Come Into My Garden: 3.1

I say it every year:

This time, I’ll keep a notebook all the way through the last harvest.

I’m not going to say that right now. I’ll just begin, because even though it’s snowing today, the work has begun.

For several Springs, we’ve hesitated on a tree order. It’s a big commitment. It means that we expect to stay here a while, or that we’ll do grand things to transform this land, and may not be around when the fruits of our labor one day appear. But, we’re in this for more than just our personal rewards. Every year, we have made the tiniest of baby steps in transforming the eroding, muddy hillsides of our wee plot into what we hope will be a flourishing food forest someday. This year, it feels already as though we’ve taken a great leap.

We transplanted berries that had been suffering, and gave them more sun and some new friends to hang out with. We planted cranberries (!!!!!!) and willows in the wettest of the wetlands, and a pie cherry tree in the most perfect place ever (in ten years). Lavender, tarragon, oh and dahlias into the place where the Jerusalem artichokes were literally choking out everything else. Now, the latter have their own bed.

All this on a gorgeous sunny weekend, and tonight it will be 25 degrees.

It still felt safe to sow peas, though, if not any other seeds, and when I started to prepare the bed, the scuffle hoe caught on something. It turned out the entire bed was filled with forgotten parsnips! Our first harvest of the year! If you’re wondering how I could forget about an entire bed of parsnips, I have this to say in my defense: we had a tremendous deer problem last summer. They came through and ate all the tops from the parsnips when they were young, down to the ground, along with almost everything else in that section of the garden. I gave them up because I figured they wouldn’t be much bigger than fingers, if they had a chance to grow at all, since the tops had only barely begun to re-sprout when winter came. And now, I have a five-gallon bucket’s worth of root candy.

Oh, the sweetness of over-wintered roots! Unbelievable.

It gives me such hope for the growing season to come.

Here’s a quick and lovely thing to do with parsnips:

1. Peel and slice whatever quantity suits your needs, and put the sliced parsnips in a wide skillet
2. Add about a tablespoon of butter per cup of sliced parsnips, and water to cover
3. Simmer, uncovered for 15 minutes, or until the parsnips are tender
4. Add salt and pepper to taste, some minced swiss chard and parsley, and simmer another 5 minutes, or until your greens are wilted. If your parsnips aren’t candy-sweet, you can add a bit of honey with the water and butter, and it will caramelize to fantastic effect.
5. Enjoy!

Oh, and there’s this:

And, when the mist departs mid-morning, the forest is aglow with red budding maples.

Sppprrrrinnnngggg!!!

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Mind Games

It’s hanging on by a mere thread, at this point, but my world is pretty well stuck in a drab color palette until Winter finally lets go.

Color is my work, but I’m feeling the need to push the issue. I’m going for full mind/body injection of rich color. Waking Up kind of color. I play with dye all day, but it’s not enough. I want to taste color. I want it to stain my skin and brighten my cold-dampened spirit. I want it to help me see past the icy muck, the bare trees, and the grey sky.

Oh, turmeric, you dreamboat.

Also, the annual, most precious care package of golden, California sunshine in the shape of meyer lemons arrived from the homeland, and after performing my usual First Ferment of the Year, this happened:

If you love lemon curd, I have to tell you that David Lebovitz’s recipe is absolute perfection. The lemons are the stars, rather than sugar; just tart enough to create a happy buzz on your tongue. We used our duck eggs and, yes, 12 tablespoons of butter, and a delicious dessert of some sort will become of most of it this weekend for the extended celebration of my son’s 10th birthday. There, I just wrote that out loud. TEN.

Yeah.

He requested salmon for his birthday dinner, and it was the perfect dish in which to stick 10 candles!

Did I mention there were TEN candles?

Okay.

Anyway, there were blood oranges in the salad because: COLOR. So far, it’s a pretty decent trick I’m playing on myself. I feel rather sunshine-y from the inside out.

Deciding that flowers are in the grocery budget even though they’re not is a pretty good one to keep up my sleeve, as well.

What do you do to keep yourself from going insane when Spring is reluctant??!?

ps: Maybe finally changing my header will help, too. Bah!

