osprey_archer | Entries tagged with garden

Looking at my New Year post for 2025, I see that my plans were (1) plant a garden, and (2) compost. (1) I achieved in a small way: I planted herbs, I ate fresh herbs, I planned my guest meals around being able to airily comment “I need some chives” purely in order to waltz out onto the patio and clip the chives fresh. (However, the non-herb parts of the garden grew outside of my control, and I must do a better job with them in 2026.)

I was stymied in (2) by the small size of my yard and the voracity of the local wildlife, who enthusiastically dug up anything I buried to compost. However, a friend has started to compost, so I save my compost things in the freezer and bring them along to add to the heap whenever I visit, so at least it’s all getting composted eventually.

The New Year’s Resolution I actually kept was one I stole from

genarti later in January, to read one book from my physical To-Read shelf each month. I achieved this! A couple of months I even read two! One month I DNF’ed the book, but upon consultation with

genarti we agreed that, as this also achieves the ultimate goal of removing the book from the Unread Book Club, it still counts.

I also managed to keep pace with any new book purchases as they came in, meaning that the number of books in the Unread Book Club is in fact smaller. So I’ll be continuing with this resolution. At the present rate, I should empty the To-Read shelf in 2027. Naturally I will celebrate with a trip to John K. King Books and return with a massive pile of books with which to restart the Unread Book Club.

Otherwise, my goal for this year is not to start any new reading projects. Read at whim! I do want to continue the Book Log Challenge, because it is a good way to remind myself of authors I’ve been meaning to read more books by… but it often happens that I’ll be reaching the end of a particular list and really just don’t feel like reading anything by the last author or two.

That is fine! I can simply decide to strike that author and move on! The list is an aide-memoire, not a binding document. Maybe I should change the tag to Book Log Frolic rather than Book Log Challenge.

…Having said this, I was all set to strike Project Hail Mary because I keep looking at the book and going “Naaaah don’t feel like it,” but then

rachelmanija posted it was one of her favorite books of the year, so… Okay, I have to at least pick it up. Give it twenty pages or so to grab me. That seems only fair, right?

When Joann’s closed (RIP), I decided to take advantage of the sale prices to get supplies for a couple of hobbies I’ve long meant to try: a crochet hook and yarn to crochet a scarf, and a cross-stitch kit featuring a motel on Route 66.

I still haven’t attempted the scarf, but I started the cross-stitch in July and I really took to it! I’ve already finished the Route 66 cross-stitch kit, acquired a second cross-stitch kit (from Michael’s, alas) featuring a handsome coffee cup, and spent a delightful afternoon at the library browsing cross-stitch books until I finally winnowed my selection down to Linday Swearingen’s Creepy Cross-Stitch, from which I have selected a favorite pattern that I am anxious to start except I’ve already started the coffee cup so I need to finish that first…

I’ve decided that the path of wisdom is to do one cross-stitch at a time, as the other pathway lies littered with unfinished cross-stitches. Not sure how to balance this with other potential fiber arts? As well as the crochet supplies, I’ve also gotten my little paws on a simple embroidery kit…

However, I remind myself that one does not take to every hobby. For instance, I’ve done some paper-crafting with my friend Christina (who is always happy to set us loose on her paper stash, as getting rid of some paper means she can buy MORE paper), and although I always enjoy our card-making sessions, I’ve never felt the urge to go into card-making myself.

The “one project at a time” principle is bearing fruit in another direction as well. Normally when I get a new cookbook, I mark every recipe I want to try and then make none of them, but this birthday a friend gave me Elizabeth Alston’s Biscuits and Scones, and I put a bookmark at the mushroom pie recipe, and made it… and then the herb scone recipe, and made it… and then the tattie scones recipe, which I made as well… and it’s been just a month since I got the book! (My bookmark now rests at the recipe for apricot swirl scones.)

Now of course it helps that this is just the kind of baking I like, but still, it’s rather magical to find myself actually trying these new recipes. Amazing!

