Whatever you choose to call it, now is the time to celebrate the shortest night of the year, and the longest days, and the burgeoning fields and gardens.  There are many, though, that at this time will not be celebrating, because of the destruction of their fields and gardens and homes through floods, drought, or some other catastrophe exacerbated by global warming, mono-culture agriculture, destruction of wetlands and flood plains, or Mother Nature just fighting back.  So we might also take this time of year to reflect on our lives in relation to the world around us and what we can do about the problems we see.

Treehugger has posted a few suggestions for observing this time of year; which you can read about here.   They also have suggestions on greening your life, as well as environmental news; I recommend them as well as Grist for great reads on being green.  Mother Earth News, the “original guide for living wisely”, has a post here on how to help the Midwestern flood victims.  At all of these and many other places online, not only can you learn about greening your life (and possibly life as we know it), you can also glean tips for saving money, becoming healthier, reducing waste and chemicals, and maybe score some great recipes into the bargain.

As I’ve talked about before, one of the major ways you can achieve all of the above-mentioned goodies is by cutting meat out of your diet, in particular red meat, or at least reducing it substantially.  We have also cut out chicken and have changed our fish-eating habits based on evidence that some types of fish have been drastically over-fished and that the “farm-raised” ones are as full of chemicals and hormones as feedlot cows (salmon is an example of both of these categories; natural populations are dwindling and the farm-raised ones, just like feedlot cows, are being fed corn which is not their natural diet and so they must be fed antibiotics and hormones to help them stay alive until they are big enough to kill). 

This brings us back to the celebration of the Summer Solstice, or Litha, the festival of enjoying the summer sun and warmth, and sharing the abundance of the fruits (and vegetables!) of our labors.  So for my part, I’ll share with you a few meatless ways to partake of your garden’s produce (or your local farmer’s market, or even your grocery stores’)…

For Father’s Day, we were going to my dad’s for a covered dish/ barbeque and I decided to bring something based on what was available in our garden on the day of the gathering.  The day before, I dug some red potatoes from the four hills we have of them, and cut a zucchini squash and a yellow squash.  We have bunches of lemon balm pretty much all over the yard, so with all this mind (and in hand), I made a garden potato salad:  first, I cut the potatoes into chunks and steamed them until just tender, then I cut the squash into chunks and steamed them till just tender along with some chopped onions.  All of these I rinsed in cold water to stop them from cooking after they were done steaming.  Then I combined them all together along with handfuls of chopped lemon balm, some lemon pepper seasoning, some chopped garlic and sour cream, and put it into the refirgerator to let the flavors “marry”.  Later my husband added dry mustard, garlic powder and paprika.  If we had been having this at home as a meal, I probably would have added some steamed greens as the “side” dish, and that would have been our entire meal.

Later in the week, I took more zucchini and yellow squash, steamed them and combined them with couscous, chopped roasted red peppers, some leftover alfredo sauce and parmesan cheese in a casserole, seasoned to taste with lemon pepper, garlic and coarse salt.  This morning, our burgeoning basil plants needed cutting, so I cut a large basket full and made three batches of pesto (pine nuts, garlic, basil leaves, parmesan cheese, lemon pepper season and garlic powder) and tied two handfuls together to hang and dry.  I don’t add olive oil to my pesto while I’m making it because it tends to “cook” in the food processor as you are whirring the ingredients around, and I think it keeps longer without it.  I put my pesto into tight-lidded jars, label and date them, and keep them in the freezer till I’m ready to use them, except for one jar I keep in the fridge for quick access.  I add the olive oil when I use the pesto; for example, when I put some on my salad, I pour a little olive oil over it and stir it around in my salad.  Same with pasta: cook your pasta, drizzle olive oil on it, then sprinkle on the pesto.  This is particularly good when making a primavera (spring) pasta: another chance to pick and choose whatever veggies you want in your dish, steam them separately or cook them right in with your pasta, drain, season with pesto and parmesan cheese and there’s a complete meal.

