Hello friends! And a double hello for all gardening friends visiting on this gorgeous springlike weekend in Oklahoma. I have a lovely surprise for you, and I hope you’ll help spread the word.

Dee Nash, a sweet, smart garden writer and friend from right here in our beautiful home state has published her first gardening book which is every bit as lovely as she is. And, because my luck knows no end, I have been invited to share it with you. 

 Congratulations, Dee! xoxo

 

Not only do I get to introduce this book to you, but I also get to give one lucky reader a fabulous garden prize, courtesy of Longfield Gardens! I’m not alone, either. The (Not Always) Lazy W, incredibly, is part of a whole group of beautiful blogs gathered to offer Dee our support. Each one is giving away a different amazing prize. (Scroll to the bottom for a complete list. They are all worth visiting and following!)

You will remember Dee from last summer when she visited the farm and let me interview her about all kinds of great things.  She shared with me about her life, loves, garden experiences, dreams, and plans. She and her husband Bill have grown a truly beautiful life together, the garden being only a part.

Dee snapped a few photos of me in my own garden, too, and just flat out inspired me in every way.  I so enjoyed that day and over the few short years knowing Dee have learned so much.

 

 

 

Dee gets it when a person waxes poetic over home-grown vegetables or flushes about which perennials are best suited to Oklahoma. In fact, after our interview hours at the farm that day, she and I visited a local tree plantation and explored for another hour or so.  She squealed over citrus trees and crepe myrtles like a new mother picking out ruffled baby clothes. To match her contagious passion, Dee is extremely knowledgeable and eager to share her knowledge. Are you following her blog? You really should. You can also find her on Facebook under that blog’s name as well right here as under the new book’s title. She posts fabulous growing ideas nearly every day, and she is wonderful about answering gardening questions.

Now her first book is being released. The 20-30 Something Guide to Gardening. You can pre-order it on Amazon and I hope you do. I have been gifted a copy and am in love.

Dee’s book is aimed at young adults with an interest in growing their own food and flowers but perhaps also with a knowledge gap.  She inspires and informs with page after page of easy but smart text and short, fun lists, all fully illustrated with her own drop-dead-gorgeous photos. I felt ahead of time that her book would be beautiful, but when I first saw the finished product I was floored.

As you thumb through it, you will feel your gardening energies bubble up to the surface just begging to be released onto the nearest expanse of dirt. She explains things so well that your fears dissolve into possibility. I really wish I had read this book when I was digging my first garden, and I intend to stockpile several copies to distribute to young people in my life.

 

 

 

I really cannot say enough about how much I appreciate my friendship with this woman. A little smidgen of Oklahoma luck brought us together as bloggers, and I look forward to knowing her and learning from her for a long time. Please check out her book and her blog. Please dig a garden and grow your own stuff. It’s just the way to do things.

Now let’s have a giveaway, shall we?

The prizes available right here at the Lazy W are just lovely. I want them myself! Big thank you owed to Longfield Gardens, you can win 25 daffodil bulbs and 25 tulip bulbs, a grand total of 50 high quality, colorful flowering bulbs for your garden! Remember, you can plant these pretty things in a million ways, maybe in a border and maybe in your edible garden. Read Dee’s book for suggestions. ; )

(I’m so jealous of whoever wins this!)

 

• Comment here, telling me what you grow or what you want to grow.
• Subscribe to new posts from the Lazy W.
• Follow me on Twitter (@thelazyw) and tell me howdy.
• Tweet about this giveaway and let me know you did.
• Share this giveaway on Facebook and let me know you did.
• “Like” this blog on Facebook and say howdy.
• “Like” Dee’s blog on Facebook and let me know you did.
• Visit as many of the other fabulous bloggers also participating and share in their giveaway fun, too. Dee keeps really good company! I am humbled to be included.
• The giveaway is open right now and all week, right up until next Sunday, February 23rd.
• Check back in anytime and watch for the winner to be announced on Monday, February 24.
• This giveaway is limited to the United States, for shipping reasons only.

Enter as often as you please. I am so excited for one of you to get your hands on these flower bulbs and for ALL of you to get your hands on this book! I already love mine.

