Imbolc

Imbolc.
Soft rain.
The earth smells
like earth.

Daffodil shoots a few hours before the rain.
February 1, 2011.
Photo by Jane Redmont.

Cross country skiing in Greensboro

I must be one of the few Greensboro residents who keeps cross country skis by the front door. I live in hope. Also, I don't have enough storage space.

I used the skis early last March when we had a good snow, and today I used them again. Yesterday the sky was grey-white and heavy. Today the sun was bright and the sky clear. Perfect for skiing, though cold.

At last the huge plot of land here is good for something. On Facebook I referred to it all summer as the Humongous Lawn and I was forever mowing it --and suffering from the mosquitos, who love me, and from wasp stings, because we had an infestation. Today I made trails and got quite the little workout.

I love the smell of snow. To me it is the smell of winter vacation. This isn't the Alps, but even in this semi-suburban neighborhood the smell reminds me of ski trips and crisp air at high altitude.








Taking the skis off...

White Christmas

It snowed yesterday. It snowed today. We have over six inches of snow here in Greensboro.


Trees near house, white sky, late afternoon, December 26.

White on white, front lawn.

Snow on leaves, December 26.

Torn leaf, snow.

Some large evergreen limbs tore off and fell in the storm. Not to worry, the tree is nowhere near the house. No repeats of the Great Tree Disaster. By the way, the house you see in the background is a neighbor's house, not mine.

+Maya Pavlova, indoors looking out. I took the photo from outside and you can see both +Maya looking out and the snowy landscape reflected in the window.

Heavily laden branches.

Consider the fig tree...

Cat on flannel sheets on a cold night.

Click on each photo to enlarge slightly and see more detail.
All photos taken with my BlackBerry camera.

Yellow butterfly with brown, blue, and orange

The butterflies are plentiful -- four in one small patch of phlox this afternoon.

There is also at least one local hummingbird (I keep wanting to use the French colibri) which is less than half the size of the butterflies! I can't capture it on camera because, well, it hums. It is beautiful, with bright green and red among its colors. I've never seen such a small one; the California ones were larger.

The first figs

Saturday was also the day of the first figs. The house I rent has a biblical back yard: a vine and two fig trees! The figs are now ripe, more of them each day, and the first harvest was Saturday. I'm going to be giving away figs a lot. Greensboro friends take note. They are delicious. In the photo some of them were still wet from the recent rain.

In other news, we've had rain, grey skies, and lower temperatures. Climbing back up today, but with a bit of rain. It's been heavenly keeping the windows open. And yesterday it was cool enough for me to talk a walk. The birds were happy too and singing loudly in the trees.

Ignatius Day: another butterfly

Happy feast of Ignatius of Loyola. Here is another butterfly, fluttering about the flowers at noontime on a rare warm-but-not-hot grey day. It is more yellow than the photo makes it seem, as is the beige-looking butterfly below (at the bottom of that post). The BlackBerry camera distorts some colors.

Meanwhile, over on one side of the house...

Inside the house, Jane continues to write and edit and pace the floor and +Maya sleeps, plays, and pesters Jane for treats, but only when Jane is in the kitchen.

Stalking the butterflies

And finally caught an open-winged photo!

Still life with ginger and chiles in china-red bowl

 

The bowl was made by a local potter who is a former Guilford English professor.  I remember his saying that the glaze is a Chinese red. I got the bowl a couple of years ago.

The red jalapeños and slim green hot hot hot peppers (I forget their name, they are too big to be serranos, I think) are from yesterday's farmers' market. 40 cents for the lot.

Still life with peaches and ginger

And rolled oats and garlic and regular lentils and French lentil - and phlox and hydrangea.

Farmers' market postscript, Part II

 Photos taken at home today, again with the BlackBerry.

 

 
 

Took several of the tomatoes and even without artificial light they had that shiny reflection - some from the window light, some from the flash. Will photograph with another camera without flash tomorrow to see if I can get a better picture.  The Cherokee Purple tomatoes are delicious.   These are all heirloom tomatoes. 

Farmers' market postscript, Part I

The goat milk camembert from Goat Lady Dairy was to die for.  Is to die for.  I had some yesterday but there is plenty left. I took this photo yesterday a few hours after returning from the farmers' market.

Sisters and brothers!  Do NOT serve cheese straight out of the refrigerator! Take it out ahead of your meal and serve it at room temperature.  For a camembert, don't start storing the cheese in the fridge till you are sure it is ripe.  Then you can start storing it in the fridge, taking it out at least an hour before you plan to eat some of it or serve it to your guests.  Even a hard cheddar will taste better with time to lose its chill and remember its original taste and texture.

This camembert is perfect.  It is runny but still a little firm in the middle.

Have this as a cheese course (after the main course -- I even sometimes have it as the main course, after a big salad), not at the beginning of the meal. Camembert is best with a crusty bread, like a baguette or ciabatta (it needs a good crumb on it as well as a good crust) but a non-crusty one will do.  I tried it with a dense whole-wheat bread from a new bakery I discovered at the farmers' market and it was very good.

Below is a photo (taken from Goat Lady Dairy's website) of the original Goat Lady, Ginnie, who died last year.  Members of the Tate family continue to run the farm and dairy.

Farmers' market bounty, July 3

Tomatoes from Peterson Farm.

