Posts Tagged ‘plants’
green pepper soup from my deck garden
Since arthritis found me, I no longer keep a big garden. But for the last couple of years, I have experimented with deck gardening. This year I planted pepper and tomato plants in my Veg Trugs (mine are pop-up, foldable raised garden planters bought at Lee Valley Tools for about $70 each). They dry out quickly but otherwise are great and easy to manage. This year I have grown a nice crop of green peppers and tomatoes on my deck.
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This past weekend, I harvested my first little peppers.
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I sliced my peppers and made a nutritious soup for lunch. Ingredients: 2 peppers sliced, 1 yellow onion chopped, 1 clove garlic chopped, water, vegetable broth, gluten-free spaghetti, black pepper, basil, turmeric. Spicy but not salty. Delicious.
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Copyright Jane Tims 2017
Green bottles and blue berries
We have been spending time at our cabin.
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In the window, on our bench, the light flows through green bottles.
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Our paths are green tunnels.
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And in the fields and along the trails are blueberries.
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Lots to pick and eat.
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bitter blue
for Mom
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of all the silvery summer days we spent none so warm sun on granite boulders round blue berry field miles across hazy miles away from hearing anything but bees
and berries
plopping in the pail
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beside you I draped my lazy bones on bushes crushed berries and thick red leaves over moss dark animal trails nudged between rocks berries baking brown musk rising to meet blue heat
or the still fleet scent
of a waxy berry bell
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melting in my mouth crammed with fruit sometimes pulled from laden stems more often scooped from your pail full ripe blue pulp and the bitter shock of a hard green berry never ripe
or a shield bug
with frantic legs
and an edge to her shell
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From ‘within easy reach’, Chapel Street Editions, 2016
Previously published in The Amethyst Review 1 (2), Summer 1993
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Copyright 2017 Jane Tims
Tendrils
My cucumber vines are still thriving …
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And the tendrils are still so charming!
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This one wants to pull up a chair!
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On Friday, I had my first cucumber salad from my vines!
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Copyright 2017 Jane Tims
wildflowers – Bladder campion
One of my favorite roadside flowers is the Bladder campion, Silene vulgaris (Moench) Garcke. The flowers are white, with five deeply lobed petals. The flowers protrude from an inflated, papery calyx, greenish, purple-veined and bladder-like. This time of year, the flowers are almost past.
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I love the scientific generic name Silene, derived from the name of a Greek woodland deity. Another common name for Bladder campion is maidenstears.
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The leaves of Bladder campion are edible, used raw in a salad or cooked in a stew.
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Copyright 2017 Jane Tims
wildflowers – Canada lily
A drive this time of year through Grand Lake Meadows, along the old Trans-Canada Highway, will show you one of our prettiest wild flowers — Lilium canadense L., the Canada lily.
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The flowers are a glimpse of orange in vast fields of greenery. The flowers are down-ward pointing, reminding me of a chandelier of light. They bloom from June through August in the moist wetlands of this part of central New Brunswick.
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As the meadow winds flip the flowers upward, you can catch a glimpse of the dark red anthers and the spotted interior of the petals.
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Copyright 2017 Jane Tims
those don’t look like French fries!
This time of year in eastern New Brunswick and elsewhere, the potato fields are flourishing and many are in bloom.
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I am so grateful for those potato fields. I love French fries, so much so that I limit my intake by making promises to myself and my son (something like: I promise to eat French fries only once per week for the next three months. I usually stick to these promises because I make them for a specific time.
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I love other potato products. I make great potato salad (potatoes, Miracle Whip, onions, bacon bits, mustard, green relish, pepper and basil). We also eat potato and leek soup regularly (a great hot-day supper). And, of course, potatoes are an ingredient in every stew I make through the winter.
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But although we love potatoes, do we ever appreciate their very pretty flowers? Like so many things, we fail to see their beauty unless we look.
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Copyright Jane Tims 2017
a touch of Monet
Last week, on a drive to Plaster Rock, we passed a pond along the Saint John River filled with water lilies (Nymphaea sp.).
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Lovely. Calming. And reminiscent, in the way they lay on expanses of open water, of Monet’s water lilies at Giverny.
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When I think of water lilies, I also remember Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Silence – “And the water lilies sighed unto one another….”
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So to add to these greats, I have my own snippet from my poem ‘Bear Creek Meadow by Canoe’ (published in Canadian Stories 14 (82 ), Dec 2011 ):
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dignity quiets our paddles
hushed voices heed
the diminishing echo
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pliant as stems of pickerel weed
we honour the whisper
of wild rice
the edgewise touching
of nymphaea and nuphar
amphibian eyes
in the harbour-notch of lily pads
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we are threaded by dragonflies
drawn by water striders
gathered in a cloak of water shield
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Copyright Jane Tims 2017
a moment of beautiful: tendrils
the place: a planting of cucumber vines on the deck
the beautiful: winding tendrils
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I have a small garden on our deck. This year I tried a new technique; I put a bag of soil on a table, cut a slit in the horizontal part of the bag, punctured the bottom for drainage and planted some cucumbers. Later, when the leaves were established, I ran a couple of lengths of string from the table to a nearby tree.
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Now the tendrils are searching for support. When the cells of the tendril encounter a surface, such as the edge of a string, the cells respond in such a way to twist the tendril. The resulting coils and spirals are so charming!
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a note of music
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Hang on little fellow!
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coils and curls
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Copyright Jane Tims 2017
lupins lean
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Yesterday our drive in western New Brunswick was dominated by two things: the wind and the roadside wildflowers.
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Buttercups, bunchberry, bluets and lupins fill the ditches with bloom. The lupins (Lupinus sp.) dominate – mostly purple and blue, but occasionally white, pink or even yellow. The wind was blowing so hard, you could use the flower heads and leaves to measure wind direction!
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Copyright Jane Tims 2017
planting trees at our cabin
Last weekend, we planted about 30 Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) seedlings at our cabin property. There are lots of trees there already, but we are thinking ahead.
We bought our seedlings at the Irving Tree Nursery in Sussex, $.50 each. We planted them with the help of a metal dibble stick made especially for planting young trees.
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Here is a photo of our cabin, taken from far away, on the other side of the lake in early spring. Lots of tree there already, you say? You can never have too many trees!
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We still have more trees to plant, including some Red Pine and Eastern White Cedar. Great time spent outside where the black flies are never very bad!
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Copyright Jane Tims 2017
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