Little Garden, Big Garden

Mine is a tiny Montana garden. Dive under the leaves of our one small row of crookneck squash and you see another world, one with possibilities for lots of good, fresh, yummy food, such as http://mixedgreensblog.com/2010/09/01/seasons-eatings/fannie-farmer-my-squash-casserole/.

Come back to our compost pile and look northeast toward the house. The garden still has a sizable look, with 6-foot-tall vines of Sungold and Black Cherry tomatoes against the garage. This means more food prep, such as: http://mixedgreensblog.com/2010/08/25/in-the-garden/happiness-is-a-bowl-of-sungolds-mid-winter/

Step away from it and into the lawn and you see how really tiny it is. We're still harvesting spring-tender lettuce plus squash, cucumbers, eggplant, herbs and tomatoes. Cauliflower is coming on (zucchini totally got away from us). http://www.inerikaskitchen.com/2010/06/spring-salad-with-cherries-and-goat.html

So here's a recent white-bean soup, made with our rosemary, parsley and tomatoes, plus Hamilton Farmers' Market carrots and kale from Pat and John's garden next door (we didn't get here early enough for a spring planting of kale). http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Tuscan-Ribollita-355570/

We even take our garden cucumbers and mint and remake a cocktail that we loved at the Seattle restaurant Revel (http://www.revelseattle.com/): Called the "Lazy Gardener," haha! It features cucumber-infused gin, fresh mint syrup and fizzy ginger beer. Especially good on a hot and smoky (fire season is upon us) afternoon.

Now, to the real vegetable gardens in the Bitterroot Valley...

I had the honor to visit Bill Kindzerski's garden in early June 2011, and Alex joined me for a visit there last week. Wow! The long-time gardener has acres to work with and brilliantly uses his mostly wide-open space for plant and compost experiments and for using/creating micro-climates. (Cold, for instance, comes down from the mountains and gets trapped by significant trees at the back of his property; he's eliminating varieties that he can't grow -- but nextdoor neighbors can! -- and focusing on rebuilding a hoop house for more varied tomatoes.)

A morning's watering lingers on Bill's cabbage.

Yellow cauliflower shines in the intermittent sun.

Bill tells Alex about his favorite onion varieties, including Redwing, Whitewing, Copra, Sweet Spanish, and Multiplier. Bill explains that he uses long-day onions that bulb only when they receive at least 15 hours of daylight, "being so close to the North Pole" as we are, Bill says, we get those longer summer days. Short-day onions are for much farther south.

Yukon Gold potatoes fill a large patch., at left above. His other favorite vegetable varieties include the celeries Utah and Tango; corn, Extra Sweet; carrots, Scarlet Nantes and Chantenay.  Early Girl tomatoes are his best performers for the short season here -- even with those extra-long days!

Bill's relatively new worm bin takes all of the kitchen waste and is eaten by the little red wigglers, digested and turned into a beautiful black soil booster of worm castings; it gets surrounded by straw bales against the winter cold and covered with a neat layer of loose straw.

Bill's wife, Virginia, meanwhile, takes care of many different flower beds, including this clever one accented with ornamental cabbages up by the road. What a gift it is to get to see this couple's Montana garden first-hand!

Happy Birthday to Me

So, I've decided to post a few pictures from my birthday -- celebrated yesterday in Seattle.

We walked some of the streets of the city, on a cool and sunny afternoon. Here's a dahlia that I loved, planted in a median near Pete's (http://www.peteswineshop.com/store/) where we bought some interesting Washington state wines. More about that later.

Likewise, artichokes are everywhere in street-side vegetable gardens (take that, Ferguson, Mo.! http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/ferguson-resident-wins-fight-for-front-yard-vegetable-garden/article_a5452134-2a26-5dc5-9c16-0c1c212c8ff3.html ).

Salted caramel ice cream from Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream shop (http://www.mollymoonicecream.com/) topped off a surprisingly ho-hum lunch elsewhere (http://whereyaatmatt.com/, celebrated as a New Orleans food truck here, not so much by us but especially not by Alex, who's from New Orleans). We made up for what we didn't eat from Matt's at tables in front of the Molly Moon store (Alex had lavender-vanilla). And when we looked up, we saw "Ice Cream" in the sky.

