autumn yarden

We don't have much of a garden, but there are a couple of things that flourish. One of them is our comfrey, dug up from our plot at the community garden, and unwittingly transplanted here when I read that the leaves make great compost. Yeah, great compost and tremendously deep tap roots that are impossible to dig back out!  It's not that I don't love the comfrey - I really love that it still has purple blooms, long after my friend Jen's comfrey plant on their hilltop farm has completely died back, because on really warm days like today there are still bees and monarchs out doing their thing, and our comfrey is their favorite spot.

We also have impressive "poop mushrooms" that flourish on the presents the neighborhood dogs leave in abundance in our yard.  They're like little condominiums of fungi, aren't they?

Ah, then there is the horseradish.  Our horseradish did so well that when I ripped up the pot to move it out of the way for the house-painters this summer, the plant in the pot died, but there were so many healthy roots left in the ground that a whole new village of horseradish popped up! My favorite part of the horseradish, of course, are its pests.  I know, it's not right, and I'm clearly not really a gardener, but you have to admit I have honed my ability to appreciate the littlest things.

My friend Molly, who has an admirable passion for healthy soil, has given me buckets of wealth from her compost pile, and along with the soil came a few volunteers. My favorite is a dark purple beauty from the mint family, called shiso.  Look who we found amongst its leaves:

Ani and I spent quite a bit of time this fall puttering in the yarden, taking photos and finding bugs. We harvested our abundant lemon balm and made a tincture for the first time...

end of summer toes

...and more than a few hours reading on our little stoop, enjoying our tiny kingdom.  I think that every year somehow our garden will transform into something respectable, but every year it does its own thing and the deer eat the morning glory leaves and the beans, or the hollyhocks just downright disappear and the milkweed I thought was definitely dead just shows up one day.  It's a ride, I tell ya. 

*I can't even pretend to understand what is happening with the formatting in this post! I've fixed it several times, but I SURRENDER! There is a husband, a cat, and netflix waiting for me and time's a-tickin!

from garden to kitchen in november

We'd checked everything off of our list today: piano practiced, poem worked on, math games played, and history shared over lunch...and then Sarah called to ask if anyone wanted to come pull pepper plants out of the garden she manages with the University.  Perfect timing for me and for Ani.  Eliza stayed home to read and work on her story before Jazz class, so we walked over without her.

It is the last burst of sun, I hear, before the cold comes.

Time to pull out the peas. Too bad, they looked just about ready to give up the blooms for the fruit.

Ani loves Sarah and she thrives when she is helping accomplish something real. Don't we all?

We made quick work of it, and then I had to go looking for these two who had disappeared with the wheelbarrow.  I found them in the huge-a-mongous leaf pile...

Leaf Love

Before heading home we harvested radishes, spinach, kale, bok choy, cilantro and mint! Wow, such abundance for November 10! We got home and set about turning the radishes into this tasty dip to take to a potluck tonight...Find yourself some radishes and enjoy!

Raw Radish Dip - a recipe I got from my Aunt Monica

1 cup finely chopped radishes
1 8oz package cream cheese, at room temp
1 garlic clove, minced
1 TBS lemon juice
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dried dill
pepper

Combine and chill - or don't! - and garnish - or don't! - and EAT.

Ten days! I've made it ten days of posting in November! Yeehaw!

spuds

more garden joy...!!

the season of OUT

We are officially into the season that sends us out and out and out...the laundry, the dishes, the cooking, the beds....ech, who has time?!?!?! All the girls want is out, so we do our best to balance that with everything else...It's meant bike riding to the garden to swing and plant and read our first Herb Fairy book (hm - there is no direct link to this anymore, but these are the folks who wrote them - more on those later).

small visitor on the page

It's meant hiking in the woods. For a bit. And then turning around because the poison ivy was just way too daunting, encroaching on the path and finally blocking it completely. Bummer.

Sassafrass

(A woman asked if Eliza were a hari krishna.  Funny, it was a woman who followed krishna who gave her this wrap she was wearing! She looked joyous and beautiful out on the trail.)

mating gold-backed snipe flies

tiger swallowtails enjoying the minerals from some bird poop. mmmmm.

trash. we left with a large bagful of cans and plastic. ugh.

 And of course every day has been peppered with "can we go swimming? how about a swim? when are we going swimming??"  So far our swimming has been impromptu - as in in their unders 'cause we didn't bring the swim bag  - and I realized that I am waiting for the sea of students to leave before committing to swimming season.  It's just not very pleasant (12 games of frisbee and football, large bodies launching themselves erratically about the beach, mug of booze in one hand, the other outstretched for a catch, cigarettes, lots of posing and posturing and conversations I'd rather my kids not listen to - kinda get the picture??), and I feel grinchy for not wanting to take them, but it'll just be another couple of weeks before they're all gone and the beaches are more or less ours again.

This worked the other night, though, and I heard Eliza continue to marvel at how a written note had brought about results.  I'm a sucker for a well-timed note.