Seven Oaks

Gardening in January

2012-01-28T11:36:00.000-08:00

Garden entrance - in warmer days!

Gardening in January sounds like wishful thinking, but I found myself outside today in the flower garden for a good two hours today doing just that - gardening in January. Normally at the time of year in our Zone 6B garden the ground would be frozen solid, and it's likely there would be a few inches to a foot or more of snow covering the ground. Not this year. This year, the crocus are already pushing up through the soil, as are the tulips. Even the tulips nearest the garage that are in a bed I consider "cool" because it doesn't get direct sunlight until late afternoon are starting to break the soil. The forsythia look like they'll bud at any moment, as do the peach trees. I've got yarrow blooming. Yarrow. And hollyhocks and foxglove with green, healthy leaves.

The weather patterns here in the Piedmon region are unpredictable. Some winters our garden is more like the gardens closer to the Blue Ridge Mountains - cold and snowy. Then periodically we get a winter like this, where I can be outdoors in my sweatshirt on January 28, trimming perennials back (that I should have done in the fall), fixing fallen peony and plant hoops, and pulling up some of the weedy grasses that sprinkle throughout the garden.

Doing the garden cleanup chores in January, when all of the perennials have died back, yielded several surprises. First, it was easier to see where my nemesis, the blackberry, had invaded the flower beds. I was actually cutting back the Rudbeckia and reached down to grab the dead canes when my thumb was stabbed with a sharp, shooting pain. Now you have to understand that my gardening gloves, which are less than a year old, are so worn that I have gigantic holes in the thumbs and a few fingertips. I looked down and had blood welling from the thumb; there was a huge thorn embedded in it. "What the heck?" I wondered, since Black Eyed Susan, the common named for Rubeckia, is thornless. I dug a bit under the fallen leaves and there it was, the blackberry cane. I was able to snip it back down to soil level. I'll have to dig it up if I want it truly out and gone, but at least I can keep them clipped back if I know where they are.

I was also able to see where a whole new crop of garden volunteers have self-seeded. I've got Buddleia sprouting everywhere, more Gaillardia, and coreopsis. As part of my volunteer hours for the Virginia Master Gardener program this spring, I'll pot up some of those perennials and bring them to the Heart of Virginia sale in early May. I'll post a list of what I'm sharing from my garden as part of the fundraiser as we get closer to spring.

It already feels like spring. It's 55 degrees outside now, and I've got the windows open in my office. I've been feeling down in the dumps lately, but my energy and happiness is back thanks to a few hours spent under the soft rays of winter sun with a clear blue sky overhead and soft breezes unraveling my pony tail. When I came inside, I brushed out my hair, and Rudbeckia seeds tumbled out. It makes me feel like spring can't be far away.

Understanding the Information in Seed Catalogs

2012-01-26T09:36:00.000-08:00

Decoding seed catalogs is an art unto itself. Each catalog states cultivation, growth and planting information differently on its glossy pages. There are enough similarities, however, that the average home gardener can learn a few simple tricks to decoding the seed catalogs.

I like to tell friends who are just starting a garden to focus on the important, unchangeable facts first. For example, you can amend the soil so that the pH value is closer to what a plant likes, but it's almost impossible to change the light in the area where you want to grow a garden. Similarly, it is impossible to change your gardening zone, although you can make some adjustments to warm up an area a bit earlier than Mother Nature determines. But for the sake of the beginner's out there reading this, we'll leave it that you can't change your zone - which means that the average frost date in the fall and the frost-free or spring planting date is pretty much set. If you live in my part of the world, the Piedmont region of Virginia, your tender annuals, perennials and vegetables can go outside starting around April 20th, give or take.

If you're new to seed starting and shopping online or from catalogs for your plants, understanding the information in the seed catalogs starts with finding the catalog's key. This is simple a few pages or a page that explains the symbols the company uses next to the plants, such as a sun-shaped symbol to indicate light requirements or an initial like A, P or B to indicate Annual, Perennial, or Biennial.

Once you find the key, the next important step is to actually read the description. It's easy to fall in love with a pretty face so to speak, and boy have I done that too many times. When it's January and cold and you can't go play in the garden, the next best thing is to sit down with all your seed catalogs and look at all the pretty pictures. You flip through and one picture just takes your breath away. You think, "Oh gosh, I've got to have that plant!" Make sure you read the description fully next to that special newcomer to the catalog. Note how tall it grows - if it's a tall plant, and you have space only along a sidewalk border, it's not a good choice. Similarly if the only area you have is a wide open space, one or two bushy plants are going to get lost visually among the other plants in the garden.

Note factors in the descriptions about its disease resistance, growth habits (trailing, bushy, etc.) and any special care needs it might have. A garden catalog or website cannot anticipate every special needs your plant may have. I want to grow figs here on our property and add one or two fig trees. Where I used to live on Long Island, New York, fig trees had to be carefully cut back, wrapped in plastic and completely swaddled to make it through the winter. Here I understand that a few types can grow successfully without such protection unless we get an unusually cold winter. That's where talking to your local County Cooperative Extension people, visiting their website, or at least investing in a good plant guide can help. A catalog can only cover the basics in a square inch of copy. A book can provide you with myriad details.

I've got my seed catalogs ready. Tonight, I take inventory of the rest of the garden seeds. Hubby has been busy creating the new walk-in pantry area in the basement. I am very blessed to have a husband who is handy around the house. He is building pantry shelves for all my canned goods, my canning pots and accoutrements, root cellar vegetables such as potatoes and sweet potatoes (and eventually fruit when the orchard begins producing in abundance) and our emergency preparedness supplies such as bottled water. But the area he is building out in the basement used to be the place where I kept all my seed starting equipment. We're moving it to a temporary location, and everything is in disarray just when I need it organized to start seeds in a week or two. No matter; moving it made me realize how many open packages I have, how many packages I bought last year and never used, and what I'm missing. I bought seed starting soil last week at Tractor Supply (great sale, by the way) and have my old cake frosting cans ready to be cut into strips for plant labels. The trays are waiting in the shed for their debut. This weekend, we check and test all the lights on the indoor seed starting shelves, check the seeds, and order the rest. My focus is again on the vegetable garden and I have almost narrowed down all my choices except for the darned asparagus. Who would have thought asparagus would be such a nerve-wracking choice? Then again, if you knew me 15 years ago, who would have thought I'd be debating the merits of Jersey Giant or Jersey Knight and itching to play in the dirt again?

Vote for the Seven Oaks Blog on the Readers Choice Awards

2012-01-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

If you have a moment, would you be so kind as to vote for the Seven Oaks on the Readers Choice Awards? My humble blog has been nominated for Best Gardening Blog, but truly, it's up to you, the reader. If you enjoy this blog and would like to give me a little gift, vote here.

Thank you.

Diversity Is the Spice of Life

2012-01-24T12:55:00.000-08:00

You'd think a bunch of grown people with three advanced degrees among them would be able to puzzle out the seed catalogs, but no - we're still in the throes of such debates as which varieties of lettuce to plant, whether kale is going to actually get eaten here (I say yes if I bake it into chips; the menfolk are doubtful that a kale chip will actually be edible), or whether to plant white onion, yellow onions, or red onions.

Yes, you read that right: white, yellow, red. Big, small, tender, sweet, make your eyes cry onions. Did you even know they came in so many types? Other than a Blooming Onion at Outback, when's the last time you actually considered the taste, the merits of the ubiquitous onion?

I spread all the gardening catalogs out on the kitchen table open to the onion pages. We can choose seeds or sets, single varieties or variety packages that provide some of each type. The question that others in the household keep asking, however, is:

"Will we like them?"

And that's really the kicker, the point at which I stop, peer into the crisper drawer of the refrigerator at the string bag of onions from the supermarket, and I wonder.

When did we go from pages and pages, dozens and dozens of varieties to one or two, or maybe three if you're lucky, of types available at the grocery store?

The plant world is chock full of genetic diversity. Plants, like people, thrive on genetic diversity. And what nature didn't provide we clever humans coaxed out of the plant kingdom, crossing this and that to get something new, hardier and tastier.

Yet all across the country and indeed now in most parts of the so-called "civilized' world we think of vegetables the way we used to think of factory widgets. If they're not all the same size, shape and taste meal after meal, we think something is wrong. Peas all have to be the same size and in a can. Green beans must all be snipped to a regulation quarter of an inch, no more, no less. Carrots must be peeled, coined and orange. Bet you didn't know you can find white carrots or purple ones, did you? The Romans apparently loved white carrots.

You won't find this in stores, kids!

But we have so commoditized the simple act of eating to the point that most children, if not exposed to a garden early in life, think vegetables are 'yucky' and won't eat them unless they come out of a can with a label they recognize. I remember when my godson visited this past summer. He pulled a carrot right from the garden. He watched me pull, clean and cook beets. It was the first time he has ever tasted a beet and he will be 8 years old this month. Beets don't taste so good from the can, but from the garden? He kept saying, "Mommy, this is yummy! You should make these too!"

I know that myriad economic factors encourage growers to grow the same varieties. There are varieties that store longer, ship better, and achieve a uniformity that consumers have been trained to expect. But I cannot help but wonder at what a diversity of color, texture and taste the average person missed when they only buy prepared, packaged foods.

As I linger over the gardening catalogs, I'm faced with a cornucopia of choices. The only way to truly answer my family's question - "Will we like it?" - is to grow it. And grow it we shall.

Now, which ones to choose? Questions, questions....

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(c) Copyright 2012 by Jeanne Grunert. All rights reserved. Linking to this post or my blog is encouraged. Copying my posts is punished by the fates in the form of hail, tomato hornworm, and blossom end rot.

I love comments so comment away. If you want to talk to me personally about this or any other posts, email me.

Asparagus Revisited

2012-01-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

Who would have thought that a simple blog post on asparagus would generate such a response? First, the emails came pouring in. Several readers wrote that the 'golden' color so praised in the article I read was actually a sickly broom straw yellow; don't get your hopes up, they wrote, since your asparagus bed will actually look like old dead grass and not amber waves of grain waving like golden tendrils in the breezes. (Well, I just wrote that, but you get the drift.) Next, several readers commented or emailed to advise that even if the gardening catalogs promise a harvest of asparagus the first year, at most you will get a few tender shoots, but not much. I heard from two readers with similar stories of waiting two years for their asparagus beds to take off, and then they had so many asparagus shoots they were giving them away to the neighbors because they couldn't eat them fast enough! I can only hope that my asparagus grows as well.

I haven't decided on the variety yet, but it's not because I am still carefully weighing the pros and cons of Jersey Knight against Jersey Giant. We took two weekends to deep clean areas of the house that were like bottomless pits. I don't know how people move around from house to house all the time. I moved only twice in my lifetime and twice was more than enough. When we moved into the house here at Seven Oaks just over four years ago, we left a few boxes of miscellaneous books, papers and household items in the basement, intending to sort them out and put them away as soon as we had major areas of the house organized like the kitchens and bedrooms. No such luck. That stack of boxes haunted a corner of the basement, nagging me every time I went downstairs to pack an order for EquinArt Creations (our other company that sells model horses and equine art) or work out on the treadmill. My husband also wanted to finish the custom closet system he had designed and built. When we moved in, we had temporary shelves installed in the walk in closet, intending them to be -ahem- temporary. But of course temporary turned into four years until they began falling down. We didn't like anything we found in stores, so he designed and crafted a solid wood system that we finished installing this weekend. It's gorgeous, but it also necessitated more organizing, cleaning out and overall straightening up that precluded my perusal of gardening catalogs and books.

I must say, however, that hauling another car full of items to throw out and packing another box to give away to Good Will felt - well, good. I even went through the linen closet and the bathroom cabinets, cleaning and decluttering things, throwing away things like 10 year old sunblock (which probably won't do anything to protect my skin from the sun anyway) and broken barettes.

Now that the house feels clean and organized, I'm ready to organize my garden. One good thing about declutteirng the basement was that I now have an entire box of half open, half full, hand collected and otherwise gift of seeds to go through before I place my order. And it's a good thing, too. I found Romaine lettuce seeds which I didn't know I have, and kale too. I will conduct a viability test to see if they are still useful and to see if I can save money and use what I have rather than spending more on new seeds.

What's in a Name? Everything When You're a Plant!

2012-01-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

Learning the Latin or scientific classification name of a plant may seem daunting at first, but it's important. The more I learn about plants, the more I realize how important it is to be precise. No two plants are alike just as no two people are alike, and knowing the precise classification of a garden plant can potentially mean the difference between choosing one that's hardy for your location or choosing one that needs all sorts of pampering.

If you'd like to learn more about understanding scientific classification and plant names, I have written two articles this week addressing the topic:

Hub Pages: Understanding Scientific Classification of Plants

Main Line Gardening - The Importance of Latin Plant Names

Growing Asparagus - Decisions, Decisions!

2012-01-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

After lengthy discussion this past fall, we decided to remove the herb bed from the vegetable garden area and plant an asparagus bed there instead. I don't use the herbs nearly as much as I thought I would, and some, like the lemon balm that grew to the size of a small shrub, I grew for a friend who no longer wants or needs it. Our grand scheme for that particular vegetable garden bed this spring is to dig up the herbs and move them into the perennial garden to use as decorative shrubs and herbs in another new garden bed we're installing. I'm afraid we're going to lose some, since the soil is literally like cement there (it's the area where we set up the cement mixer while pouring cement for the rocks along the walkway, and I think we spilled a little too much on that part of the garden during construction.) Then we will transform the raised bed into an asparagus bed.

Asparagus is a bit intimidating for me to grow, mostly because no one I knew grew it in Floral Park. As a perennial, I know you have to choose the site for it carefully, since a well-tended asparagus bed can last anywhere from 10 to 20 years, growing and producing edible spears of tasty fresh asparagus all the while. I also know that it can get big, with the tall, frothy stems attaining heights of two to three feet. One website said that people sometimes grow them as border plants in flower gardens because the foliage is so lovely. That site promised that asparagus foliage turns from dark green to golden in the fall. That sounds like a beautiful sight to see!

Researching asparagus varieties is a bit confusing. Neighbors in Virginia who grow asparagus told us to look for varieties or plants that produce spears in the first year; others, they said, would mean that the bed would need time to become established before producing anything worth snipping and cooking. Most people agree we can expect to get nothing from the asparagus bed the first year, and perhaps a meal or two the second year before it takes off. Then I need to get my freezing or canning supplies ready to store the healthy harvest.

Asparagus need full sun, and according to most sources, they aren't terribly fussy about soil pH. I will still amend the garden bed with plenty of compost and a few new bags of soil before planting the asparagus.

We're still going through all the gardening catalogs to choose our varieties to grow. There's Jersey Knight, which all the catalogs seem to have, and Jersey Giant, and all sorts of "Jersey" asparagus. I wonder if New Jersey is a good asparagus growing place? Or why they got that name in the first place?

There's purple-tipped asparagus, purple asparagus, and the traditional green ones. We're going to go with traditional green asparagus, but I still cannot quite decide upon which variety. Some are only $15 for a package of crowns while the one recommended in my Master Gardener manual is around $30 for a comparable pack of crowns. My inclination is to purchase both and conduct a test, but I probably won't have the space or room to grow two types.

Have you grown asparagus? Which one did you choose?

Get Free Seed Catalogs

2012-01-13T08:47:00.000-08:00

I pulled out as many seed catalogs as I could carry and set them up in my office for a photo shoot today just to show you the diversity in size, price and focus of the many free seed catalogs available today. I realize after I downloaded the images to the computer that I had left another stack just about as tall down in the family room. These were the bulb catalogs featuring beautiful summer bulbs, rose and other specialty flower catalogs, and a few more gardening supply catalogs. (I'm not endorsing any of these catalogs, by the way, nor did anyone pay me anything to show them - this is simply what arrived in my mailbox since Christmas.)

It's a far cry from the 1800s when the Shakers, a religious group in New England, began offering their seeds via mail order. The quality and innovative packaging of the seeds enabled gardeners to purchase seeds that otherwise wouldn't be available in their local community. In my own home town of Floral Park, Long Island, our town was literally built on the former seed and plant growing empire of John Lewis Childs, a businessman and plantsman who started a profitable mail order seed company in the late 1800s on the fertile soil of the Hempstead Plain. And while today Floral Park is better known as a great little community to grow a family, the soil underneath all those suburban houses remains rich and loamy, great for growing a garden.

If you're looking for free seed catalogs, there are several ways to obtain them. First you can search on the internet for the famous seed companies. Most have a form on their website to request a catalog. Fill it out and wait; it will arrive soon.

If you subscribe to gardening magazines, chances are very good that the magazines have rented your name out to various companies for marketing purposes. This is standard operating procedure and really, in the case of gardeners, most of us don't object to receiving catalogs and other marketing materials filled with plants and garden supplies. Okay, you may object because it is so tempting, but it is fun to see what's out there!

Lastly, if you buy from one seed company, chances are good that the others will start sending your catalogs, too. Why? Same reason as with the gardening magazines; companies sell or rent your contact information to similar companies. It doesn't make intuitive sense at first glance, but as a direct marketer by profession, I can tell you it is true. I always wonder whether or not the profit they make from selling the list outweighs sharing their customer list with competitors, but I suppose it must because it is so commonplace in the industry.

So there you have it; three ways to obtain free seed catalogs. One last way that occurred to me after my Master Gardener class last week is to gather all your gardening friends together for tea and a catalog swap! In the middle of February or January when you're craving gardening fun and it's either too cold or snowy, why not throw a little gardening get together at your home? Everyone should bring either some seed catalogs or gardening magazines they want to "swap". Provide tea and cookies or snacks and have a fun afternoon hanging out and flipping through the gardening periodicals, dreaming of the time to come when you can actually plant those wonderful seeds and plants. You may also want to organize some group orders too among your friends; if a package of 100 hollyhock seeds is way too many, maybe split four ways it's better for your garden.

Publisher Offering 25% Sale on My Gardening Book

2012-01-13T08:37:00.000-08:00

If you've always dreamed of growing your own vegetables, why not start a garden this year? A quick plug for my book, Get Your Hands Dirty - a Beginner's Guide to Gardening. The paperback is $9.99 but my publisher is running a sale until the end of January. Use coupon code LULUBOOK305 and get 25%. So you can buy the book and get beginner basic baby steps to help you start a garden.

If you kill plastic plants, my book is for you.

Read a preview and order here:

Planning the Vegetable Garden: Taking Inventory

2012-01-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

I've got my seed catalogs all spread out on the coffee table, a printout of the vegetable garden plan, and a pencil at hand. But before I can place my orders, I need to go down to the basement and take inventory among the seeds leftover from last year.

'Fess up. You know you have seeds leftover from last year rattling around somewhere in a box or drawer. I don't think there's a single gardening home that doesn't have a half open seed package somewhere. My dad was notorious for leaving them in the garage or on the windowsill in the greenhouse (yes, he built a little lean to greenhouse in my suburban/urban backyard when I was kid, thus further cementing my obsession with gardening.) Half-empty packages of sunflowers, radishes, green beans, tomatoes. Somewhere you've got some seed packages.

I keep all of my seed packages in two big coffee cans with tight fitting lids, one can labelled "vegetables" and the other "flowers." The reason I keep them in a can instead of a shoe box or a basket is that we occasionally get field mice in the basement, and they have eaten through my seed packages to eat the corn, pumpkin and squash seeds, plus they will nibble almost anything else. The cans keep the critters out.

One thing you'll notice if you use open seed packages stored for more than a few months is the low germination rate. Seeds do go "bad" so to speak, or lose viability. You can test how viable your seeds are by placing a few in between two damp paper towels. Wait a day or two, keep the towels damp (you can put them in a zip lock baggie in the meantime) and look at the seeds. If you see them sprouting, chances are the seeds are still good. If there's nothing showing, try again, and if on the second try nothing sprouts, most of the seeds in your package are probably no longer viable. Discard them and buy new ones.

Should you buy organic or conventionally grown seeds? The choice is yours, but in terms of viability, both tend to be equal. If you'd prefer to support organic growing practices over conventional methods, organic seeds are a good choice. Growing plants from organic seeds doesn't necessarily mean the resulting vegetables will be healthier for you.

Now GMO or genetically modified seeds are another story altogether. Some people believe that GMO seeds haven't been tested enough, and the genetic modifications made to the parents plants that produced the GMO seeds may result in problems down the road. If you have worries or doubts about the safety of GMO seeds, then choose other seeds. Heirloom and older varieties are usually (but not always) safe. You can always ask the seed companies when in doubt or look for specially marked non GMO products.

When you're taking inventory of your seed packages, don't forget to take inventory of your seed starting materials, too. You will need your cell packs, trays or pots, plus seed starting mix or potting soil. You will also need plant labels and a waterproof marker, such as a Sharpie. I always test my lights before planting my seeds and do a practice run with the light timer since I'm notorious for setting the light timer on weird settings. I use a plain old timer purchased from the hardware store, nothing special for gardening, and it's fairly intuitive to set, but someone joked that I had the "land of the midnight sun" going on in my basement one year because somehow I'd reversed day and night and my plants got 12 hours of light during the night. Well, at least plants don't seem to care - they grew just fine.

Your Seed Starting Checklist

Before buying seeds, take an inventory of what you have left from last year.
Conduct a viability test if in doubt and see if the seeds are still good.
Check your seed starting lights; buy new bulbs if you have to.
Check your seed starting equipment and buy more soil or trays if necessary.

For ideas, tips and hints on saving money on seed starting, read my article Seed Starting on the Cheap.

Buy Fresh, Buy Local Chapter Forming for Southside Virginia

2012-01-06T12:47:00.000-08:00

I received this in an email this morning from the Virginia Cooperative Extension office and thought I would pass it along. I'm already thinking about attending the meeting. "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" appeals to me on many levels. When you buy fruits, vegetables and other locally grown foods, you not only support small scale farming and agriculture, you also reduce the amount of fossil fuels used and pollution produced by shipping the produce long distances. And while a pineapple in the middle of winter is a treat I'm not ready to give up quite yet, and that pineapple is better traveled than I am, it certainly makes sense to buy as much as you can fresh and local.

Here's information on our local southside Virginia meeting. I do not see a national website, but if you search on the term "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" you may find something for your state too.

Buy Fresh Buy Local Chapter Forming

to serve the Central and Southside region www.buylocalvirginia.org

Thursday, January 19, 2012

6:30 – 8:00 pm

Southside VA Community College

Workforce Development Center John H. Daniel Campus

200 Daniel Road, Keysville VA 23947

“Buy Fresh Buy Local” is a nationally recognized marketing resource helping to rebuild local food systems and promote sustainable agriculture by:

• Increasing consumer awareness and access to local food

• Improving direct marketing of local food from farm to table

• Connecting local food suppliers to restaurants, institutions, and retail outlets

Make your reservation today Eric Bowen (434) 392-4246 or email: bowen@vt.edu

Seed Starting Basics - Seed Catalogs

2012-01-05T11:35:00.000-08:00

Last night was our first night of the Master Gardener class here in Virginia, and as I sat at the table and waited for class to begin, someone walked in with a huge box of seed catalogs. I have easily as many catalogs, if not more, than what was in her box. At last count there are a dozen catalogs on my coffee table, a few in the magazine rack, and even more in the recycling bin in the garage. And that's not counting the bulb catalogs which begin arriving in August!

