Permanent violet deep – one of my least favorite colors in a tube of paint, but it looks good on the Purple Royalty smokebush growing by the driveway. Winter 2010-11 was the first year this shrub wasn’t mangled down to 3′ by being run over by the plow truck. Evidently the fix was to put a giant slap of granite in front of it.

Soon the orange honeysuckle will be in bloom and ruin the monochrome effect, but for now violet Dame’s Rocket, chives, and the bluer of the two pink tree peonies fill the dooryard to the northeast.

The little flame azalea is nearly engulfed in sweetgrass. Truly wonderful neighbors gave me this for babysitting their wonderful child, and I think of them every time I see it.

And green – very in with gardens in the area this summer. Even the weedy grass along the roadside is verdant right now, but we’ll see what July will bring.

I took this photo earlier today trying to find a like vantage point but not quite getting there because now there’s a cherry tree in the way. I’ve accumulated some plant life over the years but the path is almost in the same place it was twenty years ago. It won’t be there in 2013 – I plan to do that part of the garden over into keyhole beds using Hugelkultur.

Spicy Greens with Chicken or Tofu

Serves 4, or two with leftovers. This dish is very good left over.

1/4 C soy sauce, 1/4 C dry Sherry, 1 Tbs brown sugar, 2 Tbs chili sauce or Surachi (or to taste)

Bees are also sold as packages. Last fall I ordered Buckfast bees from R. Weaver in Navasota, TX. Buckfast bees were bred by Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England and are adapted to cool, damp climates with long-lived, fecund queens and high honey production. They are also remarkably sturdy. They shipped last Monday from Navasota and arrived Saturday morning – five days of grueling cross-country travel. It was 50 degrees and drizzling here when I picked them up and they were a cold, compact mass around the can of sugar syrup and queen cage in their wire box.

I soaked the outside of the box with a sprayer filled with sugar syrup, and as the hoop house slowly warmed up to 60 degrees they began to move around the box and buzz loudly. We fed them several times during the day. By 4:00 p.m. it was really as warm as it was going to get and we installed them in the hive. I don’t normally have assistance with the beekeeping chores, but R. has expressed an interest. Here he is spraying more sugar syrup on the boxed bees, keeping them sated and calm while we put them in their new home.

There are many good tutorials on installing packaged bees in a hive, but I’d say my biggest revelation was to not smoke them. They don’t have a home to defend at this point, and you don’t want their new home (the hive) to smell of smoke and interfere with their adoption. The process went smoothly, the queen was lively in her little screened box, and it was great to have a second pair of hands.

Only a few casualties! A front piece fell out of my bottom board – these things happen – and I had to block the new, going-nowhere, entrance off with hay. Later I found the piece and taped it in (they can live with some duct tape as long as they’re not going to ever be on the sticky side) and blocked the main entrance down with hay for warmth and ease of defense. We filled the feeder with sugar syrup and let them settle in.

Buckfast bees from R. Weaver Apiaries in Navasota, Texas. They’ve once again proved to be incredibly hardy and wonderfully social – thanks, Risa!

The stems are traditionally candied and used like citron in breads and holiday cakes. Angelica is a very generous plant, seeding itself all around my garden. I’ve always wanted to take advantage of this abundance and candy some myself. Last fall I took the time to research recipes and found that the stems are harvested in the spring, when they are still bright green and tender.

Last week I picked a plastic grocery bag of stems, or about 2 lbs. I trimmed off the leaves and cut the stems in random lengths as none of the recipes I read seemed to specify size. They didn’t specify much of anything, actually, and differed wildly on how long to cook the raw plant material, how to dry it, and what it should look like when finished. I’ve simplified the process because no way am I boiling anything in sugar syrup for four days, and my adaption seems to have worked just fine.

Make a 2:1 sugar syrup by mixing 2 parts sugar to 1 part water, bring to a boil and stir until dissolved. Dump the stems into the syrup and simmer for 20 minutes. Allow the mixture to cool and set for 24 hours. I let it go from one night to the next.

Remove stems from syrup and allow to drain on a rack. I used a cookie rack with a pan underneath. I dried the stems in a very slow oven (250 degrees) for a few hours. It rained for almost the entire month of April here, and the drying part might work for you without an oven if the weather cooperates.

When the stems were solid and cooled, but still tacky, I put them in a ziplock bag of granulated sugar and left them overnight to soak up as much as possible. Then I stuffed them into canning jars, where they look pretty cool – all bright green and shiny. I have two jars in a canning cupboard and one in the freezer, to see which one preserves the color and texture best.  I’m going to try out a recipe next week, and I’ll let you know how it goes.

This is not Hugelkultur, this is a failed burn-pile. I meant to clean it up last fall, but a dry October led to a droughty November and December brought a lot of snow and I never had a free day at the right time. Come to think of it, there might be some debris in there from 2009. . .

