Elderberry Magic

I’ve been thinking about the magic of growing a garden. You build your soil and the plants do the rest. Not that building soil is easy, but layering compost, yard waste, seaweed, and straw seems straightforward and do-able compared to, say, creating a tomato or […]

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Our Oven

We built a pizza oven! It has long been a dream to have an outdoor oven of our own, but we spent a lot more time dreaming than actually planning and researching. This imbalance was, mostly, righted by a willingness to work hard to make […]

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Summer’s Last

The crab grass and other weeds hiding among the plants are going to seed. The tomato plants hang loosely, much of their potential already harvested and piled on the kitchen counter ready to be canned. I finally cleared some of the onion harvest off my […]

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Over and Over

I recently bought a wooden, waldorf-style, calendar for the kids, A little splurge for something beautiful and fun to give them a better sense of how to conceptualize or measure the passage of days and months. For most of my life, I’ve imagined time and […]

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Flower Dreams

Fall really does creep in. It takes less than a month for summer to bow out, warm days turning more consistently cloudy and cool. Fortunately, autumn presents us with those sparklingly clear days, meant to be enjoyed with little agenda beyond appreciating the greens, blues, […]

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July in the Garden

I started to share a garden update a month or so ago, but it didn’t seem like much had happened. Since then, summer has really kicked in with plenty of hot weather and enough rain to encourage the plants and bring out ALL the mosquitoes. […]

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Spring all around

Even when Spring was still unsure and far too tentative for those of us who lived through this winter, the fever struck and I couldn’t stop myself from moving compost and loam, two five gallon buckets at a time, to build garden beds. On a […]

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Outside My Door

I can see our little garden from the big windows in the corner of our kitchen. We planted late, but the zucchini, tomatoes, kale, peppers and herbs are flourishing. I thought we would wait a year before we had any garden but Ray insisted that […]

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