In eleven days, the esteemed Smoky Joe, handyman extraordinaire, will lumber up our driveway in his big two-tone truck. He will smoke a cigarette he rolled from Bugler tobacco, drink a stout cup of coffee, then begin tearing down the western wall of our house. There will be a huge mess in the house and yard.
On Sunday I went to the Useful Plants Nursery Summer Plant Sale and bought a marvelous assortment of trees and shrubs. While I was gone, Jay pulled up the old floor downstairs, which was a hodge-podge of hardwood flooring, parquet, linoleum, and tile. Now it is down to a bare slab. Later in the day when the Sun’s heat began to fade I went into the garden and picked five quarts of blueberries. The bushes were falling over themselves with blueberries. I ate a bunch, froze a bunch, and there’s still a bounty of blueberries to harvest. So begins the last week before our annual beach vacation.
There is much to do. I can’t think about the floor, and I won’t even try to put my new trees and shrubs in the ground until I get back, but I certainly can wax euphoric about my nursery purchases. I think I’m most excited about the Hybrid American Chestnut. The American Chestnut was the crown jewel of the Southern Appalachian forests, but a foreign blight wiped them out by the 1930’s. Well, not entirely. There are still chestnut stumps that produce shoots, but the shoots are killed off by the blight before they ever mature. The two chestnuts I purchased are American chestnuts crossed back with Japanese and Chinese Chestnuts to produce something close to the original tree.
I also purchased some American hazelnuts. If I had done more research before my purchase I might have bought the European hazelnut, which produces a larger nut more suitable for the home orchard, but now I’m excited that I will be able to produce nuts for our family, and for the wildlife. American hazelnuts are vigorous plants with a tendency to colonize an area, so I’ll have extra plants within a few years that I can plant back in the forest for the deer, bear, grouse, and squirrels on my mountain. By the way, it’s your mountain, too, as nearly all of it is National Forest Land.
There’s nine new blueberry bushes, which means I have now about twenty-five blueberry bushes, though not all are producing berries yet. To go along with the blueberries, I now have two Aronia bushes. These are a native berry extremely rich in athocyanins and antioxidants. Don’t even begin to think that’s enough berries for me! I purchased two female sea berry plants, which have slender silver leaves. When they are loaded down with their bright orange berries, they will be a marvelous sight.
And then there is my Vitex tree. I thought it was Vitex agnus-castus, of which I already have two small plants, but it’s actually something I’ve never heard of before: VItex negundo. Regardless, this small tree absolutely called to me. She has a supple, curvaceous trunk rising to nearly six feet with lacy leaves and delicate lavender flowers. She really does have a lovely shape. This is the information they had about her: A veritable medicine cabinet of a plant. The leaves are anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and analgesic and are applied externally for rheumatic conditions, bruises, injuries, sprains, sores, and skin infections. The seeds and leaves contain valuable medicinal compounds are used internally for chronic bronchitis, all emaciating conditions, to improve memory and eyesight, rejuvenate hair, alleviate loss of appetite, and to manage skin diseases and excessive bleeding during menstruation. The young stems are used for basketmaking. The leaves are insecticidal and used to repel insects in grain stores. The fresh leaves are burned with grass to repel mosquitoes.
While I dream about blueberry pie with a hazelnut crust , or chestnut stuffing for Thanksgiving in two or three years, right now I have Narrowleaf Echinacea, Golden Sage, Passionflower, Valerian, and Bloodflower that need to go in the garden, as in yesterday. Fortunately the hot and dry weather has broken with a thunderific rainstorm. I’ll pull my bolting lettuces and feed them to my rabbits tomorrow, making way for a bed of herbal delights. But for now, my soft bed of pillows calls, and I will answer, for I have much to do tomorrow—putting straw around the potatoes (and purchasing said straw), taking artwork to the frame shop, setting up a trellis for my poor beans, and some other things I’m quite certain I’ve forgotten about, but will remember at some juncture.
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We had a big spring-cleaning weekend, culminating in an Easter dinner with family and friends. I just love when my house is clean. Today there hasn’t been a lot going on, and so I did a good bit of Etsy shopping and another good bit of house-tending and kitchen craft.
We’ve started eating smoothies every morning. I was wanting to find an easy way to eat flaxseeds, and after a little experimentation I found that just grinding them up in the trusty coffee grinder and throwing them in the blender with some yogurt, frozen raspberries, and agave syrup for sweetening was just about perfect. I might throw in a banana, or some blueberries, but that’s the gist of it. And it makes a great breakfast! The flaxseeds are just superb for your health, packed with Omega-3’s and lignans (lots and lots of lignans) that promote estrogen balance. That estrogen balance is what I was seeking, for uterine fibroids, and so far the effect has been marvelous, darling, just marvelous.
All that smoothie making makes for a lot of yogurt! So I started buying the milk at the store and making yogurt at home. It is so incredibly easy, and so much cheaper! And in the end you have these lovely jars of yogurt just waiting for you.
Jars of Yogurt and Flaxseed
Here’s the basic recipe for making yogurt:
I’ve heard that this will work with any kind of milk: rice, almond, soy, and I think it would be a fun experiment to see how these would turn out. But for now, I need to get downstairs to my kitchen corner and make some pizza!
Pizza dough on the rise
Speaking of kitchen, here’s the view of my domestic corner of creativity. I’m excited that we will soon be getting tile in the kitchen, and then new cabinets! But even now it’s beautiful, thanks to all that spring-cleaning, and maybe, if I keep Wednesdays a day for domestic craft, just maybe it will stay that way. It’s a possibility!
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Last week I transformed a corner of my house. Where previously there had been cluttered shelves and a large painting of daffodils in the snow, there is now a chalkboard:
This has been very useful in organizing our daily activities and also keeping track of what’s going on with everybody. There’s a calendar on the facing [...]
