Signs of spring and renewal

Spring! In the form of forsythia forced to bloom indoors.

I’ve been away. I’m sorry for neglecting to tend this blog, my garden, my life.

Winter came and it was cold and damp and the sun didn’t shine for days. Some of you out there understand the condition known as seasonal affective disorder (SAD) which afflicts people during the dark of the year. I could never live in the Pacific northwest because of the weather, the leaden sky, the incessant rain. I know it can be beautiful there and I remember a particularly spectacular July when I visited Seattle for business when the sky was blue and the air was crisp while back home it was humid and 98 degrees at 10 o’clock in the morning.

And there have been changes at our little estate on Lydia Street.  A job I (Dianna) held for almost exactly 12 years abruptly ended. And Christe added a part-time position as the choir director for a Unitarian Universalist church that we both love. And our close friends decided to become foster parents to a new baby two months before they learned they were pregnant meaning that our weekly “family dinners” are plus one and aren’t every week any longer.

Soon I’ll post photos of our new/shared home office and music studio where I’m starting my freelance writing and communications consulting practice. I’ll also get back into the Friday Dog Photo routine and share my (almost perfected) scone recipe.

And if the weather WOULD EVER WARM UP I’ll write about how we’re composting and show you early spring garden clean-up photos and share our garden plans for the upcoming season.

Thanks for your patience.

~ Dianna

Oh-So-Easy Crock Pot Tomato Sauce

Oh dear ones, have I shared my oh-so-easy recipe for tomato sauce in a crock pot with you?

I promise that this is the easiest tomato sauce you will ever make.

Crock Pot Tomato Sauce

Fill your crock pot with fresh ripe washed tomatoes. We grew Romas this year, but you can do it with any tomato you have, or an assortment. Remove any stems or leaves or bad places but don’t worry about slicing them or peeling them. Fill the pot. In fact, overfill the pot to the point where you can’t fit the lid on top.

Add the tiniest bit of water, just so the bottom tomatoes don’t scorch.

Turn on high. Walk away.

A few hours later, come back and stir. Some of the tomatoes will be breaking down. You can squish those as you stir. Put the lid on askew — no need to seal it.

Keep on high. Walk away. If you are going to be away from home for several hours or if you are going to sleep, stir the pot and then turn it to low.

If you’re going to be home and awake, turn it back to high. Stir occasionally. At about 30 hours from your beginning time, turn it off completely and let the sauce cool.

Using an immersion blender, whirr everything, peels and all, until you have a beautiful thick, somewhat smooth sauce. This takes 90 seconds or so. It is so hard. This is one of the reasons I own an immersion blender. (The other reason is smoothies (!) but that’s another post.)

Pack into bags or freezer-worthy containers and stick in the freezer.

Ta-Dah!

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Garden tours make me green with envy

Our local Master Gardeners group recently sponsored a garden tour at a house I’ve been curious about for years. This garden has is only 11 years old and takes up the same space we have. Oh, do we have a long way to go.

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Fall is in the air

Happy Autumn Equinox! Here at Lydia Street, it is starting to feel like fall. The temperatures have dropped in the evenings and the mums are starting to bloom.

For years and years, we would buy potted mums to sit on the steps. The bright colorful blossoms would be wonderful until winter actually started to set in, and then I would toss them into the trash.

Why didn’t anyone ever tell me to plant them? They make beautiful garden plants when they are all green and then, when you least expect it, they burst out in full bloom. That’s starting to happen here.

Related articles

• Everything you need to know: September equinox 2012 (earthsky.org)
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Rest and relaxation in the garden

“The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.” – Ruth Stout Life has been busy these past weeks and I miss being able to sit outside and enjoy the garden. This week I promise myself time to stop, sit and enjoy.

Take a look at these Sea Oats

There’s a touch of fall in the air. The temperatures have been in the 80s during the day and the 60s at night.

The garden is beautiful in the fall. The mums are starting to bloom now but what I want to show you today are Sea Oats, an ornamental grass that turns this wonderful shade of pink-brown-gold. The latin name is Chasmanthium latifolium.

What I like about these is that they can’t be mistaken for weeds.

Purple, green and gorgeous

We haven’t tried eating these beautiful Hyacinth Beans but we are certainly enjoying looking at them.

The contrasting colors really help make this plant stand out.

Sweet 100s are our favorite tomato

This is the third year we’ve grown the cherry tomato variety “Sweet 100,” so-named for the quantity of fruit it produces. I think it should be renamed “Sweet 1000” because man-o-man these plants keep delivering.

We pick the amount in the photo above EVERY DAY. Which means we have to eat that many every day. Just the two of us.

“Here, have some tomatoes with your morning coffee, dear. What’s that?! You don’t want tomatoes in your lunch again? Well I’m sorry, but if you don’t eat your fair share we will be eating them for dinner. Again.”

Last year we had six plants. Every day we each took a quart-sized bag to our respective workplaces to give away. And because they are SWEET (like the name, Sweet 100) our friends started eating them like candy, popping them into their mouths. Two, maybe three at a time.

This year, we wisely bought only two plants. Any day now we’ll experiment with drying them. If they don’t bury us first.

Related articles

• Life is Just a Bowl of Cherry Tomatoes (iwastaughttoshare.com)
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• Garden Tomatoes & My Heirloom Tomato Pasta (juicybites.net)
• The gift of the third week in August (minnesotatransplant.wordpress.com)

Bright and beautiful sunflower bouquet

Some of the sunflowers survived the terrible storm incident earlier in the summer.

They are hardy plants, and although our plan to disguise the neighbor’s house didn’t turn out as well as we thought it would, we have been able to enjoy the flowers very much.

Related articles

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Grandmothers and gardens

Grandmother was a gardener.

That’s not too surprising. Almost everyone of her generation (she was born in 1890) who had a little plot of land grew crops and flowers. People grew food and raised animals out of necessity. And if they had time, they tended flower gardens.

My grandmother lived her whole life on Kentucky mountain farmland. We don’t know what year this photograph was taken, and we don’t know who the photographer was. What we see in this photo is a sturdy woman, focusing on a plant she intends to use for a purpose unknown to us today.

The land, however, is familiar to me. The gentle slope of the field and the mountain in the background can still be seen from the back door of the house where my mother was born, the house where my oldest brother now lives.

When I was a child, I remember that field was planted in corn. Closer to the house was a vegetable garden with beans and potatoes and tomatoes. To the right, out of the photo, was the apple orchard and the bee hives. To the left, nearer to the creek, was where the barn and the animal pens were.

I can still remember a flock of chickens freely wandering about, roosting and nesting in an outbuilding that also stored hoes, rakes and empty canning jars.

All around the house were flowering plants and shrubs. Daffodils and tulips bloomed wildly every spring, giving way to poppies and iris later in the year. Peonies and azalea took their turns, providing color in an overwhelmingly green landscape.

The orchard and the farm buildings are all gone now. Only the house, a garage and the land remain. The perennials have all died off, neglected for years as the residents who lived in the house aged and couldn’t tend them any longer.

My brother moved there after he retired. He lives in the house but, for many reasons, he doesn’t have a garden. It’s a different time, a different place.

My days are spent in fully air-conditioned environments in the city.  But I still remember everything about those gardens.  Is that why I still have a need to dig in the dirt, to plant something, for a use still unknown to me?