A Stone in the RiverStill Here!
Hello Friends! I’m still here! I did not intend to take any time away but the garden has been demanding and so has life in general. You may have heard Minneapolis is once again in mourning after a mass shooting of children attending a back-to-school mass . And of course the hate-filled people in the Trump administration, instead of focusing on gun control, are blaming antidepressants and trans people. My heart is broken in so many pieces for so many reasons.
I have no words, and too many words. So today I’m going for mostly photos.
Anyone who says life is a bowl full of cherries hasn’t spent hours and hours pitting them! But then there was cherry pie and banana-strawberry ice cream. There are still lots and lots of cherries in the freezer. There were also lots and lots of aronia berries, more than we’ve ever had. Tomorrow James will be making rhubarb-aronia jam. So we finally got around to making a solar dehydrator from an old window, parts of an old pallet, and leftover corrugated stainless steel from re-roofing the chicken coop. We did a test making a small batch of aronia raisins and it works great! And then the weather turned cool and cloudy and we haven’t been able to use it since. There are also our first ever plums from the tree an invader rabbit almost killed two years ago. James made some compote for our Sunday waffles. Then I foraged some wild plums to supplement the ones from our tree and yesterday James made plum-elderberry jam. So many elderberries this year too! Haven’t tried the jam yet. Will let you know! The lemon cucumbers turned out to not agree with my tummy when raw. We made several batches of fermented pickles–add several grape leaves to keep them crunchy! But the best pickles turned out to be some refrigerator pickles in red wine vinegar that we will be making more of. Of course the cucumbers are almost done now, so there won’t be that much more of the fridge pickles, but we will know for next year. In my sourdough baking adventures, I made bialys. They came out so good, and James was in heaven. The garden parsley played host to several swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. They were kind enough to still leave plenty of parsley for me. The butternut squash and scarlet runner bean vines have completely covered the 10-foot-tall wooden ladder. There are three huge squashes in there and probably some smaller ones hiding. Also, lots of runner beans. It’s a ladder of yum! The “eff you” amaranth tells us to fuck off all day every day, much to our delight. It took awhile for the Mexican sunflower to start blooming, probably because it was putting all its energy into becoming a gigantic shrub. Now that it is blooming the butterflies and bees have one more place in the garden to stop and eat. There are four bees, possibly five, crammed in this squash blossom. And as I was taking the photo, another bee tried to get in on the fun but got squeezed out. The hyssop has been blooming for a couple weeks and it is covered in bees. The hyssop is giant white and purple anise, both very tall and growing all around the deck. I’ve had to tie it up to keep it mostly out of the paths, but it still droops. James very carefully lifts up stalks and creeps under. Me? James says, “you just barrel right through and then pat your hair to make sure there are no bees stuck in it.” Yup. So far my curly mop has not caught any bees but I am regularly pulling out flower petals and little pieces of stems and leaves.That is all for today. Take care of yourselves. Joy is resistance and so is kindness and love. The more my heart breaks, the more love I find it has room for.
#aronia #bees #butterflies #cherries #cheryPie #elderberry #lemonCucumber #pickles #plums #solarDehydrator #sourdough
Terri K O 🍁
Countess Hope
BBC Sport AFC Bournemouth
Nonilex