Burning brush here is an all-day affair that begins with a trip to the village for a burn permit. Mount Desert Island has a long history of burning down, most notably the Great Fire of ’47. Bar Harbor took the threat seriously and, unlike many small towns who are staffed by volunteers, employs a professional fire department. On a still Saturday morning in early spring or late fall I often meet my neighbors in the dispatchers office. We read off our phone numbers and Fire Lanes to the genial folks in uniform, vow to have shovels and rakes, hoses and at least two adults on hand at all times, and if the air is still and there aren’t too many requests in already we can go off and burn our cornstalks and apple tree prunings.  Its a good system, and they do follow-up too -  it’s not unusual to see a fire truck cruise down our narrow gravel road just at sunset, making sure we’re out for the night.

Once organized and lit, bonfires are all very romantic and tiring. These days I have an Adirondack chair and a book to spend the afternoon watching the flames die down, but when my son was small he and his friends would make a day of experiments, orange-tipped apple branches making smoke signals and water pistols making steam.

That said, I’m not going to miss the big pile of carbon blazing into heat energy and drifting off toward entropy. I’m going to collect every scrap of downed tree and woody stalk and use its slow decay to build soil and grow things. I can’t find specifics on the process, which is fine – I’ll bet that it’s just that simple. I’ve started to pile up the debris in the photo on a marshy peninsula of reeds and willow in the swamp. I’m going to keep a record of how it settles (or doesn’t) over the course of a year and make a stab at “best practices” in 2012.

Thank you, Herr Holzer, for the inspiration. If I had the room, I would totally be saving up for a frontloader.

There's been a bumper crop of everything after 6 straight days of rain.

"La Ratte" potatoes win the race for showing green shoots above a foot of soil and another foot of mulch. I'll add more hay this weekend.

Those serrated leaves in the middle of this photo are horseradish sprouts. They're a long way from the horseradish bed.

Future strawberries! A good crop of dandelions, valerian and allium as well.

The lettuces love this weather. Mulching the tatsoi with seaweed seems to cut down on the flea beetles.

I don’t have a picture for either of the recipes, so here’s a photo of the Boy, snacking.

Brown Bag Banana Bars, adapted from the King Arthur Flour cookbook

1/2 cup butter, 2/3 cup brown sugar, 1 egg, 1 tsp. vanilla,3 ripe bananas

1-1/4 cups all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat flour,  1/4 cup cornmeal, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 tbsp. poppy seeds, 3/4 cup raisins (I like the look of golden raisins. Experiment with softened dried blueberries, too.)

In the bowl of a mixer, cream the butter and sugar and add the egg and vanilla. Mash the bananas (which will make about 1-1/2 cups) and stir them in. Combine the flours, cornmeal, baking powder, salt and poppyseeds and stir into creamed mixture until all blended. Add the raisins. Spread in a greased 13 x 9 inch baking pan and bake at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes, until the edges are golden. Cool on a rack and cut into bars. Makes 3 dozen bars.

Oaties

Ingredients: 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup whole-wheat flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 tablespoons packed brown sugar, 1/2 cup rolled oats (not quick-cooking), 1/2 cup raisins or dried cherries, 2 teaspoons fennel seed (optional), 3 tablespoons  butter, melted, 1 large egg, lightly beaten, 1 cup buttermilk. (After you get a feel for these you can really load them up with fruit: fresh raspberries and blueberries with plumped raisins, chunks of papaya or peach, dates, really just about anything.)

Directions; Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a medium bowl, whisk together flours, baking powder, salt, brown sugar, oats, raisins, and fennel seed, if using. In a small bowl, whisk together butter, egg, and buttermilk until combined, then add to flour mixture. Stir until batter is evenly moistened (do not overmix). Drop batter by 1/3 cupfuls, 2 inches apart, onto a greased baking sheet. I use the Silpat for these, because they can be a little sticky. Bake until golden brown, 15 minutes, rotating sheet halfway through. Let scones cool on a wire rack, 5 minutes.

I’ve been reading Gaia’s Garden, Version 2.0, and in it Toby Hemenway has a great rant about plants that have been termed “invasive”. It’s all about niche: water hyacinth loves polluted waterways, and subsides when the pollutants have been filtered out, kudzu loves disturbed soil and thrives in the poor, sunny margins of construction sites. I planted valerian and didn’t take into account the vast amount of poor soil and droughty conditions in my garden. Valerian will grow on in 1/4″ of wood chips on top of landscape fabric. So will rose cambien, dyers woad, weld, heath, and Japanese buckwheat. I dug up a wheelbarrow full of those “generous” plants tonight, and will plant them today at the garden’s sunny, poor frontier.