Posts under ‘Steve’

Two weeks ago, I took a trip to Des Moines to visit a new friend, an Iowa gardener whose garden makes mine look, well, silly. From flowers to vegetables to trees to herbs, abundance surrounds her home, evidence of hours of hard work and an incredible understanding of plants and how they work together. When [...]

Pull up a chair, won’t you? I need to tell you what’s on my mind this morning. First of all, it got up to 89 degrees in Iowa City yesterday. Eighty-nine degrees. And it’s supposed to get up there again today. Does that sound like October weather to any of you? No, it does not. [...]

After we brought in the vegetables on Tuesday night, Steve asked me if we could turn up the heat. “Are all the storm windows down?” he asked. “It’s freezing in here.” “None of them are down,” I said. “It’s going to get warm again and we’re going to have to put them back up. Just [...]

I discovered, while reading a couple of my fellow Iowa garden bloggers this morning, that I ought to check the weather forecast. They both mentioned the frost warning for tonight, and while there had been a significant drop in temperature between when I left for Chicago on Sunday morning and when I returned Monday night, [...]

While I was visiting my parents, I subjected them to the full praying mantis slideshow. Trust me, what I posted to the blog was but a sliver of what is fully available. Me plus digital camera plus my first mantis? Oh, there are serious pictures. But my mother didn’t agree that this was the first. [...]

After we released the praying mantis into the garden, I looked to see where it had gone. My digital camera has a cool focus beam that, quite honestly, comes more in handy as a tool to annoy people than an actual helpful focusing tool, but I discovered it also works well as a flashlight when [...]

I’m back in Iowa after eight days of travel, moving from friends’ house to friends’ house, checking out gardens and kids and all kinds of things that grow. I returned to rain, and snuck out back to the garden between showers to see how things were growing. “I think the season’s pretty much over,” Steve [...]

As I drove through town, the mantis scrabbled at the side of the cup. Steve peered in through the hole in the top of the lid. “Is he OK?” “He’s fine,” Steve said. I drove faster anyway. I, for one, try to limit my amount of time in a week-old coffee cup, and I was [...]

After we re-located the praying mantis, we began the process of, well, relocating it. Steve set his briefcase on the bank’s windowsill. “Maybe I could take my computer out…” “We can’t put him in your briefcase,” I said. “He’ll get smooshed.” “Pocket?” Steve looked down into his shirt’s breast pocket. “Will he stay in there?” [...]

Back when I found my first tomato hornworm, my buddy Cole posted a comment about a praying mantis she found in her house. “We watched him for a while in the grass and then he/she hopped away,” she said. “I don’t know how he got on top of our water cooler in our kitchen, though…” [...]