Procrastinating and putting off planting is not all bad
Forget what you’ve heard: There is no official time of year to plant a garden. ...
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Maine Dish
Maine Dish: A goddess worth worshipping
The recipe for Green Goddess dressing has a storied past, originating as a sauce for ...
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Tarting it up
Our household eats foods seasonally, and the winter diet of root vegetables gets quite long. So, I am quite excited in the spring to spot clumps of fresh chives, purple asparagus tips and the dark green leaves of rhubarb starting to unfold. Something new to cook! Botanically speaking, rhubarb is classified as a vegetable, although …
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Kitchen Garden: Taste of spring
Can taste buds have spring fever? Most gardeners have caught what Emily Dickinson called “A Little Madness in the Spring.” They’re salivating over catalog descriptions of juicy tomatoes and melons as their windowsills overflow with seedlings. In the old days, this period was called the “hungry gap.” Produce in the root cellar had seen better …
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Maine Dish: It’s spring in the kitchen
There is nothing more welcoming in spring than a clump of fresh chives. The smallest species of the onion genus, Allium Schoenoprasum, is a choice edible herb, and the only allium native to both the Old and New World. Here in Maine, chives grow as a perennial, and self-seed themselves wildly throughout the garden. Chives’ …
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Rethinking plant spacing to maximize yield
“I ignore what the books say,” my friend huffed. “If I planted my vegetables as far apart as I’m supposed to, they’d be in my neighbor’s yard.” I know what she means. In today’s small gardens the old guidelines don’t apply. If we had to grow cabbage in rows 3 feet apart, few of us …
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Kitchen Garden: Welcoming birds back to the garden
Some birds are so much a part of farm life that they’re considered co-workers. A fortunate barn has its barn owls, to feast on grain-nibbling mice. Or barn swallows, patrolling for mosquitoes. In spring the kildeer, a type of plover, skitter across newly tilled fields and gardens in search of caterpillars, worms, grasshoppers and bugs. …
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Tuscan vegetable soup’s on!
In many households, the lengthening daylight hours herald the time to do some major cleaning. This age-old ritual of “spring cleaning” is rooted in religious and cultural traditions and linked to the biology of how humans are wired. In the Jewish custom, the home is cleaned before Passover, while Christians clean the altar before Good …
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Kitchen Garden: Consider planting flowering crabapples
The saying goes, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” But why not a cherry? Or a plum? Maybe because in the old days, apples were one of the few homegrown foods you could eat fresh all winter. A cellar full of long-keepers supplied you with a daily, living package of vitamin C right …
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Egg chowder makes late-winter warmup
By Merry Post Special to The Ellsworth American It would be easy to ridicule the accomplishments of the temperance movement and its earnest reformers. Even when the temperance movement was at its peak of popularity, songs such as “The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine” were lampooned. National prohibition lasted for 13 years …
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Cook once, eat twice or more
In her seminal book “The Way to Cook,” Julia Child writes that “while attitudes about food have changed, fortunately the principles of good cooking have not. The more one knows about it, the less mystery there is, the faster cooking becomes, the easier it is to be creative … and the more pleasure one has …
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The Golden Retriever Man
Fly fishermen are no dummies. At a fly shop, a bright, buggy-looking fly may wind up in the angler’s shopping cart, but it had better perform out there on the water. Sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t. Yes sir, the proof is in the pudding. These days Maine fly fishermen flock to one particular artificial …