Tag: Holistic gardening
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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…
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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…
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Hummingbird Haiku
Perhaps hummingbirds offer us a fleeting reminder to welcome the wisdom of wonder? To wander wider? To pursue a nonlinear path, to be unimpeded by obstacles, to bound between ambrosial blossoms?
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Earth Day
Without being cute or hyperbolic, *every* day at Rosslyn is Earth Day. Healthy, sustainable, holistic practice — from construction and gardening to eating and personal wellness, responsible land stewardship to ecological wildlife guardianship — was fundamental to the lifestyle changes we made two decades ago when we exited life in Manhattan and started fresh on…
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Complaints: Top 5
What do you complain about the most? Such a mysterious adventure story, this thing we call life. Plot twists around every corner. Characters waxing and waning. Textures tangling and untangling, melodies braiding and unbraiding, hues shifting and sifting so subtly we wonder if we’re imagining it,… A mesmerizing mystery so pure, so pulchritudinous as to…
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Dream Job
What’s your dream job? Saturday, a day for job dreaming, right? Or telemark skiing… That’s how I spent my day. But now it’s time to wax wordy about my dream job. Jobs? Hybrid job? A dream job spanning diverse occupations, vertically dissimilar vocations. Let’s start with a few of the more obvious ingredients for my…
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Hibernal High
I almost preempted this evening’s post with an update on the rising, rising, rising lake levels. Given the alarming uptick — Lake Champlain has risen approximately 2’ in the last couple of days with waters currently approaching spring flood stage — our attention is focused on meteorological forecasts. But angsty fretting serves no one, so…
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Compost Bin v2.0
Probably about a decade and a half ago we repurposed a shipping crate (that happened to have been fabricated out of tropical hardwood) into a compost bin. We’ve used it for years, far surpassing the value I anticipated at the outset. When the top began to fail, it got pulled aside for eventual repair. Today’s…
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Legume Levity
You know the rhyme about “beans, beans, the musical fruit,…” But do you know that legume levity is not limited to toots and tunes? Today we turn to our favorite upright gardening crop, asparagus beans. We grow heirloom asparagus beans (Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis) also known as Chinese long beans, yardlong beans, snakes beans, and…
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La Pomme d’Amour
Today I return to an idea from recent post, “Intermingling”, but with a Taos twist. What, you wonder, is a pomme d’amour? And what could it possibly have to do with a high desert town in the southwest? Both good questions. And here’s another. Aside from the similarly staged snapshot in the previous post and…
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Jumbo Blackberry
This evening, walking to the house before dinner, my niece handed me a blackberry she’d picked in the garden. it was enormous. The biggest I’ve ever seen. And, without thinking, I popped the jumbo blackberry into my mouth. It exploded in flavor, like a fistful of normal sized blackberries, warmed by the sun. An explosion…
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Persimmon Optimism
It’s that time of year again. Midsummer. The garden and orchard are lush. Or mostly lush. A young whitetail deer mowed through many of the green beans, some of the Swiss chard, and a whole lot of spinach a few days ago. And the poppies are struggling. Perhaps over-seeded. Perhaps too much rain. Perhaps both.…