Later, we took plastic glasses of one of our new wines to a beach on Puget Sound, in Discovery Park (http://www.seattle.gov/parks/environment/discovery.htm). If you look closely at the center left of this photo -- where two islands seem to join -- you'll see a hazy Mount Rainier.  That mountain is extremely impressive when you drive closer to it, as we did coming in from Montana. We'll view it up close and personal again Saturday, on our drive home (http://www.nps.gov/mora/index.htm).

A pair of eagles also took in the scene, near the Discovery Park lighthouse.

Dinner came late, at the seafood restaurant Chinook's (http://www.anthonys.com/restaurants/detail/chinook-at-salmon-bay/). I had halibut cakes -- very light and totally YUM! -- and Alex chose the seafood platter. All in all, a more than acceptable birthday was had by me! Oh, and I bought myself two mini-, black-stemmed, purple-flowering dahlias at a garden center on Fremont (http://emeraldcitygardens.com/) just to round out the day.

Bungalow-mania

I came here for the weather -- a cool mid-60s most days.  It's close to 90 in our town of Hamilton, 102 in our city of St. Louis. (Truth: I'm with Alex, and he came here for a music workshop; I tagged along.) But I also wanted to be here for more access to cool bungalows -- so many bungalows in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle that I may be suffering a bit from bungalow burnout. That's not a bad thing if you're renovating a bungalow in a small town (Montana, in our case) and are in need of inspiration for cool exterior color and even cooler front-yard gardens. A friend in St. Louis says of her daughter in Seattle, "She complains that she can't stop things from growing."
Below, find a baker's dozen of bungalows and their gardens.  I'm posting this from a WiFi-friendly, winsome spot in Queen Anne called Macrina Bakery (http://macrinabakery.com/). Get it? Baker's dozen, from a bakery?? The coffee's great, but, oh well, on to creative cottage design...

For starters, I just love this summer plant color added to an otherwise gray entry. I wonder what they do in winter?

Here's more gray but updated with bold slashes of chartreuse.

May I have this one, please? This adorable little house is right atop Queen Anne with spectacular views of water from the back. (I also like the glossy white woodwork and red door on this one, plus the no-lawn look of a bermed and shrub-planted landscape.)

Enough with the gray! Here's color for you, on house, yard and easement.

And this is a money bungalow, with expanded privacy lattice and sweet garden among the rocks.

This bare-bones taupe (much like the color of our Montana house) has the crisp white trim that we're going for. This one just needs those fabulous Seattle flowering vines and perennials to wake it up.

Maybe we will strip our front door to wood, or paint it a nut-brown color, as done here (rather than ubiquitous red).

Blue was an option for us for a short time. Now we're back to gray or a dusty olive green (or the taupe that we inherited, with all our existing trim repainted in a crisper-than-crisp satin white).

Another money house on top of the hill. Love the shrubbery. Love the windows. Adore the balcony!

Gray and white, again, with red accents on the porch.

More taupe and white (do you sense a neutral theme going here?).

And again with the neutrals, plus an ornamental grass alternative to turf.

Color, finally, but too much for my taste. Someday we may have our little Montana house finished and even listed on The American Bungalow Registry (http://www.ambungalow.com/). I can dream, can't I?

Home, Home Near the Range

Okay, we now live in Montana, near scenery almost too beautiful to believe as well as near the hardscrabble ranches of families subsisting on their wits and willingness to work, very, very hard. (I met just such a beautiful family yesterday, on a gorgeous ranch that basically they built from scratch!)

But some days, Alex and I just plain take it easy at our little town bungalow.

He's getting over back spasms from lifting a few too many concrete slabs (more about that later). Right now, I'm protecting myself from a few too many UV rays (living here at 3,600 feet or so) and am gardening in the shade or when skies are overcast. Or I'm simply sitting it out for an hour or so under the carport-turned-patio, with an Alex-made latte in hand. Ah, retirement for a city girl (who worked hard herself, in newspapers for 30 years, thank you very much!).

One view of clematis that we inherited, as I sip morning coffee delivered to the "patio."

Hamiltonians walk by in flipflops or zip by on skateboards+dogs or cycle by on old-fashioned bikes+dogs or peddle along the flat streets on new-fashioned bikes pulling babies behind in aerodynamic carts. At times, it's really a tableau of the best of small-town life. And when I see kids cycling alone, I remember the freedom that I had as a kid in the '50s, to go it alone or with a girlfriend, all day sometimes, no grownups monitoring our every move. It was, and is, another world.