Seed catalogs are so commonplace in my house that I did a double take as I heard someone in the room last night say, "I didn't know there were so many catalogs." I started thinking about how I learned about seed catalogs and I realized that we always had seed catalogs in my home growing up. The arrival of the Parks and Burpee catalogs heralded the start of gardening season. It was like opening day in baseball - you just knew spring was around the corner when those two catalogs appeared. My dad would dog ear the pages and take the catalog into the bathtub at night to peruse. Sometimes he would fall asleep in the tub, and I'd find a wrinkled, ripply catalog drying out on the furnace in the basement after its quick dunk in the tub the previous evening.

But what if you didn't grow up reading seed catalogs? What if the whole idea of planting a garden fascinates you, and you love the idea of growing your own food, but it's all new?

Let's start with seeds and seed catalogs. Nowadays, that also encompasses shopping for seeds online. You can pretty much find anything you desire to grow online - anything. I have seen houseplant seeds for sale such as African violet seeds (I tried them and couldn't get a single seed to germinate) to the commonplace, such as sunflowers, tomatoes and lettuce.

You can also find seed packages at your local garden center and home and garden stores such as Lowe's and Home Depot. They usually start to appear on the shelves by mid to late January. That doesn't mean that is the right time to plant them, by the way. Like Christmas decorations on the shelves in September, it's just the merchant's way of enticing you to buy them early and often.

The way to tell when you should plant your seed packages is to flip them over and look on the back. Most companies provide detailed planting instructions right there on the back of the package. Many provide a map with colorful bands across it. Take a look at the map of the United States, find your state and approximate location, and look at the color key. That tells you the gardening zone where you live. Zone refers to the USDA Hardiness Zone and it gives you an approximately guide to planting various things outdoors. If you use your 'frost free' date in the spring (the last average date of frost for your area) and count backwards the approximate number of days and weeks recommended to germinate and properly start your seeds indoors, that's about the time you should begin planting your seeds inside.

Not everything grows well from seeds. Some seeds are quite easy to start. Other plants need started sets (roots), bulbs, tubers or corms (root parts) to grow.

If you're interested in ordering seeds by mail, start with the major sites such as Park Seed (www.parkseed.com), Burpee (www.burpee.com) and a few others. Browse first by area of interest - vegetables, herbs, annual flowers, perennial flowers. Take note of what conditions you have outside. Sun or partial shade? That guides your choices to some extent. Most vegetables require full sun, defined as six or more hours per day, in order to do well. You have more choices when it comes to flowers, for there are many beautiful flowers that do well in partial shade and even full shade.

Start this week to browse the seed catalogs online. But don't buy anything yet unless you're absolutely sure it's what you want. As the weeks progress, you may see something in the store that's more enticing or learn about a new variety from a friend. Now's the time for planning!

They'll Be Some Changes Made

2012-01-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

A gold star to anyone who posts in the comment section where today's blog title comes from. Hint: It's a song. Second hint: It's an OLD song!

A few quick housekeeping details as I embark on this - gasp! - fifth year of blogging. And as I write this, I'm astonished that I have been blogging about Seven Oaks since the fall of 2007. I began this blog shortly after we moved from Long Island, New York, to our dream home, a home my husband designed and we had built on a portion of a 17 acre timber farm. It was my dream for as long as I could remember to live on a farm. Originally I wanted horses and the space to ride them, and although I haven't given up my dreams of horses, I've been drawn more and more to the self-sufficiency part of life here at Seven Oaks. Growing our own organic food, learning how to enjoy more from less, freelancing instead of working for a big corporation as I did back in New York. It has been an incredible journey with much that I've learned and more lessons to come. All of the fears I had about living in the country - "What will you do for entertainment? How will you make friends when you'll be working from home? Won't you miss all the fancy stuff in New York City?" - have pretty much melted away. I have all the entertainment I wish for here at Seven Oaks or with my friends; if I crave a good classical music concert, there's Longwood University, and if I want to go shopping or to a mall, Lynchburg is 40 minutes away. I made friends through church and by going out and attending various farming lectures and events, and through neighbors and people we met here. And as for missing the fancy stuff of New York City, I'll admit that I still miss the sweet potato vegetable "sushi" at Pacific Echo on 58th street; walking through Central Park on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to see the balloons being inflated; St. Patrick's, Rockefeller Center and 5th Avenue at Christmastime; and all the wonderful friends I made over the years. And Indian food. If anyone wants to open an authentic Indian cafeteria here in Farmville (yes, there is such a place) I will be your first and best customer.

All that aside, we feel a shift here at Seven Oaks into new territory. Last night we enjoyed a jar of delicious pickled red cabbage purchased from the local supermarket. I said to hubby, "We haven't had this in a while and I could eat the whole jar, it is so good." We used to eat it regularly back on Long Island. He said, "That's because it's $1.99 a jar here."

What! That necessitated another lengthy discussion. I don't know if food prices have gone up all over the country or if it's just living in a rural part of the country versus a high population city; do supermarkets charge less near cities and more for us out in the boondocks because they have to pay more to truck stuff here? But the cost of vegetables and fruit is staggering. We also can't find half of the goodies we used to enjoy - certain non-wheat breads, a lot of vegetables, some fruits that I love. (Macintosh apples, anyone? I see them at Walmart for two or three weeks each fall and they are frightfully expensive. I used to buy them for 99 cents a pound back in New York. I know they grow better up north, but honestly, I wish we could get them for more than 3 weeks at a time here. I'd pay for it!)

We are rich in land here, flexible in scheduling time if not having a lot of time on our hands. Freelancing is a blessing because I can run outside and pick tomatoes if I need to, or use an afternoon to can peppers, but I also work longer hours to make less money than I did when working for a major corporate giant. I work on average 50 hours a week, sometimes more. It's a flexible week, though, so that's what I mean by "flexible" in scheduling if not rich in free time.

We sat down yesterday and brainstormed what we wanted to grow this year. The fruit orchard trees are growing well but we are still a few years away from any noticeable crop. The vegetable garden is doing exceptionally well, and we have a much better feel for what will grow and what won't.

So in self defense - in defense of my bank account and because I think paying $1.99 for a jar of red cabbage is insane - I am more determined than ever to grow as much of my family's food as I can. Fresh and organic.

With all the seed catalogs spread out on the coffee table, I sat down and made a list of everything I want to grow and eat next year. I made a separate list of permanent edibles to add to the landscape - nut trees, additional fruit trees and bushes, asparagus beds.

I also drew a map of the vegetable garden on the computer. I have all the beds mapped in, and I can print blank sheets off to pencil in what I intend to grow. I want a three-season vegetable garden. I want to harvest something from the garden for my meals most months of the year, give or take, and choose from good quality home canned produce during the winter.

On New Year's Eve, we sat down to a meal of leftover beef roast along with side dishes. I pulled fresh carrots from the garden and cooked them on the stove top. I pulled fresh parsnips and made buttery mashed parsnips. That's exactly what I mean. I want to be able to pull those vegetables from the storage in the basement or the garage, or pull them right from the garden, most of the year.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing with you my approach to planning the vegetable garden. Starting from a detailed analysis of what grows and what doesn't, what our family enjoys eating, and what is easier and cheaper to grow here versus buy at the grocery store, I will walk you through the planning, seed buying, seed starting, and spring planting. I also intend for 2012 to keep better and detailed records of the yield to share with you what exactly we were able to achieve from our organic gardening success.

And it's not always about success. If those squash beetles get my plants again, or the mole ruins the vegetable garden, or something else crazy happens, I'll share that too.

The vegetable garden and fruit orchard will be my main focus this year. The flower garden is just about done, as far as the major hardscapes are concerned. We have a few more feet of path to finish and then the stone wall to build around the center island bed, so I'll break up the vegetable gardening information with updates on our progress there.

In addition to this more organized approach to the blog, I'll also post more links to the content I've written for news sites such as Hub Pages. I've been doing a lot more writing about organic gardening practices there and it has been of interest to readers, so I'll share more links.

If time permits, I'll also be giving the blog a facelift. Changing the design is on my list of things to do, but also getting rid of the blue underlined link-things is high priority. I never realized how annoying they are until I saw one of my own posts come up on a Google search. Then it was shock and "ugh!" Time for them to GO.

Lastly, each post is going to be linked and tagged. I've had content stolen in the past year, and while some may consider it flattery, since I make my living by my pen so to speak I consider it theft. Hopefully having a bit of tag content at the end and a link or two buried within will at least give me some link backs to my website in the unlikely event content is stolen (right, you thieves trolling for content?).

So Happy New Year, dear readers, and thank you for sticking with me this long....Seven Oaks: now entering our fifth year of blabbing about everything growing, whether it's my plants, my pets or ME growing in spirit.

Simple Gifts

2011-12-30T05:55:00.000-08:00

My New Year's message today is called Simple Gifts, and it was inspired by Razzleberry, the newest family member. He's my orange buddy cat we found injured, starved and meowing in a drain pipe along the road a few weeks ago.

This morning he heard me typing in the office and meowed to come in. After playing for about 10 minutes with his stuffed mouse - "Die, mouse, die! Ah-ha! I am Razzleberry, the fiercest hunter in the world!" - he stood on tiptoes and clawed at my jeans, begging for attention. I picked him up into my arms and was rewarded with deep baritone purrs that vibrated through my body as well as his. I hugged him gently in my arms, and he purred and nestled in. He looked up at me with soft green eyes, purring and gently rubbing his face against my sleeve when I stopped cuddling him.

I leaned back in my office chair and gazed out the south-facing windows at the orchard trees. Sparrows hopped about on the frost-coated roof while Pierre, our other cat, raced into the room to leap onto the bookcases under the window and follow their progress. A hot cup of coffee steamed on the desk and the heater gently warmed my freezing space, preparing me for a full day of work ahead.

As I sat and looked down at Razzle, I was overwhelmed by waves of love for this beautiful golden-cream colored cat. I thought of how only a few short weeks ago, he was not in my life. I had no idea that one day while we were walking the dog we would find him, half starved, sick, infected leg and all.

I thought of someone's reaction to my story of saving Razzle. When I talked to this person at Christmastime, he didn't say much to me on the phone after I told him of saving the sick cat - just said "Well, good luck with that." My husband got on the phone with him and talked a while. Later that night as we were walking the dog together, my husband said that the person on the phone had said gruffly, "If I'd found that cat I would have dumped him at the nearest animal shelter and been done with that."

Been done with that....Razzle purrs, stretches, rolls over on his back to give me his creamy-colored belly for pets. He gets a silly grin on his face when he rolls onto his back, his fangs sticking out like Nibbler on Futurama.

Each day when we wake up, we don't know what paths life will give us. Each day new paths open before us. Sometimes they are wide and clear; the phone rings, and it is a job offer, or maybe a friend who needs consolation. The path is wide and clear; accept the job, listen and comfort your friend.

But on some days, the paths are neither wide nor clear. They are narrow or seem to branch into odd directions. One day this fall, a little crooked path opened up before me in my road of life. I could take the path or leave it. I chose to take it. I don't know whether Razzle will stay healthy or not. I do my best with him. He has good veterinary care, excellent food, a warm bed to sleep in, cat toys to play with, a dog to harass and two humans who love him and cuddle him and play with him. Other than that, it's not up to me.

He got plenty out of that chance meeting but I seem to have benefited more from his gifts. He is the most affectionate little cat I have ever owned, even more affectionate than my old black cat, who loved nothing more than to sit in my lap all evening while we watched television together. Pierre is a funny cat and wickedly smart - he can, after all, open most of the doors inside the house, knows and responds to whistled commands, and plays leapfrog with the German shepherd dog. But Razzle gives me the gift of unconditional love and affection like no other cat I have ever owned.

What I'd like to say to you as we say goodbye to 2011 is this: when God puts simple gifts on your path of life, pick them up and cherish them. Don't close your mind or heart to opportunities to love, share, and follow the path he lays before your feet. Even if that path seems to be narrow and crooked or makes no sense, He's got the master road map for your life. Apparently that included an orange-cream colored cat for me; the cat needed help, and fast, and I needed another animal in my life to love.

Razzle has been here only a few weeks yet he has taught me love, and patience, and generosity. Simple gifts I suppose, but sometimes, things that are simple have surprisingly complex ramifications.

Don't turn your back on love, and don't turn your back on little things in your day. If I had done what the person on the phone had said - "I would have dumped him at the nearest animal shelter - " my life would have lost one more facet of beauty, a simple gift of unconditional love that frankly, I needed, but had no idea I needed.

I don't know how this particular path will turn out or where it's going, but Razzle is here to stay. New paths opened for me in 2011 that I never thought possible, sometimes with amazing alacrity. I published a new book on model horses and a quarterly hobby journal that is getting good reviews. I was accepted into the Master Gardener program and begin next week. I went fishing for the first time and enjoyed it. I made time for friends and took some time off. Business opportunities have started flowing in rather than my chasing after them, resulting in more potential opportunities for me in 2012 than in similar quarters in years past. I feel delighted and grateful that many simple gifts have been given to me.

You too are given simple gifts every day of your life. Whether it's your own version of Razzle cat seeking affection or a moment that's going to turn your life around, embrace the gifts when God presents them to you. Every day is a gift. It's a cliche, but all cliches are rooted in truth.

Have a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year!

The Tenacity of Broccoli

2011-12-28T08:30:00.000-08:00

Yes, broccoli.

I went out to the compost pile this morning to throw the remains of breakfast - grapefruit rinds, pear cores, and a really awful orange that tasted like dry carpet fibers - into the pile. I discovered that the broccoli plants we'd composted over a month ago had continued to grow. Mind you, the roots are waving in the air, there's no soil on the roots, and we chopped the main crown of florets off. Oh, but broccoli doesn't care. It produced a whole new crop of broccoli crowns along the thick trunk-like stem. Despite several hard frosts, despite the fact that the compost pile sits under a dense stand of pine trees, despite no soil....I'm not quite sure how the darned thing did it, but it did it. It produced another crop for me. And I picked it, and it's sitting soaking in cold water until I can eat it for lunch.

Have you ever met anything more generous in the natural world than plants? Anything more amazing?

Even a broccoli can awe you if you look at it a certain way.

Canned Bees

2011-12-27T13:04:00.000-08:00

Now I have seen some pretty strange things in gardening catalogs and seed catalogs, and working in the garden center many years ago I saw some unusual products come through our hands. But today when I opened up one of the many lovely seed catalogs that came in the mail something stumped me. It was a can of bees. I mean literally, something that looked like one of those giant Budweiser cans of beer but sealed and called Mason Bees. I did a double take. Canned bees? You can buy bees by the can, through the mail?

Yes, apparently you can (pun intended.) They're called Mason bees, and each can supposedly holds some female bees who each lay 25 to 30 eggs to make little bees. The catalog sold bee houses and bee colony equipment too. You purchase your canned bees, put up your little bee house, and hopefully the little buggers go to work pollinating your trees and such.

Considering I have 30 fruit trees needing bees...I'm starting to get interested in this. But one problem. I'm a little scared of bees. Not phobic by any means, I just don't like them near me. If I'm working out in the garden of course I tolerate them. Bees are your friend and mine in the garden, from the tiniest yellow jacket to the giant carpenter bees like my lovesick bee friend. We all want plenty of bees for good pollination, particularly those of us who grow fruit trees.

As we start looking through the gardening catalogs for nut trees and the fig trees I want to add to the orchard, my eyes keep straying to that can of bees. A can of bees. What will they think of next?

And how can I convince hubby that I need canned bees and a cute little bee house in the orchard?

Happy Boxing Day

2011-12-26T10:47:00.000-08:00

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! Christmas was lovely this year because the emphasis was on faith, family and friends, in that order - NOT food, gifts and consumerism. I'm not talking about becoming a Scrooge and doing away with giving presents, but I am talking about putting the emphasis where it belongs - with relationships, first with God and then with your family and friends.

My friend Cecilia called me from Los Angeles around 9:30 p.m to wish me a Merry Christmas and send her love and best wishes to the choir. We miss her beautiful soprano voice and cheerfulness for sure every week but she's moved on to a new job in the midwest. She didn't forget her friends back east though, and it was so nice to let everyone know we had a friend on the West Coast rooting for us as we sang the new translation of the Gloria for the first time.

Midnight Mass was wonderful but for me a struggle with my body clock. I am a morning person and my body does not adjust to staying up late. I couldn't even stay up late as a teenager. I am still feeling "hung over" from sleep deprivation today and battling a migraine, which is what happens to me when I go off my sleep schedule, but it was worth it to start Christmas was carols, songs and hugs from my church family.

Then it was home to my family nest - with Christmas morning under the tree snuggling with both cats and Shadow as we unwrapped a few presents from friends who brought hostess gifts to last weekend's Christmas dinner. My little godson sent Christmas presents for the pets, and Pierre and Raz enjoyed their new catnip toy, a weird green plastic ball with fringe on it, and a new brush for Raz. Shadow got jerky treats and she loved them so much she sat next to the shelf where we placed them out of her reach and worshipped the bag from afar. We spent the day watching endless reruns of "A Christmas Story" to the point where we started reciting lines - "You'll shoot your eye out!" - and I worked on my counted cross stitch and ran out of thread. I worked out too, and walked on the treadmill for half an hour grooving to the oldies on the CD player

So now today is Boxing Day, which doesn't mean we all punch each other in the nose. Back in the olden days when people had servants it was the day to give servants their boxes or presents. Since I am the servant here as well as the mistress of the house, I think I will treat myself to some time to myself later. I am planning the vegetable garden, perusing the seed catalogs, and I'll probably go out and pull up more of the spent marigolds later to get some fresh air. I can't believe how the spring flowering perennials are all blooming - I've got daffodils emerging, Dutch iris already up, and even yarrow - yes, yarrow - blooming away. Thank God no snow but honestly, my poor plants are confused and think it is Easter instead of Christmas.

Happy Boxing Day and hope your Christmas was merry!

How King Montezuma's Favorite Plant Became the Christmas Poinsettia

2011-12-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the history of plants reads like a soap opera. I researched and wrote two pieces this morning about poinsettia, and the more I dug into the topic, the more fascinated I became with this beautiful plant. I love poinsettia and while I choose silk over the real thing, my window boxes along the front porch are adorned with stems of silk poinsettia and I have two big fake ones outside my front door. I have tablecloths with red poinsettia and my favorite Christmas candle is a big sparkly glass candle with a painting of a poinsettia on it. As I look at all these symbols of Christmas, I can't help but smile. The Europeans may have conquered the Aztecs, but their favorite plant conquered OUR holiday!

King Montezuma, the last of the Aztecs, so loved the poinsettia that he sent caravans into the lower elevations to return with the plants to adorn his palace; it wouldn't grow on the higher elevations where he lived. For nearly 100 years, one family in California held the secret to growing the perfect poinsettias until lab technicians unlocked their secret - in 1990! Conquerers, angels whispering secrets to poor Mexican girls, clever marketing and more make up the rich history of the poinsettia.

Read more in my article, How the Poinsettia Became Associated with Christmas.

A Christmas Wish for You

2011-12-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

Razzle Cat

Shadow, wearing her Christmas finery

I got a nice email from Liz at the Cooperative Extension office thanking me for my recent posts on Christmas cactus. Liz is my mentor in the Master Gardener program, and she's been a reader of this blog for a while. As in many things in this brave new world of blogging and social media, we've never met, although we frequently correspond through email and sometimes phone calls. It was nice to hear that my articles on Christmas cacti helped her with her own. It's so disappointing to have a beautiful Christmas cactus one day and a bald one the next with all the blossoms like shriveled up pieces of tissue paper on the ground.

As we get nearer to New Year's Eve, I feel more and more thankful for this year. My life has unfolded in interesting new ways - Razzle the cat found us this fall and added to joy to our family, I was accepted into the Master Gardener program, I published a new book. Lately it seems that with each passing day I feel more and more grateful for all the little things in the day than the big gifts. Last night as we walked the dog, a huge flock of robins - hundreds of them - swirled overhead near the cattle fields, diving down and alighting on the bare branches of the trees arched against a lightly clouded sky. Sunset filtered through the clouds, bathing the area in an unearthly golden light tinged with sunset orange. The cattle lowed in the field, and a hawk cried in the woods behind us. We just paused, drinking it all in, grateful for the moment.

Someone emailed me to ask how I did this - "I want joy in my life, not just happiness," she said. I wanted to tell her about the robins and the sunset, the hawk, moments like now when both cats are snoring on the quilt and Shadow is snoozing at the foot of the bed. But it's hard to explain these moments of joy.

People often think that joy is one big goal to achieve, like a finish line to cross. It's more like stringing beads on a necklace. Little beads like seeing the robins, big beads like starting a new course of study in something I love, little beads like having friends over for dinner last weekend, big beads like planning a trip.

...no presents, but we still love the tree.

This Christmas, what I want to give people is joy. I'm tired of all the commercialism around Christmas. We stopped giving gifts years ago and instead donate the money to a series of charities we support. We throw open our house and host a Christmas dinner for neighbors and friends. We plan a few days of time together, quietly, serenely in the midst of the Christmas madness.

Somehow, I don't think Jesus intended for us to get into credit card debt just because it's his birthday. I think he would rather we give him the gift of joy - by giving it to others.

Merry Christmas, dear readers!

Special Low Price on How to Attract Birds to the Garden

2011-12-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

To entice you to try one of my gardening books, the new price for the Kindle and eBook version of my book "How to Attract Birds to the Garden" is just $2.99. That's it! Plus, there's a preview up on the publisher's site now so you can read the first few pages and see if you like it.

If you enjoyed my book Get Your Hands Dirty - A Beginner's Guide to Gardening, you will enjoy this one too!

I cover the basics of attracting wild birds to the garden, including:

Tree, shrubs, and flowers to plant that birds love
Types of feeders and bird seed to attract songbirds, woodpeckers and other interesting birds
Water elements including bird baths and more
Instructions on how to mix your own bird seed and make a suet feeder from pinecones
Advice on dealing with squirrels and other pests!

For just $2.99, it's a steal. View the preview or buy the eBook at Lulu.com

Growing Amaryllis

2011-12-14T13:14:00.000-08:00

Amaryllis come along just when you think you can't stand winter another moment. As the days grow shorter, and the nights longer, here comes the gigantic screaming red trumpets of the amaryllis flower as if to say, "Here I am! Sunshine! Warmth! Life! Stand back, winter."

I don't know how amaryllis became associated with the holidays, but you stumble over amaryllis displays in every big box store from coast to coast. I love the amaryllis bulb kits - they're easy to use, they come with everything you need, and they're inexpensive. It's like just add water and get an instant houseplant.

Having discovered through trial and error that amaryllis love bright warm rooms, I advise anyone interested in growing the brilliant amaryllis to:

Follow the package directions on the kit, especially when you're planting amaryllis. The bulbs should be planted just to the soil line, meaning that the soil should cover the bulb and go just to the where the bulb's neck meets the rounded bulb portion. Look at the little picture that comes with your amaryllis kit to make sure you're doing it right.
Don't water the amaryllis bulb too much at the beginning. You can and should water it more after the green stem and at least one set of leaves appear.
Once the leaves appear, the amaryllis will remind you of an alien plant. It grow fast - super fast - and you'll swear you blink and it's gained a few inches in height.
When the flowers appear, the stalk may not be strong enough to support them. Since it's tough to find a plant stake at the garden center in the middle of the winter, I've used a dowel from Lowe's, spray painted green to hide it among the stalks, as a plant support, and a green twist-tie from the bread to tie the amaryllis to its support.

One thing I learned today while researching an article for a client is that you can get an amaryllis to bloom again if you cut back the flower stalk after it's finished its first blooming period. I will need to try that with my next amaryllis.

For more on Growing Amaryllis, please enjoy my latest article for Main Line Gardening.

And Then There Were Three

2011-12-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

His royal highness, Pierre

Had a request from a Pierre fan for an animal update. So I'm calling this one, "And then there were three."