Now get out there and enjoy the Mid-Summer Litha and/or Solstice, whatever you choose to call it and however you choose to celebrate it.

    In previous posts I have mentioned our strawberry-eating pair of foxes; here’s one of them who stopped to pose for my husband to take a few shots of him.  This one has a beautiful long tale, tipped with black, that supposedly means he is a gray fox.  I don’t really know that he is a “he”, but the other one, who has no tail at all, looked earlier this year as if she were pregnant.  Why does she have no tail?  We don’t know, but last year she had half a tail, and this year, no tail.  There’s a tale there somewhere.

    Our human next-door neighbor, the one who tends a larger garden than ours, says he thinks the parent foxes are bringing their babies out at night or in the early mornings or late evenings to play in the loose dirt/sand in a back corner of his garden (where the wild fields and trees begin).  He hasn’t seen them, he says, but he sees the messed-up dirt with fox tracks all around.  This neighbor came over a few evenings ago to show me his hat.  Here’s a picture of it:

    Yes, that’s duct tape on his hat, and one of those rolls of sticky fly trap paper.  A couple of years ago, when the deerflies were biting us all, my husband gave this role of sticky fly paper to our neighbor and suggested he stick it on his hat to trap the flies.  So two years later, he’s finally done it- and it works. 

    Our neighbor says he’s going to get more rolls and put them all over his hat.

    I’m not sure if this next neighbor is really a neighbor or not, he might have been just passing through, searching for females.  One morning several weeks ago, it was drizzling slightly, and I  looked up from my computer to see this little guy crossing the yard:

    He’s an Eastern box turtle, and I do know for a fact that he is a “he”, because the males have orange eyes (females have brown eyes) and slightly concave shells underneath, so that when they are mating they fit neatly over the female’s convex upper shell.  Box turtles can completely close up their shells to protect themselves from predators; that’s what this turtle did when I walked up to him, not knowing that I was not considering using him for turtle soup.

“Is she gone yet?”

P.S. Yesterday evening, which was Father’s Day, my farmer/neighbor’s wife told me that they had seen the fox pups!  Two of them, playing hide and seek in the beans while mom watched from the sidelines.  So Happy Father’s Day to the male fox at the top of this post and congratulations to mom too.

In the absence of a PriceWaterhouse Cooper representative, I wrote the contestant’s names on little slips of paper, folded the slips in half, and placed them all in a pottery bowl.  Then I swirled them around till they felt done and drew out a name- and the winner is…

Jennie!  Congratulations and I’ll be contacting you by email so that we can try to tailor the seed choice to your area.  And thank you to everyone who came to read my blog over the past year and to everyone who left a comment.  I’ll leave you with a quote from Marcel Proust, my favorite author:

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

May 28th is this blog’s one-year anniversary and to commemorate the event, I’m going to give away some seeds from our collection to one lucky person.  What you need to do if you want to try for the seeds is write a 500 word essay on why we should all be planting our own gardens- no, just kidding.  Just leave a comment on this post and 24 hours from now, I’ll throw all your names into a rotating compost bin, tumble you around for awhile, and then draw out one slightly dirty winner.  Just kidding on that too, but I will choose someone in a random drawing. 

Last year we had great success with our corn and lima beans and I saved some of the seeds from both of those crops so a selection of them will be included in the prize.  Also some different varieties of flower seeds and other vegetables; if the winner will tell me where they live, we might be able to tailor the prize to their growing area.  Sound good?  Then get commenting and bonne chance!

“But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”

The title of this post and the above quote are from an article in the New York Times (April 20, 2008 ) written by Michael Pollan  (author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals) in which he talks about why one might want to plant a garden and why one should, if one can, and why one might have to whether one wants to or not.  The “Problem We Face”, of course, is global warming. Did we plant our garden because of global warming?  Not really, but other reasons that Michael gives for doing so do are, among others, ours as well.  You can read the article here.

