Tag Archives: tarragon

The garden in August.

my garden, summer, , , , , ,

Today workers came, to repair and paint various places on the exterior of the house, including replacing part of a pillar near the front door, that is rotting because of all the dirt and plants around it — uh-oh. The plants needed to be removed, and I wanted to do that myself, and save them to put elsewhere. While digging I accidentally cut into an irrigation hose, but the handyman took it in stride and said he would fix it, so I didn’t need to have Alejandro over here just for that.

amaranth

Once I was out there digging and pruning, I didn’t want to stop. But I had to leave after a while and drive halfway across the county to the dentist. That was a pleasure, too, because I listened to the beginning chapters of Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, which our women’s book group at church chose just yesterday as our selection. I am loving it so far; the writing is a feast for the ears; I ordered a print edition so I can read it with my eyes as well. The only other thing I’ve read by Hardy is The Mayor of Casterbridge, which I also liked a lot, but it has been a while.

And at the dentist, I had to wait, so I read on Kindle on my phone, poking around into various books I have there. There was no drilling today or anything uncomfortable. Mostly I got to talk with my dear dentist, whose family and mine have been slightly connected and acquainted since she was a child. She’s also an excellent dentist, and a mom who likes to talk with me about our families. I’m so thankful for her and other members of her family who are also dentists ! and that they have stuck around, so we can still be in the same community after all these years, and I can have dentists I trust.

When I returned from that outing the workers had gone for the day. But I got to work again, and filled my neighbor’s green bin with all that had been left over after we filled mine a few days ago. Even though that area by the front door is in upheaval, and there is a lot of work to be done all over the property, I felt, rightly, that the garden is thriving overall. The figs are coming on, and the zinnias, and what do you know, I discovered an amaranth plant!! I did throw out all the old amaranth seeds into the planter boxes in the spring, along with others in the bottoms of packets, so evidently one of those managed to sprout and survive.

Fig tree behind the giant milkweed leaves.

The tarragon is extravagant:

Willowherb

The two weeds that are thriving right now are spurge and willowherb. Spurge is ugly and covers the ground like a mat, but willowherb is tolerable, as it looks like it could be something one meant to grow, and it hides among the ones you did plant — until it goes to seed, when it still doesn’t look bad. And it’s always easy to pull out.

Two plants I had to trim severely.

In the remainder of the week I need to repot a few plants, and to plant kale and chard in the front where zucchini did not make it. The basil is abundant and wants to be made into pesto. So far I have about six butternut squashes on the plants that are overflowing on to the driveway; it seems that I should have more fruits, because there are eight plants there, in full sun, but oh well, I will be happy to have a few. In the back, the kabocha and delicata squashes haven’t done well. I have a solitary delicata, which is very small…

After our little heat wave a couple of weeks ago, it has cooled down to about 80 on the warmest days, and the smoke has not returned. I’m loving August, and so glad that I am not one of the people who has to go back to school, when there is still a lot of summer left. September is my favorite month, but August may be my second-favorite. But I know many of the U.S. bloggers I read do not appreciate this month. Whether you are trying to stay cool, or cozying up in the Southern Hemisphere, I hope you find a way to enjoy the season.

A batch of cookies and summer loves.

books, friends, my garden, summer, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Crape Myrtles are in full bloom in my neighborhood, including on my own property. Mine is not more than five years old, and in the last year it seems to have doubled in size.

I’ve been walking down to the creek bridge and beyond several times a week, and all the trees and plants growing in and on the banks of that stream also seem to have mushroomed, so that I can barely see the water below the bridge.

I love the summer, because it’s only in the occasional heat waves of the season that I can feel fully at home and in sync with the earth. In this climate with marine influence, where the evenings get cold and breezy even in the summer, it’s a treat to fully sink into the warmth and stay there all evening; even when I climb into bed I am relaxed, and don’t have to pull several layers up to my chin against the chill. Of course, this sounds crazy to those of you who live in high-humidity summer zones!

Even when it was over 100 degrees last week, I was able to spend a lot of time in the garden morning and evening, and then work on other projects in the middle of the day. I have plenty of paperwork and sorting yet to accomplish. If I ever finish that — Please God, help me! — I could sew, or read, or get back into writing book reviews …

When I read on my phone, I’ve started taking screen shots of quotes that I don’t want to lose. And I often look up words I don’t know — On Substack there are so many good writers with vast vocabularies — and take screenshots of the definitions.

Spider in the plum tree.

