Monday Musings


A plaque I commissioned from Melissa Bridgman. As soon as the porch is finished it will find its permanent home. In the meantime, I love seeing it in our kitchen window.


Long Tom paste tomatoes (pencil for scale): Delicious, giant, and virtually seedless. I'm in love with these tomatoes, the plants are dripping with tomatoes. The harvest (below) is one day's harvest from 3 plants. I have to pick them just slightly earlier than ripe or the rabbits will taste every single one.

Using the Harvest

They're coming in by the boatload. What to do with the harvest:

Anise Hyssop:
Anise Hyssop Sauce
Anise Hyssop Simple Syrup and candied leaves

Cucumbers: 
Chopped Cucumber Peanut Salad from good ol' Martha Stewart
Cucumber and Onion Salad
Cucumber Gimlet
Cucumber Jelly (or syrup for cocktails)
Pickles: Refrigerator and Canning

Super Easy White Gazpacho from 100 days of real food

Sorrel: 
Finely chop and add it to potato or tuna salad
Sorrel and Onion Tart from good ol' Martha Stewart
Sorrel Pesto

Sorrel Sauce from the Slow Cook
Sorrel Soup



Swiss Chard: 

Tomatoes: 
Canned whole
Canned in chunks
Canned as sauce
Oven-dried or Sundried
Tomato paste

A moment for quick creativity

It's not often I find time to be creative in the afternoon. Between chasing/appeasing Mabel, making dinner, and resting my bones (and sometimes squeezing exercise in there somewhere) creativity gets mushed in with making dinner or relegated to a dark corner on the back burner of my mind. Yesterday I took 30 minutes for myself, picked a handful of flowers, one of two of my Alyssa Ettinger knitware tumblers, and took some pictures.


We have a little tiny window in the downstairs bathroom. It must be about 12 x 16" or so, and as a girl it always seemed straight out of a story book. Though miniature, the window fills the room with beautiful light. 


A few feet away, in the kitchen, in front of a window on the same side of the house as the bathroom window {bright! beautiful! soul lifting! light!}we have a rustic desk that I believe was my grandmother's. It tucks right in under the window. Old handkerchiefs stitched together into curtains filter the light for privacy enough.


And one more shot while I had the chance.

You know the old saying about surrounding yourself with the things you love? The benefit of this quick exercise was finding a few square feet in our home of things I absolutely love. Flowers, furniture with history, beautiful light and a favorite ceramic piece. All while satisfying a quiet hunger to be creative.

Of course, then it was time to do laundry and start dinner. Back to reality.

Guildy as charged

I've been working on a few drawings of potential guilds; this is a scan of the first one. I thought it might be fun to print out and color from the ink drawing. If you feel so inclined, you can download the picture here. If you color it, snap a picture, I want to see! And though I think it goes without saying, if you share the image with others, please link back or credit back to me in some way.



From Wikipedia's entry on Permaculture, the definition of guild:
A guild is any group of species that exploit the same resources, often in related ways. Guilds are groups of plants, animals, insects, etc. that work well together. Some plants may be grown for food production, some to attract beneficial insects, and others to repel harmful insects. When grouped together these plants form a guild.