Other hobby news. The garden does not perhaps rise to the level of a hobby yet, although it certainly ought to, as there’s some serious weeding that needs to be done. Sorry to report the tragic news that last week the condo mowers felled my thyme and my cherry tomato plant. The one that had actual baby tomatolets on it! The survivor has at last put forth a baby tomato of its own, but alas, alas, I mourn the tomatoes cut down in their prime…

In keeping with this newfound “one project at a time” theory, I am winnowing down my reading projects. There are currently four, but two of them are close to completion:

Newbery books (2 left!)
Postcard books (3 left!) (one of my friends gave me a set of twelve Famous Author postcards and I decided to read a book for each author. Actually, this coincided with my L. M. Montgomery reread, and so I ended up reading all of L. M. Montgomery… and there was another postcard for Jane Austen, and I had been meaning to finish up my Jane Austen reread… and Charlotte Bronte had a card, and, well, a Charlotte Bronte reread had ALSO been on my list… but then I managed to shake free of this “complete works” business, or else I would probably still be working my way through the complete works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, with a weary eye on the complete works of William Shakespeare, Jules Verne, and Charles Dickens.)

This leaves me with two projects. First, the Unread Bookshelf, and if I continue with my current pace of one book a month, that will be complete by 2027.

Second, when I was making my booklog, I noticed how many authors were on there whose works I had long meant to revisit. “What if,” I pondered, “I went through a year and wrote down each author I wanted to revisit, and then read one book by each author? And at the end moved onto the next year?”

I started in 2012 (that was the first year I had complete-enough records to make a book log possible) and have now reached 2014, so the great Saunter through the Book Log will keep me busy for a while.

Unfortunately for my hope of getting down to a single reading project, I’ve also been vaguely planning a readthrough of E. M. Forster’s novels (except Maurice, I did it one and three-quarters times and that was enough), and I don’t particularly want to put that off until 2027 or later… However that IS just five books (plus maybe some of his short stories, but those are strictly optional!) so perhaps I could sneak it in…

But not till I’ve finished the Newberys and the postcard books!

I just realized it’s been over a month since an update on life at the Hummingbird Cottage. This cannot stand! Surely you are all desperate to hear the latest news!

Still no hummingbird sightings, but there appears to be an entire flock of ducks resident on the pond, although they only come out en masse in moonlight so it’s hard to be sure how many there are. (Ghost ducks?)

The herbs are flourishing, especially the lemon balm which is the chief weed. I’ve been procrastinating on pulling it out, but at last it occurred to me that if I rip out the clump in the front garden, I could replace it with black-eyed susans (a favorite flower) and purple coneflowers (not a favorite, but they look well with black-eyed susans), which are both native wildflowers and also flourishing.

The intentional herbs are also doing well! I just found a recipe for herb scones which I’m looking forward to trying, since as soon as one has a flourishing herb garden one must begin scrambling for recipes that use herbs in order to keep the herbs in check. The chives are especially happy.

The cherry tomatoes in contrast are NOT happy. They both have a few little green tomatoes and look rather wilty, probably a combination of being planted late and not watered enough. Also one of them is beside a twining vine of some variety which began to engulf its tomato cage, so I moved the tomato cage over into the clump of vines which have since completely devoured it (really ought to get an arch or something, these vines are SO ready to go), which left the tomato plant free but also, possibly, a bit traumatized. And I expect the vine is sucking up more than its fair share of water and nutrients from the soil.

In non-garden news, I got a bike! It is a used Elektra Townie step-through bike, cream-colored with teal wheel rims and a capacious basket on the front which is just crying out for a baguette and a bouquet of wildflowers. I rode it to work for the first time today, coasting down the hill with the breeze in my face and a song in my heart… I will of course have to go back up the hill at the end of the day, but such is life.

To the house itself, I don’t think there have been any major alterations. The wicker cart I mentioned in my previous entry has been spray-painted white, and currently hosts two pothos plants (birthday presents!), although I intend to move them to higher ground so they can show off their trailing abilities. First I need to get a step stool, though, in order to water the pothos at its higher home.

