Category Archives: my garden

Homey doings in early spring.

books, food and cooking, Lent, my garden, , , , ,

This month I had two occasions when friends visited me for one or two nights, two different friends each time. It was fun to have people to cook for. About an hour before the first pair of guests were to arrive I found out that one of them couldn’t eat the bread I had planned to serve with soup, because of gluten intolerance. I have just enough time to make muffins, I thought, using Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free flour again. I mixed up the wet ingredients, and then — could not find that flour anywhere.

Though I rarely bake anymore, I have a dozen sorts of flours in a refrigerator in the garage. I rummaged through those and decided to use one cup of cassava flour and one cup of buckwheat flour. The latter was the sort one would use for buckwheat pancakes, that is, from roasted groats. Some people don’t like that flavor, so I was taking a chance that my guests would.

The muffins turned out very nice, we all thought. But the cassava flour is a little heavy, and I think if I try this again, I’ll use more buckwheat and less cassava. That very evening I discovered the missing flour, in the wrong refrigerator.

The last time I made pancakes I did not use buckwheat flour, but I did use this beautiful batter bowl that I received as a Christmas gift. It holds an amount of batter that is just right for one person, and its presence on my kitchen counter has encouraged me to make pancakes for just myself, for the first time ever.

Another type of bread I helped to bake recently was the little prosphora that our parish uses as one type of altar bread at Divine Liturgy. That day we only made these small ones, and two people prepared dough. One of the dough makers used more flour than usual, and we ended up with a record number of prosphora — so while they were cooling I took their picture:

Lent is coming right up — for us Orthodox it begins on Monday. Many people I know like to choose some “spiritual reading” for Lent, and I have done that many times. Our women’s book group has often chosen a book to read together and discuss after Pascha. But this year we didn’t; we still haven’t discussed the last book we chose, to read during Advent.

At one point I thought I would read The Seer: The Life of the Prophet Samuel and its Relevance Today during this season. And then I looked around my house and noticed so many other worthy titles. Maybe I would cast lots among these below, and let God decide for me:

But the finality of that action frightened me. It’s not likely that I will finish any of these big books during Lent anyway, because I always seem to use any extra time to attend the lovely Lenten services at church. So in the end I decided to read (from) all of them, and I’ve stacked them up next to my reading chairs as my Lenten Library; my plan is to read at least a little from one or two of them every day. Being goal-oriented does not come naturally!

hairy bittercress

The last couple of days have been sunny at times, and the weeds in the garden are getting my attention, as they grow like weeds in springtime. So I got out there and pulled a bunch. I try to keep a thick layer of mulch on my garden to prevent weeds, but I guess I got behind in adding to that layer. I’m hoping to do that this week.

The anemones and crocuses that I planted at the end of November are starting to bloom, and the muscari and daffodils are showing leaves; obviously so late in the fall was not optimal for getting them in the ground. One reason I got busy weeding was to make sure they won’t be hindered from lifting their pretty faces to the sun. Of course, it’s good for me to do that with my own face when I get the chance, and I trust that will be the case more and more as springtime unfolds, in the earth and the air, and in these anemones.

Frosty with ceanothus.

my garden, , , , , ,

The sun shone in a blue sky, so I braved the chill to walk the creek path this morning. It wasn’t too cold at all. But when I got back, I saw that the fountain was still iced over. Behind it you can see the newly pruned pomegranate and plum.

January is progressing pretty much as usual in the garden, with the typically surprising, commonplace glories. Most of my landscaping does not go into dormancy, so every day reveals something showing its aliveness by a changed feature. A few asparagus had sprung up in the last week, so I cut them to put into soup for breakfast, along with a portion of those greens I harvested last week.

Dan the Landscaper added to the collection of new plants that arrived in nursery pots in November, and quite a few went into the ground last week, including the first-ever ceanothus that has lived on this property. It came with buds, and they are starting to open. Ceanothus is a genus of 50-60 species, sometimes called California Lilac, and I never remember their names, but we had a large one on our former property in another town, “long ago.”

ceanothus
Yarrow flowers of this morning.

When I type that common name it reminds me of my first encounter with this plant. My late husband and I had only been married a year when he returned from a backpacking trip with a friend, bringing me a flowering branch of white ceanothus that his hiking buddy had told him was California Lilac. The fragrance of those blooms imprinted itself on my mind. I think most of the blue or purple varieties are not that aromatic.

One plant I am most excited about having in my garden is Clary Sage — and I have three of them just planted. These are the white ones, which I haven’t had before, but I expect to love them as much as the purple I’ve had in the past. Clary sage is a biennial, so I have to remember to have new ones going in every year, if I want to have it blooming regularly in June. This picture below is from the back garden, in ’23. My little starts only have about ten leaves each at this point, and can’t be expected to bloom until spring of next year.

