A sound life for shells

Shells, like broken pieces of pottery, hold some fascination for me. When I see either scattered on the ground, I’m compelled to wonder how its previous owner used it. I want to know the back-story of where a shell or pot came from, and how it came to be tossed aside.

Since moving from the Midwest at age 12, I have been fortunate enough to visit many beaches. And from nearly every one, on nearly every visit, I have collected a shell or two, or 10 or 20.  No more do I want these relics from the South Pacific, New York, Mexico, California and Florida gathering dust in baskets or glass jars. So I’ve come up with a very simple way to put them in view. Continue reading

My CSA Box: Blueberries

One berry, two berry, pick me a blueberry, as they say in Jamberry. This past weekend I had one berry, two berry, eight pounds of blueberries. I made a special order from my CSA – a typical box dosn’t just come with eight pounds of blueberries. Eight pounds was overwhelming for about a minute. And now they are all used up – just like that. Continue reading

Ordinary/Special

This is our first in a series of “Ordinary/Special” posts, in which we each take a photo and write a short poem to accompany it. We decided not to talk to each other about our photos or poems ahead of time and just let serendipity happen . . .

Winged fellows share a white cloud landing pad frozen in the sun

Winged fellows share
a white cloud landing pad
frozen in the sun

    in a bright kitchen     dancing tomato breakfast     summer sun's perfume

in a bright kitchen
dancing tomato breakfast
summer sun’s perfume

 

My CSA Box: Apriums

Here at Nerdhaven Farms West we grow plenty of edibles – but we have more hungry mouths than we can feed from of our harvests of artichokes, apples, apricots, blackberries, tomatoes, figs, persimmons, kale, lovage, sorrel, dandelion greens and, last but not least, eggs. So we supplement our harvest with a community supported agriculture subscription, also known as a CSA box.
imageOur CSA, Abundant Harvest Organics actually calls itself a farm-share delivery service. My understanding is that with a CSA, one buys a share in whatever a specific farm is growing. AHO, on the other hand, organizes and delivers the harvest from an alliance of small family farmers in California’s Central Valley. So AHO delivers us bounty from not just one farm, but many; providing our hungry peeps here at Nerdhaven West with a wide variety of organic produce (as well as other tasty stuff like herbs, eggs, meat and dairy by special order). (But we call AHO a CSA anyway. FSDS sounds like a florist.) The photo above is the contents of this week’s box. Yum, right? Every Saturday morning between 10 and 11, we drive over to the local Lutheran church parking lot and pick up what we call “the veggie box.”

And then every Saturday morning at 11:01 a.m. I start figuring out what to do with the contents of that week’s veggie box. Eek. Continue reading