Gardening in July

Sunday, July 23

     If it were just a simple matter of having fresh, tasty, organically grown vegetables, I'd have given up gardening several years ago, when the co-op and the farmers' market started selling a wide variety of locally grown produce, just a fifteen-minute walk from home. Last night, for example, the leeks that Kate got at the farmers' market tasted as earthy and fresh as the ones I've grown in recent years. And the flat green beans we had from our own garden didn't upstage the leeks, even though I'd carefully dressed them with a light coating of olive oil, a sprinkling of marjoram, a squeeze of fresh lime juice, a twist of grated pepper, and a dash of salt. That austere dressing balanced the intense Creole vinaigrette on the leeks and artichoke, and together they provided a fitting accompaniment to the charcoal grilled swordfish.
     But when we were sitting in the gazebo last night, dining on the fish and leeks and the beans and the cucumber salad and the beet salad, it was a special pleasure to look out at the vegetable garden just a few feet away and behold the row of plants from which I'd harvested those beans.


Carl H. Klaus, My Vegetable Love: A Journal of the Growing Season

Ragbrai Week

RAGBRAI - XXI, 1993

     This was the year of the flood, the summer that Des Moines went 12 days without tap water.
     Fortunately, we had chosen a northern route that year that avoided the worst hit areas of the state -- Sioux City to Dubuque, with overnight stops at Sheldon, Emmetsburg, Clarion, Osage, Decorah and Manchester. At one time, we had considered ending the ride that year in Muscatine. Good thing we didn't, because the riverfront ending area in Muscatine was still under water at the end of July.
     As it was, the mud in the cornfields was one of the memories everyone took away from the 1993 ride. That and the areas of washouts. It was something to look down on the way to Emmetsburg and find a two-foot dropoff where only weeks before there had been a solid shoulder.


John Karras and Ann Karras, Ragbrai: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong

Scarth Art Exhibit at the UIHC

If you're in the Iowa City area, come over to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics to see art by Robert and Linda Scarth, photographers of Deep Nature: Photographs from Iowa! Their photos will be in the PVAC Gallery 1 wall on the 8th floor of the Colloton Pavillion in the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics on July 25.

Ragbrai Week

     The main feature of the next year's ride in 1985, of course, was the astoundingly large horde of cyclists that rode out of Hawarden on the way to Clinton. Benson was quoted as saying that that was the first year any applicants for the ride had been turned away, but methinks he dissembled because he later said that everyone who applied got tags, and there had to be at least 10,000 cyclists on the road out of Hawarden.
     And with that number, we finally got the answer to a question that had been haunting us from the start: What happens if this ride gets too big?
     We'd imagined all sorts of things -- towns running out of food, water, toilet paper, patience -- but had never even considered the real answer, which was: There was hardly any room on the road to ride. It was wheel to wheel for the first three days. By Tuesday, I wanted to go home, but by the end of that day the cyclists, displaying more wisdom than all of the RAGBRAI managers put together, had spread out on the road and relaxed.


John Karras and Ann Karras, Ragbrai: Everyone Pronounces It Wrong