April 2024: April Showers Bring April Flowers

April was rough with way too many severe storms, violent wind, and tornadoes coming way too close to our house. The worst of it was April 2 when we were awake at 5:00 am and heading to the basement to shelter from tornadoes. Thankfully we made it through the month without storm damage.

Meanwhile, everything emerged in my garden. Some of my favorites were the ferns as they curled their way out of the ground and expanded into their spots in the garden. I always love their changing structures and textures. Another plant with a beautiful emergence is the peony whose leaves twist and turn as they expand from the soil. I also love the colors and textures of the epimedium leaves that line up and expand together in a team of hearts–not to mention the fairy-like epimedium flowers held on delicate stems.

The early spring daffodils and tulips had mostly passed by the start of April and were replaced by things like wild geranium, tiarella, irises, and azaleas. The colors in my garden intensified as the plants began to fill the formerly-empty space. My berries bloomed, and my garlic grew ever larger.

I didn’t do much work in my garden, spending the month mostly just watching its progress and taking pictures. I did start a few tomato plants and sweet potato slips. Many years I’ve felt like I got them going too early and had to try to hold overly-eager plants indoors for too long. Trying to avoid that, I think I may have gotten them started a little later than I could have, though it’s always difficult to know what to do.

On the last weekend of April, John and I were able to go to Scratch Brewing, one of our favorite little breweries. It’s located in Southern Illinois and we’ve gone several times before, though it had been almost a year since our last trip. The beers are hyperlocal and incorporate many plants that the brewers have foraged from the land around the brewery. The flavors are complex and unique.

We arrived late in the afternoon and shared several rounds of samplers along with a couple wood fired pizzas. Beers on tap that weekend included one brewed with dried oak, hickory, and maple leaves; one brewed in a copper kettle with wild cherry bark; one brewed with elderberries; and one brewed with chanterelle mushrooms. All of these items were grown or foraged nearby. The pizzas also featured local foods for their toppings.

In addition to having really interesting drinks and food, Scratch has a beautiful setting. The indoors is full of artwork and the outdoors features a variety of rustic seating areas. We ate in the roofed area built around a log cabin. We had a view of the woods, and an Eastern phoebe had a nest nearby in the eaves so we watched her come and go.

We spent the night nearby, then checked out Inspiration Point in the Shawnee National Forest the next morning before going home. At first, Inspiration Point didn’t seem all that inspiring, but then we braved the steep little side trail and gusty winds to get out on the actual point where the view was, in fact, inspirational. It was a fun little trip.

August 2023: Bountiful Blooms

Since John and I were on vacation for two weeks in August, I thought my garden update for the month would be short. Not so! There were still many things to photograph with lots of great colors and textures everywhere. Flowers were blooming, plants were fruiting, and there were interesting bugs hanging out everywhere if I just looked closely enough.

A serious bonus was that my garden got a good amount of rain while we were gone, so the plants were able to take care of themselves. When it’s dry and I need to water things myself, it usually takes me a whole day to do that. It’s nothing I want to ask someone else to do, so I just leave and hope for the best. Most summers things get brown and crispy, but this summer things were still in great shape when we got home. It was nice to come home to everything well-watered naturally for once!

We got home just in time for a “heat dome.” Actual air temperatures were around 100 degrees and the humidity brought the “feels like” temperature up about 120 degrees. It was horribly hot. My garden made it through just fine, and so did the outdoor cats. Temperatures were 20 degrees cooler in Michigan during that time, so we wished we were still up there but were glad to be home to monitor everything and everyone. I do think the heat supercharged the sweet potatoes, lima beans, and zucchino rampicante squash. They, in particular, have exploded.

I can tell fall is approaching. Summer-blooming native plants have gone to seed. Late summer blooms like the blazing star have just begun. The monarch butterflies are visiting. The tomatoes are getting tired. Soon enough the leaves will turn and it will be time to pick the squash and lima beans. With a little frost, it will be time to harvest the sweet potatoes as well.

