Last week I built new cabinets for our kitchen (well....assembled ones I got at Target, originally meant to be bookshelves).  This was a large task for me and took two days!  Val doesn't do home improvement; his talents lie in mowing lawns, digging holes, and cuddling on the couch.  Anyway, it turned out quite well I think and opened up the kitchen, giving me more room on my countertops.  Next to the cupboards, not shown in the pictures, I took the door off the pantry and added a cute cloth blue shower curtain that really adds a lot to the decor.   Meanwhile I went through the cupboards and carted away several boxes of things I don't use anymore , freeing up more space.  I like my kitchen now.

We have been harvesting our garden and putting up fruit.  The cherry tree was the first tree to ripen.  We bottle cherry juice and make sour cherry jam.  It is peaceful to go out on the patio and pit the cherries, as in the picture below.   The weather has been so beautiful, and I watch the quail come and nibble on the garden.  We picked two gallons of currents and about that many raspberries.  The strawberries are so small this year we pick the biggest ones for breakfast and let the quail have the rest.  We have an abundance of beets, lettuce, and chard and are enjoying our vegetables.  I get up and work in the garden from 6:00 until 9:00.  That may change when it gets hotter, but it is such a nice way to start the day.

Below are perennials foxglove (digitalis) and below that yarrow and lavender.

We have pictures of Jon and Josh, neighbors for years and lifelong friends of our family.  Josh is marrying Lisa, and Jon is joining an immigration law firm.  I don't put last names on the blog, but you all know who we are.  What beautiful people!

Today I "bagged" my fuji apple tree (see picture).  Fuji apples produce late (October) which necessitate many sprayings for the apple maggot.  I like my apples unsprayed, so I am following an organic practice of bagging them.  You put a little bag over each apple and staple it.  It stays on all summer.  Orchardists say they have 100% success with this method and have nice big juicy apples.  The only problem is that it is time consuming.  Thank goodness my tree is small.

I also thinned the chard,  beat the quail to the strawberries and got a quart of fruit, and sprayed the cherries with spinosad.  I don't like worms in my cherries so I use spray on them alone.  It was a beautiful day outside, so I brought Cuddles, our parrot outside to enjoy the weather (see side column)

INTERESTING HEADLINE IN FRIDAY'S PAPER: "TRI-CITIES' JOB GROWTH RANKS FIFTH IN THE NATION"  Imagine that!  Our little community of Tri-Cities.

My recital was held last night.  And syllabus adjudications were held here in my home yesterday also. All and all it was a very busy day.  Both were successful.  As always, the recital was a bit long because I have so many students, but I can't bring myself to break it up.  I like them to see and hear each other play.  Here is a picture of them from last night.  And below it is a picture of my youngest student, a darling five-year old who stole the show.

So much rain!

It has been raining for two days, quite a phenomonon for this high desert country.  I  wonder what will happen to our cherries, and indeed to the cherries in western Oregon and Washington.  I swear our grass is growing 2 inches a day.  It makes wonderful compost, but we have two huge piles of it in our compost area.  Val is mowing constantly, as we have a lot of lawn here. 

Val says we had a death in our kitchen over Memorial Day weekend.  Our refrigerator/freezer died.  I had to use  the partially frozen fruit up, so I made pies us and for our friends.  I used up the  thawing vegetables in a pot of soup.  There was room in our other freezer for the rest of the food.  We had to order a new refrigerator and must wait over a week for it to come.  I have decided that one of my favorite things is ice water.  I love a large glass of ice water any time of the year, any time of the day.  I am missing that more than the refrigerator.  There isn't room in our other freezer now for ice!

But the pies-for-no-reason-at-all taste nice!

