This weekend it’s time to start the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and zucchini in the basement under the grow lights. I’ll probably also put in spinach, arugula, and onions — the earliest of early spring crops — the things that can withstand some snow, a few more frosts. There are bulbs coming up, and the iris are poking through the debris of the winter … Because I’m underwater at work, here’s a link to a great article about building gardens in low-income neighborhoods — teaching people they can grow their own food in areas where there are not only no Farmer’s…
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Winter is on the wane — it was in the mid-fifties today, blue skies, sunshine, birds singing and I dug the quackgrass out of an entire bed at the front of the house. Three years of serious spring composting and my dirt is lovely — even after being trampled hard last summer during construction. Stick a fork in it and it just turns right over, all nice and loose and friable. Hardly any clumps. Big fat earthworms. The youngest dog was quite interested in the whole process, which isn’t surprising since digging holes seems to be his outdoor hobby. Tomorrow…
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I have four apple trees in my backyard. They’re old, and overgrown, and today I went out and scalped them. Pruning doesn’t quite describe what I did out there — I cut off everything that was sticking straight up into the sky. I cut off everything that was bigger than an inch and a half in diameter. I cut off everything I could in an attempt to take what was four scraggly trees that, granted, did provide good shade, but which also didn’t produce very well and when they did produce, the apples were 20 feet in the air where…
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Michael Ruhlman had an interesting post last week about white meat and Jesus (Whiteliness is Next to Godliness), and the comment discussion in particular got me thinking about greens. I eat a lot of greens, largely because I have a garden and they grow really well here — but I’m a latecomer to cooked greens. We didn’t eat greens growing up because, well, “nice people” didn’t eat greens. Poor people ate greens. Black people at greens. We were upper class (even if we were broke most of the time) and we ate white food — chicken, fish, potatoes, pasta, salad…
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I’ve added a couple of features to the blog — if you look to the left you’ll see a link to Interviews and Profiles, and Place Last Seen. One of the things I’m liking about WordPress is having the flexibility to post some longer pieces. In the Interviews and Profiles section I’ve posted an profile I wrote for the Corporation for the Northern Rockies of Rick Bayless. I spoke with Bayless shortly after returning to Montana after a visit to Chicago where I was astounded by the vibrant Farmer’s Market culture that has grown up in the 20 years since…
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Christmas is over and the seed catalogues are arriving! I pushed the remains of the Christmas baskets aside, cleared out the last of the cookies (the Pastura were particularly good, although the dogs got into them, and since chocolate is not good for dogs, well, it was a very fragrant Christmas eve around here), and have been happily perusing seed catalogs, dreaming of new varieties of endive and chicory, searching for an insect-resistant bean that won’t get skeletonized, musing over asparagus crowns and the idea of artichokes. Hmm. What to order?
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Look what I found once the frost killed off all the foliage — a zucchini as big as my leg! I thought I’d done a pretty good job keeping up with them but this one was lurking in the back, hidden by the cucumber trellis. I may try to save some seeds from it — for now I just pose it places and take pictures. The garden is pretty much done. My other big surprise of the season was these beautiful raddiccio heads. I took them to a party where first we admired the pretty colors, and then the visiting…
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The garden is finally starting to come in this summer. I’m on vacation for 2 weeks, and I spent a lovely morning the other day puttering in the vegetable garden. I pulled out all the peas, which did really well this year, but which were starting to get woody. The tomatoes are starting to pop after a couple of days of hot weather — it really takes until August to get a tomato around here, but once they get past that 6-inch stage it feels like summer’s really begun. I have a lot of greens, and more onions than I…
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The garden is starting to come in again — fresh chives on my morning egg for the past couple of weeks, the mint is coming back so my morning pot of tea tastes fresh and green again, and as always, onions are poking up from all sorts of odd places among the perennials. I’ve begun planting, the tomato, pepper, eggplant and cucumber seedlings are in the cold frame. And it’s spring, so I’m craving greens — spinach or asparagus, for example. But at the supermarket I look at those crinkly packages of baby spinach, or mixed greens and I just…
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The mini-daffodils are blooming in my side yard and yesterday I turned over the vegetable beds, planted peas. Tonight it looks like rain (or maybe snow) is on the way, but yesterday was sunny, nearly seventy degrees, and a lovely day. Things outside the garden are still a little alarming, but inside the yard there are dogs, and plants starting to green up, and tiny little spinach seedlings coming up.