Charlene Teglia

I planted Sumter Cucumbers what seems like a very long time ago but was only six weeks thinking that it would be neat to make my own pickles.

Then after 6 weeks of watering and fighting crab grass, all of a sudden there are future pickles ready to pick and process. Time to learn HOW to do this pickling thing.

I read several recipes from Preserving Food Without Canning Or Freezing and online, and in the end I kind of made up my own recipe to test out the process.

I started with a 16 oz. pickle jar with screw on lid that I'd washed and saved, a handful of our own wee cukes and half a large cucumber from the farmer's market sliced into rounds. Those filled the jar, and I also put in two generous sprigs of fresh dill (from the garden), one in the bottom and one on top. I boiled 1/2 cup of white vinegar, then stirred in 1 Tablespoon salt and 3 Tablespoons of sugar until it dissolved, let it cool a bit, poured the liquid into the jar, and added a mix of 1/2 water, 1/2 vinegar until the jar was full and all the cukes were covered. Screwed on lid, put in fridge for 24 hours.

The result? Amazingly good. Truly amazingly good. Refrigerator pickles are apparently good for about 2 months but I don't think mine are going to last a week so not worried about the shelf life.

Nom. Also? If I'd known it was this easy I'd have started making my own pickles a long time ago. The whole process took maybe 5 minutes. It also used less than $1 in ingredients so significant savings involved over a jar of store pickles. But forget the money, the TASTE is the point here. I'd better make another jar of these so it can marinate the 24 hours we spend devouring the first batch.

The garden grew up all of a sudden. You can see a whole set of pictures at the 6 week mark on Flickr. The child provides some sense of scale, she's over 4 feet tall. Herbs and greens are ready for harvesting, there are a lot of green tomatoes on the vines, and we've been picking cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini with a whole lot of other stuff right behind that. There are tiny acorn and butternut squashes developing, and tiny cantaloupe and honeydew melons. Not yet for watermelon, but I live in hope.

On to cake! Same child who helped in the garden wanted to make cake. We decided to make the
Pioneer Woman's Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Ever, printed the recipe off and headed to the kitchen.

The cake is delicious, but if you're an inexperienced baker you should watch a couple of issues. The pan size isn't specified, so you have to watch the baking time closely. Also, she says to use ungreased; I greased mine and it still stuck a bit. Yes, even with all that butter in there. Your mileage may vary, but I say grease that sucker. You might even flour it for good measure.

Also, the amount of butter. It calls for a pound between the cake and frosting. I cut the butter, powdered sugar and milk in the frosting in half and it still made plenty to cover the cake. And while the cake was good, if I made it again I'd reduce the butter in the cake by half, too, and make up the difference with applesauce. Again, your mileage may vary and sometimes maybe you need to eat cake with a pound of butter. Who am I to judge?

Every once in awhile (not often enough) I go through my files and clean things out. And I find things like this:

"I'm
having second thoughts about the wedding."

“Good,”
said Jean. She pushed back her chair and stretched around behind
herself to grab a sugar packet from the table, tore it apart like she
was imagining the groom’s head and neck between her hands, and
dumped the contents into her cup. She stirred vigorously. “Dump
that wedding. Or let me do it for you. It’ll be my pleasure.”

“I’m
not sure I should. Business has been slow, and we need the money.”

“Speak
for yourself.” Jean sipped caffeine and sugar and eyed me
suspiciously. “Is there something you aren’t telling me? Did
the rent go up? I can pay for my own coffee. We can’t possibly be
so broke that we need this wedding.”

“
The
rent didn’t go up.” I quit stalling and came clean. “It just
didn’t get paid last month. This wedding will put us in the black,
and we don’t have any other events coming up before Valentine’s
Day. We need this wedding.”

“
Trust
me, nobody needs this wedding. Including the bride and groom, except
maybe they deserve each other.” Jean nodded sharply as if agreeing
with herself.

She
had a point. I agreed with her myself. But I have trouble sleeping
when the rent doesn’t get paid. I lay awake imagining scenarios
that end with me trying to fluff up my pillow in a cardboard box in a
dark alley, a blanket of newspapers failing to block out the cold
night air. Homeless. Hopeless. Bankrupt and ruined. Better to
suck it up and coordinate my ex-fiance’s wedding, collect the cash
(I didn’t trust him to write me a check), and pay the bills before
that alley became my reality.

“We
need this wedding,” I repeated. I read somewhere that repeating
your point is assertive. I might be the older sister, but Jean is
the assertive one. I need all the help I can get.

“You
know, if we have to stoop to doing this wedding to keep from losing
our home, maybe we should move.” Jean put her coffee down and gave
me a serious look. “We don’t need that much space.”

Hey, at least it gave me a blog entry. Have you cleaned out your files lately? Also, everything gets screwed up now when I copy/paste which is why the formatting above looks like that. Will have to get around to fixing that. When I'm done cleaning out the files.

Weeding is one of those jobs that is trickier than it seems on the surface. You would think it's straight manual labor, but in fact you have to have some knowledge to do it; you have to know a weed from a cultivated plant, and you have to know how to get the root. Otherwise you pull up the plants you want, keep the ones you don't, and weeds return stronger and more entrenched because their root system has deepened and spread, making them harder to eliminate.

