When I first saw Gem, I thought he was three feet tall. That was a powerful misperception, given that he is in reality just 10 1/2 ounces of flesh and bone and very fancy feathers. I was driving home at the end of the day, fantasizing about apricots as jam makers do in June, when…
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke the owls. Invoke winter, then spring. Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that sound goes away, wait. A slow bubble rises through the earth and begins to include sky, stars, all space, even the outracing, expanding thought….
A recipe for simple homemade orange syrup for sodas or drinks, plus three variations: orange mint, orange cardamom, and orange elderflower.
My career as a legal writer and editor has involved reading and analyzing hundreds if not thousands of legal statutes. I wouldn’t call that part of my job fun, but I’ve always been nerdy enough to find it a little bit fascinating. Because people write laws and people are quirky, laws are often quirky, too….
Last year, two things came into my life that changed the way I preserve fruit. One was an upright storage freezer, which now lives in the basement. The other was a Food Saver, which allows me to freeze fruit in vacuum sealed packages at the height of just-picked excellence, without the danger of ruin from…
‘ve experimented with several variations on the quince-based marmalade theme and (other than orange) this version using Meyer lemons is by far my favorite.
This is what it’s like in the February garden. The soiled rag, the oilcloth hanging half off the table, the untrimmed ivy. (The forever untrimmed ivy.) But I love the warm morning light these days, and the towhees that come first thing when I go out to feed the pigeons. They know any seed left…
On Sunday, I picked nineteen pounds of Rangpur limes. (I have the scratches to prove it. Rangpur trees are thorny!) I sent eleven pounds out to the folks who won them in last week’s giveaway. That left seven pounds to play with this week and about forty pounds still on the tree. That’s a lot…
At the end of this post, I’ll announce the winner(s) of the Rangpur lime giveaway. Thank you for all the entries. I love how you all love the fruit. First, though, I want to say something about “regular” limes — the dark green kind that most of us buy at the market. It was only…
As every gardener knows, what you hope or intend for your little patch of earth isn’t always what you get. Like last spring when I accidentally planted hot peppers thinking they were sweet. Or when, many years ago, my mom mistakenly thought she had planted a Mexican lime tree in her backyard. Her “limes” turned…
A tall glass of fizzy water with a splash of homemade fruit syrup is one of the most enjoyable alternatives to commercial sodas.
Down near the bottom of the crossed-out list of things you have to do today, between “green thread” and “broccoli” you find that you have penciled “sunlight.” Resting on the page, the word is as beautiful, it touches you as if you had a friend and sunlight were a present he had sent you from…