It’s STRAWBERRY TIME! I don’t know about you, but we’ve been eating strawberries pretty much every day for the past two weeks. Our appetite for strawberries largely exceeds what our singly strawberry bed can supply but luckily our neighbours have…
How are your tomato plants doing? Still pumping fruits by the bucket or finished because of blight, hornworms or early frost? Here the only tomato variety I have known to keep going outside past August is ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’. Many…
September is a time of wonderful abundance in the garden – most of the summer vegetables are still producing while the cool weather crops are coming into their own. Which means we’re picking lots of sweet corn, zucchini, tomatoes and…
My daughter is in the middle of her finals, marking the end of her high school career. She’s pretty calm and undoubtedly doing well in her exams. There’s not much we can do for her at this point but in…
If this fall had a theme, it would be ‘tarte tatin’. I’ve been trying to crack the secret to the perfect classic apple version and have made it several times to that end. I am in no way unhappy with…
If I could grow just one vegetable (and I really hope it never comes to this), it would probably be lettuce. And if I could grow just one variety of lettuce (and again, I really hope it never comes to…
No vegetable I grow is as dependable as chard. This is best proven by the fact that there is at least one meal featuring chard in any of my ‘A week of eating from the garden’ post, whether they were…
‘A week of eating from the garden’ may well be my favourite kind of post to put together. It is both a garden and a kitchen diary. It chronicles what we harvest at a certain time of the year and…
I am one of those people who love ‘before’ and ‘after’ posts and I thought that it might be fun to look at my summer garden in terms of ‘before our holiday’ and ‘after our holiday’. I even found some…
In the Netherlands, when you’re too late for school, there’s a widely (mis)used excuse: the bridge was open! There are a lot of channels here and if you have to cross one and the bridge is open to let a…
As you can see in the photo above, a salad does not need to be just green. I have nothing against a green salad, of course. It is what I eat most of the time and I never get tired…
This year we left our vacation a little later than usual. Though the reason was mainly that I had to finish my manuscript (I only sent the last chapter to my editor the night before we left (of course)), it…
Summer time and eating from the garden is easy. While the last time I wrote a ‘Week of eating from the garden post’ in May, I was still scrambling to make a week’s worth of meals out of what I…
You may look at this photo and just see soup. But you’d be wrong: it’s not just a soup, it’s also a solution to a problem. Several problems, actually. First: The problem known as ‘drowning in courgettes’ most gardeners are…
As I’m typing this post we are experiencing a record-breaking heat-wave which makes it difficult to remember that there was actually a freakish frost at the beginning of the month. ‘Freakish’ because frosts are not supposed to happen around here…