Wine Successes and Unsuccesses

July 21, 2015May 21, 2016 / lizbaessler / 3 Comments

IMG_20150714_212055272 The wines are resurfacing! For the past month or so, they’ve been bubbling and settling away in the cellar. Every now and I again I check on them to make sure they haven’t exploded and created an ant paradise. Since I went through such a wine frenzy, everything was brewed at roughly the same time. Meaning everything has to go through its next step at roughly the same time. Meaning now!

I dragged everything upstairs and we had a Grand Tasting. Most of the wines just needed to be racked, but how can you not taste a little bit? These are our findings.

Rhubarb Wine: Still looks like dishwater, but not unpleasant. I have hope for this one. I racked away a lot of lees, so I can imagine it clearing up some day. The taste is basically unchanged.

Grapefruit Wine: Close to undrinkable. To be honest, the main problem with the grapefruit wine is that it tastes so much like a grapefruit. I’m not sure what I expected in that regard. I’ve been picturing something light and crisp and sweet, more with the fragrance of grapefruit than anything. And that still may be achievable, with a lot of ageing and a lot of back sweetening. This wine has such an edge to it, I can’t imagine it would be any fun to drink dry.

Blueberry Wine: A strong contender. This was one of the house favorites. It’s got a very distinct blueberry flavor that borders on being too tanniny. There was a huge amount of sediment in this one, and I had to make up for the missing volume with water. It’s so dark and strong, though, even with the added water, that I think it’ll be alright. For the future, though, I need to invest in some glass marbles for bringing up volume.

IMG_20150714_211458292 Elderberry Wine: Basically vinegar. I don’t know where I went wrong with this one. I had such high hopes for it when I racked it the first time. It was dark and raisiny, by far the closest thing to grape wine I’ve made so far. But something has obviously changed between then and now, most likely one of those stray foreign yeasts I’m always sanitizing against. Everything I’ve read has said that if you do one thing right, it should be sanitizing. I try to sanitize faithfully, but I do have a cat and roommates and a kitchen that’s far from spotless. At my level a bad wine now and again may just be par for the course. The recipe I’m following does say that this wine improves with age, so I’ve racked it and put it back in the cellar in the hopes that the long road to improvement includes an early vinegary phase.

Mead: Genuinely good. I started the mead and the strawberry wine earlier than than all rest and had racked them both once already. According to my recipes, this meant that I could bottle them or let them age, depending on my tastes. Mead apparently gains a lot more complexity if you age it, and some people whose blogs I’ve read wouldn’t dream of drinking mead that’s under a year old. I’m new to this, though, and impatient. And the mead was really very good. So I decided to bottle it! I can always make another batch and age it for longer to do a comparison.

My only complaint with the mead was that it was very dry. I like sweet wine, and the flavor of honey especially feels disjointed to me when it’s not accompanied by sweetness. Everyone who tried it said they liked it just the way it was, though, so I split the difference. I siphoned the whole carboy off into a bucket and added some Sodium Metabisulfite and Potassium Sorbate to inhibit any remaining yeast. This is absolutely necessary if you’re back sweetening with honey, but I’m paranoid about exploding bottles and figured it couldn’t hurt for my unsweetened batch, too. 20150719_142420_HDR

I filled five bottles with the unsweetened stuff. Maybe I’ll hide one of these bottles from myself in the cellar to see how it ages. To sweeten the rest of the mead, I just added honey, stirred, and tasted until I was satisfied. I’m really happy with the result. It has a strong alcoholic body to it, with a sweet finish. It’s very obviously made of honey. And the alcoholic body is strong. Back in May I was too eager to get started to take any hydrometer readings (something I will be doing from now on), but I wouldn’t be surprised if the alcohol content is at or over 20%. I’ve put it in beer bottles with the idea that they can be shared or portioned out over a day or two like wine bottles. Or drunk by one person after a particularly hard day.

