Open View Gardens

My father was among the world’s most enthusiastic record keepers. As a historian, he stacked details of time, place and event neatly in his mind. On index cards he noted the noteworthy including nagging holes in his coin and stamp collections. Even after he died, we discovered more: deep within his desk he’d squirreled a […]

My sister-in-law is about to come down with a bad case of mid-summer gardening fatigue. I can sense it creeping up on her—and many others– as it does every year right about now, just as the birds are quieting down from their early nesting hoopla, just as the sun hits its warm stride, just as […]

Published in the Addison Independent PATCHwork Column 4/21/11 Some call them uninvited guests, interlopers, opportunists, ne’er-do-wells, even weeds. Earnest gardeners work hard at banishing these trespassers from vegetable beds, pulling them in fall and spring, evicting them when they pop up during the summer. It makes sense, I suppose. If left to their druthers, they’ll […]

After a week immersed in wedding preparations, from picking wildflowers to baking pies, to sprucing up the gardens to making pre-wedding feasts from the garden harvest and the neighboring sheep farm’s lamb, pork and sausage, we’re tired! But the peppers need picking, the tunnels covering, the lemon verbena drying, the tomatillos pickling, so out to […]

This week’s PATCHwork column for the Addison Independent: Hot Pepper Mania My house smells of hot peppers.  Who knew that a dehydrator filled with them would send clouds of pungent oil into the air.  At this rate I could probably produce highly effective pepper spray, may soon have to don goggles.  It’s a good thing […]

I can go months without thinking of something or someone and then a smell, a glimpse, a sound, or a dream plunges me right back to a time, a place, an experience. We all experience the sensory triggers of memory. The smell of freshly ground curry always sends me back to two places and times: […]

Note: Every other Thursday I contribute to a shared column, PATCH work, Three Gardens, Many Kitchens, in our local newspaper, The Addison Independent.  This week I’m thinking artichokes–here’s how it reads with its images (the online newspaper version does not include the visuals). As a child I wanted swordfish and artichokes for my birthday dinner. […]

I spend most of every day out in the gardens, down in the basement repotting seedlings or in the kitchen developing new recipes for what I am harvesting. In other words, I’m pretty much on my own out here on our sixty acres, with the birds, our two old cats, the rabbits and whatever other […]