Around the Town: This, that and a plant sale

Loretta Humble

By Loretta Humble/Around the Town

Here I am with another non-health column.

Here’s the deal: I’m still a part of the Around the Town column, but now usually Kristi or somebody else who is around the town more than I am writes it.

This week Kristi has a lot going on-more about that later-so I figured I could write something to take the space. I did and then discovered Pat Isaacson had sent one in last week that didn’t get printed yet. Well, we have been begging Pat for weeks to write more, so we really didn’t want to discourage her. So here I am with a sort of timely column in hand, and I don’t have another one for here written, and besides I know probably half of you get tired of me ranting about the dangers of sugar every week even though it is a very important message. So what is a person to do?

Make excuses, I say, and send what I wrote. So here it is.

Greetings:

Kristi couldn’t make it this week. She is busy playing musical houses and stores. She sold her house so she could buy more stuff downtown, then moved upstairs in that wonderful Margado building on Mitchum Street, then as soon as she got sort of moved in there, she got a chance to get a little house in the country at a price she could afford and still pay for her buildings downtown. At the same time she is moving Rusty Circus from the place she has been renting, all of two doors down to a building she owns. Now I’m saying this like she is doing all of this by herself so you will understand why she couldn’t come up with a column this week, but her husband Brandon is right there with her every step of the way. Brandon is a wonder. He can fix stuff and build stuff, and he is as gung-ho about Malakoff as Kristi is. And he can weld really good sculptures, and he also is a first-rate musician. And he is also a really nice guy.

So they are both rather busy at the moment, and a little frazzled, moving from one home they had just moved into to a different one in just a matter of weeks, at the same time they are moving the store. And Brandon is still busily remodeling both (I know he’s managed to get something like this skip bin hire sydney or, in this case, dumpsters at each site for all the waste that must be accumulating, so at least it’s all going to be properly taken care of). So I believe it may have been the last straw for the column when they walked into their new house today and found a trespasser: a doped up young woman who it turned out was wanted by the police in New Mexico. When Kristi told me this I told her she had the makings of a column for next week. Now I’m using it. But I’ll bet she will still have some stuff to tell us about it.

Here I am filling Kristi’s spot and I haven’t even got my Living Well column done yet.

I’ve been busy with garden matters all week. Partly with my own garden, which is doing very nicely, thank you. Best I’ve ever had. We’ve already had zucchini, yellow squash, Swiss Chard, green onions, and I peeked under a potato vine and saw a little pink potato. And I picked about six English peas today. I spend a lot of time with it and my flower garden which would be beautiful if the caterpillars hadn’t eaten up all my roses. That reminds me, I should probably think in more detail about getting some materials to build a decking. I know that you can get them from somewhere similar to https://www.dinodecking.co.uk/ but I need to find one in my local area to see if this can help stop the caterpillars getting to my garden if it has been placed on a slightly higher platform. If not, a decking might look good in my garden space anyway, so we’ll have to see. At least I’m making a bit of progress. But the other gardening thing this week was getting ready for and then working at the Master Gardener’s Annual Plant Sale. It turned out great, and I am just one of many who just about worked themselves to death to make it happen. Both sellers and buyers had a great time visiting while the shopping was going on. Worker’s weren’t allowed to buy anything until the sale closed at 2:00 but by then just about everything had been sold.

I need to tell you one more time, if you have time on your hands and love gardening, you should definitely consider signing up for the next Master Gardener’s class. These are the greatest folks you would ever want to meet. Quite a few of them who live right here around us. Five or six of them live on one short street here in Malakoff, and two more of us live down towards Cross Roads, and there are several more scattered around pretty close. (Okay, some of us are just Interns so far, but we are on our way.) You learn a lot in class, then you learn a lot from the other members. Plus, everybody gives everybody plants all the time. And you get a great big book that you can look up anything about gardening you ever need to know.

There are, as you would expect, more women than men. But there are quite a few men, and not nerdy men at all, but smart, friendly, men who laugh a lot and who are totally serious about their gardens. So if you are a guy who loves to garden but thinks he wouldn’t fit in, forget it. You would love it.

I’m going to post some links to the Henderson County Master Gardener’s Facebook page on Living Well, and maybe some other information about the Master Gardener program so you can take a look and see if Master Gardeners are calling your name.