Country Mouse Monday: threshing & dreaming

Maybe you know this feeling already: the deep satisfaction of harvesting food you've grown with your own hands and land.

That's a sweet, sweet feeling that for me never gets old.

For me yesterday, harvesting the haricots Tarbais, the holy grail of beans, there was that and there was more.

There was the delight of learning a new word. Dry beans require threshing – getting the beans out of the pods. Cool!

There was also, though, mostly, this sense while sitting there on the patio in the late afternoon sun, with a bowl in my lap and the basket of dried pods in front of me, of continuing an interrupted family tradition of cultivation.

I was my grandmother, and my grandmother was me.

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Country Mouse...Tuesday: wrong seeds?!

This is making me feel a bit like a crazy person, so I'm turning to you for help.

Look at the photo at left. Does the actual physical pumpkin on the vine look anything at all like the one depicted on the front of that seed packet?

I didn't think so.

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Country Mouse Monday: at home in the dirt

You know that way that people worry that their babies and toddlers are going to take their first step, utter their first word, at day care, and they'll miss it? How they'll miss that precious, once-in-a-lifetime moment?

That's how it is for me being away from our farmlet in the month of August.

For a creature of habit like me, super-grounded in the ground of my garden, being away for a few weeks at the peak of productivity was hard. In fact, I don't really recommend it, as much as we did really and truly enjoy vacation.

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Country Mouse Monday: hot fun in the summertime

Where I live, it gets hot in the summer. Roasting hot, close to 100 both days this past weekend.

I LOVE that kind of heat -- something I never got enough of growing up in San Francisco, even though our neighborhood, Eureka Valley (aka The Castro), had some of the best possible weather, the fog held back visibly by Twin Peaks above.

July for me is a paradise: ooooh, that feeling of stepping into the oven of 90+ degree weather.

And, naturally, because it's hot, I need to bake.

Yesterday, because there were cherries, it was clafoutis.

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Country Mouse Monday: the why, the weird & the wonderful

Monday mornings around here are always sweet and dreamy, filled with memories of the two days prior, two days in the garden with the poppies and the bees, planting and harvesting, eating and laughing with friends.

Monday mornings are that reflective pause before the work-week kicks off, and the Country Mouse takes a back seat to the demands of the 9-to-5.

Every weekend around here is like a vacation.

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