In The Garden 
Be Kale My Heart
Kale plants in the backyard are a show all winter long. Hardy and steadfast, they dominate a big patch of the winter garden, and lately they’ve turned seasonal warmth and light into effervescent new leaves – garden sirens beckoning me to look, to photograph and to eat. Be kale my heart may be a frivolous [...]
Ready, Set, Plant Peas
Some say President’s Day, others say St. Patrick’s Day. Any way you look at it, prime pea planting time is upon us. There’s no better way to give your gardening muscles a wake-up call before spring has fully sprung than to plant a couple rows of peas. It’s a springtime ritual here in the Northwest [...]
So Fines Herbes
Tender herbs are popping up all over my garden and it’s making me positively giddy with excitement about spring even though it doesn’t officially arrive until March 20. Our mild El Nino-influenced winter has given the garden a jump-start and it’s gotten me out earlier than ever in anticipation of a long growing season. At [...]
Hats off to Johnny: A PNW Waldorf Salad
Johnny the vagabond meets the highfalutin Waldorf and together they make a mean PNW salad.
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The romanticized Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Chapman, was a real appleseed-totin’-plantin’-canoe-travelin’ eccentric with a passion for apples. At first he was as wild as the seeds he carried, wrote Michael Pollan in Botany of Desire (published 2001). [...]
Roasted Tomato Sauce, A Walk in the Park
In the day or two before leaving on vacation I’m running around like crazy, and really, I wouldn’t mind a walk in the park. I’ll be in Desolation Sound*, maybe kayaking, maybe swimming or tide pooling as this post is published, but in the meantime I have all these tomatoes on the vine that [...]
Plums Get Wrinkles & End Up Stewed
Lately I’ve been on a mission to dry plums. In case you don’t know, dried plums is a polite term for not-so-fashionable prunes. Prunes have gotten such a bad rap and yet when Molly Wizenberg describes them in her wonderful blog Orangette, they sound positively sexy. She uses a recipe for stewed prunes from Edward [...]
Culinary Contenders, Crookneck vs. Straightneck Squash
In the garden as in life, you don’t always get what you want, or what you thought you wanted, or thought you planted . . . whatever. We plant our lettuces year-round, Brassicas in late summer for winter crops, tomatoes sometime in May, favas are a nutritious cover crop, artichokes have created a mini-orchard [...]
Herbes de Pacific Northwest
I know. I can’t bear it either — the reality that summer is practically over. I makes me want to hold on to our delicious September light as long as I can. I think I’ve come up with a way to make the transition from outdoor to indoor living the tiniest bit easier. I know [...]
Foraging Backyard Bouquets
I’ve been foraging in the backyard for bouquets, looking at the garden with a murderous glint in my eye for lush leafings and anything gone to seed. Surely plants don’t need all of those leaves and pods.
A bouquet with vegetable leaves might be a little avant-garde in the flower-arranging world. Avant-garden. My own [...]
Putting food by . . . Pickles
Summer’s waning and you just want to kick back, have another vacation weekend, another picnic, tweak the garden, spend time with a daughter, a husband, a friend . . . but nay, produce beckons.
For some veggies the annual, seasonal show is over. But in late August and September there are a few fruits and vegetables [...]