Long term plans: a four-poster bed with soft white curtains. A built-in bookcase with a ladder in the living room. Presumably living room seating of some kind? (The living room is currently empty except for (1) a cat tree, (2) the wicker cart with the pothos, and (3) a box spring which came at a discount with the guest room twin mattress, which is for one of my friends, who needs to come retrieve it.) I feel the rest of the living room will fall into place once I get the bookcase sorted.

Today is my birthday! Happy birthday to me!

Yesterday I took chocolate white chip cookies to Dulcimer Gathering and everyone played me Happy Birthday. Today, I caught up on my correspondence while sipping my free hot chocolate at Starbucks, then spent the rest of the day happily puttering: a little cross stitch, a little dulcimer, a little reading with tea and the last of the aforementioned chocolate white chip cookies.

Next up: dinner with the family, and then I will be taking them on a tour of the Hummingbird Cottage! This is the first time that my brother and sister-in-law have seen the place with actual furniture, so I also spent some of my puttering time tidying so that everyone will believe that I live in an oasis of peace and cleanliness.

The herbs and the cherry tomatoes are growing well. There are little green tomatoes on the tomato vines now! Also, one of the tomatoes is next to a climbing vine of some variety, which has latched onto the tomato cage and as far as I can see tied itself there. Most impressed with the plant’s knot-making abilities.

A couple weeks ago, I was browsing my favorite local bookstore when I happened upon a book about maintaining a kitchen garden. I picked it up and idly flipped through it, began to consider buying it because the advice seemed so well-suited to my garden and also the illustrations were so charming… and strangely familiar… so I flipped to the title page and shrieked like a tea kettle when I realized it was illustrated by Tasha Tudor.

Tasha Tudor, for those who don’t know, wrote and illustrated Corgiville Fair. She is also responsible for the iconic illustrations for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden, as well as a lovely illustrated edition of Emily Dickinson upon which I doted in my youth. She also put the core in cottagecore, living in a classic New England farmhouse atop a hill in Vermont with her Nubian goats and chickens and corgis and her many, many gardens.

So of course I bought Betty Crocker’s Kitchen Gardens. And it reminded me that there’s a book about Tasha Tudor’s lifestyle, which is called The Private Life of Tasha Tudor, so I went to put it on hold… and it was gone! The library had weeded it! (The library is forever weeding things that I’m intending to check out as soon as I have the time.)

I consoled myself with Tasha Tudor’s Garden), which is full of gorgeous photographs of Tasha Tudor’s many gardens, full of roses and hollyhocks and crabapple trees. The focus is on the photogenic flowers, of course, as well as her lovely bouquets, but she also had a kitchen garden with plenty of fruit and vegetables and herbs… and also plenty of flowers, because why not? That made me feel better about the fact that my current herb and cherry tomato plants found homes on the theory of “Well, there’s some space between the flowers here…”

Anyway, fortunately the OTHER library has The Private World of Tasha Tudor, so you’d better believe I put a hold on it. They also have Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts, Tasha Tudor’s Dollhouse, and a documentary called Take Joy!: The Magical World of Tasha Tudor.

There’s also a Christmas documentary, and quite a pile of Christmas books, and of course Tudor’s many children’s books… but I already have so many books out that I’d better stop myself for now! There are so many books in this world and it’s both a blessing and a curse.

Important Hummingbird Cottage updates! First, I am sad to report that the geese after all decided not to nest on the pond, presumably flying off in search of a larger pool. However, the pond is still frequently visited by ducks and geese, and also a red hawk which swooped across the pond and snatched something small and dark from the rocks. You go, red-shouldered hawk! Keep the small rodent population in check!

The flowers have begun to blossom. Velvety purple irises, blue-violet columbines, yellow roses, lovely gold-pink roses like a sunrise, these last outside the window of the downstairs bedroom, which at last forced me to remove the mattress blocking the window -

I have not yet told the story of the mattress. So. At a mattress fundraiser for my old high school, I bought a queen size mattress on clearance, only to discover upon delivery that my bed frame was, in fact, a full. This ended with the mattress leaning against the window for a month, until the roses forced my hand, and I took apart the old bedframe and lowered the new mattress to the floor, where it will reside till I get an appropriately sized bedframe.

