Category — Jan's Thoughts

We first made raspberry daiquiris a couple summers ago, after a neighbor mentioned that that is what they did with their black raspberries. As fond as we are of pie, we decided we could sacrifice some of our berries to try out their recipe.
[Read more →]

The biggest bonus of growing berries in the garden, in our case black raspberries, is having enough to make a pie! I find it difficult to justify using fresh berries purchased from the store to make a pie when the cost is so astronomical. Berries from the garden, however, are like free gifts! And our plants produce enough to have provided the opportunity for me, over time, to perfect a black raspberry pie.
[Read more →]

We took down our old barn almost two years ago. Demolition and replacement for the barn was a difficult decision to make because there were so many things we liked about the old barn. The old barn was charming and unique and an antique, in additional to being drafty, damp, impractically small, and so short that Jim had difficulty standing up inside on the ground floor and had to crawl on hands and knees almost to go up to the second floor at all. The fact that the old barn might fall down, sooner rather than later, also added some motivation to our decision.
[Read more →]

We picked up two more sage plants from the garden center last week. The herbs were 50% off so those are very hard to pass up. We’ve have good luck with herbs purchased from the “last chance” shelf, especially perennials; after they have a chance to settle in and grow, it’s hard to tell that they were once the runts of the litter. [Read more →]

We’ve finally arrived at the rose garden stage of gardening. I used to think that only gardeners with a certain amount of experience and maturity could grow roses. It seems that we’ve arrived at this point, after 25 years of gardening, sort of by surprise– a little bit like the surprise one feels when one finally concedes that perhaps one is middle-aged. Hmmm…
[Read more →]