Strawberry Wine: Also good. I’m so happy my bizarre sprouting wine has come out okay. Over the past month it’s settled beautifully and really cleared up. It has an amazing summery smell. According to the recipe, it can be bottled very young, so I took the same tack as with the mead and back sweetened it to taste with honey. Since this batch had been downsized to a half gallon that still produced a lot of sediment, I got only six beer bottles’ worth. 20150719_234355_HDR I like the look of a hodgepodge of saved bottles, and I even threw in an old Jarritos bottle to show off the beautiful clear blush. I chose to use beer bottles because this wine, too, is incredibly boozy. I have an open bottle in the fridge right now that I’ve been nursing over several sittings, like a liqueur. My only regret is that I think you can taste the fact that I used grocery store strawberries that had been shipped from who knows where. Sweet as it is, I think there’s a noticeable undertone of that white, foam-like core you get in big, under-ripe strawberries. I’m going to hunt down some farmer’s market berries and attempt another batch, because I think it could be really great.

Thirty-Seven Pounds of Cherries

July 9, 2015July 11, 2015 / lizbaessler / 4 Comments

Apparently when my parents got married, they each already had a manual cherry pitter. So I grew up in a two-cherry-pitter household. One of those.

I went home to visit my parents in Pennsylvania recently. They’re very much into growing and preserving and all those things I’m trying to do, except they’re good at it. Fresh food from the garden was always a given when I was growing up. Although that apple tree has produced one decent crop in my lifetime, and it was the year the fourth Harry Potter book came out.

Summer arrives here quite a few weeks later than in Rhode Island, so there wasn’t much in the way of ripeness yet. I did pick a huge amount of rhubarb to bring back with me, though. My first batch I brought inside to cut apart nicely on a cutting board. Then my mom told me she hacks it up right in the garden, machete style. I did another batch, and it was deeply satisfying.

When I came downstairs one morning, at an abysmally late hour by my parents’ standards, I was informed that the local orchard had cherries that weekend, and we had to jump on the opportunity before they were all gone! I threw on an old shirt and we took off to beat the rabble.

It was a rainy morning, so the rabble wasn’t out yet, and we went a little overboard, picking 37 pounds of cherries. We’d brought our own buckets, but the orchard owner loaned us a few of her buckets with hooks for hanging from the tree, “to make picking easier.” Ideally, we’d then transfer the cherries to our buckets. But once we’d filled up the loaners, it felt silly not to fill ours as well. It was a flawless grift. I’m onto you, orchard woman.

Of course, on a hot summer day, you have to act quickly before your 37 pounds of cherries squish. Some, obviously, did not survive the ride home. And some had to be saved for general eating. As for the rest, an afternoon-long pitting and freezing operation was established. 20150629_155508_HDR

We settled for the first cherry pitter to be uncovered. I believe this one was my mom’s originally.

Cherries have a dishearteningly low pit to meat ratio. One does not simply cut a cherry apart cleanly with a knife. The only way to go about it and not completely lose your mind is to pulverize the whole thing and accept the fact that you’re not going to get every last ounce of fruit and juice. Even by the end of this this method, I could feel my sanity slipping slightly. But in a good way. 20150629_171129_HDR

I mentioned that I’d been considering trying infusing, and my mom fetched a bottle of vodka. For the long haul we filled up this jar with whole cherries. I didn’t get to try it before leaving, sadly. For the moment, though, we mixed up a slurry of vodka and squashed cherries. It was really very good, and made the remaining pitting process a lot more bearable.

A Mulberry Invasion

June 25, 2015May 21, 2016 / lizbaessler / 3 Comments

In a way, I’ve been making mulberry wine for two years now. The neighbors don’t have much going on in their yard, but they have one mulberry tree with production rates any orchard owner would be proud of. And it hangs mostly over our driveway. Which means the berries ripen, fall off, and make a vinegary sludge an inch deep.

I know it’ll be a challenge, but this summer I’m hoping to improve upon this setup. Last year my friend Tommy and I got our act together enough to collect one crumble’s worth of fruit, with some heavy supplementation from other berries scrounged from the community garden and the woods. We called the crumble Fruits of the Forest, and my hat still has stains.

This is a year of proactivity, however, so my plan is to collect the ripe berries daily and freeze them, hopefully accumulating enough to make mulberry wine, which I vaguely remember being drunk at a Redwall feast. If not, it’ll be Fruits of the Forest time again.

As you can see, the invasion has already begun in earnest. 20150613_134109_HDR Twice now I’ve gotten out the hose and blasted them into the street, but by the next morning they’re always back in about this thickness. I don’t want to scavenge them off the ground, since they don’t handle the impact well and start to smell vinegary pretty quickly. I’ve had dreams of hanging hammocks to catch them, but with the bird traffic around here I’m afraid I’ll catch just as much poo.

