Bindweed For Berry Preserving

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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Peaches and nectarines are fabulous flavor bombs right now

Fresh Fruit Season Is Sumptuous

This week, the markets are full of fresh, local fruit, including flats of beautiful Tayberries that work beautifully in salads or smoothies. Long and plump, these elegant, dusky red berries were bred in Scotland, a cross between a red raspberry and a blackberry. A bit less tangy than raspberries, they have the smooth savor of blackberries. They have to be hand picked because they don’t slip off the canes as easily as their raspberry parent, instead clinging to their cores the way blackberries do. This means they aren’t a common commercial crop, but someone is surely doing a fine job of both growing and picking them around here. If I ever reclaim my bindweed filled back garden, I’m planning to grow some Tayberries in a trough to keep their rambunctiousness in check.

I’m also planning to grow a couple of new-to-me kinds of raspberries, including Cascade Delight, with big, flavorful fruit, and Tulameen, with the best flavor of any I’ve tried so far. All my scrappy old plants are doomed after tasting how much better newer varieties can be. Poor old things! Raspberries are among my favorite fruit, as are nectarines, and the two together are pure magic. Add in a little minced mint or basil and you have a tantalizing tart-sweet mixture that’s perfect just as it is. With the addition of a little vanilla yogurt and homemade granola rich with pecans and walnuts, this concoction becomes my ideal summer dish, as satisfying as a light evening meal as for breakfast or lunch. I especially enjoy the combination of raspberries, nectarines, and mint with a splash of Nectarine Vanilla Bean vinegar. Bliss!!!

Nectarine Heaven

This easy fruit vinegar is amazingly delicious on cooked beets. It’s also fabulous in dressings for salads green or fruity, and makes a lovely shrub when mixed with sparkling water. It’s even intriguingly yummy drizzled over vanilla ice cream. Or maybe that’s just me

Nectarine Vanilla Bean Vinegar

2 cups finely chopped ripe nectarines (2 or 3)
1 vanilla bean, lightly split lengthwise
2 cups cider vinegar
1/3 cup water
1/4 cup sugar or honey

Combine all ingredients and bring to a boil over medium high heat. Reduce heat to medium low, cover pan and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand, covered, for 5 minutes. Pour into a clean jar, cover and let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate overnight or up to 36 hours. Strain into a clean bowl through a fine sieve or several layers of muslin cheesecloth until dripping stops. (Use the fruit in yogurt or a quick cobbler). Pour liquid into a clean bottle, seal and store in the refrigerator for up to 3 months. Add the well-rinsed vanilla bean to the bottle if you want to emphasize the flavor. Makes about 2-1/2 cups.

How Bindweed Can Help (!?!)

Years ago, a friend told me an amazing story about a time when she was helping an elder with her large, fruitful garden. The aging garden was getting overgrown and becoming too much for the equally aging gardener to keep properly. My friend was trying to bring the garden into order, not to manicure anything but simply make it all more manageable. One area that seemed a likely place to start was a lush raspberry patch, full of healthy, vigorous plants but also totally infested with bindweed. My friend spent hours carefully removing every scrap of bindweed from between the canes and getting as much of the roots out as possible without disturbing the berry plants. When she proudly showed off her work to the gardener, the woman looked carefully at the berry patch then said, “I imagine that you think you’ve done me a favor.”

A bit stunned, my friend asked her what she meant. As it turned out, the gardener had been losing most of her fruit to the birds. She discovered that when bindweed covered the fruit canes, the birds didn’t see the ripening fruit and she was able to harvest quarts of berries, enough for jam and pies and filling the freezer. I was reminded of this story recently when I thrashed my way into my tiny but overgrown backyard. It’s been gently going to the wild ever since a major electrical project left it difficult to access and now it’s exactly like that elderly gardener’s berry patch. The good news is that, like her, I have been happily harvesting raspberries by the quart, untouched by birds or raccoons. Onward, right?

 

Posted in Birds In The Garden, Care & Feeding, Growing Berry Crops, Health & Wellbeing, Plant Partnerships, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living, Teaching Gardening, Vegan Recipes | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Tomato Time At Last

Posted on July 5, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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Midnight Snack tomatoes have little secrete stars

The First Tomato Is Just So Delicious

After the cold, windy spring, summer got off to a very slow start. In fact, there were a number of false starts before actually summery weather finally kicked in, but now it’s staying reliably warm even by night and the plants are loving it. The lasting chilI made me wonder if I’d even get any tomatoes this year but my grafted plants are sturdy and resilient. Strong and vigorous, they just keep chugging along despite whacky weather. They’re covered with flowers and I’ve been watching the fruit form with great anticipation. This week the first cherry tomatoes are finally ripe and I’m treating each one like a precious little garden gem.