May 2023: A Few Field Trips

I’m a little later than usual in putting together my roundup of garden happenings for the month of May. So far in June, John and I have spent one weekend camping at Spring Mill State Park, and I spent the following weekend catching up on a massive amount of work in my garden–hence the lateness of this post.

May had its own assortment of travel. Early in the month I went back to Twin Swamps Nature Preserve, located out past Mount Vernon, Indiana. The description of the preserve from an Indiana DNR information sheet describes it this way: Twin Swamps consists of a swamp cottonwood-bald cypress swamp and an overcup oak swamp, with an area of southern flatwoods between the two. This preserve is one of the few existing remnants of such communities which once occurred over large portions of the Ohio and Wabash River Valleys.

I’d gone there last year and enjoyed the walk, so I went back this year and brought waterproof boots. I really needed them! In one spot the water on the trail was at least 6″ deep. Twin Swamps is near Hastings plant nursery, where I often stop for plants for my garden. I also stopped at Hastings this year.

At the end of the month, John and I traveled to one of our favorite spots, Scratch Brewing, which is located near Carbondale, Illinois. They were offering a plant tour, so we signed up. It was really fun. One of the owners took a group of 15 of us tromping off through the middle of the woods where Scratch is located–seriously, tromping without any trails (the ticks were bad!). It sounds like he’d spent his childhood wandering through that woods and knew where lots of interesting plants grew. He picked a variety of plants then took us to two picnic tables in a clearing where he poured hot water over several of them to make teas that we could sample. He also brought some Scratch beers to sample that had been brewed using some of the plants we saw.

He clearly loved foraging and loved plants. One of his statements to the group was, “It’s just so amazing to me how many very different flavors exist here right next to each other.” There was also a moment when he pointed out a shagbark hickory tree, then paused while looking at it and said, “That tree has made beer.” He described the process of brewing new beers at Scratch that starts with a plant or fungus that they notice has an intriguing scent or an interesting flavor. The brewers at Scratch take that plant or fungus and experiment to figure out how to include some part of that essence in a tasty beer. It sounds like there are plenty of failures, but there are also some interesting successes. We sampled a few with a pizza after the tour.

In between the swamp and the brewery plant tour, there was plenty happening in my garden. I picked up a few more plants at the Master Gardeners’ Plant Sale and at a couple area greenhouses. Some of those plants ended up in a special new garden for Boo Boo. He’s buried under the broken concrete angel beside the rear bottle tree. I added hostas over his grave since he always liked to sleep under big hosta leaves. The new garden also includes some great shade plants. When I finished it, I was inspired to get all my fairies and mushrooms and toad houses out of storage, so it’s also a fairy garden.

Also in May, the last of the “spring-y” things like the irises finished blooming and we moved into solidly early-summer blooms like peonies and baptisia. I also had some nice blooms start on the native prairie plants I have planted in the dry, compacted “hell strip” located between the sidewalk and the street. And even the many leaf combinations among my plants have been beautiful to see. My lettuce sat and sulked for half the month and then took off at about the time that I’d been hoping to have eaten several rounds of it and removed it. I’d had other plans for the space where it was at, but delayed some of my additional planting.

Below, you can take a video tour of my garden and you can also flip through my photo highlights from the month. Each photo is labeled with more information about what’s in it.

December 2022: Polar Plunge

December dawned a little warmer than usual, but not much. There were cold spells with lows in the 20’s, and there were sprinklings of rain here an there. Most color had faded from my garden, save the last of the leaves to turn and fall: the leaves on my blackberry. Every year they are some of the last bits of red, yellow, orange, and green to leave my garden. I always enjoy seeing them. Meanwhile, the last of the tomatoes left on the vines withered away to nothing, but indoors I had one final round of fresh tomatoes that I’d picked green in November and that had ripened on my counter. Fresh garden tomatoes in December! John and I baked them with chickpeas and feta for a tasty meal.

Mid-December, John and I got a Christmas tree. This year we didn’t even check the traditional spot in a strip mine where we and others from Patchwork had gone to collect cedar trees for decades. If you remember, lately it’s only been John and I going to get trees there and last year when we went it just felt like too much had changed and it was no longer a good idea. So last year and this year we got a normal commercial tree. Times change.

