She made a raspberry galette
Pastry and fruit
And not a thing more
There was no custard and no cream
Cuz it was too hot
To go to the store

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You can give the Forest Service $5 and get a permit to go into a National Forest area that needs thinning and cut your own tree, with hand tools, or you can give them $25 and they will do all the work.

( I chose the $25 option )

My library twin's holds this week are
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. duBois
A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
The Deficit Myth, by Stephanie Kelton
The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet, by Leah Thomas

( her holds )
I love her. We should be friends. I do not know whether she feels the same way about me: My holds this week were Red Moon, by Kim Stanley Robinson, and the movie Free Guy.

I built squirrel-baffling cages around several of my pumpkins this year, and I count it a success:



I got eight pumpkins, they got three, plus many unripe ones. And they got a few of my acorn squashes. Last year, I don't think they recognized the acorn squash as food. I thought maybe they learned to eat pumpkin from smelling jack-o-lanterns that had already been cut open for them, but they didn't realize that the other squashes were similar. But this year they attacked both.

For the cages, I stuck an odd number of stakes around each little green pumpkin and wove grapevine around the stakes until the pumpkin was hidden. It wouldn't stop a determined squirrel, but maybe it looked like a squirrel trap, or maybe it just made it enough harder to get that the squirrels were deflected to easier pickings. (My compost piles are full of easier pickings.)

Next year I'm going to make as many grapevine baskets as I can, to hide all my squash under.

Nixie and I went to Spring Creek gardens to look at the bonsai exhibit. ( one bonsai photo )

Then we walked around some of the gardens, and found another art exhibit: ( dead tree )
I didn't plan the juxtaposition of the tree's curls and my daughter's, but I like it!

This artist finds an interesting dead tree, and pares and burns it down to its strongest and most interesting part. There were some-teen of them in the gardens but we only found a couple.

My rhubarb has decided that this is a year for flowering:

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Dutch is the most Allie Brosh dog I've ever had.

( illustrative pics )