Port Potager

Recently Kirk found something new to get us through the winter months. It's a little BBC show from the 1980s called "Victorian Kitchen Garden," and it is awesome: It's like a precursor to those great PBS shows like "Frontier House" and "Manor House" that they used to make, where people recreate everyday life in a historical time period. This lacks the costume-y nature of those shows, but these guys use their research and first-hand knowledge from some of the last old-time estate gardeners in England to bring a decrepit garden back to its full Victorian splendor. And since this is more about food than flowers, it's super interesting. In a quiet, old-guy-narrating-a-BBC-documentary way. I think Jonas half-expects a knight to come riding by and stab people. Anyway, Episode 2 has given me fresh food for thought in the winter gardening arena. It's all about nineteenth century greenhouses (kinda expensive to heat, but so beautiful) and, m...

Once upon a time, in the bleak midwinter, we would get depressed. I don't think this is unusual in and of itself, but we used to channel our Seasonal Affective Disorder  by plotting grand plans of escape and/or renovation: the unbuilt garage-mahal, the kitchen remodel, the first garden re-do at the Red House, an untaken sabbatical in England. It should come as no surprise that we moved to Newburyport during the Winter Solstice. Some things come to fruition; other plans are shelved as the days get longer. One of our lingering fantasies from the dark days is the idea that we should pick up and move to England. Or Wales. (And yes, we are aware that winters are actually darker there. Nobody claims this is logical.) We actually almost did it once, going so far as to applying for work visas and taking tests to prove we are competent speakers of English. (Alas, U.S. workers have to jump through many more hoops that their E.U. counterparts, which makes no sense as the linguistic and cul...