, but we lack any bright colors this time of year. I think we need some Mums and Zinnias. We didn't plant any Snapdragons this year and if you dead head them they keep producing until the first frost.

Hey, if the gardens were all perfect we would not have anything to do. We want to move some of the lilies as they are too crowed now and we have some rock gardens we are going to expand. To expand a rock garden you just roll all the rocks out one turn, The soil is black under them and you only have to add a few rocks to fill in the gaps.

I like these Friday columns because they let me know how great life up here is. The seasons seem to keep going by faster, but that's OK. I now find that I like every one of them. It was hard before I had the workshop done, but now I work on projects inside if it is too cold or wet outside.

So I guess I have to get out of the summer mode and start thinking about fall. I am starting to get like that old man you always think of, that has a place for everything and everything has its place. That can only happen if you stay in the same place long enough. People that constantly move never get to that point, maybe never get unpacked. If we could get rid of our extra "stuff" we would have a lot more room for the things we actually use.

Either I am a lot slower than that old man, or I'm not that old yet. That's it, I'm really not that old yet, so I don't have everything right yet. Sure would be nice if I could, before I get old.

POST SCRIPT DEATHS IN IRAQ

I really don't like writing this part of the column. These Soldier's deaths are going to end this war. Someday President Bush will wake up to the fact that our Soldiers are getting killed for him. We already got rid of Saddam, found out there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, and most Americans know Iraq is going to be a sink hole for our money and our troops.

George wants some sort of total victory, but he doesn't know what that will take. If we keep having one Soldier die each day and ten wounded, soon the whole country will tell him, ENOUGH! At the rate we are going, we will have 400 Americans killed in action and four thousand will have been wounded by election day. Hope some one tells the President that.

Remember President Bush has never seen an American soldier killed or wounded in combat. He has no real idea of what it is to fight a war. He is asking others to pay a price he was not willing pay.

An American spokesman said that three Soldiers were killed and two wounded in an ambush near Tikrit, Iraq

In another report, three American Soldiers were reported killed earlier Thursday in an attack in the town of Khaldiyah, Iraq.