Country Mouse Monday: roast beets, Blissbug (Lazy) Farm style

File under: Old dog, new tricks. 

I don't think there's anything that tastes more of the soil than beets. Which is probably why I detested them as a child, just loathed them. Now I celebrate them for that very reason, beets more terroir even than wine.

Now, because they taste of dirt, to me they're just plain Delicious.

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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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Summer lovin'

Summer is so tricky.  All I want is to stay home.  There are so many invitations, so many parties, fairs and festivals. I love my friends and yet I don't want to go anywhere.

I love you, but could you let me be, please? Til, like, September?

I just want to be here, walking around, taking it in. A little bit stupid, in a bit of a stupor, quiet, busy, idle.

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