Just before Christmas, I pulled a year’s worth of raspberries and two years’ worth of blackberries from my freezer and turned them into jam. I like blackberry jam a lot better without seeds, so I used my Squeezo Strainer to separate them out before making jam. It was more difficult than it should have been because I got impatient with the slow-to-thaw berries and tried to run them through when they were still a little frozen. Eventually I got one batch of raspberry jam, two batches of blackberry jam, and one batch of blackberry preserves.

What’s the difference between jam and preserves, you ask? Well, I accidentally used half the sugar I should have on my last batch of jam. I knew I should have made myself check the recipe, but instead I told myself that it was the fourth time through and I remembered the recipe just fine. I didn’t realize my mistake until I noticed that the jam hadn’t gelled correctly. I looked online to find a remedy and the first search result started with the words of wisdom, “If you don’t want to invest any additional work in that jam, the best choice to make is to change your expectations. If the finished product is just sort of runny, call it preserves (they can be great stirred into oatmeal or yogurt, or spooned over waffles). If it’s totally sloshy, label it syrup and stir it into sparkling water.”

As I was finishing the jam, a serious winter storm was gathering. Snow and extreme cold air were forecast to hit our area in the afternoon on December 22. Everyone was urged to get our affairs in order. Suddenly we were prepping our home and workplace for bad weather at the same time as we were preparing work to be closed for the holidays. On the day the storm blew in, the high temperature on my weather station was 44 degrees and the low at bedtime was 3 degrees with a windchill of -10 degrees. Very early in the morning on December 23, the low on my weather station got down to -6 degrees and the windchill reached at least -19 degrees. In other areas around the city where the wind could blow even harder, the windchill got to at least -29 degrees. On Christmas, it was still cold. Christmas night it snowed more. Things started to ease on December 26, but it was still plenty cold.

It was stressful. One night we had an alarm going off on our furnace at home. We had a couple furnaces at work limping along and spent time during our holiday working to keep them going. We had a pipe briefly freeze at home. We were monitoring two buildings at work and the four cats sheltered in them. We pushed off leaving to visit my family for Christmas once then again then just decided to stay home. Since we’d intended to be gone, we hadn’t stocked up on groceries before Christmas, but we still managed to use things we had around to make a fancy Christmas feast of Chicken Cordon Bleu and roasted sweet potatoes from my garden.

The snow was pretty while it lasted, enhancing all of my outdoor Christmas lights. After it melted and the weather warmed, I did notice that many of my plants that normally stay evergreen through the Southwestern Indiana winters have turned black. The leaves on the honeysuckle on the back fence are brown and limp. The azaleas in the front have many leaves that turned brown and are falling off. I will be interested to see how well things come back to life in the spring. Clearly this weather was on the colder end of what they can tolerate.

And with that, we ended 2022! Now it’s time to look toward next summer and to start ordering my seeds.

March 2022: Everything is New Again

March was a great month for being continually surprised by new blooms here and there around my yard. I would be out walking Perry the Cat when I’d notice a new fleck of purple or yellow popping up. There was a lot of promise at the beginning of the month with many old regulars appearing and the knowledge that there were many more in the ground yet to emerge.

Unfortunately that promise had dulled a bit by the end of the month. Many beautiful things bloomed, don’t get me wrong, but quite a few new bulbs that I’d planted last fall never appeared and several of my existing bulbs didn’t return this year. For instance, I’d planted a bunch of dwarf irises last fall because I loved the ones that I planted a couple years ago, but of all the bulbs I planted I only had two blooms. Still, I love the fancy little flowers.

And for the first time in the more than ten years that John and I have been living in this house, a cold snap wrecked most of the magnolia blooms so the usual show was extremely muted. We’d had a pretty snow the evening before the cold snap, and I ran around the yard taking some photos before it was gone. Then we had a couple days with lows that dipped into the teens and that was what destroyed the magnolia blooms. Our friends who’d owned this house for decades before us had warned that it sometimes happened like that–so we have been lucky that it hadn’t happened before now.

