Open View Gardens

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 […]

I’ve just returned from a work trip to southwestern Montana where it seems that most people don’t plant gardens. In towns, out on the ranches, I saw little sign of tomatoes or lettuces, even kale or broccoli tended in neat rows or clustered in raised beds. And vegetables that do grow?  They fold up early. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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: […]

For my next newspaper column (in a couple of weeks), I plan on writing about abundance–even in an early season northern garden–about how so much is ready for harvest, almost too much: plants bolting, plants trying to bolt, plants ready overnight, and how working within that abundance hour by hour opens up perspectives beyond mine […]

In today’s Addison Independent, our food column, PATCH work, features my piece on the pleasures and pitfalls of growing mint.  Just yesterday, I was wishing I had planted mint all around the perimeter of the garden; perhaps if I had done so, I would now have fenugreek, the kale would not be looking chewed up, […]