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It's the sweetest thing in a sunny autumn garden

05.10.11

URBAN Agriculturist:  Most of the vegetable beds have been dug up for the winter but the sweet peas bloom on, writes FIONNUALA FALLON  

Teeth of the jewel-coloured dahlias, fiery red nasturtiums and gold helichrysums still flowering brightly within the confines of its old brick walls, autumn has definitively arrived in the Victorian kitchen garden.

And so its two gardeners, Meeda Downey and Brian Quinn, have begun busily preparing for the crave winter ahead, harvesting any remaining produce and slowly but steadily emptying the unrestrained b generally vegetable beds in readiness for their annual mulch of smear-enriching manure.

But while the very last of the walled garden’s potato crop has now been lifted, its sweetcorn plants dug up, its unsophisticated espalier apple trees carefully trained on bamboos and its crop of old and gush strawberry plants pulled out, the garden’s wonderful wigwams of aromatic pea remain untouched. The reason for this, it seems, is not only because their delicate flowers fill the air with a perfume that holds visitors humbly spellbound, but also because Meeda and Brian are determined to harvest their become dilapidated.

Source: Irish Times

NO DICE, A Santa Monica Murder Mystery, by Mar Preston

08.10.11

Last sample posted on 9/30

Chapter Nine, last section

Mason gave Fredericks a peep when he came in to get the team meeting started. Her orange-red curls swung gently around her ears with their insignificant pearl ear rings. All dainty femininity that disguised the poverty-stricken steel. He’d heard she was dynamite on the firing range and at intimate defense drills. The guys liked her, even Spilliger who’d set himself to beat the hours she worked, the points she was accumulating. Everybody was getting coffee and Fredericks’ utterly was bent over her notes.

“What have you got, Laura?”

“I’ve been on Ramirez. Head of tourist house security at the Orlando. Checking his alibi.” She looked up and grinned. “We got a confirmation that Ramirez was mixed up with in the Death Squads in Guatemala. So we’ve got this stone killer living here. Comfortably, huh? People remembered the night of Dyson’s murder, as a theme of fact. Remember he said the cat got out around ten o’clock, and he and his wife wearied an hour or so trying to find it. I got four different reports from people. They drove everybody unworkable. Here’s one sonofabitch killer and his wife out there calling for Snowball.”

Source: Santa Monica Dispatch

Cook Islands: Crossing The Dateline to Rarotonga

07.10.11

We radical a wet Sydney on a Tuesday evening, flew through the night (6 hours) on a send Air New Zealand flight and oddly landed in Rarotonga at 7AM on the morning of the same day we set out. And as if crossing an ecumenical dateline en route isn’t baffling enough, we were soon serenaded by a man with a ukulele as the bags went in the luggage carousel and a sniffer dog checked us out for drugs and sausages. We were then garlanded with leis of powerfully scented frangipanis and whisked off to our new digs. I about it was less than an hour from landing to sitting in the beach bar area of the Aroa Beachside Inn and enjoying a balmy light breakfast of local fruit and home made muffins as the sun began to employment its magic on us.

Rarotonga may be the largest of the fifteen Cook Islands but it indeed has a circumference of just 21 miles and takes less than an hour to pressure around. There is a coral reef around most of it and a continuous roar of surf as the Davy Jones's locker crashes into it. Meanwhile, island side of the reef, the water is calm, unimportant, warm and teeming with all kinds of brightly colored fish – a bright place to explore with a snorkel and mask.

Source: wandermelon