The peas are something I’ve taken for granted for a long time now, because classic Sugar Snaps never seem to fail. Good years and bad, those tall, late-bearing vines always come through with about 6 weeks of perfect snap peas: crisp, juicy and sweet. And twenty feet of double row pretty much guarantees enough. In good years, we give a lot away, and even in poor years like this one we still have plenty.

How much is plenty? I never measured before, but we just had an opportunity to check it out - 

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How dry we are! It’s just the worst - our sliver of the Maine coast has had less than a half inch of rain in the last 5 weeks and we have only a shallow well, barely enough for dishes and showers. I’m watering the joint with my tears, and when friends complain they’ve been stuck dragging hoses around for eversolong, it’s hard for me to dredge up much sympathy.

Some crops are going to be all right, and there’s still plenty going on - Lois had no trouble finding something to paint the other day

but if you look a little closer

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Over the years, we’ve grown at least a dozen kinds of strawberries, mostly standard garden varieties (Fragaria x ananassa) like Sparkle and Tristar, and so-called “wild” strawberries, aka fraises de bois and alpine strawberries (F. vesca),  like these Mignonettes being used as an edging in the lower garden.

Cultivated strawberries are easy to grow, almost always tasty and sometimes very tasty. But none of them - yet; I keep trying - are as good as genuinely wild strawberries (F. virginiana), the intensely flavorful, amazingly aromatic gift that grows freely in woodland edges all over the northeast and beyond.

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is the one making its debut in today’s New York Times , according to David Leite, who is responsible for it. Well, maybe. Although I prefer my own ( which include roasted cacao nibs), there is much baking wisdom in Leite’s story, including the use of high quality couverture chocolate disks, which really ARE the consummate chocolate chips.

Roasted cacao nibs, couverture chocolates from El Rey (round) and Valrhona (oval). The dusty coating on the nibs is just a bit of cocoa butter that rose to the surface in storage.

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 Kristi the demon camerawoman was just complaining about it yesterday, so I know I’m not alone when I say 

closeups are easy.

and mugshots present few problems

while landscapes are dificult

And anything in the middle is just about impossible

Yet the urge to photograph persists, along with the urge to get back to gardening and not be endlessly messing around with the equipment.

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If you must store strawberries for more than a couple of hours, spread them out on a paper-towel lined plate so mold and bruises can’t travel.

The Theory Part

“ Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.” (Samuel Butler, at some point in the late 16^th century.*)

“Doubtless the cooks who have gone before could have devised a better strawberry dessert, but doubtless they never did.” ( me, at this point in 2008, after trying many vintage recipes before settling on the shortcake that follows).

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I post this picture of The Heap to warn you of what can happen if you do not prune your old fashioned spirea at least every other year

This Spiraea x vanhouttei was only a little slip of a thing when Lois fobbed it off on me - admittedly quite a while ago. The house is 20 feet wide. The spirea is still on the march. How did this happen?

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It’s fashionable to hate annuals, particularly common annuals like the licorice plant ( Helichrysum petiolare)  that’s spilling along here in front of the clematis. But as stepdaughter Celia says ” Phooey on that.”

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Former scenario:

It’s late August. The tomato rows are solid plant. I’m down on my knees in the jungle, pushing aside the mulch, digging around in the soft earth at the base of a mystery plant. It MUST be here somewhere and when I find it I will know whether the fat juicy sweetsharp tomato we had at lunch was a Brandywine or a Prudens Purple.

No more mysteries.

The place on the pole will be covered too, but the label will still be firmly in place.

If you use wire supports you can use Kristi’s never-fail identification system. Get flat green plastic plant-tying tape, write the name on it with sunproof (!!) permanent marker and tie it to the top wire.

When firewood suppliers who sell by the cord or truckload say they’re selling dry  wood, they mean the trees were cut down some time ago. They do not mean the wood was fitted: cut to length and split, more than about 5 minutes before it went on the truck. So if you want firewood dry enough to ignite easily and burn cleanly next winter, now is the time to order it and get it stacked out of the weather.