Can it always be September please? It’s probably my favourite month for homegrown produce – we’re still harvesting most of the summer vegetables while fall fruit is abundant as well. This year, our tomato harvest in particular has been magnificent…
This year was the second year we hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. Since my husband is Dutch and I’m Czech, Thanksgiving is part of neither mine nor his cultural heritage. But there’s a lot in our lives to be thankful for,…
Somewhere in November, my mom texted me the photos below with the caption: ‘We have all these beautiful fragrant quince – what should I do with them?’ The fruits were from a tree in their garden that we planted together…
The abundance of autumn can get a little overwhelming – not only is there all the garden produce to take care of, store or preserve, there are also a lot of wild delicacies available for free in the nature. But…
Every year we cover a strip of ground under the trees of our young food forest with cardboard to eradicate perennial weed and then plant squash through holes in the cardboard. Later, this space will be planted with perennial herbs…
Back in July when my birthday was coming up, Remco asked me what I wanted as a present and I said: ‘Pergola!’. This pergola has long been planned (& dreamed about) and I must admit that in my lack of…
It’s Wednesday evening and I’m finally sitting down to look back at what we’d made with our beautiful harvest. The abundance at this moment is such that, to be honest, I did not even get around to using everything –…
Our supply of home-grown butternut squashes is dwindling. The good thing about that is that it frees up space under our bed which is where I’ve been storing them much to the chagrin of my son who’s the one doing…
If you’ve watched my video about the 7 winter squash varieties we’d grown in 2016, you’ve heard me talking about what I call ‘one-meal-squash’ varieties. I prefer squashes that don’t get too big so that we can use a fruit…
Every fall, I plant lots of spring bulbs. Even if I forget to plant garlic (and I still have not planted any this year!), I will plant some crocuses, tulips and daffodils, together with some more obscure spring bulbs like…
One of my goals this time was to try new recipes instead of falling back on a couple of old favourites. Even though I cook dinner at least six times a week, there are times when I feel uninspired and…
When we bought our garden, there were two mature trees there: one big hazel and an even bigger pear tree. We tried to find out what variety it was, but all the answer we got was ‘probably a cooker’. We…
Today is my daughter’s birthday and this is the tart she has asked for. Which should be all the information you need before running to the kitchen to make it, because when it comes to tarts, Esther is the pickiest…
The pace slows down quite a bit in autumn, but still – looking at these two photos of the garden, the top one taken at the beginning of September and the one below at the end of October, you can…
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…