The photos are selective, as I tend to buy from the smaller farms that do sustainable agriculture.  (At this market, those farms are mostly not certified organic but they use no pesticides and watch their farming methods in a variety of other ways.  It costs $ to get certified.  One of the best such farms is Peterson Farm, and it has a blog! There are some great photos of the farm there.)  

There were larger displays like the one in the photo immediately below and there was also a lot of good people-photography opportunity, but I didn't have the portrait camera with me, only the BlackBerry in my pocket and my several shopping bags, which rapidly grew heavy with vegetables, fruits, and goat cheeses.

Not sure of the name of this farm.

I went to the market out on Stony Ridge Road in Colfax, off Route 40, not the downtown one near the old stadium.  I prefer this one in the summer most of the time.  Initially I only went to the downtown market when I first lived here. This market one is more basic-NC-folks and much less hippie-lefty and not so connected with the Slow Food Movement, though the Goat Lady Dairy people are at both markets.  Happily for me.  When I became a finalist for my current job at Guilford College, I googled "goat cheese Greensboro" to see what I could find, and sure enough, Goat Lady Dairy popped up; that's when I knew I could manage living here.  Seriously.

Interesting-looking squash from Peterson Farm.
 

Peterson Farm again. Yum.

Okra from Peterson Farm too.  I just bought one box.

This was a small family farm stand. 

Berries are among the higher-in pesticides fruit but I couldn't resist, and since this isn't an industrial-sized farm, the berries may be less toxic than the ones in the supermarket. I decided to take my chances, and I'll rinse the berries well.  I went for the "3 for $6" deal and got one pint of each of the berries: two kinds of blueberries --they really do taste different-- and big juicy blackberries.

Can't remember name of farm here.  
It's not one I remember from other times I've been at this market. 
Those onions look fabulous! 
They are going to go into one dish with squash 
and another made with okra and tomatoes. 
And I'll still have some left over.  

Four or five of these onions go a long way in the flavor department.

The first corn of the year is out in full glory.  More later in the weekend (when I add more text here) on the white vs. yellow corn disputes in my family.  This is a white corn variety called "Avalon," very sweet, and it turns pale yellow when cooked. I had these two ears for lunch. Here they are post-steaming and pre-seasoning.

And here they are mid-lunch. Olive oil, salt, and freshly ground pepper. Nice alternative to butter if you are watching your butterfat intake or if you are a vegan.

I thought to myself, "Well, we are in North Carolina" when I saw these, but that was my bad and my nasty stereotyping.  I am an ignoramus. The true origins of whoopie pies are Pennsylvania Amish and New England.  I looked this up after I got home.  But anyway, there they were. I didn't buy any.

These are all BlackBerry photos. I'll take at least the Nikon digital camera with me next time.  It will fit into a big pocket and I can pull it out easily. 

Lily season

The first lilies bloomed a while back, but now they are here in full force, just as the hydrangeas are fading.  You can see the Humongous Lawn, as I refer to it on Facebook, in the first picture.  I spend my time mowing. Then again, it burns calories and it beats going to the gym, except for the heat and the bugs.  Speaking of the bugs, who just love me, I think the proper order of things is 1) apply sunscreen, 2) apply bug spray.  For a while I wasn't sure.  But I digress.

I took the three photos above in the bright sun on Sunday after returning from church, sometime after 1:00 p.m.

Yesterday, La Virgencita got some day lilies.  (The first photo is a bit fuzzy.)

Same lilies, close up.  They look Van Gogh-ish in this photo.  They are a much brighter orange in reality.

 

 Here endeth the tour of the day lilies.

Hydrangea catch-up

Good heavens.  I neglected to put up pictures of the hydrangeas when they got really blue.  Though there is one small bush of purple hydrangeas (the color of hydrangeas has to do with the acidity of the soil) the other small bush and the really huge one are both blue, and they went from pale blue (mixed with cream at the core of the flowers when they were just "ripening") to periwinkle.  I took most of the photos with the BlackBerry camera, which distorts the color a bit, so the periwinkle-ness is not obvious, but you can see that the blue is more intense than it was in the first week or too of hydrangea blooming. 

The hydrangea is the only thing I've taken care of this year.  The garden is my landlady's doing and the flowers pop up in due season, one wave after the other.  The hydrangea bushes were full of dead wood --no one had trimmed or pulled it out in years-- so in the late winter or very early spring I got rid of it.  It took a long time and the wood filled about three garbage bins.  I had scratched arms after that, having been attacked by the hydrangeas as I worked.  I now understand why garden ladies garden in long sleeves. The reward was a huge, really huge hydrangea bush, much larger than last year, and even more flowers than last year. Spectacular.

Otherwise, all due credit to the house's owner, to Mother Nature, and to Godde, not necessarily in that order.

 

This is a little purple hydrangea flower after the rain.

In the variegated bouquet below, the middle flower was in fact more blue-purple than the dark blue it appears to be and the right hand flower was more of a dark purple than it appears in the photo.

I'll take photos with a regular camera next time around, but it is handy to have the BBerry in pocket - I just whip it out and click over to the camera function and take a picture.  The camera is especially good with flowers.  It is a little less so with pictures of +Maya and even less so with people pictures, though in a pinch it is helpful to take quick snaps of humans.

I've had flowers next to the Guadalupe candle for weeks now.  Here is Guadalupe with the last of the hydrangeas.

  And this is what some of these flowers looked like as early adolescents.

 And here is the way one looked as a green, unripe baby flower.