Helen Lehndorf

news + musings

  • colour in the winter vegetable garden

    I know it is spring now – but in terms of the vegetable garden, most of what is in there is still wintery-fare.

    Where I live, what I can grow in the winter is mostly green things: silverbeet, leeks, spinach, spring onions, brassicas, herbs. I’m grateful to live somewhere where it is possible to grow food all year around, but all the same, by the end of winter – I get a little tired of just greens and look forward to the colours of the summer garden: chillies, tomatoes, nasturtium flowers, the bright red flowers of scarlet runner beans…

    In winter, I have to sneak a bit of colour into the garden – just to cheer me up. This is how I do it:

    Choosing rainbow silverbeet – the stalks are wonderful candy colours – bright pink, orange, yellow.

    & Growing marigolds as companion plants. I know some people think they are tacky – but I love the colour they bring to an otherwise pretty dark winter garden.

    Harvesting greens in my op-shopped bright red colander.

    & Growing radishes – their hot pink pop can really liven up yet another green salad. Also, they grow from seed to plate in about three weeks. The closest thing you can get to instant gratification in a vegetable garden. These ones are ‘French Breakfast’ – which I grow because they are much sweeter and milder than other varieties, so more child-friendly.

    I saw on an Anthony Bourdain Food show that in France people smear these with butter as part of a breakfast meal. I tried it and found it to be kind of gross, to be honest. I think I’ll stick to chopping them up and chucking them in a salad. The French love to put butter on everything, don’t they?

    Have you got any other ideas about adding colour to a winter vegetable garden?

  • the birthday cloth

    I enjoy ironing. I think if you like to sew, you have to like to iron because ironing is such an key part of sewing.

    I even have a poem about ironing in my book, called ‘Sunday Night’.

    It doesn’t mean all my clothes are perfectly ironed, because I am a haphazard ironer. I only do it when I have a spare hour, which isn’t often.

    The other day was a lovely sunny spring day, perfect for a bit of laundry – I got my vintage tablecloths out of storage – thinking ahead to summer meals on our porch. I gave them a wash, dried them in the sun and then spent a happy while ironing them.

    One of my favourite cloths is one I picked up at an opshop, ‘The Birthday Cloth’:

    It has all the months of the year around the outside, with that month’s birth-flower and birth-stone. Here are a few of my favourites:

    As well as the vintagey (50s? 60s?) flowers, I love how quaint and twee it is. A cloth just for birthdays, which women must have laid on the table to serve tea and birthday cake to their friends or family.

    If you like vintage textiles, there is a great New Zealand blog called Glory Box here – where they examine all manner of fascinating stuff around textiles and textile history.

    I think it is important to USE the vintage textiles (and anything else!) you have – don’t worry about spills and wear. I firmly believe there is no point owning beautiful things just to store them. If they get ruined, ah well. It’s a good lesson in not getting attached to arbitrary things…nothing is permanent, nothing lasts forever.

    I’ve used the birthday cloth a few times for friend’s birthdays. It makes people smile.

    I like imagining all the birthdays that might have happened around this tablecloth.

     

     

  • grow your own way

    In autumn I planted a whole lot of bulbs: ranunculus, freesias, gladioli…and the other day the first of my ranunculus flowered.

    I bought all white bulbs, as I’d planned to have all white flowers in pots on the porch for added cooling effect, come summer.

    As you can, see not all of the bulbs came up white.

    Hello, bright pink interloper.

    The same thing happened with the dahlias I planted. The packet said ‘white’ and they flowered bright red.

    I don’t really care – in fact it makes me like them even more somehow. I always do like rebels and non-conformists best.

    Also, why should I get to dictate what ends up in my garden? I share the space with all manner of flora and fauna.

    White or not, they are very pretty, right?

     

  • travel in a tin

    Often when I mooch around a deli it is the food packaging that catches my eye more than the contents.

    Chillies from Mexico…

    Smoked paprika from Spain…

    Plain old tinned tomatoes from Italy…but somehow the Italians manage to make a quotidian product look appealing. Those bold, shiny tomatoes against that black background. Whoar!

    (Although this is obviously their export packaging because the text is in English.)

    I like the packaging so much…I’m loathe to eat the contents because I like having the tins on my shelf…cheering me up with their hints of hot, exotic locations and a life less ordinary.