(Hilariously, a week after my mattress misadventure, my former roommate bought a new mattress for a bedframe that was surely a full. But NO. That bedframe was in fact a queen.

One would like this to end with the trading of the bed frames, but Julie understandably wished to keep the charming wooden sleigh bed and therefore cut it down to size.)

The weeds are getting away from me, in particular the lemon balm (a variety of mint that is spreading all along the shady north side of the house). However, yesterday evening I did get rosemary and chives from the farmer’s market, which I planted, having cleverly come out through the garage in order to keep Bramble inside… only to look up from planting the rosemary at the sound of a happy meow. Bramble trotted past, intent on exploring the neighbor’s patio, which I must admit I’ve also been curious about, so I followed him nothing loath.

The Hummingbird Cottage is half of a duplex - all the houses in this condominium development are, except the ones that are fourplexes - but I’ve never seen the neighbors in the other half of my duplex. Nor have I heard any noise from their half of the house, seen their car, or seen a trash can pulled to the curb by their driveway.

Through the patio door as I chased Bramble (happily hiding under an overgrown bush), I saw a dining room set with a jacket draped over a chair, so someone must live there at least occasionally? A mystery.

Bramble eventually scampered down to the pond, and then apparently decided he’d had enough, as he docilely allowed me to pick him up and deposit him inside. Possibly all that water was a little alarming. I finished planting the rosemary and chives and contemplated the best place for a cherry tomato plant, but as I have not yet acquired said plant, that is a problem for another day.

Also, I found the perfect little wicker cart for my houseplants! Admittedly there is currently only one houseplant, but now that I have a home for more they will surely come into my life. The cart is currently a somewhat battered yellow and needs a wash and a coat of white spray paint, but it was only twenty dollars at the secondhand shop, and anyway how often do you see a charming wheeled wicker cart for sale anywhere?

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting with baited breath for Hummingbird Cottage updates, and I am happy to report that I’m all moved in! In the main the boxes have been unpacked, although not all their contents have yet found homes.

In particular, there’s a bottleneck at the linen closets, which are currently filled with books, which I would like to remove and put in the front room bookcases, but as the bookcases are currently the only furniture in the front room aside from the cat tree, it’s a bit hard to decide where they ought to go.

The cats are settling in. Bramble has taken to the cat door in the closet under the stairs and would like a Bramble door in ALL the closets, please, a suggestion he has delicately hinted at by getting caught one after another in every closet in the place. Why should Bramble have to wait for a human to open the door before he can get into the pantry??

He will not get his wish of a cat door in EVERY closet, but I will probably put one in one of the upstairs closets, as it would make a nice out of the way place for a third litterbox, which I hope and pray will stop Baby Boy’s annoying habit of peeing by the walls. (Probably not, though. I think the wall-peeing is scent-marking his territory and unrelated to the number of litterboxes. Why must you do this, Baby Boy!)

Have also begun work in the garden! Since I bought the house I’ve been saving fruit and vegetable scraps in the freezer, and on Tuesday when the weather was nice I took the opportunity to dig a couple of holes in the garden, alternate the scraps with layers of cardboard, and bury it all. I believe a truly dedicated digger could have got it all into one deep hole, but my wee little arms were not equal to the task of battling that many roots, so I did the best I could. Enriching the soil! Giving back to the earth!

Now the temperature is hovering around freezing again. It may be another month before it’s safe to plant herbs and cherry tomatoes. Still yearning after raspberry bushes as well, but not entirely sure where would be the best place to plant them. Overall the east-facing (pond-facing) garden will, I think, be best for fruits and vegetables, as it gets the most sun; the west-facing front area is shaded by trees.