One of my favorite early bloomers are the hellebores. I got my first one because I was intrigued by the name, and then I found out how wonderful they are as plants. They look amazing as they crawl out of the earth with a mass of new stems in late winter when most other things are still dormant. You can see them in the photos below. The first one I got is the dark purply one. Then I got the one with the beautifully creamy double blossoms edged in red. I’ve seen photos of the kind with speckled blooms and I’ve wanted one of those. A couple years ago I attempted to get one that was all purple with speckles, but the cats almost killed it by napping on top of it during its first, spindly year. This was the first year it bloomed, and it was the last one to do so. Last year I got one that promised fancy white flowers and magenta spots, and this year it bloomed exactly as advertised and very beautifully, too!

Meanwhile some of my other early perennials are starting to emerge including tiarellas and heucheras. I’d meant to do some cleaning and weeding all winter when the perennials were dormant but the weeds (mostly creeping Charlie) were green and easy to see. However, I never really felt like coming out to weed in the cold, so the creeping Charlie kept creeping. A couple weeks ago I attempted to carefully pull it out of my garden. It’s a really tricky job because it’s low and sneaky and entwines itself around other plants and bits break off to regenerate, which also reminded me why I hadn’t done it sooner.

I’d also meant to pull my hops out of their pot and trade out some of the old soil for new, since they’ve been less vigorous in the last couple years. But I looked at the hops I saw they were already well underway (surprise!), so they’ll have to make do with what they’ve got. They’re another plant that quietly gets a head start every year before I expect to see any plants.

I’ve started preparing some sweet potatoes indoors, I got a small patch of salad greens going in my garden, and I planted tomato seeds, so I’m slowly working my way toward a new year of harvests. The raspberries and blackberries are coming out of dormancy, and the garlic is showing more signs of growth. I have plenty of work to do in April to get my garden going now that the earth is waking up.

Meanwhile, in mid-March, John and I saw that Scratch Brewing was celebrating its 9th birthday with a special weekend of unique beers, some of which would not be offered at any other time. We decided we needed a short weekend getaway, so we planned another trip there.

If you recall, we first visited Scratch last October, and we had a wonderful time. Scratch brews really unique beers, many of which incorporate ingredients that were foraged from the woods around the brewery. Some taste like you’re drinking a tree, some are fruity, some are smoky, and all of them are delicious–or at least John and I think so. The day’s menu in the tasting room is below so you can read through it. We both especially liked the one brewed with green tomatoes, the one brewed with marigolds, and the one brewed with paw paws, but all the beers we tried were incredibly drinkable.

The one thing that we were a little disappointed about was that their food menu only consisted of two sandwiches. I guess they had wanted to streamline the food prep so their staff could focus on serving lots of beer. When we’d been there in October, there had been several different food options so we’d been able to sit around eating and drinking until we’d spent the entire afternoon there. The sandwiches that we got were absolutely delicious, but with only two options we were finished much sooner than we’d expected.

After we’d eaten and drunk our fill, we went to the nearby Piney Creek Ravine Nature Preserve to hike and to see the Native American rock art that is there. At first the trail wasn’t very clear, but we slowly found our way into the ravine and across two streams and found the rock shelter with the art in it.

When we got there, I really wished I’d known to research the art beforehand. It’s been nearly destroyed by time and by so many, many years of graffiti. It was difficult to see where the ancient petroglyphs were under all of the newer names, initials, and dates. We managed to find what we thought were a couple. We would have identified more if I’d have looked it up ahead of time.

In the second-to-last photo below, you can make out a V shape on the left and you can just barely make out two human shapes on the bottom right. The human shapes are lighter colored against a rusty background. On the boulder in the last photo you can see a squiggle that runs horizontally above Louis’ name. There’s a kind of a bird shape at the start of the squiggle. Those are all examples of the petroglyphs.

December 2021: The Final Shades of the Year

December was quiet in my garden. I moved around a few more leaves but that was about all I did all month. All the plants pretty well finished settling back into the earth for the winter. Slowly the last pops of vibrant color drained away. At first glance, the photos of my garden from the start and end of the month look the same, but on further examination you might be surprised at the things that were left to fall away as the month progressed. The blackberries were the last plants to have their leaves turn color and drop. I love their colors darkening from yellows into reds and purples.

