It’s HOT. Too hot to go look for mushrooms. Too hot to do much but close all the windows in the morning, draw the sunscreen blinds, and hunker down until the evening thunderstorms roll through. The good news is that my tomatoes and peppers and zucchini and eggplants should like it … As to the freezer part … it was hot tonight. I wasn’t terribly hungry, but I did want some dinner. And despite the many greens I grow, I don’t really love salad. I love cooked greens, but salad, not so much. Don’t know why, it’s just the way…
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It’s mushroom season here in Montana and I’ve spent much of the weekend obsessively wandering the bottomlands along the Yellowstone in pursuit of the beautiful, fragrant, and elusive morel. It started on Saturday morning, when Maryanne’s friend Tice took us down to the sweet spot by the sewage treatment plant where her family has been hunting morels for years. A little backstory here, Maryanne and I have any number of friends who hunt mushrooms — big men, some of whom are known as famous outdoorsmen. Would they share their spots with us? Would they take us out so we could…
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Look what I did with my week off! Those would be fourteen tomatoes planted all in a row. Fourteen! I’ll probably regret planting so many, but last fall when I was in France, I saw tomatoes trellised like this (not with copper plumbing pipe, which I like because it’s sturdy, easy to put together, and weathers to that pretty green color — but with much more rustic and charmant bamboo) and it seemed to me like a good solution for our short-season tomato issues. This time of year, I can start them with the wall-o-waters, about which I cannot say…
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All day long. Some hail in mid-afternoon, but for the most part it’s been one of those days characterized by low-hanging clouds in the mountains, and nice cool, slow spring rain. I planted some potatoes this morning (dark of the moon is the time to plant root crops) and the rain this afternoon is exactly what my garden needed.
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The doorstep Buddha and the daffodils were buried this morning under several inches of new, wet snow. It snowed all day — big fat wet flakes covering everything in the garden. I love this time of year. One day it’s seventy and sunny and I’m outside checking buds on the roses, looking to see which perennials are up (trying to remember what I planted where), and then a day later, everything is covered in a nice wet blanket of not-very-cold snow. Luckily, the apple trees have only just started budding out. I didn’t get any apples last year, and it…
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So — now that it’s spring, and I’ve got teeny tiny little spinach (and arugula) seedlings poking up in the garden, I find myself most nights rooting around in the bottom bin of my basement freezer pulling out packets of spinach and chard I put up last summer. When I put them up, I envisioned myself eating them in deepest January, when the snow was piled up around my wee Montana house. Of course, we had no snow this winter, but nonetheless, what did I eat this winter? It wasn’t frozen greens from downstairs — I don’t know now what…
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My new remote temperature sensor came yesterday, and this morning while the sensor in the garden read 29 degrees, the one in the cold frames read 48 degrees. The cold frames actually work! They hold heat overnight — still too cold to leave my tender tomatoes out in overnight, but I’m just thrilled that they actually work. Yesterday afternoon, which was sunny, it was a balmy 75 in the cold frames, 65 outside ….
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It’s spring, which means time to spend the weekend doing little projects in my garden. Some of you may remember last spring when I built my cold frames. They were nice cold frames, but I didn’t take into account the famous winter winds of Livingston. The cold frames didn’t weather winter particularly well — the old storm windows I used blew off and the glass all broke, and the heavy-duty plastic sheeting also shredded over time. So I ordered some corrugated plastic a few weeks ago, figuring it would not only be tougher than the original cold frame coverings, but…
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It must be a spring thing, but every year about this time, I become obsessed with green sauce. I want it on everything — grilled chicken, poached salmon, steamed cauliflower, my morning cheese toast. Green sauce varies — this spring’s version is slightly Indian — I was going for that great green sauce you get in Indian restaurants but I wound up with something slightly chunkier. Basically, here’s what I did. I took a bunch of scallions out of the bottom of the fridge that were slightly past their time, washed them and trimmed off all the skeevy bits, cut…
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On Friday, the day our Miss Martha was sprung from jail, I had six cubic yards of compost delivered. The first year I ordered three yards, then last year I ordered four and noted in my gardening notebook, that I could easily have used six. So, this year it was six yards, which is a very big pile of dirt. At this point, I have flower beds, about three feet wide, across the front of my house, and running thirty feet along the side. I also have a long perennial bed that’s about six feet by thirty along one side…