A Certain Slant of Light

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!