Heirloom fruits & veggies are relics.

Before the food-growing industry's most practiced approaches were rewritten, fruits and vegetables took on a diversity of impeccable flavors, curious colors and skin patterns, and unexpected yet eye-piquing shapes. Heirlooms are the name given to those that survived.

The last century's strong commercial push involved seeds for crops being developed into hybrids intended to yield high amounts with sturdier outer skins.

This large-scale shift in agriculture, starting with the seed, led to a lot of sacrifice in taste while sometimes diminishing the nutritional value per plant.

Heirlooms are food relics all their own. They behave differently than mass-produced garden and field crops by having less-standard mature growth sizes and food-bearing periods.

To read the rest of this article, visit this lil' link. 

sassier salad selections.

when they sang on the simpsons years ago that ''you don't make friends with salad,'' i think it was just that whoever ''you'' was, was making a boring-as-a-curse word salad. 

this delish dish included hydroponic salad blend lettuce from butter valley harvest, tomatoes, avocados, craisins, hard-boiled eggs, olive oil, lemon juice, and pink salt. i forgot the snapea crisps. oops. still, nom and a half.

solar toys-- stirring my proverbial sun-soaked fancy.

meet my new crew. these fellows are a bit sun-inspired with their more positive provocations. the frog performs some darn happy hopping, the racecar zooms along with quick-spinning little tires, and the grasshopper jitters about-- all through the solar persuasion of their backsides.

over the past few months, i featured stokes solar green toys & goods on phillyecocity.com and also in lancaster farming, the reading eagle, and with some outside penning-assistance, in news, not blues as well.

john stokes, who is the man behind the oley operation of green-speak in toy-sly approaches to shifting how energy is viewed on the local level, also recently introduced a first-ever wind-powered toy to his lineup.

and another enticing update is that he's working on bringing educational workshops into schools, using the toys. children will learn how the fun-time perks are put together, building the critters and cars themselves, sometimes, to really absorb function-smart ways while seeing how solar energy has such environmental potential.

and of course, on top of all that, the crew is just darn cute. i am a lucky garden harlot to have such lil' props of versatility and excitement-stirring, sun-powered jollies. mhm !

ode to the mouth-perking persuasion of pear and ginger butter.

something like fruit butter is bound to have its own song, especially when it's as seasonally-pulling as pear and ginger butter, prepared with love built right into it during the whims of winter weather. and this palate-hugging medley certainly sings, on key, too, with a flavor-set and texture so exacting that it easily wins an eat-this-by-the-spoonful distinction.

phoebe canakis, the naked food home cook behind phoebe's pure foods, kindly dropped off a little jar of this for me to pick up at a coffee shop while i was in fleetwood this weekend. 

after i'd told her about bauman's apple butter and the pennsylvania dutch family's cherish-worthy line of fruit butters, and once she'd finally discovered a few jars in her own food-travels, this creative kitchen mistress whipped up her own sampling. 

the delightful lure of an autumn-plucked crop, along with hints of the warm south asian-known spice, quickly reminds the palate of sudden comfort taken straight from the leggy limbs of nature.

homemade catnip-- a cinch and stitch of an effort.

i wanted to do something nice for my little fur kid quasi-niece named iris, a cat of a close friend of mine. she isn't too savvy on kitty treats, so her papa suggested i use the catmint in my garden to make her another play toy.

once the catmint dries out after i separate all of the leaves from the thin stems, i'll stuff it into this wildly pink-striped monkey sock with some cotton balls, tie it up sewing-wise with some string and a needle, and gift it to the adored iris.

catmint, the perennial known for catnip-makings, is hardy for our region in pennsylvania. it can sometime take over in gardens, so if you don't want that effect, keep an eye on it and prune it back or thin it out, when need be. it's probably easily transplantable as something to gift to others or relocate in your garden space, too. look for it at garden centers and nurseries from spring to late fall for possibilities in grabbing up this easy-to-grow plant well-capable of tantalizing the inner-temptresses in kitties.

november half-slumber: a quick-witted greeting.

quick words. willow wood ones.

and smokebush speckles, a glimmer into autumn's appetite.


brevity can say a lot.

with much long overdue affection, the garden harlot.

august greetings from the garden harlot.

long time no flower ? it has been an incredibly busy set of life-weeks for the garden harlot across the expanse of many jobs, but luckily, they are wonderfully fulfilling ones. 

in the meantime, here is a sampling from my tumblr page of positives, which i have also semi-abandoned for instead working on so many other projects. here, a night embers daylily from my garden graces oxygen and its other friendly elements.

i currently have a fun lil' 10 week series about farms premiering each wednesday on the limerick-royersford-spring city patch site. so far, beyond the introduction, i've featured discussions of the farm to school program, renninger's farm in royersford, and dream come true farm in spring city.

and i started writing for copper in the arts with the copper development association, recently featuring an artist named david burns from california with his rough and ready moniker, copper gardens.

this afternoon, i'm traveling down to spring city to photograph some sweet cows at kolb's farm store.

lots of fun and work is spilling me away from the blog, but news, not blues is still a monthly must.

thanks for stopping by, and remember to soak up the sky a good bit in your days.