Tag: Asparagus

  • Asparagus Officinalis

    Asparagus Officinalis

    Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis) is an early season perennial vegetable that pops out of Rosslyn’s still chilly soil sometime in May. Each year it is a harbinger of spring, arriving at just the right time to reassure us that the long Adirondack winter is retreating; that mud season is mostly past tense; and a happy, holistic gardening season is underway. Rosslyn’s asparagus bed was one of the very…

  • Asparagus Sunup to Sundown

    Asparagus Sunup to Sundown

    Eureka! Or, better yet… Spargelzeit! Join me in celebrating asparagus time, one of my favorite highlights of the seasonal culinary calendar. For a month or two our asparagus cravings are sated sunup to sundown. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.  Why so obsessive? Because the season is short. Because these delicate shoots look like and taste like the quintessence of…

  • Green Eggs and Ham

    Green Eggs and Ham

    As asparagus time begins yielding to rhubarb time (photo update soon!) I brainstorm asparagus recipes that I’ll lament overlooking once seasonality advances our homegrown ingredients. A vague recollection sends me filtering through old blog posts and then drafts of incomplete blog posts. I find notes started on May 14, 2014, and I know what my…

  • Spargelzeit: Asparagus Time!

    Spargelzeit: Asparagus Time!

    Imagine for a moment enduring many, many months without fresh, homegrown produce. Tragic, right? Especially for a passionate gardener who loves to prepare and share garden-to-table fare for family and friends. Now you can stop imagining because this next part requires no imagination… It’s Spargelzeit! The word Spargel means asparagus and Zeit means time. The…

  • Green Zebras 1st in High Tunnel

    Green Zebras 1st in High Tunnel

    Green Zebra Tomatoes are first transplants of the season. Others to follow soon!

  • Homestead Haikus

    Homestead Haikus

    I often refer to Rosslyn as a homestead, but I’m aware that might mislead some of you. No livestock. That’s probably the biggest deviation from most self proclaimed homesteads. No chickens. No pigs, sheep, or goats. No milk cow. No 160 acre land grant (though we’ve slowly grown Rosslyn’s acreage to more than a third…

  • Summer Supper Prequel

    Summer Supper Prequel

    Sometime summer supper comes in springtime because the asparagus are perfect and I just can’t wait for summer. Or I want to jumpstart summer. Or… Let’s just call this a summer supper prequel and get in with the eye candy! Because asparagus season just happens to have coincided with the decadence of fresh lobster meat.…

  • Moist May 2017

    The Lake Champlain water level is ever-so-slowly dropping, but it’s premature to rule out the possibility of hitting (or even exceeding) flood stage. At present, there’s about a foot of clearance between the bottom of Rosslyn boathouse’s cantilevered deck and the glass-flat water surface. Windy, wavy days are another story altogether. [pullquote]With the first impossibly green asparagus…

  • Radishes and Radish Greens

    Radishes and Radish Greens

    On this technicolor Tuesday I present to you one of our flashiest May garden treats, French Breakfast Radishes. Field and forrest foraged veggies — like stinging nettles, wild ramps, and fiddleheads — are nature’s charitable reminder that winter has once again yielded to spring. Then our vegetable gardens begin to awaken with asparagus and spinach that spoil…

  • Sally Lesh & Hyde Gate

    Sally Lesh & Hyde Gate

    One of the unanticipated joys of living at Rosslyn (aka Hyde Gate) has been discovering the property’s legacy. Prior to purchasing our home, neither my bride nor I had ever stopped to consider the impact that these four buildings clustered along the shore of Lake Champlain might have had on others before us. One recent…

  • Serene, Patinaed Fantasy

    Accustomed to living out of a suitcase, I pendulumed back and forth between Manhattan where Susan was wrapping up a degree in interior design following a decade-long career in video production, and Westport, New York, where both of our parents owned homes and where we’d met a couple of years prior. Susan had recently refinished…

  • The Farm

    We walked down the road from the tennis court and stopped off at my parents’ house, still closed up for the winter. It would be several weeks before my parents arrived in Rock Harbor for the summer, and by then the asparagus would have gone to seed, so we picked enough for dinner and enough…