One morning as I set out on my usual walking route, I passed by the house down on the corner, where a vegetable garden has been carved out of the lawn, next to the sidewalk. For months I have been admiring the health and size of the plants, and that morning I spied a dozen beautiful yellow summer squashes peeking out from under the leaves, several of which should have been picked days earlier; on my way back I debated about whether to inquire about them. If the owners didn’t want them for some reason, I would take them… and if the gardeners had suddenly been incapacitated and couldn’t pick their own squash, I could offer to do that for them….

It sounded reasonable… and one hates to see beautiful vegetables going to waste… but what if I got involved with people I found disagreeable? Or who were needy beyond my abilities to help? I stood on the sidewalk and thought a while, then walked up to the door and knocked. The result: I made a new gardening friend.

Dee gave me three overgrown squashes, though none of the size I’d have preferred, and she invited me to come back for more. She enjoyed talking about her garden, and told me about her family that she lives with, including her recently widowed mother, who she said is the cook of the household. I wondered if that cook prefers overgrown zucchinis…. On one of the less sweltering days I did cook the squashes into a spicy, satisfying stew, which I was glad to have..

That’s my own chard and collards in the picture above, the leaves that were not eaten by insects or mollusks; I picked almost all of my greens and now my own little squash plants are spreading out in the planter boxes. Recently I transplanted the tarragon out of a pot into one of those boxes where it will get more regular watering, and it is thriving.

I used several sprigs of it to make Anytime Apricot and Tarragon Cookies from the Dorie’s Cookies book. They were in the chapter called “Cocktail Cookies,” and the recipe includes no sweetening beyond the dried apricots and tarragon.

I baked those savory shortbread cookies to take to friends who’d invited me for lunch, who I knew didn’t care for sweets very much. But they are winemakers, so I thought they might like the kind of savory cookies one could nibble on while sipping a glass of wine. We all thought they were really nice; it was amazing how much subtle sweetness we tasted in them; I think the level of saltiness helped bring it out.

I got together with several women who are collaborating to share homemaking skills; for our first meeting we focused on knitting. I had two cotton dishcloths I’d knitted a while back, which I decided to join together. I tried crocheting them together but I couldn’t figure out how to do that while at the same time chatting with everyone, so I just sewed them together with a blanket stitch.

I don’t have hopes of becoming an expert knitter, but I like to be with these women. And their babies! (At church there is a new family with a little guy just turned one, and he is the friendliest love bug. He loves me! And I never tire of holding him.)

Our host had an awe-inspring jar of kombucha scoby on her kitchen counter, and two of our group were happy to take home a quart of it to get their own kombucha production up and running again. My own fermenting experiments stalled decades ago with yogurt-making, and a succession of three yogurt makers that never satisfied. I never tried making sauerkraut, because that was a food I have been prejudiced against ever since it made a regular appearance on our table when I was a child; I did somehow manage to enjoy kimchi when my son “Soldier” brought it into the family’s already international culinary repertoire.

But I have made Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste!  Lemon verbena is one of my garden treasures, but I haven’t pruned my plant often enough or used its leaves much, and it has gotten very leggy. So when I saw a young and well-shaped specimen in the grocery store, I brought it home and now have two such treasures. When I pruned the older plant, I took all the leaves to make Lemon Verbena Sugar Paste. There were more or less potent recipes online; I used the one with the highest ratio of herb to sugar, 2 cups to 1/2 cup.

I stuck the paste in the freezer and hope I will remember to bring it out to add to tea, sprinkle on desserts, use as a glaze, etc. Maybe I’ll also remember to tell you here if I do.

After I asked my friend Cori what were her summer reading plans, naturally she asked me back. I should have anticipated that and not asked her to begin with — because I have no real plans, and feel like an imposter. I have been reading less than usual. I see that of the nineteen books I pictured here five months ago, I have read just two. Only one of those I got to the end of was from the stack I was going to “try extra hard” to read this year. Well, the year is half over, so it doesn’t look promising for those selections. I took new pictures of the “summer books” to show Cori, because it was easier than typing out the titles.

Four of those I have at least started reading, and the Undset book is my current reading-while-falling-asleep choice. I have, typically, read several books that I didn’t anticpate back in February, and some of them were not worth talking about, or even reading to the end.

But let me just mention a young adult novel I did read to the end and liked a lot, What the Night Sings. Written by Vesper Stamper, who was one of the speakers at the Symbolic World Summit I attended earlier in the year in Florida, this is a coming-of-age-in-the-Holocaust story, illustrated by the author. First I listened to the novel, and then I borrowed the hard copy from the library, because I wanted to see the illustrations, which are many, and are very well done, as is the whole story. Stamper’s Berliners, is at hand, too, waiting for me.

