Spring has been late this year — I can’t remember a year since I’ve lived here where it’s been May before I’ve had greens — but April was cold, grey, and snowy. These are the first of the year — Grumolo Bionda Chickory from my beloved Seeds of Italy. These overwintered, actually — once things thawed out this spring, I pulled the dead rotty bits off the tops, and lo and behold, green leaves sprouted from underneath. So, while the spinach, arugula, italian mustard and turnip greens and broccoli rabe are all just wee seedlings, I’ve got some greens out…
-
-
I’ve been seeing reviews all over the place of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book about eating locally — she’s not necessarily one of my favorite writers, but between this interview over at Salon, and this piece she wrote for Mother Jones I might just have to go get a copy. Here’s a quote from the Mother Jones article: Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached; cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply.…
-
This is the new bed I dug on Sunday. And this: is the bed I have yet to dig. The second bed defeated me. I’m not a very big person, and so digging means sticking the flat-end spade in, standing on it, and either wiggling it side to side or sort of jumping on it until it goes in. Because this is old sod, I have to do this from a couple of angles before I can pull up a chunk of sod, shake as much soil off as I can, and then chuck it in the can for the…
-
The entire day I searched for spring but spring I could not find, In my straw sandals I tramped among the mountain peak clouds. Home again, smiling, I finger a sprig of fragrant plum blossoms; Spring was right here on these branches in all of its glory! Plum Blossom Nun (via the Nebraska Zen Center)
-
It’s been a grim spring here weather-wise. Cold. Gray. Snowy. Gray. And yet, it’s been warm enough that these pretty daffodils bloomed. I don’t even remember planting them — they must have been in the batch I bought from one of Nina’s kids as a fundraising thing. At any rate, I was silly enough to plant them right under the dripline from the porch, so they got kind of battered, poor things. I’m always torn about picking flowers from the garden — where will I enjoy them more? Outside? or inside? But since these had broken stems from the water…
-
The weather here is still awful, cold, grey, damp and just dreary, but in my basement, spring has begun. This is the system I rigged up a couple of years ago. I kept seeing all these expensive propagation systems in catalogs that I couldn’t afford, so I built my own. I bought a bunch of ten dollar shop light fixtures at the hardware store, some light chain, some s-hooks and the most expensive part of it all was the grow light bulbs. I had the metal shelving — Patrick bought a whole bunch of shelving for his business just before…
-
Winter has returned to Montana — it’s been three days of cold, dank weather with low grey skies. Now the heat wave we got in the early part of March was as little scary — it’s not supposed to be in the mid-70s that early, and it was alarming to have to break out the sprinklers. But this, well, it’s completely expected, not a surprise, and yet … sigh. We’re all ready for some blue skies, some sunshine, for the fruit trees to start filling town with pretty flowers …. in the meantime, we’ll have to settle for daffodils in…
-
It’s happened again — the world has come around and has begun to tilt back toward the sun again — and our northern world is turning light again. When I moved up here my California friends were horrified by the prospect of cold, but having survived childhood and college in Wisconsin, the coldest place on earth, I wasn’t worried about the cold. It was the dark that concerned me. Winter is long and dark here — months on end where the sun disappears by five, doesn’t show itself again until after eight. It’s one of the things that keeping a…
-
Ten thousand years ago, when I was in my 20s, I spent a couple of months in Taiwan. My college roommate had married a Chinese guy and was clearly going to stay there, and I was in between jobs, and I wanted to see what her life was going to be like, so off I went. We were so young that it never occurred to us that having a third person move in with a couple who had just gotten married might not be the greatest idea, although I have to say, for the most part we all got along…
-
So Meg at megnut is throwing up her hands and isn’t going to worry anymore about what she eats while at Salon, Barry Glassner talks to Tracie McMillan about the religious and sociological roots of America’s strange and inconsistent anxiety about food. Meanwhile, at the LA Times, Alain Passard comes to America to cook with his fellow chef/gardener David Kinch at Manresa and notes that “If I didn’t have my gardens, I would no longer love to cook.” Seems to me the only thing to do is to join Meg, and simply start following Michael Pollan’s key points about food,…