Someone brought a fellow gardener, introduced to us as a Master Gardener, out to see our garden, thinking that since we both are absorbed in the cultivation of earth we should get along great. Unfortunately he sneered at my companion-planted garden rows and the huge number of tomato plants I’m growing – one row to…
Tag: Gardening
Pink Sauerkraut
The winter garden is fading fast. The onions, once growing in neat rows, must be hunted for among the ragweed and evening primrose. The lettuce has become tall spires of bright yellow flowers, and the Brussels sprouts have been harvested all the way up the stalks. The cabbages this year have begun to split open…
Coconut Chicken Curry
It’s been a very cool, wet spring but now the days are longer and hot, and at noon the sun feels too bright and strong. I’ve been waking early again, going out in the cool, misty mornings, enjoying the gentle and almost alpine air to work in, and spending the bright, hot part of the…
Chicken, Chickpea, and Spinach Stew
The past two days have brought us grey skies and pouring, drizzling, sprinkling, thundering rain. Rain making a puddle out of the patio, pooling in old buckets, pattering and rattling on the roofs, and pinging like chimes on the pile of junk under the eves of the barn. Last night between rains the sky flashed…
2017-2018 Lettuce Trials
You will have to bear with me for this post, if you aren’t also a gardening nerd, but i am so excited to write up the results of the lettuce trials from the fall/ winter season! I grew 15 kinds of open-pollinated lettuce, some were varieties I know I like and always grow, but most…
Recovering
Last week was rough. On top of all the new babies, Ethan was out of town for work, and we all had a really nasty illness, possibly the dreaded flu that’s been killing everyone. I have no idea really, since I only go to the doctor if I’m actually dying, and obviously i made it…
Pumpkin and Broccoli Casserole
The dreamy blue-skied spring weather, so warm it is almost hot, has called forth the flowers of all kinds. There is a narrow definition of flower in our minds, the colorful, the beautiful, the many-petaled ones, but there are so many more, such as the scaly dimorphous cone flowers of the pines, or the catkins…
Blooming
Since the first frost that killed the last of the summer zinnias, there have been no flowers in my garden. In the fall I seeded snap dragons, chrysanthemums, linaria, and poppies. They have grown slowly between the hard frosts, at least bringing the green of plant life to the empty flower beds, but no flowers, …
January Chicken Pot-au-feu
The chickens are on my list lately. Not only have the bold, bad things been making raids on the kitchen, strewing the contents of the piggie bucket all over the place and devouring the cat kibbles, but they have also been getting into the garden. When I see them, plump and nonplussed with bulging crops,…
Roasted Radishes, 3 Different Ways
I guess it’s cold when you turn the tap on in the morning, and you get a cup of ice, and that’s only after it’s had some time to thaw. In some ways it’s hardship out here in the cold, but at the same time i feel much stronger and healthier than when we lived…
Building A Garden
I love, more than anything else about gardening, watching the garden grow. Even before the uncertainty of putting small seeds into earth, and waiting, there is the dreaming, where long straight rows of vigorous vegetables grow in the fertile imagination. I’ve tried different gardening methods over my seasons of gardening in the past 10 years, …
Radish Salad With Roselle Dressing
Radishes are one of my favorite things to grow, although they weren’t always. They are very easy and reliable, some years the only vegetable we could manage to grow in the early years of gardening, before we had cows and goats to enrich the land. I’ve pickled them, served them with butter, chopped the roots up for salad, …
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 