We’ve had a few hours of sun today (after serveral weeks of rain, and apparently before several more weeks of rain) so I finally had a chance to take a picture of these new tulips. I don’t remember their name but they’re quite fun — before they open they look like they have teeth.
Also, they’re a nice contrast with the purple Queen of Nights:
It’s a blurry little green thing! Actually growing!
There’s always such an unsatisfying lag between planting seeds and any obvious result. These lettuces were planted on Friday — five days ago — and already I was (quite unreasonably) getting all tappy-footed about it.
Now I just have to wait for the basil, lime basil, other lettuces, catnip, lavendar, petunias, nasturtiums, peppers and beans to appear… and then wait another month before the frost risk passes and they can go outside…
…or not. That’s a picture of my front garden as it appeared yesterday afternoon.
The other day I was going through my photos looking for something else entirely and I happened across this picture (below) from March 13 2007:
Note the lack of snow covering the garden. Note the beginnings of crocuses.
Today is March 20.
Note my tappy foot (and I’m not the only one – h/t to Melle).
Hello? Spring? Please?
It’s a good thing Easter is super-early this year; at least we can console ourselves by grumpily biting the heads off chocolate bunnies.
Last night when I went to bed, the maple tree out front of our house still had most of its leaves.
This morning, not so much. The neighbour’s car was covered with a thick layer of leaves. The path, the lawn, the sidewalk and the street are pretty much indistinguishable.
I suppose at some point soon I’ll have to acknowledge that winter is arriving very soon.
Late summer and early fall are usually the season of Projects in our house. They’re usually of the preserving kind, although as always renovation projects elbow their way in as well. First up (June or July) is the strawberry-jam project, which is later followed by other berry jams and various peach projects (August), then grape juice and grape jelly projects and various pesto projects (September), and lastly tomato-, mint-, apple- and crabapple-related projects.
It’s my Estonian heritage I’m sure. It’s summer! Preserve, preserve, because soon it will be cold and we might die! I have to enter winter with a nice big shelf of preserves and a freezer full of pesto or I feel deeply uneasy. I own an insane number of mason jars and I find it hard to part with them. If I share one with you, you know I really really like you and would very much want you too to live through winter.
But gah, who wants to deal with great vats of boiling water, pots of bubbling jellies or slow-roasted tomatoes when it’s 30 frickin’ degrees out? I made peach butter when it was still over 30 out, and I ended up with spatter burns up and down my arms because I simply couldn’t handle the thought of long sleeves in that heat.
Finally now it’s cold enough to enjoy jelly projects. Good, because my parents left a huge bowl full of crabapples on the kitchen table today before they left…
Leaves turning…
And then falling…
And of course, time for playing in the pool, because it’s 35 sweaty degrees out…
It’s hard to contemplate turkey and soup and other fall things when one is raking leaves while wearing a sleeveless sundress, sweating heavily, and still fancying wheat beers…
Animal, vegetable, miracle: a year of food life
by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.
It’s a simple premise for an experiment: what does it look like to spend a year eating food you’ve either produced yourself or sourced locally? The Kingsolver/Hopp family certainly aren’t the only ones who have attempted this in the past few years; the personal eco-food-adventure is becoming a bit of a genre.
Still, if it is a genre, as long as we’re spending more calories shipping food than the food itself contains (and don’t get me started about bottled water), it’s a worthwhile topic and this book is one of its better examples. Kingsolver (and her husband and oldest child, who also contribute) can write well, and she has managed to write about their experiment without the over-earnest tone common to eco-adventurers, recognizing that fifty or sixty years ago her point would have been moot. She has a sense of humour and — critical to the books success, IMO — while she is thoughtful and articulate, she doesn’t take herself too seriously.
They’re realists: they buy coffee and spices from overseas sources and the odd box of KD for one child’s school friends. They eat out sometimes. They plant too much zucchini (well, any zucchini is too much zucchini in my books). They are not vegetarian; they produce some of their own poultry and buy meat from local farmers. They don’t gloss over the amount of pure work involved in weeding and maintaining a garden large enough to feed four people for a year. However, it is, as she writes late in the book, an experiment that turns out to be about eating well instead of being about deprivation: about enjoying the crunch of spring greens and the sweetness of fresh strawberries and eggs straight from the chicken; of appreciating what is in season and of working within those natural limits.
It is also, inevitably, a book about compromise. She recognizes that it’s easy to contemplate growing your own food when you have forty acres in South Virginia, but that we all make choices in our own contexts. The extensive sidebars, references, and links give people ways to find out more should the urge strike.
Nicely done. Not so much a book to read at breakfast while munching raspberries from California and blueberries from New Jersey, though. At least my yogurt was organic and my honey was local!
In a few weeks we’ll be fighting the squirrels and raccoons for these…
A big pile of happy violets! This is part of the main clump in the garden, although the ones that made a break for it and took up residence in the middle of the lawn look pretty happy too.
The garden has gone crazy this week. I plan to park my butt in our newly-deployed hammock chair and admire it. I wonder if our wireless internet extends that far?
I have a nasty migraine, but when I saw crocuses blooming as the mailman dropped off a package I was compelled to head out into the sunshine to take pictures. Two minutes of bright light would be worth it, I thought.
There I was outside in my oh-so-attractive John Deere flannel pants commandeered from D, a very unsupportive tank top and bright pink Crocs. Just for a minute! Who would see? Of course M’s daycare chose that exact moment to walk by on their way to the park, and I had to be sociable despite the absurd outfit and splitting headache.
At least the pictures turned out well!
Now that the great piles of snow have pretty much melted off our lawn, I spotted the beginnings of a crocus.
Tarragon and “oregano” (it’s probably some sort of extra-pungent thyme, but we’ve always treated it as oregano) from my grandfather’s garden in the foreground. The spiky red-barked bit at left is a dogwood originally purchased by P’s dad.
A slightly melancholy scene…