Clary Sage in 2023

While I wait for the new landscaping to get installed and to grow up, I put in various bulbs and annuals, so that when I go in and out the front door I can be cheered by their colors. I see the leaves of muscari and anemones poking up, but right now it is the wholesome faces of the common pansies that greet me every day. This one is saying hello to you right now.

Waking in the middle of January.

my garden, the language, winter, , , , , , , , ,

Today felt like the beginning of a fresh season. The real seasons don’t sync with the dates on the calendar, and right now presents itself as more natural for starting something, for having the necessary energy and expectation. If my helper Alejandro hadn’t come to prune, it might not have happened still. But I did ask him to come, so I guess I got the ball rolling, or the pruners opened, or something.

In the first week of January, I only needed to go to church, to be carried on a wave of feasts and exultations. I did that seven times in seven days, because of St. Basil’s Day, Theophany, and our parish feast day, with all the associated Matins and Vespers services. When I go to church it’s nearly impossible for me to get Anything Done the rest of the day. So of course I was Behind in the second week, and before I had caught up much I sank a bit Under the Weather, and put this painting as the background of my computer monitor:

Felix Vallotton, Femme Couchee Dormant, 1899

But! I didn’t resemble that lady all the time, and when I put her picture up it was at my New Computer I was sitting, the whole project of which was accomplished for me (just before I went Under) by a team of family members, starting with Soldier, who chose and ordered the machine, and the Professor and Scout who got it set up beautifully. Especially Scout, whom some might remember as the boy at left, but who now is a young man and my favorite I.T. guy. My computing (reading and word processing) now goes blessedly like lightning, compared to the old system.

That speed enabled me to switch my Duolingo lessons from my phone to the computer, which was a relief, because all the phone pecking had aggravated my right thumb joint. It is in an effort to learn Greek that I was suffering the abuse, which led one friend to declare that I now have a Greek Thumb. I found the audio-visual lessons to be inadequate without writing practice, so once I switched to the computer I started writing down some phrases and sentences I was learning.

A trip to Greece is in my near future, if all goes as planned — I will surely tell you more about that soon. It’s doubtful that I will use the language much when I go there, but at least I may be able to make out some signage. And languages are always fun. I really need to work on my Greek penmanship, though!

My Greek Thumb had been one more cause of my enervation. But after about a week of lounging about and never quite finishing the dishes and laundry, I found myself out in the garden picking greens and stringing up pea supports. It was an overcast day, but I wore my barn coat and garden gloves and happily pulled out the rotten cherry tomato plant and took pictures of the pomegranates before they got pruned.

Many people have looked out the window at those fruits and wondered what they could be. The pomegranates get bleached by the winter rain and frosts, and don’t resemble at all the deep red fruits they were in the fall.

The day’s harvest of parsley, kale, collards and Swiss chard was fantastic. I hadn’t picked any for a couple of months. That type of kale on the top of this bowlful is so beautiful and hardy, I hope I can find the same seeds to plant again this year.

On the last day of lounging, my podcast listening also helped me get into a more active mode, because my contemplative self had been supremely satisfied by listening to Malcolm Guite. He was talking about George MacDonald, at a celebration last year of MacDonald’s 200th birthday.

The event took place at the Wade Center at Wheaton College, and the recording of it can be found here on YouTube: “When A Heart Is Really Alive: George MacDonald and the Prophetic Imagination.”

If you are at all interested in MacDonald, C.S. Lewis’s conversion, the vision of Coleridge, or myth and the imagination generally, I very heartily recommend it. I’m going to watch/listen again. Guite’s love for God and for his subject(s) are contagious. Immediately following that experience, I had today a perfect Home Alone Day, when my scattered mind wasn’t too challenged by having to multi-task. And that helps me to get more Things Done, which is calming and energizing.

Even though my last couple of days were more about Getting Up than waking up, I put the word “wake” in the title of this post because one theme of Guite’s talk and MacDonald’s writings is Waking Up. You can listen to the podcast and hear more about what we might wake to; I will just leave you with a related thought from the author himself:

“The world…is full of resurrections… Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it — the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.” -George MacDonald

I shift my attention to wisteria leaves.

beauty, my garden, , , ,

Most of the day I’ve been in a melancholy mood, except for the hour or so I was outside helping Alejandro pull the remaining leaves off the plum trees. We did this in preparation for applying the first dormant spray of the season, and I do love being in the garden, just soaking up the fresh smells and dampness. In the middle of the day, that is, when the chill doesn’t go straight to the bones.

I spent hours and hours out there this week, planting bulbs and annuals too late, and getting a little weary of the cold sogginess. But every time I would look up from the ground, there was the sky, and the varied colors of leaves drifting down from my crape myrtle, or the neighbor’s liquidamber. The whole thing overwhelms me with the beauty and sadness of the earth.

And today, it was the wisteria in my own garden that lifted my head and heart — it is a richer, deeper, brighter yellow-gold than I’ve ever noticed before. Truly, if cameras had never been invented, I would have had to learn to paint long ago.

Happy December, my Dear Readers all!