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After we put the Rebels to bed, we have been:
…Making Pickles from our garden cukes, dill, and fennel. Here Mr. Brown is stuffing it into one of his Party Pigs originally used to make homebrew.
…processing peaches. Every year the peach truck comes from Georgia and we buy two cases, one for eating and the other for freezing. We’ll make some jam from a few of them when it’s cold outside and we can stand to be in a hot canning kitchen.
Sunday Dinner of zucchini* stuffed with tomatoes*, chard*, herbs*, and Bumble Bee Beans*,along with crusty bread drenched in egg and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. Mr. Brown put them on the grill and we served it with white wine and Peach cobbler for dessert.
* all vegetables from our garden
During the week, I made ratatouile entirely from vegetables from our garden and added a few springs of our lavender as well. Yum.
We bought the house in April of 2006 it looked like this:
It was a fixer-upper on a corner lot. It was in a great neighborhood, close to schools, a library, the bike path. Then we birthed twins, painted the house, pulled out the overgrown bushes, replaced some windows, built a fence, built a patio, had another kid, read Michael Pollan , read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, read Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn , read Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, rode Bike the Barns (twice), got tired of kohlrabi in our CSA box, stopped subscribing to a CSA, went to the farmer’s market so often that the farmers know Mr. Brown on a first name basis, built a raised bed in the front yard, cut down the crab(Crap) apple trees, installed rain-barrels, wanted to get chickens, looked into getting chickens, decided chickens were not for us, hired Madison Groundworks, brewed beer, made chili, invited our friends and their favorite shovel over and turned this:
into this.
The kids showed amazing stamina and played in cold, drizzly weather for 8 hours. They came in briefly to use the bathroom and eat, but they tirelessly rescued worms from the old raised bed and relocated them to their new, bigger home.
It’s a bit unsatisfying to build a garden and then immediately put it to bed. But now we have all winter to inventory our seeds and perfect our plant wish list , find black current bushes, asparagus, and quince trees.We will spend the coldest nights debating about which heirloom tomatoes are sweeter. We have all winter to dream of green things to come.
This project is our 10th anniversary present to each other. Tin is the traditional gift….think tin watering can. Happy Anniversary, Farmer Brown. I love you more than dirt.