In a previous post I wrote about the blueberry plants we planted and how I was really hoping they would bear this year; well, one is trying to live up to my hopes.  The picture is of our Legacy blueberry with clusters of small, green blueberries.  There are still some strawberries in this patch of ground but our two resident foxes generally eat those.  Speaking of the foxes (which I believe are gray foxes, because of their black-tipped tails), they are becoming more accustomed to our presence and trot by us unconcernedly as we work outside.  One even came onto our porch one night (through the cat door) in search of popcorn. 

There’s been more planting in the Native American garden: the Southwest quadrant is planted in Ruby Queen corn; after they have come up we’ll plant Mexican cucumbers (which are supposed to deter the raccoons), King of the Garden lima beans, and Golden Honeymoon and Tigger melons.  I also planted nasturtium seeds on the sides of the zucchini and squash hills to keep away borers, and transplanted marigolds to the corners because of their ability to repel all sorts of pests.  And speaking of pests, some sort of bug nibbled holes in the basil and tomato seedlings, so yesterday we whipped up a batch of soap spray and sprayed all the seedlings. 

Today I sowed some radish seeds in the cucumber hills, as they are supposed to keep away the cucumber beetle.  And I planted three mounds with Detroit Dark Red beets.  Beet greens are good just steamed by themselves and seasoned with lemon pepper, garlic and butter or olive oil.  The beets themselves I like to peel, slice and cook till tender, then add some hard-boiled eggs till the eggs turn a lovely red-purple.  Then I use them to make a salad with chickpeas and feta or mozzarella cheese. 

Since this garden post seems to be turning into an eating post, I should also mention that our asparagus is coming up thinly, so I bought some from Cullipher’s Farm Market to supplement it.  Last night, I steamed them and seasoned them (lemon pepper, garlic, butter and olive oil), sauteed some mushrooms (a la Julia Child: slice some very dry mushrooms, put about half a stick of butter in a pan, heat pan but don’t add mushrooms until the butter foam has just begun to subside, add the mushrooms and brown on both sides, add as much red or white wine as you want, salt and pepper to taste), added some shrimp, combined this with the asparagus and feta cheese and served it all over couscous.  There’s leftovers, if you get here quick, and don’t forget to go read Michael Pollan’s article.

Winter is on it’s way out, spring days come and go, on sunny days the causeway to the island is lined with turtles basking, piled up on each other like dominoes after the fall.  The turtles are mostly sliders; I tried to photograph them last week but they were too wary of me, even though I pulled the truck over across the road from them.  They all were sliding into the water before I even walked halfway across the road to where they had been.  I did see a snapper walking through the mud alongside the causeway, there’s usually water there but sometimes the water is so low it’s nothing but mud in some places.  So I took this snapper’s picture as he/she slogged along, leaving a trail behind and no place to go to escape me, but you can’t see the turtle well in the picture, so I decided not to post it.  Here’s a picture of some of our irises instead:

Planning this year’s garden began with the decision to plant more of a variety of things instead of sticking to the traditional three sisters- corn, beans and squash.  Last year, we had ears of corn coming out of our ears, more lima beans than we hardly knew what to do with, and no squash.  So we pulled our seed packages out of the fridge, went through them all, drew up a new diagram of the garden, and began to plan.  Outside, the garden needed digging and weeding and re-making of the mounds, plus the addition of compost and good soil into each mound.  Inside, we started tomato, basil, green pepper and swiss chard seeds in peat pots, and because this garden gets full sun, we acquired (from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds- www.rareseeds.com) new seeds to try out there- Poona Kheera cucumbers from India, Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers, Tigger melons from Armenia, and Golden Honeymoon melons. 

These are red potatoes coming up from eyes I cut from some potatoes just before we ate them (the potatoes, not the eyes):

Earlier, in our smaller gardens, some of which don’t get much sun, we planted spinach, lettuces, beets, turnips and okra; some of these seeds are old and didn’t come up too well last year, and aren’t doing all that well this year.  Which is why we have bought new replacements for some of them.  We store our seeds in the refrigerator year-round to keep them viable, but they eventually just get too old. 

