This year has lacked a dry season, making the pastures already green and beautiful and filled with flowers. Walking through the cow-paths, the starry Erigeron flowers swirl past in a green galaxy of grass. It isn’t the usual hot, blue, open skies of May, but chased all over with piled up clouds shadowed with silver…
Category: Uncategorized
Poppies
The poppies are the scarlet beauties of the garden right now. The legion poppies have been blooming the longest, but every week a new kind is blooming, delighting us with new colors and shapes. They are so proud and bold among the grass, yet so delicate with their ruffled petals like fine silk that glows…
Goat Stew with Parsnips and Raisins
More than a week ago now i woke up to a grim grey sky. I started the chores right away, hoping to be inside by Calcifer when the rain started. Things went quickly, despite the usual difficulties of the brooder lamp flickering out for the little ducks, and wading awkwardly through the 100 little meat…
Easter
This was the first year we were able to dye eggs with all home grown dyes: turmeric, beets, red Brussels sprouts leaves, mulberries and spiderwort flowers. The natural dyes are so subtle and beautiful. They blend in beautifully with nature and are really hard to find. I woke up early to cut dewy grass and…
The Hermitage
The warm days are rushing me onwards, from first light of dawn I feel the same pulse and impulse of the ginger sprouting from winter-hidden roots, each day taller, flushing with urgent green to catch the gifts of the sun. It is time to plant, and i have started earlier than in past years. The…
Spring Soup
I have been very much enjoying the warmth and beauty of this 35th spring I have experienced. The garden is covered in flowers, and it is the time when the laurel and live oaks shed their old, tough leaves, and they come down like rain in gusty swirls with each gentle breeze. One morning I…
Unfolding Spring
Spring is just so beautiful, when the bright little leaves look like lace in the dark forest, and the air is sweet with flowers. The branches are dripping with blossoms in the unrelenting damp. The wild herbs have woven themselves into a tapestry of many colored greens, embroidered with delicate flowers. Their names murmur themselves…
2019 Kale Trial
I love to try different varieties side by side because it gives you a good idea of the variability in flavor, appearance, and production. Besides that, i find it fascinating how different varieties can be from one another. They almost have their own personalities. Just like with meeting people, I will find myself drawn to…
Gardens of Dreams
All around spring is flowering in the branches. The croaking of the Sandhill cranes will now and then fill the blue-clouded skies as they pass along on their long pilgrimage. From out of the earth the green force of life is brimming in a flowery haze, all things stretching forth with new, fresh growth. Except…
Kale, Apple and Cheddar Salad
It was the middle of the night when I seemed to hear the dogs barking in the midst of a dream, gradually drawing me back from an immaterial world and into the loft under the dark rafters. I lay listening for a moment, wanting to roll over and drift back to sleep, but the voices…
Spiced Rice With Fresh Turmeric
Sunday was just about the most awful day possible, beginning very early with a leak in the kitchen roof. All morning I did chores outside in the almost freezing rain, and in the afternoon Mirin and I had to clear brush from the road so we could get a hay delivery to the cows back…
Turmeric-Coconut soup with Calamondins
These are the cold, cold days of January when the fronts come through in the pattern of hot and sticky, silver chilly rain, and then the glittering mornings laced with frost. The rain has already come through, which is why it hardly ever snows, though it is cold enough to. It leaves a damp, chilly…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 