I get frequent questions about publishing and agents. Surprisingly I don't get many questions about writing. People want to know what agents and publishers want, and sometimes I start to answer these questions and then I realize: why bother? They didn't do their homework before they asked me. If they won't read what agents and publishers themselves say they want, why would they read what I say?

But I will say this: the process of writing a book and getting it published is an awful lot like growing a garden. What you don't know will work against you, and your ignorance can cause you to root out the things that matter. So first do your homework and gain some knowledge. Know a weed that's choking your story from the seed you should be nurturing.

Once you learn that, you will recognize an editor or agent who knows what you should root up and what you should keep, and the ones who don't. You want to work with the former. You don't want to work with the latter. The people you work with will have enormous impact on your career and reputation so choose them carefully; the wrong choices can plow your career under before it ever has a chance to produce a harvest.

Above all, keep doing your homework. And have the discipline to root out your own weeds when you discover them.

Not tagging anybody, but play if you want to! Copy the q's, write your
answers.



1) What author do you own the most books by? Terry Pratchett and Anne
McCaffrey battle for dominion.

2) What book do you own the most copies of? The Lord of the Rings
series. Yes, I am a sucker for matching sets with cool cover art.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
No. "Correctness" shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of sounding
clear and authentic.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Miles
Vorkosigan. Shut up.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding
picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?
Excluding Goodnight Moon which I have read five million times, probably A
Wrinkle in Time.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? A Wrinkle in
Time, Madeleine L'Engle.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year? I'm not going to
answer that. Sorry. Professional conflict.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would
it be? "Of Men and Numbers" by Jane Muir. It will revolutionize the way
you see math.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature? I'd vote
for Barbara Kingsolver.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie? Oh, I'd love
to see any of the Vorkosigan novels made into a movie. The Warriors
Apprentice, ramming a space station? Wheee! Peter Jackson should direct
it.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie? I'm trying
to think of something really impossible to translate into visuals, here,
but with current technology I think anything can be done.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary
character. That would be a dream about one of my own books; many years
ago I'd been asked to rewrite Love and Rockets, before it was published
and won the RT Award, minus the hero because the interested editor hated
him. I tried and tried to think of how it could be done and still save
the story; then I had a dream in which the lead singer of Green Day sang
the lyrics "wasting your time" (Sassafrass Roots) to me, over and over.
I got the message; it was a wrong direction and wouldn't work. Love and
Rockets was published many years later with the hero by an editor who
loved him, and it turned out well. Thank you, Green Day, for your
nocturnal assistance.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult? I am the
queen of lowbrow. My forehead drags the ground when it comes to
literature. (I'm not trying to duck the question, but what's more lowbrow: Cherry Poptart comics? Bimbos of the Death Sun? Slaves of the Volcano God? Read and liked all as an adult.)

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read? Oh, God. That
would be Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. My eye is twitching just
thinking about reading it.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen? Are any of
them obscure? But probably the most fun version I ever saw was A
Midsummer Night's Dream set to the Beattle's music with 60s costumes.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians? For literature? I can't
believe you're even asking this. The only Russian writer I can recommend
is Bulgakov. Go France.

18) Roth or Updike? Neither. Please.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? Why are you torturing me this way?
Stop.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot? Eliot.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? I
didn't read Science and Civilization in China until I was nearly 30, and
it really changed my view of history. Everybody should read at least
the single volume version in high school. (The extended version is a
long series of books but is well worth the time.)

23) What is your favorite novel? William Kotzwinkle's Swimmer in the
Secret Sea. Short but powerful.

24) Play? Much Ado About Nothing.

25) Poem? All of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats".

26) Essay? The one Montaigne wrote about loving your works, however
badly they came out, the way a parent loves a deformed child. Can't
remember the title but you really can't go wrong with any of Montaigne's
essays. Still, that one especially speaks to all writers.

27) Short story? Robert Heinlein, And He Built a Crooked House. About a
mad mathematician who built a house on a tesserect.

28) Work of nonfiction? The Way Things Work by David MacAulay.

29) Who is your favorite writer? I can't have just one favorite. I have
favorites for all categories.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today? That question can't be
answered for at least another 20 years. Nobody can guess what
literature will stand the test of time. Some of the authors we consider
classic today were considered hacks by their generation.

31) What is your desert island book? Probably The Way Things Work. So I
can build what I need to survive until I can get off the island.

32) And ... what are you reading right now? Preserving Food Without
Freezing or Canning by the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante.

It's the 4th of July. Happy birthday, America. If news of the Gulf oil spill is getting you down, here are 5 things you can do to be part of a green American revolution and give us all the gift of a less petroleum-dependent future.

1. Ditch your petroleum-based laundry detergent for a plant-based alternative. The eco-friendly detergent does cost more, but you can actually save money by making your own using plant-based castile soap.

2. Put up a clothesline and use it whenever weather permits. Clothes dryers are a significant percentage of home power usage.

