Garden

Larry has put a lot of time in the gardens this year, and we're seeing early rewards.

Yesterday we got our first new potatoes of the season. I only had to buy one bag of potatoes between our last year's stored spuds and this year's new ones--and most of the bag is still in the fridge.

Some of what's ready in the garden now: radishes, three kinds of lettuce, snap peas and potatoes. Also ready: spinach, chard, onions, beets. Coming next will be cabbage and green beans. The beans we planted (defying the frost date) on April 12th are almost ready to bloom.

But these potatoes, these are the thing we look forward to every year. We're not big potato eaters--except for new potatoes. Add butter, maybe a little parsley, and eating doesn't get much better.

The End of One Road

Jared and his father, our son Derek.

...and the beginning of another.


Grandson Jared graduated last night. Now for the next step...starting college at Fairmont State University.


But pause the remote for a trip to Beach Week!


...and Granny said not to call her to come bail you out...mean granny...


Of course, if I was truly worried about it, I wouldn't say that.

Flowers in May, Part 2

These in the garden

Become these in the house.
Ah, roses! The scent is summer caught in soft petals.

This last rose is an old variety I dug up before an old farm was covered by a watershed dam. It's incredibly strongly scented, slightly spicy. The deep, deep color of the petals is almost purple. I don't know what kind it is, and the bush struggles to survive each year, but it is my favorite. It only blooms in June, so I look forward to it each year. Anyone know what it is?

Spring Tides

It was a damp and stormy day today. The humidity was so high I felt like I was breathing underwater this afternoon, a fair sign that storms were on the way. The weather alert radio in my office kept sounding off about "severe thunderstorms" (part of my job is keeping track of weather in case it might affect our services) and such things.

When I left at 5:30 pm, I drove right into the teeth of one or several storms--it was hard to tell because the rain would slack off briefly only to come on strong again. The trip was slow, 40 mph on the interstate because the water could not run off fast enough.

But by the time I reached Joe's Run, the sun was shining and the sky was crystal blue. The only sign of the storms was the water--which was everywhere.

This little creek, known as Poverty Fork, was all over the bottomland as it back up trying to feed into Joe's Run.
Further up the road, the creek had come out of its banks, but then subsided, leaving the road covered in water that was slowly finding its way back to the creek. A small run coming down the hill to the right fed the pond in the road, so it might be a few hours before it settles down.

Through the water and looking back--to see neighbors fording through it too. It was actually not very deep, perhaps 6 inches or so. I crossed through several places like this. On our road, it's not so dangerous to cross the flooded sections because it's usually where the creek came up and went back down, and the ditches are still overflowing. There are places I would not drive through if the water was over the road, but generally there's no problem with most of the areas that tend to flood. We tend to get minor flooding like this most years, sometimes several times a year, because of the steepness of the hills and the ferocity of the storms that hit us first after crossing the flatlands of Ohio.

Then, up the hill we call Kenneth Parrish hill. The runoff was too much for the ditches so the water found its own path downhill.

At home, the sudden sunlight on the damp logs of the house created steam in the nearly tropical air.

But my goodness, do the gardens seem to love it! The green is almost painfully beautiful this evening.

And maybe tomorrow the rains will hold off for our grandson Jared's graduation. That would be nice. Very nice. And dry. Dry is good, after such a wet week.

Why I Might Not Want to Eat Here

I've passed this sign a hundred times, I'm sure. It's just outside of Weston, WV in a little community called Pricetown.

Today it registered. Maybe I won't try this mom-and-pop after all.

Spring Greens

This is a good time of year. The garden greens are in lush abundance--snap peas, spinach, chard and beet greens. Larry picked a 5-gallon bucket of them so after work I set about freezing them.

The first peas--just about enough for a snack, but a precursor of things to come.

Beet greens! A sinkful of them...

...but when steamed for a minute or so, they only fill a few baggies.

We ended up with 10 half-pint baggies of greens. Each baggie is a serving each for us. I'd like to have about 40 baggies in the freezer. I mixed the beet greens, spinach and chard tonight.

To freeze greens:

Pick, wash and clean them. Keep the best for freezing.

Boil water--I used about 4 cups in the clam cooker. I put the greens in the strainer basket and after the water boiled, I put the basket into the pot.

After about 30 seconds I stirred to be sure all the greens were getting steamed. After one minute, I took the pot off the burner, removed the strainer basket of greens and rinsed them under cold water.

Then I bagged them up and put all the small baggies into one large freezer bag and put them in the freezer. They're ready to use whenever I want.

As for the peas? We'll eat them raw and look forward to picking many more.

There is nothing like Spring gardens. We have lettuce, onions, radishes and greens now, with other veggies coming along quickly. Planting early has rewards that are worth the risks (like frost) and the work.

