Beauty

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South Carolina’s Unbelievable Angel Oak

This is Angel Oak on John’s Island in South Carolina.  When we were ready to make the trek from Charleston to Kiawah, our friends drove their car and we hired a car service.  Our driver begged us to take a few minutes to stop and see this tree.  He said it was one of South Carolina’s best kept secrets and we needed to stop and take a look.

The Angel Oak is a Live Oak (Quercus viginiana) that is a native species found through the South Carolina coastal low country.  Many people think that the name Angel Oak has something to do with angels from heaven, but it just refers to the last name of its previous owners.

Towering over 65 feet high, the Angel Oak has shaded John’s Island, South Carolina, for over 1,400 years.  This means that the oak would have sprouted 1,000 years before Columbus’ arrival in the New World.  Recorded history traces the ownership of the live oak and surrounding land, back to the year 1717, when Abraham Waight received it as part of a small land grant.  The tree stayed in the Waight family for four generations and was then part of a marriage settlement to Justus Angel and Martha Waight Tucker Angel.  In modern times, the Angel Oak has become the focal point of a public park.  Today the live oak has a diameter of spread reaching 160 feet, a circumference of nearly 25 feet and covers 17,100 square feet of ground.  Angel Oak’s largest limb has a circumference of 11.25 feet and a length of 89 feet.  Talk about a large and long arm!

Angel Oak has in the past few years been threatened by proposed development in the area and the destruction of the surrounding woods.  While Angel Oak will not be cut down, many residents of the area believe the surrounding woods help to protect the prized oak from storms and helps allow proper moisture and drainage.  Residents also believe the surrounding woods help filter out harmful pollutants before they reach the Angel Oak tree.

We were very happy to take a little turn off the beaten path and get a chance to see Angel Oak.  Know that the pictures don’t do justice to how large and majestic the oak tree actually is when you see it in person.  It is said to be the oldest living thing east of the Mississippi River.  It sure is a sight worth seeing.  Have you ever seen Angel Oak or heard of it?

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Friday Dance Party – Getting Faster With Matt Nathanson

This is another edition of Friday Dance Party on Acorns On Glen. It’s the time where we give thanks for making it through another week and for being alive and present here on Earth. How do we celebrate another week of living? We dance. So, are you alive this Friday? Are you and your family safe and sound? Take a few seconds now to be in the moment and realize what a great life you truly have. Did you give thanks for that?

Good, now let’s dance.

So you all know that we are on vacation. Taking a little time off to recharge physically and mentally. Of course we didn’t forget to give thanks for another week, so while posts are slim during our vacation time, our Friday ritual with all of you remains. For the next few days, we will be enjoying the city of Charleston and then off to the ocean and the beach on the South Carolina shore. Sitting on the beach or by the pool allows you to spend some quality time with a great book (and we have a few that we are dying to read) and to listen to all the great music out there that is new. This is how we ran across this week’s song, ‘Faster’ by Matt Nathanson. It was a pleasant little surprise after a friend recommended that we would like this new song. Who doesn’t like a nice little upbeat love song? So this week, while we are giving thanks for living through another week, maybe we should also give that someone special in our life a little hug of appreciation for making our hearts beat a little faster. A partner, a child, a sister or brother, a dog….there are so many choices. Go ahead and give that special loved one a little squeeze….and remember, you’ve survived another week. It’s time to celebrate! Turn up those speakers and dance. Who are you going to give that little hug to this week…don’t be shy?

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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words – Phlox You!

This is one of the remaining blooms in our garden.  How lovely is this Phlox bloom with its white flowers with intense pink centers?  We have had a lot of rain over the last week.  There were several fronts that moved through the Connecticut area that dumped quite a few inches of rain.  While you would think all the rain would be great for our plants, in most cases it just served to destroy any remaining blooms that were left in the garden.  A nice bloom takes a beating in heavy pouring rain!  So while most of the blooms were destroyed, this Phlox bloom held tough and is about all that remains in our garden.  How has your garden been doing in all this crazy weather we have been having?

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Friday Dance Party – Enjoying The Lazy Song With Bruno Mars

This is another edition of Friday Dance Party on Acorns On Glen.  It’s the time where we give thanks for making it through another week and for being alive and present here on Earth.  How do we celebrate another week of living?  We dance.  So, are you alive this Friday?  Are you and your family safe and sound?  Take a few seconds now to be in the moment and realize what a great life you truly have.  Did you give thanks for that?