I don’t have any pictures of the actual event, but here’s a lively re-enactment.

My roommate’s mother visited recently, and she was having flashbacks to shaking mulberry trees in Iran with a big sheet held out to catch the berries. I adapted this method by laying out a bunch of newspaper and whacking the tree with a broom. It was not a booming success. I took out just as many unripe berries as ripe ones, and when they hit the newspaper most of them bounced or rolled away.

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In place of that technique, I’m now opting for hand-picking. I find it strangely soothing.

Since our driveway is Birdtown, USA, my initial plan was to pick the berries when they were nearly ripe, then let them sit on the counter for a day or two before freezing them. The birds and I have formed a strange truce, though. They ravage the top branches and leave the ones I can reach, so the berries I’ve been collecting are actually nice and ripe. I’ll have to look into this bond I’ve apparently formed with the natural world and use it to my advantage somehow. 20150613_151913_HDR

So far I’ve collected and frozen 5 1/2 pounds of the things, and the tree is showing no signs of stopping.

Man, I hope mulberry wine is good.

An Attempt at Science

June 18, 2015June 18, 2015 / lizbaessler / Leave a comment

This summer I’m using Neptune’s Harvest Fish & Seaweed Fertilizer on everything I grow. It has great Amazon reviews, and it was available at the urban farm supply store where I talked so long with the owner I felt obligated to buy something. I’ve gone whole hog on ideas for much stupider reasons. 20150611_094656_HDR

And I have to say, my garden does look a lot more impressive.

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On the left we have last year at this time, and on the right we have this year, all fishified.

The fish-drenched guys are definitely further along. The chives are enormous, the greens at the far end are a solid mass, and the peas have completely escaped their trellis. Of course… last year I didn’t plant anything until I got my plot at the end of April. Most of the things in this year’s picture were planted indoors during a February snowstorm. There are more scientifically rigorous studies…

Like this one!

I’ve chosen two vegetables I know grow quickly. I don’t know anything that grows faster than radishes, but I’m worried the hot weather will set them back, so I’m planting beans as well.

The Neptune’s bottle suggests soaking seeds before planting in a solution of 1 tsp fertilizer to 1 cup water. Do radish and bean seeds like to be soaked? I’ve never heard they do, but I’m doing it anyway! I’m also doing a control of seeds soaked in regular tap water. 20150611_182021_HDR

If you’ve never used fish fertilizer before, trust me when I say it smells just as good as it looks.

I let the seeds soak for 24 hours, then planted them. Another use for Neptune’s, and the one I’ve been using in my garden, is a simple watering with a very diluted solution every one to two weeks. So I sowed a set of each seed that will be watered normally, and a set that will be fished. If you’ve been doing your math, you’ll know that comes out to eight different treatments.

And here they are!

All sown at exactly the same time in soil from the same bag in basically the same containers are plain radishes and beans, fish watered radishes and beans, water-soaked radishes and beans, and fish-soaked radishes and beans. I’ve put three seeds evenly spaced in each pot, so hopefully individual seed quality doesn’t get too much in the way. I lightly watered the plain pots with water and the fish pots with fish solution.

After only four days the radishes, true to form, were making an appearance. At least one plant emerged in every pot.

Oddly enough, though, the water-treated seedlings look vastly healthier.

Go ahead and click on the pictures to enlarge them so you can see the seedlings and my beautiful labeling. The plain seedlings look more developed and vividly green. Their leaves are splayed out completely. Also, only the completely untreated pot has two of its three seedlings already. The fish seedlings, on the other hand, look yellower and not fully opened yet. This could be chalked up to a few hours’ difference in growth at this stage, but I really did sow everything in one go. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that there are berries just everywhere. They’re mulberries, and they’re getting a post of their own soon.

I’ll be tracking the seedlings’ growth and updating every now and again. If this current trend continues, maybe I’ll have enough evidence to bring down Big Fish.

Wine Progress

June 15, 2015June 15, 2015 / lizbaessler / 1 Comment

Mango wine has been put on hold. Avid readers may remember that I was keeping twenty pounds of mangoes under my desk, waiting for them to soften. But it’s been a hot week, and my six gallon bucket had blueberries fermenting in it. So I, forward thinker that I am, moved the mangoes to the cellar, where they could keep nice and cool. 20150614_171256_HDR

And something ate them!

