Meow.

Preserving

A good weekend: tomato sauce, dried tomatoes, sour pickles, dilly beans, pesto, tomatillo salsa. And enough time for a hike in the woods, where we picked chanterelles... enough to saute in butter, simmer in cream, and pile atop some polenta.

Baked

These few months of summer, when Matt's farmers markets and the garden and life in general are in full swing... they speed by. I treasure the early morning when the light is blue and the city is quiet, and the late evening when it's just the dusk-singing insects and me. In between is a blur.

On baking mornings I stump down the stairs to the bakery in my nightgown to visit the baker. He says things are going well, or things are not turning out so good. There is accounting to be done: for the temperature, the humidity, the variation in batches of flour from the small mill where he buys his flour. The other day, the sunrise aligned with the stars, and we had a happy baker and good light for pictures. And afterward, garlicky eggs with toast.

Buck buck

I recently had the pleasure of designing a postcard for Carlton Farms, a local operation using biodynamic and organic methods to produce pastured poultry and small grains, amongst other things. I'm excited about what they're doing, in part because it's bringing even more new life to a really pretty old farm (which is already home to the wonderful Prospect Street Gardens), but also because Farmer Jennie is just a fun, enthusiastic person.

These are a few of the spots I drew for the card. We ended up swapping the butterflies out for some herbs not pictured, but I think if the chicken had chosen... well, this is probably the way she would have arranged things. Based on her appetite.

Things on my desk

I think it's a tobacco hornworm, because it has white diagonals instead of the white Vs a tomato hornworm has. I scampered out in the garden last night to cart in my beloved potted Ballerina datura, so that it would not get tornadoed, and I mention this because at 7pm, my datura was happy and whole. This morning, half my datura is just plain missing! And in its place are huge poops. I put two and two together (absent leaves + huge poops) and quickly discovered someone large and hungry (= a hiding hornworm). I have relocated this fellow to a volunteer tomato plant that I meant to weed out anyway, which might be a bad idea, but A. I don't want to squish it, and B. I do want to see it get parasitized by wasps.

Berries...

...of the goose-, cran-, and wild blue- varieties. What a blueberry year it is! Matt pronounced himself a Berry Pickin' Fool, then strapped his great big backpack-style mushroom basket on his front side and employed it for "strippicking," a high-efficiency/maximum-production/non-motorized method he's devised for harvesting wild blueberries. He has to pick like that to make up for his companion, who shoves a few handfuls of berries in her mouth and then sets off across the cranberry bog to look for snakes and become mired in sphagnumy swampwater.

Shaking my rattles,

and praying for rain.