A few years ago, I discovered a fabulous cherry tomato called Midnight Snack. Black skinned and plump, these little cuties have the best sweet-tart balance of any tomatoes I’ve tasted. They look so glossy and plump, it’s hard to wait until they’re truly ripe, but not until their skin turns matte and a bit dull purple-black are they at their peak of perfection. Mine are growing strongly on a triple-grafted plant along with Sungold, another favorite steady producer with reliably great flavor, even when not quite ripe. The third member of Team Tomato is Artemis, another lusciously tasty type with long clusters of fruit that stay pleasantly firm.

Beefsteak & Bees

Although this may not be the year for bigger tomatoes, my grafted Darkstar tomato is growing with alacrity and setting fruit generously. These initially tiny tomatoes are starting to size up, making me feel hopeful about getting enough to enjoy real BLT’s this summer. Darkstar is a beefsteak type with dusky purple skin and that tangy heirloom flavor that stands up to that smoky, peppery bacon flavor just fine, thank you. All of these lovelies are benefitting from the company of a large catmint that is abuzz with so many kinds of bees and other pollinators all day long.

The long, bountifully flowering catmint stems are companionably interlaced with the tomato stems so every visiting pollinator is tempted to stop in for a quick snack of nectar and pollen. Technically tomatoes are self fertile but the company of bees guarantees good fruit set and besides, it’s heart-lifting to watch them busy at work and hear their contented buzzing.

Stuck Is Just A Moment In Time

A month ago I started to write about the home front situation and just couldn’t say a word. Now, another corner has been turned and things are heading once again in the right direction. The turning point was a gift from a dear friend who studied martial arts with me and my kids many years ago. Now a happily retired physical therapist, our old friend has been coming by to help my daughter regain strength and balance. He brought skills and ideas but he also brought her a new kind of living hope. With a few words, he changed her perspective and that is changing everything.

She had been stuck because of damage to her core muscles (having a large, gut-deep midline incision will do that to a person). Whenever she tried to do the core exercises she had been given at the hospital, her ostomy bag would start leaking. Super frustrating especially because insurance only pays for 10 bags a month and if you need 11, you’re shit out of luck, as it were. Our beloved occupational therapist friend researched core exercises that would NOT dislodge the ostomy bag and that’s been helping dramatically.

Hope In The Body

However, the greatest gift came from our PT pal, who asked my daughter to stand up. She did, and he said, “More! Up! More, more!” and amazingly enough, each time he said “up” she got taller and taller. She’s 6’3” so the effect was quite remarkable. Then he started talking about core muscle memory, saying, “Your body knows how to move, how to stand tall, how to hold yourself in gentle strength.” As she listened, she began to move with grace in a way I haven’t seen in years. Later she talked about how hopeful that session felt, and it’s been obvious that she is tapping in to that body memory of how she used to stride with purpose and pleasure.

She also said that a lot of things that have been said about her path to recovery by various medical folks were sort of hopeful but didn’t work in her in the same way. Bill’s gift of hope was real because it was a reminder of what she already had gained, skills that were still present in her body and memory. There’s a fair amount of research that shows that when people truly remember how it feels to do something they enjoy, whether striding or hiking or skiing or whatever, our bodies are stimulated as if we had taken healthy exercise. This morning, she was walking uphill, still with a cane but so briskly that I had to stride to keep up. Onward is all we have but it doesn’t always feel like enough. But sometimes it does.

Posted in Grafted Plants, Health & Wellbeing, Plant Partnerships, Pollination Gardens, Pollinators, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living, Tomatoes | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Regenerative Gardening

Posted on May 24, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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Nurturing the ecological circle to heal the garden & the planet

Healing Our Gardens & Ourselves

The older I get, the more I want to encourage my gardens to be independent yet abundant. Finding the ecological balance between a naturalistic Eden and a giant mess is tricky, especially in the early stages. Transitioning from control oriented models to one of working with natural plants and patterns involves unlearning old ideas as much as learning new ones. Don’t get me wrong; when I walk into my little backyard, I want to call in a bulldozer. It’s been totally neglected for the past few years of increasingly stressful family health issues. Too many times I would open the back gate, determined to clear it all out, and end up just closing the door and walking away. Just. Too. Much.

