Color

The garden is so full of color!  It has become my palette for creating art. And, as you can see, there is a blending of art and garden - it is an interactive process.

Connected

I've been taking some pictures of the garden as I get ready to start working in my studio again. There are so many beautiful plants and I'm amazed that almost everything flowers at some point! I've been watering every morning so everything is hanging in there in this heat - and mostly I've been able to use water from the rain barrels. But I ran out today, so I hope it rains soon!


I love being in the garden in the morning - it's so cool and refreshing.  I don't feel like my day is really real unless I've been able to get out and work for a couple of hours.  Now that it's so hot I try to be outside by around 6:00 a.m.  Working in the garden is like meditation for me - it's not really work, it's like garden therapy!  I don't even really care what I'm doing - I just like being there.  There is always something creative to do and it just feels good to connect with the earth and connect with where food actually comes from.  I like knowing what the plants look like in the ground and what the flowers for each vegetable and fruit are.  It just makes me feel more connected somehow - not just to food, but to everything.

If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk;
If you want to be happy for three days, get married;
If you want to be happy forever, make a garden. - Chinese Proverb

Strawberries are all finished and we picked - and ate, of course - the first of the raspberries.  Everything from the greenhouse is now in the ground and am getting tomato cages around all the tomatoes today.  It finally rained so all the plants are very happy!

I love my morning routine - up early to meditate, then drink tea and read on the back porch.  After that I spend several hours in the garden.  Everything seems to fall in place for the rest of the day with such a lovely beginning!

The strawberries are ripe and ready to eat!  I can hardly keep up with picking and eating them!  We have tons of rhubarb, so it's strawberry-rhubarb pie time.

Eating Local

Yesterday Mollie and I rode our bikes to a local orchard where we bought fresh peaches, blackberries, and blueberries and where we also picked 4 quarts of raspberries! We have raspberries in our yard that will be ripe soon, but we thought it would be nice to take advantage of the season and pick some at the orchard as well. That way we can eat raspberries to our heart's content. Raspberries are my favorite, favorite fruit.

We have been reveling in the delicious taste sensations of the berries and have been able to gobble them up by the handful. I love having so many raspberries and blueberries that I can eat and eat and eat them. I often think that a bear must feel the same way! It is also nice to know that we can eat as many peaches as we want to - and they are absolutely delicious.

We had a lovely bike ride, supported a local business, bought locally grown food (basically - the blueberries are from Michigan), had fun picking berries, and got some good exercise. Mollie said that the bike ride made her feel so much better about getting the food. Tomorrow morning we will bike down to the farmer's market to pick up our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box that will be full of locally grown vegetables from a local farm. And we are picking cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, and potatoes out of our garden on a daily basis! Tonight everything we had for dinner was from our homegrown and right from the garden. We picked a huge tomato that melted in our mouths - I mean it was sooooo tasty!

Local food is good for the environment, but it also just tastes GREAT!

EcoVillage at Ithaca, New York

We stayed at EcoVillage at Ithaca on our way to Boston and we found a wonderful place. When we checked into the Bed and Breakfast the first thing the owner did was to show us the raspberries and greens we could pick in front of the house. Then he gave us a quart of fresh sugar snap peas from the local farm that is part of the EcoVillage and a quart of fresh local blueberries. We were able to attend their board meeting in the evening and learn about some of the issues they are dealing with - how to write the lease on the land for the farmer who grows organic food on their property and supplies the village with food, and how to deal with people building campfires on the property. We also met the Executive Director, Liz Walker who wrote two books: "EcoVillage at Ithaca, Pioneering a Sustainable Culture," and "Choosing a Sustainable Future, Ideas and Inspiration from Ithaca, NY."

There is much to tell about this place, but suffice it to say that this morning Mollie and I went for a walk in the trails that they have cut through the wood and ate handfuls of wild black raspberries. As we neared the bend toward the community garden we were met by some very friendly and sweet chickens who greeted us hoping we would feed them. We also ran across a local villager who gave us handfuls of basil, some tomatoes, a cucumber, a fantastic purple onion and some fresh garlic. He just handed it to us from his garden and said he always grows more than he can use. So very nice - Mollie and I were really struck with the openness and friendliness of the community, and also with the richness of life here. It is not monetarily rich, but rather rich in life and spirit.