I transplanted the pepper plants yesterday — it’s been warm and sunny, and I was losing a few of them in the cold frame because they were in the little 4-packs, and sometimes I forget to water. So, into the new 8 x 3.5 foot bed at the end of the new garden. It’s a sunny spot, and the fence bounces a fair amount of heat, so I’m hoping it will be a good microclime for peppers. Every gardener has his or her obsession, and mine is peppers. This year, I have the usual assortment of oddball herilooms — most…

Spring means morels, and morels mean the return of hiking. We’d both had sort of an intense week, so when yesterday dawned cool and sort of rainy after a week of unseasonable and unwelcome temps in the high 80s, Himself suggested we go out in the afternoon and look for morels. Now I haven’t quite hit the big half century mark, but I’m getting close enough that one notices certain changes during an afternoon in the woods. For one thing, there’s the vision issue. I’ve gotten into the habit of wearing my bifocals most of the time (since most of…

This is what we woke up to at the cabin this morning (that’s the motel building and the shed behind it. If any of you good readers would like to rent this property for a vacation, the listing is here: http://bit.ly/wCoIWE). Anyhow, things got exciting last night. For the first time this season, it looked like we’d be able to build a fire in the firepit and cook outside. And for a while, it was beautiful. Then I went inside to saute the morels, and by the time the sausages were grilled, the wind had picked up and it was spitting…

Because this photo didn’t get into the last post — here are the raspberries, including 5 new bare-root canes, in three or four inches of straw mulch. They seem happy. They’re leafing out. They like this corner of the yard better than the other corner, where it was too hot, and where the previous raspberries went to die. The leafy ones were 2 year old plants I bought in pots last year. Since they did so well, I took a flyer on some bare root starts this year. We’ll see, like I said, I’ve killed raspberries before. My dream is…

All the signs are pointing to a long, hot, dry summer this year. For one thing, it’s currently almost 80 degrees outside. In April. In Montana. Stick a finger in the dirt in my raised beds, and it’s powder dry just below the surface. Powdery. In April. All of this has me worried. I don’t like to water much, but since our average annual rainfall is 17 inches, one has to irrigate if you’re going to grow much of anything here. My other inspiration was a rapidly-sprouting crop of weeds. I filled the new beds with semi-composted chicken shitty straw…

Spring arrived this weekend –real spring — sunny and 60 one minute, cloudy and 40 and raining the next. I broke out the clothesline again (does anything smell as good as sheets dried on the line?) But this is not one of my many paens to the clothesline — this is a post about berry bushes. Because this weekend I planted berry bushes. I planted three gooseberries, four red lake currants and five bare-root raspberries (sticks, basically). I also planted a grapevine in the hot stony place off my porch where I’m hoping it will grow up the trellis eventually. I’m…

Well — that was a project! This weekend was gorgeous — sixty, sixty-five degrees both days, although the wind kicked back in yesterday afternoon (along with the clouds that made this photo a little gloomy). Thank goodness it was gorgeous, because this was a real project. I am sore. Even my fingers are sore. Where to start? First thing I did was to pull the screws all along the right side of the garden, and pull the boards up. Then I recycled the wood, trimmed the edges, and used scrap lumber to fill the gaps for the long bed on the…

LivingSmall finally took the most obvious money-saving, small-living step, and got rid of cable TV! Woo! Hoo! Cable/Satellite has been a thorn in my side for ages. It’s so unnecessarily expensive — and for what? garbage mostly. But we do like sports. So about a year ago, I got an AppleTV, in part because I liked Netflix streaming and the little pop-up wireless doohickey for my TiVo was slow. AppleTV was pretty awesome, and, we discovered, you could buy a subscription to MLB.com. Himself is from Boston, and we don’t get very many Red Sox games on tv out here…

So I did a little reading last week, a benefit for our local food bank, and I read My Inner Child,  the piece that Culinate submitted to the Best Food Writing 2010. I was a wreck. Well, I was fine until about two days before the reading when I realize that the piece was all about that first Christmas after Patrick died, and that most of the people who ate the Croquembouche That Wouldn’t Die would be there — oh, and to add to the sad-memories factor — Bill and Maryanne’s beloved dead dog Moja was in the piece. What was…