My Home Farmer's Market

I'm a huge fan of Farmer's Markets. I like to check out the local ones wherever my travels take me. The all time most amazing Farmer's Market in the world, Pike Place Market, is in Seattle and close enough to visit whenever the mood strikes. But there is nothing like my "Home" market, the one held here in the town where I live. The first day the market opens in April is my personal bookmark for the real start of spring and the last day of the market in October is always the first day of my winter. But right now, in high summer, the market is a blast of color, life, and activity that gives the weekend a great start and provides the rest of the week with the fresh tastes of summer fruits and vegetables and the brilliant flashes of color from fresh flowers.

My Home Market is held every Saturday morning from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM on one of the original homestead farms here - some of the vendors are arrayed outside the old barn; others are rowed up inside along the sides of the dairy barn. I buy from many of the vendors every week; I know many of them by name as we've made acquintance and become weekend friends over the years. The cookie lady has my slice of lemon pound cake waiting for me now and Garden Barb usually has a salvia plant or some other plant that's interesting and needing a home as well. My amigo Tobias and his family have the *best* fruits and veggies. We gripe about the weather and marvel at the bounty of the harvest. He tells me about the new varieties of fruits and veggies he's planted this year as I pick through boxes of produce in his stand and pay for them. He's one of the hardest working guys I know but he always laughs as he throws in an extra ear of corn or a peach for me.

One of the great joys of living in the Puget Sound area is the number of flower vendors at any of the farmer's markets around here. There are usually at least four or five of them - with buckets and buckets of flowers - all picked earlier the morning of the market. The vendors spend all day making the most amazing bouquets, rubber banding bundles of stems as big as their wrists together, wrapping each one in a cone of white butcher paper and setting it in a bucket of water, tempting each passerby with the sheer joy of life. The mildness of our maritime climate means the bouquets are inexpensively priced: ten dollars purchases a merely large and lovely one and fifteen bucks will get you a huge and astounding one. It's always a tough decision which vendor has the best flowers and bouquets every week but the smiling little vietnamese grandma and her teenaged grandkids usually manage to fill my house with color from their garden.

In addition to the master gardners always on hand to help with questions about your own gardens, there are the other regular plant vendors - some of them specializing in veggie starts, or tomatos or annuals or trees. One of my favorite plantswomen at the market is the tiny, elderly woman who is there every week selling houseplants, the occasional lily, rose or rhododendron, sea shells, polished stones and small cachepots all planted and ready to take home. I hope I have as much energy and vitality as she when I reach her age.

There are some other regular vendors I don't know so well. Some of them are there each week, but one needs only so many pot holders, pillows, jewelry, wooden cooking utensils or any of a raft of other handmade things. Then there are the food stands: Tamales, chinese/thai dishes, hot dogs & brats, and the Cadillac Bar-B-Que, along with cookies, popcorn, struedels, bread, honey, pasta and dip mixes, rubs and bar-b-que sauces, nuts and the occasional one week pleasure of salsa, sweet potato pie, or pickled carrots. The regular folks who serve lunch (Tamales, chinese/thai, and Cadillac Bar-B-Que) have been interesting to watch. In the years that I've been going to the market, they've all started small, and have outlasted the others, building up a loyal customer base and gradually expanding their menu lists. All of it is served and consumed outdoors - sun or cloud, rain or shine - which makes it all taste better, of course. Added to the pleasure of the food is the joy of live music - usually about 3 times a month with Gospel choirs, Kodo Japanese drum groups, English brass bands, folk guitarists, and many more making the air vibrate with sound and grace.

Others vendors are more intermittent - coming perhaps for a few days at the beginning of the season, or once every few weeks, or even a single day each summer. Most of the berry vendors are there only when their berries are in season - first Ranier and Bing cherries, then raspberries and strawberries, then on into blueberries and finally blackberries and marionberries. Pear and Apple vendors tend to star showing up later in the season as their produce ripens as well. Each week they each all get a look - one can never tell what new delights might show up.

