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Category Archives: Sustainable living

Local pecans!

Thursday, December 23, 2021

One of my friends here in Stokes County is a horticulturist who used to work for the county’s agricultural cooperative extension service. He was here a couple of days ago for my winter solstice fire. He brought for me a couple of pounds of pecans, which were grown in a pecan orchard only a few […]

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Oysters

Saturday, December 4, 2021

Oyster soup, more or less Louisiana style. The sandwich is a winter-style BLT — lettuce from the garden, but no tomato. Oysters are magical somehow. They’re also slightly creepy. Picky eater that I was as a kid, it’s surprising that I even liked them. But I did, either batter-fried or in a creamy stew. We […]

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Radish sprouts

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Radish sprouts are my new favorite sprouts. They’re also one of the healthiest kinds of sprouts you can eat, very high in antioxidants. They do have a fairly strong flavor, though. Not everyone likes them. If you don’t like radish sprouts raw, they work very nicely in stir-fries. They’re almost as big as mung bean […]

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Winter greens

Saturday, November 20, 2021

I wish I had started experimenting with winter greens in a cold frame a long time ago. This mustard was planted in early October and is now ready to start picking. I’ve decided to make a little ritual of it, though, and have the first winter mustard on Thanksgiving. For comparison, I’ve also got some […]

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Tomorrow: first feeze

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

The National Weather Service has issued a freeze warning for tomorrow night. I made my rounds this evening as the birds were bedding down in the arbor vitae trees. Some blooming things will bite the dust in tomorrow’s freeze. Others, such as the camellias, will survive, but winter shabbiness will start to set in. I […]

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Fall sproutings

Friday, October 22, 2021

My attempts during the spring of this year to get an early garden going under a cold frame were pretty much a total failure. I’m not sure why. But my guess would be that the soil was just too cold for good germination, because spring was unusually cold and dry. Now I’m using the cold […]

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Fall desserts

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Poached pear. Click here for high-resolution version. Though it’s mid-October, it was nice for Ken to be able to have some abbey-grown foods while he was here for a five-day visit — persimmon pudding from persimmons he picked from the wild persimmon trees that grow in the yard, a poached pear from the abbey’s orchard, […]

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The moral status of animals

Friday, October 8, 2021

The gorilla Ndakasi, shortly before she died in the arms of her keeper, Andre Bauma. Source: Virunga National Park via Twitter. Ndasaki was 14 years old when she died, after a long illness, according to the BBC. When Ndasaki was a baby, her mother was killed by poachers. Andre Bauma, who remained her keeper at […]

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Persimmon season

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Persimmon season has started. Ken picked (and shook trees) for only a little while this morning and got more than enough for the first persimmon pudding of the year. This is only about a tenth, Ken said, of what we’ll get this year just from the persimmon trees in the yard. We’ll make a video […]

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Summer 2021: Some of us had it easy

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Tomato bisque from tomatoes I grew and canned Nature was not kind to everyone this summer. There were terrifying fires in California and Australia, and deadly floods in the United States, Europe, and Asia. But here in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, it was like 1950 again. The temperature here in my woods never […]

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