I’ve  just spent nearly six hours in the kitchen making broccoli dishes to freeze. This is tiresome. Broccoli Lasagne. Broccoli Quiche. Broccoli & Spinach & Ricotta Canelloni. It’s not over. Tomorrow is another day, another broccoli day, another bean day, another salad and arugula day, and, very possibly, a cauliflower day. Yes, another day of toiling away in the kitchen, preserving our harvest, and doing my damnedest to convince myself that all this utterly slavish work will pay off when, after a long day of manual labor, I can pop some delectable, homegrown, organic, homemade dish into the oven and have a ready-made meal with no work involved. Well, you get what you pay for. I’m paying the price now. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t feel compelled to make my own pasta, but, you know, we’ve got something like 50 chickens, so, the eggs are there, and because we’re Costco-ers, we’ve got a thousand pounds of flour in the larder, so, I might as well, well,…. anyway.  This afternoon, I visited the freezer and extracted a container of frozen spinach that was labelled, in Andrew’s distinctive handwriting, “Salted Spinach Puree – 2009”. This seemed very dubious but, after defrosting it in the microwave and tasting it, believe it or not, it tasted exactly as one might expect salted spinach puree to taste like; nice, spinachy. (The purple leaf Basil puree, however, was not such a succes). The beets will be ready in no time, and the cucumbers and zucchini will begin to shout out at me, making demands that I may not be able to meet. This will be followed by Basil, crying out for Pesto-Festo!!! I’ll  go with the flow. I whine, but, at the end of the day, I know that it’s a tremendous privelage to have the space, the physical vigor and health, and the modest means to grow food for ourselves without relying on multinational supermarkets and knowing that the food we’ve produced is organic, wholesome and the fruit of our labor. We are blessed.

The garden cycles through the seasons at its own pace. And although it seems that, here at Stonewell,we put a greater amount of effort into the gardens in late winter, and then early to mid-spring, pruning fruit tress, adding 60 tons of composted horse manure to all the beds, feeding the bulbs and roses, performing selective, editorial ‘weeding’ of the self sowers, (over whom we try to maintain some control), moving plants around, planting out things that we’ve propagated in the greenhouse, edging the beds and borders, mulching, etc… perhaps I’m wrong in this perception. Presently, the flower borders seem to be making their magic on their own with little interference from us;  self-sown, annual poppies exhuberate, anthemis leads the cheer, lavender is beginning to make it’s voice heard. The annuals; nicotiana, cleome, cosmos, and petunias are making their colorful and fragrant contribution and the whole place exudes and effusive, jubilant and colorful quality. It seems effortless, compared to the spring training sessions that last for weeks on end, and we are greatly appreciative of this garden cycle. Wait, but didn’t I just spend many hours weeding the vegetable garden, spraying the cole crops with BT, planting more vegetable seeds, screening the dahlias and the berry crops for insects, deadheading the roses and feeding them again, setting up Japanese Beatle traps, pruning the weigelas and the philadelphii, screening the vegetable garden for pests, etc,,,? Yes, it’s all work keeping the gardens in shape, while creating new gardens for clients, but, at the end of the day, even for hyper-critical me, the gardens provide a moment of respite and refreshment from the dull, green, boring landscapes that we see far too much of.