We did some good cooking in December (though we cook well every month!). Early in the month we made acorn squash stuffed with Beyond Burger, veggies, and breadcrumbs. The squashes were not from my garden, but they were local. They tasted amazing and 100% like they contained actual meat. We don’t normally cook with Beyond Burger, but we had some on hand and this was a great way to use it.

On Christmas Eve we made Smoking Bishop, a British mulled wine drink mentioned at the end of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. One of the most interesting parts of the recipe was that you roasted citrus fruits in the oven before putting them along with some other spices into some port and heating the whole thing up. It was tasty! Apparently it’s called Smoking Bishop because it’s the color of bishops’ robes and the steam rising off of it looks a little like smoke. (I was inspired to try making it after watching this video.)

I didn’t include a photo, but we did cook up some of my garden produce, too. Our Christmas meal included some of my sweet potatoes roasted.

And I decorated for Christmas! It always looks cheery. I hate to take the outdoor lights down in January knowing we’ll have a few more dreary months to go. I’ve had solar lights on my bottle tree/stump all year, and I thought I’d leave them up for Christmas, but then I saw a photo of the tree last year with real Christmas lights on it. The non-solar lights were so much brighter and really made the bottles sparkle, so I decided I needed to switch out the solar lights for some higher-powered ones for Christmas. I was not disappointed.

And finally, you’ll notice we have a more conventional Christmas tree this year. John and I normally go to a secret spot on strip mine land and grab a cedar. People from Patchwork have been getting their trees that way (though usually with official permits) for nearly a half century (yikes!), but this year when John and I arrived at the spot we knew it wasn’t going to work. It was like the gates leading to Brigadoon had disappeared. There was no route to the clearing where we’ve found our trees over the last many years, despite multiple passes down the road where we knew it should be. And it looked like things were being actively mined again. Without a permit, it felt like a really bad idea to stop, so we didn’t.

We ended up getting a nice tree from a local tree farm. The tree farm’s trees weren’t big enough to cut yet, but they’d gotten several pre-cut trees from a big tree farm in Northern Indiana. I felt a little like one of the people in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special who choose the fancy trees instead of the scraggly little one. The one we got has even been dyed a little bit to ensure a nice, green appearance. Oh well. It was the right choice this year.

October 2021: From Tomatoes to Turning Leaves

October finally saw summer turn to autumn. I started the month by cleaning out the mass of plants in my vegetable garden. By that point, the tomatoes and melons were pretty rough looking. There were several melons to pick, but not many tomatoes anymore. There were also some pretty Klee’s orange marigolds mixed in. Covering it all was a mass of Mexican sour gherkin vines. They’re so cute and fun to grow, but, sadly, I didn’t get inspired to use them in anything this year, so they just grew and grew and never got picked. Next year my garden will be swarming with them because so many unpicked fruits fell on the ground everywhere.

Once the mass of plants was out of the way, I planted my garlic. I always think I have a great new plan for how I can plant garlic so that I’ll be able to plant something else around it in order to maximize the little space I have. But it never works that well. I always get the Small Garden Sampler from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. It’s four different kinds of garlic. This time around, I thought I could plant four rows lengthwise in the raised bed. Surely that would be enough space, right? Well, a couple of the kinds of garlic had lots of small cloves in each head, so there were a lot to plant and they took up more like three rows each. I couldn’t throw any out, so I planted them all and, like usual, hoped something will work out brilliantly next spring. I don’t know what that solution will be, but I’ve got several months before it’s a problem.

Mid month, the overnight temperatures started to regularly be below 50 degrees and that meant it was time to bring in my houseplants for the winter and to harvest my basil. I’d used leaves of the basil here and there all summer, but at the end of the season I always pick everything and turn it into pesto. I made three rounds of pesto and froze most of it. We did use some as the bottom layer on a few pizzas, covering it with fresh mozzarella, pizza cheese, and roasted red pepper. It was delicious!

