A big thank you to Sally and Summer Silverman. They stopped by my vegetable garden on Sunday and gifted me with two beautiful Korean garlic bulbs. I had not even thought about checking my garlic crop. It seems early for it but, sure enough, I harvested that very day. Because it has been so dry, they are not as large as I would have hoped. Nonetheless, Marie and I made up for the size in quantity. We have enough for winter use and then some.

If I hadn’t been so busy this past couple of weeks I would have had a chance to read my friend Abigail Higgins’s column about picking garlic earlier. As usual, she is in the know.

I seeded some purple top turnips in the spring into a couple of flats. I never bothered transplanting them properly. Instead I flopped the entire flat right side up on the top of a garden bed. I don’t even think I managed to pile dirt around the edges. Nature is so forgiving. I have been harvesting perfectly clean larger-than-golfball-sized turnips for weeks now. They are actually growing on top of the ground.

On the other hand, the eggplants I carefully tended are just pathetic. I started them on a propagating mat, drove them to my friend Marie’s house for a few weeks under grow lights, took them on another road trip to Charlene Douglas’s greenhouse, and finally planted them out with fertilizer and prepared soil. They have bugs and some are barely bigger than transplant size. It goes to show, sometimes things are simply meant to be regardless of our control or the lack thereof.

For years I have read about beneficial nematodes. I chose to ignore them or think they magically appeared in my soil. Leave it to Marie ... she went online researching and ordered us three containers of them. Each one has about seven million of the little critters.

They are microscopic and feed on the larvae of Japanese beetles, striped cucumber beetles, and corn ear worm. We certainly will provide meals for them. We stored them in the refrigerator until we had the garden thoroughly wet.

After warming them to about 60 degrees, we mixed them into a slurry of water and metromix. We wandered around placing sloppy handfuls of the mixture under mulch. We were laughing that each handful was home to thousands. One can only hope that it was not in vain. Guess we won’t know until next year when we make entirely subjective observation of our pest population.

Speaking of thoroughly wet, is that even possible? I have spent the entire past week on my job sites hauling hoses around. These are places with fancy irrigation systems. No matter, they simply cannot give enough water to satisfy the needs of all the plant growth. Remember, the larger the plant the more moisture will evaporate.

If one more person says we’ve had plenty of rain last month I’m going to have him put his index finger into the soil. I have total compassion for our ancestors who lived through the dust bowl situation in the thirties. I could never live in the desert Southwest. I need rain and green around me.

There, I have sufficiently whined and complained about something over which I have no control. I have to once again quote Will Rogers concerning the weather. “Everyone’s talking about it but no one is doing anything about it.”

Sarah Palin has a new follower. I have been following the policy positions of Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for the Nevada Senate seat of Harry Reid. How she is even a consideration is beyond me. I will be mentioning her in the upcoming weeks. She advocates abolishing the 16th Amendment, which established the federal income tax. Let’s see, that will cost the government $935.8 billion in individual tax and $156.7 billion in corporate tax. She has no plan to raise that money elsewhere. Harry Reid is so unpopular she may actually win. Have mercy!