Three times each season during the run of my Home market, they have kid's day. After attending an evening class on the basics of buying and selling, farmer's market style, kids of any age are allowed to set up as vendors and sell stuff they make: pillows, beaded necklaces, eyeglass holders, crayon drawings, lemonade, dog biscuits, sugar cookies, cupcakes, clay sculptures, decorated candles, tye-died t-shirts, or whatever they want to try their hand at selling. These days are always a ton of fun: the kids are anxious to sell, the parents are having fun with it, and there are always the interesting transactions that happen when kids find themselves dealing with adults as equals. Today, one of the kids was a 8 year old girl selling tiny clay sculptures of animals and people made of brightly colored baked modeling clay. She had cats, dogs, pigs, cows, an entire dragon family (dad, mom, kids and uncle) and a farmer. Her parents looked on as we had a very interesting chat on how she made her scupltures, how long it took to make them, and whether her tiny hands and fingers gave her an advantage in making them over someone with very big hands like mine. After careful inspection of each of her pieces, I finally decided I needed one of her Siamese cats (perhaps an inch tall, with a white body, blue eyes, and black face, ears, legs and tail) and $3.00 moved from big hands into small, nimble ones with smiles on both sides.

Some of the kids do quite well with this start in business. Last year, an older boy, perhaps fourteen or so, started selling small jars of homemade jams. He began with about six varieties or so, selling them on a one day lark. However, his jams and jellys and preserves proved popular and the farmer's market bug must have bit him because this year he's a regular each week, selling a dozen or so varieties, all made the previous week from fresh market fruit. At $3.00 each, they're sunshine in a four ounce jar for your morning toast and a great way to stretch the 6 days til the next farmer's market.

My Plant Obsession

I've a small obsession about the Salvia plant family. Salvias (also known as sages) are a widespread and large sub-family of the mints. They are, for the most part, highly aromatic, and of special interest to me, possessing the some of the brightest and purest colors of any blossoms in any family of plants. Pure bright blues (no cornflower or purpley-blues here, thank you), purples, reds, and yellows, not to mention all the pastels one could wish for in pinks, reds, lilacs and others. All that, not to mention the blue, red, purple, and black calyces, the outrageous flower shapes that look like dragon faces, and the huge variation in form and habit. We won't even begin to discuss how how new species are being discovered yearly and the odd blossom color-changing behaviour of some species.

Each year, I grow about 20 species of salvia: some old favorites and a few new ones each year, mostly grown in large pots. Not all salvias grow well here in the Pacific Northwest - most of them like lots of sun and heat to develop - so many of them bloom late or, unfortunately not at all. It's a wonderful thing to research here in the foothills of the Cascades though, and I keep notes on what seems to do well and what makes a valiant effort and what just doesn't seem to be happy under our our frequently soggy pearl grey skies.

Last year I planted a couple of salvias native to east Asia: Salvia Hians and Salvia Flava. Both of these take a couple of years to establish themselves, so I was really looking forward to seeing them in bloom this year. The Salvia Hians bloomed a month ago and is just now finishing up. Hopefully, they'll rebloom this autumn but I'm thinking not. (There's a photo of Salvia Hians on the June 30 entry of this blog.)

Salvia Flava started to bloom a couple of weeks ago while I was traveling. However, it's still booming along, if slightly past it's prime. It's a lovely purple and white spotted flower that has a fine covering of hair on some surfaces, and the elongated dragon's face that is so expressive. About 3 cm in length or a bit less, it grows in roughly 30 cm spikes of blossoms; my single plant has 5 such wands of flowers.

Here's a side view of Salvia Flava. Enjoy!

More Pictures from Mainau



After my outrageously self-indulgent blather about fountain pens and technology obsolescence, I thought I'd lighten up a bit and post some pictures from the SmetterlingHaus at Mainau. Enjoy!