We have been really careful to keep Raz and Pierre apart for the most part, with supervised visits. So far it has worked just fine. The staff at the veterinary hospital advised us to make sure we keep the boy's water, food bowls and litter boxes separate due to the virus Raz carries, even though Pierre is vaccinated against the virus. So Raz has his accoutrements in one room of the house, Pierre's in another. Raz sleeps in that room at night too, so we don't worry about the boys getting into a spat while we're trying to rest.

We've been gradually letting Raz out for longer and longer periods of time, and on Sunday, he stayed out of his room the entire morning. Raz kept chasing Pierre on previous days, but finally the two cats settled into the living room. As long as Pierre is up high - perched on the back of a chair, or on the back of the couch, or even sitting on the coffee table while Raz is on the floor - he's fine with it. Raz is an awful jumper. He can't even jump up onto the bed. He seems content to box up on the floor the way cats do, folding his front paws in to make a neat little box of himself. He sits there and trills a little song to Pierre, while Pierre glares at him down his regal nose. Then the two just doze off and that's that. No fights, no fuss, no muss.

Raz discovered the couch...

Raz is an odd little cat. He doesn't seem to know how to play. I have a bunch of toys in his room - a stuffed opossum we call Opie for some strange reason, a stuffed chicken with feathers, a toy mouse, a ball. He doesn't play when he's alone. He liked to watch out his windows, and he seems to like to sleep on things I've knitted, which does wonders for my ego. I have a cat bed that I knitted for my old black cat. She hated it. I then tried to entice Pierre into it when he was a kitten. We have one photo of him as a fluffy gray kitten, blue eyes matching the blue of the cat bed, staring up at us. But the next night he refused to sleep in the cat bed.

Raz loves it. I made him a bed in the garage on his first night with us using a cardboard box, the knitted cat bed, and a flannel blanket I'd gotten from the Humane Society as a thank you for a donation made long ago. I made him a nest, and moved the box upstairs to his bedroom. He prefers that box to the fluffy cat bed I bought him at the store. Pierre already snagged the cat bed, but it doesn't matter. Raz prefers his cardboard box and homemade hand-me-downs.

He has a good appetite, he drinks and does all the natural things a cat is supposed to do, but he doesn't seem to know how to play. When he's with me in the office, he does bat around a green toy mouse. But only when he has some company.

He purrs, he enjoys being petted, and he loves Shadow. Shadow is like his big furry mama. She licks him and when he meows inside his room in the morning to let us know he's ready to come out for the day and sun himself on the couch, she lays down outside of his room and watches with worried eyes until she can sniff him and reassure herself he is okay.

And then there were three...

Shadow is really an amazing dog. She already knows the names of the cats - and she herds them. Shepherds them, I guess, since she is a German shepherd. If Pierre is doing something bad, like trying to jump up on to of the television set, I yell, "Shadow. Get Pierre!" And she's off and running, herding him out of the living room and into the dining room away from trouble. If Raz starts sharpening his claws on the couch, we just have to yell, "Raz, NO!" and Shadow bounds into the room. She's gentler with Raz, but she herds him away from the object being destroyed, pushing him with her nose and biting him gently on the back when he disobeys.

Raz returns to the vet hospital this week and I hope he is showing more improvement. In the meantime, I have to rummage through the box of old Christmas stockings in the basement and find one to remake over for the new guy. Santa has to leave him toys, too!

Surprises from the Organic Vegetable Garden

2011-12-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

I love the fall vegetable garden, not just for the abundance, but for the surprises. Just when you think you've harvested everything, along comes a surprise potato...a carrot neglected among the weeds...or the cauliflower, which we thought was nothing but leaves, but which hides fist-sized heads of creamy-colored florets.

Some of the vegetables we left outside on purpose. The parsnips, turnips and carrots were so generous this year that we had absolutely no room for them in the refrigerator. My freezer is packed with pint-sized containers of blanched and frozen carrots. Turnips store fairly well, but we've already put up bags of them in the garage, which is now doubling as a cold-storage room until the spring thaw. So we left them in the ground, figuring that the soil would insulate them for a few weeks longer, and the cool to cold weather would slow their growth rate so that they wouldn't get much bigger.

The red cabbage is slowly forming into heads, and the cauliflower finally allowed us to peek inside the leathery green leaves to find the edible head. The broccoli continues to surprise us; the last stalks left in the garden not only produced another lovely head of broccoli, but it was so tender, so sweet, that even the broccoli haters in the household looked hopeful when I brought the bowl to the table.

Now is also the time for planning. The Parks catalog arrived, and I have already dog-eared several pages, including a page of asparagus for the new asparagus bed we are planting next year, and the sweet potatoes, which will once again have pride of place in the garden. I sat down at the computer over the weekend and mapped out the vegetable beds, printing a blank form so that I can pencil in each variety.

Next year, my goal is not only to share with you the pictures, the progress, but also what I planted, when I planted it, and the yield.

In the meantime, as we start thinking about putting up the Christmas tree and writing out the Christmas cards, the Parks catalog beckons. I wonder if Santa can fit a few seed packets onto his sleigh?

See How They Grow - Measuring the Orchard Trees

2011-12-02T06:04:00.000-08:00

Each year around Thanksgiving we measure the trees in the orchard. When we planted them in late fall 2007 - spring 2008, they were just pitiful sticks with a twist of root (if we were lucky!). They ranged in size from 18" to 2'.

Now three years later, our trees have soared. The tallest tree is Bartlett pear tree that is now over 11 feet tall. We have four pear trees in all - two Bartletts and two Orients. Among the four, three are over 10 feet tall, but one Orient pear remains about 6 feet tall.

The peach trees had quite a growth spurt this year, each one gaining at least two feet or more. Some of the apple trees gained a foot or more in height, but not all.

We keep examining the measurements, the location, and the variety of tree to see a pattern, but none emerges. At first we thought that perhaps the trees in the second row received more sun and thus grew taller, but no - in some cases, the trees closer to the woods, which receive slightly less sunlight than the other trees, grew the fastest.

Water may be a factor, or it may not be. All of the trees receive rain water and obviously, it's about equal, although the orchard is planted on a slight slope. The apple trees are at the top of the slope, then the peach trees, the pears, the plums, cherries and apricot trees. We supplement rainwater with hand-watering during the hottest periods of the summer and in times of drought. Considering the discrepancies among the growth rate of the trees, I'd say it is not really a question of growing conditions, but more a factor of the differences in individual trees themselves. Two trees of the same variety planted side by side, receiving nearly identical soil, fertilizer, sunlight and water can be very different.

Nature never fails to surprise me. The differences among the trees remind me that even plants are individuals, each with unique qualities. Sometimes when I look out across the orchards, the woods or the garden, I see the plants as one big mass of the same; there's my spread of day lilies, the iris, the peonies, the roses, the coneflower, the herbs, the apple trees. Yet when we measure them and inspect each one individually, we note many differences. The trees take on personalities of their own. They are as unique as we are.

The True Miracle

2011-12-01T16:24:00.000-08:00

For a writer, I get strangely tongue-tied (or maybe finger-tied in this age of typing everything on a keyboard) when it comes to describing deep mysteries. One such mystery is how a young man I've never met named Matthew has, inadvertently, deepened my prayer life, made me more sensitive to the suffering of others, and made me consider the awesome power - for good, not for ill - of social media.

It happened like this.

A friend of mine from college named Regina and I reconnected through social media. Regina teaches English and religion. She is funny, witty, and super bright, and I consider her the authority on all things orthodox Catholic. I enjoy following her updates on Facebook. I laugh out loud at her children's antics, her battles with her Weight Watchers leader, her wrestling matches with her mini van with close to 200,000 miles on it.

Then, sometime in September, she invited me into a group called Prayers for Matt.

I've never met Matt. I've never met his parents, Sue or Mike. I don't know his family. I live in southern Virginia, they live in northern Virginia near my friend. Yet suddenly, I'm being asked to pray for a young man admitted to the hospital with ARDS - Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome. You can read about it here.

That was in the fall. I began praying for Matt, a college student I've never met. Because of Regina, I started following his progress updates on Facebook. I invited friends from my church to pray for him. Suddenly, we were over 1,000 people, worldwide, praying for this young man. Young and adult, lay people and nuns and priests and all sorts of folks praying for a miracle for this young man struggling for his life.

We read with growing horror as he was moved from Virginia to Maryland for more care, for better experts on his condition. And I read with a dawning sense of dread last night his mother's last post - that he was declining, quickly.

This morning, Regina posted that he had passed away last night. Despite hundreds of people, countless prayers, countless petitions, he'd died of heart failure last night at age 26.

I was left staring at my computer screen. This isn't supposed to happen.

College students aren't supposed to contract pneumonia, go into ARDS, and die in the ICU. It doesn't happen today, right? But it did.

Someone said to me rather cynically, "So much for prayer." Yet I wonder....

Over the past several months, I have committed to prayer for this young man as I have not done in a long time. I have said a rosary every morning for him; I've prayed during the Eucharist for him. I've thought of him throughout the day, a brief glancing thought that made me remember to say prayers during my day. Whenever I saw a crucifix, I thought of Matt; I thought of his mother when I saw a picture of Mary. She too saw a child die.

When I heard he'd died, I found myself gently singing the new Gloria from the Mass of Creation, the refrain over and over again, "Glory to God in the highest; and peace to all peoples on earth." Wishing peace for Matt, peace for his mother and father and his sisters and brothers. What a Christmas. My heart aches for them all.

Only God knows when each of us will die, and when, and why. Why God decided to make an otherwise healthy 26 year old die like this is not something I'm ever going to know. But I can see how in a strange way he used it in my life to work a miracle, to help me better understand prayer. I got out of my own head and tried to help, albeit in a small way, a family I've never met and may never meet every in my life, because a friend asked me too. It was a simple as that. And my own eyes teared up when I saw his death notices this morning.

How many other people were changed as a result of this?

It would have been great if we'd been granted a miracle and Matt had suddenly risen from his bed, thrown off the life support equipment, and breathed freely. But that wasn't the miracle we were given.

We were given the miracle we needed, not the one we wanted.

The miracle of 1,700+ total strangers come together and offer love freely for a young man some have never met. Of seeing the prayers, the love, the outpouring of spiritual and physical support for his parents?

Is that not a miracle in and of itself?

And They're Off - Seed Catalogs Already Arriving

2011-11-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

I no sooner put down my trowel and store the lawn mower for the season than the seed catalogs begin arriving in my mailbox. It used to be you'd start getting them around Christmas, or maybe New Year's Day. It was fun cozying up on the couch with the pile of seed catalogs while a fire crackled in the hearth and the spouse watched the Jets lose a game on a Sunday afternoon. Now the seed catalogs are vying for space in my mailbox alongside Swiss Colony, Figis, and the usual 1,001 clothing catalogs and office supply catalogs.

The first two to arrive this week were Vermont Bean Seed (which sells more than bean seeds) and Pinetree Garden seeds. Of the two, Pinetree offers a more intriguing array of seeds. They have specialty sections for growing Italian herbs and vegetables as well as special Asian cuisine vegetables. We've been toying with the idea of growing some herbs and vegetables and trying to sell them through the farmer's market or to local restaurants, and if I ever go through with that plan, I'll turn to a catalog like this for my seeds.

I've got a few things circled already. I know I want to try to grow leeks next year. Each year I pick several experimental vegetables to try, and 2012 shall be the year of the leek and the year of the asparagus here at Seven Oaks. We've got a bed already prepared for them, as if they're long awaited house guests. Here's your nice bed of well rotted cow manure and peat - come on down! I'll bring you a hot toddy of compost tea tonight, okay?

I know why the seed companies are rushing the season. But I've barely finished this year's garden, and now they're already enticing me with seeds for 2012!

Because Stories Aren't Stories Until They're Told

2011-11-28T12:44:00.000-08:00

I made a bold decision this month regarding my writing, one which I hope I won't regret. I've gotten so frustrated at not finding markets for some of my fiction and essays that I've decided to self publish them. I've published them on Hub Pages - first my short story, An Ancient Gift, and today, an essay entitled The Fox.

I wrote both stories in the early 1990s. The incident in The Fox actually took place sometime around 1989. I've lost track of how many anthologies, literary magazines, and whatever I've submitted both works to. Sometimes I get back notes saying "Nice but not quite us - try again" or "Keep submitting" - and although I know, based on countless books on writing I've read over the years, that these are meant to be encouraging, at this point I'm just discouraged. Yes, I've had plenty of essays, stories and articles accepted for paid publication, but these two works I felt deep in my heart were good enough to be read by others, but I just couldn't find them a home.

Elizabeth J. Andrew is a writer whose work I admire, and last night I finished reading her book Swinging on a Garden Gate. One thing in the book that really struck me was that she wrote that stories aren't stories until they're told - and that sharing our stories is a gift we give others. She was talking about a pile of manuscripts that she'd lost to a fire, and she mourned their loss because now she could never share them with others. I thought a lot about that last night. It's not as if my works are lost, but aren't they, if they're just sitting on the computer? It's unlikely a new print publication is going to launch and clamor for my type of stories. And I think I've tried every single one in the Writer's Market by now.

I'm tired of having wonderful stories stuck in limbo because there just aren't publications out there these days buying them. Traditional tales, or uplifting essays. It seems as if every short fiction market these days wants people to write like Hemingway or have some sort of vague, quasi literary ending. I hate stories like that. I want to be entertained when I read a story. I don't want to have to reach for my dictionary or pretend I am uber-hip because I get the nihilistic meaning of the deep thinking writer who doesn't punctuate properly. I'm tired of bad art, bad music, and bad writing masquerading as brilliance.

So I have decided to go the way of many...self publishing. I am grateful for the internet. It's really given control of content back to writers. Sure, readers have to find your writing, whether you're penning a blog or a book. But once readers find you, it's up to the READERS whether or not they like you - not one editor making decisions based on profitability.

If you like these works, please leave a comment on their pages on Hub Pages (or here if you prefer). And if you like them, I will share more.

Because a story just isn't a story until it's told...and someone like you is there to read it.

First Sunday of Advent

2011-11-27T06:08:00.000-08:00

I'm barely awake and in less than two hours I'll be joining the choir to sing all the new mass translations. We've been practicing for weeks (pretty much since August) but it is still going to be interesting. For those who are not Catholic, I'm referring to the fact that we begin today with a new translation of the Mass; there have been only four times in the history of the church when this has happened, so it is big news. The congregation's responses and many of the prayers have new words. The Latin remains the same; it's the English translation that is shifting, and hopefully closer to the original meaning. I think of it as sort of a course correction. When the first translations came out, they were very modern and lost some of the beauty of the Latin. Now we are moving back to some of the original syntax. Some of it is quite beautiful. Some if it is just a tongue twister. In any event, it starts today and I'd better wake up soon or I'm going to be stumbling and bumbling, and I'm also supposed to be reading a bit of psalm today too.

In honor of Advent, please enjoy my article on the History, Symbolism and Meaning of the Advent Wreath.

Every time I think about writing this article, I remember an Evangelical Christian family who lived down the block from us when I was growing up. One day, Mrs. W came by to visit my mother. She was a sweet, kind lady, and I could tell by the consternation on her face that something was wrong. "What is it, Mrs. W?"

"Oh, my dear," she said, "if you need another purple candle, I can lend you one."

"What are you talking about, Mrs. W?"

"Well, you have those pretty purple candles in that wreath of yours on the dining room table, but one of them is pink. Shouldn't they all match?"

Nope. And here's why.

The History, Symbolism and Meaning of the Advent Wreath.

Enjoy!

Now for me to WAKE UP and sing the Lord's praises...loudly...maybe on key today?

Christmas Cactus

2011-11-26T10:07:00.000-08:00

If you've nurtured along a Christmas cactus from last year, or you're considering purchasing one to enjoy throughout the holiday season, please read my articles on the care and blooming of these gorgeous holiday plants.

Phaelanopsis Orchid Still Blooming Two Years Later

2011-11-25T08:30:00.000-08:00

Almost two years to the day, and the pink phaelanopsis orchid I purchased in December 2009 continues to bloom without ceasing. It still has the round hole in the middle of the leaf as if someone used a hole punch on it, but every time one stem finishes blooming, another appears. I've had it in my bright, south facing office, but it is actually doing better in the cool east-facing plant room on the first floor. I water it once a week and that is it. Everyone always told me that orchids were fussy, difficult plants. Not this one. If you look very closely at the photo, you can see the beginning of yet another flower stem appearing under the old one. I love this flowering houseplant and for a $2 bargain plant from the sale rack at Lowe's, it has been a wonderful houseplant!

I hope your Thanksgiving was great. I spent the day curled up in the living room recliner reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I loved it and recommend it if you are looking for a good novel with very engaging, real characters. I like books like this but they are so hard to find. The last book I read that was similar to this in how I was drawn into the characters was John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meaney, an older book that I checked out of the library in August. After reading how the author struggled to get The Help published (I think I read that she received 65 rejections before an acceptance for publication, and she spent over five years working on it) I am feeling bolder about my own literary efforts. I write for a living, but writing sales and marketing copy and informative non fiction is so different from writing fiction and creative non fiction. I want to write a story that makes a difference but I lose heart so easily. When I read about other authors' struggles, I feel better and not so alone. It makes me realize that writing rarely comes easily for anyone - and that for most of us, writing something of quality takes work.

So today is is back to work, albeit with some breaks in the schedule to finish planting bulbs. I still have over 100 daffodils left in the garage that must get into the ground over the next week before the ground finally freezes solid. I tackled planting the tulip bulbs yesterday - 50 "Easter Joy" mixed pastels to add to the pink pastel tulips in the backyard planted near the deck (to avoid deer.) Luckily for us, the weather looks like it will hold out and remain warm and sunny during the day, so I can get out there and get a few more bulbs in each day!

Raz got his sutures out this Wednesday and his infected leg healed up fine. He's very full of himself now that he has gained some weight. He was screaming to get out of his bedroom this morning and go for his daily excursion around the house! I gave him a green stuffed mouse to play with and boy, he must be a great hunter of real mice. He really played with that thing until I thought he would pop it the way Shadow does with the stuffed mice. She likes nothing better than stealing the cat toys and giving them one gigantic CHOMP in her massive German shepherd jaws, then dropping the remains of the popped mouse toy in front of the cats as if to say innocently, "What? I was just helping you!"

"Get away from my new toy, dog."


"What? I'm not supposed to pop the cat toys?"

Master Gardener Program

2011-11-21T13:01:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note today to share some good news. I received my letter stating that I have been accepted into the Virginia Master Gardener program. I start classes in January, and through May, will be learning all sorts of interesting things. I am very excited and can't wait to share what I am leaning with you!

Broccoli and Cabbage from the Organic Vegetable Garden

2011-11-19T06:47:00.000-08:00

We picked the last of the broccoli and cabbage from the organic vegetable garden this past Thursday. Broccoli grown without any chemicals, without any pesticides, and left until after a frost or two has touched it is an incredible taste experience. It's sweet. I know that's hard to believe, especially for you broccoli haters out there (and you're numbers are legion.) But it's true. Even my husband and his dad, who really don't like broccoli that much, perk up when they see me bring the bowl to the table now.

"Is that garden stuff or store stuff?" they ask me, spoon poised midway between bowl and plate with one lonely floret perched aboard.

"Garden."

"Good." The spoon dips faster and faster into the bowl, and a big pile of broccoli moves onto the plate.

Organic cabbage, nearly perfect.

The cabbage this year was an interesting experiment. One beautiful head (shown here) is nearly perfect, without insect marks, blemish or issues. It's a tight head of cabbage, crunchy and sweet. We have red cabbage growing too but it hasn't made a head yet. I don't know much about red cabbage and this is the first year that I am growing it, so I have left it alone. If it doesn't do anything over the next few weeks I will harvest what we have and cook it to see what it tastes like.

We picked buckets more of turnips, beautiful globes with just the right tint of regal purple near the top like trim on a king's robes, and parsnips, long and gnarly, all resting in buckets in the garage. Since the garage is chillier than the basement right now, we're just storing them there until it gets below freezing consistently. Then we will move them to the basement area where I've stored the potatoes.

Foreground; carrots and parsnip. In the background: turnips and second sowing of carrots.

Late harvest: broccoli, cabbage, and a surprise find of dill that self seeded among the parsnips.

This year's gardening experiment were wonderful and helped me learn even more about what to grow. We're busy planning for next year's vegetable garden. The herbs are going to be dug up and moved out into the unprotected portion of the yard - the space not fenced in. They're really taking up a valuable garden bed, and we moved the mint without any issue. There's plenty now growing along the edge of the woods at the bottom of the orchard for our needs. The oregano will meet a similar fate. It also grows like a weed, so come spring I will move the oregano, the remaining catnip plant, the sage and the lemon balm out of the valuable raised bed and into the open area. If the deer nibble it, so be it.

Next, we hope to add an asparagus bed. I want an entire bed of asparagus. If I get a pressure canning device, I will continue to grow green beans. I'm not going to grow the heirloom beans. They really weren't all that wonderful and the production was below expectations. I will grow sweet potatoes again, and onions and I want to try leeks. I think the asparagus and leeks are going to be my big 'experiments' for 2012, but when the Parks and Burpee catalogs come in a few weeks.....I'll probably be enticed by something else.

To anyone reading this who is thinking about trying to grow organic vegetables - do it. Don't wait and don't think you have to know everything. One of my pet peeves is that most gardening books make organic gardening seem like something esoteric, something difficult. They make it sound like you have to have a Ph.D. in chemistry and work all day long in the garden to get a single carrot. Not so! Nature intended plants to grow organically! If you're just growing vegetables for your family, grow them organic. So what if a bug or two nibbles it? You don't need the vegetables to live on - you're growing them to have fun, to supplement what you buy from the store. So do it. Don't wait. Grow your garden in 2012!


Rain drops on red cabbage leaves. Nature creates beauty wherever I look.

The Snake Poking Stick

2011-11-17T16:29:00.000-08:00

Married couples develop their own lexicon which grows into strange forms the longer the couple is married. In our family, we have odd names for tools. "Thongs" are kitchen tongs, those metal things you use to pull ears of corn from boiling water. My mother-in-law, rest her soul, christened them "thongs" because she couldn't say "tongs." She also couldn't pronounce "pumpkin" so they became "punn kings." My in-laws also "shut the light" instead of "turn off the lights." If I had known I needed to learn a foreign language to enter this family, I would have asked for a dictionary during our engagement...

I always thought that inventing words was limited to children and an odd thing for adults to do until I realized that John and I are now inventing our own Grunertese, a language purely our own.

Take this small hand-rake. It's an 80-year old garden tool with a splintery handle. I wanted to throw it out when we were packing for our big move from New York to Virginia, but there was such a hue and cry that it made its way into the garage-bound box. I'm glad it did.

I didn't know that the old rake, with the handle dissolving into a mass of splinters and shaky, rusty tines is over 80 years old. I also didn't know - but should have realized - how important it was to my husband and father in law.

During the spring and summer, we were busy smoothing and finishing the pathways through the flower garden. John would say in our unique lexicon, "Get the snake-poking stick" which meant, "Please bring the short-handled rake and the long garden hoe with the tines into the garden; I need to move more flat slates from the pile." Before moving any of the slates piled on the pallet, one of us would use either the long-handled rake or the short-handled rake and flip the stones over. Several times, snakes slithered out and into the garden. Nearly every time, we uncovered plump, shiny, deadly black widow spiders. It's never a good idea around here to reach into a pile of stones with your bare hands.

