[CH] Danceswithcarp

Susan Byers (chilewmn@bluemarble.net)
Mon, 28 Sep 1998 07:25:54 -0500 (EST) 

Thought I would send this to the list for carp, in case he didn't post it
there.
Susan Byers
The Chile Woman

>
>Does anybody know.. or maybe I just missed it..
>what ever happened to
>"Dances with carp"?


I still be here.  I just spent a lovely year teaching in a maximum security
prison (shudder) and now I'm safely esconced ina middle school.  I subbed to
chile heads a few months back but simply didn't have time to email much.
Now I'm still busy, but I eat at least one hot meal a day and still nuture
the chiles in me yard.

The garden this year, on the other hand, was a catastrophe of unprecedented
magnitude.  As Chilewoman must have told you, we suffered over a month of
deluge in May and June.  We found a dry weekend in May and put out the
garden but it was wasted effort.  Out of over 300 hot chiles, maybe 30 or 40
survived.  We're getting enough cayennes to spread on steaks and enough habs
to spice soups, but that's it.  We couldn't even get 3 of any kind together
to put in just one exhibit at the county fair.

Out of 70-80 sweet peppers of various sorts, we got exactly TWO peppers.

Then things turned bad.  Just as the tomatoes really started coming on (40
plants--the rain didn't hurt them a bit; big and full of tomatoes and
luscious foilage) a bevy of groundhogs discovered the patch.  Wow.  We
haven't had a ripened tomato from the garden in a month--there simply aren't
any left, ripe, green or otherwise.  The danged creatures would just gnaw
part of the fruit and then move on to the next one.  So we started picking
the green ones that were only slightly turned in color.

Wrong answer.  The groundhogs would just bite a hole in the bottom of a
green one and wait for the hole to cause it to ripen.  The Head Honcho
Groundhog is this big bruiser we halfway caught in a wire-box trap last
year.  He got out of the trap and now won't go close to one.  He has
communicated his experience to the rest of the crew, so we have no defenses.
The neighbors who allow us to plow their back yard have ruled out gunplay,
so we are at a loss as to a solution.  Next year I will plant moustraps next
to the plants.

Other than that things are peachy-keen.  Jim Campbell sends the occasional
missive telling me what a bumper year it is just 50 miles away, while my
guitar gently weeps.

Maybe this winter I'll have time to resub.  Right now I'm up for re-election
to a small-time post that is about 1/2 of my livelyhood.

Priorities, you see.


carp