One of Levi’s favorite books is Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert. In this beautifully-illustrated board book, a mother and daughter plant a rainbow of flowers in their garden. One night after I finished reading the book to him, Levi told me that he wanted to plant a rainbow garden too. That week he’d been learning about the colors of the spectrum in school.

“Alright,” I said.  I told him  we could  start in the front of the yard since we had a nice row of daffodils there. “We already have a lot of yellow,”  I told him.  That seemed pretty reasonable to him. “But we need to get some flowers that mama likes,” he said.  I told him that his mother’s favorite flowers were tulips, so we could start with those.

Later that week we went to the garden store. Levi picked out some nice red tulips for Shawnna. We planted them in a row in front of the daffodils.

The next week we added to the spectrum–orange marigolds and lampara, purple violets, and a beautiful cascading blue ground cover. A kind neighbor gave us some tiger lillies.

I let Levi decide where  he wanted to place the plants, and together we dug holes for them.  Occasionally we’d dig up a grub worm which we’d  leave for the bluebirds next to their house.

After we finished planting, Levi wanted to make sure that the plants got enough water.

He made several trips to the backyard pond, dunking his watering can into the water and then racing back to the front yard  to take care of the flowers. It was exhausting to watch.

By the end of the day, we were tired but happy.  I am so grateful that this child loves being outside with me.

A few years ago I wrote about my obsession with the miracle plant, Comfrey. 

I wrote how the plant has been used for a variety of purposes over the years, from healing fractures, helping with skin irritations, insect bites and inflammation  associated with rheumatoid arthritis. It’s a nitrogen fixer too, which means it’s a great fertilizer. I love it’s pretty purple flowers, too, and so do the bees. So I planted a whole bunch of it, and it turns out that it is a very vigorous perennial indeed.

Before I work in the yard, I usually pick some comfrey leaves, tear them apart and rub my arms with them.  The leaves produce a semi-sticky substance, known as allantoin, which keeps the poison ivy at bay.

When my wonderful mother-in-law, Rosemary, recently paid a visit, I told her how I thought it would be a great idea to make a comfrey healing salve. Before I knew it, she had taken my idea and run with it.  She started by drying a mixture of salve herbs, including the comfrey leaves.

Next, she infused the herbs with oils. I gave her a giant slab of beeswax that had been taking up space with my art supplies. I had used beeswax for an encaustic painting  project a few years back.  She took the beeswax, shredded it in the kitchen and  used it to finish making the salve.

Then, after letting the batch cool, she put them in little tins.  For my part, I’m trying to design a logo for her product!

Rosemary, who is a member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, plans on calling her salve “Cherokee Rose’s Healing Salve.” I hope she gives Burt’s Bees a run for their money.

Currently she’s looking for one more ingredient to add to the mixture that will give it a more pleasant smell, as the tea tree oil in the mixture gives it a very slight odor, not unlike insect repellent.

At our house, Rose is known as Oma, and we always look forward to her visits.  Here she is in 2015, right after Levi was born.

Nice work, Oma!

Last weekend we dug up a bunch of  sweet potatoes and transferred them to the cellar, where they’ll be curing for a few weeks under a fan.  If they promise to be sweet enough by Thanksgiving, we just might let them out of the basement for the celebration.

Earlier that afternoon I’d been staring at the pretty greenery of the sweet potato terraces I’d constructed back in the summer.  Armed with a shovel, I hesitated for a minute, worrying that I might accidentally cut some of the little beauties open at first strike of the ground.   I thought a little blessing might help prevent casualties.  May this be a bountiful harvest,  I whispered before taking a plunge into the ground.  It didn’t work; as soon as my shovel hit the ground, I split a beautiful big sweet potato right in two.

Suddenly it occurred to me that using a hoe might be a much saner approach to harvesting sweet potatoes.  It was.  From that point on I had fun pulling them out of the ground in one piece.

