Living and gardening in an older Hudson Valley home
Thanksgiving is about the feast and the time-honored traditions and recipes that somehow relate back to the early pilgrims. This is our interpretation of Thanksgiving dinner. We had a special dinner for two with all the trimmings! I remember many wonderful Thanksgiving dinners over the years. When I was a child, my mother used a […]
Autumn leaves take the spotlight in the Hudson Valley this time of year. Miraculous displays of red, yellow, gold and brown provided stunning vistas in all directions and surprises of color around every bend and corner. It was truly a gorgeous season. Rains in the past week have caused most of the leaves to fall, […]
Bread week, of the current season of The Great British Baking Show, featured a signature challenge of focaccia bread. A signature challenge is one where the bakers are asked in advance to take a traditional food item and give it their own twist. Of course the signature challenge was won by an Italian, Giuseppe, who […]
It is nearly November and still the garden is yielding vegetables. While the number of things we are gathering from the garden is small in comparison to the bounty of late summer we are enjoying those few things still available. Small black tomatoes, rosemary, sage, basil, chives and hot peppers have gone into seasoning wonderful […]
Now that autumn has begun in earnest, it is time for me to reflect back on this year’s vegetable garden. It was an unusual summer. We had tremendous amounts of rain throughout the summer. My recent experience is that July and August are drier. Last year we needed to water the garden every day. This […]
After nearly three years of not getting on a plane and almost no travel, I went to Germany. When you put this into the context that I had some years where I was traveling at least 75% of each year, to not go anywhere was…..a luxury! A luxury I had some trepidation of giving up. […]
Dear friends from Colorado, Gayle and Bruce, stopped by for lunch on Sunday. An out of the way stop on their journey home from a Saab convention in Albany, NY. I have never owned or even driven a Saab so I do not understand the appeal of the Swedish car, but Saab enthusiasts revere the […]
It has truly been a busy Spring season. No one thing has caused it to be busy, it is just the amalgamation of an assortment of activities. I wake up each day wondering, where have I spent my time? Why isn’t it possible to just lie in bed. The life of the leisure class. I […]
My neighbor, a retired judge, has labeled me a killer. He chastises me for waging war on the creeping charlie weeds overrunning everything (but they have a flower, he says), the dreaded honeysuckle bushes which proliferate like rabbits (but they grow so well he says), and the bittersweet vines which kill everything in their path […]
Often it feels like Winter hangs around longer than it should. This year, I know this was the case. I compared photos of our yard from one year ago. The plants are blooming 2-3 weeks later than last year. There was some snow left in the yard, from a large pile, just two weeks ago […]
