My heart has been so full of the sweet beauty of the spring lately – all the flowers and sweet smells, and the still cool milky nights under the waxing moon, with the first little fireflies winking in the dark places under the oak trees, looking bright but lonely in the big night. O sweet…
Tag: spring
Radishes With Miso Tamari Sauce and Sesame Seeds
The peach trees are blooming profusely in the orchard still. I’ve watched each of the ten trees one by one be ornamented with delicate pink blossoms, and then the slow, graceful dance of lacy green leaves unfolding. So quickly the flowers fade and are gone, but for these three weeks or so I am enchanted…
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…
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…
Spiderwort Soda, A Magical Elixir
I have always been enchanted with the herb Spiderwort (Tradescantia ohioensis I think is the Latin). The thin, succulent leaves, like grass leaves, poke out at a pixie-like angle, and the luminous blue three-petaled flowers, each petal delicate like a fairy’s wing, whose color delights the eye and changes even as you stare, shifting between blue…
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…
A Dance of Flowers
The flowers we started from seeds last fall have slowly, slowly begun to bloom. Clothilde helped me, with that rambunctious activity that the age of five years old inspires, sow the seeds on the raised beds prepared with compost and soil. In the end I had no idea what got planted where, and by now…
Spring Fertility Madness
It’s been the craziest week ever, and nothing seems to be slowing down in the least. Nearly every evening finds me exhausted and covered in some sort of birth juices, dirt, milk or all three. It all started about 3 weeks ago, when I had just finished creating an email to send out, offering acorn-fed…
Wild Chickweed Salad with Ranch-Style Dressing
All around the earth is greening. The forest looks lacy with new leaves, and the pastures have begun to grow. Not only have the summer grasses thrown off their winter sleep and have started to poke up their heads and send out new shoots, all the pretty weeds of spring decorate the ground between the…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 