Next year we  hope to get an even bigger yield by using drip irrigation from our rain barrels.  This year I found the biggest potatoes in the sections of the terraces where the soil stayed moist.  Those potatoes that had the misfortune of being in the under-watered areas  suffered.  When dry, the  sandy loam tends to clump up into little blobs, leaving a little shriveled potato in the mix.

We look forward to dining on sweet potatoes this holiday season.

I was in the kitchen prepping for a spaghetti dinner when I spied a beautiful string of cherry tomatoes beckoning me from the backyard.   I knew they would be a tasty addition to the evening’s meal, and I was so proud of myself for being able to grow my own food.  Practically running out of the house towards the tomato patch, my joy turned to horror when I picked up one of the tiny beauties and rolled it over.   It was grimacing at me with a huge, angry,  gash-of-a-smile.   Soon I realized that all the tomatoes in the patch,  big or small,  were afflicted with cuts of varying pattens.

This has been the story of the summer.  (I wish I had a good tomato for everytime one of my Triangle friends complained about their tomato crop this year.)  2014 has been an interesting year weather-wise here in Durham, with some hot dry spells followed by monster downpours.  Call it Bull City’s Monsoon Season.  From what I understand,  it is this disproportionate watering cycle that causes the tomatoes to expand to accommodate the influx of water.  When the skin can’t grow enough to hold all the water, it cracks.

Bottom line, tomatoes need consistent watering.  This is why they can be so hard to grow, and why some people grow them hydroponically.  It has me seriously considering growing them bins or big pots in 2015, using overflow from  one of our rain barrels to keep them filled to capacity.  If we decide to grow them in the ground again, we’ll probably use slow-drip irrigation from one of our larger rain containers.  Increasing the amount of mulch around the plants will also help them retain moisture.  Of course, one could always water their tomato plants every day, but what fun is it if you can’t let Nature do part of the work for you?

Farthing Pond is frozen over for the third time this year.

This year we had some butternut squash (Cucurbita moschata)  grow up out of nowhere in our backyard.  I’m sure a kindly bird dropped the seeds off for us (unless there is a Squash Fairy.)

I cut off a piece and tasted it; it was the most delicious piece of raw squash I’ve ever had.  Later that afternoon I discovered a little secret, though: squash tastes even better when cooked with cream and sherry.  That evening we dined on squash soup!

To prepare the soup, I had to cut the squash in half.   This turned out to be an excruciating task.  For a minute I thought about getting the electric saw out of the basement,  but that thing scares me.  Thankfully, Shawnna  suggested heating the  squash in the oven for 10 minutes or so, which made it easier to cut through.

Once I’d cut the squash in half, I  placed the pieces in a baking dish with a little bit of water and cooked at 300 degrees for about 30 minutes.  After letting it cool for a couple of minutes, I took out the remaining seeds and peeled the skin away. Throwing in some ginger, salt and pepper,  I chopped  up the pieces and mixed them in the food processor.   Meanwhile,  I sauteed some onions with butter, nutmeg and allspice.  Everything then got thrown into the dutch oven with vegetable stock, cream and sherry.

I turned it up to a boil, and then let it simmer for a while.  It was probably some of the best soup I’ve ever made.

Squash is a New World Native and was growing in Mesoamerica before the arrival of any humans.  It was part of the diet for many indigenous people from South American to Canada, who started cultivating it between 8 and 10,000 years ago. I wonder if they had any soup recipes?

And they shall cover the face of the earth, that one cannot be able to see the  earth: and they shall eat the residue of that which is escaped, which remaineth unto you from the hail, and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field.   (Exodus 10:5)

As many of you  know, those little green cankerworms
invaded Cackalacky again this spring.
They’ve disappeared now that their larval stage is over,  but they  left a wake of destruction.   The leaves on our fruit trees and blueberry bushes look like Swiss cheese.  While not fatal for these plants, the damage certainly contributes to our under-performing fruit harvest.