In our backyard, we also inherited a long fence-row of raspberry canes. Suddenly, the berries are beginning to ripen at a feverish pace (see guide to "Growing Raspberries in Montana Gardens" at the Montana State University site, http://www.montana.edu/.) Below, one morning's pick...

Fresh raspberries for breakfast (or dessert!) from our yard.

We've invited our nextdoor neighbors, Pat and John, to please help us relieve these canes of so much fruit. Already, we've all filled Ziploc after Ziploc of the berries someone planted long ago. The bounty takes up an entire shelf of a freezer in the basement, with another shelf crammed with rhubarb also from the yard; I diced and froze it weeks ago. There's a sudden embarrassment of riches! And it's a tiny hint of how real Montanas subsist and live. (I plan to whip the berries with cream tonight for  cupcakes that I'll take to a party.)

But when we tire of the ease of our new town life, we jump in the old Subaru and go find a dusty road with elevation. This one is facing west, looking at the Bitterroots from the facing mountain range -- the Sapphires.

Dirt, gravel and mountains -- just what you want in a scenic drive.

Another dirt road on another lazy day takes us up high into the Bitterroots along Lost Horse Creek. Dust, if I may say, is a Montana fact of life, in town as much as it is up here. The alley behind our house is pure white dust, and any fast moving car or, more likely pickup truck, sends it billowing up and over our fence. I figure we're coated with and breathing lots of this stuff and, perhaps, it's making us more Montanan. Silly, I know, but (and not to get religious, just a bit spiritual) remember, "for dust you are, and unto dust shall you return."

Alex fishes Lost Horse Creek while I amble down the road taking pictures (I do have a Montana fishing license but, so far, have been way more interested in poking around with my camera).

There are velvet antlers on these young bucks just a ways away...

Velvet on antlers, at left.

One deer takes an inevitable look back for a second or two...

...then, jumps and quickly gets into deep woods.

I've blogged before about beautiful "cricks," as creeks universally are called here. But just look at this rock through the clearest of water in Lost Horse Creek:

Lichens on rock, in Lost Horse Creek.

We head home after a few hours and sip wine on our sunset-shaded patio, watching one or two of the four varieties of hummingbirds here come to our feeder (photos, below, are from a site called mt.gov, specifically http://fieldguide.mt.gov/displaySpecies.aspx?family=Trochilidae:

Black-chinned

Broad-tailed

Calliope

Rufous

The Broad-tailed and Rufous are "potential species of concern," says mt.gov. We've had one Rufous sighting, we think. Mostly we see Black-chinned. These are spectacular creatures, as we know from also watching our Ruby-throated hummingbirds back in Missouri, as they dip into a wonderful feeder that my son gave me.

BTW, I promised more information about the backaches that Alex experienced on a recent renovation job. It's just a hint of what he, and to a lesser extent, I, are going through. The total rehab of our Hamilton house is almost complete, and before-and-after photos will be my very next post!

 

 

Contractor Don Sylvester, at left, spent a day mightily jack-hammering out this old parking pad next to our house. Alex helped him load it (ouch), piece by piece, into Don's truck for runs to a reclamation site operated by a local concrete company. Alex was "down in his back," as my grandmother used to say, for just a couple of days. Lucky! Stay tuned for the glorious results, here and elsewhere in the yard and garden, but especially in, and to, the house! Next post, I promise.

Went fishing, found bear

Taking a break from house and garden, we went fishing the other afternoon along Skalkaho Creek. It was Mel Holloway's suggestion. He's the friend who drives all over the Bitterroot, shooting great photos of wildlife, both human and animal. He posts at lease one of these pictures a day on Facebook. He thought Skalkaho would be a relatively good, close trip for us.  We'll, Mel, we took in the spectacular pine-scented air, stopped around mile-marker 18 and saw beautiful sparkling water...

Clear water on gorgeous rocks, in Skalkaho Creek.

...and a few small trout (didn't catch any)...

 ... plus random birds and insects...

But the biggest treat was a bear. Driving in an easterly direction, Alex slammed on the breaks as a juvenile cinnamon-colored bear clambered up from a ditch and then started slowly crossing Skalkaho Road. Let me tell the rest in pictures.