So I was frustrated when John kept asking me this fall where the rake was. "Which rake?" I asked, pointing to the rows of rakes neatly hanging from the garage wall. It's fall, after all, and I keep thinking he wants the leaf rake, although raking leaves on a tree farm is like emptying the ocean with a thimble. But maybe he wanted to rake up a bit of the lawn and reseed.

"No, no," he says. "The short rake! The short rake!"

I haven't got a clue what he is referring to. Which short rake? I gesture towards hoes, pointed and flat; garden forks and spades; leaf rakes with large sweeps and short ones; and at last he gives up, stomping away to search the shed.

Weeks pass and every once in a while, he asks me if the short-handled rake has turned up. "No," I keep saying, still uncertain of which tool he's looking for or why it's so important to him.

We decided to take a walk in the flower garden on Monday. We stopped to admire the wisteria, which we patiently trained to climb the trees at the rear of the garden. Suddenly, John spies something at the back of the garden. "The short handled rake!" he shouts, rescuing it. The fallen leaves from the bushes have exposed the 80 year old short-handled rake. It's a mess. The handle has a case of rot and the tines are rusty all over.

"Oh!" I say without thinking. "You mean the snake poking stick!"

He held it in his hands, carefully examining the metal for rust. Slowly, he began to tell me about Nana and how she weeded her vegetable bed with it. He remembered his father weeding the pachysandra, his mother using it to scratch a few flowers into the dirt beds under the azaleas. I began to see through his eyes the misty glimmer of the past. He was right. It wasn't just a rake. It had a life of its own. It began as a rake, but in Nana's hands, it was a warm sunny day of helping his beloved Grandma. It was a memory of his much-missed mother. It was a memory of times when his father was young, and no one gave any thought to kneeling on the cold March earth all afternoon to weed pachysandra.

The short-handled rake - aka, the snake poking stick - turned up today on my little bench in the kitchen where I place my gardening gloves and other things that need to move from house to garage, shed or garden. There it is. I had to photograph it for you. The handle has a fresh new coat of hunter green paint, the tines, bright Christmas red.

"There," John said with satisfaction. "Now with all that red, we CAN'T lose it!"

Well, no, we can't lose it. Because it has moved through 80 years of time into my hands now, creating memories of...poking snakes.

Living with Feline Leukemia

2011-11-15T16:10:00.000-08:00

We brought Raz to the veterinary hospital last Thursday, and after discovering his infected leg and thriving ear mite colony ("Want to see the party?" Reinette, the vet assistant quipped. "Really, these guys are having quite the party in there.") she took the requisite blood samples and disappeared into the back of the veterinary hospital to conduct his feline AIDS and feline leukemia tests. When Dr. M emerged from the back room, she was brisk and to the point.

"There's good news and there's bad news," she said. "The good news is that Raz doesn't have feline AIDS. The bad news is that he tested positive for feline leukemia."

"What?" we quickly exclaimed. We both looked at each other, very grateful we'd kept little Raz in the garage away from Pierre. "What does it mean?"

I had always heard that feline leukemia is a death sentence. That even touching or petting a cat with feline leukemia might mean that a healthy cat, if touched or petted afterwards, might contract the disease.

But Dr.M was quick to dispel those rumors. First of all, Raz was probably in the early stages of the disease. Her best guess is that the bites on his legs were the results of a fight with another cat, probably the one who infected him. Bites, she said, were the number one way to spread feline leukemia.

Our number one concern was for Pierre, however. "What about Pierre?" I kept asking. "What does this mean? Can we keep Raz?"

It was so confusing! Dr M thought the two cats, as long as they got along and didn't fight, would be fine together. She gave me some websites and pamphlets. She seemed more concerned with how communicable the ear mites were than with the feline leukemia. I had no idea what to expect, except that Raz now had a shortened life expectancy. Four years, maybe more, was her best guess. I kept looking at the scrawny ginger tom and wondering what we'd gotten ourselves in for.

When we got home, a search of the internet turned up all sorts of conflicting information. The only thing Dr M had warned us about was allowing Pierre and Raz to drink from the same bowl or share a food bowl. She advised us to keep their feed and water, as well as their litter boxes, strictly separate. I put a check mark next to that in my head: can do. Pierre has his food and litter box in the bathroom connected to my office. We moved Raz into the spare bedroom along with his box, food and water. Easy enough to keep them separate for the time being. But why did so many website warn us about not even allowing them to share toys? What about mutual grooming - would that make Pierre sick? And one website said to keep the cats strictly quarantined at all times and even take your shoes off when you walk into the infected kitty's room, so as to keep the virus away from the well cat! I couldn't believe the crazy diversity of information online.

Worse, although we'd spent plenty of money having Pierre vaccinated, now I learn that the vaccine isn't 100% effective. Some websites have it at 75% and others at 95% with the chances of it imparting immunity rising the older, the healthier the cat is....and as I look at pudgy Pierre, I see a picture of glowing health.

So what was the story? On Friday and Saturday of last week, Raz slept in his cat bed in the spare bedroom. We went in to visit him and were very strict with allowing him only in two rooms - the bedroom and the office. I worried myself sick the first night we had him here. Last Thursday, I was up until 1 a.m. worrying about Raz. Would I have to have him put to sleep now? Would my selfishness in keeping Raz make Pierre sick?

One of the best parts about living in a small town is that you know everyone, and you either run into them at Wal-Mart or church or maybe both in a given week. It's a fact of life; after church or after checking out at Wal Mart, I have run into my neighbors, our veterinarian, our business attorney and our accountant. The veterinary assistant sings with me in choir and usually sits a few seats away in church. So I asked her before mass if she would mind answering a few questions.

After mass, we talked for at least 15 minutes. "I'm so confused," I said. "Dr M seemed to think Raz and Pierre could live perfectly fine together, and yet the websites she sent us to [she gave me some she thought might be useful] all made it sound like a grim prognosis and we shouldn't even bother with Raz. I just don't want to put Pierre at risk!"

We talked for a good long while and she helped me sort out all the facts. Basically, they thought it was fine that Raz and Pierre walked on the same floor, across the same carpet, and around the house (Raz is on my desk now, leaning over and watching me type with great interest, while Pierre is downstairs watching television with John.) As long as the two don't continually share water, food and litter boxes, Pierre should be fine. And even if by some chance Pierre is exposed to the virus, he has been vaccinated, which gives him better than average - much better than average - chance of fighting it off.

Here's the clincher. Raz may actually be able to fight this thing off [he is whacking the computer screen now as I type....apparently my fast typing amuses him....]. If he was recently infected, the best thing we could have done was take him in front the cold, give him food, shelter and a warm bed, and get that infected leg cleaned up.

He may actually be able to neutralize the virus of his own accord.

According to my own research, he has about a 30% chance of neutralizing the virus. About another third of cats infected with this virus live four years or so and then succumb to cancer (hence the name, feline leukemia.) I can live with that. For those four years, he will be happy. Loved. And alive.

The rest of the cats with this thing get sick very quickly and must be euthanized.

So the question is this: can I live with this? Can I love - knowing that my love might be lost? Can I nurture this creature, all the while knowing my nurturing might be in vain?

I look at him now. He's on my desk, grooming himself. He is alive. He is warm. He is comfortable. He has friends. Tonight, he ate some of John's pork chop, carefully diced up. He has gained weight. The bandage on his leg fell off sometime overnight, and his sutures are clean, dry and no longer oozing and infected. He glows with health. He purrs. He bites my computer monitor.

God answers our prayers in ways unexpected and sublime. For months since this summer, I have followed St. Frances de Sales Instructions for the Devout Life. I have prayed the Salesian prayer each morning and my 12 step prayer - two prayers awfully potent. The 12-step: "Thy will and not mine, O Lord, be done." The Salesian prayer, dating from around 1600 or so: "Let thy will be done today Lord. Let all that is good happen for your glory, and all that is ill make me more conformed to your will" or something akin to that. And both I have meant.

Last Tuesday evening, a scrawny ginger tom with an infected leg and all sorts of medical needs followed us home. He made himself known: MEOW. He demanded love and affection, he needed medical care and food. And he found the home probably best suited for it - three adults, all of us home during the day, more importantly, a home with the room and space to keep an infected kitty away from a non infected one. A sunny, bright, airy bedroom with a door that closes to keep him safe and warm and comfy, and keep the other cat safe too.

Nobody knows for sure what feline leukemia can do...or not do. One thing that is important for anyone reading this to know is that just because my vet said one thing that does NOT mean it is the right thing for you or anyone else. Please consult your own veterinarian. Everyone's case is different. The virus cannot be transmitted to people or dogs, so we are all fine, as is Shadow. It's just pudgy Pierre I worry about.

I went online over the weekend as we still struggled with whether or not to keep Raz, and if not keep him, what to do with him. I searched for a shelter for feline leukemia cats and found some in other states, but none in Virginia. Here's why. The ASPCA estimates that in Virginia, 13 million puppies and kittens are born every year. Of those 13 million, 8 million are euthanized...for no other reason than that they are no homes for them.

I look at Raz. He did not ask to be born. Someone let his parents breed. Someone did not spay his mother or neuter his father. Someown thought it was okay to let kittens roam the neighborhood. He is not neutered right now (he will be in about two weeks.) If he were on the street now, how many other cats could he infect with feline leukemia? How many kittens would he father if he were left on his own?

I wonder how much poverty has to do with the boom in kittens like Raz, or ignorance. Believe me, I know how expensive pets can be....I have Raz's initial vet bills to prove how expensive good veterinary care is (and I don't begrudge the wonderful people at our animal hospital one penny, but it is expensive.) We are stretching ourselves to cover Raz's bills and I'm eying my horse model collection now, thinking of whether or not I will have to sell some of them to cover his veterinary care at some point.

But Raz has made me stretch in other ways. He's opened my eyes. Not just to the puppy and kitten boom in the state, not just to the pressing need for help for these innocent animals, but also...for people. For the elderly neighbors we stopped by to see if they were missing a cat who were so lonely, so awfully lonely. I never knew who lived in some of these houses and now I know. I cannot forget them and I won't. God has used Raz to make me aware of a few elderly people on the block who now I tell John I must look after...even just to visit....check in on them....

God used Raz to open the door to love. I need that. I am not very good at reaching out to other people. I have a hard shell around me, brittle, from years of all sorts of crap. Raz made me reach out, knock on doors, meet people, see the hope in their eyes. I cannot forget some of them.

They need me, too.

God used Raz to melt a little of the brittle shell.

Raz has made me aware already of the gift of love, and how we are all finite creatures. He is teaching me to love unconditionally. He is teaching me patience and how to help in matters small....so that maybe, matters great may be affected.

I cannot euthanize him just for being a virus carrier, just because a blood test says he has an incurable virus. I cannot. He did not ask to be homeless, he did not ask to be infected. He just asks to be loved.

I can give him that. And I can give him a safe, warm environment to enjoy while he lives, and keep Pierre separate and safe too. With our good vet's instructions and healthy food and good care, I trust in the future. And I love.

And that is why I think God put Raz into our lives.

To teach us more about love.

***

Feline leukemia is a controversial subject. Please consult with your pet's veterinarian with any questions. This blog is not meant to substitute for professional advice, and what I share is my personal opinion. I am not an expert on medical or veterinary facts. Listen to your veterinarian's advice - and follow it when it comes to your pet's health.

A New Resident at Seven Oaks

2011-11-13T11:58:00.000-08:00

This past Tuesday evening, John and I walked Shadow along our country road just before suppertime. Across from our wooded tract is a large cattle operation - hundreds of acres I'm guessing, long, rolling hills of grass dotted with copses of trees. There are no houses for miles except for my neighbor Janelle and three houses on a dead end road as our road bends sharply to the left. There's a farm lane leading into the cattle field where dogwoods stand sentinel and a gate prevents livestock from becoming more neighborly. Now this lane is about a mile from our home, give our take.

As we neared the lane, we suddenly heard a very loud cry coming from the farm lane. Shadow immediately began barking at the bushes. We heard the cry again, only this time it was recognizable

"MEOW!"

My husband walked over to the bushes while I took Shadow to the other side of the road so that the kitty wouldn't be scared. We thought it might be Louie, a black and white cat who lives on the dead end road. Instead, a scrawny ginger tom marched out from the drainpipe under the bushes, a culvert for water run off. He must have been hiding inside the pipe, which amplified his "meow!" to epic proportions.

"Hello, little fellow," I heard my husband say, and the ginger tom bobbed his hand in a friendly how-do-you do.

I could count every rib on this young fellow's sides, and his ears were crusted with dirt. He limped a little, stumbling with ever few steps and favoring his front right leg.

"John," I said, "try to get him to follow you home while I walk Shadow the other way."

The scrawny ginger tom marched along behind my husband, fluffy tail held high. By the we all got home, the orange creamsicle kitty was in the garage and my husband had already given him a handful of Pierre's Friskies.

"What do we do with him?"

The million dollar question. We knew that the houses on either side of us do not have cats - Janelle has a dog, Cindy and Mark on the other side have dogs. We have new neighbors who have a dog and a cat, but I know they have an adult gray tabby. I've seen him on their front porch. There's one house down the block where an elderly lady is always outside with a dachshund and about a dozen cats of various sizes, shapes and colors following her about, so I thought the orange tom might belong to her.

Since it was going down into the 20s that night and he seemed to be starving, we agreed to keep him in the garage and away from the other animals. John worried silently about rabies while I worried about other cat diseases, and we both forgot all about the potential for fleas. Thankfully common sense prevailed and the orange tom was given Pierre's extra litter box, a bowl of water and food, and cat bed made from an old cardboard box, a towel, and a cat bed I'd knitted for my first cat.

Two cats had already tested the lovingly hand-knit cat bed and found it disdainful. My first cat wouldn't even deign to lay on it. Pierre slept on it his first night here, then after that acted like it was foul and refused to go near it.

The orange tom took one look at it, happily kneaded it with his paws, and settled right into his cardboard box bed.

The next day, I brought him around to all the neighbors we could find for as far as we thought this little cat could walk. We looked for lost cat signs, we looked in the newspaper and the radio station's lost and found pets, and nothing - nobody seemed to know where he belonged.

My new friend down the road, the lady who feeds all the cats, said he sounded like one of the strays another neighbor had been feeding. As I left her house, I saw another ginger - this guy's spitting image and probably the same age - along with two others and a calico. She said they'd all appeared around the same time. One had already gotten hit by a car. The others were being fed by her, but she asked me if I could take another one.

It was the same story at the farms we stopped at. One man looked at the orange tom in the cat carrier and said, "He's probably been dumped here. Happens all the time." He and the man working with him who had stopped to talk to us in a field said how they'd found puppies and kittens many times on the farm. It seems to be rampant. People get kittens and puppies, play with them while they are cute, then dump them on farms in the stupid belief that the animals will somehow "fend for themselves."

Let me tell you what "fend for themselves" means. The next day, we made an appointment for the tom with our veterinarian. The cat lived in the garage for a few more days out of the elements, eating and resting. We got him to the vet to discover the gimpy leg was cut badly and infected; he needed antibiotics and sutures. He needed vaccinations and medications, and he has some medical issues that will be with him his whole life - all of which could have been prevented if he'd been properly cared for and not dumped out on the road.

Do I know for sure he was dumped? No. But he's friendly - super friendly. He's no feral cat. He's not at all scared to be inside a house. He seems to crave human and canine company, for that matter.

Shadow fell in love with him. Orange tom has been named Raz, and Raz will be living in our guest bedroom and acting as our new catly writer in residence with me in the office during the day. Pierre has been curious about the newcomer but not aggressive. Given Raz's injured leg, which needs time to heal, and some communicable medical things which also need time away from Pierre, he's going to be separate from the other cat for a while, but it can all be managed.

Raz is happily sitting on the windowsill in my office right now, watching the birds in the orchard trees. He's got stitches in his leg and medicine in his ears. He's figured out how to open the bag of cat treats in the office (which I now have to hide in the drawer) and he's figured out the sun spots here already. Shadow, for her part, thinks Raz is her new puppy. She licks him, cuddles him, plays with him. When we can let him roam the house (while Pierre is contained elsewhere), Shadow herds him gently along. Yes, you can herd cats - if you are a German shepherd.

So we have a new resident here at Seven Oaks. His name is Raz. His guestimate birthday is February, and he like listening to Rachmaninoff and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass in my office while I work. He can type "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" on the computer, thus proving he is a genius. He is probably going to put me in the poorhouse, but I think I will go broke happily.

Oh, and the first night in the garage before we made him his little warm cardboard box retreat?

I found him curled up on the shelf...wrapped around a statue of St. Francis of Assisi I had taken in for the winter.

It was as if Raz knew he'd found a forever home.

First Harvest of Parsnips

2011-11-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

Last night for Sunday dinner, I made a roast chicken and three vegetables from the garden - fresh baked potatoes, broccoli, and parsnips. Parsnips are a new vegetable for my family. Many years ago, I bought some at the store - a small bag, about 1 pound, for $2.99. I made a recipe out of Cooking Light. My family made faces and complained about the bitter taste. I figured that parsnips were one of those vegetables they just didn't like, and to tell you the truth, I didn't much like them either.

A short while after my failed parsnip experiment, I was away on a business trip at a large conference. It was one of those conferences where dinner is served in a hotel ballroom at round tables seating exactly 8 people. Everyone orders the rubber chicken, the burned steak, or the soggy fish, although of course they don't call it that. I ordered the rubber chicken and out it came from the kitchen served with whipped mashed potatoes and parsnips. The best part of that meal (aside from the chocolate cups filled with vanilla cream as the desert) were the parsnips. The chef had cut them into matchsticks and sauteed them in butter. They were crunchy and sweet, with just a hint of zip. I fell in love. I could easily have eaten an entire plate of just the parsnips and skipped the bouncy chewy chicken.

Reading about their growth and cultivation, I decided to grow them here at Seven Oaks this past year as part of my annual vegetable gardening experiments. Each year I choose a few new vegetables to try: this year, the experiment include horseradish (still underway), heirloom beans (not worth the effort), potatoes (lots of work but valuable) and parsnips. Among the experiments, the parsnips were the very last to harvest, but worth the wait.

Parsnips always conjure up a musty image in my mind of a Victorian grandmotherly type in a long gray dress in a dusty house while a Victrola plays somewhere in the background. They really aren't in fashion, are they? Kind of like the humble turnip, or a cabbage. Perhaps in the south they are more popular than in the north where I grew up, but they do have that fussy-mussy, old fashioned aura about them. Which is a shame, because not only do they taste good, they're good for you, and at least for me, they were easy to grow.

First off, parsnips need a long growing season. Depending on the variety, that's over 100 days, sometimes 120 days or more. I planted the seeds in April and haven't touched them since. Every book and article I have read on growing parsnips states that you must leave them in the ground until the first frost; the frost transforms the root starches into sugars and makes them sweeter.

The first frosts occurred the last week of October, but we haven't had a meal where parsnips seemed like a tasty side dish - until last night. I made the roast chicken, baked a few garden potatoes, and steamed some fresh garden broccoli as the side dish. Then I pulled out my favorite cookbook out all, the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, which provides how to information to cook all the basic vegetables, along with a few recipes to make them interesting. It was from Fanny Farmer that I learned how to cook beets and make Harvard beets, and once again the cookbook did not disappoint me on the parsnips. Peeled, sliced, and boiled; then sauteed with butter, salt and pepper. I gave each family member a little spoonful but only told my husband what they were. If I serve him mystery food he gets annoyed with me.

The consensus was that they were delicious, and they were! The consistency was something between a potato and a carrot. The first taste was a bit like a potato too, with an aftertaste like carrots, but with a hint of something spicy there too.

According to my research, parsnips are actually related to carrots. One thing of interest is that the ancient Greeks and Romans liked them a lot! Supposedly the foliage can exude a chemical that can burn the skin. Since I always garden wearing gloves, that's not a problem, but the books recommend harvesting them carefully while wearing long-sleeved clothing and gloves.

I looked up parsnips last night and found that they are very good for you; high in fiber, potassium and vitamin C. Given that they required no cultivation whatsoever, and weren't bothered by a single insect pest, I will probably plant a few again next year. All I did was sow the seeds, thin them out a little, and nature did the rest. What can be easier?

Parsnips - one experiment that worked this year!

Beware the Gardening Expert, Because We're All Gardening Experts

2011-11-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

Water on cauliflower leaf in my garden

Beware the gardening expert, because in truth, we're all gardening experts - and perpetual learners.

I just finished participating in an interview for Hobby Farms magazine on seed starting. I don't know which, if any, of the information I shared from my personal experience will appear in the magazine. But it felt rather odd to be interviewed for Hobby Farms. I first subscribed to that publication over a decade ago. I found a copy of the magazine on a newsstand in Penn Station one evening while waiting for my train; of all the places to find a hobby farming magazine, I'd put Penn Station in New York City dead last on the list, but there it was.

Hobby Farms fueled my dreams for owning my own hobby farm someday. Here I am today, being interviewed for the same publication that inspired my own dreams of living in the country. God has a great sense of humor; I always sense loving irony in the universe. I've written personal essays where I've described "my life always comes full circle" and here's another example of that - the magazine that fueled my dream is now asking me to comment so I can fuel others' dreams. I shake my head in wonder and mingled fear. How did I suddenly become quotable? Does this mean I have to hide the dead plants when the neighbors come to visit?

I think that all gardeners are both experts and perpetual novices. For everything you learn, you discover there are a 100 new things to learn. Gardening is one of those things you just sort of learn by doing. I learn more from my mistakes than anything else. For example, my potato mistake. I never grew potatoes before; this year, I've harvested not one but two crops. John dug up another 20 pounds or so this past week. Although I thought I'd harvested all of them back in July, clearly I missed some little spuds, and they decided they knew better than me and flourished, producing a bumper crop. I got some tips from my neighbor Mel, who gave me the original batch of seed potatoes, a bag of sulfur, and some advice, but it's really been trial and error. I have a feeling I'm going to be digging potatoes from that bed for a long time to come.

The first year I moved to Virginia I read in some 'expert' book that cabbage could be planted in the spring here, so I raced around planting cabbage, broccoli and all the fall crops I knew from Long Island. Talk about a disaster. Well, it was a disaster for me but not for the cabbage moths, who really feasted on the sudden early spring growth of their favorite plant. I think I supplied the whole moth larvae population of south central Virginia with food that year. I remember picking a head of cabbage and dumping it in the sink, only to pick little yellow worms out of it. Eeew!

This year, I did the smart thing; I talked to neighbors and asked them when they planted their cabbage and broccoli. I asked one local fellow whose family has farmed these parts since the late 1700s. Now if he doesn't know the answer, nobody will. He said plant it in the fall. I've got beautiful heads of cabbage and broccoli ready to eat out in the garden now, and probably some annoyed insects, but tough luck - we'll eat the cabbage, thank you!

No matter what I grow, I'm always growing. Experience teaches us gardening; we garden writers and teachers just transmit the knowledge.

Checklist for Easy Fall Garden Clean Up

2011-11-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

I just wrote this article today on Fall Garden Clean Up, providing readers with a checklist of 10 points to cover when they're cleaning up around the garden and preparing the garden for the winter. I'll a little behind this year on my own gardening tasks - we're still weeding, pruning and mulching the fruit orchard trees and planting our annual 300+ daffodils out there. I've started pulling up dead vegetable and annual flowers, and trimming back some of the perennials, but I have a feeling I'm going to be out there working until it snows! The early frost sure took a toll on the garden and got me all off-kilter.

However, I will use my own checklist to make sure I cover the important stuff.

Read the article here: Fall Garden Clean Up Checklist

What Ever Happened to Halloween?