I don’t know if was a badger, or a rat, or a man living in the walls, but whoever it is is well nourished now. I’ll have to buy some more when they’re softer in the store and I have a fermenter ready for them. And watch my back when I’m in the cellar.

But it’s not all tragedy on the wine front.

I freed up that 6 gallon bucket of blueberry wine and moved it to a carboy. I also learned from my strawberry adventure that even with the pump, regular old siphoning is a lot easier. Although it does look like an IV drip…

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My mead also finally stopped its bubbling, and I moved it to a new carboy. It came up a little short, and I had to top it up with some water, which I hope wasn’t a mistake. That meant I only got to try a tiny bit that was left behind, but I was amazed at how… meady it tasted. Like something I might pay money for and not regret. Which is the goal, I suppose.

I learned my lesson from the sprouting strawberry wine and bought a pair of pantyhose to act as a filter bag for the grapefruit wine I started. I cut off one of the legs, jammed it full of grapefruit segments and zest, and then tied the end off.

Ooh la la.

The other leg is full of dried elderberries, which I ordered online. Apparently they were grown in Norway! I’ve since found a Pick Your Own farm in Connecticut that has them. Maybe I’ll go there and get a feel for what they look like before I start foraging mysterious roadside berries.

Last but not least, I racked the rhubarb out of that horrible Mr. Beer keg which, to its credit, did not leak out of any new places. I was right in resigning myself to no healthy pink blush. I wasn’t anticipating this color, though, which unkind critics might call “dishwater” but I’m choosing to call “pearl.” I’m really curious to see if it settles over time into something transparent. 20150615_172143_HDR

Even after filling the carboy so high, there was a lot left over. And wouldn’t you know, it’s palatable! Very tart and crisp. I could see it being a decent summer wine. Which is too bad, because it probably won’t be done until the fall.

Fulfilling a Dream

June 14, 2015June 17, 2015 / lizbaessler / 1 Comment

I’m becoming a beekeeper! 20150613_125532

Eventually.

I’m a lot closer than I used to be, anyway. The community garden I belong to keeps its own bee colony, and I’m apprenticing Kimberly, the garden member who actually knows what she’s doing. I’m the faceless one on the right. I promise it’s me.

The New England winter this year was famously awful. You may have heard about it. Or experienced it. A huge number of bee colonies died, and ours was one of them. So we ordered a new starter colony. Out of a little mesh crate about the size of an actual bread box, we released a few thousand bees into our hive. They’ve had a little over a month to get settled, and they’re doing great.

20150505_131550 They’ve been filling up their first box nicely, so recently we put a second box, the blue one, on top. Yesterday we went in for the first time since then to see if the queen had moved up to the second box to continue laying. Kimberly prised the frames out one at a time and I noted our findings on my little clipboard.

My Findings:

The bees are loving it in the second box. They’re active in at least half the frames, collecting nectar and storing honey. And the queen, most importantly, is out and about and laying eggs. Queens are pretty easily distinguishable from the rest of the colony, mainly because they’re so much bigger. You can pay a little extra, though, 20150613_130035 to get your queen shipped with a splotch of blue paint on her back. It’s easier for us, and it’s easier for blogging. There she is, right in the top middle.

We took a peek into the bottom box, but didn’t open it all up because we’d already been messing with the bees for a while and didn’t want to keep disturbing them. There’s still a whole lot of activity down there, so next time we’ll go in and see what those guys are up to. Once most of the frames have been filled up, we’ll add a third box on top, as well as a queen excluder, which is a fine grating the worker bees can fit through but the queen can’t. That means the third box can be devoted to honey, without a bunch of eggs getting in the way. But that’ll be later in the summer. For now we’re just observing, and I’m taking notes on my clipboard.

And expressing myself artistically.

Accidental Gardening

June 12, 2015June 1, 2016 / lizbaessler / 2 Comments

My strawberry wine appears to be sprouting. While interesting, this isn’t exactly what I was going for.

This is still very much a learning process, and today’s lesson is in straining your fruit must thoroughly. A search has found me one person on reddit who had exactly the same problem. There were a few assurances that it should be alright, lots of confusion, and not one but two references to The Circle of Life. There was general encouragement to plant the seeds, which I’m going to do, because why not? And there was more or less a consensus that I should get the wine out of there as 20150612_112956 quickly as possible. So I’m going to rack the wine, about two weeks before I was intending to, and I’m going to hope it keeps fermenting. I’m also going to rack it into a half gallon bottle, because today’s lesson is also in head space, of which I apparently have way too much. All that residual air is no good.

