Oh My Word!!!

Can you believe I completely forgot that I had started this blog? Yikes!!! What does that say about my mental health? Scary, I know. Since last September, I've changed jobs, changed towns, and haven't had a chance to put in a garden this spring.

We've just moved to St. Cloud, MN but still haven't found a house. So, no garden this year. I did have Phil VERY CAREFULLY move my Jude the Obscure to an enormous pot so I could bring it with me, but we left everything else behind. Of course, one of the big factors in looking for a place is the yard. We need some sunshine. A fence would be nice. Maybe even an already-dug garden spot.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying gardening vicariously. Yesterday I visited with a little old lady who was out hoeing her garden. Her tomatoes were 2 feet tall. Her potatoes were almost ready to bloom. And she was looking forward to having beets for the first time in a long time since she had a nearby teenager put a little fence around the garden.

I guess, if I have time, I'll visit the farmer's market and some neighbors gardens. Sigh.

b

Tomato Time

And after a busy summer weeding and watering and waiting, it's finally time for tomatoes. Hurrah.

I'm hoping that later this week I'll have time to add a few individual tomato portraits, but since it's going to be VERY busy, it might have to wait till next weekend.

Until then, I'll share my five favorite ways to eat fresh tomatoes:

- Whole, like an apple fresh from the garden and still warm from the sunshine.

- Sliced in half-inch slices and layered on fresh warm rolls.

- Sliced in half-inch slices and layered on toast with mayo.

- Roasted in the oven and tossed with pasta.

- Sliced and layered with chevre, then drizzled with olive oil.

These are in no particular order, since it's totally impossible for me to choose a favorite.

Later,

b

PS, I do know that one of Phil's chocolate peppers sneaked into my photo. What a card.

September???

So I woke up, rolled over and looked at the clock this morning and was completely floored to discover that it's September. I feel like Ripina van Winkle. Where did August go? Between having kids arrive home from their globetrotting and starting back to school and work, somehow the month disappeared. Never fear, I'm back. Or should that be, I'm ba-ack?

Whatever.


Of course there's still lots going on outside, but today I'm going to indulge myself and talk about our little vacation in the hills.

Phil and I spent a week in the Black Hills of South Dakota recently. It was in celebration of our 10th anniversary. (I'll pause here for general expressions of amazement and unbelief.) He found a little place on a quiet road back in the hills about 20 minutes from Sturgis. The cabin was wonderful, all open ceilings, polished hardwood floors, trees and deer in the back yard and a hot tub on the deck.

We spent an unbelievable amount of time at the cabin, tanning and hot tubbing and relaxing, but did manage to tear ourselves away most days. While we were away, we hiked. We hiked around Sylvan Lake; we hiked around Dalton Lake; we hiked the Centennial Trail, we hiked the Mikkelson Trail; we hiked from Deadwood to Lead and back again. Of course the upside was that even with lovely meals and bottles of wine, my jeans still fit when we got home again.


The point, however, is that we saw some lovely wild things while we were hiking. Some I've identified, and some I have not. If you recognize any of the beauties scattered throughout today's post, please let me know what they are.

Thanks.


This one should have reproduced as a MUCH deeper purple -- think royal purple.

Later,
b

Why Garden?

I am often asked, especially by baffled teenagers, why I spend my summer hours digging and weeding and working in the sunshine. So here's my gardening apologia....

Gardening is good exercise and good for your heart. Even the American Heart Association lists gardening as a healthy form of exercise and recommends at least 20 minutes three times a week. All that bending and stretching and twisting keeps you young and flexible. The sunshine on your shoulders is also necessary for your body to produce Vitamin D -- essential for calcium absorption and bone growth. Who knew?

Gardening is good for your soul. The prolonged periods of solitude guaranteed by gardening provide perfect opportunities for philosphizing and self-examination. I know my teenagers rarely interrupt me when I weeding the tomatoes or deadheading the pinks, something about being put to work, I think.

Gardening is good for the environment. All those plants busily transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. All those weeds and clippings can also be used to build a compost pile, saving space in the local landfill for something else. The resulting compost also returns nutrients to the soil when I dig it in around my plants.

But the real reason I garden? Jude the Obscure:


Phil gave me this rose bush two years ago for Mother's Day. Since then it's flowers have perfumed my garden, my house and even my school. All that and it's beautiful too.

More later,
b

Remember Me?

So it's been about 2 weeks, but I have a very good excuse. I was on vacation. In Canada. At Mom and Dad's 50th anniversary celebration. I had all kinds of good plans -- I was going to take a photo tour of Mom's garden and post it here -- I was going to take family pictures and post them here -- I was going to write a blog or two at midnight when the sun was still shining in the very far north. Funny how none of that happened.

Instead I have two pictures of my favorite wildflower ever:

See how lovely it is? And it grows enthusiastically from Edmonton north. I've seen it in Colorado too. Maybe it's the elevation, not the latitude. Who knows. But here in parting, with a promise that I'll get back to this blogging thing regularly, is number 2:

Isn't that lovely?

More later,

b

Meet My New Friend

Since my last post the weather has changed dramatically. Hurrah. We've been enjoying classical July 4th weather -- 90 degrees and sunny. My favorite weather. Of course once the sun comes out, things start to change in my garden.

And the biggest change I've seen yet is my dinner-plate dahlia. The little dahlias have been blooming enthusiastically for the last week or so. (I'd post pictures here, but a sudden summer storm chased us all inside before I could finish my garden tour.) But I did get a picture of my new best friend:

I know this isn't any kind of record-breaking dahlia, but I'm impressed with my first attempt. Daniel suggested taking a picture of the flower with a quarter so we could see how big it really is. See:

Since the lightning seems to be getting MUCH closer, I'll stop now.

More later,
b

Yucky Day Gardening

When I got up this morning it was only 50-odd degrees and the wind was blowing ferociously out of the west. Of course it was the morning I had planned to do a little gardening before plunging into the busy rest of my day. Coffee with a girlfriend at 9. Work at the greenhouse at noon. I had a little time after getting Daniel up at 7 to putter in the yard. But the dilemma was, what to do?

So, I came up with a list of my top five favorite "Yucky Day" gardening activities.

#1. Read my latest garden magazine. Admire the pictures. Plan what I want to do next in my own garden to make it match one of those lovely pictures. Admire the recipes and check the kitchen to see if I actually have the ingredients.

#2. Move from the magazine to one of my many garden catalogues. Then I can actually figure out how much it might cost to implement my new vision, or if I could grow the ingredients for the recipes.

#3. Make a cup of chamomile or mint tea with fresh steeped herbs from my garden. OK, I don't actually have chamomile growing this year, but one of my students gave me some that she had grown. And my mint this year is chocolate mint. I haven't tried it as tea yet. I'm not actually sure what to do with it, other than feed bits of it to visiting friends and their children to enjoy their reactions.

#4. Pull on my warm red sweater, take my tea outside to a sheltered corner, and listen to the wind blow. Sitting outside, warm from my tea and my sweater feels like a manageable adventure.

#5. Play in the kitchen. Use the last of those lovely strawberries for a pie. Make a batch of strawberry-rhubarb jam. Even just chop the rhubarb so it can wait in the freezer to be a taste of spring in February.

Hopefully by the time I'm done entertaining myself in the kitchen, the weather will have cleared up and I can actually go outside and get dirty.

More later,
b