‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells, And pretty maids all in a row.’ Illustrations of this familiar nursery rhyme tend to show proper young ladies in beribboned batiste holding colorful watering cans with clean hands, but while the students at the Heath Elementary School do all they can to make their garden grow, there is no sign of batiste. Real modern children favor denim…
Our Frog Pond is beautiful. And useful. When our dilapidated barn was struck by lightning in the middle of the night, July 5, 1990, the volunteer fire department was able to pump water to help put out the fire. In fact, the previous owners had enlarged the pond which is stream and spring fed to make it a fire pond. The frogs like it, and so do the grandchildren. So do we. It's good for swimming and catching…
You never know what you'll run into as you surf the garden blogs. Or where. Yolanda, in the Netherlands, on her beautiful blog Bliss is celebrating vegetables with a Beach Boys serenade. Check it out.
This Columbus Day weekend the dawns were beautiful, if only briefly, but it was a nice change after a cold, dreary, damp week. This is the view from our bedroom window. The long weekend means a short but intense Bake Sale Season. There were bake sales everywhere. Henry took my apple pie down to the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club Pie Sale, and dodged 6th graders in the parking lot at Avery's. They weren't quite ready to sell, but…
Regular visitors at May Dreams Gardens know that Carol is an afcianodo of hoes. Her October 7 post was her final Hoe-tober Fest for the year and she asked about the hoes other bloggers use. I have two hoes that I use, very occasionally, and when I dug them out for this shameful photo it was clear that a trip to OESCO in Conway is in order. I need a sharpener. I can arrange a cleaning and oiling cloth right here…
When I visited Marie Stella at her house, Beaver Lodge, she took me out onto the deck overlooking the woods and beaver pond. She said The Birch Woman was a sculpture done by Sally Fine. I looked, but did not see. Although the birches were beginning to lose their leaves, my eyes had to adjust to the shifting light and shadows as the leaves danced in the autumn breeze, until suddenly the Birch Woman materialized. The Birch Woman…
“We live where there is so much possibility in the landscape,” Marie Stella said to me as we stood on the deck of Beaver Lodge, her house in Ashfield, looking through the woods down to the beaver pond. Stella has entered into most of those possibilities, using native plants, planting vegetables and fruits where a lawn might be expected, harvesting rainwater, using stone from the house site to…
These apples may not be the most beautiful, but they are pretty sound inside which means I spent the afternoon peeling, chopping and boiling them down to make 5 quarts of apple butter, a delicacy I only discovered last year. Two quarts have already been passed along to my oldest daughter and her family. They like apple butter on black pumpernickel bread, we like it on French toast. There is hardly any way to use apples that is…
The North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival in Orange, MA, has to be one of the best organized, most fun, most educational, most artistic, most inspiring festivals I have ever attended. It all began with a conversation under a tree, and now, 11 years later 12,000 people find their way to this small town to enjoy a fabulous day in the autumn sun. Or autumn showers as the case may be. The solar powered main stage provides music…
Yesterday I put up a new Blog Page, a Brief Tour of Heath, which will give more distant friends and readers a better sense of the Hilltowns in western Massachusetts. Sawyer Hall is a center of town life containing as it does the Post Office, where you can also buy the annual dump (Transfer Station) sticker, all the town offices, the Police office, and the Heath Free Public Library which I visit at least once a week. Last summer…