3. Drive less; combine errands to do them all at once, carpool.

4. Dig up some lawn and plant a garden. Growing some of your own food is not only good exercise and gives you better-tasting veggies, it reduces the petroleum-heavy system of transporting food from growers to markets across the country. Supplement by buying direct from local farmers and farmer's markets.

5. Use organic fertilizer on your garden instead of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers. Not only does that reduce petroleum usage, it reduces the toxic runoff that created a
dead zone in the Gulf long before the BP oil spill hit.

Petroleum is in all sorts of common products you wouldn't expect, so become a more aware consumer. Anybody can make a few changes, anywhere they live, to help give the country a birthday present of a better future. If everybody did a little, the result would truly be revolutionary.

I was talking to my kids this morning about the fact that we don't know what the world they'll grow up to will look like, but we know it won't look like ours.

I grew up with weekly trips to the big branch library and using card catalogs to do research; library funding has been slashed all over, hours reduced, fewer books. The internet has somewhat replaced that, except for the freely circulating books. Project Gutenberg is a great resource, but not the same as a large well-stocked library. I don't know what the library equivalent of the future will be, but I don't see a return to the past coming.

I grew up with constant news of recessions and budget cuts, but there was never any question that schools could afford to operate buses. Now distract after distract is doing away with student transportation; they can't afford it. And that's on top of other drastic cuts. What will the future of school look like? I think adding more virtual public schools is the obvious answer; no need for transportation, fewer teachers, janitors administrators required, fewer buildings to maintain. In the meantime, I predict a huge upsurge in home schooling and private distance learning.

Will more people telecommute? Oddly, telecommuting seems to be losing favor right when it makes more economic sense than ever. But it offers the same savings to businesses that virtual schooling offers school districts.

Basically I see a shift to local and individual efforts. More individual accountability, more local involvement. The job force is already following the trend back to small businesses, self-employment, contract workers instead of employees.

None of this is bad, necessarily, just different. If we have to be more conservative in our habits, if we have to do more ourselves, we become more capable. Capability builds confidence. I think the world of tomorrow may be a very interesting, vital, connected and inventive place as individuals find ways to replace systems that have become unsustainable with new solutions. 

What will the future look like? Imagine. And then start building it.

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My garden. It is a little, well, wild. There's crabgrass between the rows, which I am slowly but surely rooting out. This makes it resemble a teenage boy in need of a haircut putting up a determined fight at the suggestion that a trim might be needed. My garden does not look like those pristine pictures you see in garden magazine layouts.

But I love it. And despite the crabgrass and the marauding deer, it's producing tasty greens and radishes and strawberries, and the flowers say that soon we'll have squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, corn, eggplant. The sunflowers might recover from being eaten by hooved hoodlums, too.

I love it despite the imperfections because it has reminded me of something important; that a garden doesn't have to look like something out of a magazine to be effective.

For the first time since I took up the habit at age 12, I'm not writing daily. I've been doing this for two reasons. One, I want to communicate and if I don't have anything worth saying, I don't want to spew words just to make noise. And two, I have promised myself I will never force myself to write again.

So now I have to strike a balance between writing at the expense at the rest of my life and my creativity, and getting into a habit of not writing. I need to practice the discipline without using it as a stick to beat myself with. 

I think a gentle way to do this is to make sure that at some point each day, I take uninterrupted time to sit down and write. No quotas. No "this many words" or "for this length of time". No "no matter what else is happening". The discipline is for my creative benefit, not my detriment.

Maybe some days I will find I have nothing to say. That's okay. Maybe some days I will find that instead of spewing words, words, words, I need to listen to what the story is trying to be or to mean. Writing may need to take the form of being quiet sometimes. Maybe instead of writing a scene, I will close my eyes and imagine the scene, with all my senses.

I don't think it matters, as long as I check in with the writing daily and do my best to participate in the process.

Yesterday we visited a local farmer's market (yes, we're lucky enough to have more than one nearby) and found new potatoes, peas, onions, apples, cucumbers. Our garden is beginning to produce but while we wait for things to ripen, it's wonderful to benefit from gardens that started earlier with a greenhouse, cold frame or grow tunnel.

Visiting farmer's markets is one of the best parts of summer. So much more fun than going to a store, and so many offerings; we buy handmade natural soap from one stall and Amish baked goods from another. (I don't bake much in the summer; I try to keep the oven off.)

Then we came home and I sat in the gazebo with the kids and taught them to shell peas. They were enthralled, and even the cat came to watch and chase the occasional runaway pea. Shelling peas and snapping beans are great excuses to sit and watch the sights of summer, a chance to relax in between bouts of weeding and picking in the garden.

It's fun to watch the garden to grow, to see what other gardens are producing, to have fresh flowers in the house as various things come into bloom and stalk the nearby woods for ripe blackberries. Summer is full of timeless pursuits that carry over from generation to generation.

Croquet on the lawn, backyard badminton, stealing a juicy strawberry from the garden, shelling peas to have for dinner with onions and new potatoes roasted on the outdoor grill. Campfires and cookouts. The sound of lawnmowers and the smell of freshly cut grass. Summer is a feast for the senses and many summer pastimes are free or very inexpensive. And watching your kids shell peas for you? Priceless.