Tag: Organic Gardening

  • 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…

  • Hummingbird Haiku

    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?

  • Life is a Garden

    Life is a Garden

    This time of year, especially on weekends, my mind melds with moist soil, with the earliest hints of life, the first hint of bud burst, earliest spring blossoms, seed sorting, plant plotting, spring start coddling,… Seasonal synapses begin to fire. I start to count weeks and days working backwards from probable last frost. And I…

  • Earth Day

    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…

  • Tanglefoot Tango

    Tanglefoot Tango

    A poetry flirtation among tango and two Tanglefoot counterparts. Peculiar, but provocative.

  • Sacred Exchanges

    Sacred Exchanges

    I awoke this morning thinking about Danusha Laméris’s poem, “Small Kindnesses”, and Rosslyn. Two discrete points of reference mingling, as if in conversation. Two planets passing, briefly eclipsing, a gravitational closeness, a tender but fleeting affinity, an ephemeral communion. The echo of a question in Laméris’s lines lingers. Like a hint, a glimmer of affirmation.…

  • Complaints: Top 5

    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…

  • Family Traditions: Top 5

    Family Traditions: Top 5

    Write about a few of your favorite family traditions. Hhhmmm… Family traditions. What are our family traditions? That’s an interesting question, and I’m not 100% certain that I have answers at the ready. But a few ideas come to mind. Canis familiaris Let’s start with the beautiful beast snoozing in a sun puddle at my…

  • For Fun: Top 5

    For Fun: Top 5

    List five things you do for fun. Almost a year and a half into Redacting Rosslyn, I’ve taken a semi respite from the rhythm of old house journaling, not by interrupting my daily updates — those have continued albeit with a different flavor and focus from previous posts — but by handing over the steering…

  • Dream Job

    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…

  • Hibernal High

    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…