Late August bounty

The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Late August bounty

Between first-year-establishment tasks, Mark's hernia, and the extra time I'm putting into my fiction writing, I decided not to do any preserving this year. But there's still a lot to cook up!

On the plus side, smaller batches of vegetables coming out of the garden tend to make for more variety in my cooking. If there aren't quite enough beans to create a side all by themselves, I throw in some bell peppers and squash or eggplant and turn it into a stir fry.

How about you? Is your summer garden a bust or are you paying people to take tomatoes and summer squash to deal with the glut?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.

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garden--and realizing about summer

To be outside, puttering around, drinking in the light and shadows. To be part of the garden in an intimate way...Hello, broccoli! Celery! Time to pull you up, broccoli... Yes, celery, I forgot to check to see if you revived, after that strange wilt in July...Haven't really checked out all the individual vegetables, even if they are not bearing, since all that rain. Afternoon shadows...and sunlight, filtering thru--These glimpses of how my garden exists when I am not there are why my garden is actually more, to me, than what it bears. In a way, if we don't have enough to can or freeze, or even make a big mess of, we do still have a little, and it is perfectly ours. What we pick, what we pamper, in how we nurture, gives us an excuse to Be, out in our gardens...Yes, we do fiercely protect from varmints, blights, fungus, drought, etc--but we also breathe in the freshness. We can stoop over, weeding. We can yank up! We can make headway or not---our gardens are so alive. In summer.