Author: Jennifer

Currant Jelly
Food

Currant jelly

Four pounds of currants and twelve beautiful scarlet jars of jelly (from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving) to give out at Christmas time. I saved the schmutz from the juice making and added it to a bottle of vodka; so far it’s just a pretty pink color so […]

Plants

August 2023 Week 3 Highlights

Glorious in the garden right now. It has its moments, and it definitely has its moments where nothing much is going on and there’s like two things in bloom and they’re being eaten by army worms or Japanese beetles but then there are these moments like this one in mid-August, […]

chanterelle mushrooms
Foraging

Of monsoons and mushrooms

Non-stop rain and the mushrooms are standing up to salute their good fortune. There are so many chanterelles it’s possible to casually make soup, as if it is routine to go and grab handfuls of chanterelles from the woods on a whim, to make soup for dinner.  The ‘grabbing’ is […]

Blue hydrangea with bee
Kitchen Garden, Plants

Garden Journal 7/13/2023

Harvested three pounds of currants and first chanterelles and black trumpets of the yesterday. Planted seeds: daikon, romaine, chard, beets, scallions, mizuna. Started seeds in flat for fall crop: broccoli and broccoli raab; some form of bok choy; something else that I am forgetting… Propagating cuttings of: Jackmanii clematis, aralia, […]

Daffodils: Delshenaugh, Thalia, Tete a Tete, Winter Waltz
Bulbs

Daffodils 2023

I grow a lot of daffodils–I wasn’t always a fan, but they don’t get eaten by rabbits or deer (no tulips here).  They can be used to prevent voles from eating root systems of other plants.  Hellebores work well for that purpose too, in shady areas.         

mixture of foliage plants
Blank forms

PDF of blank plant record

  Revised 2025. The old one is here.  For any nerd who wants to print to keep plant records, I have a sheet for everything I’ve planted in a messy-but-arranged-alphabetically binders. The revised version is to help me reuse the same form regardless of whether the plant in question is […]