Outside my bedroom window, iris leaves spear through the dirt, and a bare rosebush awaits warmer weather. Eager to see what it will look like as the weather warms and the flowers bloom.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

It’s been All Hummingbird Cottage All the Time up in here, but I did manage to finish Angela Brazil’s A Popular Schoolgirl, which sadly is only sort of a boarding school book. Our heroine Ingred boards during the week, but goes home on weekends, which doesn’t lend itself to that enclosed hothouse boarding school feel. A pleasant read but not memorable.

What I’m Reading Now

Dipping into books about houseplants and gardening mostly! Contemplating whether I would like to have a little indoor tree to go in the not-exactly-bay window that wraps around the northwest corner of the house. Possibly a Meyer lemon? The book makes it sound like you can actually get lemons off an indoor Meyer lemon, which does not appear to be the case with most indoor plants…

What I Plan to Read Next

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History. My students rave about this book, and since they read it for a class, I believe that means that I can justify reading it on the clock once the slow summer season begins.

Spring is coming! We had a tiny two-day foretaste of seventy degree temperatures earlier this week, after which point the highs plummeted back to forty, but it was enough of a taste that I’ve begun to turn my thoughts to my garden.

The sage and thyme are perennials, so they should plump up again once the warm weather comes; they’ve haven’t entirely shriveled even now, but they do look a little limp after the rigors of winter. I’ll need a new basil, of course (if you can only grow one herb, it’s probably worthwhile to make it basil), and probably rosemary, and I’m thinking chives, because they’re supposed to be very easy to grow and if you sprinkle it on top of, for instance, little cheesy toasts, they instantly look classy. (It also adds a mild flavor boost, but it is very mild.)

The herbs will grow on the sunny spot alongside the brick wall. I’ve also got two raised beds, and I’m thinking one of them - the small sunny one, also close to the house - I might use for tomatoes. As for the big bed - I’m thinking I might branch out to flowers - one of my friends gave me a little round red flower bowl that I’ve put on the bookcase next to my desk, and what could be more Anne of Green Gables than filling it with my own flowers?

However, I’ve never grown flowers before, so we’ll see if this one goes through.

Stretch goals:

A compost heap, or a compost bin or whatever the cool kids use for compost these days. (It looks like expensive composters have become a sort of status symbol.) I like the idea of turning heaps of kitchen scraps into usable soil, although if I go this route obviously I’ll need to do some research on how precisely one goes about doing that.

Raspberry canes. I love raspberries, and if I put a lattice up along the fence the raspberries could grow up it without sacrificing any other garden space (although I would have to excavate from actual soil from beneath the current covering of big rocks). Fresh raspberries! Sun-warmed! I love picking berries too, so that’s a bonus.

After a long dry July, we’ve had three straight days of rain. (Well, spotty rain. I feel I must in all justice note that the rain was not constant, but politely let up when I needed to walk to a friend’s house for a tea party.)

My garden is therefore looking positively perky. The basil is yet again attempting to flower, so in a desperate attempt to keep it in check, I made a batch of pesto this morning. I don’t have a food processor so it was a very rustic pesto, coarsely chopped, but still scrumptious on toast with goat cheese. You can’t go wrong with anything that is mostly basil and garlic and olive oil.

One of the tomato plants (not Rapunzel, who looks a trifle peaky) has grown so robust that she’s attempting to knock over her tomato cage. In keeping with the Disney princess theme, I’ve named her Mulan. The third plant will probably be Aurora if she doesn’t start displaying signs of personality to the contrary.

The tomatoes haven’t started to ripen yet (I planted them pretty late), but I’m checking them nearly every day in hope. Soon it will be the season of my favorite snack food: fresh tomatoes and basil with goat cheese on a crostini.

The last of the radishes have been pulled and eaten; I never did grow fond of the radishes themselves, but the radish greens made a nice salad addition, so I may plant it again next year. The spinach, which I thought would nice for salads, never really prospered, so I probably won’t bother again.

The herbs, though, are flourishing! Unfortunately the only one I’m using on a regular basis is the basil (which I also put in salads; it’s been a very hot summer, so there have been a lot of salads) although I do have recipes that use rosemary if it ever gets cool enough to use the oven again.