All month, my garden was brightened with a lot of blooms. Most of them were zinnias and marigolds, but there were also morning glories on the back fence (the kind that come up on their own and not the fancy kinds I planted, not that I noticed (I did)) and tassel flowers by the front bottle tree. I also had pretty blooms from a daisy-like chrysanthemum located by our front steps. You’ll see photos of the flowers here, but not of the plant. It got really leggy and not very attractive. I need to keep working on my mum-growing technique. The last half of the month was time for some of my favorite flowers to bloom–toad lilies. I love how bright, new, and fancy they look just when everything else is getting kind of tired and brown as it coasts into fall.

Toward the end of the month, I tried a project I’d always meant to do: using cement to make casts of big leaves and using those casts as stepping stones. The leaves on my elephant ears are always so beautiful and I’m sad every year when the frosts come. They’re the perfect leaves to turn into stepping stones, and now I can keep them year-round. I made five stones, plus a first one that turned out ok but not great. Next year I may try to add some color to them. For now I’m glad to have finished them before the frost destroyed the leaves (but not long before the frost so the plants didn’t look chopped up for long).

Another project at the end of the month was a round of garden-fresh ravioli. I hadn’t made any ravioli all summer and I decided that that needed to be remedied. Made from scratch, it’s absolutely delicious, but it’s also a lot of work. This time I made it even more work by attempting the fancy, multi-colored pastas that I’ve seen people making on the internet. I needed some natural coloring, so I used the one brightly colored thing I still had in my garden: sweet potato leaves. I cooked the leaves and pureed them and added them into some of the pasta dough to make striped dough. It was a lot tougher to do than they make it appear in internet videos. The pasta was stuffed with a cheesy, garlicy, roasted squash mixture. The squash and garlic were both from my garden. The pasta was served in a brown butter and sage sauce. It was sublime, but took most of the day to make.

Overall, the month was a little dry and quite warm. There were multiple weeks I decided to use my sprinklers to water because we didn’t get nearly enough rain. And our air conditioning was on for a lot of the time while the heat was only on for the last couple days (we tried to engage in the local sport of holding out till at least November before turning the heat on, but we quit when the temperature indoors didn’t get above 62 degrees for the day). There were no frosts and no temperatures near or below freezing, so most of my plants were still going strong at the end of the month.

John and I have been talking about how much we need to take more time off to help us cope with the stress of the pandemic and work. Then I saw a reason to take a long weekend away. There’s a place in Southern Illinois called Scratch Brewing. One of my Facebook friends wrote about visiting it a couple years ago, and I’ve wanted to go there ever since. They use all kinds of locally foraged plants in their brewing. I was intrigued but we never actually went there. Then Scratch’s announcement about their Octoberfest popped into my Facebook feed, and I decided it was time to visit.

We organized a couple days around our visit to Scratch. We found a cabin nearby where we could stay for a couple nights and drove out on a Friday so we could be at Scratch when they opened on Saturday. It was fantastic! The flavors were incredibly complex and layered. Some were surprising. All of them were fantastic. It was a cool, rainy day and was absolutely perfect for sitting in their outdoor dining area sampling all their drinks and eating good food. We spent several hours leisurely drinking and eating. All of it was created with an eye for what’s local. It was SO GOOD, and we can’t wait to go back.

Michigan Getaway

John and I spent the first two weeks of August Up North in Northern Michigan. It was the first we’d been there since the summer of 2019, so it was well past time! It was incredibly relaxing, which was important after all the stresses of the pandemic.

The couple weeks we’ve been back have held lots of additional stress. It’s made me wish I could teleport myself back up there to soak up a little bit more of that peace. Since I can’t do that, I’ll share a bunch of photos from the trip with you. Flipping though them brings a moment of peace and solitude.

We did a lot of hiking in various Little Traverse Conservancy nature preserves. We ate a lot of good food including plenty we cooked ourselves and also some good sandwiches, wine, and cider at Pond Hill Farm. We canoed on Crooked Lake, which is near our cottage. And, we visited Lake Michigan shores.