Now, before you go… Remember to spend a few minutes visiting each of these wonderful ladies. You can glean something different from each of them and WIN something different, too:

1. Shawna Coronado website — gift certificate to High Country Gardens for a Summer Dreams Garden.
2. Whitney Curtis at the Curtis Casa — David Austin Rose, ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ and Authentic Haven Brand Moo Poo Tea.
3. Colleen Dieter at Red Wheelbarrow Plants — Garden Girl shorts and Fiskars PowerGear 18” loppers.
4. Robin Haglund at Garden Mentors — Buckaroo Worm Castings, a hula planter and Empire Soil Builder, from Sanctuary Soil.
5. Rachel Hough at The Domestic Artiste — Fiskars Tools, two sets of loppers, one is the PowerGear Lopper 32” and the other Power-Lever 28”.
6. Niki Jabbour at Niki Jabbour, The Year Round Veggie Gardener.
7. Carmen Johnston at Carmen Johnston Gardens — Garden Girl pants with knee pads and a David Austin rose, ‘The Alnwick Rose’ catalog link for ordering bare root roses.
8. Carol Michel at May Dreams Gardens — DeWit Tool kit and Botanical Interests Organic Heirloom Seed Bank Collection. 
9. Pam Penick at Digging — Three small Bee Preservers, www.glassgardensnw.com.
10. Jenny Peterson and J. Peterson Garden Design — SeedKeepers Deluxe seedkeeper and Burlap Girdle.
11. Genevieve Schmidt at North Coast Gardening — Annie’s Annuals gift certificate and Keira Watering Cans.
12. Marie Wreath at the (Not Always) Lazy W — Longfield Gardens tulips & daffs 

 

Aren’t those all great prizes?

Warmest congratulations, Dee! I am so happy for you. And I am so grateful for the incredible amount of passion and expertise you poured into this work. What will you write for us next?

Happy gardening!

XOXOXOXO

Happy Valentine’s Day!! It’s also Friday, so I thought for Friday 5 at the Farm I’d share five ways that Handsome and I infuse our home with romance. (And I will even keep it above board.)

We do romance here, okay? I mean, it has always been important to both of us. We are always looking for something fun together or something comforting, and I love it. And without meaning to sound to cliche, it is so true that the best ways to drum up and enjoy a romantic mood are often the simplest.

• Environment Matters. Our mood thrives with a clean house, work done, lights low, and minimal fragrances except vanilla. Lots of twinkly white lights.

 

• Cuddling with a great movie. Cell phones are turned off. All indoor animals are somehow made to be quiet and peaceful. (Sometimes that part is tricky.) For dinner on these nights, we often make nothing but homemade popcorn with obscene amounts of real butter. There are layers of heavy, fuzzy blankets involved, and there is much “xoxo.” What kinds of movies? Never heavy, serious dramas. We opt for comedies, action, or some other kind of fun. Because stress frowns and tears are not very romantic. Or sometimes we do the whole “binge-watching” thing and take in several episodes at once of a show we both love.

 

• Meals We Love. Food is a love language in which we are both fluent. When we have a little something special to celebrate or crave a dose of ooh la la, a beautiful meal is often in order. For Handsome, the menu almost always includes homemade Alfredo sauce. For me, it’s avocados. We don’t imbibe, but we will share an ice cold bottle of sparkling cider for fun. Other faves are chocolate covered strawberries and steak with all the trimmings. Homemade pizza. More popcorn. Sometimes I don’t even do the dishes till the next morning! That’s how crazy we get.

 

 

• Road trips. Of course we love big, elaborate vacations! But for a dose of simple romance we like to strike out on nearby roads and just explore. We have tons of made-up bingo games we play. We like all kinds of music for singing along. And we talk. Or don’t talk. We could talk or not talk for hours.  (Name that movie for bonus points!)

 

• We own a massage table. So there you go.

 

 

Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope however you celebrate, and whoever is lucky enough to spend it with you, that you feel some simple romance. I hope you know it does’t have to be expensive or fancy to be really special. It just has to be genuinely you.

 

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.”

~Elinor Glyn

XOXOXO

 

This week Mama Kat invited us to write about really special Valentine’s Day memories instead of dead childhood pets. So I’m pretty much jumping on the opportunity. http://www.mamakatslosinit.com/

 

 

I am very fortunate to be in love with a thoughtful, romance-inclined guy who out does me at every single gift-giving event in life. This means we have lots of special  Valentine’s Day memories, but one stands out in my mind. It was the weekend of the final Valentine’s Day before we were married, which will be thirteen years ago this summer. I like to say things the longest way possible.

This story takes place on a cool Friday evening in Oklahoma City. Handsome and I were solo for the weekend. We must not have had any certain plans, because he picked me up from my apartment sort of last minute for what turned out to be dinner at Eddy’s, a special steak restaurant in Bethany that is now, sadly, closed. I was wearing jeans and a long sleeved pink t-shirt and almost no makeup. I know for sure he was wearing a black leather jacket, because the smell of leather is heavy in this memory. He was as strong and good looking as ever. With zero effort.