On the other hand, the birds are thrilled with the chaos, as are a zillion bugs and bees and who knows what all else. A large part of my horror is based on what’s growing wild back there; if it were all natives, I might just call it good, but it’s a nasty mix of persistent garden weeds that I inherited with the house. When we moved in four years ago, I spent the whole first year clearing and weeding and uprooting and composting bales of bindweed, invasive blackberries, Bishop’s weed, vinca, and sticky-weed (aka bedstraw, though I certainly would never want to sleep on a mattress stuffed with that prickly stuff). Had I kept on top of the eradication project, the back garden would very likely be fairly clean. Probably.

The Big Pause

Some people used the Pandemic Pause to teach themselves several languages, play a new instrument, and develop marvelous recipes using ingredients that were still available (remember those empty shelves?) in inventive ways. However, the pandemic took the wind out of my sails. My daughter’s medical team changed, as did mine, and care was only available online. As she began to lose ground, she was told she probably had long covid (which turned out to be a serious misdiagnosis) and back then nothing was available to help. About that time, I stopped doing a lot of things-ok, anything-that felt too hard. For starters, a community electrical system replacement project tore apart my new retaining wall and waist-high raised bed, filling half the small backyard with heaps of sand and soil and heavy stone blocks. A rather inferior type of raspberry avidly spread through the newly prepped ground beds and bindweed jumped the fence to weave its merry way through the canes. After a while, I just closed the gate and stopped looking.

As my daughter’s condition improves, I’m finding just enough energy to begin a very slow process of reining in the wild. I’m leaving the native plants, those I planted and those that choose to appear, from ferns and false Solomon’s Seal to coralbells, Tellima and Miners’ Lettuce (though the Oregon Grape has such powerful takeover tendencies its spread has to be limited). Everything else is on the removal list, whether to the nearby community garden, to friends, or to the green waste bin. All those hikes up First Hill to Harborview Hospital helped me get some of my own strength back and made me realize that as my daughter’s condition had worsened, so had mine. Her situation was extremely serious because her gut had been failing for years, which nobody recognized, not even her. Things that develop slowly can creep up on us until we find ourselves in dire straits, inside and out. Her condition was so degraded that it was life threatening. That was a huge wake up call for both of us and fortunately the crisis came in time to save her life.

Reboot and Renew

It also helped me reverse my own downward spiral and reset my life as she’s been resetting hers. We’re both having to dig down deep to remember how it felt to be strong and competent, qualities that can get lost in a long, drawn out illness, whether physical, mental, emotional or all three together. Reclaiming my little lost garden is part of that process and it doesn’t really matter how long it takes. Some days I can put in an hour without interruption, others just a few minutes. Some days I only think about it and that’s ok too. While pondering renovation, I’ve been tickled to notice that regenerative gardening is getting a lot of buzz these days, touted as a ground breaking way to go beyond doing less harm to get to active improvement of our share of earth. It may be news but it’s not new because guess what? It’s all about healing the soil, and the magic ingredient is compost. Who knew? Well, obviously some of us knew….

No matter how trendy it seems, the idea of regenerative earth work is definitely a positive impulse with far reaching and vitally needed impacts. Regenerative farming combines key elements from various schools of organic, sustainable, and what’s called ‘polycultural practices’ which basically means cherry picking the best ideas from many sources. The big idea is that every farm and every garden, every park and every managed forest is part of an interconnected ecosystem. The underlying principle is that humans really need to start (or return to) working WITH nature and natural systems rather than trying to reshape and manipulate nature to meet our short-sighted human goals.

Heal The Soil, Heal The Planet

Regenerative systems all start with soil; nurture soil health with compost (just sayin’), minimizing soil disturbance, covering bare earth with mulch. It’s also about supporting our allies, planting for pollinators from bees and butterflies to birds and bats. These days, all living things need our protection and active support, so let’s plant for the wild things as well as for our own needs and pleasures. We need to relax our control based perfectionism to allow imperfection; instead of freaking out when fodder gets nibbled, let’s remember that’s how caterpillars become butterflies. If leaf cutter bees leave a few rose leaves hole-y, rejoice that they are becoming adorable little egg cases.

With humans, healing our own ecosystem starts with nurturing gut health. It means eating not just to fill our bellies but to encourage our inner garden of beneficial, wholesome gut flora. Plant based, whole food diets are better for us and better for the planet. Instead of Meatless Mondays, let’s consider observing Meatless Most Days, and explore the amazing cuisines of the many cultures that consider meat a condiment. Better soil quality, better food quality. Better food quality, better health for everyone on the planet. Onward, right?

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Happy May Day!

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Ann Lovejoy
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Paper, scissors, and nimble fingers (or get a grandkid to help!)

