Open View Gardens

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 […]

I’m trying to break a bad gardening habit. I’m trying to resist the urge to over-plant, to stuff the vegetable beds to bursting point no matter how good it makes me feel. You see, when visitors ask for a tour of my gardens, I do a lot of apologizing– for the small size of the […]

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: […]

We’re harvesting and preserving like mad at Open View Gardens: vegetables, fruits and herbs to make syrups and sauces, jellies and tisanes, ristras and pestos, chutneys and cordials, salts and mustards, salsas and herb mixes. The hot peppers are ripening up, and so we’re exploring the full range of flavors and heat, variety to variety. […]