Squash Blossoms

Ronde de Nice Zucchini after blossoming

Buttercup Winter Squash ready to bloom

The Front Garden in June

front steps

foxglove

yellow roses

Simon Says: Blog

It is time, Simon says, to begin blogging again.
I think I have forgotten how. I tell him.

You will remember.

But what will I say? How will I explain three years of silence? I ask him.

There is a season, Simon says, and a time to every purpose under heaven. There was a time to be silent, now it is time to speak again. To blog again.

I go out to the garden. Procrastinating. My colander becomes heavy with raspberries and words I am not writing. June sunlight is drowsy across my shoulders. A storm is waiting to water the earth. The afternoon fades to mosquitoes. Mosquitoes give way to fireflies, fireflies fade to pre-dawn songbirds. And the rain comes down to water the earth. My garden grows. I grow. It is quiet here.

It is time, Simon says.
What if I can't do it?  What if people realize I don't have it all together? What if I make mistakes?

He looks at me with that familiar expression. Did you really think anyone thought you had it all together? It will be okay. And it is time.

So I begin.

It is also time, Simon says, to scratch the dog's ears.

Reader Favorite: New Year's 2010

Another New Day
Arbitrarily it is the end of a year and the end of a decade. An ancient Roman-based calendar obliges us to consider tomorrow January first as the demarcation of a new year: 2010. For weeks (or months) we will continue to write 2009 on our checks, not ready to give up the old year, not ready to embrace the changing times as the years zoom away from us.

The date marks no change of seasons. We are in the midst of winter and winter will continue into the new year. There is no high holy feast to observe, no pre-calendar pagan rituals harking us back to a holiday mood. There is no reason tomorrow should be anything other than another quotidian sunrise and sunset. Another ordinary day.

Yet offices are closed, tomorrow there will be no post, and everyone goes about today with good wishes and cheerful greetings. The midnight sky will be interrupted by fireworks and dropping pickles, apples, roses, crystal balls.... each timezone will countdown to this one instant, this thin line between two ordinary days on a calendar, a separation between old and new.

We go about with Hope brimming over, Expectations and Good Intentions leading our way...This year we will do better. This is the year. Everything will be different this year. Are we deluding ourselves? I don't think so. Somehow, even though it is just another ordinary day it is still a day of promise.

Anne of Green Gables says "Tomorrow is always new with no mistakes in it -- yet." we are never more aware of this truth than at the new year. Tomorrow the whole year will be New, with no mistakes in it -- yet. Despite our best intentions the coming year will fill up with mistakes big and small. But for right now it lies ahead of us level and clean like the blanket of new fallen snow outside my window. What tracks we will make through that unbroken white! For now the expanse lies clean at our feet.... 10...9...8...7...

When morning comes remember, every day begins fresh and new and blank waiting for us to make something of it. Will it be a holiday? Will it be a day when we wish each other well? Will it be a day when we spread a message of Hope? We get to choose -- all year long.

From Psalm 85

For to You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
For You, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive,
And abundant in lovingkindness to all who call upon You.
Give ear, O LORD, to my prayer;
And give heed to the voice of my supplications!
In the day of my trouble I shall call upon You,
For You will answer me.
There is no one like You among the gods, O Lord,
Nor are there any works like Yours.
All nations whom You have made shall come and worship before You, O Lord,
And they shall glorify Your name.
For You are great and do wondrous deeds;
You alone are God.

What I learned from YouTube

I was assigned the appetizer for a group dinner -- that's easy right?  Or you can make things hard on yourself.  You can google things.  You can have a great veggie dip (take a jar of pesto and a block of cream cheese and add enough milk to make it blend smoothly in the mixer and you get dip that people love and rave about) and you can begin innocently enough thinking you want to make one little vegetable flower to garnish a tray of cut veggies.

Be warned:  YouTube will suck you in with fantastic amazing demonstrations of vegetable (and fruit) carving.  There are some truly talented people doing amazing perishable art.  That's the first thing you learn.  The second thing you learn is that most of these people don't speak English.  Which makes the third thing a little harder to learn -- the third thing you learn is how to make some of those veggie flowers yourself. 

I am particularly fond of the way my carrot flowers look almost good enough to be recognizable as flowers.  By the way, some of the things you learn from actually making those carrot flowers?  Carrots will stain your hands yellow if you work with them for three hours straight.  They really do get stiffer and crisper in a bowl of ice water just like the lady from Thailand says.  And seriously, if it takes three hours to make five sad little carrot flowers like that how amazing must God be to have created real flowers and carrots in the first place!  :)

August Dye

I have a dented pot I bought intentionally for dying in. It was discounted because of the damage, which damage also makes it easy to spot that this is not one of my cooking pots, and my "spoon" is an old stick so I don't worry about the toxicity levels of my dye ingredients. Natural dyes can be just as toxic as chemical dyes.  So even though I tend to go for natural dyes I still don't want my experiments mixing with my food. 

The vinegar and sumac are both acidic enough to act as the only mordant necessary.  Or so I thought.  I was attempting to dye cotton this time too, but cotton clearly needs more mordanting.  Coming out of they dye pot the cotton lost more than half its color in the first rinse, although the resulting pastel is not unpleasant. 

 The wool on the other hand held its deeper richer color beautifully.  Isn't it pretty?

As you can see there is quite a lot of variation in the resulting wool yarn, lighter bits where the knots of the skein kept the dye from penetrating, darker bits where it oxidized or brushed up against the pot and a few purpler streaks where I didn't get all the plant matter out of the pot before putting the yarn in and it must have been next to a poke berry.  I love the way the color plays and changes with this batch and as you can see it's already being knit up into something.  What kind of something uses such a small batch of hand-dyed yarn to best show it off?  Stay tuned. :)