Pasta Salad

I love to make pasta salads! Honestly, anything goes when you make one of these. I look into the fridge, cabinets and garden and see what can be used.

For the salad in the photo (bad photo, I know), I used:

1 pound of cooked spiral pasta, drained and rinsed with cold water
1 small can of sliced mushrooms,drained
1 small can of sliced black olives, drained
1 small jar of marinated artichokes (add the juice too)
1 small jar of baby pickled corn, cut into small pieces
2-3 stalks of celery, chopped
grape tomatoes, halved
chopped baby carrots
1 thinly sliced English cucumber
1 bottle Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing

Just mix all the ingredients together and refrigerate. It's best to make this a few hours in advance to let the flavors mingle.

This is just one of the many pasta salads I've made. What dictates the final result is what is available. Some other things that could be added:

sliced green onions
diced green, red, yellow or purple sweet peppers
diced yellow squash or zucchini
cooked kidney beans, drained and rinsed
chopped cooked chicken
tuna
pine nuts
sunflower seeds
Italian herbs
parsley
cubed cheese
bacon or ham

The possibilities are endless. You can use different kinds of pasta and dressing too. One of the family favorites uses elbow macaroni, celery, diced cucumbers, diced tomatoes, celery seed and a dressing of half ranch dressing and half Italian dressing.

Do you make pasta salad? Care to share your recipe?

Flowers in May

Is there anything prettier than gardens in May? Mine are a little ragged this year--while Larry has been here to handle the vegetable gardens (and doing a great job), my flower beds have suffered because I had so many weekends away from home. They look better after I spent about 6 hours in them today, but these photos were taken yesterday so the gardens were still not up to par.

So many plants in this photo! Barberry, Veronica, lots of Coneflower which seeds itself freely in my gardens, southernwood, coreopsis, oregano, iris, dying daffodil leaves, and lots of other stuff. This is under one of the maples and honestly I did not think much would survive here. But the plants that like dry conditions are thriving and I am learning to let them do what they do naturally, and work with the results.

Daylilies everywhere. Not planted by me. They came up after we made the patio about 10 years ago. They are very cool flowers--the early growth is great in salads, the flowers can be eaten, and they are just so pretty!

The "wild" garden. This one hasn't had any attention this year, so the lemon balm, roses, yarrow and lavender are running rampant. I may just leave them alone to see what happens next. What I am happy about: the hollyhock to the far right. I've always wanted hollyhocks in that corner and this year the ones I planted last year look great. Big smile on my face--it only took me 30+ years to finally plant them!

The spirea (wish I kept a record of the name of this variety) that started as teeny tiny 77-cent plants from Wal-mart. I love these bushes--pretty in Spring, lovely in bloom, bright red-orange foliage in fall, nice wintry-red twigs for arrangements and twig wreaths. A four-season bush, and birds love to nest in it.
Derek put this chair frame out for the trash, but wasn't surprised when it resurfaced in my garden. I need to add some alyssum to the geranium in the pot; it was one that over-wintered in the root cellar. The rose came from an old Virginia farm where my brother Tom lived for a while. I don't know the variety, and it was put here "temporarily" about 25 years ago until I could find a better place. Guess this is the better place.

The roses along the walk to the porch share space with lamb's ears. Lots of weeds in this picture! But they're gone now (smile). There's a #%*! maple tree in this bed that is so intertwined with the roses I can't dig it out. So every year I just break back the branches. Haven't done it yet this year. The two water maples we have in the yard are wonderful shade trees but seed themselves prolifically in our gardens, and there are several seedlings that we have not been able to get rid of because of where they grew. Even so, I love my shady maples.

Garden Pics

Cathy said yesterday she'd like to see more garden pictures, so here are some I took today. It's pretty dry here right now, no rain in a week.
The tomato patch. Larry put out 100 plants, but only has about half of them staked so far. This garden also has some Indian corn and a row of sweet potatoes--we've tried sweet potatoes before without much luck, but we're trying again. This garden does not have an electric fence, although most of the others do.

The Spring garden, with early beans, carrots, 2 kinds of lettuce, chard, spinach, beets, leeks, celery, snow peas, onions and dill. The peas are setting on now. The beans were planted in early April--we took a chance and it paid off, so we'll have beans by my birthday, I think. Or soon after.

The new strawberry plants are under the mulch, edged with two kinds of lettuce; the tilled ground is planted with broccoli plants that you can't see and about 20 new asparagus roots. You can see the tomato patch in the background.

This was last garden planted and still isn't finished. This one has cucumbers, squash, pumpkins and melons--and peppers. We'll finish planting it tomorrow, I think.

