I’ve got Big Plans for growing and foraging for food this summer, and Leah has said she’ll allow me to assist her in what we both know will be a huge job: The eventual canning and preserving of everything we hope to put aside to eat next winter.
It is a shift of mega proportions in the way things are done here that permission has been granted for me to be Leah’s sous-chef, because, in the 30-plus years we’ve been married, Leah has always been Empress of all things Kitchen.
Yours truly, the Knight of No Cooking Skills, has known better than to trespass in Her Highness’s domain in this particular castle.
We have three gardens outside -- separate plots for vegetables, strawberries, and herbs -- and, despite a cool and wet spring, all three spaces are already off to a promising-looking start. I dug out winter’s weeds and debris, turned over the soil, and we put up new fencing to keep the chickens from nibbling away at our foodstuffs. The strawberry plants are lush and will be blooming in no time. Leah has so far planted peas, spinach, salad greens, and onions in the veggie garden. The herb garden has parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (we are, of course, gardeners who came of age under the influence of Simon and Garfunkel.) And there are other, less lyrical herbs as well.
Beyond the confines of the three produce gardens, fruit trees -- apple and plum, mostly -- are in full-out bloom, a profusion of spring’s exuberant excess. Ornamentals like the magnolia are a visual temptation, luring me away from my work in the gardens (I always keep a camera nearby for these kinds of welcome distractions.) And there are visitors too, mostly little green ones, like the fellow I photographed on a tulip petal.
Spring is a pretty swell time of year, and I’m jazzed too about a summer and fall when I’m finally allowed to learn the secrets of what goes on in the kitchen.