Good, now let’s dance.

This week’s song is what I’m thinking of doing on Saturday of this weekend…nothing at all.  It’s been a really rough week at work as my company had one of its official ‘closing of the books’.  This is the time when we close all of our systems and take a look at the numbers.  This means we see either how much we made or didn’t make to our profit forecast.  Given the rough economic times, you can understand the pressure people are under to ensure the company stays profitable.  So besides doing the work, there are lots of questions and concerns that every department raises that you need to answer.  Bottom line, when you are finally done with the week-long close process, you have devoted some late nights and have been under some wild pressure.  So what’s the best way to get back on track?  Chill out on one day over the weekend.  So, just like ‘The Lazy Song’ by Bruno Mars, Saturday is the day where I’m not doing anything….nothing at all.  I’m just re-charging, re-fueling and re-laxing.  Sounds great, huh?  So let’s get back to Friday.  You’ve made it through another week and deserve to celebrate this fact.  Turn up your speakers and dance.  Get some rest this weekend too.  What are your plans for this weekend?

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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words – A Real Barn Burner

This is a picture of a barn in our neighborhood taken when the temperature was 94 degrees.  A real barn burner, get it?  OK, so some bad Summer humor.  This was another little “find” that we ran across on one of our evening walks over the weekend.  Next time we will have to see what is inside.  Probably equipment of some sort, but let’s hope for something more exotic like a cow or a pig.  Who knows?  How are you coping with the heat this Summer?

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Crafting and Orange Marmalade

This is a jar of my newly labeled orange marmalade.  After making my first-ever batch of orange marmalade, I decided that the finished jars looked a little plain.  I decided that they needed labels.  For many people, making and affixing labels to their canned goods would be a simple and rather artistic chore.  Not me, because this falls in the area of crafts and I am not very good at crafts.  I have tried.

There was one year when I made a real cranberry wreath from a ‘Martha Stewart Living’ magazine article I had read.  It jumped out at me from the pages of the magazine.  I had to have this bright red beauty on my front door for the holidays.  For days, I took real cranberries, inserted toothpicks into each one and then pushed the cranberry spikes into a foam wreath form that I had bought and spray painted red.  It looked pretty, but Martha did not tell me that for those of us who lived in California at the time, that real cranberries would quickly rot in the high temperatures that Californian’s enjoy at Christmas.  Within a week, my wreath had a bad smell and the squishy and wrinkled cranberries were falling off their toothpicks onto my front porch floor.  As well, pushing sharp-edged toothpicks into hundreds of cranberries messed my fingers up for a good week or two.  It was painful every time I jammed my two sensitive fingers into my computer keyboard after being mini-stabbed by toothpicks a hundred times or so.

Then there are the times I decide to make hand-made Christmas cards to impress my friends and family (and make them green with envy).  The last time this urge hit me was when a friend of mine convinced me to buy some stamps, card stock and ink from her new ‘Stamping Up’ business.  I bought like $700 of stuff that guaranteed me beautiful hand-made gems.  My stamps were three penguins with Santa hats and scarves on and each one held a candy cane and a string of Christmas lights.  Each one was stamped in black on white card stock and special markers had been purchased to color those penguins in with various colors.  Sounds easy, right?  Not for me.  After I realized that the date to mail the cards was two days away and I was only half done with the number of cards I needed to send, there were two all-nighters needed to finish.  There is nothing worse than coloring your festive penguins at 4 AM in the morning.  This was the last time I sent cards out.  Too much work!

Being wiser with age, I found a website that produces gorgeous writing papers and envelopes called Felix Doolittle.  This company makes canning labels available in the Summer months.  Perfect for me!  Even better, they had a label with oranges on it and I had them add ‘Acorns On Glen’ across the top.  My blog’s first product although they are not for sale so probably not a product at all.  The best part of getting the labels?  I decided that it made me crafty for the first time in my life without having a breakdown or a mess on my hands.  I like this new way of crafting.  I might have to keep it up.  What things have you accomplished in the crafts department?