2011-10-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

So what ever happened to Halloween? Is it because I grew up, or Halloween grew up too? My memories of Halloween are filled with homemade fun. Costumes were pulled together from the box of Good Will cast offs in the attic awaiting drop off at the charity shop, bits and pieces of things found around the house and sometimes raiding Grandma's costume jewelry. Our favorite costume that was easy to pull together year after year was the Old Lady; we'd wear one of my grandmother's old polyester dresses, put on chunky black shoes, carry a big black purse (and something to stash the candy, of course), and don an ugly acrylic gray wig purchased from Grand Value, my home town's answer to Dollar Tree. Sometimes if we had a bit of loose pocket change we'd invest in one of those corny makeup kits and add moles or wrinkles that made us look like we had leprosy. Actually, if we were more creative, I suppose we could have been old lady lepers or zombies...

The most 'commercial' costumes ever got were those boxed costumes with the ugly plastic masks. Remember those? You got a shiny plastic costume and a mask. I remember a whole wall of those boxed costumes at Grand Value. I always wanted to buy one, but they were too expensive.

Parties didn't involve bounce castles, fancy games, laser lights shows and treat bags for all. My older sister paid for our party out of her babysitting and later her work money. She would make a pinata by blowing up a balloon and covering it with paper machine; crepe paper layers transformed the newspaper-coated sphere into a pumpkin pinata. She got the idea from library books. From September onwards, each week when we got our allowance, we'd jog up to Grand Value and buy candy for the pinata, or cardboard Halloween decorations, or packages of black and orange construction paper. I'd make paper chains to hang from the ceiling of the basement play room. The year we got fancy we bought ghost and pumpkin candles.

One of my childhood Halloween parties....you can see a bit of the old paper chain in the upper right!

Bobbing for apples

There was bobbing for apples using my mother's big green Tupperware bowl, and lots of chips and dip; and candy and caramel apples, and popcorn balls. There was a limbo contest using a mop handle for the limbo stick, musical chairs, bobbing for apples and the pinata.

A good haul when trick or treating meant chocolate - real, honest to goodness Hershey's chocolate, M&Ms, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Mounds and Almond Joy bars. Colorful bags with a Dum Dum pop, five pennies, and a few pieces of gum. Usually the old bachelors on the block dumped quarters and pennies into our bag. One old lady still gave out apples, which my mother made us throw away.

I don't know about you, but the Halloween decorations, costumes and whatnot were out and on the shelves around here in August - and this area doesn't celebrate Halloween all that much. You can't go trick or treating on our block; you'd have to walk a mile to the next farm to get one small candy bar. The kids trick or treat in town or go to parties and such. There were commercials on television showing all sorts of fantastical costumes that looked like they belong in a theater company. We actually got a Halloween catalog here that sold nothing but adult sized costumes for $200 and up, realistic looking tombstones, spiders, mummies and zombies to deck out your house. Amazing.

I don't begrudge anyone some innocent fun, but the older I get, the more I yearn for the old construction-paper-chain and bobbing for apples days. There was something so wonderfully spontaneous and creative, joyful and innocent, in it all.

Happy Halloween!

Saying Goodbye to the Summer Vegetable Garden

2011-10-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

Last night, I raced out with my huge steel bowl in hand to pick as many peppers and other hot-weather veggies as I could. As predicted, today we got a humdinger of a storm, with temps only reaching the mid 40s all day today and sleet pattering on the roof on and off. This is very unusual for southern Virginia - we usually don't see sleet or freezing rain until November, December most years. I even turned the heater on in my office while I worked today. Ah, the smell of hot dust....a-choo!

But last night I indulged in a pleasant end of summer ritual. I made a Caprese salad. Thinly sliced tomatoes arranged in a pinwheel on the plate, interspersed with fresh basil leaves and a sprinkle of low fat mozzarella cheese, then drizzled with extra virgin olive oil. I poured a small glass of wine and sat at the kitchen table, my gaze lingering over the vegetable garden about 30 feet away. I raised my glass. Salut, I thought, and thank you for the bounty of vegetables. This was probably the best year ever for the veggie garden. Each year I learn more and more, and each year I harvest more from the garden.

Thank you, I said mentally, and dug in.

The taste of summer. I'll miss you.

Second Place Feels Like a Winner to Me!

2011-10-24T09:08:00.000-07:00

So....does anyone remember how I was terrified to can my first jars of garden produce?

How I was afraid I'd poison my whole family....picturing them writhing on the floor in the throes of botulism poisoning....

Bravely channeling the spirit of my Grandma Rudmann, born and raised on a farm in the valleys of southern Germany, armed only with The Ball Complete Book of Home Food Preservation and Preserving the Harvest, my husband's grandmother's speckled canning pot and a shiny new utensil box set from Walmart, I proceeded to can two jars of peppers, several jars of pears, and two jars of pear butter.

And my family liked it. They ate it. They actually asked for more.

My first canning project, 2009

This is year three. I am proud to share with you that two of my canned produce items, my pickled beets and pickled peppers, took second place ribbons each at the Five County Fair. (The rainbow-colored ribbons go to all participants - it's like saying, "thanks for being brave enough to show off your stuff.")

I couldn't wait to show my husband my ribbons when I got home from picking up my items on Sunday.

It was the end to a perfect fall weekend. I couldn't help but think of my dad. I spent many brisk October weekends as a child at the Long Island Chrysanthemum Society Shows at Farmingdale Community College. I remember helping him pack up all his ribbon cards and the occasional bright silver trophy or two.

Placing my little jars on the counter with their ribbons put a big, goofy smile on my face. I did it.

I came, I saw...I canned!

Five years ago I was working in a cubicle farm at 2 Penn Plaza, a gigantic office building right over Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, in New York City. I was bored, stressed and overworked. I was tired of the rat race. I yearned to write again but every day was a drag. By the time I came home at night, I was so tired that I couldn't imagine doing anything creative. My garden consisted of several shady beds in my in-laws garden since we didn't even own our own home; we rented rooms from my in laws. To say that I was unhappy with my life was an understatement.

But there was light at the end of the tunnel. We'd found the perfect land in south central Virginia in 2005. It was so covered with pine trees and brush that my husband kept asking doubtfully, "Are you sure about this?" And as I looked around, a little voice inside of me said, "This is the place." I was sure as sure could be.

We bought the 17 acres and had three cleared. We built our dream house. My elderly father in law moved with us. My husband helped me build a fenced in vegetable garden; 10 raised beds, a nice stout fence around it, a shed we painted to look like a country cottage. The steep area next to the driveway that he felt he couldn't mow safely with the riding mower I transformed into a blowsy, "wild" flower garden as my friend Ilsa called it when she came by last week for the book group meeting, with winding stone and gravel paths and arched rose arbors and a bench to sit and watch the butterflies.

I grew not only enough produce to feed us throughout the summer, but enough to can almost 40 jars of peppers, beets, carrots and pickles. I have bins of potatoes in the basement and sweet potatoes from the harvest of 2010, all 79 pounds of them. I have grown and stored onions and garlics too. We planted 30 fruit trees.

All this in four years.

Those shiny red ribbons are more than second prizes in a county fair. They're confirmation of the right choices I made and the hard work we - not just me, but the "we" of our family - put into our lives.

I try as often as I can to share these stories with you because I want to encourage everyone reading this to do what Yoda told Luke Skywalker to do - "Don't just think. DO." Don't waste your life in a cubicle farm when you have a dream in your heart. Don't rest content with life as your parents scripted it for you if your mind and heart tell you otherwise. God has a plan for your life, but you've got to listen and act. You can make your dreams come true. I am doing that one day at a time.

It's not that there won't be fear at making great changes like we made. There was fear, and many moments of fear thereafter. Fear that we'd made a terrible mistakes and that we wouldn't fit in. Fear that I'd never make friends like I had in New York. Fear that working from home would keep me isolated and that I would never make new friends. Fear that my business wouldn't succeed, fear that we'd use up all of our hard-earned savings. There's been times of plenty and lean times too, but I have learned to just trust the flow of life and enjoy the moment while prudently planning for the future.

If you think you can, you can, and if you think you can't, you can't, or something like it Henry Ford once said. What is holding you back?

Five years is not a long time but I look back at my life and it is like I am a new person, with a new life, yet I maintain a connection to all that was good in my old life. I still miss New York City and the smell of hot chestnuts roasting in the carts of street vendors near Christmas. The constant clang of Salvation Army bells and the sway of subway trains while the muffled voice of the conductor barks the next station. I miss the beautiful area I worked in on the upper west side of Manhattan, the free Lincoln Center concerts on Wednesday and bringing our brown bag lunches over to Alice Tulley Hall to listen to performers run through their programs while we happily ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches along with the rest of the workers who loved classical music. I miss running out for Indian food at lunch, or "street food" from a pushcart, the delicious $1 rice and beans made by an immigrant, legal or not, from his push cart. I miss the weird synchronicity that only living and working in Manhattan makes you appreciate; running into a friend on the subway I haven't seen in over a decade only to find out we will now be working for the same company in Manhattan, running into an old grammar school buddy on the A train during rush hour, waving madly to a sibling I see crossing the street who I didn't even expect to see in the city at all that day, only to find us in the same block hurrying to separate destinations.

Two red ribbons marking the new place and new chapter in my life. Am I sorry they aren't blue? No, not at all.

Red is also my favorite color.

And there's always next year....because I'm not going anywhere at all.

Four years ago, bare clay. Today, blooming. Bloom where you are planted.

Hiking Cold Mountain

2011-10-24T08:16:00.000-07:00

Don't you just want to spread you arms out and like an eagle, soar off this mountain peak?

This weekend, we completed our annual fall hike. We hiked to the top of Cold Mountain, and it was one of the best hikes I've been on in ages. We took Shadow with us. She loves to hike!

Hiking girls....your humble blogger and her faithful companion, Shadow the German shepherd

Each fall, John plans the hike, but this year he announced the desired date but never told me where we were going. After we finished the hike and were driving back towards Appomattox, we passed the Appalachian Trail head just a few minutes from the start of the Cold Mountain hike. "That's where I thought we would go this year," he said, pointing to the other trail parking right off Highway 60 and I had to laugh - great minds think alike! The Cold Mountain trail actually merged with the Appalachian Trail for a considerable distance, so he got his wish, too.

The hike begins at the Mount Pleasant parking area in the George Washington National Forest in Amelia County. It's a busy, crowded spot - I was surprised at how many people were camping and hiking. It also happened to be Boy Scout weekend, and I felt quite safe after passing several groups of polite, respectful Scouts on trail. I said to John, "Well, if either of us falls and twists an ankle, we have about two dozen kids working on their First Aid badges here to help us home!"

One group had us cracking up laughing. We were hiking on a narrow, steep section of trail, with a sheer drop to our right and boulders to our left. Not much room for two adults and a big German shepherd to pass a group of Boy Scouts and two Scout Masters coming in the opposite direction.

The Scout Master halted the group and was teaching them proper hiking etiquette. He had all the boys step to the side, carefully making room for us, and then he said, "And what do we say to warn hikers that we are on the trail." With a loud roar, a dozen pre-teen boys shouted, "HELLO, HIKERS!" They sounded so much like Ed Norton from the famous Honeymooners skit "greeting the ball" ("Helloooo, ball!" when playing golf ) that we burst into peals of laughter. The boys loved Shadow and she wanted to go back with THEM thanks to all the pets she received as we hiked by. When we got to the top of Cold Mountain Meadow and were enjoying the view, we suddenly heard floating up from the trail a faint and ghostly shout, "HELLOOOO HIKERS" and we broke out laughing all over again.

The trail directions which I linked to at the top of this entry have you hike the long way up, but the Scouts and many other people told me later you could actually start on the other side - and walk about a mile uphill, then get to the top of Cold Mountain, to the meadows, which is really where you want to be.

Here you'll see why - this waited for us at the top - an expanse of meadows, with an almost perfectly 360 degree view all around us, gazing down to the Blue Ridge and around.

Along the way, you can see signs of a former homestead. A beautiful stone wall, broken in spots but still visible, reminded me of hiking in New England. We also found strands of barbed wire still attached to tree - again, evidence of a homestead.

An old stone wall along the trail

The hike was strenuous, no doubt about it. Once we returned to the parking area, we explored the area around and found several more trails to try in the spring and next fall. By the time we got to Appomattox and the Chinese restaurant where we ordered dinner, my pedometer stated we'd walked 9.95 miles - and I knew that when we set out on the trail, I already had a little under a half mile on it already from just walking the dog that morning. So we did indeed get a good workout!

I'm noticing that I get tired more easily on trail. My joints held up well this year, especially my knee. I'd had very bad arthritis and wear problems with my left knee, which thankfully my doctor was able to advise me on ways to help it heal without surgery or drugs. Good man. It worked! I was able to hike with only minimal discomfort afterwards. I am getting very winded on the uphill portions of the trail now. We were both very tired so it must have been a strenuous hike. Even Shadow came home and dropped into her corner behind my chair in the living room where she sleeps when we watch television at night, and she was so tired she didn't even want to come upstairs to her soft, comfortable dog bed to sleep.

When I hike and I get tired, or I feel like I can't go on, I think of my parents. Saturday would have been my dad's 86th birthday. I wish he were here to see all the good things in my life now; I think he would have been proud of me. More importantly, as I huffed and puffed up a really steep section of trail, it suddenly occurred to me that when my mom was my age, she would not have been able to do this hike. Multiple sclerosis made her unable to walk without a cane by the time she was in her early forties and she was in a wheelchair not long after that.

So more than ever, I gave thanks for the hike, thanks for the sore feet and the sore muscles, and thanks to God for views like this to carry me through my days:

Cold Mountain. Recommended hike!

Last year's hike up Bluff Mountain, and the things we found there: Little Ottie Cline Powell
And the 2009 hike, which gave the word "strenuous" new meaning: Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Three Gardening Interviews in One Week

2011-10-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

This was an unusual week for me, a week of telephone interviews. Two were with reporters interviewing me about my book, Get Your Hands Dirty - a Beginner's Guide to Gardening. A writer for Hobby Farms magazine and another for an organic gardening publication both wanted quotes on starting gardens and how to begin organic gardening. It was a pleasure and an honor to share tips with them. It's funny but I always preface each conversation with, "Remember, I'm not an expert in this - " and then proceed to talk their ear off for half an hour on the nuances of soil microorganisms, composting and seed starting. I'm not sure what my personal definition of 'expert' is but I think what I mean to say is, "I don't have any credentials in horticulture; I'm just your average backyard gardener."

That brings me to my third interview. I applied for the Master Gardener program of Virginia. The Master Gardener Program, also called the Extension Master Gardener Program, was founded in Washington state in 1972. Each of the 50 United States and many provinces in Canada have a Master Gardener program. Each program is affiliated with a local land-grant university. If I'm accepted into the program, I'll join a group of approximately 95,000 Master Gardeners who have received intensive training in plant pathology, horticulture and many other topics. In return, I'll be giving back to the community about 52 hours per year of service in the form of writing, teaching and speaking in the community about gardening. I don't know whether or not I was accepted into the program and I won't know for some time yet, but I hope so.

I've been looking for ways to get back into teaching, and this would be ideal. I've tried running marketing seminars (I'm a writer and marketing consultant by trade) and they aren't always successful. I miss teaching. I taught business writing in the local high school when I lived in Floral Park, and after I graduated from New York University, I would host the Master's program open houses and guest lecture one night per semester in the Advanced Direct Marketing class in the Master of Science program in Integrated Marketing. I love to teach and I miss it. I would so enjoy teaching about gardening!

So I don't know whether or not I am an 'expert' in this stuff, but I do know I love organic gardening and all aspects of gardening. It would be terrific to have a conduit to share more of that love and knowledge. We shall see!

Fall Color in the Garden

2011-10-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed that autumn seems to have her own color palette? From the golden yellow leaves dotting the trees to the rich, dark purple berries hanging off the trees on the edge of the woods, fall's palette is rich, deep and strong.

I'm enjoying the annual display of garden mums now. The bright pink daisy mums with the yellow centers are from plants purchased at the Cooperative Extension's spring plant sale back in 2010. I bought a small 4" pot and it's turned into an enormous mum that people sometimes mistake for a shrub. Next to it, the smaller dark pink colored pom pom mums from Lowe's, now in its third year in the garden, seems small by comparison.

I've still got zinnias blooming and marigolds, but most of the other annuals and perennials are finished. That doesn't matter much now, as the understory trees crouched below the loblolly pines flanking the garden are all beginning their transition. Looking out from my office windows towards the garden is like looking at an impressionist's painting, as if a master swirled a brush daubed in ochre, crimson, and burn sienna across the back of the canvas.

Even the vegetable garden gets into the act at this time of year. Have you ever noticed that fall vegetables are also richly colored? I've got acorn squash, with dark hunter green skins and rich golden flesh, butternut squash, and many hued cabbages coming into their own now.

I love fall for its color. I especially love Virginia's fall season. It lingers longer than I thought it would. I thought the south would be low in color in the fall but boy was I mistaken.

What's blooming in your fall garden?

What Is Homesteading?

2011-10-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been seeing more posts, ideas and shares about homesteading. Whether you call it urban homesteading, homesteading in place, or another name, it's really about becoming more self sufficient. I think there's a growing discontent with the general status quo. There's also a pushback against giant agribusinesses and the loss of the family farm, alongside the shuttered and empty stores on Main Streets across America but new stand-alone malls with giant big box stores springing up along the outskirts of now abandoned towns. We yearn for yesteryear but we dial up information on our handheld computers. We want the closeness of horse and buggy days while driving hybrid automobiles. I used to laugh at this dichotomy....and now I find myself drawn to it.

Part of this has always been a part of me, so to speak. Growing up in an urban landscape, where our teenage rite of passage was navigating the New York City Mass Transit system by ourselves to go Christmas shopping along Fifth Avenue, I still yearned for a farm of my own. Gardens. Lands. Animals. Growing my own food. I admit, I wasn't terribly interested in homemaking, but that changed gradually until now I'm fascinated by it all.

There's the slow food movement, the eat local movement, the CSA movement. There's the urban homesteading movement and the clean food movement and all of that. Sometimes I wish for clarity and one set of guidelines and at other times I'm delighted by the messy overlap among all these movements.

The bottom line is that people seem to want to grow their own food. There's an increasing awareness that the packages, bottles and cans with jaunty labels lining the grocery store shelves contain something other than food inside. People are starting to realize that all that soy and corn chucked into everything from hotdogs to potatoes au gratin just isn't good for us. Our bodies didn't evolve to live on soy beans. Or corn, for that matter. And certainly not genetically modified vegetables.

I'm not sure where I stand on the continuum of the homesteading movement. If you can imagine a line with one end of the spectrum "I buy junk food and eat at fast food restaurants all the time, and all this talk about vegetables is nonsense" to "I'm a raw vegan who grows her own food and makes her clothes out of hemp fiber" I think I'm maybe a quarter of the way up from the guy snacking on fried chicken and hamburgers all day but not even halfway up the scale to some of the wonderful raw vegan people I know.

I grow many organic fruits, herbs and vegetables. We usually buy a share of a locally raised, grass-fed beef steer each year. I'd love to raise chickens but my family remains unconvinced and afraid that having animals other than the cat and dog would tie us down too much. When I can, I beg fresh, free-range eggs from my neighbor.

I'm gradually getting better at baking bread, but my family still relies on loaves purchased from the grocery store for sandwiches. We're buying and consuming fewer packaged foods, and when we do buy them we try to buy them on sale and the healthy kind (no MSG soups, for example, or simple packaged foods like a bag of rice, beans or pasta.)

We telecommute and work from home by choice; no need for expensive clothing or expenditures on gasoline, and it saves some fossil fuels and pollution. I try to do my part to reduce my impact and to live according to nature's principles.

And I guess that's what this homesteading movement all comes down to. Living by your principles, whatever they may be. It's also not a race to be run and won, but rather a slow, gradual shift in perspective.

Five years ago I was living in a suburban home and working for a giant global company. I donned a power suit and high heels every day, swiped my Metro Card at a New York City turnstile, and drank copious quantities of coffee to fuel my nonstop workday.

Today, I rise with the sun (or Pierre's incessant whacks with a paw - "FEED ME" ) and slip into a pair of jeans and a t shirt or sweat shirt purchased at the second hand or discount store. I make two cups of coffee for myself. I go for a walk. I eat a natural, healthy breakfast. I work from home, relying upon the magic of the internet to earn my daily bread and pay my bills. I garden and grow some vegetables, but not all that I'd need to survive; it's not reality at the moment. I try to eat and live simply but I still like my little luxuries - ice cream when it's on sale, a good book or movie, a concert.

Homesteading is what you make of it. It's what you can do, rather than what you think you should do. And if that means planting a single tomato plant on your city balcony, then do it.

Fall Vegetables Are the Best

2011-10-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

Some people think that summer is the best time for the vegetable garden, but I'd have to say that it's fall. Not only does the summer harvest continue, but now all the fall crops produce in abundance.

Just this week I harvested:

Tomatoes - we are getting the last hurrah of tomatoes from the garden. They're smaller than the ones I picked during the peak of summer, but just as delicious.
Peppers - 27 pints canned, 4 pints frozen and countless peppers eaten already in the form of sausage and peppers, stuffed peppers and stir fry dishes, I am still picking them. We should have another huge harvest before the frost kills the plants.
Eggplants - two are in the refrigerator already, waiting to be made into eggplant parmigiana tomorrow evening, but I've got more on the plants outside. I don't know how many more I'll harvest before the frost sets in, but it's going to be a good year for them for sure.
Beets - the last of the beets are in. I saved a few fresh ones for cooking but canned another nine pints last weekend.
Carrots - I canned six half pint jars using a new pickling recipe for sweet carrots. If they taste good, I'll can more, but in the meantime I've frozen another six or seven pints, and left about half the bed in the ground.
Strawberries - yes, you read that correctly! I planted ever bearing strawberries and they sure do live up to their name. Each fall, I get a second crop of fresh organic strawberries. They're smaller than the spring crop but still juicy and sweet. One word of caution (earned the hard way): wear gloves when picking fall strawberries if you happen to see some berries on your plants. Wasps, hornets and yellow jackets love them, and at this time of year those critters get MEAN. Last year I got stung badly on my hand when I reached down into the strawberry bed and grasped a berry with a yellow jacket on it. OUCH.
Herbs - I'm drying trays of parsley and basil this week, but there's also fresh sage, oregano, rosemary and chives to enjoy. And the horseradish needs to be dug and made into sauce!
Green beans - still coming in. No matter how many times I cut back on the amount I plant, they keep coming in. Somehow I accidentally bought the flat Italian kind and so now at least I have some variety.

These are the vegetables that I am harvesting in abundance, but there are more out there. I have acorn and butternut squash on the vine. I found the trick to outwitting those awful beetles - plant the seeds in August! Apparently it's just past their mating season so I avoided all the eggs and the swarms of newly hatched beetles that decimated the cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash. We counted 20 butternut squash on the vine and just two acorn squash, but I'm hopeful we may get a few more of the acorn squash.

I planted cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower in what I *thought* was the empty potato bed. Wrong. I must have left a whole bunch of little seed potatoes around in the soil, because now I have a gigantic mess. I have potato plants springing up everywhere, with a giant cabbage in one corner and broccoli leaning against potatoes. I have no idea how I'm going to get the potatoes out, but I'll deal with that closer to Thanksgiving. The good thing about raised beds is that the soil stays workable longer. I can get in there and dig even after the frosts. So I can keep gardening until Thanksgiving or so.