The largest garden has potatoes, purple beans, half runners, sweet corn and pole beans. The potatoes are already blooming, so we'll have new potatoes in a couple weeks, I hope.

Cathy said yesterday she'd like to see more garden pictures, so here are some I took today. It's pretty dry here right now, no rain in a week.

I'll post some flower garden pics soon. They're not as pretty as the veggies because I haven't been home enough to take care of them this month.

The Day After

The Charleston Sunday paper had a good article about the storytellers at Vandalia yesterday. Click here to read it. No pictures of storytelling with the article, and the title says "storytime," reminiscent of library programs for preschoolers, but the text of the article is good.

What a great day we had. More pics later today.

And I got to meet Cathy and her husband! She's a follower and I had never met her in person, which is true of most of my readers, yet I feel I know all of you like friends. Meeting Cathy was just that--like meeting an old friend. (Be sure to pay her a visit at her blog, Whippoorwill Wood).

What a Mess!

My office is destroyed and I can't blame anyone but myself. This is what happens when I do too many different kinds of programs and it's Spring and I really just want to be outside and in the gardens and not inside putting things away.

What's the mess?

Well, look:

Craft supplies for 2 different crafts and books to prepare for bird stories for Migration Celebration are in one suitcase and the cart. The other suitcase holds the props for my Appalachian Sampler program--mining items ,quilts, bonnet, turpentine, scrip, etc The spiral binder was out because I needed to make more ghost story books. The box and the pile on the table are recent mail, new books and magazines. The other box is from the new CD player I bought after I broke the one I took to Ohio for the ballads program.
The desk is overflowing with mail that needs to be sorted. A bag of books and a quilt from the Appalachian program still need to be put away.
Stuff from my storybag that I won't be using today at Vandalia are on the computer desk, along with a bear puppet and the birthday gift for my oldest son that I was supposed to take to family reunion, but now will have to mail. The Flatwoods Monster was a gift from my good friend Jason and he is where he is supposed to be!
Books from recent research for blogposts, notes and folders jam the other end of the computer table.

And the suitcase full of ballad books from the Ohio workshop isn't even in these photos. Neither is the puppet stage from the Ripley workshops or the sound system plugged in to charge for today. Or the fingerpuppet craft I'm working on in the log room for Vandalia and for summer programs.

I offer a lot of different programs and workshops and each one has its own requirements. It keeps me busier as a storyteller to have such a range of possible presentations, but it's also a lot to keep up with. If I was a more organized person, I'd put everything away as soon as I got home. Instead, I head out to the garden, write on my blog, respond to email, hang out on the patio with my hubby, talk to sons and friends on the phone--or just go to bed if, like Thursday night, it's almost midnight when I get in.

So each program's remainders have piled up over the past month and I have no one to blame but me. There is only one thing I can do:

Close the door.

Vandalia Gathering!

The biggest celebration of traditional mountain arts in West Virginia happens this weekend at the State Capitol in Charleston: The Vandalia Gathering. Old-time music, musician competitions, dancing, crafts, and storytelling will all be on tap for a weekend of good fun. There will be good food too. I'm ready for the homemade ice cream myself.

On Saturday, I will be at the storytelling tent and performing with other members of the West Virginia Storytelling Guild on stage in the Cultural Center from 12:30-1:30pm. We will have storytelling and children's activities at our tent--something for everyone. Please stop by to say hello, listen to a story and enjoy this beautiful festival. Here are some photos from last year's festival: (For more from last year, click here)







A very good time! I hope you can join us.

A Little Time by the Woods and Water

While at the family reunion last weekend, Larry discovered this enticing spot and showed to my sister Theresa and me.

There is so much to see in a little patch of woods, like a patch of Mayapples (sometimes called Mandrake) in bloom,

and Jack-in-the-Pulpits in both green and purple, some of the largest I have ever seen.

A lovely Mayapple flower hides in the shade of its umbrella leaves. Later a fruit will form that is supposedly edible, although I have never tasted it.

A forest giant stretches its arms to the sky.

A little further down the road we came to another pretty place--a little creek bordered by wildflowers. Here the Bluets (also called Quaker Ladies by some) are barely visible as a blue haze along the creek's bank (see this poem about them),
while Golden Ragwort makes itself at home on a large rock in the stream. Have you ever smelled the leaves of this wildflower? They are highly perfumed, with a fruity-flowery scent. I used to have a plant in my garden just so I could nip a bit of the leaves every now and then.
A strange apparition--the Dancing Outlaw, perhaps?-- appears on the swinging bridge.
A small round tuft of moss, arched with a twig, looks like a soft green basket,

and water sluicing over rocks made music that was perfect for the time and place.