So this past weekend, I got all the seedlings planted in the garden formerly known as the Native American garden, now informerly known as the “big” garden (see the blog’s previous posts).  On our diagram we laid out where everything was to go, consulting our copy of “Carrots Love Tomatoes“ by Louise Riotte so we’d know who likes to be next to whom and who doesn’t, also called companion planting.  The weather people were promising (or threatening) days of rain coming up so I also got in as many seeds as I could, even planting some where they aren’t supposed to be, just to get them started.  This was Rod’s suggestion, a good one I think; we can transplant them to their permanent places after they sprout.

Here’s a picture of one of the Tiny Tom Tomato seedlings with deer tracks around it- that was close!

Here’s a list of all the plants and seeds that are now in the big garden:

10 tomato (Tiny Tom, Delicious and Rutgers) seedlings, 18 Italian Sweet basil seedlings, 3 California Wonder green pepper seedlings, and 6 Fordhook swiss chard seedlings.  I forgot to mention that there’s already three mounds of red potatoes coming up as well, and two swiss chards that over-wintered from last year:

Now the seeds: Fordhook zucchini, Emerald okra, Dixie yellow squash, Table Queen acorn squash, Early sweet sugar pie pumpkin, Kentucky Wonder pole beans, French filet bush beans, Cherokee wax bush beans, Poona Kheera cucumbers, and the Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers.

One-quarter of this garden will still be for corn, and with it we are planting the Tigger and Honeymoon melons and the Mexican cucumbers.  They’ll be planted next, and we’ve also marked some places on the diagram for beets, and there are still some empty mounds!  Any suggestions?  And since today is Earth Day, how about telling us your plans for what you are doing today to celebrate our Mother’s Day for the Planet?  Here are some links for inspiration:

http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2008/04/21/lets-make-this-earthday-a-real-earth-day/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080418-pope-environmentalism.html

http://blog.blogactionday.com/environment/50-quick-painless-ways-you-can-help-the-environment-today/#more-17

Since it has stopped raining, I’ll be out in the garden.  See you outside.

Today and for the past couple of days, we’ve had a taste of spring here on the island.  The temperatures have been in the 70’s, the breeze has been southerly, and the sun has been shining (some occasional showers as well).  Our double row of daffodils are coming up and have their buds on them.  The narcissus are coming up, birds are clamoring at the feeders…I know it won’t last, there’s more winter on the way, but a little taste of spring is better than none.

Back in December 2007 we ordered and received six blueberry plants from Finch Blueberry Nursery.  Each plant is a different variety and their names are Brightwell, Croatan, Legacy, Powder Blue, Tifblue, and Climax.  They are three-year old plants and we have planted them where the strawberries that the foxes eat used to be.  We were told they wouldn’t produce this year, that it would be next year before we’d get any blueberries, but I’m hoping that the little guys are so happy here that they’ll pop out a few this year.  And I’m hoping that foxes don’t like blueberries as much as they like strawberries.

Somewhere earlier in this blog I said that I wanted to choose the seeds for the Native American Three Sister’s garden earlier than we did last year.  Because we conceived and executed said garden so late in the planting season, we were limited to the seeds we could find locally.  So here I am, looking earlier, and after researching heirloom seeds and Native American varities online, I have requested catalogs from Seeds of Change and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. 

 We don’t really need any more seeds.  Our refrigerator’s bottom shelf is half-covered with a basket, bags, and a covered container of all different types of seeds, many that we’ve harvested ourselves, including some of the Ruby Queen corn and King of the Garden limas and Kentucky Wonder pole beans from last year’s garden.  But I would like to plant heirlooms, and “real” Native American varieties, and I also want pods to pick that aren’t green and therefore camoflauged in the corn stalks.  Picking the green beans and limas last year was like being on an Easter egg hunt where the eggs are all green and are hidden in tall, green grass.  Give me some color, please.

