Port Potager

Despite the cold, slow start to our spring, flowers are blooming all around us. Many of the flowers I've planted this year were selected for their scent in addition to how they look, and now it's clear that this was a great decision: Catching the scent of flowers on the breeze is one of the best parts of being outside in the springtime. Here's what's blooming now: Irises , which smell like violets. Actual violets (which, unsurprisingly, smell like violets). Chamomile , which smells like apples. Stock , which smells like cloves and baby powder (which is to say, they smell wonderful enough to make me break my rule against fuchsia flowers). A close-up of the white stock shows how nice they look, too. The lilac is a bit past its prime in the looks department, but still smells great. Sweet woodruff , which smells like vanilla and fresh-cut hay. Heliotrope , which smells sort of like grapes or fruit punch. ...

We do a lot of work throughout the summer and fall to make our food last: canning peaches, fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut, brining pickles, oven-drying tomatoes. Processing gets the house all hot and steamy, and we're on our feet in the kitchen for hours at a time, stirring and jarring and getting shit done. But sometimes, all you have to do is wait. Over in a bright corner of the dining room, our sideboard is covered with flowers and seeds. We don't need to do anything at all to preserve them, other than let them sit and occasionally give them a stir so all parts can dry out.  That's it. Not everything can benefit from this type of abject neglect, but our small, herby flowers are perfect candidates. They dry quickly, and since it takes a while gather a big pile, it's convenient to have them out where I can add small handfuls to the tray every few days.   Here's our chamomile harvest, in varying stages of drying. The flowers to the l...

Yesterday I walked through the garden and realized that we have more to harvest now than just salad greens and rhubarb. Those things are great and all, but look what I found: Chamomile flowers are ready be picked. These should last all summer long, and eventually I should have another nice, big jar of them to use for tea and some cosmetic purposes. Our first few strawberries are just another sunny day away from being ready to eat. This one is a little pink on the bottom, and still a little too firm — but we're close to having fruit! I am most excited of all that some of our peas are ready. The ones here in the photo are a couple days away from being ready to pick — the pods are are still flat on one end. I was able to pick a bowl full of fully ripe pea pods, though, which I shelled. They made a nice, surprise addition to dinner: Kirk made a curry with Swiss chard, chicken, and the peas. There is also cilantro on top — another herb that's big en...

This past weekend was so lovely — sunny and (for March in New England) warm. Nothing at all like today, where we're struggling to stay at 40 degrees, and with a gusty windchill that's back into the 30s. We're also going to have lows in the 20s tonight, all of which sets back my hardening off schedule for the cabbage and broccoli seedlings that should be planted next weekend. So let's look back on a nice day instead of thinking about this cold one, shall we? After adding compost to the beds we needed, we were ready to go with three varieties of peas (Premium Nat, Penelope, and Sugar Snap). The tape measure was to keep us on track to plant them every six inches; the garden plan to remind us where we want to put them. Loving the smaller-scale garden plan this year — much more convenient. Once we got the trellises up (Kirk had to build some more, by the way, since the rose trellis-turned-pea brush schemes last year didn't work out too well), I set...

In addition to all the edible stuff we've been growing all summer, I've also been slowly building up an herbal apothecary: From left to right, we have dried lavender, dried rose petals, dry face scrub, face scrub moistened into a paste, dried chamomile, and comfrey oil. The dried flowers have all kinds of uses, both edible and not. Here I've used it for an all-natural face scrub.  You can see it in its dry form in the jar above — the white stuff in the center. This is from a recipe by herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. You can check it out here , or read the whole book , which has lots of cosmetics as well as medicinal recipes. This face scrub is called "miracle grains," and is actually a substitute for soap. It uses a bunch of kaolin clay (that's the white stuff that you see in the jar), plus ground almonds and oatmeal, and chopped up dried rose petal and lavender. The clay draws impurities out of the skin, and the other ingredients are for gentle exf...

My mind-clearing, repetitive activity of the month? Picking chamomile blossoms: The biggest of these flowers is about the size of my thumbnail, and (as you can see) there are an awful lot of them. Also, harvesting them requires some finesse. You only want the flower , not the stems (which are bitter). So I pinch them off with by thumbnail again my index finger right up against the bottom of the flower, and I catch the blossom in my other hand. I've become ambidextrous at this, so I can switch hands when one gets tired. I get about a salad plate full of blossoms each week, which need to dry thoroughly before storage. This is what they look like after a week or two of drying: This is actually a couple harvests' worth, because they lose a lot of volume as they dry out. I suppose technically I should have these up on cheesecloth-lined screens for maximum air flow, but I just give them a turn each day with my hand when I walk past, and it seems to work fine.  ...

Midsummer means lots of color in our veggie garden: cucumber and squash blossoms, tomatoes and peppers ripening to all sorts of shades. There are purple snap pea blossoms, white bean blossoms, and yellow mustard flowers, too. While most of the flowers in the garden are just a precursor to the main event, others are edible in their own right. Here's what we have that looks good enough to eat: These are nasturtiums. The raw petals are really pretty in salads and have a peppery taste. These will keep going strong all summer, or at least until the aphids find them. We had some tonight mixed in with sautéed Swiss chard: As you can see, the petals kind of wilt and disappear in the heat. We added them late, but in the future it will be better to sprinkle them on top just before serving. Our chamomile is tiny this year, and just starting to bloom. The obvious use for these flowers is dried and used for tea, but they can also decorate desserts. Our bor...

We are finally finished dumping dirt into our raised beds! This is the last quadrant, and we wasted no time getting seeds into those beds once we were done filling them. This weekend marks our frost-free date, so it was time to get cracking on our planting and sowing. In the center "C" you can see our bamboo tepees (made by pulling apart an extra section of bamboo fencing we used for privacy at the Red House — glad to put them to good use!). Around each tepee are planted Cherokee Trail of Tears, an heirloom black bean that will climb those poles. In the squared off ends of the "C" are zucchini and nasturtium seeds as well. In the foreground of this bed are also mustard seedlings (too tiny to see, but they are in the rectangular section that is dark from having been watered). Our tomatillos are just off frame. Other seeds that went into the ground this weekend, now that we're pretty sure nothing will freeze: sunflowers, chamomile, and borage, plus...