Tag: Garden

Good Finds: Local Business Captured

Even though anyone with Photoshop has long been able to “instagram” a photo, it’s still easier to add a filter or change the focus with Instagram. That ease makes me go for my iPhone as I make the rounds to local businesses.

And before you ask, why are you putting images on a blog post when they’re on Instagram and now, Facebook+Instagram, I’ll just say that no one venue does it all. Here, I can curate. And believe it or not, not everyone is on Facebook or Instagram.

Crate (above) and red truck (below) both at Porch Light in Portland’s Pearl District, an airy store that places great music.

(Below) Blackboard and reclaimed lumber at The Rebuilding Center of Our United Villages, a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable practices by accepting donations of and selling used building materials.

(Below) Donald inspecting free-roaming chickens at the adorable Pistils Nursery on N. Mississippi—
country living in the city.

(Below) The Meadow specializes in gourmet items like this impressive array of bitters as well as chocolates, salts, flowers and vermouth.

(Below) The dry rock garden at the Portland Japanese Garden, one of the many wondrous spots to linger in.

(Below) A recent find at the Portland Farmers Market booth of Sweetwater Farm. Chef Kathryn of The Farmers Feast cooks up mushrooms alongside Sweetwater Farm. In this case, sauteed porcini and Douglas Fir tips.

(Below) Need a newsprint Chinese umbrella, a wooden head or a 10-foot-long paper dragon?
Cargo in the Pearl District might just have it.

(Below) I could roam the aisles of Beaumont Hardware store forever. My favorite find was this wall diagram of available springs. If they had let me, I would have bought the display.

And to top it off with something sweet, below is a portion of 21 pounds of Hood strawberries from Sauvie Island Farms, my favorite spot for picking berries through the summer.

Stay tuned for more…

Year of Produce: September

One thing about a regular, and more importantly, self-directed, non-client-based project, is that life sometimes gets in the way of getting it done. Life, in this case, was cross-country travel, getting walloped by a flu while on travel and attempting to steal moments to get this month’s produce log designed and posted. A laptop with a mouse pad next to it (I have trouble with a track pad for detailed work) does not fit on cramped airplane tray table.

Download September Fresh Eat log in high-resolution. Below are links to previous month’s logs.

Why Eating Healthily Can Be a Challenge

Life gets in the way of a lot of things while we’re living it. Eating is one of them. Or eating well, as in healthily, not fancily. In a recent New York Times article “Even Benefits Don’t Tempt Us to Vegetables,” the author reminds us what a serving is: half a cup of cut-up or cooked vegetables, one cup of fresh greens, half a cup of cooked dried beans, or, if you must, six ounces of vegetable juice.

Read more

A Year of Produce: July

July’s produce log has proved a little challenging to get finished. I could blame it on the fact that I’m too busy eating but that wouldn’t be entirely true. Though I confess to stuffing my face with berries as you can see by my bucket ‘o blues. When people think of Oregon’s adventure sports, they think of kiteboarding in Hood River. But it’s not until you’ve been elbow deep in marionberry vines that you’ve truly experienced extreme sport. This is not an activity for wimps. This is full-metal jacket sport. But boy, is it worth it. The floral, bubble-gummy marionberry, a type of blackberry, is indeed one of the great wonders of the northwest.

If this is your first visit, you’re seeing a month-by-month log of fresh produce, with a tally to see how my local versus non-local dollars compare. See April Produce Log for an introduction to the project. Here are May and June. You can download each one as a PDF. Here is July. Each month includes recipe ideas, links and PDFs to download.

Art of Surrender Redux: The Garden

One must embrace irony. There is a lot of it in life, after all. Consider the garden if you will. In an effort to control my food source, I found a place to live where I could (in theory) enjoy the fruits (and vegetables) of my labor by having a garden.

Instead, it is a daily practice of surrender to a host of elements out of my control. My plants are gracious hosts to a wide variety of critters from nearly invisible to purring.

No book by the Dalai Lama or Eckhart Tolle will teach an essential lesson in letting go more than having a garden. Tending a garden requires relinquishing the foolish notion that you will reap a product at the end. Each morning, coffee in hand, I make my rounds to the plants like a nurse visiting her ICU patients, inspecting limbs, peering at their wounds, unleashing a few expletives (me, not the nurse most likely).

As a woman said to her husband who complained of flea beetles, “There’s a good way to get rid of the pests. Go to the grocery store and buy eggplant.”

Where’s the fun if you can’t suffer a little? Who learns anything if you can’t experience your hard work wither away one tiny bitefull at a time? The truly strong among us are strong, not for our victories but, for our losses. The truly wise among us are wise, not for the tomato we ate at the end but, for the garden path we walked.

Though a tomato would be nice.

The beauty of simple

As I stared at my growing stack of books yesterday, the ones full of important ideas I should stuff into my brain, I was distracted by my seedlings. I planted seeds just five days earlier and all were sprouting. Some were meant to go directly into the ground but, just for kicks, I stuck a few beans and corn kernels in the soil plugs, in addition to a variety of herbs and tomatoes. Ever since I started this activity a few years ago, the seemingly endless grey, rainy season in the Northwest has been more bearable.

It’s often said that the best things in life are free, or at least don’t cost that much. This can’t be more true for sprouting seeds indoors. It’s cheap entertainment. Aside from a few bucks for seeds and seedling mix, all you need are some containers and a sunny window. Lifting up the plastic dome each morning is like peering into a living jewelbox. Got bored kids or kids glued to their electronic devices? If I hadn’t had anything else to do yesterday, I would have been happy to stare at my Italian romano beans growing. Below is what happened over five hours.

Today the sprout is four-and-a-half inches tall. I have corn growing right next to it. Corn! I couldn’t have imagined corn growing in my suburban Maryland neighborhood where I grew up. It makes me wonder what other unquestioned, limiting ideas I have.

Though I get immense pleasure watching the simple, but profound, life span of a minescule seed turn into large, red tomato, I can’t help but wonder if that giddiness is a sign of too much of a lack of it in other corners of our lives. Most of us know the delight we get from the simple and the unexpected. So why is it that we continue to plan for the complicated?