My seed orders arrived the other day, making it one of the most exciting days of 2016 so far! Here they are organized by type. I ordered 14 different varieties of tomatoes, this might be a problem.
 My problem is I want to buy ALL the seeds, from ALL the catalogs.
The sunflower idea must not have worked; Fall is still almost here. And because I can't stop the season with some flowers I spent Sunday afternoon making these apples from our farm....  ... into applesauce.  The other day I noticed that my once beautiful stand of potted Catnip was looking a little thin. Last night I found out why.......  The past two years the outside cats have never once even looked at the catnip. I guess that has changed this year.  I won't be having catnip tea anytime soon.  In our garden we grow two types of green beans. The green kind and the purple kind. I enjoy the purple beans for their interesting appearance and their delicate flavor. These are my favorite beans to eat raw or slightly cooked. This year we had a few more than we could eat before they went bad, so I had to can some of the crop. The thing about purple beans is they are a little bit magic. Not magic like grow a stalk up to the land of the giants, but magic as in their own right.  I started with a big basket of purple beans and snapped them like normal. Look how beautiful these beans are snapped! I love the contrast of the green and purple.  But when I pull them out of the canner 30 minutes later, they looked just like regular old green beans.  It's actually a kind of disappointing magic trick.
It's been a rainy summer. This is an understatement. We've have 14 inches of rain at our farm in 25 days. The sun came out the other day, and I took the opportunity to harvest the bumper crop of parsley that has been growing. One of my favorite ways to store herbs is to freeze them. Freezing herbs retains their fresh flavor, and there is nothing like the flavor of fresh parsley in winter soups and stews. I picked a huge bunch of parsley, cleaned it, and picked the leaves off the stems.  I wanted to document re-potting our indoor orange tree, but what I actually captured is a sweet moment between a father and his daughter. This is my potted orange tree. I bought it from Gurney's Seeds in the summer of 2014. When it arrived in the mail it was but a mere twig with a handful of leaves. It spent the summer outside in the sunshine, the winter in a south facing window in the warm upstairs. Before the spring and summer arrived I wanted to get the plant into a new pot so it had room to stretch it's roots and continue growing.  Start with a larger container and potting mix of your choice. Citrus trees like to have loose dirt around their roots. Add the dirt to the pot, and lightly pat it down.  |
The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of Archives
November 2015
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