I love to create salads.  Here is a good one:

salad greens

one chopped orange

one chopped avocado--optional

small sliced mild purple onion

1/2 cup jicima sliced in 2" sticks

fresh asparagas spears in 2" pieces

Dressing:

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup rice vinegar

2 T orange juice concentrate

1/2 t salt

2-3 finely chopped cloves garlic

pepper to taste

Pictures of our garden

My piano students love all the hiding places in our hard; you can get lost out there.  The quail love the seedlings in our vegetable garden.  I love the scent of the roses everywhere.  Val loves to putter and feed all the stray cats (we have several come around) and maintain the bird feeders, which are out of reach of the cats.  So it is a magical place.

The Cecil Bruner rose is blooming in profusion right now.  The yard is full of scented flowers and bright colors among the cool greens.  We had some thunderstorms and rain last night.  It has been a very cool spring and the vegetables are slow to start.  The local cherry crop has been ruined, but my tree seems to be all right.  Mine are Balaton cherries, a Ukranian variety from which I make juice and pies.  The juice is to die for.

We have some favorite books we have passed around in our family lately.  Here is the list:

Steve Solomon  "Gardening when it Counts"

Patricia Lanza  "Lazagna Gardening"

Barbara Kingsolver  "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"  This is my very favorite book!!!

Jeff Gillman  "The Truth About Organic Gardening"

Michael Pollan  "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto"  I LOVE this book!!

Well, if you haven't read Kingsolver and Pollan, they will inspire you to eat right.  Our western style of eating is killing us.  We have too many chemicals in our food (sometimes in the name of health----that's certainly questionable).  We need to go back to basics.

And growing and canning your own food is certainly more nutritious than eating food shipped up here from South America, costing fuel, picked green, grown without FDA regulation.  When it is canned ripe from the vine or tree from your own yard (and hopefully organically grown), it has all the nutrients.  In the middle of winter it is far more vitamin-rich than the so-called "fresh" foods we get out of season at the grocer.

Well those are my favorite lectures of late, so I will get down off my dais and go out and groom my roses for a while   Ahh, the peace and serenity of beautiful, fragrant roses rivals the greatest

of therapists!

Gardening

It is the middle of May, and I am thick into gardening and preparing for my May recital.  Funny thing about gardening in my family.  Three of my sons, Joe (36), Chris (33), and Steve (32), all take after their Mom and Dad (Vern, who died in 1995) and love to garden.  However, Nathan (40) doesn't know a tree from a bush or a flower from a weed.  He will probably hire a gardener if he ever has a yard.  But he loves books and has loved them since he was two years old.  By the way, he is an English teacher.

Back to gardening.  Steve just moved and is renting, so he doesn't have a garden this year.  But Joe and Chris and I have been corresponding on gardening for some time now.  Usually interested in flowers (I love roses; Joe, in southern Oregon, grows enviable dahlias; Chris lets the Portland climate grow his huge blue hydrangeas),  However this year all we can think of is vegetables.  Joe has been growing vegetables on a farm,  where he built a greenhouse and has Rogue River irrigation.  Chris plowed up his back yard in a Portland neighborhood and is using the lasagna gardening method.  His garden looks beautiful.  

I have 9 fruit trees (apricots, peaches, apples, plum, pear, nectarine cherry) and a large vegetable garden with about 15 tomato plants, swiss chard, beets, lettuce, leeks, carrots, parsnips, kwintus green beens, bush beans, winter squash, zuccini, crookneck, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and then the berries: 7 blueberry bushes, a row of currants, grape vines, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, guomi berries aronia berries, strawberries.  I think that's all, except for the herbs, and I won't go into all those.  The surprise is that I live on only 3/4 acre and also have 40 rose bushes and plenty of beautiful lawn and flower gardens.  There's much one can do on a small city lot.

Val helps me with everything, even though isn't all that fond of gardening.  I really think it is growing on him.  He is a mail carrier who works hard all day.  His life is all hard work and service and love.  You couldn't find a better man.

Last year we gave away bushels of fruit from our trees and canned 400 quarts of fruit and juice and tomatoes besides.