I've been tagged ! 

Book meme

OK, just when I was wondering what on earth I had to write about between now and April, I got tagged by Judith with a book meme. The categories at first seem rather repetitive, but not really when you think about them.

Here goes:

1. Name five of your favorite books

Pentimento – Lillian Hellman
Spartina – John Casey
Crossing to Safety – Wallace Stegner
Damage – Josephine Hart
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

2. What was the last book you bought (or brought home from the library)?

Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

3. What was the last book you read?

Old School – Tobias Wolff

4. List five books that have been particularly meaningful to you.

The Path – Chet Raymo
I stumbled onto this book while on a web search tangent one day. It turns out that this Boston Globe Science writer moved to my hometown the same year I left it and began walking to work each morning through the woods I grew up in as a child. The path of which he writes and which he makes universal in these pages, is embedded in my bones. I adore this book.

Oxford History of the American People – Samuel Elliot Morrison
In my other life I was an American history teacher, and my Morrison was always within an arm’s reach of my lectern. He had such a gift for breathing life into the past with his prose.

All Aboard – a Golden Book
When I was three, my mother and I traveled by train from Boston to visit my grandmother in Oklahoma City. Each night before the trip, we would read this book together. I have a hard time separating the REAL trip from the one the girl in the book took with her mother. I am proud to say that All Aboard was my first Ebay purchase some 6 years ago. It felt so good to be reunited.

The Garden Primer – Barbara Damrosch
My paperback copy of this book meets the Velveteen Rabbit’s definition of being “real.” It has mold on the pages from where it dried out after I left it on the porch in the rain … it has swollen to the size of a watermelon, and the binding is curled back on itself. But every spring I bring it out find something new to focus my work with vegetables. It is my bible.

Seeing the Crab – Christina Middlebrook
On a more somber note, this book was suggested by a friend, now deceased, who said “If you want to know what it’s like to live with breast cancer, read this book.” I find it very difficult to enter the world of terror that my friends living with cancer live in, but this has helped. I want to be present, but appropriately so. To this I would add a book with stories of healing that I have passed on to many friends …
Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal – Rachel Naomi Remen
It reads in short 3-4 page stories of healing. It is a good read in times of wondering if you can trust your body, and reading the stories helps to focus on the fact that the body has the capacity to heal itself. I thank my friend, Mary Beth, for passing it on to me.

5. Name three books you’ve been dying to read, but haven’t gotten around to

1491 – Charles C. Mann
The Botany of Desire – Michael Pollan
(I started it last week and then lost it while I was traveling … it is a GREAT read)
More Vineyard Voices: Words, Faces and Voices of Island People - Linsey Lee

As for tagging, I shall tag ~ but respect their right to decline

Kerry - Kerry's Garden
Holly - WoollyMutts
Jessica - High School Unscripted

Happy Valentine's Day

gotta love this dog ! 

a sidetrack from the garden

OK. I’m taking a trip out of the gardening realm and into the realm of another interest … the movies. I have made it my goal to see as many of the movies up for an Academy Award before March as I can. Last night (and this is my ONLY connection to gardening) I watched the new Wallace and Gromit film. I LOVE Wallace and Gromit … actually I love Gromit, truth be told … those raised eyes speak a thousand words. I’ve been following them for years. This new one is about a giant vegetable contest! What’s not to love? Gromit carefully measures his watermelon they way I measured my tomatoes last summer. This dog and I are soulmates. I’ve been humming the W&G theme music to myself all morning.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. Having seen Brokeback Mountain, I wanted to read Annie Proulx’s short story. The movie is dead on. Ang Lee does a brilliant job in bringing Annie Proulx’s characters and setting to life. What’s interesting is, that when I found the story (I found it in the New Yorker DVD collection I gave my husband for Christmas … so wise of me) I discovered that in that SAME edition in 1997 was an article by George Plimpton about Truman Capote. If you see Capote you must read this article. It is a haunting complement to the movie. Quite a coincidence that two best picture nominees are foreshadowed in that one issue.

