Port Potager

It’s that time of year again! We’ve been a little slower than usual to get the garden plan done this winter, as we’ve been driven to distraction by current events . Still, we finally finished that work today, and leek and onion seeds have already been started. Here’s hoping that the spring will bring the goodness and light of things growing and being nurtured in your corner of the world, too. Starting in the center C, you can see dots that indicate the spots where PVC pipes will be inserted for pole beans. We’re doing the bean house again here! Around the outside is a traditional companion planting of squash and pumpkins.  Across the top of the top bed is a long row of trellises cucumbers, both pickling and slicing. We’re going all in on these this year, since last summer’s drought left us with just one  cucumber for the whole season. Behind the cucumbers will be bell peppers, hot peppers, eggplant, head lettuce, and a few succession plantings of cilantro. ...

Hot toddies have come my way several times this season, and I must say, I’m a fan. I wrote about them for a client in an article about warm cocktails, and discovered then that there are lots of ways to make them. In general, think of the tea you’d drink to soothe a cold, and add a shot of liquor – you know, for comfort.  I was served one at a Christmas party that was lovely. It was, I think, based pretty closely on Jamie Oliver’s hot toddy recipe , but with the addition of some ginger to the general mix of honey, lemon, and spices.  This week I have been struggling with a killer head cold, so I took the opportunity to make a hot toddy for myself.  First, this hip retro mug was originally Kirk’s grandmother’s. She was a nurse, and everyone on her floor had one – the back has her shift hours. Next, I made this with a mug of herbal tea, a slice of ginger, and a wedge of lemon studded with a couple cloves. The tea had a fair amount of stevia in it alrea...

Like just about everyone I know, we were not at all sorry to kiss 2016 goodbye last night – and we had fun doing it! Friends in town had a great idea to have a traveling New Year’s house party, where each family hosted a position of the meal (apps, dinner, dessert, and champagne toast) and we all walked from house to house throughout the evening to change venue (and, truth be told, get some fresh air and a breather from all the rich food and drink!). It was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it if you live within walking distance of your friends! Our job was dessert, and we found two recipes we liked a lot. First, mulled wine: For this we followed Jamie Oliver’s recipe  using Beaujolais Nouveau, though I skipped the bay (because we didn’t have any) and added a cardamon pod and a few slices of ginger instead. What you see above is the initial syrup making process, which lets you get all the flavor without burning off all the alcohol by heating all the wine at onc...

Now that our long autumn nightmare is over and we have heat again, we were curious about the financial upshot of sticking with oil. Not that we had a choice .  The new furnace works much better and is much  more efficient than the old one, thanks in no small part to fully insulated ductwork that is now installed properly – that is, the heat registers are under the windows instead of in the center of the house, where they did little good to anyone.  The only thing that’s not entirely up to snuff is the ductwork to the second floor. These are quite small, and there are only two ducts to the whole upstairs: One in our room, and one that’s split between the kids’ rooms. It’s a good 5 degrees colder upstairs at any given time of day – and that’s actually an improvement. But could we do better if we hung on to some of those electric space heaters we were using all through the fall? My thinking was that if programmed the thermostat to dial the nighttime t...

We had our first real snowfall today, and it was nice to have a weekend snow day for baking and tree decorating: Now that the landscape suddenly has been wiped clean of its color, these photos from a month ago look all the more brilliant by contrast:  Back when we were raking leaves , the kids reported finding a wasp nest in the trees. We had one in each maple tree, and each was a perfectly formed little habitat:  They’re both about the size of a grapefruit, and they’re still hanging from their branches, accumulating snow. They’re empty now, of course, but the craftsmanship is solid – they’ve held up in our perennially windy weather  and don’t seem to mind bearing the weight of several inches of snow.  They’re rather beautiful in their own way, and with the leaves long gone they look like paper lanterns hanging from the tree. Paper wasps are good predators for bugs that like rosebushes , and they’ve never been even remotely aggressive, u...

For the past two months, we’ve been shivering and bundling up in blankets because our furnace broke. This isn’t the sort of thing you tend to discover in July, and we realized something was wrong in mid-October when we first went to turn on the heat this season (the burning oil smell was a clue).  It turns out that a previous owner of our house – in a fit of misguided Yankee frugality – decided to make the ductwork a DIY special.  That dummy made such a mess of it that it forced the furnace to an untimely demise, mainly due to a near-total lack or returned air to the system. This was not helped by the fact that another genius tiled over all the floor registers in the hallway and kitchen.   The saga was made more difficult by the fact that we were trying to switch from oil to gas, since there’s a line right at the street. Too bad that NATIONAL GRID IS THE WORST COMPANY ON THE PLANET. Even though we had an emergency situation without heat – in November! –...

Though there were times during this summer’s drought when our celery was yellow and sprawled flat on the ground — rather like a cartoon version of a thirsty plant — it recovered really well this fall: That’s the celery growing in our greenhouse tunnel, and it’s really robust — pretty much the best we’ve ever done with it. I attribute this to our long autumn growing season. We had a late frost, and the nightly lows just haven’t fallen much below 30 until this week. Celery does well in cool weather and can handle some frost, so it’s been loving life in the tunnel this season. Alas, the high  temperature by the weekend will only be 27, so this week we’re working our way through the most tender items in the tunnel to eat it all up before the deep freeze. The tunnels offer some protection from the cold, but won’t be able to keep things alive once temperatures start hitting the teens.  This celery is nice enough to eat raw, and the ribs are actually wide enough...