Greenhouse gleanings: thanks to Eliot Coleman

December 2, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

  Greenhuse gleanings

I entered the greenhouse today. This would not be worth remarking upon if I did it every day, but I don't. And since the weather took its sudden plunge a couple of weeks ago, there seemed no point. With highs in single digits some days last week, surely everything would be dead.

But it wasn't. That photo at the top shows what I collected today. Some of it, especially the chard, had clearly frozen; it was limp and dark. But I've washed it and thrown it in the freezer; tomorrow I'll throw it into some soup, where its limp texture won't matter.

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Posted in Horticulture

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Plum good plum bars

November 30, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

   Plum tree

This is Lisa's* plum tree, down the block from me. I took the photo on October 23rd, which shows what a gentle autumn we had. The bushes in the background have changed color, but not the tree.

It's astonishing how well plum trees hide their fruit. Only when you get much closer can you can actually see the plums:

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Posted in Food & Recipes

Thanksgiving garden fare

November 29, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

Part II of this post actually addresses garden-related topics.

Brief Meditation on the Market

We celebrated Thanksgiving with a Harry Potter movie marathon, courtesy of our web-savvy son. We were driven to watching pirated, poor-resolution versions from the computer, because we had typically failed to plan ahead, and you couldn't rent a Harry Potter DVD in this town for any money. We figure that everyone else, like us, was trying to remember the plots before going to see the penultimate installment, in a theater near you now.

Our Malian friend Abdoulaye will be happy to learn that we watched all of this on a new, 32-inch flat-screen television. Yes folks, we are moving up. As I wrote a while ago, when this potato specialist from central Africa came to the United States, he found himself living in a log house without cell-phones, cable, or a wireless internet connection, with a family that had never heard of 24.

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Posted in Food & Recipes

Winter is a-coomen in…

November 17, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

I shouldn't complain. After a brief cool spell in late August that left me gnashing my teeth (were we really going to be cheated of autumn this year, after having had practically no spring and only half a summer?) temperatures rose again and we had a long, warm Indian summer straight through October and into November. There was frost several mornings a week, and temperatures in the twenties some nights—after all, this is Montana—but during the day, we'd see fifties, even sixties.

Given that we had a wringing wet spring that culminated with the wettest June on record, punctuated by frequent hail, this long, warm autumn was especially welcome. I was still picking not only lettuce, broccoli, and of course kale, but even tomatoes right into November.

Of course, it couldn't last. Two weekends ago, on an almost balmy Sunday afternoon, my husband and I washed windows and got the storm windows up. The next day it snowed.

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Posted in Herbs, Vegetables, Weather

On injury and idiocy

October 27, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

So why haven't I posted in weeks? Well, in a way, because I went to Hawaii.

Sunset 3

Early September was taken up with planning, and the rest of the month we were there, and since then it's been all about recovery.

But something else was going on as well.

As I finally realized while talking with my younger son last week, there's just no easy way to write about doing something really stupid, especially when one's stupidity results in major surgery for oneself and major inconvenience for a number of others.

But as my older son pointed out, no one would even know I'd done something dumb if I'd kept my mouth shut. People would just have thought I'd been unlucky. Accidents happen, after all, and cliff-diving isn't a risk-free activity. The dive was not in itself particularly outrageous: the cliff wasn't that high, we'd checked for rocks in the water, and I know how to dive. Ah, but there's the rub: diving badly was really really dumb.

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Posted in Personals, Travel