Posts Tagged ‘garden produce’
Shouldn’t Compare
We had a wonderful lunch opportunity yesterday. It was a first-time visit to the home of friends who live just a few miles north of our place. It’s not fair to compare our worlds, but it is hard not to, and it has given us a fresh perspective about everything that we have accomplished on our 20 acres.
It feels like they have achieved a dizzying amount more on their 40 acres, particularly in the realm of landscape plants and an incredible garden of vegetables and flowers. After lunch, we got a tour of their gorgeous log home –with an impressive finished basement that they did themselves– and then walked some of their property.
They hired a crew to burn one of their fields to replace it with a variety of healthy prairie plants. Many of the grasses and beneficial pollinator plants are as tall as me or taller. It is beautiful.
I am humbled by how many impressive improvements they have achieved on their land, even though they have lived there half as long as we have been at Wintervale.
I was particularly inspired to see the number of new plantings they’ve put in, including quite a few apple trees that are producing fruit for the first time this year. The produce in their garden, and the developing squash and pumpkins out beyond their modest stand of field corn, look bigger and better than anything I’ve seen in a grocery store.
When it came time for us to go, they loaded us up with pickles, green beans, carrots, purple cauliflower, basil, cucumbers, and two varieties of apples, plus an arrangement of flowers.
As soon as we got home, I went out and mowed some grass. Suddenly, that feels like much less of an accomplishment to me than it did the day before.
If it ever seems like we get a lot done around here in terms of upkeep, just know that it’s a drop in a bucket compared to what plenty of others around us out here in the country are doing.
The best takeaway for me from the revelations we saw yesterday is that I am not alone in tending to a little piece of this planet by nurturing nature. We are both helping desirable trees and plants succeed and controlling the spread of troublesome invasives.
It is great to have found such a close neighbor with a similar mindset. It will be good for me to keep in mind that it’s not a competition.
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Cyndie’s Handiwork
She enriches my life immeasurably in countless ways and today I would like to share a few morsels of her splendor. The produce garden Cyndie hastily planted last spring during the distracting interruption of a knee replacement surgery has now run its course. Last of all the plants to be pulled from the dirt was a stalk of Brussels sprouts that offered edible buds roughly the size of peas.
They were delicious, but at that size, and based on my gut’s eventual reaction, I fear I may have eaten too many in one serving.
Something interesting showed up on our counter and I had to ask what it was.
“A pumpkin!” she says.
In trying to figure out how to describe the size from memory, I decided it could compare to a tennis ball. Looking at the photo again this morning, it reminded me more of a clementine orange. Cyndie disagreed and pulled out a clementine to show me them side by side as proof. The little orange was definitely bigger.
She felt it was more like a lime and pulled one from the fridge to compare. Nope. Even the lime was bigger.
We’ve concluded the little pumpkin compares closer to a ping-pong ball.
Apparently, the dry year we’ve had has squelched the size of some of the garden produce.
One of the best contributions Cyndie provides in support of my blog (beyond the endless fodder for entertaining stories) is the great images she captures on her phone.
The other night as the moon was climbing through clouds while she was walking Delilah, she snapped this gem:
It’s like a painting.
I am a really lucky guy to have this artist’s handiwork in my life.
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Season’s Bounty
As always, we arrived home yesterday with a royal greeting from our animals. After unpacking the foodstuffs that made the trip home with us and then gobbling up some of it for lunch, we granted Delilah her wish and headed outside to survey the grounds.
The first thing I noticed was how much some of the grass has grown since I last cut it. At the same time, the ground seems incredibly dry. Parched and cracked enough that I don’t understand the hearty growth of some areas of grass.
The next noteworthy thing that caught our attention was the incredible buzzing sounds of a striking number of bees busy in the yellow flowering tops of goldenrod beside one of our trails.
Cyndie did a great job of capturing a photo of a couple of the happy visitors.
Not far down that same trail, we made another surprising discovery. Tucked behind a large viburnum nannyberry bush was a volunteer apple tree with an impressive amount of fruit on its limbs. It’s the first time I noticed it, which is surprising because we usually pay a lot of attention to the volunteer trees showing up beside our trails.
We made our way out into the pastures to say hello to the horses and quickly decided they were telling us the flies were bothering them. Cyndie went back and got their fly masks. The growth in the pastures is a mixture of good grass they looked very happy to be munching and a disturbing number of problematic weeds.
I will be mowing the pastures to a pretty short height as soon as I can get to it in attempt to control some of the weed propagation.
I re-stacked the dwindling number of hay bales in the shed to make room for the next delivery, now expected to arrive on Friday. By then, Cyndie will be on her way to Boston with her mother to visit Barry and Carlos. I will be stacking bales by myself.
The last stop for Cyndie on the tour of our property was her garden. She came in with quite a bounty of a photogenic variety of vegetables.
She thinks some of the growth was stunted by how dry it has been, but the overall variety of produce sure looks impressive. Pretty good for a year when her planting was hindered by knee replacement surgery back in the spring.
We’re just happy to have any bounty at all.
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Relative Something 