Feel free to flip through the photos below. If you click on one, you’ll find a little bit of a description.

March 2021: Another Day Another Flower

I’m a little behind in posting my review of the month of March. Partly I was making sure I had a batch of new cat photos posted here. But also I’ve been busy taking more photos of all the new things growing and blooming and changing before my eyes.

There was certainly a lot of that happening in March. At the start of the month, things were mostly brown and covered in dried leaves. First came the crocuses–one here and another there, always surprising me with a new color in a new spot. I’ve scattered them in a lot of places around my garden with that in mind. The irises came soon after. This is only the second year I’ve had them blooming in my yard, and I love their pops of color. Then came the snowdrops–all descended from a clump I took from a spot where an old farmhouse was torn down.

Along with all of these blooms were the hellebores. I’d never heard of them before I started my garden, but now they’re some of my favorites. They fill the early garden with color and vegetation. Their flowers are frilly and fancy, though if I’d realized how much they hide these pretty flowers by facing them downward, I would have planted them closer to the edge of the bed where they would be easier to admire.

Then came the big show: the magnolia tree. Every year, it’s a magnificent show. The blooms last for several days, making a beautiful progression from buds held on the limbs like candle flames to newly-opened blooms that are fresh and bright to aged blooms edged in brown bruises and then to the aftermath of petals strewn over the ground.

In the middle of the magnolia blossoms, the daffodils began blooming. Like the crocuses, I’ve got a wide variety planted throughout my garden, so they surprise me with new color patterns popping up at different times and in different places.

As the daffodils started to bloom everywhere, many other perennials began to make their presence known. Ferns began to unfurl. Each variety has its own patterns of growth as it emerges from the ground and expands into the garden. There’s also a patch of the native wildflower trillium that appeared around this time, followed by the fritillaries, whose little checkerboarded lanterns I love. Around this time, the blackberries and raspberries began to leaf out, the hops emerged from the ground, and the irises began to expand to fill their section of the garden with their bright green blades.

In food news, I was able to eat some garden harvests in March. I finally finished the last of the sweet potatoes that I harvested last fall. I roasted them to make a side dish for a balsamic chicken. And the lettuce that’s been biding its time all winter under a plastic dome is finally exploding, providing tasty early season salads.

And all month, I held off on new spring plantings, not wanting to have things ready to grow outside before the weather was warm enough for them. Just before the end of the month, I got my tomatoes started. On the last day of March, I had tiny seedlings in each of my six seed pots. In April, I’ll start a few more types of seeds indoors, but I’m trying not to rush.

January 2021: Dormancy and Dustings

Not very much happened in my garden in January, and the proof of that is that I hardly have any photos of it! We got a few dustings of snow, which always make everything look a little more interesting because of the white accents, and that’s about it. It’s still too early for me to start the few seeds that I will start indoors, and this year the earliest crocuses hadn’t yet shown any signs of blooming, so there’s really nothing but dormancy going on.

I have, however, been cooking with garden produce. I started 2021 by making a bean and sweet potato stew. I took all the lima beans and cowpeas that my garden produced in 2020 and dumped them in the slow cooker with some of my sweet potatoes and garlic along with a few other things from the grocery store. The cowpeas are in the same family as the black-eyed peas that many people around here eat for good luck on New Year’s day, so I figure they’ll work. Hopefully dumping a whole year’s worth of my garden’s bounty into a New Year’s pot will guarantee plentiful harvests in 2021.

Later in January I made another round of ravioli from scratch. My recipe calls for squash, but since I have plenty of sweet potatoes sitting around, I decided to use them instead. I tried to find at least one of each of the three colors of sweet potato that I grew, and I was successful. It was amazing how much color just a single, purple sweet potato added to the final filling. To make the ravioli, I roasted the sweet potatoes, garlic, sage, and a shallot (the shallot was the only thing NOT from my garden), then added cheese and pureed it all. Meanwhile, I made pasta dough and ran it through my pasta maker to create thin sheets before piping the filling onto the dough. I boiled the pasta to finish cooking it, then made a browned butter sauce. It was a lot of work, but it was also really delicious!