Coming home with food

Last week we got the garden back under control. Then it rained (and rained and rained). The good news is things are growing. The bad news, it’s a weedy mess out there. I hoed and hand weeded the sweet potato patch as best I could, but the mud made it a bit challenging. There is, as always, more work to be done.

The best part of my evening gardening was being able to come home with food for the first time this season. Two straightneck squash, one zucchini, one white onion, one head of romaine lettuce and a cup full of snow peas. May the summer of garden veggies commence!

Residents of the Pink Palace Mansion

Here’s my latest post on the Pink Palace blog. I love my job.

palacesocial's avatarThe Pink Palace Family of Museums

Clarence Saunders never lived in his pink Georgia marble mansion. In fact, he went bankrupt while the mansion was being built, and the unfinished building was given to the City of Memphis in 1926. Saunders never lived in the mansion, but over the museum’s history a couple of people have called the mansion—at least a few rooms of it—home.

The first was Julia Cummins, the original superintendent of the Memphis Museum of Natural History and Industrial Arts from 1929-1950. Ms. Cummins did not particularly like children and felt that the museum should be like a library. She had museum porters carry “no talking” signs. However, she did have a parrot. While he was painting the murals in the lobby in 1934 (oral history, 1984), artist Burton Callicott noted that the bird “would talk and make noises and just reverberate over the whole lobby.”

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The second resident was Mrs. Ruth Bush…

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Baby Bingo

I’m pretty much willing to do anything to build up my kid’s library. Without overstating it, I think reading is magic. It has been a constant in my life, from my leisure activity to a huge component of what I do for a living. I read for fun, I read for work, and I read anything. I have preferences, but I really will read anything as my list of what I read last year and this year so far can attest. Reading is something that I want to pass on to my child, but it isn’t something that I want to force. You can’t force someone to like to read any more than you can force a homebody to enjoy Beale Street. They might make outward signs of compliance, but it won’t stick. We read to our baby everyday in the hopes that he will grow up equating reading with comfort and happiness. Even if he isn’t quite as rapacious as his mother, I hope that he will know the pleasures of a good book.

Part of that challenge is making sure that he has lots to choose from. I know it doesn’t matter too much right this minute, but before I know it, he will have preferences and express them (loudly if heredity has anything to do with it). When that day comes, I want him to have a fully stocked bookshelf that can take him wherever it is he wants to go. He is signed up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, one of the most generous and effective nonprofit enterprises I have come across. We did the Wheaties family challenge last fall and got him some books for when he is a bit older. In that spirit, we are doing the Memphis Public Library’s Baby Bingo program. The library does great summer reading programs–I’m actually doing the Explore Memphis program for adults–and the bingo card is the part of the program for infants and toddlers. Each time we get a bingo, we’re entered into the end of summer drawing for a gift card. When we fill up the card, he gets a free board book.

A free book for something we are already going to do anyway? Win.

You can sign up at the children’s desk at any Memphis library branch.

Raised Beds

Back in March, our friends Chris, Patrick and Claire helped us construct raised beds on the side of our house. Our neighborhood is full of mature trees, which makes it both beautiful and shady. The only place that gets consistent sunlight is the south side of the house. When we moved in, that area was planted with bushes that really didn’t do anything for me. It’s not that they were terribly ugly, but they were not adding anything to the space. We decided to make the investment in raised beds because 1) we wanted them, 2) they are a productive use of the area, and 3) it would provide a place to grow greens in the spring and overwintering crops like garlic that we can’t do at the big garden because of the rules.

Chris runs GrowMemphis and knows a whole heck of a lot about raised bed gardening. (Side note–he and Claire are making their dream of being small farmers a reality later this year when they take over his family’s farmland. I’ll miss them being down the street, but it is amazing to watch them make their farm a reality.) Claire and Patrick know a lot about gardening too and were willing to give up a Saturday afternoon to help us construct the beds with nothing but spaghetti and beer for payment. We have fantastic people in our lives.

The actual construction was on the guys because we used railroad ties (courtesy of Bob’s Tie Yard, seriously), which are heavy. They had to cut some of the ties in half to make the ends. The stacked ties are reinforced on the sides with rebar to keep them in place. One bed is tall and comes up to my waist. The other one is only one tie high and is the one that is planted with asparagus. Two weeks later, Patrick and Chris came back over and helped us get the manure and soil in place. Chris knows some horse owners in the Bartlett area who are happy to have someone take manure off of their hands. We put a layer down in the tall bed to act as fertilizer. The rest of the square footage was filled with cotton burr compost.

