Yesterday we went out to Monticello, a little historic town east of Tallahassee, to browse in the antiques shops and look around at houses (my sister Bunny is thinking about maybe moving). Pretty much the whole family went–me, Rob, Bunny, Mom, Kris, Jake, and Sophie. …
I mentioned before that we harvested our sweet potatoes on Sunday, but I forgot to add that aside from the rotten ones they were really nice—big and bulging and fat. We used two that very night to make a batch of peanut chili spiced up with some of our lovely Long Slim cayenne peppers.
On Saturday morning I couldn’t wait to get up and get out in the yard. We’d been on vacation, so everything had gone to pot. There was so much to do, it was hard to know where to begin. Rob and I spent the whole day weeding, mowing, and edging. Oh, it was fun—pulling up camphor seedlings and singing dumb songs to myself. I saw a turtle and lots of nice toads. We have so many toads this year; I believe they were all born in our pond.
On Sunday morning we harvested our sweet potatoes, a very disappointing endeavor. A lot of our sweet potatoes rotted, or they had big bites taken out of them. Rob was being so funny and dramatic. He kept up a running commentary as we dug: “Oh, look, here’s a nice one! Oh, no. Never mind. It’s rotten. Totally rotten. . . . And this one would have been nice if some subterranean creature hadn’t eaten about half of it. Oh, I’m so disappointed. Oh, I’m going to cry. I thought we’d surely have 50 pounds of sweet potatoes, but we might not even have enough for tonight’s small supper. . . .” He went on and on.
But then he had an idea. “I know!” he said. “We can harvest some of our wonderful Rangpur limes to make ourselves feel better!” He was only partially kidding. The main reason he wanted to pick the limes was that the tree was so loaded he was worried branches might break. But his spirits really did rise as we picked. He was singing the praises of the Rangpur, talking nonstop: “Just look at this glorious bounty! Just look at this beauty! How many limes do you think we have here? I can’t even begin to count. And the tree is so young! It’s only three years old. Imagine when it’s 10 or 20. Imagine! We’ll be forcing limes on everyone. We’ll be begging strangers to take them!”
I love it when Rob is really enthusiastic about things, so I really enjoyed the lime picking. We ended up picking 22 pounds of limes, just a small, small fraction of the total on the tree. Then that night we stayed up late squeezing them all and getting the juice ready to freeze. Our freezer is now full of Rangpur lime juice. It’s the most beautiful color—chartreuse.
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| Our Rangpur lime harvest |
We spent Sunday afternoon putting our fall vegetable garden in. We ripped out all the tired old summer crops and weeded and added wheelbarrow loads of compost. Then we planted a bunch of starters: Bubbles Brussels sprouts, Top Bunch collards, Ruby Perfection red cabbage, Bonnie Best green cabbage, and Packman broccoli. I should have taken pictures of our new garden, but all I’ve got are these random flower shots:
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| Sparkling Burgundy sasanqua |
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| Marie Van Houtte rose |
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| Bear-paw (Smallanthus uvedalia) blooming in the front yard |
When my sister Kris and I were kids, we were big fort builders. We were always crouching in a fort under a tree. We built a great succession of forts, little lean-tos concocted without nails or screws. We’d usually stay in each place for about …
When I was a little kid, probably about nine, my father, one day, brought out a leaf collection he had made when he was about my age, about nine. I saw it only once, that one time, but I never forgot it. It was beautiful …
Rob and I just got back today from our trip to Sequoia National Park. It’s always so hard to come home from a vacation because the yard is such a mess. After a week of neglect, most of my potted plants are dead, and my beds are absolutely overrun with weeds. I guess there was a little storm while we were gone, because the lawn is littered with fallen branches . . . and big blobs of Spanish moss that look like dead possums. The grass is too tall. I feel like I’ll never get everything put back to rights.
This afternoon I took a little walk around the yard to survey the damage. I was dumping pots of dead torenia and caladiums and pulling up camphor seedlings and picking up sticks and muttering, “Oh, crap.” But I did manage to find a few pretty things to take pictures of. I can’t wait to have a big gardening day and get everything shipshape again.
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| Sparkling Burgundy sasanqua |
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| Katie Road Pink rose |
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| Katie Road Pink rose hip |
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| Devil’s walking stick berries |
Our house is 162 years old, and all over the property there are ghostly vestiges of gardens. Sometimes these are just little arrangements of old bulbs (daffodils and summer snowflakes)—and sometimes they’re something bigger, better. When Rob and I moved in eight years ago, the …
On Saturday morning Mom, Kris, Sophie, Jake, and I went out to Windy Hill Vineyard near Monticello to pick muscadine grapes. This is an annual tradition for our family, something we’ve been doing for 30 years. When I was in high school I always loved …
Here’s just a quick list of some of the sights and sounds of the weekend:
Lovebugs everywhere
Wrens chattering in the sumac
A little eggplant harvest
Muscadine grapes, fresh from the vine
Open windows
A strange breeze (from the hurricane)
Tiger swallowtails on the ironweed
Red mushrooms in the grass
Cats lounging in sunbeams
Yesterday I did a whole bunch of weeding while Rob mowed the lawn and cleaned out the gutters. I actually love to weed. It’s so peaceful and it gives me a chance to really look at my plants, really study them and their surroundings. Yesterday while I was weeding I discovered all kinds of interesting things: cute mushrooms, raccoon tracks, and tiny fiddleheads. I saw ladybugs and toads and hummingbirds and big, float-y tiger swallowtails. If I hadn’t been weeding way back in the back of the big bed along North Adams Street, I would’ve never even known my old roses were blooming; they’re so hidden among all the raucous perennials—the purple coneflowers and ironweed and bearpaw—that you have to wade in really deep to see them. You have to get up close.
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| Here’s Baronne Henriette de Snoy. |
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| Baronne Henriette de Snoy again |
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| And Maman Cochet |
Aside from weeding, I also did a lot of cat brushing out on the screen porch. The cats were so lazy this weekend, especially today. Carl slept on top of the pie safe, and Francie lay on her back on the couch, her long white feet in the air to catch the breezes.
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| Here’s how the breezeway looks with the new Coke sign we got in Dothan last weekend. |
I made a peach cobbler today, and vegan macaroni and cheese with a miraculous creamy sauce concocted from ground raw cashews. Rob made the best seitan, flavored like sausage with sage and crushed red pepper. We ate on the screen porch surrounded by napping cats and, farther off, the shaggy August meadows. I could see the rosinweed flowers as round and yellow as happy faces, and the complicated surprise lilies (they look like whirling eggbeaters, I think).
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| I should have taken a picture of the surprise lilies, because they won’t last long. Oh, well, here’s a picture of the back of the house as seen through the lemongrass. |