We sat in the quiet, dimly lit restaurant and ate our meal slowly, talking and being in love. It’s so easy for me to drum up the emotion from that dinner, because I still feel it all the time. We indulged in the requisite beef ribs and cabbage roll appetizers, those hot, fluffy baked potatoes, and the most perfect charbroiled, marbled steak you will ever allow to melt in your greedy little mouth. If memory serves we also split an obscenely wide slice of chocolate-chip cheesecake.  Eventually, filled to the brim with great food and simmering in soft, easy romance, we collected what remained of our feast into a Styrofoam box. We left the restaurant and drove off in his curvy red Stingray corvette. Things were about to get interesting.

On nights when we are free to just drive around in a fun car, anything could happen. I am happy just being a passenger, just succumbing to the speed and power of whatever car he happens to be driving, sure, but really… I’m succumbing to him. I love to have my left hand on his right thigh and feel him dig deep into the accelerator.

Anyway.

On this particular night we drove to Lake Hefner in Oklahoma City and parked beneath a well lit flagpole, near the super old red white and blue metal playground. (If you’re from here you know exactly where I’m describing.) As we exited the Vette, we decided to remove the T-tops so the smells of our leftover food wouldn’t be overwhelming later.

What is that they say about hindsight? And twenty-twenty?

So. Handsome walked me to a beautiful spot near the high flying American flag. He was all muscular arms and cologne and leather jacket, and we smooched like there was no tomorrow. Almost wordlessly he gave me a narrow, sparkling gold band bearing three diamonds, one large one in the center for me flanked by two sightly smaller diamonds, one for each of my girls, both still toddlers. He really could have given me the ring at the restaurant, but this spot was important to us and I appreciated the absence of embarrassing fanfare but overdose of eye contact and meaningful affection. It was, just like every other romantic gesture of his, perfect.

Then things got interesting.

We strolled back in the dark, a newly engaged couple, floating on that strong, bright  cloud of belief that the future holds only good things for people this in love.

We approached the Corvette and had our hands poised on the door handles when it happened.

Do you know how in cartoons, a whirlwind is actually visible? Like, you can see not only the item or creature that is spinning, but also the air around it? You can see the lines of its spinning motion tracing concentric spirals in faster and tighter patterns? That. Like, the Tasmanian Devil. That’s what I saw first.

After that I saw the cat. Maybe two. Yes, at least two feral cats had hopped into our car and tried to help themselves to the steak and potatoes held inside that Styrofoam box. They were fighting over it or with it, it was hard to tell. But the chaos in that small black interior was intense. They were screeching and hissing and there was much fur.

Then I saw my fiancee of exactly three minutes. His face. Oh my goodness, I have only seen his face like this a few times in our life together. He was frozen in what I can only describe as shock and awe. His beautiful show car being scratched at and most likely sprayed by at least thirteen wild bobcats or tigers, it was hard to tell. Things were officially Out. Of. Hand.

I do not remember exactly how we got the rabid lions and bears out of the car. But I am kind of thinking it had to do with just opening the door. The Styrofoam box was still closed but toppled onto the floor and etched with angry claw and bite marks. I remember having to bite the inside of my cheek and look up at the stars to not bust out laughing. In fact, right now as I type this Handsome is across the room from me and I still feel guilty laughing at this thirteen year old memory.

LOL

He was not amused then, and he is not terribly amused now. But at least I wasn’t reading about Ted Bundy the night we got engaged.

 

Happy Cat Scratch Fever Valentine’s Day, babe. I love you more than you can imagine. And let’s just eat at home this year.

 

Steak is Natural, Steak is Good

Not Everybody Eats it 

But Everybody Should

XOXOXO

Hello again! Did you catch my book review of Notes to Boys? As predicted, most of my friends are now salivating to read the latest novel by Pam Ribon. She just… she just, well… she gets us, us pseudo-serious writerly girls from the nineties. And we all want to read how someone else has articulated the teen-aged girl experience of the Drakkar Noir-Edie Brickell era. More to the point, few of us (okay none of us) are brave enough to do the articulating ourselves. And because I am the luckiest blogger on the face of this earth, I was given the chance to do some casual Q & A with the author, which I am sharing with you today. You guys, she just remained as true and sweet, funny and comforting, smart and self-aware as ever, right to the last syllable. Please enjoy.

(Warning: two or three moments of adult language are not edited out and could make this interview less than appropriate for young readers. I mean, unless you were as cool-awkward as Pam and I were at that age. Just kidding but not really.)