The big yellow and black spiders are everywhere this year, a sign that the garden flourishes along its own terms, with spiders and birds keeping the insect population in check. The mole is back - this time, Pierre the cat found it near the shed. We caught Pierre digging fast and furiously in a hole and saw the mole scamper into the woods with Pierre hot on his trail. He lost the creature within a few feet but I had one excited kitty on my hands. I've had to watch Pierre very carefully every time he goes out into the garden. Last week, he managed to find a snake...which he brought up to the house, of course. We heard a commotion on the back deck and went to the window to see Pierre under the picnic table playing with something. I said to my husband, "Oh, how cute, he has a lizard." Oops. Not quite. A rather good-sized snake was trying to escape his clutches. I yelled for John and handed him a shovel, which he used to scoop and fling the snake into the side garden while I quickly snatched up Pierre and moved him back into the house. He mewed in protest, the ungrateful brute, as if to say, "Hey! Daddy stole my snake!"

If you didn't get a chance to plant vegetables this fall, now's the time to head over to your local farmer's market or a garden center and enjoy a little taste of fall. Do it now, before Halloween arrives with all that flurry of stuff to do. Enjoy!

Readers Ideas About Money Saving Vegetable Gardening

2011-10-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

I received an email from Liz Dunn, a local gardener, who shared the following tips for money saving vegetable gardening. She gave me permission to post it verbatim, so here's Liz's note to me:

"As you pointed out, you did not include what you ate out of the garden in your savings. That would be a huge amount!! Even in the middle of the summer tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers still are expensive. I saw red bell peppers while shopping the other day for $1.34 each. I probably have 6 or 7 red ones on the vine right now.

"Another savings can be on seed since some seed will save for 5-6 years. Tomato seeds can be saved for long periods and quite often for home use you don't need forty seedlings and can just plant 4 or 5 seeds of each variety that you want and once the plants get some size trim down to 1 or 2. You save the cost of buying seed for a number of years. Cucumber seeds, squash, and others save well too.

"I know you compost. Your vegetable debris goes right into your compost pile creating another savings in making your own compost instead of buying it.

"It's amazing how "rewarding" gardening can be!"

You might enjoy this publication from Virginia Tech Extension.

- Liz

Five Great Reasons to Grow a Vegetable Garden

2011-10-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

Growing my own fruits and vegetables is something I love to do, and it's something I recommend to anyone who shows the slightest interest in gardening. While flowers delight, vegetables and fruits nourish. There are many reasons to grow your own fruits and vegetables, but I've put together my Five Great Reasons to Grow a Vegetable Garden in this Hub Pages article. Please click the underlined words to visit Hub Pages and read the complete text.

Growing Your Own Organic Vegetables Saves Money

2011-10-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

After a fun yet exhausting Sunday afternoon canning, my husband and I decided to tally up all the vegetables I had dried, canned and frozen this year - and put into the basement for storage.

All of these vegetables were grown using 100% organic gardening methods. I am estimating everything; please understand that this in not a scientific, mathematically accurate estimate. It's just an example to show you the amazing power of growing and preserving your own vegetables.

The 2011 Tally
(and there's more out in the garden, so I'm not finished yet)

Carrots: 7 half pint jars pickled and canned; 6 containers of 1 1/2 pints each, frozen
Peppers: 26 pint jars pickled and canned, 2 contains of 1 1/2 pints each, frozen
Beets: 22 pints canned
Dill pickles: 4 pints and 4 half pint jars canned
Green beans: 2 contains of 1 1/2 pints each forzen
Tomatoes: 4 bags of 24 tomatoes each, frozen
Dried beans: approximately 1 pint, dried
Potatoes: approximately 20 pounds grown and stored
Onions: approximately 5 pounds grown and stores

That's the 2011 tally to date, as of October 1. Despite the cool night time temperatures, I still have peppers in the garden, tomatoes, winter squash (acorn and butternut), plenty of carrots, parsnips, turnips and eggplant left.

We did a little experiment. We added up the cost of buying in all of those vegetables if we purchased the canned or frozen equivalent at the store. I know that prices vary drastically, and if you have coupons or there's a good sale going on that can change things. To make things simple, I estimated the value of a pint jar and a half pint jar the same. Here is what we came up with in terms of the value of what's in the pantry, freezer and storage cellar today:

Canned vegetables and pickles: estimated at $1 each = 63 jars = $63
Frozen vegetables: 10 containters (I estimated the bags of tomatoes as 1 container each) = $10
Potatoes: Estimated 5 lb bag at store, $3.99 each so 4 "bags" worth x $3.99 each = $15.96
Onions: Estimated weight, about 1 bag of onions, $3.99 = $3.99
Dried beans: One bag at the store is about $1.49

Total: $94.44

That estimate doesn't include all the fresh vegetables we have consumed since planting the garden this year and the potential cost savings there.

Now we looked at the expenses. We did NOT include the cost of the canning jars and freezer containers. Why? Because these things can be used year after year until they break, so there are an unknown number of times of use out of them. The only cost is replacement seal lids, which are $2 for a package of 12, and that's negligible. I also did not include costs of vinegar, sugar and spices used to pickle and can the food.

Seed costs:
Beets = $1.99
Green beans = $2.29
Cucumber seeds for pickles: $1.49
Dill herb seeds for pickles: $1.49
Heirloom bean seeds for drying: $4.99 (two packages)
Peppers: four pack of plants, $1.79 bought from a local farmer, plus two seed packages at $1.49 each
Tomatoes: Two seed packages of $1.99 each
Carrots: Two seed packages, $1.49 each
Onion set: $2.99
Potatoes: half a bag received at no cost from friends; $2.50 for bag of seed potatoes from local store
Total of seeds and starter plants: $24.50

Round up all these numbers, here's the bottom line. Again, these numbers omit the investment into the canning jars and the costs of ingredients such as vinegar, sugar and spices. I'm also rounding up and estimating a lot, but I think it makes my point:

An investment of $25 yielded for me $100 in organic vegetables.

No special equipment...after planting the vegetable seeds, the only time I spent is tying and staking tomatoes, thinning vegetable plants, and harvesting potatoes (which was more labor intensive than I'd thought it would be). All of the vegetables were grown organically, so I am guessing that buying the organic equivalent at the store would be more expensive than the conventional brands.

Not only do I know precisely WHAT is in my food, I have grown it all less than 30 feet from my house in a backyard garden. Instead of fossil fuels burned trucking it from California, Florida, and other parts of the country, by growing my own food I have reduced some of that burden from the environment.

You might not have the space that I do to grow vegetables. But you can really grow quite a lot in small spaces. My dad grew many vegetables in a tiny area in our yard; when I moved to another house on Long Island, we had dense shade in the yard and only some direct sunshine onto a patio and deck, so I planted tomatoes, peppers and many other veggies in pots on the desk. You CAN grow vegetables no matter where you are.

In the fall of 2008, I wrote on this blog about my first efforts at canning. I was so afraid to try it. I was afraid I would do it wrong and poison my family. Now I feel confident with the hot water bath canner - so confident that I have asked for a pressure canner for Christmas! With the pressure canner, I can can garden vegetables without pickling them.

We harvested our first fruit from the orchard this year - one pear, and about six peaches. When we planted the fruit orchard trees in 2008, we read that it might take up to 5 - 10 years, depending on the trees, before we saw some fruit. Once those trees begin producing abundantly, I will be able to dry and can that fruit too.

I was born and raised in the big city. I grew up on Long Island, and worked most of my career in New York City. Canning was foreign to me. It was a skill only one generation removed; my grandmother canned her garden produce and canned sauces and soups, but she moved when I was 8 and died a few years later, and I never had the chance to learn from her.

As I lay down to sleep last night, it wasn't the thought of saving money that made me smile. It was the thought of self sufficiently. There is a deep, strong appeal to me of the thought that I am beholden to no one for me food. I can grow it and preserve it on my own. If at some point we decide to raise some chickens and other animals, we can reduce our dependency even further. It's definitely a lifestyle choice, but if self-sufficient living appeals to you, I urge you to try whatever you can in your little corner of the world. When I lived in the equivalent of a big city, I grew vegetables in pots on the deck. I started small with my canning projects and now I can can close to 20 pints in one day and feel confident about it. Each time you try something, you'll learn.

Yes, you CAN!

Why Do Leaves Change Color in the Fall?

2011-09-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

You'd think that learning the science behind the mystery and beauty of why leaves change color in the fall would taint my appreciation of this annual display, but not so. In fact, I'm more in awe than ever of the wondrous world around me here on the farm as I learn the intricate dance between genetics and environment that transforms the trees at Seven Oaks into fireworks of color. Please read my latest essay for Main Line Gardening here, where I summarize the science behind why leaves change color.

Cool Weather Is Coming - Are Your House Plants Ready?

2011-09-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

It's warm and humid today, but by the weekend, evening temperatures are expected to be in the high 40s in my little corner of the Commonwealth. That's the signal to begin bringing houseplants, and any annuals you want to winter over, inside. There are a few steps you should take, however, to ensure that you are only bringing your house plants inside and not half the insect kingdom.

Spiders are notorious for leaving egg sacs under the rims of flower pots. Be very careful when you move your plants, and use the hose set on a high spray to dislodge any critters who have taken up residence. Don't forget to look under pots, too, especially if you slip your plastic pots into pretty outdoor patio containers.

Bugs lurking under leaves or near the soil are another matter. The only sure way I have found to remove as many as possible is to repot houseplants and shake off as much of the old soil as possible. Not only does it give the plants some new soil (and nutrients) but any eggs or critters in the soil get left outside.

I've written a new article this week for Hub Pages How to Bring House Plants Indoors for the Winter.

Now you know that it involves more than carrying them inside. Happy gardening!

Financial Savings of Organic Gardening

2011-09-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

It seems as if every autumn, I'm writing something about the rewards and financial savings and benefits of organic gardening. Last fall, it was 79 pounds of sweet potatoes from my $16 investment. This year, it's carrots. I guess that's because autumn is harvest time. I'm busy pulling carrots, gathering peppers, and canning, blanching, and freezing everything I can before the first frost. I sometimes feel like a squirrel gathering acorns for fall with the exception that I always remember where I've stashed my loot.

This morning, it was too rainy, squishy and wet to do any gardening, but the carrots were overdue for harvesting. I'd purchased five large freezer containers to store them and my plan was to pull them up, clean and take the tops off outside so I could just run the bucket over to the compost pile and avoid getting dirt in the kitchen sink, then peel, coin, blanch and freeze them.

I couldn't believe the heavy yield in the garden. I pulled up about a quarter of what was growing out there and I ended up freezing approximately 10 cups of carrots.

I spent 99 cents on a package of seeds. Assuming that a can of organic carrots is $1 - and it's probably more expensive than that, but I have only seen conventional in my local supermarket, so I'm going by that price - that a 10x profit from my investment.

Carrots are some of the easiest vegetables to grow. What do you do to grow them? NOTHING. At least I don't do anything. I directly sow the seeds into the soil in the raised beds once the last danger of frost is past, and that's it. I weed early in the season but after the carrots begin to form, weeding tends to pull up immature carrots along with the big clumps of crabgrass and whatnot that spring up in the beds, so I just leave the weeds. When I pull up the carrots, I pull up the weeds.

I do not have a pressure canner, but if I did, I'd can the carrots instead of freezing them. Both methods are helpful but I would prefer canned carrots just in case we get a power outage of some sort.

I now have stacked containers of carrots in the freezer. I found a recipe for spiced pickled carrots that can be safely canned in the hot water bath canner, so that's a project for later this week, along with canning the last of the beets.

$1 worth of seeds yields at least $10 worth of produce.

Let me ask you, if your stock market portfolio or bank account paid that kind of dividend, wouldn't you invest in it?

Get growing! Grow your own food. Not only will you save money, you'll have better quality food. It's fresher. You know what's in it and what's not (as in - no pesticides or chemical fertilizer used on my carrots.) And as I sit and type this, I feel a great sense of satisfaction knowing that I can feed my family some healthy vegetables, grown less than 20 feet from my kitchen door.

Organic vegetable gardening is wonderful!

Beer for Your Slugs

2011-09-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

Although it seems like a waste of a good brew, beer traps do work to drown slugs in the garden. I've just written a new organic gardening article and I include five methods of organic slug control, of which beer lures and traps are just one. There's saucers of beer to drown the critters, diotomaceous earth to shred them, oak leaves to repel them, gravel to repel and shred them, and copper tapes and spray to zap them.

Did I mention how much I loathe slugs?

Know your enemy! Yuck!

Luckily there aren't too many here in Virginia. One benefit to always using organic gardening methods is that there are plenty of birds and other creatures to patrol for insects in the garden I also don't plant too many hosta, and those I do are in the front garden beds with a gravel path separating them from any moist, dark areas where slugs can hide. Deer also love to munch on hosta, so the few specimens I've planted are quite near the house.

If you hate slugs as much as I do, please click the link and read my article on Getting Rid of Slugs - Organic Slug Control.

I'd raise a beer to you, but I"m saving it for my slugs.

Wondering About Wonder

2011-09-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

I walked Shadow around the flower garden today, and noticed with surprise that the lavender border I planted around the roses is blooming again. Most years I get one beautiful show of lavender in June, then nothing for the rest of the season. This has been the oddest fall temperature and plant-wise since I moved to Virginia. It's been very rainy, with five inches of rain in one week, and cool. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Perhaps the lavender thinks it is spring again? I can't quite figure it out.

We have an odd vine that is growing out of the driveway, and it has set fruit. I'm betting it's a stray cantaloupe. I am careful not to compost the seeds and I did not grow any this year, but every once in a while a seed clings to the compost bin or to the rind, and my best guess is that a squirrel carried the seed with him across the driveway and accidentally planted it. The gravel driveway has made a neat little micro climate, and the heat radiating up from the dark gravel must be keeping the melon toasty warm during this cool snap. I wonder how long we can keep it alive? Every day we go outside and check out little melon. We guided the vines back into the flower garden so that the car won't run it over every time someone drives in and out.

In the vegetable garden, the tomatoes seem to have finally cried 'uncle' and given up. They're flopping this way and that with nary a tomato in sight. Shelob, the giant spider named after the spider in the Lord of the Rings series of books, still holds court in the tomato bed. She turned in the opposite direction, however, with her back facing the sun instead of her abdomen facing the sun, and she's turner her web now so that instead of it on a direct north-south access, it's slightly angled east-west. Another thing that fascinates me but to which I have no answer. Did she sense the windy days we have had over the past week, with winds coming from the east, and change direction so that insects are blown into her web?

There are so many questions I have about my garden. Why did we get gigantic 'fairy rings' of mushrooms this year, not just in our yard, but in the neighbors' yards too? I'm talking gigantic 10-20 foot circles of perfectly formed mushrooms, the likes of which we have never seen before. Why was this a great year for peppers and a not so great year for tomatoes? Why did the spider angle her web different? Why is my lavender blooming in September? And why oh why are all the dogwood trees already turning colors, and the under story trees, as if they sense an extra cold winter on hand?

I think that if you love a garden and you have even a modicum of curiosity, you will never be bored. There is always something to learn, explore and wonder about. It seems like every day as I walk to get the mail or just walk the dog, I stumble over another mystery, raise another question.

"I wonder" has become my mantra.

Seeds of Change

2011-09-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year that always makes me think of new beginnings, of change. It's the change of seasons, I guess, although that phrase means less to me now than it did years ago. I love Virginia's long, slow change of seasons, the transition from spring to summer and fall to winter more drawn-out than what I used to experience on Long Island. There, it always seemed as if winter's icy breath changed to summer's gentle kiss in an instant, and we'd move from hot, sunny autumn days to cold snaps and pumpkins without pause. You'd be wearing t-shirts and jeans to school one day and the next day be bundled up inside your parka and searching for a missing glove.

This is the season when the garden slowly begins its descent into death. I walked among the paths in the flower garden this morning, marveling at how the marigolds have formed such dense orange tufts that they spill over the walkway. I have marigolds growing among the blocks my husband placed on a solid bed of sand in the back; no soil, no moisture, no nutrients, but the seeds grew into mature, thriving plants. I have morning glories turning brown, leaves drifting onto the paths, seeds falling among the flower beds. I'm forever picking heart-shaped vines out of the paths. This year I left some to grow among the flowers.

I marvel at the seeds each plant produces in abundance. Some we save - in a week or two we'll begin taking pails out in the garden and collect the marigold seeds. Some I'll just let nature sow where she wants them. I'll find drifts of coreopsis in the driveway, marigolds in the sand.

My garden has taught me many things, but the lesson that I learned lately is the lesson from the marigold seeds. Not just bloom where you are planted, but let nature tug you to where you should be planted. I tend to be a planner, logical, methodical, write the to-do list and check it off. The problem with being so methodical is that often, I end up closing myself off to inspiration, to creativity, to the joy of the moment. A friend will call me in the morning with the unexpected gift of tickets to a professional horse show she knows I'd love to see, but I cannot embrace the moment - I've got that to-do list, you see.

My garden is like my to-do list. It's planned. I mapped out the pathways, I tried charting the plants on graph paper. Nature has other ideas. Some plants grow in certain spots, other seeds drift to new ground and form beautiful clusters and clumps of plants I would never have dared plant there. As I look at the marigolds this year, at the morning glories twining among the boxwoods, I understand the lesson the garden has for me this year. Change is good. Be open to the drift of possibility, the tug of creativity, the spark of inspiration. Plan, yes, for only the fool does not plan. But be open, be creative, be free.

Seasons change, and so do I...

Butterfly wing

Time to Shop for Spring Flowering Bulbs

2011-09-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

Fall is one of my favorite times of year for many reasons. The days remain warm, but the nights are cooler. Football. Apples. Apple cider. The Prospect Fire Department Harvest Festival, complete with yard sale and old-fashioned auction. The Five County Fair. Pumpkins, mums...and buying bulbs. Tulips, daffodils and more. It's really an act of faith to buy bags of bulbs now, and plant them in the cooler days near Halloween, then wait until the promise of spring. I always forget where I plant my bulbs. I think that makes me more sensitive to the plight of squirrels...

I've written some tips today for Main Line Gardening on the things you need to think about when buying your spring flowering bulbs. You can read the original article on Main Line Gardening - click the underlined words.

Weeding After Weeks Away

2011-09-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

I meant to write that essay on Sunday, but decided against it. It's not that I didn't want to sit down and write - I did. But the weekend passed in a hazy blur of chores, and I was studiously avoiding anything that might trigger reflections, musing or blathering about September 11. So I decided to follow the Shaker maxim of "Hands to work, hearts to God" and work I did, giving my heart some room to pray.

Saturday morning, I tackled the weeds in the flower garden. Now that might not sound like such a big deal, but the flower garden is large and the weeds are strong. Plus, they've had nearly six weeks to grow unchecked. In early August, my sister came for a visit, then we had a weekend 'off', then two weekends in a row, John's sister and her family were here visiting. The next two weeks? Hurricane Irene, followed by yet another weekend of rain! So this really was the first sunny weekend for weeding.

I spent two hours pulling weeds, and finally got the edges of the garden at least into law and order. I uncovered one poor azalea that had been smothered by crabgrass and managed to give myself a great unidentified rash on the arm. It was itching so badly I feared something dreadful, like poison ivy, but I knew I hadn't seen that particular evil one in the garden. I must be allergic to another weed. I wear gloves, but the rash was in the crook of the elbow. A bit of soap and water, some first aid spray, and I soldiered on.

You can really see in just these few weeks how fall has crept into the garden. The marigolds are at their peak. Some grew up in the cracks between the sidewalk in the little pathway leading from the garage to our back deck. I don't know what they live on - they are growing in pure sand, and underneath, a bed of hard packed clay. Yet they thrive. I don't have the heart to pull them up in the spring. If they are tough enough to grow under those conditions, they are plants to be admired.

Leaves are starting to turn golden on the tulip poplars along the driveway. I spent time taking pictures of mushrooms, in all their glory. We found several perfect rings of mushrooms growing in the lawn which my husband dubbed "Shroom Henge." It is amazing to watch each mushroom (fungi? what is the proper name anyhow?) unfold daily. Some start as small baseballs, then suddenly grow up on stems as thick as a man's wrist. The baseball unfurls into an umbrella with what looks like a car filter underneath. Then the umbrella collapses, the mushroom shrinks back into the earth, and the cycle continues. I am slightly in awe of them. I don't quite understand them.

After grubbing about in the garden for hours, I was ready for some indoor house-wifey tasks. Saturday afternoon, I canned eight pints of pickled peppers, which is good because the family keeps eating them faster than I am able to can them. That's a sign they like my recipes! The pickled beets are also disappearing from the shelves. I keep eying the pressure canner in the Lehman's catalog. Maybe next year....

Sunday church, then off to do the shopping, then the afternoon filled with house cleaning. I finally curled up on the back patio to read the latest issue of Countryside and Small Stock Journal, only to get dive-bombed by a bee jealously guarding "his" part of the patio. It got so bad he actually chased me inside. It was either that or he was going to be a dead bee...

So honestly, although my heart wanted to write, all I managed to do was curl up in my big fat armchair last night and watch the weekend reruns of my favorite TV show, Monk. My garden is neat and tidy, my peppers - all 13 pounds of them - canned, and my house sparkles.

That, I think, made up for the lack of essay.

Woods here at Seven Oaks

Wordless Wednesday - September Sunflowers

2011-09-07T06:51:00.000-07:00

September...a time for new beginnings. The start of a new school year. In Judaism, the start of the new year. I In honor of fresh beginnings and changes, I'm announcing some changes to the blog. I'll participate in Wordless Wednesday, sharing with you images from around Seven Oaks each Wednesday. Also on Sundays, I will feature a personal essay on spiritual topics, so look for that this weekend. The rest of the week will be devoted to gardening posts as always.

Are you ready for Wordless Wednesday?

September Sunflowers

Types of Chrysanthemums Explained

2011-09-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

Quill Mum, courtesy of Morguefile

After writing yesterday about fall mums, I decided to explore the many types of chrysanthemums for the home garden. Looking at pictures on the National Chrysanthemum Society website brought back many fond childhood memories of Friday night setups at Farmingdale Community College, helping my dad place his show mums in old glass milk bottles at the agricultural college. Dad would hand me the bottle and a green paper sleeve and his neatly typed entry card, and I would bring each out to the show table. That was the only night in the entire year - no exaggeration! - that we ate at a fast food restaurant. In fact, I never even HAD fast food until 1975 when my dad first entered a mum show. And then my mom chose Arthur Treacher Fish and Chips, thinking it was 'healthy' because fish was involved! I remember being all excited because on that Friday before the mum show, usually the first weekend in October if memory serves me correctly, I'd get to stay up late to help my dad at the show. Then we would get the fast food on the way home. Then the weekend - the excitement - to see what, if any, ribbons my dad won. He won quite a lot and we used to have the awards proudly displayed on our fireplace mantle.

Over the long weekend of the mum show, my dad would be on hand to help out. I'd stand with a clip board near the doorway. My dad asked me to count the number of visitors coming into the round agricultural college auditorium. He taught me how to do a tick list, or make the slash marks to count visitors. Now that I think about it, he probably did that so that I wouldn't get in trouble and bother anyone.

I'd wander for hours looking at all the beautiful mums. My favorite displays were the ones that showed a dining room scene. There would be gorgeous floral displays on the center of the table. I always wanted to enter that contest. Maybe I can, someday!

After the show ended on Sunday, we'd bring home the chrysanthemum flowers. We'd run out of vases and stand them in buckets in front of the fireplace. On Monday, I would bring two bouquets to school: one for my teacher, and the other for the statue of the Blessed Mother in the hallway at Our Lady of Victory school. I'd carefully choose the most beautiful flowers for that particular display. It made me so happy to place the bouquet at the Blessed Mother's feet, and I was proud of my dad's accomplishments.

