Out With the Summer…
November 3, 2025
… and in with the Winter garden.
We are a garden in transition. The tomatoes, zucs, eggplant and most of the basil are out. Mary planted lots more chard, thinned the strawberries and added soil. There are a few more things to plant.
I’m Not the First
October 26, 2025
That’s probably true of absolutely everything, but it’s now certifiably true about my garden faces. Marty commented on my most recent FB post that featured the latest — and last — of the season’s garden faces. He said something about how Arcimboldo would be proud. Not knowing who (or what) that was, I AI Googled and learned me some art facts.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo];[1] 5 April 1527 – 11 July 1593), was an Italian Mannerist painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.[2]
These works form a distinct category from his other productions. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague; also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.[3][full citation needed]
The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day.
Whattaya know.
Here’s a sample, probably the most famous of his fruit (and vegetable and flower) faces:
I’ll have to up my game in 2026.
Happy About…
October 24, 2025
:: Happy that it’s the end of another growing season. Funny, isn’t it? It’s so wonderful to have a robust crop of tomatoes, squash, eqgplant, basil, strawberries, chard, rosemary, chives, lemons, figs… AND it’s nice when the season’s over, too. Raising food can be oddly stressful.
This guy is likely my final garden face for the season. Everything’s looking a little long in the tooth. I was not aware that we’d planted parsnips.. but I do believe that’s what the nose is. What a .. surprise.
:: Also happy that tonight is the first night of the World Series (starts in 11 mins, so I gotta hurry here). Go Dodgers… unless they are crushing the Blue Jays, in which case we’ll have to become Toronto fans to even things out. Go Blue in Game #7. We’ll see how all this plays out.
:: Happy to be going to see Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen tonight (after the baseball game). I really like that guy. Eager to see him in a non-moody chef role.
:: Happy about the conversation — long overdue — that we had with Peter yesterday afternoon. Holy cow I love that guy.
:: Happy that I finally cleared out all my unread emails and have only 700+ emails in my inbox (champ!) and only 300+ tabs open in my Chrome browser (double champ!). Been a productive couple of days in that regard.
I had intended to list many more HAPPY things, and to accompany the happy list with a NOT HAPPY list, but I don’t want to miss the first pitch.
Almost Two Quarts
October 7, 2025
So this is what became of the arm load of basil Jim brought in from the garden a couple days ago.
It generated 15 cups of packed basil leaves, enough for three batches of Ina Garten’s recipe.
The pesto making begins…
Her recipe is slightly different than pestos I’ve made in the past.. but not much. Hers has walnuts and pine nuts, and she adds a fair amount of salt and pepper. She also may use more garlic than most. I ended up not using as much oil as she called for.
But look at this!
I figure each of those is about 1/2 a cup. There are 14 of those, plus the nearly 1 cup of pesto I set aside for last night’s dinner. That’s two quarts.. which oughta last us the winter. Into the freezer these have gone. I left the parmesan out of the ones I’m freezing. I’m thinking about 2T of grated parm, added just before serving, will be about right.
That’s what we did last night and it was perfect! Here it is, pre-parm garnish.
Pesto Part 1
October 4, 2025
Today turned out to be the day…. time to pull up the summer’s basil and make some pesto! It was already too late for the sweetest, most tender basil, but any longer and we’d have run out the clock. Our plants (we have 8-10) were getting long in the tooth, long-flowered, their leaves well-munched… so it was kind of now or never.
Jim brought in a huge armload of long, leaf-ful stems. He gave them their first bath, which got most of the birch detritus, dust, and bug remnants off of them. Then we plucked….
Then the leaves got a second wash…
Then they were laid out to dry…
Not going to blanch them, though some do to preserve a bright green color.
Tomorrow, we’ll make the pesto.
Farm to Fork
August 29, 2025
Summertime, summertime, sum sum summertime.
Fresh, flavorful, homegrown.. a dinner ready in an instant….
Love. It.
From this….
To this …. a Jim summer special of toms, basil, olive oil, garlic, s/p…
To this… served over angel hair pasta w/ parm, and a side of steamed zuc (eggplant saved for another day)…
Pitcher of Tomatoes
August 23, 2025
Jim went out to the garden … and came back with this (the day after we got back from Yosemite.. a couple days ago).
Pretty…
Would have made a nice centerpiece.. but we ate most of it on last night’s pasta. (Excellent!!)
That is actually our former blender thing.. the one we replaced with a Vitamix. Not sure how he sealed the bottom.. but he did. Makes a nice vessel for crop gathering.
Sun Dried Oily Garlicky Goodness
July 27, 2025
Last night, we dropped a few dozen cherry toms on two trays in the dehydrator. Fourteen and a half hours later, we had these beauties. Wrinkly and still a wee bit soft. Then, into a jar with a couple of garlic cloves, some kosher salt and covered in olive oil.
Some do them in the oven at a low temp, which I believe is a lot faster. We’ll see how these go. We’ve done them in the past, but dried them too long and they were hard. Mighta softened in a jar of oil. The summer is young and the tomato plants are prolific; we will experiment.
Hi and Dry
July 22, 2025
First, here’s our garden haul yesterday, strawberry hair edition:
Try not to think about the time it took to form the head with all of those rolly polly cherry tomatoes. But do know, I have fun amusing myself with my garden art. LOL.
The zucs were a late addition… and kinda don’t really make sense. Just chalk it up to garden whimsey.
Also, while you may not hear it, this fellow is saying “hi” with the golden twinkle in his eyes.
Okay, next up: Dry.
I cut into this mango last night only to discover it was not ripe enough to use in our salad.. but now that it was peeled and cut, what to do, what to do?? Overnight in the dehydrator was Jim’s solution. Jim’s really branching out in the dehydrating department!
Like we discovered with unripe plums: an unripe mango yields unripe dried mango. But these are (er, were) pretty good! Next time we’ll shorten the drying time in order to achieve a chewier result, but I tell ya, this dehydrator is showing a lot of promise.
You Are Berry Beautiful
May 20, 2025
From the garden.
Life of Wry 