Our working bunny
A white rabbit with pink eyes moved into my garage this week. He’s a working fool. Everyday Cottontail (he came pre-named) commutes to work in the back of my daughter’s silver truck. When he gets to his workplace, he’s put into the fields and ordered to eat. He eats all the grass and weeds poking up through the holes in his cage and is then moved on to another spot when he’s finished. In this way, he is both mowing and fertilizing... Read More
Vineyard innocence
One of the things I really like about the Vineyard is its sense of innocence. You encounter it specifically in all the flimsy metal lockboxes you find around the Island, with jars of change and instructions for how much you should pay for eggs or flowers or yogurt. (I say metal lockboxes, but once I came upon a child’s cash register; push one of the big, brightly colored buttons and you instantly had a magical place to deposit your dollars and... Read More
A visit to a different place
I spent last week in a hospital outside my hometown in Missouri, helping tend to one of my favorite aunts who’d undergone an injury and then some major surgery. The town where the hospital was located, Cape Girardeau, Mo., used to be one of those typical Midwestern towns with an interesting downtown and lots of local stores. I don’t know if it retains that look – I was pretty much confined to a new part of the town along the highway – but... Read More
Fall on the farm, with squash soup recipe
The first frost has reminded me of this section of the Morning Glory Farm book – and this recipe that accompanies it: The college kids have left, and the few workers who remain follow new seasonal imperatives. … The frosts are coming now, and pretty much everything but the root crops have begun to die off. A cold night will vaporize the basil, but the last of the field crew will sometimes pick kale in the snow. “We had Christmas spinach one... Read More
When Red is on the menu
Red came on the menu halfway through the dinner in the greenhouse at Beetlebung Farm. He’d already been preceded by innovative salads and raw kale with vinaigrette and delicious varieties of barely cooked vegetables as appetizers, so Red was just another part of the farm-to-table menu. Except, of course, that Red the Pig had lived and breathed and been slaughtered very near to this plastic tunnel greenhouse now strung with white Christmas lights... Read More
Fresh from the Vineyard
Virginia Crowell Jones, better known as Ginny, recently published a cookbook that is “very Vineyard.” The recipes include a lot of old time things she remembers. She has used illustrations from Juliet Kraetzer. Here is her guest blog about the inspiration for Fresh from the Vineyard. I was fortunate to be born and raised on the Vineyard (a much simpler and more civilized place) back before the real estate market got pumped up on steroids.... Read More
Uh oh, it’s raining
My shoes are filled with icky brown sand. Not the type of stuff you get when you go to the beach for a beautiful, sunny day. It’s the kind of stuff you wish wasn’t on your (new) Sperry Topsiders. But this is nothing compared to the look on my friend Karen’s face when I deliver a copy of “Jaws” that she had requested. “Can I come with you?” she asks a little desperately, glancing back at the churning masses in her house. “I can... Read More
Thoughts while I eat my cherry tomatoes
I am munching on fresh cherry tomatoes and thinking about farmers. I think about farmers often, since I have two young farmers in my family. Their dinner conversations involve how much squash they’ve picked that day (once it was 1,000 pounds of zucchini and 750 pounds of yellow squash.) Or the baby bunnies born at the farm, so tiny and sweet. Or whether shell peas, usually grown in the spring, can be a cool weather fall crop, too. Tonight, we’ll... Read More
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