 *************************

Marie:  I’d love to hear a little about the conception of this (very cool by the way) book idea. Was the initial inspiration yours? Or did your Mom find the archived boxes of your writing and give you a little nudge? Or was it something completely different? Did you lose a bet? The idea of my teen-aged writing being unearthed is so terrifying to me that I need to know how this went down, basically so I can prevent it from happening in my life. I’m actually a nervous wreck right now, because I wrote lots of love notes to boys and wrote lots of general junk in my spare time. Just kidding, but please tell us about the creative process here.

Pam: You make it seem so romantic!  No, what happened was I started reading these letters out loud at book readings and posting them on my website and people got a little obsessed with my young, weird self.  I was reading the awkwardica poems at the book party for my last novel when my publisher said, “That’s it.  We have to give Little Pam her own book.”  I didn’t stop to think about what that really meant until I’d turned it all in.  And now it’s all… so very much out there.

Marie: What would Little Pam have thought about you sharing these with the world? I wonder if the notion of world-wide exposure would have shut her down or fueled her? How would the writing have been the same or different?

Pam: I believe actual Little Pam would have thought this was exactly what was supposed to happen with her “writings.”  She was archiving them for a reason, after all.  If anything, knowing people were going to read it would have only made her insufferable.  She probably would have written even more essays on topics she knew absolutely nothing about.  The gun control essay alone would’ve been terrifying.

 

 

Marie: I just want you to come to the farm and watch a Christian Slater movie with me and maybe listen to Pearl Jam and the Doors. I kid you not: some of the lyrics you mentioned in the book are painted on a big canvas in my guest bath. ‘Cause that’s just how girls from the 90’s roll. Also I ran around with a small group of “guy friends” in high school who, in retrospect, might not have seen me the way I saw them? Hmm. Anyway we went to see The Doors together and felt collectively that we were the coolest people ever. My boyfriend at the time was one of those guys, and we listened to the Doors music, burned incense, even snuck out to poetry-reading coffee shops, but never ever past my curfew. Oh I thought I was so cool, then for years I felt so weird, now thanks to you I feel normal. Whew! Question: Assuming Jim Morrison’s actor had aged more gracefully, who is hotter: Kilmer or Depp?

 

 

 

Pam:  Listen.  If you Google my name + Johnny Depp and see the results number, you will have your answer right there. 

True Story: I went to see The Doors with two people from the memoir (K and Super Mario Brothers Boy).  We had to sneak in because people were losing their minds about how R-rated this movie was (due to the elevator BJ scene—remember?! We were so innocent as a nation!), and they were checking ticket stubs at the door.  We bought tickets to He Said, She Said, finagled ticket stubs from some grown-up who looked old enough to just waltz into The Doors, and snuck in.  We did it!  We were gold!  Super Mario Brothers Boy convinced me to go back out to buy him some snacks.  When I tried to walk back to my seat, arms filled with provisions, I got carded.  Busted.  Kicked out of the theater. 

I sat in a parking lot for two and a half hours with all the other pissed-off minors while Super Mario Brothers Boy watched the entire movie without a second of empathy.  That was our high school love affair in a nutshell.

Marie: And the take away here is never to stop sneaking into R-rated movies but rather to never leave for snacks once you’re in.

http://pamie.com/2010/02/when-all-you-wanted-was-to-be-wanted/

Marie: The book is dedicated to both your infant daughter and your husband, beautifully.  As I read the book I thought a lot in abstract terms of her. Whether you hope for her to read this, etc. Then I found your list of ways to write to boys and started crying.  Clearly you had her in your heart as you wrote the entire thing. I know you want her to avoid violence and all forms of injury and invasion. Do you also want her to be spared these more benign heartaches and unfulfilled longings you suffered? Or do you think it’s okay for girls to have these painful teen-aged experiences? How much did it hold you back in life, or how much did it fortify you?

Pam: I was stopped at a red light last week when a group of teen-aged boys walked past my car, all floppy hair and weak necks, holding their skateboards like they were too cool to have wrists, pants falling all over the place, wearing shirts from bands I didn’t know, and I thought, “YOU AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR HER!” 

So, I guess the transition has already happened. 

I know she will fall in love and get hurt and I know I’m going to be hiding in the other room not letting her see me cry for her.  The hardest part will be giving her the space she’ll need to figure out love on her own.  But what’s different about her teen years and mine is that only one boy at a time read what I was writing.  Having been online since 1998, I’ve already made just about every mistake you can writing in a public forum.  I won’t be quiet about those lessons learned.  I am already fiercely protective of her Internet footprint.  She has no idea how annoying I’m going to be when she finally has her own Tw9bot account.  (That’s what I assume the equivalent of Twitter is called in the future.)

Marie: You’re absolutely right, mama. No one is good enough for her. xoxoxo

Marie: Judy Blume. 5^th grade. Please tell me you too got in trouble for reading it? I was in Catholic school at the time and had to go see the counselor (who was a nun) and everything. What other controversial things did you read? I am impressed with Anais Nin.

Pam: Did I write about this in the book, or are you just actually my life-twin?  In the fifth grade I got in SO MUCH TROUBLE when I asked my mom what a menstrual belt was, and she flipped through my copy of Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret.  “This is NOT A BOOK FOR KIDS!” she screeched.  The combination of teen girls celebrating getting their periods and the tips for how to make your boobs grow made her livid.  I remember yelling, “But, Mom!  She wrote Superfudge! You gave me that book!”  Mom confiscated all my Judy Blume and instead handed me: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.  That is true.  There’s a HJ scene in that book so confusing it messed me up for years. (“Where in God’s name did you learn how to do that?” “Girl Scouts.”) 

So, in my house it was okay to read controversial things, as long as they were for grown-ups, not teens.  I read all of Stephen King.  I read Endless Love.  Roots.  I fell in love with a copy of The Color Purple I found in the trashcan of my parents’ bathroom.  (My father often said, “Women can’t write.”  This is why I am a writer.)

Marie: “I must! I Must! I must increase my bust!” hahaha!! And yes once again, this time to Stephen King. The target audience matters, right? I take it as a compliment now, that my parents thought I was better suited for the latter form of literature than the former. But I’m probably wrong about that, too.

Marie:  How would you speak with your Dad about things now, if he were still alive?

Pam: This week my father would’ve turned 64.  In the twelve years he’s been gone, he missed more than just the birth of his granddaughter or the start of his eldest’s career.  There are all these little things he missed I know he would’ve loved.  Breaking Bad.  Drive-thru Starbucks.  Netflix Streaming. That show where Gordon Ramsay goes into struggling hotels and yells at everybody (which was pretty much my dad’s job). I do wish I could call him right now to listen to him tell me for three hours how much he hated everything about Her. 

We weren’t really able to talk to each other with something resembling respect until the very last of his days.  He had a hard time letting go of how he thought a father was supposed to treat a daughter until he knew our time was running out.  Then he dropped all of that and talked to me like I’d suddenly aged twenty years.  I’ll never know if the dad he was right at the end is the dad he’d be right now.  I’ve decided to believe in it, because it’s the only way I can tolerate the fact that he left my life before it ever really started.

Marie: Happiest birthday wishes and warm hugs to you for your Dad’s birthday week. How poetic that your memoir release right now. It is amazing how relationships can evolve even with a physical separation, and I would imagine your gift with words must have helped with that over the years. “Will ya still need me, will ya still feed me, when I’m 64?” xoxoxo

Marie: Now that the book is printed, is there anything in it you rather wish you had left out? Is there anything not in it you rather wish you had included?

Pam: I know it’s hard to believe, but there are so many more poems and letters I didn’t include in this book, usually because they are about stories I feel aren’t mine to share.  This book is a comedic memoir, first and foremost, so I was careful not to let it get too heavy. You can’t talk about high school without delving into some serious issues when it comes to life as a teenage girl, but I didn’t want to turn this book into an Afterschool Special.  If Facebook hadn’t been invented, and it was still like before, when high school was a time left in the past and you never know what happened to all these people who helped shape who you are, then maybe there would be more stories.  Facebook makes it hard to keep that time in a bubble. 

My mom probably wishes I hadn’t included that sex talk my father gave me.  I also have to legally state here, for the record, that my mother would like to remind people that I’m normally a writer of fiction, so maybe some things in this memoir are a little exaggerated or simply not true, especially when it’s about her sex life with my father, and whatever it was that man said to me when she was not in the room to defend herself.

By the way, to back to your first question, that’s how you know this book wasn’t my mother’s idea.

Marie: So stated. And this reminds me of the review I saw on Goodreads. The one you wrote on behalf of your Mom: “Since my mom isn’t on Goodreads, I’m giving me her five stars. IT COUNTS.”

*************************

Pam, thank you from the bottom of my ink-smeared, Drakkar-Noir scented heart for sharing your youth in this beautiful way. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions so generously. Thank you for making your peers from that era feel better than normal; you have made us feel rather exotic and interesting. (You should know that I read your remarks top to bottom while holding a pretty bad ass crane pose.)

Happy Valentine’s Day. Happy Birthday to your Dad who obviously loved you more than he could say. And happy LIFE to that baby girl you’ve been given. She has an amazing Mom to guide her through the choppy seas of girlhood.

Riders On the Storm…

Into This House We’re Born

Into This World We’re Thrown

~Jim Morrison

XOXOXOXO