Love
February is here. In fact, we are almost half way through it. Advertising tells us this is the month of love and there is so much to love about February: the days are getting noticeable longer, the sun is warmer, seeds we ordered are arriving, email confirmations of plants ordered. It makes us want to be out side doing something. And soon we will be outside, pruning, thinning, and generally making plans for spring and summer. I love this time of year. So many of my passions will soon be avaible again.
I’m sure Christie sometimes wonders which I love more, her or the plants. Well, I can safely tell you it is her. Although it is sometimes hard to tell, it is really truly is her. I do love the plants, but they are just plants and will always be just plants. That means they will come and go as the love grows and wanes. Take the grapes for example, they are our problem plant. I love them but we have yet to get a usable harvest of them. They haven’t died outright but they do die down to the ground every year. Most of them come back, sometimes not till July or august, but they do come up. The “starting over” every year is not sustainable. They set grapes about 6 inches above the ground from June to August, with most never ripening. There’s not even enough to do anything with. As much as we love them, we can’t continue like this. If they die down again this winter they will be going away. Yep, we will be yanking them out and replacing them with something else we will love until we don’t. Not all the grapes will come out. Our first little group (64 plants) we will keep, those are our babies and no matter how bad they are, we will continue to baby them. But as for the rest (270 vines) will be going away to be replaced with something else. There are so many other plants, we haven’t tried yet, so much to love.
I love the process of deciding what to plant. Will it thrive here? Will we like the fruit? We don’t always like what we plant and that’s ok, we can always pull it out. As an example, we will be taking out the Gogi berries we planted last year. We just don’t like how they taste, kind of like soap. Life is too short to grow something we don’t enjoy.
I love to cook for my loved ones. I just cooked our last Red Kuri squash. It was sad to see all the squash gone but I made a delicious soup with it. We enjoy this soup at least once a month. When the fresh are gone I use squash we cooked and froze in the fall. I would like to share our recipe with you.
Squash soup
Makes 8 cups
4 cups cooked winter squash
3 cups stock (chicken or vegetable)
1 cup half and half
Salt and pepper to taste
This is a nice soup as it is, feel free to change it up, more stock less stock, milk or milk substitute instead of half and half, more less of anything. Please enjoy this and make it your own.