preserved sunlight
we have been thinking about northern food lately, as part of an assignment steve is working on for a magazine. we are concluding that you value what is scarce, and what is scarce in the north is sunlight. so that most of what we think of as typical of northern food involves the various ways we harvest summer sunlight (in the form of vegetables and berries,) and preserve it (in the form of pickling, drying, fermenting, and smoking). there’s still a little bit of sunlight left in these dried giant sunflower stalks, but if they remember summer at all, it is a distant fading thing, like trying to remember your kindergarten teacher’s name.
giant sunflower (heliatnus giganeus)
rice creek trails, shoreview, mn
imagine
virginia creeper acts like its name, moving along the floor of our woods, and finding its way up the sides of buildings and up the trunks of trees. this one is working its way up the oak tree in our woods, mostly unnoticed in our dense woods. but come fall, its bright red fall color can’t be missed.
virginia creeper vine
saint paul, minnesota
fly away
my son came upon this goose in the shallows of our lake. there was a time not too many years ago, when a son coming upon a goose killed by a snapping turtle would have run back to the house to shout the news. but it’s 2017, and so instead my boy took a photo with his iphone and texted it to us with the commentary, “wtf.” it was a particularly contemporary form of engaging our interest. but interested we were, and the whole family trundled down to the lake to look at this thing we had never seen before. i won’t describe the goose’s injuries except to say that it had clearly dipped its head below the water to eat some weeds, and was never allowed to pull its head back out of the water in this lifetime. i have tried to photograph its beautiful mottled belly and powerful wings in a way it might like to be remembered by. i’d like to think it has good memories of this pose, flapping hard, just over the surface of a flat evening lake, on the way toward sleep.
canada goose killed by snapping turtle
turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota
blueberry season
i had to do some talking to get my husband to pick this premature little bunch of unripe blueberries. blueberries in his world, are for eating, and eating ripe and tart and sweet. but i’m sorry. look at that color. and that dusty bloom. and the green of that green, and the lavender of that lavender.
lowbush blueberries
turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota
for all the wrong reasons
we have one of our best minnesota herb gardens in years right now, for all the wrong reasons. reason #1 is that we are newly chicken-free, which means we no longer have freshly laid eggs on our counter, nor the peaceful evening sight of chickens scritching for bugs in the back yard. that also means, however, that that there are no chickens taking dirt baths in the pot of basil, or eating the parsley down to stems. (i will update everyone more thoroughly on this subject soon, since i know how attached we all became to a certain bossy hen named glimmer.) reason #2 is that we normally don’t bother with a summer herb garden in minnesota, because we know we will be spending the fall in southern france, where steve will harvest wild thyme from a local hillside, and grow woody, pungent rosemary, bay laurel, basil, sorrel, chives, savory, sage, hyssop, and chervil on our back terrace. we are not going to france this year, and so our minnesota herbs, sadly, are spectacular.
bouquet of kitchen herbs
turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota
