Open View Gardens

Our fourth guest writer, Barbara (Bee) Dieu, takes us to Brazil where she is an educator working at the intersections of language learning, multi-literacies and professional development in online contexts.  Over the years I have learned many things from her about teaching and learning online, about working across and between cultures and about being fearless […]

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 last! After months of  harvesting, drying & preserving the garden output; planning, tasting & developing recipes; dreaming up  & revising menus, I’m ready on this last day of 2010 to roll out my limited subscription series of menus, recipes & Open View concoctions!  I’m excited to offer our jellies & elixirs, dried herbs & […]

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. […]

The first time I made cassis and realized how simple it was to transform black currants into ambrosia (really, all you need is patience as it takes six months of maceration in a cool, dark place), I felt as though someone had been keeping a secret from me all these years–some of the most sublime […]

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, […]