Or I could buy a rotisserie chicken and make rosemary cranberry chicken salad. Mmmm. Now that’s a good summer food.

And as for the thyme and sage… well, I daresay I’ll figure out something to do with them.

The real excitement these days, however, lies with the tomatoes. The Rapunzel variety attempted to make a break for it, levering itself and its square of potting soil out of the ground (clearly I had not planted it well), but I caught it in time and a day of rain put its wilting leaves to rights. I have begun to call it Rapunzel as a name, which sounds rather odd when I say things like “I’ve tied Rapunzel to a stake till I can get a cage for her.”

She is supposed to grow cherry tomatoes in long skeins. I am very much looking forward to seeing this.

I’ve got two other cherry tomato plants, which also need Disney princess names so they won’t feel left out. I am leaning toward Anna and Elsa, as they’re a pair, but we’ll see if they develop suitable personalities.

I have started my garden! By which I mean that I’ve planted two rows of seeds, one of spinach and the other of radish. It may turn out to have been too early for the radishes but I bought a jumbo pack of seeds so if this first batch doesn’t grow it doesn’t matter much. Which is fortunate, because it is supposed to snow eight to ten inches on Saturday and I feel that this might stress the seeds.

But if they do grow, radishes are basically instantaneous in garden terms, so I could be eating the first ones this time next month! Apparently one eats radishes by slathering them with butter and sprinkling on salt which honestly sounds like the best way to eat any vegetable.

...I’m actually not sure I like radishes, but then I haven’t tried them since the last time I grew radishes, when I was approximately ten and loathed all vegetables. Perhaps they will suit my taste buds better now.

The packet says the seeds will take five days to show visible sprouts. I planted them on Sunday so it’s too early to expect anything, but I have nonetheless been checking hopefully every morning.

My other garden plans this year: tomatoes, of course (cherry tomatoes, because I like them better than full-size & I think they’re more reliable, too), and four herbs: basil, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Some year I’ll probably add parsley to complete the song, but I never use parsley so I can’t quite bring myself to do it.

We've skipped directly from summer to winter. A few days ago, it was eighty degrees; then yesterday, it snowed.

Admittedly, this snow fell only very briefly and did not stick, but STILL. First snow of the season: I got a hot chocolate to mark the occasion, as is tradition.

Fortunately, the day before I had gone out into the garden and picked all the cherry tomatoes that looked like they might ripen further on the kitchen counter. They have, not coincidentally, utterly conquered the kitchen counter. I have been making tomato & goat cheese crostinis as fast as I can all autumn and I have not been able to keep up.

Julie has suggested that we might try making fried green tomatoes out of the unripened tomatoes still on the vine. I am a little doubtful of this - maybe if we cut them in half? I just think that a whole cherry tomato, unsliced, will either not cook in the center - or alternatively become entirely molten inside and burn you when you bite into it...

Other garden news: I need to transplant the rosemary soonish if I want to try my hand at keeping it inside for the winter. (Hopefully the fact that I often forget to water my houseplants will work in the rosemary's favor?) The basil, I think, is a lost cause; it never did regain its full brilliance, although it recovered stunningly well given that it was completely pot-bound when I finally transplanted it into the soil. Better to start off with a new one.

Which leads me to food news: I tried the white bean soup again, this time starting off by cooking a strip of bacon & then frying the onions and garlic in the bacon grease (the bacon itself was reserved for garnish), and simmering the soup on top of that - most successful! Very tasty! Also, bacon garnish makes everything look fancy. Most garnishes have this effect, in fact. Must remember this for dinner parties of the future.

This bring me up to two soups in my repertoire: lentil and white bean. (I also make chicken rice, but that is comfort food, not "I could serve this at a dinner party!" food.) My cooking goal for the winter is to add a third soup recipe to this list.

Also, to perfect my apple-cheddar turnover recipe. I tried it once already, and it needs less sugar - more cheese - perhaps sharper cheese? must contemplate ideal sharpness - I want to them to serve as a savory side dish rather than a dessert.