  • my journals keep me

    Do you keep a journal?

    Sometimes I feel like my journals keep me.

    They keep me sane, keep me engaged, keep me feeling creative even when I don’t have time for larger creative endeavours.

    I’ve been teaching journal-writing for years. Teaching is a good reminder to me in how important it is to keep on with journals. People often start the journal workshops with slightly skeptical, guarded expressions…(I don’t know what they are thinking, but I imagine it is something along the lines of ‘Is she going to make me write about my feelings and then read it out?’) but after a couple of hours of my raving and sharing my work wth them, they light up, they see possibility, they go out the door with a new resolve.

    Now that book one is nearly birthed, I am working on the next projects. There will be more poetry, of course, there’s another thing I’m working on which I am calling ‘writing blobs’ at the moment, because I’m not sure what they are yet – not poems, not stories, just blobs. Finally, I want to write a journaling book. I’m feeling my way into what that might look like – probably a mix of my teaching and my own journal pages. Would you read a journaling book? What would you like to see in a journaling book?

    Here is a recent journal collage: ‘water’:

  • teaching your mother to suck oranges

    I was sitting across from Magnus watching him eat his dessert which was, that night, two cut-up oranges.

    Magnus was really eating those oranges. He was so present in his enjoyment – he was sucking every drop of juice and had the fixed stare of someone experiencing great sensory pleasure.

    I love that about children. They are great teachers in being fully present in the moment.

    Watching Magnus eat an orange made me want to eat an orange, so I did. It was delicious. We sucked oranges companionably for a good ten minutes.

    Messy fruit offers a particular pleasure, I think. Sensual and fun, all at once. It also demands presence of mind. You can’t suck oranges and read. You can’t chew out a mango and talk on the phone.

    Messy fruit as zen practice? Why not.

    At least we are free to suck oranges in public…unlike in this quotation about oranges in Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell:

    “When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.” 

  • beach treasures

    One of our favourite things to do as a family is visit a body of water – be it creek, river, lake or sea.

    We tend to split into two camps – the stone throwers and the foragers.

    Magnus and Fraser are the stone throwers. Fraser likes to skim stones, so actually, he has to forage a bit for good skimmers.

    Magnus just loves to throw stones in water. He has since he was tiny. So he stands at the water’s edge: plop! plop! plop!

    Willoughby and I are the foragers – we mooch about picking up bits of shell, rock and plant that interest us.

    I’ve taught Willoughby to, at the end of our visit, sort through everything he’s collected and only take home a couple of favourites. (‘Leave only footprints, take only photographs’ etc…) Both of us, with our magpie tendencies find it hard not to take a small treasure home.

    Here is a photograph of us sorting through beach treasure from a recent visit. That’s my lap, and you can just see a bit of W at the top.

    So many lovely things! You can see why it takes us a while to put some of them back.

  • this is a post about the rugby world cup (kind of)

    There’s a Rugby World Cup on.

    I’ve noticed it more than I might usually because in my new job at the Palmerston North City Library, we are hosting public screenings of many of the matches which means I’ve been tying up flag bunting and making party food. (Who would have thought I could feel ambivalent about bunting? but the flag bunting is kind of cheap, synthetic and nasty…& probably made in China.) Up goes the Argentinian flags, down they come, up goes Samoan flags, down they come, up goes French flags…etc.

    Anyway…rugby isn’t really my thing, but I was really moved to see this when I was walking the boys to school the other day….a house with a Tonga connection draped their entire front fence with beautiful Tapa cloth. It was quite a sight and made the boys stop and stare.

    It beats that cheap nylon flag bunting any day.

  • there is no perfect time to do anything

     

    I’m working two jobs, my garden is a weedy mess, in a week it is the school holidays, I have nearly 100 essays to grade, I’m training to teach yoga, lately I only get to see my husband at bedtime…

    …golly gee, I think I might publish a book.

    While I’m at it, why don’t I start a new blog?

    Some of you might say ‘why start a blog right now, Helen?’ and cynically think that it is just to publicise the book, that it is all about self-interest and the blowing of one’s own trumpet…

    You’d be right.

    The book is coming out with a wonderful small press, Seraph. When you publish with a small press you are accepting that there is little marketing budget and everything you can do to promote your own book is going to help a lot.

    Welcome to my self-promoting soap-box.