Karl G. Buder of Vineyard Haven, a member of Good Shepherd Parish on the Vineyard, is one of 13 men scheduled for ordination to the permanent diaconate for service in the Fall River Diocese on Oct. 8.

The service is scheduled for 11 a.m. at Corpus Christi Church in East Sandwich.

Mr. Buder and his fellow candidates have been preparing for their ordination for the past five years.

By KATE J. CONDE

The lead foreman of Vineyard Gardens, Jeremiah Brown, doesn’t mince words about his expertise.

“What I know is pruning,” he said.

He shared his experience with members of the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club at its September meeting by combining a talk and hands-on demonstration on the grounds of the Old Mill in West Tisbury. 

Mr. Brown admitted to starting out his career in horticulture by “knocking out false bamboo in his mother’s garden with a golf club.”

Imagine you have 12 juice-size cups in front of you. Carefully construct a six-cup pyramid in the middle and two three-cup stacks either side. Then, working from right to left, demolish these structures finishing with three perfect cup stacks, and punch the clock.

You just mentally completed what stackers call a 3-6-3. How long did it take? A minute? Thirty seconds . . . 2.6 seconds? Odds are, even in your head, you can’t do it fast enough to beat some of the Island kids who have taken up the sport over the past year.

Temperature: Precip.

Day Max. Min. Inches.

Fº Fº

Sept. 28 80 65 .27

Sept. 29 75 58 .00

Sept. 30 71 50 .00

Oct. 1 68 45 .00

Oct. 2 67 50 .00

Oct. 3 72 59 .00

Oct. 4 73 62 Trace

Water temperature in Edgartown harbor: 71º F.

It’s the great Pumpkin Festival! Anyone who ventures into the growing pumpkin patch at Morning Glory Farm next Saturday, Oct. 13, need only wait until 11 a.m. for sightings of — if not the Great Pumpkin — at least pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin squares and, well, you get the idea.

Nonbelievers, too, can gobble up an Island-grown burger, carve their own Halloween pumpkin, crawl through the hay bale maze, or join the pumpkin tossing competition.

Janette Vanderhoop says she cannot function without caffeine. Her addiction is recent, but, she admits, chai tea in hand, she is worried. Halfway between Aquinnah and the Gazette office in Edgartown, she realized she had not had her morning cup and found herself veering to the other side of the road. She makes a beeline for the coffee shop.

Vineyard summer, with all its last-minute social scramble, is over, and I’m back in New York. I decide it is finally, finally time, after 25 years, to create a new address book. As a member of the pre-computer generation, I had kept my addresses and phone numbers in a black leather notebook on small sheets of lined paper, and in pencil so that I could make erasures and additions and changes. After all these years it was a mess.

A thin crescent moon appears tomorrow morning right above two planets. The moon is right above Venus, the brightest “star” in the East. The ringed-planet Saturn appears underneath Venus. The assembly of three celestial objects will be an impressive sight.

Double Dip

The ice cream cone is soon to become an endangered species on the Vineyard after a long, hot, delicious summer.

From Columbus Day to May, ice cream cones are simply not to be found up-Island or down. Occasionally, one surfaces in a convenience store ice cream freezer, but those are hardly the same. Popsicles, fudgicles, chocolate-covered ice cream bars are quite acceptable from a grocery freezer, but never an ice cream cone. An ice cream cone must be freshly scooped.