When Farmingdale College got rid of its ag program, the show was moved to Planting Fields Arboretum, a gorgeous 19th century Tudor mansion and formal garden in Nassau County, Long Island, that's now open to the public as an arboretum. If you are ever on Long Island, go to the greenhouses in February for the annual camellia display; it's breath-taking and they have a great collection.

I hope you enjoy the results of my research this morning in my latest article - Types of Chrysanthemums for the Home Garden. Click the title to read the article. Feel free to share the link, too (just not the actual words, okay?) Thanks!

Hardy Mums in the Garden

2011-09-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

We've got plenty of hardy mums in the gardens here at Seven Oaks, and more added this year. I forgot to cut most of them back in the spring, and ended up with a continuous show of mums blooming as early as July! Someone reminded me that you're supposed to cut mums back around May and again in late June so that they bloom later. One large mum in the little flower garden next to the deck threatened to grow right over the top of the garden lanterns, so I cut it way back in June, and am glad I did. At the time, I worried that I'd pruned it back too much, but now it is finally getting buds.

I have several bronze, purple and yellow chrysanthemum plants, and these hardy mums act as perennials in the flower gardens, returning year after year. Last year, I added a beautiful subtle pink mum with large flowers that I bought at the Heart of Virginia plant sale down at the old Farmville Train Depot, run by the Master Gardeners of Virginia. They were labeled with the color but not the variety name, so I have no idea what I bought. All I know is that I planted my mums too close together and ended up with one gigantic tangle of green that bursts into bright pink in September.

My latest acquisitions hasn't bloomed yet, but did appear to settle in quite well in the same garden space. It's a spoon mum, and I was happy to find it in the Burgess catalog. Spoon mums have long, thin petals with a little "spoon" at the end. When my dad showed his mums in the Long Island Chrysanthemum Society, the big football mums and the spoon mums were my favorites.

I keep the mums in garden beds close to the house, because deer love to chomp on them. My friend Mary Alice once told me a story about her home in Pennsylvania when the deer found her mums. She had purchased over a dozen yellow mums from the garden center and spent a Saturday afternoon planting them among the foundation hedges around her house. She went inside to cook dinner, and idly looked out the window an hour later. Suddenly she realized not one single flower was left along that entire strip of mums she had planted! A glance out a side window revealed a doe, happily grazing among the new flowers and pinching off each bud to eat them! Deer will do that. I don't know why they were so bold as to come right up to Mary Alice's doorstep, but here they leave my little side garden alone. I suspect "German shepherd power" or the fact that Shadow sets up a ferocious bark every time she spies a deer.

I'll post more pictures of mums as time goes by and more bloom. But for today, enjoy these early charmers, hardy mums in the garden.

Beneficial Insects and Organic Gardening

2011-09-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

Part of the fun of organic gardening is getting to know your neighbors - beneficial insects. Because organic gardening practices include the use of natural methods to control problems and boosting soil fertility, insects love organic gardens. Most of the time, beneficial insects visit my garden. Today I took some beneficial insects pictures out in the vegetable garden and in the little cottage garden next to the shed. The praying mantis has been frightening me on the porch every day. He lurks on the door frame or right over your head as you step onto the porch. Then he turns his head and fixes you with a beady eye, moving his 'praying' hands as if clapping. I don't know whether he's cheering me on or being sarcastic that I'm out walking the dog again. I give him a wider berth.

Let me introduce you to the beneficial insects I met in my organic garden and around Seven Oaks....

Argiope aurantia

Meet Argiope aurantia...the black and yellow garden spider. (She is also referred to as a St. Andrews Cross spider because of the black markings on her body.) She is HUGE. I made her acquaintance while reaching for some ripe tomatoes in the garden. I stuck my hand into the tomato bed, leaned forward...and my face was about six inches away from good old Argiope aurantia. I let out a squeak, slowly closed my hand around the tomato, and backed out. The web was torn and she seemed agitated, possibly thinking she had some good, juicy prey. After that, I picked tomatoes all around the center of the bed. She made her large web between several plants in the center of the bed. She can have those tomatoes. Yes, my dear, you can have all the room you want....

She is about four inches long and hangs upside down in her web. My tomatoes have been amazingly bug-free this year. So thank you, Argiope.

The other day my husband grabbed the basket we use to collect garden veggies and headed out to the garden to pick tomatoes. I said to him, "Watch out for the bed of beefsteak tomatoes; we've got a really big spider there." He sort of made a face at me. He knows I'm a little afraid of spiders. I think he thought I was exaggerating. I smiled to myself and kept working in the kitchen. A few minutes later, I heard a muffled exclamation float in through the kitchen windows, "Holy cow!" I looked out and my hubby was circling the tomato bed, peering at the spider, gently touching the web, just as fascinated as I was by her large yellow and black striped self.

She's so big, she's become like a pet. She's a great beneficial insect!

This spider is tricky. I found him or her this morning on the zinnias in front of the garden shed. I wanted to snap photos of the big zinnias since the flowers are really beautiful right now. As I looked through the camera's view finder, I realized there was a big white spider with a large round abdomen hiding among the petals. I took two pictures, and then moved on to another zinnia. Imagine my surprise when I found several tiny yet similar spiders on that zinnia. I won't be picking flowers from that garden bed any time soon to bring into the house, that's for sure. There were baby spiders jumping all over the zinnia flowers.

Does anyone know what kind of spider this is? There were no webs near the zinnias.

Praying mantis or Preying mantis

This guy thinks he's moved into my house. Every fall, we get at least one praying mantis on either the front or the back porch who hangs out in a place where we can watch him quite easily. This year, it's the front porch. You're looking up at the ceiling of my porch where the praying mantis decided to perch today. He's about four inches long with a beautifully mottled green and brown body. When I walk near him in the mornings, he moves his front legs up as if clapping, and swivels his head around, fixing me with those frightening insectile eyes they have.

Among all the beneficial insects in the garden, I'm fascinated the most by the praying mantis. They seem both graceful and deadly, moving with precision and speed that often surprises me. I know why this particular beneficial insects has chosen my front porch for his hunting grounds. We have one of the doorbells that glows at night, and it attracts moths. By hanging over the doorbell area, he snags many flying insects each night.

Don't be afraid of the bugs in the garden. When my little nephew was here, all he wanted to do was kill bugs. His parents had taught him "all bugs are bad" and Billy the Exterminator is one of his favorite shows. When we walked around the garden, I had to stop him from stomping bees, spiders, praying mantis and lady bugs. I hope he remembered that some bugs are his friends, and not all bugs are bad.

House Plant Health

2011-09-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

I've been growing house plants my whole life, ever since I brought a terrarium in an old plastic shoe box to my first grade class. Our first grade class picture shows my friend Gina and I holding the little terrarium - my dad's influence on me, and the first sign of my impending gardening mania...(I'll have to find that picture or beg my sister to look through the old family photo albums for it!)

I was in for a rude awakening this week when I discovered a large pothos in my office so waterlogged and pot bound that I'm ashamed to admit it. It's like admitting your house is dirty and you run a Merry Maids franchise.

My "plant room"

My poor plant has been moved into the plant room awaiting a transplant, along with a bunch of African violets that are so overgrown I can see their roots not just underneath the pot but curling UP the sides of the cachepot, the way elf shoes curl up at the toes.

My essay, The Importance of Checking on Your House Plants, can be read on Main Line Gardening's community website.

May my tips spare your house plants some distress!

Seed Swap at Monitcello in Charlottesville, Virginia

2011-08-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

Gardens at Monitcello. Photo by my sister, Mary Fassetta

I just received a press release from Monticello, the heritage site and home of the great Thomas Jefferson. It's located very near to Seven Oaks (my farm) in Charlottesville, Virginia. The gardens alone make the trip worthwhile and I have written about the gardens of Monitcello for various websites. It's a favorite place for me to take out of town visitors. They will be hosting the 5th Annual Seed Swap on September 17, 2011. Below is the press release I received from the events coordinator. It sounds like fun!

Flowers at Monitcello

Statue of Jefferson at University of Virginia

Heritage Harvest Festival seed swap encourages exchange of historical and heirloom seed varieties

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.—Seed savers will unite at the home of Thomas Jefferson September 17, to exchange historical and heirloom seed varietals at the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello’s third annual Old Timey Seed Swap.

The 5^th annual Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello is a celebration of revolutionary gardener Thomas Jefferson. Often considered America’s “first foodie,” Jefferson championed vegetable cuisine, plant experimentation and sustainable agriculture. Monticello’s West Lawn, the location for this year’s swap, reveals the importance Thomas Jefferson placed on sharing seeds with neighbors. Jefferson’s excitement for botanical discoveries may have germinated with the Lewis and Clark expedition, from which he received a considerable amount of seed varieties. Jefferson had a genuine enthusiasm for seed exchange and preservation and was passionate about passing along seeds to fellow gardeners.

Jefferson wrote to André Thoüin of the Jardin de Plantes in Paris that his seeds “came safely to hand and were committed to our best seedsmen, in order that they might be preserved and distributed so as to become general.” Peter Hatch, Monticello’s director of gardeners and grounds, has dedicated his life’s work to restoring Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary garden. His significant contributions to historic plant preservation and gardening have been manifested through seed saving.

“Seed saving, a critical feature of Thomas Jefferson’s gardening efforts at Monticello, is integral to the sustainable gardening movement. The Heritage Harvest Festival’s seed swap, at 9 a.m. on September 17th, is a fun and engaging introduction to traditional and heirloom varieties of flowers and vegetables. Sharing the seeds of special plants is a great way to preserve cherished vegetables and build a sense of community among gardeners of all levels of interest and knowledge,” said Hatch.

The seed swap allows festival goers to obtain and pass on rare seeds not available commercially. The Old Timey Seed Swap is open to anyone who shares an interest in gardening. Seed owners may give out samples or charge a fee for participants with no seeds to trade. Rodger Winn, host of the swap, anticipates a large response because of the participation of legendary seed savers, such as Debbie Donley and Rob Danford. Winn says most participants are from Central Virginia; however, avid gardeners from Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Tennessee, and South Carolina also participate. One of the many draws to the swap is the abundance of seeds from the Appalachia region, the birth place of many heirloom beans, corns, and tomatoes. Although these seeds are considered to be the most notable of the region, gardeners from Appalachia save seeds of all types of vegetable and flower plants.

The Old Timey Seed Swap attracts a multi-faceted group of people. Business professionals, home makers and farmers alike unite for networking and seed preservation. The diversity of people, the seed stories, and anticipation of getting something new is the uniqueness of the seed swap.

Join the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the Southern Seed Exchange, and Rodger Winn on Saturday September 17th at 9 a.m. to enjoy this exclusive sharing opportunity. The Old Timey Seed Swap is included in the price of admission to the Heritage Harvest Festival, $8 in advance, $10 at the door.

Growing Rose of Sharon

2011-08-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

Patty, my gardening buddy and neighbor, emailed to let me know that the beautiful Rose of Sharon plant I'm enjoying so much wasn't only from her - our mutual friend Joan gave her the original plant, which Patty added to her garden, and then Patty gave me an offspring. So it's like our little circle of friends and neighbors is connected by these beautiful plants!

I was so inspired that I sat down and researched the Rose of Sharon, then wrote a new article about it today for Hub Pages. One thing I forgot to put into the article is that Rose of Sharon is the national flower of South Korea. It was also one of the first plants written about - over 1,400 years ago, in ancient Chinese texts! Simply amazing.

Anyway, please enjoy the article. Click the link to read it: How to Grow the Rose of Sharon.

Pollinators at Work in the Morning Glory Vine

2011-08-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

On Monday mornings, I usually take my camera into the garden and take photographs for articles I plan to write during the week. We got just about 5 inches of rain last week from a strong thunderstorm and the outer rim of Hurricane Irene, and the flowers just love it. I noticed that the morning glory vine growing over the trellis at the garden entrance looked particularly lovely, so I stepped closer to get some closeup photos of the various hued flowers. It was then that I noticed that some of the flowers were bouncing up and down, but there was no wind. As I watched, this little bee backed out of the deep throat of the flower. He was so coated with pollen that he was nearly indistinguishable from the white throat of the flower. Bees have always been a symbol of industry and hard work, and watching this guy move from flower to flower, diving in headfirst, then wiggling his bulbous butt as he backed out of the flower made me laugh. He never rested, though. He kept moving from flower to flower no matter how much pollen stuck to his abdomen. I tried to capture my new pollinator friend at work in these photos. Can you spot him?

New Blooms in the Flower Garden-Rose of Sharon Bush

2011-08-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

Today's flowers are courtesy of my friend, Patty. Two years ago she gave me a little seedling she'd transplanted from her garden - a Rose of Sharon. I've never grown Rose of Sharon before and had no idea what to expect. We planted it at the back of the flower garden, near my climbing rose. That area of the garden gets partial sun, partial shade, and the soil isn't great, but Patty assured me that Rose of Sharon bushes are tough plants and can tolerate a wide variety of conditions. So we planted and waited.

This morning I was rewarded by the first pink blossom on the Rose of Sharon. I like it because it reminds me of the hibiscus growing in the butterfly garden, which is another favorite plant. And for good reason: technically, this particular Rose of Sharon is called Hibiscus syriacus, and the two are related.

According to Plant Care Guides from the National Gardening Association, Rose of Sharon grow as high as 8 to 12 feet tall, so my little 2 ft plant will grow to be a giant if all goes well. Rose of Sharon are very easy care and flower abundantly in late summer and early fall, the perfect time in my garden when most other plants are finished flowering. Plant Care Guides states that Rose of Sharon produces flowers on new wood, so pruning in early spring is a must. I'll just give this one a little gentle pruning to encourage flowers. I don't want to cut it back too much and damage it. There are plenty of buds on it this year, and I am looking forward to more of the display from my new Rose of Sharon bush.

* * *

Thank you to those who sent me kind messages via social media regarding our string of amazing events last week. I told my sister Mary yesterday, "Every day held a new challenge, but I am hopeful that I will get a nice, boring peaceful week!" Hurricane Irene gave us a great deal of wind and rain, mostly rain, and fortunately the power remained on. We are still experiencing a few minor aftershocks from last Tuesday's 5.9 magnitude earthquake but nothing major. Thank you to all for your good wishes.

Hurricane Preparations for the Garden

2011-08-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

The trellis view before the wind moved my morning glories.

I can't quite recall a more adventure-filled week. I listed the events somewhere else today: Monday, business setbacks; Tuesday, 5.9 earthquake; Wednesday, aftershocks that woke us all up at 1 am; Thursday, on my return from an all-day business meeting, violent thunderstorm tossed a tree in front of the train on the tracks, causing quite the delay; Friday, we prep for Hurricane Irene. I am really hoping for a boring, peaceful, totally nothing to report week!

Yesterday's thunderstorms brought wind gusts of over 60 mph to our farm, giving me a taste of what the hurricane might bring. The rain gauge reported 3 1/2 inches of rain - in under two hours! On top of that, some plants were absolutely flattened by the rain. My morning glory vines are growing thickly along the top of the trellis, and the wind lifted up a big mat of vines and pulled it right off.

If you live in an area prone to hurricanes or affected by hurricanes, you may want to read my latest essay for Main Line Gardening: Hurricane Preparations for the Garden.

Can I Have a Do Over, Please?

2011-08-24T11:31:00.000-07:00

I'm a sunny optimist. I have an optimistic nature, carefully cultivated and nurtured by my background in meditation, positive thinking, and New Thought-style philosophy. So, given all that, why am I asking for a do-over?

Let's see. I had an awesome weekend with little Michael. I am not a big fan of little children, but something inside me changed this weekend, and I found myself able to comfortably communicate with my godson and nephew, and looking forward to spending more time with him. That was a big adjustment and I was sad to wave goodbye to their car as they pulled away on Sunday morning.

After a great church service, I came home on Sunday, ate lunch, puttered around the house cleaning up after our company, then decided to check emails. And there, sitting in my in-box from Friday after I'd logged off for the workday, was a note from a company I'd worked for since 2008 as a telecommuting freelancer letting me know they were cancelling my contract effective immediately.

Just like that, my biggest gig was gone. No good bye note, just a cold email that read like it had been penned by the corporate lawyer. Now what?

On Monday I was still too upset to do much. I told myself I could have at least a day to process the sudden loss of what I'd perceived of as an oasis of job security in the tumbled world of freelance work. As a freelancer, you never know what your income is going to be like from month to month. Some months you get a lot of work, other months you get nothing. Having that steady gig each month meant I could take some risks and be choosier about my work because I had a rock to fall back upon. Well, somebody dynamited the rock and it was gone.

I kept plans to meet friends for a concert at the university and enjoyed the music very much, but more so, the time with my friends Getting outside my own head and away from my worries and listening to beautiful music, then spending an hour or two socializing with friends was just what I needed.

I sat down to work on Tuesday in a much better frame of mind. Then, around 1:51...the earthquake struck. My house is about 70 miles from the epicenter. I was sitting at my desk and I heard a noise like a truck coming down the driveway. I was expecting a UPS delivery and thought it was just his truck, but the noise got so loud it was as if the truck was in the room with me. My chair began shaking violently from side to side. Suddenly my computer monitor was jumping up and down. I have a large china cabinet in my office filled with horse models, and models began flying through the air from the shelves, crashing into pieces on the floor. The noise grew louder. There was a pause...then it started again! I gripped the sides of my chair and felt vibrations just pulsing up through the floor, through the walls of my office.

It was by then that I realized it was an earthquake. I came about as close to panicking as I've ever come. I ran downstairs to the front door. Poor Shadow was in such a panic she was running around in circles upstairs trying to find a place to hide, but where an you hide from an earthquake? Pierre streaked by, and ran to his safety zone in the basement where he goes whenever there's a loud noise or a commotion.

Shadow finally came to my repeated calls, and with the grandfather clock bonging crazily in the downstairs hallway and dishes jumping and clattering in the cabinets, I yanked open the front door and ran outside. I sat with my arms around Shadow for several minutes on the front porch while my heart raced and the adrenaline pumped. I still didn't believe it was an earthquake. I live in central Virginia. An earthquake? After a few minutes, I ran upstairs and called a neighbor to ask if she had the same experience at her house. I could hear her smiling at saying yup, same thing here, that was an earthquake and wasn't it a doozy? We hung up so we could check our homes, but I knew I wasn't crazy!

Aside from some smashed horse models and crooked pictures on the walls, we escaped unharmed. I thank God for that. I walked around the house examining practically every inch of the walls, ceiling and floors, looking at where pipes come in and out in the basement, sniffing for gas leaks, the works, but we were spared. Aside from losing some pieces of art I really liked that got smashed when they fell to the floor, we were lucky.

This weekend it looks like Hurricane Irene will pass further to the east, so we will get the bands of rain. It's heading to my old home on Long Island. According to the map, the bull's eye of the storm will pass directly over my old home town of Huntington. I keep hoping the rest of this week will be uneventful. I think I have had as much excitement as I can stand!

Gardening with Children

2011-08-19T11:51:00.000-07:00

Did you garden alongside your mom or dad when you were little? How did you first become interested in gardening?

These past two weekends, I had the rare experience of having a small child in the home, my 7 year old nephew. His parents do not garden. They live in a modest suburban home with a lawn and a shrub or too and lots of concrete sidewalks, walkway and patio...nature just doesn't interest them. I don't understand that, because it feels like throughout my entire life, I've loved nature. I remember as a child marveling at the clouds and jumping into piles of leaves on the lawn in the autumn when my older brothers raked them up. I remember my mom teaching me the names of the birds sitting on the telephone wires as she pushed my stroller along - wait! That's the answer, isn't it?

It's our moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas and all the other grownups in our lives who either taught us to love the world around us or ignore it and focus on the ephemeral. My mom gave me a sense of curiosity about nature, and my dad's love of science and his amateur science experiments, like the time he tried to grow ferns on a brick from spores he picked from a fern growing in the backyard, instilled a healthy curiosity in my mind and heart as a child.

My dad gardened, my grandma gardened, and my next door neighbor gardened; gardening was as natural to me as breathing. Knowing the names of trees and shrubs, flowers and birds, insects and everything in between was deemed important in my household. Knowing the name of the current hot rock band or whatever else was 'hip' was deemed unimportant.

So many kids today are growing up completely oblivious to nature. It's not just city kids. City kids can be very keen on nature too. I remember walking through Central Park on a bright summer's day when I worked near Lincoln Center and watching children playing near a pond. They were pointing at the ducks and feeding them bread and they were loving every minute of it. There were little gardens in Manhattan too sandwiched in alleyways between buildings, community gardens made from whatever space was available. There's nature in the middle of the city, too.

My nephew doesn't live near anyone who gardens, and his parents don't really care about gardening. They mow their lawn and that's it. Their neighborhood is like that; we've visited them several times, and I don't remember anyone planting flowers at all.

When we took everyone out to the vegetable garden to show them what was growing, my nephew grew excited for the first time during his visit. "Look mom! Peppers!" he shouted, running to point at the peppers. He clapped his hands in delight. We let him pull a carrot and he accidentally pulled two. As soon as he got into the house, he wanted to scrub the carrot and eat it. He ate two raw carrots right there standing at the sink! Can you imagine if you said, "Honey, would you like a raw carrots?" He'd probably demand potato chips. Yet you let him pull his own vegetables, and he was so excited to taste the carrot.

He tasted beets for the first time too. He didn't know what a beet was, and he pulled one for me. He marveled at the pretty purple color. I happened to have some leftover ones in the fridge already cooked in a Harvard sauce, which is sweet and sour, and we gave him one to taste cold. "Good?" my husband asked. "Good!" he declared around a purple mouthful.

Every garden bed he peered into he squealed with excitement. "Strawberries! Tomatoes! What's this?" pointing at the Swiss Chard - "And that?"

We couldn't get him interested in the hummingbirds at the feeder, or even the deer tip toeing across the yard at dusk, but vegetables he got excited about. And that's a good thing. Showing a child where his food comes from, teaching him that it is okay to leave bugs alone and that some bugs are good, and teaching him to compost - which he got the hang of very quickly, knowing what to put into the kitchen compost bucket and what not to - gave me a good sense of having passed along a bit of wisdom, along with one scrubbed carrot in his lunch sack to take with him in the car. It was like I got to pass along a bit of my grandma, a bit of my dad, a bit of Mr Hoffman, and a bit of the joy I feel for my garden, too.

Telling People That They Matter

2011-08-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite windows from my childhood church

My old home town has its own page on Facebook, and it's been a wonderful way for me to reconnect with former neighbors, grade school and high school friends, and memories long buried. We've been sharing memories of our favorite places to hang out as teenagers, the old playground and recreation center, and the people and places that meant so much to us as children.

We talked about....

Billy, the retarded man who used to hang out at the playground and pretend to give you tickets. The kids called him Moose because he was well over 6' 4" tall, and we were afraid of him. But we all remember Moose and the games we played with him in the lat 1960s early 1970s
Charlie the Good Humor ice cream truck driver. He'd always remember to pull up at your street corner and he'd always remember what flavor of ice cream you wanted. He used to let kids climb into the cab of his truck and jingle the bells - JING JING JING!
The Dingy Man. I have no idea what his real name is. He drove a battered green truck up and down the street with an old bell that sounded like two chimes grinding together - Ding - D----i----n------G! Hence the nickname the "Dingy" man after the dinging sound of the truck bell. He'd drive slowly up and down all the town streets, ringing the unique bell, and our moms would gather the knives, scissors and lawn mower to be sharpened. He would park the truck, grind the knives, and moms would pay him in cash.
The store owners - the Levines on Tulip Avenue, who still sell the best jelly bean flavors in the world; old Herb who retired from running the tiny candy shop, Shannon's, after over 40 years behind the counter; Bob R at Grand Value who used to eye all the teens and follow up around like we were all shoplifters; Mrs. Price, mom of my prom date in high school, who was the town's reference librarian and her special way of "ssshing" us when we got too noisy.

