Open View Gardens

I eat seafood only when I’m on a seacoast.  Never in Vermont. Or at least not by choice. I know that this rather severe, absolute rule flows from having grown up six miles from the ocean, and from spending childhood summers in a cottage overlooking the salty water–water that was once filled with lobsters and […]

I’ve stopped buying pine nuts–except when I find fresh Spanish ones at Sahadi’s when I visit my daughter in Brooklyn.  The only sort available around here are flown in from China–too far for something that needs refrigeration and careful handling–and the $30/pound price is beyond affordable.  Perfect pine-nutty pestos and some Italian cakes and cookies […]

On a table in my house sits what most people, including my entire extended family, find quite bizarre, something they cannot align with what they know of me.  After all, I pride myself on being an ecological gardener who tries to consider the impact of my actions on all the inhabitants of the garden, not […]

Barbara’s Note: I buy my meat from these two young farmers–fabulous pork shoulders and chops, chickens and ducks–and am much inspired by their example.  Kate Corrigan grew up in Shoreham, Vermont where her family raised their own eggs, pork and poultry. Sebastian Miska grew up in the Middlebury, Vermont area and enjoyed frequent visits to […]

My family jokes about how when my husband heads out on a trip, Mother Nature lets loose. An albino robin appears just before he’s to leave. An owl hangs around in broad daylight, staring intently into the screened-in porch.  Bats flit about the house.  Birds get trapped in my studio. Coyotes prowl the garden to […]

I’m lucky to have a family that likes to cook and eat together. Our tastes range, for sure–some of us do not like kale or Brussels sprouts,  some don’t like red meat, some will not eat hazelnuts.  When we splurge on ice cream in New York City (at Grom or Van Leeuwen), our choices range […]

At Open View Gardens, our weekend revolved around strawberries. Since this year we can’t pick any of our own strawberries in order to encourage the 50 first-year plants to send their energy to their roots (which will lead to healthier, more robust plants and higher yields next year), we decided to go to The Last […]

Addison Independent PATCHwork Column for May 12, 2011 Kerplink Kerplank Kerplunk When I was a child, those sounds–berries hitting the bottom of a tin pail in Robert McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal—echoed through the blueberry field behind our Maine cottage.  I spent almost as much time looking for signs of Sal’s blueberry-ing bear as I did […]

Cross-posted at Eating Well Magazine. We’ve reached the turning point–the fields and woods have shrugged off their winter torpor and are decking themselves out in glorious shades of green. The female coyote who hunts in our back field is clearly a nursing mother; the birdboxes all have residents; the turtles are digging holes to lay […]

I started Open View Gardens to help open our notion of what we can grow and therefore eat locally.  I want to explore as much of the world as possible through garden and kitchen.  As are others in the North country, I am experimenting with foods we don’t normally associate with this region, and foods […]