I organized the basement propagation center this weekend — it’s fabulous! I took one of the five-shelf utility units from Patrick’s storage unit, bought some cheap shop lights and grow-light tubes, and I now have four shelves set up with lights. Last year, I bought a couple of heat mats to help with germination, since it’s cool in my basement, and I have them set up on another short utility shelf unit. It’s like a real potting bench down there — space to store flats and cells, space for the bucket of potting mix, space to start seeds. It’s organized…
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There’s a terrific piece in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle by Hazel White about how gardens keep us connected to “body time” — that is, how gardening keeps us in tune with earth time, the rhythms of the earth and our bodies, as opposed to “mechanical time” — the kind of clock-driven time that all too often has us running to accomplish things according to some external measure. We fall into “mechanical time” when we allow ourselves to be driven by “shoulds” — when we allow ourselves to be driven by plans we’ve already made and wind up all thrumming…
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I ordered seeds today from Seeds of Italy and Cook’s Garden. I have a lot of seeds left from last year, many lettuces, the beans that never grew because they were eaten by bugs, the melon that didn’t make it, the eggplant that did, and three kinds of tomatoes. This year I’m branching out — I ordered two kinds of broccoli rabe from Seeds of Italy, as well as, gasp, five different tomatoes, some laccinato kale, an intriguing-looking egyptian beet, and a couple of chicories. I can’t say enough good things about Seeds of Italy — last year I ordered…
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We got our first snow — just a light dusting of tiny snow-pellets. My wholly unreliable thermometer (that’s what you get when you only spend 3 bucks) reads 20 degrees this morning, and I think this is certainly the end for the late-season cosmos, the asters, although I have a hunch that the unstoppable chard out in the veggie garden will somehow survive even this. I love my little house in winter. It’s so cozy and warm. My only heat source is this freestanding gas heater in the living room. I am very fond of this heater — it goes…
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Today was a good day. Today was sunny, clear, warm. Today I pulled dead plants out of the front garden and put in the yellow rose bush that Yena sent over. It’s right off the front porch where Patrick and I drank coffee in the mornings, had gin-and-tonics in the evening. The tag says it will bloom continuously, which will be nice — he loved yellow roses. I also pruned back the perennials in the back, including the mondarda that grew a wonderful four feet tall this summer and planted the iris transplants that Andrea left on my front porch…
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The End of the Garden I pulled up the tomatoes this afternoon. All day it looked like it was going to snow, and there I was out there in the backyard in a sweater and my down vest. I figure, if you’ve got a down vest on, it’s time to harvest all those green tomatoes. (Plus, I have to go to San Jose for business next week, and my brother was afraid he’d kill them all and I’d be mad.) As I was working out there, the weather got even worse, and I had to go put on my gore-tex…
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Summer’s Over Summer appears to be, rather suddenly, over. The temperature dropped early this week, and this morning my (highly unreliable) thermometer reads 50 degrees. Highs have been only in the 70’s and with the light rapidly receding, well, I’m not feeling hugely optimistic about all those green tomatoes out there. We had hail on the solstice, and here at the end of August I would estimate a hard frost is only a couple of weeks away. The challenges of short-season gardening. Sigh.
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Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwiches It’s that time of year — there are ripe tomatoes in my garden, which means, it’s time for BLTs. Because what’s the point of a Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich that isn’t made with a real tomato — a tomato grown locally, a tomato grown to ripeness and juicy perfection? A BLT made with a supermarket tomato is a travesty. It isn’t a BLT at all, it bears the same relation to a real BLT as silicone breasts do to real ones. It is a Bad Thing. Whereas a real BLT, made with a real…
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Freezing the Harvest Meg, over at Meg’s Food and Wine Page blogged this week about the plethora of fresh produce she encountered on her weekend in the Hudson Valley, and how this time of year what she eats is largely dictated by what’s ready to be eaten (and how rare this necessity has become in a world where we’re flying apples from New Zealand for out-of-season produce) … at any rate, her post is much better than this summary so just go read it. But Meg’s post got me thinking about my summer here with my garden — yesterday I…
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Lurid Soup Beet Soup! It’s so gorgeous that it is right up there with the Oxford Magazine Music Issue. It’s a soup that will make you do the snoopy dance all over the room. It’s absolutely fuschia (which, by the way, is soon to be the color of my office), and tastes good, and generally is just so beautiful that it will make you happy. Now, I was a beet-a-phobe for a long time. It was those nasty pickled beet slices you’d sometimes get as a kid — the ones that leak nasty canned pickled-beet juice onto the perfectly innocent…