The heat wave in July was both record-breaking and unpleasant. But look what it brought. Tomatoes! Basil! Breakfast in summer is toast rubbed lightly with a clove of garlic, smeared with goat cheese, and topped with sliced tomato from the garden and shredded basil. A drop or two of nice olive oil and some fleur de sel and well … what more could anyone want for breakfast? For the record (which I’m terrible about keeping garden records), the first tomatoes this year were the Whippersnapper cherries, followed by Galina (a yellow cherry that spreads all over the garden, but produces…
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I haven’t had a chance to read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal Vegetable Miracle yet (it’s still out at the library, which I’m trying to use more because if I fail at living small, it’s on the book front), but the sheer volume of press it’s getting has had me thinking that it was time to revisit Joan Dye Grussow’s earlier book on the same subject, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader. One of the things that sold me on this house was the big, if fallow, vegetable garden in the back yard. Eight children grew up in…
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A few groovy new sites I found: Leslie Land, the GreenGrower: check out the instructions for building a gorgeous twig garden arch in her blog. The Daily Green: has a piece on an upcoming scientific paper on colony collapse disorder. Also, in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about colony collapse disorder and her own experience keeping bees. There’s also some great footage of the pulley system she’s devised to try to keep the bears out of her hives.
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Hot. It’s hot hot hot here. We’re going into another week of 100 degree weather, and with the crazy pace my day job at the Big Corporation lately, I took the opportunity to prep some cold food in advance. I roasted a baby chicken one night last week when it wasn’t so brutal out, and so this afternoon I pulled the breasts off. I was going to make some chicken salad, but I decided that cold roasted chicken breasts by themselves would give me a wider variety of options (that’s how hot it was last week, pulling the chicken breasts…
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This photo doesn’t do the soup justice — it is a much more vibrant green — a lovely live-plant sort of green. So, this morning I was confronted with half a dozen spinach plants that really did need to be picked — they’d bolted and well, it was beyond time to do something with them. I wanted soup, but spinach can get tricky — it gets that funny soapy taste on the back of your teeth — wanted to avoid that. I surfed around in the cookbooks for a while, and finally found a soup that sounded good in Rick…
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I have an abundance of mint in my garden — which is partially my fault because I deliberately transplanted some mint from the front garden to the back — I knew I might regret this, since mint is really weedy, but so far, I kind of like it as a ground cover. It’s invasive, and I’ve pulled a lot of it out, but I also really love this mint in particular — it’s somewhere between a spearmint and a peppermint — not too strong and not too sweet. I crush up a big handful in my pot of tea every…
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Here are the first roses of the spring … Therese Bugnet, I think — I’m terrible about putting the markers in the ground. The cranesbill geraniums in the background are starting to bloom and the Iris that my friend Andrea gave me a couple of years ago have finally really come in. They’re huge and gorgeous this year. So, the weather warmed up, and the flowers are starting to bloom, and just about everything survived our little snowstorm. I think I lost one or two cucumbers, but I have plenty and can afford to lose a couple. The peas and…
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Because I put the peppers and eggplants and cucumbers into the garden on Saturday, it is snowing this morning. I covered as much as I could last night — we’ll have to see what lived, and what didn’t. Ah, spring in Montana …
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If it’s Memorial Day, then it’s time to get the garden put in (I love that phrase, it’s so old-fashioned) — I jumped the gun a little on the tomatoes this year — they were getting so leggy in the cold frames that I had to put them in — and last week’s spate of cold, wet weather didn’t do them any good. It went down to 28 degrees at least twice — although sheets draped over the trellises seem to have kept them from giving up the ghost entirely. This year I’m experimenting — these are the eggplant seedlings.…
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Look at my new toy! It’s a tractor! It’s a sprinkler! It moves on it’s own accord — follows the hose — all the way around my house! I’d never seen one of these until I moved up here and I did really think they were just a goofy gimmick, but this spring my neighbor across the street had his turned on, and when I took the time to watch it, I saw that it seemed to be pretty efficient. It’s low to the ground, so you don’t lose as much water to evaporation as with the back-and-forth sprinkler —…