Honestygirl

 I was surprised by a bear this evening, but realized he was a regular from last year.  I meant to post here, but posted on Places of the Spirit instead. Here's a duplicate post. I came down to my studio after dinner and much to my surprise there was a smallish bear enjoying the parsley.  I soon realized he was our infrequent neighborhood bear from last year -- the same grizzled face and now with an ear-tag, marking him as an urban bear (part of ongoing NC urban bear research here in the Asheville basin). He enjoyed the parsley, spending some time munching.  Then he wanted to investigate our trash bins.  Thankfully, today was trash day, so there wasn't anything in there to forage.  Younger males are the most likely to be spotted in urban areas, aside with moms with cubs, especially now in almost spring.

I concentrated the last fresh peaches from last summer this evening. They're peach butter, I think, as I was also boiling the excess juice on the stove as I wrote this. Peaches are a problematic fruit here in the Southeastern U.S.  Leave them to the professionals, my former horticulture colleague at Clemson, a peach expert, advised.  Well, commercial peaches are delicious (and I just try not to think about how they were produced.)  At our local WNC Farmer's Market, in summer, we get a wonderful procession of varieties, large baskets full, largely from peach farms in South Carolina. We enjoyed them this last year, as we were here in Asheville. A peach memory.   https://naturalgardening.blogspot.com/2008/08/perfect-peach.html

 A duplicate post from Places of the Spirit.  The image first appeared here. A path in Umbria Preparation for a program this afternoon about garden blogging had me revisiting posts from long ago.   I've done so many posts on Natural Gardening that it's a bit intimidating to even contemplate going back and organizing and collating subsets of them into some sort of coherence, whether it turned into a book or not. Nevertheless, I had great fun revisiting some of these posts. This image, coming up with a "traveling" search was a wonderful memory of our time in Umbria in April 2018. I loved revisiting the gravel road and the red poppies, above a nearby hill town that we visited on this day.