Over the Columbus Day weekend we sat out on our friends’ patio in the golden sunset before going indoors for a wonderful supper. As we admired the fields and the pond our friends told us they had decided to build a pergola over the patio, much as we had, to provide cooling shade on hot summer afternoons. The question was, what should they plant to provide that shade? We have a wisteria growing on our pergola (which some call…
Eudora Welty has been much on my mind these last months. First there was a performance of the one act opera composed by Alice Parker based on Welty's The Ponder Heart, and then I read a biography of Elizabeth Lawrence who was a friend of Welty's, and then my book club read One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty. All of that is topped off with the publication of One Writer's Garden written by Susan Haltom who researched and…
Gardens are planned, grow and develop over time as dependably as any single plant. Ray and Melanie Poudrier’s garden could be said to have begun when Ray’s father bought land in Hawley in 1942. Ray’s father joined his mother and their brood of thirteen children on Hawley summer weekends to see the latest developments. The family grew a vegetable garden, had an orchard and a blueberry patch. They even rented a cow for the summer to have milk…
When I was about halfway through my Henhouse Series, a friend said I had to visit Cosima. Her henhouse was a Taj Mahal of henhouses she said. Look here and you can see the center posts that is key in holding up the green roof. When I finally visited Cosima I had to agree. Her henhouse is a work of art. She said they built this cordwood masonry henhouse using Robert L. Roy's books and that this is actually…
I live in a ruraltown of 750 souls in the western corner of Massachusetts that sits on the Vermont border. On the Fourth of July in 1981 I happened to meet two other friends at the spinning wheel in the town museum. We were celebrating the holiday, but got to complaining that we never went out to dinner, we couldn't afford to, and besides there were no good restaurants closer than 40 miles. Actually there were no restaurants…
In spite of the warm fall, with only one real frost, the garden is beginning to die. Its demise seems to have been hurried by the three days of rain we just had. All these photos were taken in the rain. This is the very last daylily of summer. Ann Varner is a real trooper. Behind her you can see there are a few Buttercream nasturtiums crawling around, and it has been so warm that even the canna…
CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture) has established a revolving loan fund designed to help farmers recover from Hurricane Irene. The Fund will offer quick, zero-interest loans to assist farmers and farm businesses in the aftermath of the storm and flooding. They didn't do it alone; Whole Foods, Equity Trust and an anonymous donor who gave a $50,000 challenge are all a part of this effort to help the farmers who are so important to all of us. You…
All of a sudden I noticed the moss growing between the pavers on the Piazza in front of our house.
Holz hausen, a German system of building a fast drying wood pile. Click here to see an artful woodpile in Hawley. Click here to see more Wordlessness on Wednesday. OK. Almost wordless.
There was nothing photogenic about our chores this glorious autumn weekend - mowing, weeding, cutting back - so I'll concentrate on an exploration of another Heath henhouse. Joey built, overbuilt he said, this 10x12 foot henhouse for his ten hens. You can see he has a lot of help! He read a lot and looked at a lot of henhouses, and talked to a lot of people before he built his. The forethought shows. His luck shows too.…