Doing my best to keep the siphon in the middle of the fermenter, between the sediment on the bottom and the seeds on top, I’m sending the wine through a mesh strainer in a funnel, hoping against hope it’ll catch the seeds but allow the yeast to pass through. I have a racking cane with a pump, so I usually don’t even bother putting my secondary vessel on the ground to siphon. The funnel, however, just barely fits into the lip of this jug, so I’m balancing it between my knee and the kitchen cabinets. When the person you usually conscript into holding things has been conscripted into photography instead, you have 20150612_122718 to improvise.

A half gallon of wine has survived the transfer. There’s still sediment in the bottom, but no seeds have made an appearance and there’s already activity in the air lock, which means some of the yeast made it as well. The jug is a growler from Endless Brewing, a great little brewery from my hometown. If you find yourself in rural Pennsylvania and craving beer, go to them and tell them I sent you.

There’s still quite a lot left over, but not enough to justify saving in a separate container. It smells fantastic, and I have visions of whiling away the afternoon writing and sipping my young strawberry wine.

I’m just going to tell myself it needs to age.

Rhubarb Connections

June 10, 2015June 1, 2016 / lizbaessler / 1 Comment

I’ve gotten really into craigslist deals again recently. These fascinations with it are always ebbing and flowing, but since I’m learning to drive my boyfriend’s manual car, there’s been a serious flowing as of late. Turns out there’s a real freedom to emailing a stranger and knowing you can arrange to meet them around your schedule. And with a car, no less!

This weekend, however, both boyfriend and car were away, so when I found an ad for mature rhubarb plants for $12, I had to call ahead and confirm that the planter would fit into my bike’s milk crate. 20150606_142439 It did.

Along with eight enormous stalks of rhubarb.

I did the deal with a lovely older lady. I told her I was planning on making rhubarb wine, and she regaled me with stories of tomato wine made with the guy she was going with at the time, as she called him. They opened one bottle and loved it, so they took it to the local wine festival, where it quickly became apparent that every other bottle was swill. At the end of the day they sold out, though, because theirs was the only table that still had wine and all the festival goers were too sloshed by then to care what it tasted like. She was great. I want to be her when I grow up.

The plant has found a place among all the other driveway plants. My dealer suggested that I bottom water it, presumably because it was in desperate need of watering but it was so sunny out. I didn’t ask her rationale. I just went along with it and set the pot in a big dish of water, which it promptly sucked up. I gave it another dish, then watered it from the top as well in the evening. It seems happy enough, though I’m not positive I’ll be able to harvest from it this summer.

20150609_214526_HDR The day I brought it home, I hacked up my stalks and mixed them with sugar, then covered it all and left it in the closet for three days. It started as a solid mass, but during that time a whole lot of liquid was drawn out. From everything I’ve read, you want especially red stalks to make for a nice blush to the wine. As you can see, any blush to this stuff is going to be a seasick green. Oh well. The price was right.

I added water to the 20150609_230227_HDR rhubarb, then strained it into my primary fermenting vessel with some yeast, yeast nutrient, and some grape juice concentrate. My snazzy new craigslist bucket is is full of blueberries, so the job has fallen to Mr. Beer. My mom got me a Mr. Beer kit for Christmas. It made a huge amount of an alright light beer that I still drink every now and again. It also gave me this pretty handy food grade plastic keg with an airlock-esque lid. Perfect! Who needs a bucket?

20150609_230325 …Oh wait. What’s that? All over the paper towel that’s been conveniently laid down…

Enhance!

That’s some very sticky rhubarb juice.

That’s a pretty fast-flowing leak.

Uh-oh 20150609_231213_HDR .

Luckily, my canner is just the right size to balance this thing more or less securely in such a way that the liquid can’t reach the lid or that damn spigot. Also luckily, it only has to stay in this precarious postion for a week before it moves to a real glass demijohn.

Mr. Beer will not ride again, I think.

A Brewing Operation

June 8, 2015June 2, 2016 / lizbaessler / Leave a comment

I am on a wine kick. I’m not sure where it came from. A year ago my roommate and I made a mostly successful IPA from an ancient graduation gift beer kit. Since then we’ve made two more downright drinkable beers from Brooklyn Brewery kits, 20150607_182116 although I think I may have overdone it on the carbonation… Look at that head!