Munich is the only best movie nominee I have not yet seen. That said, I would have to give the best movie nod to Crash. It is so different from any movie I have seen and so provocative in its theme. It changes the way you think. I guess that’s why I like it.

Soon to be soup 

Solving the garlic problem

I love growing garlic the way some people love growing roses. But I have a problem. I harvested close to 200 heads of garlic this year. 15% of the crop went into seed for next year’s crop, and I probably gave away another 20%. That still leaves 130 heads of garlic to eat.

And there is another problem. The stiff necked garlic starts to go bad by the end of January. The cloves start to grow little roots and sprout as if they were deep underground. You can forestall this with proper curing and storage, but not much past February. I need to use it up or lose it. I will still have braids of soft necked garlic to take me through the spring, but in my use or lose bin right now are many smallish heads of stiff necked that were not suitable for gifts nor seed. It is time to make soup.

In Italy and Provence garlic soup is a staple of the diet. Aïgo Bouïdo is a very simple concoction of water, garlic, sage and an egg yolk. It can be quite hearty all by itself when it is poured over French bread sprinkled with a little Parmesan. It can also serve as a stock for other soups. I like mine straight.


I gathered 10 heads of garlic and retrieved my rolling rubber garlic peeler from the drawer. I insert 10 cloves and roll smartly on the counter and out come the naked cloves. It saves a lot of time.


There is another, more elegant garlic soup recipe put together by Susan Spicer the chef at Bayona in New Orleans. It’s more work, but it sure is tasty.
Here is the simpler, peasant version of Mediterranean garlic soup

Aïgo Bouïdo
INGREDIENTS:

1. 4-1/3 cups water


2. 6 garlic cloves, crushed (I used nearly 100 cloves)


3. 1/2 teaspoon salt


4. small sprig of fresh sage


5. small sprig of fresh thyme


6. 1 egg yolk


7. 6 slices of French bread, brushed with olive oil

PREPARATION:
1. Bring the water to a boil. Add the garlic and salt and boil for another 10 minutes. 2. Add the herbs. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the herbs to steep for about 10 minutes.
3. Remove the herbs. Blend the yolk with some of the cooled broth, and then stir it back into the soup to thicken it.4. Place the oiled bread into the soup bowls, pour the soup over the bread and serve immediately.

Aigo Bouido

a warm January afternoon on the porch 

Balancing brown and green

It has been a warm January. I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon sitting on the back porch in the sun. Normally I will cease my composting operation around Christmas and pick it up again in early March. The problem is that it is in January and February that we are inundated with citrus rinds. They make such a sweet compost that I hate to just throw them away. One particularly cold winter, I put them in the freezer until spring. But then there was no room for real food.

So because things have been so mild and because I don’t have to dig a path through snow to the composter, I have been adding plenty to the pile. The problem is, I have only brown leaves so my balance of brown and green is off. The same thing happens in August when all the leaves have been used up and I have nothing but grass clippings around.

Then on a walk last week I spied this young man trimming these green plants that grow around the trees in the nearby shopping center. He happily surrendered a crate full of greens and I have been “in balance” ever since.

Christian Kauffman April 1796 - January 1858 

The Kauffman Family Crest
"selbst gesponnen selbst gemacht"

a confession

Something Judith said recently about hiding artifacts in her garden reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to confess. I’ve been bringing my ancestors back to the garden.

It all started last spring when I went to Iowa City to find the grave of a triple great grandfather. Christian Kaufmann was born in Pennsylvania at the end of the 18th century and made the most of the expanding opportunity this country had to offer. He rafted down the Ohio River until he found a place that he liked and then WALKED back to PA and brought the family to Dayton, Ohio. His children (there were 14 of them) also caught the westering spirit and headed for Iowa. It was there, in Iowa, that Christian Kauffman was laid to rest in January of 1858.

I had driven that morning from Des Moines and arrived mid-day. I checked in at the cemetery office and was informed that the grave I was seeking was in the old part of the cemetery and that many of the headstones were no longer visible as they had been eroded and had sunk below the ground. Seeing that I was a bit disappointed at that news the supervisor invited me to visit the cemetery’s “special site.” It is a headstone that has been nicknamed “The Black Angel” and it is surrounded by myth and mystery. It seemed quite benign on that spring afternoon.