Billy has long since passed on, and I'm pretty sure Charlie the Good Humor man has passed away too. I don't know what happened to Mrs. Price. I don't know what happened to the folks who owned Grand Value before they sold it and it became Raindew variety store.

But I did stop by Shannon's in 2007, when I returned to town, to say goodbye to Herb before I moved to Virginia. Herb ran Shannons Candy Store from the early 1970s until it shut down for good in 2010.

I told him how much his store had meant to me all those years. I think his eyes teared up a little.

I never got a change to tell Mrs. Cook, the organist and music director at my childhood church, how much she meant to me, or Mrs. Vincent the other organist. I never got to thank a few other people for making my childhood better. (Today's picture is a stained glass window from the church of my childhood.)

I wish Billy and Charlie and the Dingy Man and all those characters from our childhoods could know how much we loved and remembered them. Here we are, a bunch of middle aged ex-Floral Parkers, getting choked up about how Charlie let us climb into his truck and how he knew you wanted a Bomb Pop or an Italian ice each night. How Billy was teased a lot and how we all wish we could take that back. How we are sorry for swiping candy bars or how are loved the old Floral Movie Theater with its faded red velvet curtains and ancient murals you could barely see across the old Vaudeville stage.

It's all changed now, and we can't go back. But we can move forward. We can remember to tell people we appreciate all the little things.

Tell people in your life that they matter to you.

It's better to tell them now than sit around the nursing home later, swapping stories.

Summer Is Winding Down

2011-08-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

Summer is winding down here at Seven Oaks...a few days ago, we walked on the High Bridge Trail and noticed red leaves on the sumacs. Today, looking out my office window, I see some of the underbrush trees already turning shades of gold and red. This morning while I sat on the front porch with Shadow, I needed a sweater. First time since April.

Shadow's nemesis - the beeping, belching yellow school buses - are back on the road during her early morning walk. In Prospect, new deliveries of donated furniture are starting to show up at the fire house in anticipation of the fall auction, another sign that fall is here.

I'm canning peppers, freezing tomatoes, and readying the garden beds for the fall crops of vegetables. The flowers are at their peak, and I'm noticing second flowering on some of the spring bloomers, the dianthus and a stray pansy or two.

Last year, I felt like summer rushed by all too fast. I worked too many hours and didn't take time to enjoy any time off. This year, I don't want summer to end. Each morning, the light seems more gentle, and each evening darkness falls too soon.

We have a few more weeks of summer yet to come, but I feel like already it is winding down. How about you? How do you tell the seasons in your garden?

View from the High Bridge Trail, looking south in Prospect

Timing Is Everything

2011-08-12T05:26:00.000-07:00

My furry guardian angel: Shadow

Have you ever heard the expression, "Timing is everything?" I saw a news article that mentioned meteor showers visible this week, with the best days Thursday and Friday between 3 am and 5 am or so (no, that's not a typo...). I love a good meteor shower. It's like God is putting on a fireworks show just for me. So I decided I would get up early to watch the show. I asked Shadow to wake me up early, and she was true to her word. On Thursday around 4:15 am, a warm muzzle nudged me awake, and I opened my eyes to her whiskey-brown ones staring at me across the edge of the bed. I was so sleepy though...all I wanted to do was roll over and go back to sleep! I thought, "Well, I can always get up tomorrow..." but then my next thought was, "Better go out now while I can."

I parked my lawn chair on the walkway in front of the porch, tipped my head back, sipped coffee, and watched the skies with Shadow by my side. It's such a unique experience to sit outside in the country in the dark. The darkness is like velvet pressing around you, and after your eyes adjust to the dark, the starlight and intricate patterns of the constellations become visible in ways I could never see when I lived on Long Island.

I don't worry about animals coming close or any other things to fear because Shadow is there. German shepherd dogs are the best protection I know of, and she lay down by my side and was on what I call "relaxed alert," with her ears perked up but her demeanor very calm, so we were fine. She has an uncanny ability to sense danger, and I trust my 'guardian angel in fur' to watch my back whenever I work outside. Her keen senses alert to the presence of animals or people before any of us humans notice them. She watches my back all the time.

Within half an hour I saw a lot of small meteors, and one really great one that was truly like a firework. By the time the sky lightened around 5:20, I gave a sigh of happy satisfaction and decided to head out again early on Friday morning.

Timing, however, is everything. Last night around 1 a.m. a terrific noise woke me up. John thought it was hail. Shadow was running around the bedroom just trembling with fear. It was pouring rain so hard on the roof that even with the windows closed, we could barely hear one another speaking. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. I didn't get to sleep again until 3, because Shadow was such a wreck. She's not normally afraid of thunder. In fact, she usually rolls over and goes back to sleep during thunderstorms. At one point during last night's storms, however, she actually dove under the bed to hide. That's her spot of last resort in the house, when she's absolutely terrified of something. I didn't understand why she was so frightened and why she couldn't settle down. The cat was also unnerved. Pierre went into the guest bedroom to his special bolt hole. With both of them so freaked out by the storms, I was upset too. I lay in bed with one ear listening for tornadoes, which I was sure would come...but didn't.

Needless to say, I ended up sleeping until 6, and thunder was still growling and snarling out there. The skies were cloudy and sitting in a metal lawn chair in an open lawn area would NOT have been a good idea this morning. Tomorrow and Sunday we have house guests for the weekend, so I won't be able to go out and see the meteors then...and then they peak moments for them are gone.

Remember that timing is everything. Don't put off joy for tomorrow. If I had yielded to the temptation to go back to sleep Thursday morning, I would have missed one of my favorite natural displays in the whole world. You can't predict what happens tomorrow. Seize the day!

Unexpected Surprises

2011-08-11T04:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you have things all planned out, and an unexpected surprise delights you. The other day, I was busily working away when my Internet connection went down. Now, I work from home as a freelance writer, editor and marketing consultant, and I rely upon my Internet connection for the majority of my work. When it stops, often I must stop, too. After half an hour of fruitless clicking the little antenna icon on my computer tray, I gave up and grabbed my camera. I figured I could take my week's worth of pictures out in the garden. I write about herbs and gardening a lot, and try to take many of the pictures myself, so at least once a week you can find me outside snapping images at dawn or dusk to capture what I need.

The sky was a brilliant blue with puffy, fleecy clouds, and I realized that many of the sunflowers growing along the south side of the house had bent under the weight of their flower heads. By standing underneath, I could snap the sunflower and the blue sky, and crop out the window screens and side of the house. So I started snapping away.

When I loaded the pictures onto the computer, I burst out laughing. There, putting along, was a big fat bumble bee, and my camera not only captured him in mid-flight heading to the sunflower...it captured his journey away, probably annoyed with me for disturbing his snack!

I love it. It reminded me that sometimes unexpected surprises are the best ones of all.

See my friend leaving (lower right corner?) Bee zooms away

My New Book - A Gift Just for You

2011-08-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

Download it FREE

To celebrate the release of my latest gardening book, How to Attract Birds to the Garden, and to thank readers who purchased my books, I created a free inspirational eBook. You may download it directly from my publisher's website, or if you buy one of my books, check the thank you email I send out with every purchase. It includes links to two free eBooks, one filled with inspirational nature and garden photography and scripture passages, and the second to a marketing eBook for those who buy my business books.

I was inspired to create this book thanks to reader feedback on my Facebook page. Each day, I posted one of my garden pictures, many of them the ones you see here. I get so many kind comments and private emails from people saying how they are inspired by the pictures or the pictures cheered them up that I decided to create this book.

Right now only the eBook is available. It is totally free of charge. I hope to offer the paperback and hardcover versions soon. Because the publisher needs to make a few bucks to cover the cost of paper and printing, I can't offer hardbound or paperbacks free (yet) but maybe some day. Or maybe I'll have a little content on the blog. Won't that be fun?

Please enjoy my photography if you wish by downloading the PDF. Feel free to pass the book along, but please do not use the images inside for ANY reason. I do own the copyright.

Gardening/Inspiration Book
Song of Joy: Daily Meditations
My original nature photography, particularly garden photography and inspiring Biblical passages. This is a large file (20 MB) eBook with full color photography and passages to warm your heart and inspire you.

Checkout says "Buy Now" but it should be free. If it's not, please let me know. Thanks.

My latest book, How to Attract Birds to the Garden, is 50+ pages, and available as a paperback ($9.99) or eBook download ($5.97). It will teach you how to plant trees, shrubs and flowers to attract birds; types of birdfeeders and feed to use; how to make your own suet feeders; and much more.

At Last: Meet Your Blogger

2011-08-08T10:51:00.000-07:00

Well, at last. A picture of me in my element...so to speak. I had a house guest here last week who decided that after all the garden writing I do, the world needed to see a picture of me doing what I do best. Weeding. A glamor shot this is not, but next time I whine - er, write - about the weeds, weeding, or anything to do with weeding the flower garden, remember this:

A Full Pantry of Fresh Organic Vegetables

2011-08-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

Let me see a show of hands. (Peering out at my reading audience...).

How many people feel a great sense of satisfaction when the pantry is full of fresh, home-grown organic vegetables? When you see rows of canning jars neatly lined up and labeled, or a freezer full of labeled bags of fresh produce? A kitchen table groaning under the weight of garden produce?

Isn't it a great feeling to know where your food is coming from?

Not everyone agrees with me. I've met people who think it's stupid to grow your own food. They think, "Why would I want to do that when I can just run to the supermarket and buy whatever I want when I want it?"

They have a point. Right now we are picking pounds of tomatoes a day, peppers, eggplants...and some green beans. The onions and potatoes are harvested, dried and stored in the cool dark basement. I've got 16 pints of canned beets and another two dozen or more beets still in the garden. Today I'm stopping off to buy some freezer containers for carrots because I have a huge garden bed full of them, and I plan to plant more seeds today to try to get another crop in this fall.

I've been eating tomato sandwiches and tomato salads for lunch every day, followed by squash and eggplant at dinner. So I can see their point.

Yet I still feel quite a sense of accomplishment when I walk into the kitchen and see my giant metal chef's mixing bowl, pictured here, filled with vegetables. I actually have two big bowls now on the kitchen counter filled with organic vegetables from the garden. In the pantry, the current tally is 16 pints of pickled beets, 8 half pints of dill pickles, and 6 pints of pickled peppers. Today I will add more peppers to the mix, since they don't freeze well for me. In the basement, I have over 30 pounds of potatoes stored, enough onions for the winter, and garlic from the crop almost two years ago, plus sweet potatoes leftover and still keeping nicely from last fall's harvest.

Last year, I calculated that the sweet potatoes alone saved me a bundle of money. I spent $16 on the sweet potato "slips" or plants and the harvest was well over 70-80 pounds of sweet potatoes; at $1 a pound, the very cheapest you'll find them, that's still considerable savings. This year, the potatoes alone are making me sit up and notice the money-saving benefits. I spent $2.50 on the seed potatoes and got a bag of Yukon Gold seed potatoes from our friends, Mel and Joan. I have about 30 pounds of potatoes now stored in the basement. How much would that cost me? Well right now potatoes are going for $5.99 for a 10 pound sack. You can do the math...

Beets are $1 a can, and a can is less than a pint. My 16 pints of pickled beets are probably worth $16 - $32, yet I spent $1.79 on the seed package.

So there you have it. Oh and another benefit? The other day I was wearing a sleeveless top for the first time in years. It was really hot and I was wearing a tank top and shorts. I was sitting in the living room reading a book, and the television screen was off. It caught my reflection and I realized that I had actually developed some muscles in my arms! I have definition in my upper arms now thanks to lifting, digging, pushing a wheelbarrow and a lawn mower and carrying those heavy pails of gravel. I have also lost a little weight since May, thanks to the extra walks I have been taking as well as all the gardening. Oh, and those tomatoes for lunch every day!

Truly, can you beat gardening? The benefits are amazing. And every time I walk into my kitchen and see the fresh vegetables, I feel all happy inside.

Second Vegetable Planting

2011-08-04T06:55:00.000-07:00

Did you know you can grow a second harvest of many vegetables? I just learned about this and am excited to plant beans again and make use of the now-empty garden space where the potatoes, lettuce, and beets used to be. After dinner tonight, I plan to head out into the vegetable garden and dig through the remaining dirt in the potato beds to find any remaining Yukon golds. They are so delicious and tender that we have been enjoying the fingerling potatoes for many meals. I'm not a fan of eating potato skins, but when they're grown 100% organic and I know exactly what is in the soil, I even ate the skins and boy were they good. I plan to plant more Dutch brown and Jacob's Cattle heirloom beans. I've been collecting the seeds, but the yield is disappointing. I was too tentative in my planting this spring. After planting way too many green beans in 2009, I was hesitant to plant more than half a bed of each, but honestly when you're growing heirloom beans to dry and use the seeds, it's a different thing altogether. Green beans have to blanched, frozen and/or canned (if I had a pressure canner, which I don't); heirloom beans are solar dried and shelled, and that's it.

Now according to the Cooperative Extension sheet I printed out last night, my fall veggie should go in around August 20th. I'll probably push that planting off a few more days, but I've already got turnip, Brussels sprouts and broccoli seeds waiting. Maybe I will have better luck this year and not have to fight the worms and moths for them - wouldn't it be nice to have that last harvest, crisped by the frost, just in time for Thanksgiving?

Please enjoy my latest article today for Main Line Gardening, written on this very topic and with more instructions on how you can get a second harvest from the garden.

Read: Vegetable Gardening-Second Planting.

Gardening as Meditation

2011-08-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

Have you ever looked up from your weeding to realize that an hour flew by in a quiet, gentle peace, like water flowing in a quiet stream?

Or you're pruning a shrub, and the breeze nuzzles your hair while birds sing, and you breathe the scent of a thousand flowers in the evening air, and you realize in your heart that this is peace?

Last night, we went on our usual 2-3 mile walk with Shadow, then returned home. It was a sticky evening, humid and warm, but there was nothing I wanted to watch on television and I'm tired of news programs. So I said to John, "I'm going outside to putter for a bit - I won't be long." I slipped on my gardening gloves and Shadow and I retreated to the flower garden. I had four large pots of perennials started from seed this spring that needed to be transplanted, columbine and penstemmon, and a pot of Dusty Millers my father in law had bought for me. Trowel in hand, I carried my pots to the garden, dug in the soft soil, and gently patted the flowers into their new homes.

Of course as I wandered among the flower beds, weeds demanded to be pulled, and so I used each empty plastic pot as a weed receptacle. Soon, I had weeded the pathways - yes, despite the landscape fabric, sand, gravel and stones, a few weeds do manage to sprout and must be pulled before they spread. Ditto for the various grasses, which always seem to prefer the flower beds to the lawn areas where we want them to grow.

As I puttered and pulled, patted and pruned, dusk descended on the garden. Birds sang quietly in the woods behind my back and the breeze stirred my perspiration-dampened hair. I looked up to a spectacular sky of blues and indigo shot with veins of pure ocher and gold; sunset.

During our walk, many worries and fears crowded my mind. I tend to be a worry wart. As a child, I'd lay in bed at night and worry that I hadn't done all my homework or that I wouldn't hit the ball during gym class baseball games. I was a bundle of anxiety before I had a real reasons to be anxious.

I'm like that now. I worry about everything. My mind can go in about a zillion fearful directions to the point where I feel paralyzed. No amount of logic helps. I've heard that fear is "False Evidence Appearing Real" and that's me to a T; false evidence appears real, and I worry.

So you can image how my evening walk went. I walked and talked with my husband, and we had fun playing with Shadow, and every time a bit of quiet came into the walk, my worrying mind started in again.

Yet as I picked my head up from the garden, my gloves caked with good red Virginia clay and a bucket of weeds by my feet, I realized that for the first time all day, my mind was quiet. No worries chattered and poked at my subconscious; all was quiet, peace, serenity. My mind was tranquil, my spirit serene.

People go to great lengths to create meditation gardens, and they are lovely places for the spirit. But I find that gardening is meditation. It is better than anything I can take to sooth my spirit, it is more prayer for me than anything else. Gardening is my meditation, my serenity. A simple evening of weeding resets my worry buttons like nothing else until this morning I rise secure, ready to face the challenges of the day, the spirit of lingering peace offering rest.

Update on Ann's Bloomerang Lilac

2011-08-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

I've written about my Bloomerang lilac, a gift (well, purchased through a gift certificate from White Flower farms for my birthday a few years ago) from my sister Ann. At my old house in Floral Park, my dad had planted a beautiful holly next to the front door; my Aunt Betty had given it to my parents as a house warming present in 1960 when they bought their house. I love that tradition, and so when Ann gave me the gift certificate, I purchased the Bloomerang lilac and planted it in roughly the same spot at my new home in Virginia; slightly to the left of my front steps and in the front of the house.

It's August 2nd, and going up to 97 degrees today, and still the lilac blooms on! This picture was taken today. We've had great rains over the past two weeks - 3 inches one week, 2 inches this weekend - and as long as it gets plenty of water, it does indeed produce new waves of blossoms. The Bloomerang lilac truly lives up to its name, like a boomerang returning again and again with new waves of blossoms. Best of all, the dwarf size makes it a good addition in front of my porch; it won't tower over the railing and block the garden views.

My (New) Home Town

2011-08-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I had company staying with me. I got a chance to show off my new home town. We hiked the High Bridge Trail and enjoyed gorgeous country vistas thanks to two inches of rain on top of three inches last week. The fields are emerald green, the wildflowers blooming. We saw Passion Flower and wild Rose of Sharon growing along the trail, as well as many beautiful butterflies. I hope you enjoy glimpse of my new home town...and why I moved from New York City to rural Virginia....

View from High Bridge Trail, Virginia

There's a Rebel in Every Pack

2011-07-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

The new seeds were supposed to look like this....

It's true for people as well as plants - there's a rebel in every pack! Thanks to my friend Lisa Ritchie for the title for my essay today written for Main Line Gardening, in which I celebrate the surprise of a new and different Gaillardia among the 100 seeds that were supposed to be alike.

When I bought the seeds, I expected 100 identical plants. But nature had another thing in mind and provided me with one unique plant. I have choices; I could rip it up and insist on my little pink border being "perfect," or I can celebrate the unique and different. I can rejoice in the new and exciting.

I choose to rejoice. Celebrate with me!

...but I got a little of this...and that....lemon yellow REBEL Gaillardia

And if I get seeds? Yes, I'll share...but I can't guarantee they'll grow true. Maybe yours will yield surprises, too!

Please enjoy my essay on Main Line Gardening's website - There's a Rebel in Every Pack.

And yes, the picture is of my latest rebel...

Petunia Pizzazz

2011-07-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

I managed to score a whole bunch of "Wave" petunias as well as many other types at Lowe's yesterday, each for 50 cents a pot. They're going to need some TLC, but I think they will recover quite nicely. Below are photos of the last batch I rescued from Lowe's discount rack. A little water, a little talking to and some love, and lo and behold, abundant flowers!

With 3 inches of rain this past week, my garden is green and glorious just when Virginia's hottest summer weather rolls around. Thank God for rain!

Enjoy the petunias...once the stragglers recover, I'll photograph them too.

Last petunias 'rescued' from the discount rack, and looking good!

Some Serious Thinking-Type Stuff

2011-07-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

Tonight is one of those nights when I'm glad I didn't spring for the next most expensive television package from our satellite provider. My house is HBO deficient, and that means I will miss the docudrama, "There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane," about a family from my home town of Floral Park, Long Island, who went through the unimaginable tragedy last year of losing not one but all three of their children in a car accident on the Taconic Parkway.

Many of my friends from grammar school stayed in Floral Park. It might be Long Island, it might be just 20 minutes from midtown Manhattan (by train), but it still retains the charm of a small town, albeit a town with about 16,000 residents and jets screaming overhead as they descend to Kennedy Airport.

One of my childhood friends who lives not far from the Hance family sent me a link to the story when it broke last year. The photos haunted me for weeks - the Hance home on Vanderbilt Avenue, which is a few doors down from a childhood friend's house and site of many a high school Friday night fun with the gang, the scenes of mourners marching across town to the doors of my old church, Our Lady of Victory, where my parents were married, where I was baptized, confirmed and married, too.

Prayer vigil last year for Emma, Alison and Kate at Our Lady of Victory, my former church

But what haunts me more and more is the growing sense of deep, bitter sorrow for all those affected by drugs, alcohol, and other addictions. Addictions claim more lives - both literally and the lives wrecked around the addict - than anyone can count.

In the Hance family case, the children went off for a weekend of camping with their aunt Diane and uncle, their cousin and the family dog. The grownups took two vehicles, and Diane drove home the three Hance girls and her own child in the mini van while her husband took the equipment and the dog in the other vehicle. During the ride home, the oldest girl called her father on the phone and uttered the unforgettable sentence, "There's something wrong with Aunt Diane" line and told her father that Aunt Diane was acting "funny" and driving on the wrong side of the road. The panicked dad jumped into his car while his wife called the police, but by the time they found them, it was too late. Diane's mini van hit another car head on. Killed in the accident were all three adults in the other car - a grandfather, his son, and his grandson. Killed in the mini van was Diane and the three Hance girls, Emma (age 9) , Alison (age 7) and Kate (age 5). Only Brian, Diane's son, survived, and has no memory of what happened.

The story has made the national news. Oprah even covered it. It's unthinkable. A family lost every single child in one bizarre accident. At first, the Hance family thought that Diane had suffered a medical event - heart attack, stroke, something. Then the coroner's report shocked them even more. Diane, it seemed, had the equivalent of 10 shots of alcohol in her bloodstream and was over the legal limit, along with high amounts of whatever active ingredient is found in marijuana. In other words, sometime between leaving the campground and the accident, she drank and drugged, then got behind the wheel of the car and drove three children to their deaths, while killing three other people in the process.

Part of me is wrenched with pity for her, pity for all the alcoholics and substance abusers out there. The Aunt Diane of the title of this story isn't some hideous monster the way I have seen some people portray her. Aunt Diane could, but for the grace of God, be any one of us so in thrall to the god of the bottle (or the refrigerator, or the craps table, or the needle) that we would do anything for the little god of addiction. Anything.

We're all one or two steps away from that, some of us closer, some of us further, but all of us reading this, I am sure, know at least one person among our family and friends who could have been Diane, now or in the past.

No, I won't watch the HBO show tonight, and not because I don't have HBO. And it's not that I won't watch it because the scenes from Floral Park, if they actually did film outside my old church and on the streets of my childhood, will make me sad and nostalgic.

I won't watch it because I can't stand all the suffering that continues due to drugs and alcohol and every single kind of addictive behavior out there. So much suffering, which compounds others' suffering. It becomes unbearable to think about it all, and one has to cling to the hope that God will take the bitter and wring some sweet from it.

If you can, pray for the three little girls and the three adults in the other car who were killed. More importantly, pray for Diane's soul, and for everyone alive still stuck in the hell of addiction today or who hide their pain and suffering behind substances, whether it's alcohol, food, cigarettes, drugs or you name it. Hell in a bottle brought hell to others. Let it end there. Let all who need the light and grace of sanity find their way out of the hell of addiction today.