I’ve been itching to make something more homemade, though, and since it’s June, fruit wine seems like a good direction to go. I bought this fabulous 6 gallon carboy off a very nice craigslist man, along with a 6 gallon bucket with a grommeted lid and more supplies than you can shake a stick at, all for $40. 20150608_112228

It’s a lot of responsibility, coming up with a wine I can afford and am confident I might like enough to make 5 to 6 gallons of the stuff. I’ve settled on mango wine, mainly because mangoes were on sale and are a heck of a lot cheaper than berries. I will be following this 32-year-old recipe from the Rare Fruit Archives of Australia because it’s the first one I found that sounded doable. And because I like the sound of it.

That will be a separate post, though, as I’m still waiting for the champagne yeast to come in the mail, and I’m typing with my feet drawn up on my chair because there are twenty pounds of mangoes softening in paper grocery bags under my desk. Until then, a quick look around at the operation I’m trying to get going.

No one has lived in the apartment below ours for a year now. This means their basement storage room is unoccupied, apart from all the junk they left behind. Until someone new moves in, I’m appropriating it as my wine cellar! There’s a great, reasonably dark shelf for finished bottles, where I’ve put what’s left of the beer. And another, darker shelf for all that caution tape the neighbors were hoarding…

I’ve also got two wines fermenting 20150607_121114 down here already. I brought them out into the light for a photo-op; they’ve been living off to the left of the frame in a dark corner. I’ve read many a forum argument about whether dark is necessary for wine or just an old wives’ tale. The jury appears to be out, but I figure if I’ve got the dark I might as well use it.

The pink fermenter on the right is a strawberry wine. When I transferred it from its primary vessel I had a terrible time separating the liquid from the berry sludge that formed, and now I have a pitifully shallow fermenter that still somehow has a ton of sediment. When I rack it again I’ll have to decide if I make up for the lost space with water or just move it to a half-gallon jug.

The yellow fermenter is mead that I’ll be racking as soon as the bubbling dies down. By the numbers it should be any day now, but the yeast is still going strong. 20150607_120859

The bubbles in the airlock have actually formed a very cool honeycomb pattern. For a while I had a half-baked idea that this had something to do with the high honey content. And then I found the same pattern in the strawberry airlock.

And then I realized that idea was ridiculous.

Containers Galore!

June 1, 2015June 17, 2015 / lizbaessler / Leave a comment

Summer weather has hit New England, which means I can finally transplant my hot weather plants outside. This is good news for my seedlings, which are getting so big the word “seedling” has become generous. It’s even better news for my living room, which has been slowly returning to nature as the eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, -grow operation and melons get more and more unruly. Here they are back in April, when they were already getting a little big for their britches.

As they grew I gradually moved them to bigger containers, which I precariously stacked and arranged so each one would get its place in the sun (or grow light). When daytime temperatures started getting reasonable, I took to hauling them down to the driveway from our second floor apartment, one armful at a time, to harden them off. Which of course meant schlepping them back up the stairs in the afternoon before big bad night came.

But now summer is here, and I’m tired of schlepping, which means it’s time for all good eggplants to get out and enjoy the weather, even if the nights get a little chilly from time to time. I managed to fit one tomato, one eggplant, and two peppers in my garden plot where the radishes had been, but since I may have gotten a little carried away with my cold season vegetables, that’s all that’s going to fit. Which means container time! -eggplants

I used some old store-bought containers I had kicking around, but since I’m going for mass production (on a one-person scale, at least) I quickly ran out. I visited the florist department at my local grocery store where they were kind enough to unload a bunch of big used plastic buckets on me for free! After I’d drilled some drainage holes in the bottoms, I had a huge supply of big and sturdy containers for my vegetable plants! As a bonus, they’re black, which means they’ll hold the heat better and hopefully trick my hot weather plants into thinking they live at a lower latitude than they do.

I’ve got a row along the south-facing wall of my driveway, and another row along the south-facing wall of the house, which I’m calling the Secret Garden. Really it’s a three foot wide strip of concrete between the house and the neighbors’ yard, but I’m doing my best to glam it up. back garden 2

Glamorous.

Liz Baessler

I have an MA in English and a lot of time on my hands.

Author: lizbaessler