Last month  they were everywhere, in places like  our front yard, chewing up the leaves on our enormous oak tree (apparently oak is their favorite.)   Often they would bungee jump off  the  tree, tied to a little silk thread, landing on my face, arms, or slithering down the back of my shirt.  Once Shawnna picked four  of them off me before bedtime.  Whenever I walked outside, I’d   hear a crackling noise, reminding me of the sound of sleet or frozen rain.  My neighbor told me that  the crackling sound was  the gentle falling of  worm excrement.  The horror!

It’s so bad down in Charlotte that the city actually  has a municipal program to control  73,000 acres of cankerworm infestations.  That’s about 40% of the city.

Tree banding seems to be the most effective way to deal with these worms.  The sticky bands prevent the moths  from crawling up the tree to lay their eggs, but they must be installed in November, because December is moth mating season.

You can use a strip of cotton or insulation and wrap it around the tree, at least three feet from the ground, placed below the lowest limb.  I’ve seen a lot of folks use staples to hold the strip in place.  (One website recommends positioning a band of roofing felt over the strip and then attaching it with s staple gun.)  Of course you don’t want to use staples on small trees, so try using something like electrical tape to hold the strip in place.

The next step is to coat the band with a sticky substance that prevents the moths  from inching up the tree, such as Tanglefoot glue.   The sticky band should be kept in place until the larvae disappear in April.

We’ll know better next time around!

I think it’s time for  a  new series called  Nostalgic Plants of Childhood,  starting with Solomon’s Seal.   As a youngster growing up in Boone, I’d always see this plant when I was hiking in the woods.  I loved its gently curving leaves and tiny clusters of white, tubular-shaped flowers.  Thinking it was a mountain plant, I was surprised and delighted when some shoots sprouted up in our Durham backyard a few years ago.  Since  then it’s returned every spring in all its beautiful glory.

A relative of the lily, Solomon’s  seal is the name for almost 50 species in the genus Polygonatum.  The kind I’m referring to is commonly known as “True Solomon’s Seal” (Polygonatum biflorum) not to be confused with False Solomon’s Seal.

The young shoots are edible and taste like asparagus when boiled. Unfortunately, the rhizomes only seem to grow about an inch or two a year, which means at this point it’s not really practical for us to harvest it.  Too bad we don’t have it covering the backyard, like the huge patch we saw on Mt. Jefferson in Ashe County last summer.  I’m definitely going to let it keep growing. It seems that our woody, shaded backyard is an ideal environment for it.

Looking online, I was also surpised that there seems to be a whole cottage industry associated with this plant.  There is even a website, http://www.solomonsseal.net, that sells Solomon’s Seal for medicinal purposes.  For hundreds of years people have used the root to make herbal teas and liniments. The  alleged benefits of the root are numerous:

• Heals bruises, wounds and rashes
• Reduces inflammations in joints and tendons
• Reduces blood pressure
• Loosens mucous in lungs
• Prevents premature ejaculation
• Relieves  premenstrual syndrome
• Hastens recovery from bone injuries

According to one source, the plant gets its name from King Solomon, who proclaimed that the plant was a gift from God.

It’s just a plant that is too beautiful for us to harvest.

It made my morning to discover that our paw paw tree had flowered.  The flowers are an  astonishingly-pretty deep red with a hint of purple.  We planted this tree a few years ago, but this is the first time it’s flowered, which means it should fruit sometime over the late summer.

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve never eaten a paw paw before, but I’m told they taste like mangos. They live in shady areas along streams and river basins   in much of the Eastern U.S.  When we planted this tree, we thought the back of the yard was wet and shady enough, and would be a nice addition to our edible landscape.  When I create my first paw paw smoothie, I will be sure to write a post about it.

Does anyone remember this song from their elementary school days?

Pickin’ up paw paws,
Put ‘em in your pocket
Pickin’ up paw paws,
Put ‘em in your pocket
Pickin’ up paw paws,
Put ‘em in your pocket
Way down yonder in the paw paw patch