Our Rangpur lime tree is doing great this year. It’s dark and lush, loaded with bright orange, tangy fruit. A Rangpur lime isn’t a real lime; it’s a cross between a Mandarin orange and a lemon. But the fruit is sour enough to use as …
Last weekend we started harvesting pecans from our giant pecan tree. We have a handy “pecan picker-upper” that makes gathering the nuts really easy. It’s a little round cage on a pole, and as you roll the cage along the ground, the pecans get trapped …
In fall, during cranberry season, I try to make cranberry sauce as often as I can. It’s beautiful and delicious—and it’s so good for you. Cranberries have more antioxidants than any other common fruit.
When I was little, it was always my job to make the cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. I loved the way the cranberries popped as they boiled (it just seemed so festive and merry), and I loved to eat the sauce hot, as soon as it was done. Warm cranberry sauce is so comforting.
Here’s the recipe I’ve always used, ever since I was seven or eight. It’s right off the back of the Ocean Spray bag, and it’s so easy even a child-cook can’t mess it up.
Cranberry Sauce
Ingredients:
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
12 oz fresh cranberries
Directions:
Bring water and sugar to a boil, and stir until sugar dissolves. Add cranberries and boil gently for 10 minutes. The cranberries will pop as they cook. Serve warm!
Last night I had a very nice little cozy evening making peach cobbler in my pajamas and watching an NCIS marathon with little June Baxter curled up in my lap. Then this morning I got up in the freezing cold and picked some of …
This weekend the weather was crisp and sparkly, as it has been around here for the last couple weeks. We’ve got quite a bit of fall color in the yard, which I’ve been trying my best to savor. …
In February 2010, Rob and I dug a pond in our yard. It’s about 12 feet long and 3 feet deep at the deepest end. Where the pond is now, there used to be nothing but invasive plants, a tangled thicket of nandina, ardisia, ligustrum, camphor, and wisteria. It was a wasteland.
The first thing we did was get rid of the invasives. That meant cutting them again and again, and mowing and weed-eating. Then we dug the pond and surrounded it with limestone rocks (the only kind of rock found naturally in Florida). We designed a huge bed around the pond and mulched it with newspaper and wood chips to kill the grass and low-growing, non-woody invasive weeds (bordergrass and old-world climbing fern). Then we filled the pond with water and goldfish and eelgrass and hornwort.
We built and painted a picket fence around the pond that summer, in 2010. We painted it dark black-green, like the fence that borders the front of our front yard. It took weeks to paint the many surfaces of that fence, and while we worked the goldfish had babies.
It wasn’t until November 2010 that I was able to plant the first plants around the pond. In Florida, planting season runs from November through February; the rest of the year it’s too hot to plant—or it’ll be getting too hot too soon. Inside the fence I planted Shi-Shi Gashira sasanquas, a leucothoe, sweetshrub, a Walter’s viburnum, a bluestem palmetto, coonties, needle palms, beautyberry, arrowwood, hearts-a-bustin’, and three Piedmont azaleas –and then I ran out of time. It was February 2011, a dry, hot, weird February.
2011 has been the driest year I can remember. All summer I was hand-watering, every day, trying to keep my plants alive. I was worrying, too, that this drought isn’t just an aberration, part of a natural fluctuation, but the beginning of a trend, the early days of a new reality–a hotter, drier Quincy.
Now it’s planting season again, but it still hasn’t started raining, so I’m planting—but cautiously. I’m concentrating my efforts in one area, just the pond garden, so I can keep everything watered. So far I’ve planted Christmas ferns, royal ferns, lady ferns, and southern wood ferns. I love ferns. A homeless man I once knew called them “fairies,” and I thought that was such a good name, because ferns are so ethereal, so magical.
After work on Friday, Kris and I took Sophie and Jake to Lofty Pursuits, this awesome little ice cream and toy store. Kris and I got grapefruit sorbets, Jake got a cone, and Sophie got a Make-Your-Own Sundae.
Over the past two weekends we completely revamped our vegetable garden. We had some problems with it this year. I think most of the trouble was caused by the horrible drought we’ve been experiencing, but there were also problems with overcrowding. You see, our main …
The drought is so bad here in Gadsden County; rainfall this year is at least 20 inches below normal. I’m just miserable over the rock-hard soil and silver, crunchy grass, the beds full of wilted and crispy plants. It’s so depressing. I’m starting to feel hopeless, so today I looked through my old pictures to remind myself that the weather wasn’t always this way. Here’s what my yard used to look like when water still fell sometimes from the sky:
