The other day I got an email from my friend Victoria. She’s a food stylist (she styled the cover of Omnivore’s Dilemma), cookbook author and generally interesting and curious person. She started a blog, which maybe she’ll continue if enough of us convince her to.
Anyhow, in her email she was desperately trying to find a highbush blueberry that had fruit on it. At the time mine only had flowers on it. I couldn’t imagine any plant in this hemisphere having berries and kind of chuckled about clients being so far disconnected from nature as to think they could get blueberries in early spring. Well, it is New York and if you can’t find it here, you usually know someone who has it. Sure enough, the photo assistant’s family has a blueberry farm in the Berkshires. A call was made and two bushes with berries arrived in time for Victoria’s shoot. Don’t ask me how they found a bush up north that had full-sized berries on it, but they did.
After the shoot, Victoria offered me the bushes. And being the scrappy (greedy?) gardener that I am, I walked to her house to pick them up. They were enormous and heavy, but I managed to walk home with one slung over each hip. I am thrilled to have these massive bushes because I have one with blooms and another very immature one that wasn’t able to help with cross-pollination. You can see the difference between the new bush with it’s huge berries and mine, which I don’t think will develop into berries.
Last night I pulled out my x-acto knife, cutting board and old newspaper to make pots for my seedlings. Neil and Lindsay gave me this nifty little tool called the PotMaker last year. You wrap 3 1/2″ wide (longer than 9″) around the base of the cylinder. Then you fold the ends under and press down on the small disc-shaped base. I had a lot of fun making them and got a kick out of the pictures that appeared on the outside of the pots. And, yes, I’m a little insane/ocd because I planned some of how the photos would fall on the pots.
One of the bright spots of winter for me is when the seed catalogs start to come in. I can snuggle under a blanket and dream about the warm weather to come. I ordered 2 currant bushes and 2 gooseberry bushes to go along with the 2 elderberry bushes I already have.
Here are the seeds I just got. Who could resist the name Sugar Daddy peas? A friend is giving me some tomato and zucchini seedlings. I’ve never grown zucchini in my tiny yard and might regret the amount of space they take up. I am going to try and train them over my railing instead of the ground. The tomato seeds that I bought are Black Krim. I grew them last year and really enjoyed the taste.
One of the signs that summer is ending and fall has taken over, is when we have to cut down our basil. Neil always makes a huge batch of pesto that we freeze and enjoy all winter. On Sunday, we had friends over and made a batch of pesto pasta, from some of the last of the pesto. I also harvested the first greens in my garden for a salad. I planted the mache lettuce in the fall and covered the planters with a plastic tarp. There they sat all winter under snow and in the cold. It is amazing to me that anything could grow at all. But grow they did and the salad was delicious. I adore mache greens and have taken to growing them because they are so difficult to find in the store. I have found them at Trader Joes in my neighborhood.
Mache salad with pear and walnuts
Toast about 1/3 c. walnuts. Peel and thinly slice a bosc pear. Thinly slice a shallot. Use a vegetable peeler and shave about 1/3c. parmesan cheese. Add everything to the salad.
Dressing: Mix 1T dijon mustard with 2T sherry vinegar and 1/4c. olive oil. I put them into an empty jam jar and shake it until it emulsifies.
Our sweet girl turned 6 today. We used to count her age in days, then weeks, then months and now it’s hard to believe that she’s already six. She looks like a big girl with her skinny jeans. She acts like a teenager as she sings along with Lady Gaga and Beyoncé and begs for me to paint her nails. She is a graceful ballerina and a fierce warrior in Tae Kwon Do. She has an opinion on everything and is not afraid to share it with you. She’s smart, a gourmand (we’re going for sushi tonight on her request) and has a wicked sense of humor.
We joke that she was born with a top hat and a cane, but it’s pretty much true. It will continue to be an amazing journey seeing her grow up.
This beautiful card and package came from her godparents in Rhode Island, who are amazing artists and make beautiful metal kitchenware.
Here’s a great video of Patti Moreno, the Garden Girl, showing how easy it is to build a raised bed garden and hoop house. She doesn’t get into it in depth, but she keeps chickens and rabbits in cages over the gardens to help fertilize the soil.
It’s finally starting to get cold here and I wanted to save some edibles from my garden. On the left is lemon verbena and on the right is flat-leaf or Italian parsley. I washed all the leaves and they are on this wire rack to dry. I put the parsley in the freezer to use it in sauces. I dried the lemon verbena to use as tea. It makes a wonderful tea mixed with mint leaves. You can also chop up the leaves and put them into baked goods.
Here’s a nice video showing a man and his son building a coop out of a lot of re-purposed materials. I can’t tell from the video, but my only suggestion would be to make sure the whole thing is sealed. It looks as though the back wall has an opening under the roof, which could allow raccoons in.
Neil is in our yard right now trying to figure out how to secure our coop to keep marauding raccoon claws out.
