Clara's Window

T-minus three days and counting until I board a putt-putt plane and head down to Maryland! People laugh when I tell them where I'm going. "A sheep and what festival?" (A rolling of the eyes usually follows.) But I consider it a replenishing of the soul, being around all those enthusiastic folks who love this stuff as much as I do.

Meanwhile, Grace Robinson in Freeport, Maine, is looking for good summer help. If you want to work (hard) in southern Maine's most upscale yarn shop, let me know and I'll hook you up with her. I hate to see a good job go to waste.

Spring still hasn't sprung at home. Despite the presence of snow briefly on Friday, I spent the weekend plotting out the new garden beds. I asked a farmer friend to plow a small vegetable garden for us in the back field, forgetting that "small" has different connotations here in Maine than it does most elsewhere. In no time flat, he had plowed a plot that was bigger than my entire apartment building back in San Francisco!

Sooooo.... We dumped bags and bags and bags of lime on the soil, followed by a nice big truckload of aged manure, and there the garden sat all summer. But this year it's ready for action.

There'll be a permanent asparagus bed, plus a raspberry patch in back. With any luck I'll also have onions and shallots, pole beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, carrots, lettuce, sorrel, spinach, basil, chives, cilantro, and dill growing by the end of the season.

If it ever warms up.