Fountain Pens and Computing: A Self-indulgent Rationalization

I've been thinking about fountain pens and why they hold such a peculiar attraction for me. I like them all on general principles, and many of the new ones are aesthetically and mechanically amazing, but my very favorites are the Big Reds, Mandarin Yellow, and Vacumatic Parker Pens of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Why fountain pens in general, and these models in particular? Many reasons might be relevant, but these spring to mind: An enjoyment of well crafted, beautiful and timeless technology An individual protest against the planned obsolescense of consumerism A small statement of personal style - or perhaps more correctly, a harmless affectation A particularly effective ad campaign in the 1970s when the style was revived A taste for bold designs and bright colors An enjoyment of the ritual (some would say futzing) that goes with cleaning, inking, and maintaining a fountain pen An enjoyment of the act of writing with a instrument perfectly suited to the task as opposed to the skittering click of a keyboard. Mainly, I think it's the first two reasons though honesty won't let me deny the rest. I've been deeply involved in computing for something over 30 years. That's a lot of tech that's come and gone - some good and some less so. I cut my teeth on a GE timeshare system and paper tapes, and went on to DEC PDPs, Hollerith cards, Unisys Multics mainframes, IBM mainframes, 9 track tapes, DEC VAX/VMS's, several generations of Crays, Silicon Graphics and Unix workstations of all brands and flavors, Macs, PCs, and several specialty computers that were specific to work I was doing. In turns I was passionate about each one - staying up to date with the latest Beta releases of operating systems and applications and the fastest hardware. The Good News is I've grown up a bit and lost my zealous advocacy for the latest and greatest, though for professional reasons, I have to keep up with the curve. Over the past few years I've become increasingly agnostic about what I use now - I just want it to work, to be secure, and to be reasonably low maintenance. Along with that personal trend toward more a more functional and less branded approach, I seem to have developed a respect for older and frequently elegant technologies that still work well in an increasingly digital gadget oriented world. Such tools are nearly always optimized in some way so that, despite the passage of time and "progress" in the way of "better widgets", they remain exemplars of utility and unplanned for obsolesence. Maybe it's a natural part of the aging process but I'm thinking I'm not the only one wending my way in this direction if my peers are any clue. The jury remains out on whether other geeks gravitate this way as they hit middle age. All that aside, fountain pens seem to be one of those shining examples of perfected technology, even if in a relatively small way. They were a quantum leap above the quills and dip pens and yet still provide a superior experience to the trivially inexpensive ball pens that ultimately crowded them out. It's a personal theory that using a hand manipulated implement granted the required bit of mindfulness that let the idea be more fully articulated before it hit the page. Countless other formerly hand done technical tasks, from drawing flowcharts to drafting building plans have now been automated using computers, all during my lifetime. Faster? Cheaper? Better? Probably all true and many without doubt easier and more capable, but the nagging thought persists that the mindful moment, whether spent aligning celluloid triangles or inking the fountain pen, gave enough pause to do it right the first time and express the idea with clarity and vigor. At any rate, that beauty on the left is a 1929 Parker Big Red with an extra fine nib. It's the apple of my eye, having been The One I've wanted for many years. I keep it filled with a dark grey ink that it lays down back down - without pressure - in a thin, wet line that dries quickly in my Moleskines. It's such a sensuous pleasure, that keyboarded words created by glowing electrons completely fail to capture it.

Not sure of providence or copyright of this photo; please let me know if it needs to be removed.

Macro Flowers

The subtle shapes of flowers at the macro scale remain an endless source of fascination for me.

This shot of Lilium 'Casablanca', an Oriental hybrid lily, was taken yesterday in my gardens. While the insides are pure white , the back has spokes of dark grey. The blossoms are big: more than 25 cm in length and 20 cm in diameter. This particular blossom seems luminous in the white drapery of its petals and glowing golden pollen.

Unfortunately, a hail storm in June savaged the foliage and flowers of nearly all the plants in my gardens. The storm damaged or bruised the buds of nearly all the Asiatic and Oriental hybrids in the lily bed. As a result, nearly all of what are usually color saturated starbursts of sensuous beauty are mostly mis-shapen this year with holes and oddly twisted shapes. A precious few - like this bright yellow one, were lucky and came through nearly perfect.

Oh well; Hope springs eternal for next year. The colors are no less lovely this year and that is always something to enjoy - especially at macro scales.

The island of Mainau (Insel Mainau) on Lake Konstanz in Germany is a particular pleasure. I was fortunate enough to visit there at the end of May. The gardens were in the transition from Spring to Summer - so the famous bulb gardens were done and the annuals were not yet in full bloom. Nonetheless it was a spectacular place - astounding in so many ways even in less than satisfactory weather.

At the time I was there, the rose gardens were in full bloom and they were utterly amazing, to say the least. There is both a formal rose garden near the castle and as well as a long rose alley. The formal garden looks out from the castle over Lake Konstanz and is divided into plots of with various varieties of tea, cabbage, and climber roses (and many others I don't know, I'm sure). The rose alley follows the shore and is graced on both sides with shrubs and climbing roses. Many huge specimens graced the grounds including many unusual and amazing types. Of particular note were the Moss Rose and the Green Rose - both long cultivated (several centuries) and completely new to my eyes.

Very cool indeed...

Insel Mainau is located just over the Swiss border. The first traces of habitation on the island date to roughly 3000 BC. The recent history of it's transformation to a garden island is the life work of Prince Lennart of Sweden. On the death of his mother, Queen Viktoria of Sweden, he was given the island. When, in 1932, he renounced his claim to the crown in favor of a marriage to a commoner, he took up residence on Mainau. He and his family then dedicated their lives to turning the island into a garden, eventually opening it to the public. Lennart (by now Count of Wisborg) eventually passed away last spring. A full history of the island, as well as a map and additional information is available at the web site (www.mainau.de).