 

And March, it came in…

…with bird song, duck eggs (for the first time in months), and tiny, glittering snowflakes. I didn’t even mind that last bit, because they were backlit by a rising sun.

I’ll be honest; I was starting to feel a bit like this knitting project:

Tired. Broken. And with only the potential to be a warm thing.

It’s still not warm, by any stretch, but there’s something about the way the word March sounds coming out of my mouth, and the way it feels like hope. It stokes an inner fire I thought I’d let go out.

We lost too many of our girls to bitter cold temps this winter, and will be collecting some eggs to hatch. Looking out at this thick blanket of snow, I can hardly imagine duckling feet padding around, but the thought makes me smile. With ducklings will be soil and seeds and digging and barn-raising and all the goodness of warm, bright days ahead. Bring it.

In the meantime, audio books and neon knitting are keeping me sane.

Happy March!

morning : noon : night :: 2.7

 

 

morning : noon : night :: 2.6

 

 

morning : noon : night :: 2.3

 

 

morning : noon : night :: 2.2

 

 

More of Everything Else, please

It didn’t feel like an Adventuring Sort of Day, even though Juno stalled just shy of letting us in on the snow dump. It was blustery and I felt chilled unless I was standing inches from the fire. Snow was swirling ’round outside our windows, but didn’t seem to land anywhere. It was a Chocolate Banana Muffins for Breakfast sort of Day, instead.

It was a taste of sunshine from the south kind of day, a daydreaming of green things while we pored over our notes from myriad seed catalogs and planned our garden sort of day.

The increase in daylight hours does all of us good, even in the thick of a winter storm. It sets me to thinking hopeful thoughts, whereas weeks ago, in the deepest darkness of the year, I struggled to get through even the most basic, every day tasks. Not least of all, it makes sledding more sparkly, and the boy likes to stay outside digging in the ice until dinnertime.

Less moping means more of Everything Else.

I revel in this mid-Winter time, when my brain is messy with ideas and there are so many unfinished projects around the house. Big projects, like our kitchen-in-progress, and the wee projects that remind us it’s okay to stop moving every once in a while and not feel guilty about it. If only for a few minutes in a day, while my eyes search and my fingers fit puzzle pieces together, I can move freely about in the brain clutter and start tidying up.

There’s a lot going on in there. I hope this is the year I figure out how to pick the choicest bits out and share them with the world.

the circle game

It’s been a wild ride into autumn, life in a constant state of flux-y turmoil sprinkled with the odd joyful moment. The photo above illustrates finding one of those odd joyful moments in a sweet golden hour of the last week of summer, reminding ourselves that we live in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Do you remember the 52 Project? It fell off the face of my blog, but not because I’m a slacker. It’s just that this happened, a while back:

…and The Boy said he didn’t want me to post so many portraits of him in this space anymore.

So, I stopped.

These days, I ask his permission before I publish any posts with his image. He is old enough now to require that consideration and I do my best to respect it. Well, except for right at this moment while he’s in bed, but if he wants me to remove his gleeful splashing face in the morning, I will do so without hesitation. I have a feeling, though, that he’ll really get a kick out of it.

And, remember the One Shot Project? I didn’t discontinue that on account of being a slacker, either. My lens experienced a sudden recovery from its mysterious illness and stopped crapping out after only one shot. Simple as that. I suppose I could have continued with the project, anyway, but it seemed a little…I don’t know…contrived, I guess.

All that said, the only reason I haven’t shared my now-well-tested and ridiculously delicious recipe for fermented cocoa granola is because I’m a slacker. Stay tuned.

Pick a Color, Any Color

…my post on Luminous Traces Collective this week…

I had something completely different in mind…a hue lively and bright, to help me pretend summer has not yet begun its exit while my tomatoes are still young and green (hint, hint)…but then, this guy paid a visit to my workplace and changed everything.

I spend so many of my waking hours adding color to whiteness, that it only seemed fitting and, perhaps, necessary, to celebrate a blank canvas.

And then we dyed him teal. KIDDING.

Anyway, full set of images here.