 So, from the above-mentioned sources, I’m considering pole beans called Gold Marie Vining Bean, and Purple-podded Pole Bean.  They should stand out in the crowd.  And for the Native American choice, there’s Cherokee Trail of Tears Pole Bean.  Green, but native.  Also Lakota Winter Squash, Black Aztec Sweet Corn, and Rouge Vif d’Etampes.  I threw that last one in to see if you were still paying attention.  Actually, it’s a pumpkin that was a staple of the Paris markets, and like my husband says, I’m a sucker for anything Parisian.

Today (in this hemisphere and Time Zone!) is February Eve, also known as Imbolc.  From Chalice Center:

“The First of February belongs to Brigid, (Brighid, Brigit, Bride,) the Celtic goddess who in later times became revered as a Christian saint. Originally, her festival on February 1 was known as Imbolc or Oimelc, two names which refer to the lactation of the ewes, the flow of milk that heralds the return of the life-giving forces of spring. Later, the Catholic Church replaced this festival with Candlemas Day on February 2, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and features candlelight processions. The powerful figure of Brigid the Light-Bringer overlights both pagan and Christian celebrations.”

I encourage you to go to this article at Chalice Center to learn more about Imbolc; it’s beautifully written and detailed.  Anything that heralds the return of light and spring and warmth is welcome!  As for us, we’ll be lighting white candles and browsing heirloom seed catalogues in preparation for this year’s garden.  And trying to keep warm while awaiting spring.

The first- line contest has ended and I hope everyone who visited during these past few days, and those who entered, had as much fun giving their brain a work-out as I did coming up with this.  Our winner, Surrealist Gesture (read his blog here), was first with all the correct titles and authors.  The second entry, from Steve Posin (his entry is in the comments section of this post), also had all of the answers correct.  (I would have accepted either A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Remembrance of Things Past, In Search of Lost Time or Swann’s Way for the Proust quote.  Trust Marcel to make things complicated.)  The third entry, from Quinn McDonald, had a couple of answers wrong but she made her entry interesting to read with her remembrances and remarks on the books.

And now, on to the challenge.  No, this challenge doesn’t have a goofy acronym like NaNoWriMo (if you are thinking “whut?” like I did the first time I saw this, google it).  I’ve seen these GoAcs (goofy acronyms) for everything from comitting to writing every day for a month to doing yoga every day to committing to thinking every day (just kidding on that last one).  On second thought, why buck a trend?  Let’s have a GoAc for this challenge:

REvBoITConCha!

It’s the Read Every Book in This Contest Challenge!  I give you one year.  The Prize?  There isn’t anything I could give you that would be of greater worth than what reading these authors will give you.

 If you know anything about me, you know that I love to read books.  I Read.  A Lot.  Of Books. I was, in honor of the end of the Old Year and the beginning of 2008, going to give you a list of the books I’ve read over the past year, the ones I’m reading now, and the ones lined up waiting to be read.  Then I thought: boring.  For anybody except me.

So then I thought: Contest!  Prize!  Everyone loves a contest, right?  You love a prize, don’tcha?  Well, here’s your chance to show off your literary chops and add to your Christmas booty as well.  If you win, that is.

 So, here’s the contest:  I’m going to list the first line of some of the books I’ve read this year and you get to answer with the author and the book in which the line appears.  Put your answers in the comment box below.  At the end of the contest time, the person with the most correct answers wins!  Simple, no?   Oh, and no fair googling (or any other kind of searching) for answers; if you don’t know an answer, say so.

Here are the first lines (or snippets of them):

1. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

2. “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family…”

3. “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”

4. “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the particulars about…”

5. “Marley was dead, to begin with.”

6. “On the 24th of February, 1815, the watch-tower of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.”

7. ”Call me Ishmael.”

8. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by any body else, these pages must be show.”

Hint: All of the books are considered “classics”.  And the prize?  (Wait for it.)  A $25 gift certificate at Amazon, which I’m sure you will use to buy a book.  I would.  Oh, and the contest ends January 4th, 2008 at midnite, EST in the US.  

Bonne Chance!

(The picture at the top of this post is our latest acquisition of books, the Harper & Brothers Household Edition of Charles Dickens’ works (16 in the edition, we got 14), published in the decade after Dickens’ death in 1870.)