If you have read — or even scrolled — this far in my ramble, I’m impressed! There is some reason you stayed so long, though there were doubtless some topics along the way that didn’t interest you. Whoever you are, I appreciate you very much.

I flit and hover before departure.

birds, home, my garden, travel, , , ,
smallage

In the middle of the afternoon, a flock of little birds — maybe kinglets? — flew into the garden and frolicked all over, visiting the pomegranate flowers and the fig tree, but not the fountain. Their zig-zag swooping looked like play, but maybe they were finding various tiny things to eat. In less than five minutes they were gone.

I watched them all that time because I was leaning against the kitchen counter holding one of my favorite Dansko sandals braced against my body, as Shoe Glue cured in the cracks in the sole. I want to pack these shoes in my suitcase this evening to take on a trip tomorrow, and somehow this task got pushed to the last day possible.

So many things got pushed here to today, or were left in a sort of limbo waiting for me to gather my wits — or something. I wish I could be more organized, but today has been fun, for the most part, after I got down to business.

Part of that work was cleaning out the refrigerator, or at least removing produce that won’t keep five more days. I had plans to make soup with whatever was there or in the garden. That would also have been good to do yesterday, but then, there was no pressure…

The initial reason for the soup idea was a head of celery I wanted to use up, but I found lots more in my own garden to add: tomatoes, lemon basil, tarragon, parsley, smallage, zucchini and eggplant. There was only one of the skinny long eggplants, so what else could I do with it but cut it into rounds and plop them in.

tarragon

I watered all the newly planted irises, yarrow, lavender, etc. in the garden, and all the potted plants, and I fed the worms. My worms are doing great! I’ve had lots of vegetable trimmings and even whole leaves and fruits from the garden that were so damaged by birds or insects that I couldn’t use them, so my “vermis” had plenty to eat, and seem to be reproducing a lot. When I dig around a little in the bins I always see at least one big cluster of worms of all sizes, which I consider to be the “nests” of young ones.

The strangest thing about today was that I spent the very middle of it in a literature class online, the first time I’ve ever done such a thing. It’s to study Beowulf, and I couldn’t pass up the chance, and it started today. That was very satisfying. I’m sure I’ll have more to tell about it as the weeks go by.

It really wasn’t until after that class session that my serious flitting began — interspersed with hovering, which can mean to hang fluttering or suspended in the air. Or, to keep lingering about; wait near at hand. Those little birds I’d seen weren’t doing any of that, but then, my garden is not their home. I lingered in the garden as long as I could.

And then, I took time to start writing here, which probably means that I won’t get the floor swept before I go. These days when I live alone, I give myself permission to leave without putting everything shipshape; no one is here to care. I can sweep next week.

[Next morning, this morning]: So, I didn’t finish this soup-and-worm story before bed. Now I’m at the airport waiting for my flight that has been delayed two hours, and I can wrap it up here.

Once I got to the airport, I could calm down. The way from here doesn’t involve a multitude of things to remember or tasks to accomplish. I won’t have much time to think about my garden. But from now until I return, I won’t be fully settling. While my plane flies at great speed, my mind will still be hovering, and I don’t expect it to touch down until I am home again.

Springtime garden soup.

food and cooking, my garden, , , ,

One night this week I had friends to dinner, and it was a lot of fun to plan the menu, which in this case included a soup course. I always intend to make cream of asparagus soup at least once in springtime, but don’t usually get to it, even though I harvest several pounds of that vegetable from my front yard plot for a few weeks running. Having someone to share it with gave me the added push.

So I used my own asparagus, and an equal amount of leeks from the store — just over a pound each, chopped. I sautéed them together in butter with fresh tarragon leaves, also from my garden. Just before everything started to brown, I removed the flower tips of the asparagus to a little bowl, and stirred in a couple of tablespoons of flour. I added a quart of chicken stock and cooked all of that together for 10-15 minutes, then used an immersion blender to make it smooth. Added salt and pepper to taste. After I’d ladled it into bowls I dropped a few of the reserved asparagus tips on top of each serving. We were all deep in conversation at that point so the thought of taking a picture of the lovely green soup never came into my head. (I also forgot that I’d planned to drizzle on a little cream.) But earlier I had noticed the beauty of the panful of chopped vegetables and leaves…

You will have to imagine the look of the creamy green soup.
We stopped talking and slurped it up joyfully.