My Garden, 2009

  Today I will finally show you pictures of my garden and you will see how I can easily spend 9 hours a day outdoors.

  Every spring I rough-up the iron urn that is our fountain, with a wire brush and repaint the inside.  By the end of the summer the interior will be very rusty again.  We spent an afternoon in a hardware store assembling different bronze pipes, joints, and spouts to finally come up with our fountain's spigot.

  Our French park chairs, that are the seating for our outdoor dining table, are eleven years old and were showing their age.  I sanded the varnished wooden slats and repainted them with a gray weather-proof low-lustre enamel.  Hopefully this will extend their life.

If there's a theme throughout my garden this year, it's red cabbage.  I'm planting it everywhere.

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  Our tomato plants that we started from seed in March, have finally been planted in the garden.  All of the plants are heirloom except for the Yellow Pear tomatoes.  The heirlooms are Cherokee Purple (my absolute favorite), Aunt Ruby's German Green, Green Zebra, and Red Siberian.  There is nothing more beautiful than combining all of these tomatoes, sliced, on a huge, white platter and drizzling with balsamic and extra-virgin olive oil.

  More red cabbage in the front bed, along with Italian parsley.  The center holds tarragon, sage and English thyme.

I have two concrete urns that hold my rosemary plants.  They're surrounded by white and violet alyssum.

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  In this photo you get a glimpse on the left, of our twig fencing we use to protect our bush beans and beets from the rabbits that frequent our garden.

               Late summer we'll be picking grapes from these vines.

My plan is to eventually sit in these chairs with a glass of wine and a stack of magazines.  Before that, however, I need to finish planting the garden.  It is finally warm enough to get my two packages of basil seeds into the ground.  I use a lot of fresh basil in the summer, and along the way I combine the basil leaves with just enough extra-virgin olive oil to bind, in my food processor.  I put this mixture into ice cube trays, freeze, and then store in a bag in my freezer.  I highly recommend this as the best way to preserve basil for use in the winter.  It will be like adding fresh, summer basil to your sauces, soups, etc.  I'll show you more photos throughout the summer as my garden matures.

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