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In anticipation of a pleasant disruption of your regularly scheduled Friday Alphametic.GARDEN+ HERBS+ GREEN———–HERBAL
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herbs, garden, wednesday, alphametic |
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Double-Bladed Herb Chopper with Integrated Base and Storage
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From the website: •••••••••••••••••••••• Herb Chopper Soft-handled, double-bladed cutter slides from the non-slip chopping base. Effortlessly and neatly dices nuts, chocolate, herbs and garlic cloves. Then sweep them right off the base and into the mix. Wipe clean and safely...
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Come help at the community garden
Our community garden at 10 1/2 and Grady is sprouting! Please come join the crew tomorrow (Thursday) at 5:15 pm for an hour or two of weeding, staking and tending to the garden.
All of the food will be donated to the community, and this is a great opportunity to meet other members of St. Paul's and some of our neighbors.
Next Wednesday June 24 , the garden organizers are planning a celebration at 4:30 pm. Plans for the celebration: food, musical instruments, games, possibly creating an art project inside the circle, and to have some poems be visually up in the garden by that time as well as scriptural or poetry by anyone who would like to read.
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Little Bits
The vegetable garden, well really both the vegetable and flower gardens, are slowly making progress. Over the past two days I've planted about 40 day lilies. Some that I dug up off of a hill behind our house that, if last summer is any example, will be covered with vines soon, choking out the flowers. Some were given to me by a neighbor who had dug them out last fall and stored them over the winter. The peonies are starting to leaf out (when the dog leaves them alone for a few days) and I have a flat of nasturtium seedlings ready to go out in the garden tomorrow before we leave on our vacation.
But as much as I'm looking forward to having flowers out the ying yong this summer, I'm a vegetable girl and so seeing tiny little carrot seedlings gives me a thrill that no amount of Camellia or tulip buds can. What can I say, I must have been a farmer in a past life.
Well, maybe not because I'm still struggling with when to plant what here in Virginia. I've spent most of my adult life (and a good chunk of my childhood) in rainy, temperate places and so when it comes to starting seeds and setting out young plants I am a little at a loss. This winter I read a Virginia vegetable gardening primer cover to cover and dutifully transcribed the dates to start sends indoors and out for each of the plants I wanted in the garden this year. And then we had the snowstorm and I thought everything would shift a little and worried my seedlings would be ready too early. But alas, it's pretty much full on early summer here (mid to high 80's every day) despite the long and late winter storms and my eeny little plants seem behind.
A few weeks ago we set out the broccoli seedlings and seeded the carrots, beets, parsnips and some early lettuce. The broccoli is plodding along and the shallot bulbs and lettuce starts given by a friend are providing some green in the otherwise barren landscape of the vegetable patch. The lettuce seedlings came up not long after but the root vegetable had made no appearance what so ever. I started to wonder if the birds had been snacking away on our seeds when I caught Evelyn hopping down the middle of one of the beds (sigh, this is gardening with a three year old I suppose) and discovered that she had trod on some tiny little beet plants. Crappy that she stepped on them but yay! they were finally coming up! And when I got down on my hands and knees and looked really really hard I saw some teeny carrot seedlings as well.
This weekend we leave for a five day trip to Florida. While I'm gone the tomato seedlings and cucumber plants should come up in the little mini greenhouse in the mudroom and the potato sets should arrive from the seed company. We've got a timer on the hose and beautiful weather ahead for when we are gone so, fingers crossed, by the time we are back it should be looking like a real garden. Get RSS Buttons
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Photos from the Community Garden celebration
Alas, we missed the Community Garden celebration last week, but we sent sunny weather from the West! Thanks to Martien Halvorson-Taylor for a terrific slide show (see below) of the celebration. By the way, if you want to do an hour or two of work at the garden, it is all for a good cause -- producing food for the poorest among us. The garden is located on 10 1/2 Street just south of Grady.
And if you have photos of other St. Paul's events, PLEASE send them to me and I will post on this blog. To see the photos from the garden celebration, just click HERE .
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Rhubarb.
Feast your eyes on the deliciousness that is my Hubby's strawberry rhubarb pie. Made with his tender hands using only the best Horse and Buggy CSA rhubarb and strawberries. Schhhhhhhlup!
Was meandering home today through the heart-in-your-mouth country hills that are my neighborhood, listening to Glen David Gold's* new book, Sunnyside on the ol' iPod. His words are like elixir - I swear when I saw he had written a new book it was Christmas morning. I jumped up and down in the local B&N, clapping my hands like a leetle gurrrl. Carter Beats the Devil was one of my all time favorites. Imagine Charles Dickens meets Stephen King with a healthy dose of Stephen Millhauser . Add a dash of Fitzgerald with a sprinkling of Tom Robbins . This man can yarn better than an old timer holding court on the General Store's porch.
Anyway, Gold mentions strawberry-rhubarb pie at one point. Some poor sap who'd just been beat all-to-hell-black-and-blue sees this just-out-of-the-oven perfection and slams his entire paw into it like he's Little Jack Horner. Ate the wad of pie goo, licked his fingers, and thought, "What a GOOD boy am I!" (okay, not really, I added that part).
The passage was so descriptive it reminded me my own sweet thang had baked a rhubarb treat for us a few weeks back. I photographed it from every angle, cursing the whole time at my inability to capture its sweet-tart goodness - and then ate it. We finished the entire thing in a night. In my rhubarb-induced stupor I TOTALLY forgot to write about it. There the picture sat for weeks, languishing. It took ol' Glen David's mastery of the written word to remind me. I blame it on the pie. Twas so damn good I plumb forgot to describe it. It also causes me to descend into unneccessary colloquial "country tawk" (as you can see).
Forgive me for sounding too much like Joy Turner , but that pie was SO GOOD! Sweet red berries hit you first, and then BLAM! the tart of the rhubarb. It knocked my socks off so much I insisted rhubarb become a prominent fixture in our first garden. Luckily it's easy to grow and propagates with the ease of a horny rabbit. Hubby tells a story about his brother who as a child was tilling the garden and dug up all his father's prize rhubarb, thinking they were weeds. No matter, the stuff quadrupled overnight and came back ten-fold the next year. They were eating rhubarb on everything for eons.
Hope our little plant is just as hardy. We're in the midst of a thunderstorm you see and there our rhubarb sits. Still in its tiny plastic cup, freshly purchased from Edible Landscaping , on our back porch. Being pummeled by penny-sized hail - and me too chickenshit to dodge the things and save my little pie-making paradise. Sigh. Wish us luck. The above picture may be all we have of the 2009 rhubarb harvest...
* I positively LOVE that I'm linking to a blog he wrote about why he doesn't blog...
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