Making May Baskets

As a girl growing up in New England, I loved the tradition of making May baskets for neighbors. We kids would make little baskets, from cones of paper or more elaborate woven paper strips, for everyone on the block. We were not allowed to pick from anyone’s actual garden, so we filled our baskets with “found” flowers from sidewalk edges, alleys, along the railroad tracks and the edges of the woods. Usually we’d find spring beauty, bloodroot, Virginia bluebells, columbines and of course shaggy yellow dandelions, with sometimes a trout lily or trillium (which I would never pick these days, but were fairly abundant back then).

If you want to try your hand at making a woven May Day basket, there are plenty of posts and videos to show you how. These simple heart shaped baskets go together quickly and look far complicated than they really are. You can make them from construction paper, origami paper, wallpaper samples, felt or stiff fabric and they’ll all work. If you have a hard time weaving the pieces in and out, shave off a little bit from the width of the lowest (last) strip and it will slide into place better. Tape or staple on a paper strip for a handle to hang on a door knob, then line your basket with a piece of cloth to keep it from getting soaked by the flower stems. Too complicated? Fold fabric or paper into a cone with a closed bottom, fasten on a loop of ribbon for hanging and call it adorable (because it is, no matter how funky).

Darling Buds Of May

As Shakespeare knew, there are in fact a zillion buds everywhere on this first day of May, but not as many open blossoms as usual for this time of year. Our chilly spring has set back a lot of early bloomers, including the famous Skagit Valley tulip fields, a popular tourist destination which are just peaking in glory now, weeks after their usual time. Even so, my early morning ramble turned up a sweet bundle of bloom, including fluffy golden puffs of Kerria japonica, bright white candytuft, English lawn daisies in rose and pink and white, a scattering of delicate blue forget-me-nots and some soft yellow kale flowers. I also found some soft purple blossoms of native self heal (Prunella), my granddaughter’s favorite herb and the inspiration for her awesome Halloween costume last fall.

I also came upon some of the same flowers I found 3,000 miles away and nearly 70 years ago, including columbines (though these are PNW native blue ones), bluebells, and of course dandelions. There were lots of late daffodils and quite a few tulips but those childhood ‘don’t pick the garden flowers’ lessons seem to have stuck, as I still prefer to see most flowers in the garden. Those bluebells I found are not natives, but Spanish, and they appear in profusion wherever they’ve ever been planted, however long ago. They also appear in plenty of places where they haven’t been purposefully planted, as they produce great quantities of tiny bulblets that tag along with nearby plants which get new homes, and sneak into compost as well, sizing up in sudden bursts of blue or white or pink. Bees and other pollinators do enjoy them but they really don’t belong in the garden proper or they’ll quickly crowd out choicer plants.

On The Home Front

After two weeks at home, my daughter is making more progress every day. Though each step may be small, they represent courage, effort, determination and grit as she retrains her body into remembering wellness. Some of the work involved is both mental and emotional; after being disabled for far too long, she now has to rethink her assumptions and claim her wellbeing again. Thanks to the pandemic, she was struggling alone with what we now know was a long standing and very serious digestive system disorder, undiagnosed because it came on gradually and because only online tele-med visits were available to her. At Harborview/UWM, she got the best care possible, now she gets me. Hmmm. Fortunately, last week we managed to get her (and her wheelchair and walker and etc.) to meet her new care provider, who works on this side of the water, so we don’t have to trek into Seattle with all the gear.

She’s been working with a dear friend who’s an Occupational Therapist and comes to the house several times a week. Our initial meetings were fantastic but unfortunately last week she tested positive for Covid19 the day after her visit. Fortunately, she always wears a KN95 mask when she’s working. Equally fortunately, both my daughter and I have tested negative all week. Gotta say that it gave me pause; we really don’t need one more thing to add to this mix of challenges. It also renewed my determination to stay masked myself around other folks and keep our household closed to almost everyone else.

Laughter Is Good Medicine

Today our OT pal is back and as I write I can hear laughter and joking along with joyfully encouraging exclamations. My daughter is trying out transferring to and from the wheelchair with different chairs, which they carefully measure for seat height and rate for ease of getting up (down is pretty easy, getting back up not always). Now they’re out on the porch, taking in some fresh air and enjoying a momentary sun break. A few weeks ago, I never imagined we’d come this far so soon. Onward, right?

Posted in Annual Color, composting, Crafting With Children, Easy Care Perennials, Gardening With Children, Health & Wellbeing, Native Plants, Pollination Gardens, Sustainable Gardening, Sustainable Living | Tagged , | 2 Comments