Category: Home and Garden

Fresh spuds

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I stuck two rotting potatoes in the ground and got eight pounds in return.

Not a bad investment, is it?

Well, I stuck them in two old planters with just a covering of soil at the bottom late last spring and kept covering them as the stems and leaves shot upward. Didn’t take long for the entire container to be full. Three or four months later, in early September, the lush foliage went kaput, and it was time for harvest.

Have you ever eaten truly fresh potatoes – the kind picked just an hour or two before cooking? It’s a revelation. Roasted, they’re so creamy and sweet. Melt in the mouth, if you nibble at the oven. By the time they get to the table, they’re getting some firmness … but, oh, they’re still heavenly.

You don’t have to visit Maine or Idaho or even live there to discover what this means.

 

Netting around the blueberries

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
In previous years, the netting we’ve used to keep birds and squirrels off the blueberries simply sat on top of the bushes. It tangled in the plants, and resourceful critters could still get at some of the berries. Last year we used fallen branches to create this rig, which kept the netting further from the plants. It made harvesting much easier, too – just lift one side as needed. How do you think it looks?

Corral for raspberry bushes

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A couple of particularly nasty winter storms brought down a lot of big limbs in our yard. I really do need to get a chain saw to convert them to firewood, but in the meantime, I’ve put them to work in the garden. One place is in the row that lifts the raspberries away from the rest of the yard. Using the limbs here is much more satisfactory than the rope and wire of before – the branches keep the fence poles from pulling toward the center. How do you think it looks?

Busy bees

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment
My wife couldn’t resist getting up close to the entrance to our new beehive and using her cell phone camera to record this. The portal is getting a lot of action during the day as the honeybees are take off in search of food and return. The one with the fat yellow legs is carrying a load of pollen home. The colony itself seems to be thriving.