Garden Help: Get ready now for spring vegetable planting
Larry Figart
One of the busiest times for gardening questions at the Extension Office is the month of June. Folks are wondering why their vegetables are not growing as they expected. Either they are wilting in the heat or suffering from foliage diseases due to the summer rains.
Unfortunately, the biggest reason for these problems is that the gardener started the spring garden too late. If you want to have homegrown vegetables this spring, now is the time to start getting the garden ready for planting in March for most of the spring crops.
Book review: Essay collection presents Joan Didion at her best
Mims Cushing
Author: Joan Didion
Knopf, 192 pages, $23
Joan Didion, who is 86, has been published for more than 50 years. Of the 17 books she has written, a few have been fiction, (“Play It as It Lays,” “A Book of Common Prayer,”) but most have been nonfiction, (“Joan Didion: The 1960s and ‘70s,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” among them). One was a play. Most notable was her National Book Award for “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) following the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who collaborated with her on many projects. Dunne died in an instant from a coronary at the dinner table after having been at the hospital visiting their daughter, Quintana, who had septic shock, recovered, and ultimately died a few years later. Didion wrote the heartbreaking and profound book “Blue Nights” following the death of her daughter.
Book review: Small Town a chilling, thrilling quest for vengeance
C.F. Foster
It’s been two years since escaped prison inmates “murdered Weldonville.”
In Thomas Perry’s “A Small Town,” the pleasant little village in Colorado had made its living from a nearby federal penitentiary until a well-organized prison break freed 1,200 inmates who descended on the town and its residents killing, raping and burning all that stood in their path. The prison guards were brutally executed and most of the town’s small police force were killed trying to defend their homes.
Most of the escapees were soon rounded up or killed by state and federal authorities but the 12 who engineered the overthrow are still on the loose and the FBI has made no progress with finding them.
Berkley, 400 pages, $17 paperback
Max Seeck has written a brilliant new Nordic noir thriller called “The Witch Hunter.” This novel will keep you guessing from the very beginning.
When Roger Koponen is giving a talk at a bookstore to promote his various works, it is his trilogy revolving around a witch cult and series of gruesome murders that attracts the most fans. At one point during the question-and-answer period, a question is asked that floors him. “Are you afraid of what you write?”
As he is speaking hours away, his wife, Maria, is being murdered. Police response is swift yet after the investigation is underway, nothing adds up. There are, effectively, no clues and at the same time, too many clues.