This spring, we had arugula, spinach, two types of lettuce, beets, radishes, carrots, swiss chard and peas in the tall bed. The peas straight up died, and only half of the radishes made actual bulbs. The carrots and beets are still in the ground with plans to pull them up this weekend. The arugula and spinach were delicious additions to our salads for the past month. The plants bolted so I planted a tomatillo and black cherry tomato plant in their place. The swiss chard is quite tasty, and we will be eating our second harvest of it for dinner tomorrow night. Once I pull up the carrots and beets, I will plant two more tomato plants and basil in their place. Next fall/spring, I’m definitely going to stick with growing greens and lettuces in that bed.

Cost–High

Labor–High

Impact–High

Mostly planted

While Greg worked from home and dealt with the air conditioning situation, I spent two hours weeding the plot. Last week was Italian Fest, and the days we had planned on working the garden were rainy messes. That means weeds.

Greg spent two and a half hours tilling and weeding yesterday so I followed up with a precision attack around the vegetables. I stopped by Lowe’s on the way home and realized that the window to get plant starts is rapidly closing. So I got an acorn squash, pattypan squash, tomatoes (pink brandywine, celebrity, better boy), edamame, hot banana peppers & Anaheim peppers. It’s supposed to rain the next five days so we went back out for an hour after dinner to plant. We also got okra, purple hull peas and seven hills of slicing cucumbers in.

We messed with the baby boy’s schedule to get the plants in the ground. Suffice it to say, he was not amused. The only way to get him to stop crying out of extreme tiredness was to sing him his favorite lullaby. Loudly. The other gardeners got a concert out of the situation. Hopefully, this will be one of the last times we take him out there.

Memphis Milano at The Dixon

Our air conditioner appears to be circling the drain. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that our house is very warm and the last thing I wanted to do was spend the heat of the day in our many square foot oven.

The baby and I took advantage of Dixon Gallery and Gardens’ pay what you can day to go and see the Memphis Milano exhibit. The pieces in the show all come from the personal collection of a Memphian, and the 1980s furniture is fun but not exactly functional. They are full of bold colors and patterns and combinations of various geometric shapes.

The exhibit is well laid out with the first gallery being chronological and the subsequent ones being thematic. My favorite touch was the use of one of the geometric prints along all of the door frames. It really tied the galleries together visually.

If the baby was a few years older, we would have had a blast in the participatory gallery that gave families the opportunity to “experience” the 80s. I wish I could have dressed him up in the blue jean vest, but he was not feeling it.

I wish I had had more time to read the text, but kid was hungry. My main criticism is that they included wall text in the first gallery that told the major events in each year the Memphis design group was active. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but they used the same technique in last year’s contemporary Memphis art exhibit. It felt recycled.

Overall, I enjoyed the exhibit. I don’t care much about furniture usually, but the Dixon and the Memphis group made me think about it differently, which is basically the point of museums. At least to me.

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On mud…

Italian Fest turned into a mud pit by Friday afternoon. Really smelly mud. Because of the downpour, we didn’t serve nearly as many people as we normally do. About 175. So we have lots of gravy left over. It was fun and a bit weird to be there with my baby. The kid rocked some noise canceling headphones for a chunk of the weekend, which was adorable. DJ NJ. Greg and I also got to have a date on Friday night to watch Star & Micey and Paul Thorn–both bands I really enjoy. Stream of consciousness, brought to you by my sleepy, slightly mud self.

On celebrating Italy

This week is Italian Fest week. In other words, one of my favorite, exhausting, spectacular family traditions. For as long as I can remember, my family–grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, siblings–comes together as Rome(r), Italy (my mom’s maiden name is Romer). We set up shop in a couple of tents at Marquette Park and spend days spending time together and with friends who pass through.

On Friday, we will serve spaghetti to over 150 friends. We will have a few drinks and listen to music. For us, Friday is an accomplishment and a way to share our good fortune with the people we care about. Greg and I cooked up our quadruple batch of my grandmother’s recipe yesterday afternoon.

Of course, Saturday is the cooking competition. We take turns cooking for that so that no one needs to worry about it every year. We haven’t made the finals in over a decade, but that’s a bit beside the point. It would be fun to win, but it’s also fun to spend time together.

My relationship with the festival has changed over time, but for my entire life, the festival is what my family does the last weekend in May. We spend time together, cook, eat and laugh.

I love it.

And we aren’t even Italian.