About a month ago, I transplanted my basil plant from its pot into the ground. Upon doing so I discovered that the basil's roots completely filled the pot, which probably explained why the basil was looking so yellow and peaky, and even after transplanting it I daily awaited the basil's demise.

Dear readers! The basil is flourishing! It has put forth a bounteous new crop of rich green leaves, and only grows more fervently when we take some of those leaves to adorn French bread pizzas or tomato crostinis.

Did I tell you we made bat-shaped crostinis when we watched LEGO Batman? (Julie had not seen it so of course we had to remedy this.) They turned out much more bat-shaped than the bat sugar cookies, which spread in the oven, as sugar cookies do. Next time I need thematically shaped food, crostinis are clearly the way to go!

Also, the cherry tomatoes from the garden are so much better than cherry tomatoes from the store that I have begun to wonder if I am experiencing subpar versions of all the vegetables, and ought to try growing more next year. After the unfortunate strawberry experience, it's probably best to stick to easy vegetables; a zucchini plant perhaps: I've heard those grow like gangbusters without much help. Also, zucchini fritters.

The rosemary, which I transplanted at the same time as the basil, has not burst forth in quite the same manner - but then rosemary is a more retiring plant, and when I needed rosemary the other night for rosemary chicken salad and rosemary sweet potato fries (it was a very rosemary dinner), I found plenty of tender young rosemary shoots. The unseasonable heat, unpleasant though I find it, seems to be good for the herbs.

Look look! We have successfully grown two strawberries!

( STRAWBERRIES!!!! )

And what's more, I actually managed to eat one of them before the squirrels got to it. That's the first one I've won all year. I think next year we need a better strawberry protection program...

But although we haven't had much luck getting to the strawberries, the tomatoes are BOUNTIFUL and delicious. My new favorite snack is melba toast with goat cheese and garden tomatoes on top; in fact just writing about it makes me want to go fix one right now. No matter how many I eat, I never make a dent in the sea of cherry tomatoes on the counter!

Other garden news: I think we've killed the poor basil plant. It was looking positively peaky in its pot, so I decided to transplant it - only to discover when I removed it that its roots had pretty much grown to fill the pot... I went ahead and transplanted it anyway, but it doesn't seem to be perking up. Perhaps it's time to get a new one?

The transplanted rosemary, on the other hand, seems to be doing all right, although it has not burst forth in bounteous rosemary stalks. My mother warned me that it's easy to love rosemary to death, so I am mostly resisting the urge to water it and hoping that this string of hot days don't parch it to death. I have chicken salad plans for you, rosemary! Stay strong!

A couple of photos! On Thanksgiving, my dad and I drove over to the new buffalo reserve to see the buffalo... only the buffalo did not want to be seen. They couldn't be seen from any angle at the buffalo viewing area; they also couldn't be seen as we drove around the reserve. Finally, we saw another car stopped, and we also pulled up there and stood on the running board...

( And there they were )

My roommate and I have been planning an herb garden for next spring. She's already got basil and rosemary (well, we'll need to replant next spring, but she's got places for them), and I wanted to add thyme - "And we could do parsley and sage too, and call it a Scarborough Fair garden," I joked.

( And what should I find at Trader Joe's but... )

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Page Summary

New Year’s Resolutions
State of the Hobbies
Life at the Hummingbird Cottage
Happy Birthday to Me!
The World of Tasha Tudor
Hummingbird Cottage Updates
Hummingbird Cottage Updates
Wednesday Reading Meme
Garden Plans
The Garden News III
The Garden News II
The Garden News
I'm Dreaming of a White Halloween
The Return of the Basil
News from the garden
A couple of photos

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with garden

New Year’s Resolutions

State of the Hobbies

Life at the Hummingbird Cottage

Happy Birthday to Me!

The World of Tasha Tudor

Hummingbird Cottage Updates

Hummingbird Cottage Updates

Wednesday Reading Meme

Garden Plans

The Garden News III

The Garden News II

The Garden News

I'm Dreaming of a White Halloween

The Return of the Basil

News from the garden

A couple of photos