Next I went off to the “old section” armed with a crude map and after re-orienting myself a few times, I found his headstone. After standing trying to imagine which trees might have been there in January of 1858, a year before his grand-daughter, my great-grandmother Sara Alta Kauffman was born, I went about cleaning up the area around the headstone.

As I was scraping up the bits of leaves around the base of the obelisk I thought, “this would make good compost.” Then it hit me. Why not take this bit of Iowa back east with me and place it in the garden. So I scooped the decomposed leaves into a plastic bag and brought it with me. Early last May I placed it in the parsnip bed. I did the same in Ladbergen this past October, though the soil is still waiting for next spring to be put to work.

... like fettucini ...

My garden catalogues are stacked neatly in a pile. I am scared to open them. Something bizarre happens in my brain when I start to read them. I seem to lose all perspective on reality.

Last year a friend gave me a book by Susan Watkins called Garden Madness. Her section on gardening catalogues had me weeping with laughter. I finally went out and bought my own copy of the book and, if you find the following even half as funny as I did, I encourage you to do the same. There’s more where this came from.

“It is the dead of winter. You have just stuffed logs into the woodstove for the seventeenth time today, and it is only nine o’clock in the morning. Outside the landscape is as exciting as a piece of yesterday’s butcher paper. With the wind chill factor it is forty-seven degrees below zero. Everything has frozen to death including the fence. You are seriously considering the logic of doing the same. Perhaps you will simply walk to the mailbox naked.

But lo! What is this? A bright shining kaleidoscope beams out of the gloom and into your eye … What is this Fantasia of delight, this Xanadu of prose, this promised fairyland of spring?

Why it is a garden catalog, of course. You shall open it now and, and read it cover to cover. You shall look at every glossy photograph … You shall read every word, believe every claim, desire every seed. You shall contemplate the quickening of your breath, the tingling of your veins, the thumping of your heart, the foreclosing of your mortgage. You shall, in other words, order every single plant in the catalogue. And you shall have absolutely no idea what any of them are by the time your head has cleared and UPS is trundling up your driveway. Not to mention the fact that that all the packaged plants will look exactly the same – like fettucini.

It is early spring now. The UPS man has been to your home one hundred and twenty-five times since March first. He will no longer get out of the truck if you are nearby. Instead, he flings the packages out the door as if he were feeding lions at the zoo. He has a frightened look on his face. You do not blame him. You have a frightened look on your face, too. The garage no longer has room for cars. The local landfill exploded last week, spewing cardboard and excelsior over your tri-county area, and you are solely responsible. You have 9,725 plants to install before next winter, and you are not going to make it. The daylilies in box #316 have been grabbing at your ankles with their roots. Any moment now they will go for your throat. But you are still trying to figure out where to plant all the fettucini in box #65. The name on the label says it is “Eragrostis v. expensivosa as allgettoutti.” But you have no idea what that means. You do not remember what any of these things are, or why you ordered them in the first place. … Some of these plants may kill you on contact. You no longer care.

Outside, it will soon be ninety-seven degrees above zero and humid enough to turn wallpaper to oatmeal. It is out there that you must toil for your sins. You are doomed.”

From Susan Watkins, Garden Madness

Chlorophytum comosum
 

Chlorophytum comosum

The flurry of travel has ceased and I am back to a winter’s life. Houseplants and amaryllis will have to fill my days until the seeds start to arrive. Today I tended to a collection of spider plants. These are all descended from a piece of my wedding bouquet. My sister found the baby spider on the church floor more years ago than I want to admit and put it in a pot and gave it to me for Christmas. I have nurtured it with care and have given away its progeny as engagement gifts over the years. It is wonderful to be able to give away growing things.

The “mother plant” is pot bound now and I’m not sure I want to have it in a bigger pot. Perhaps this spring I will try to divide it.

A jarring insight

For years I’ve used a phrase for referring to the long ago as “not since ought six.”  It just dawned on me this IS “ought six.”

a Baobab Tree 

 

El Gecko and his creators