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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words – Brook, You Just Keep Babbling

This is our neighborhood babbling brook.  Glen Road has taken on a strict diet and exercise plan starting last Monday.  Healthy eating and several walks per week is the charge.  If you notice our food posts, most are desserts, so it is time to work a few of those calories off.  Most nights this week, we put on our sneakers and put JoJo on a leash and we take off for a 45 minute walk.  Yes, even JoJo has indulged a little too much this Summer and needs to lose a few pounds as well.  What has been great about these outdoor walks versus walking on a treadmill inside of a gym is that you can really take notice of all the cool things nature has to offer.  Like this little brook.  We’ve driven over the small bridge that is on top of it for six years, but we have never really stopped and looked at the water that flows through it.  We’ve never listened to the babbling water rushing around rocks and tree trunks.  We’ve never really taken a look at all of the brook’s bends and turns.  Our walks started for the exercise, but now have also gotten us closer to nature.  Who would have thought?  We never thought we would like to exercise, but this seems to work.  What do you notice when you take a walk around your neighborhood?     

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A Field Trip To Le Farm Restaurant

This is Le Farm restaurant in Westport, Connecticut.  We were lucky to go there for dinner over the weekend.  Le Farm is one of those great restaurants where it seems one dish is better than the one you ate right before it.  It is an absolute great place for dining.  What else is great about it is that it is one of the front-runners in the farm to table movement.  Bill Taibe is the executive chef and here is how the restaurant and local farmers operate together to make the food at Le Farm some of the best and freshest food in the area.  This is from the website for Le Farm:

Farmers like to grow things.  They don’t like to market, advertise and transport them.  Bill Taibe likes to cook.  He loves using local ingredients — the fresher the better.  The convergence of area farmers and Taibe is good news for diners — and not just fans of Le Farm, Taibe’s restaurant that earns raves for showcasing market-based food cooked and presented in a homey, comfortable and very sustainable atmosphere.  Thanks to RSA — “Restaurant Supported Agriculture,” a concept that Taibe knows needs a zippier name — 5 local restaurants now offer the best in local products.  Banding together, they guarantee farmers a market for their goods.  Promising to buy takes pressure off the farmers.  They reciprocate by planting what the chefs request.  Make no mistake:  It’s not just lettuce, tomatoes and corn anymore.  Taibe — who built 2 previous restaurants on the barter system, and admits he “may have been born in the wrong century” — explains that RSA is based on the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model.  RSA is less structured – shares are not bought in advance from farmers — but the concept is similar.

Once a week — via the Green Village Initiative — 5 restaurants (Le Farm, the Boathouse and Dressing Room in Westport, CT, plus Wilton, CT’s Schoolhouse and Fat Cat Pie Company in Norwalk, CT) receive a list from local growers of whatever is ripe.  By 4 p.m. each Monday, the chefs respond with their own list:  what they want.  The farmers pick the crops on Tuesday morning.  By 2:30 that afternoon, Green Village Initiative volunteers have gathered it and it’s ready for pick-up by the restaurateurs.

Le Farm is a very small restaurant.  We counted 11 tables and were told that the restaurant holds 34 people at capacity.  That doesn’t mean there are 34 people dining there at one time.  The hostess told us that the kitchen cannot accommodate that many diners at one time.  So when you dine there, you are eating with a relatively small number of people and the atmosphere is really quiet and relaxed.

Wooden tables line the walls in a very homey and country sort of way.  Glass jars filled with dried split peas hold the silverware.  Water for the table is brought to you in country-style bottles.  There is a wine list for sale and limited cocktails are available made with spirits that were hand selected by Le Farm.  Have you ever heard of:

  • Tito’s Hand-Made Vodka
  • Caeden Head Old Raj Gin
  • Gran Centennaro Plata Tequila
  • Ben Riach 12 Year Scotch?

After you’ve secured the beverage of your choice, the food starts to roll in and you can’t believe what you are feasting on.  Let us show you some of the things our party ate while at Le Farm.

Let’s start with appetizers.

This is roast pork belly with whipped cornbread, collards and sweet bacon vinegar.

How about foie gras terrine with cherry marmalade, pistachios and toast?

This is smoked duck potato hash with black truffle and a fried egg.

This is an aged beef meatball salad with green cabbage, pignoli, parmesan and pickled cipolinis.

Last, but definitely not least, here is some cavatelli for the table made with sweet 100 tomato pan sauce, spicy oregano and parmesan.  We asked what sweet 100 was and we were told it was a type of tomato.

Who said we were done eating yet?  Now it is on to our main courses.  Not as many pictures as many of us got the same dish.  Great minds think alike I guess???  Here is what we had.

A Southern classic.  This is shrimp and grits with italian sausage, roasted corn and shrimp sauce.

A little comfort food?  Brisket braised in beer with beet tops, potatoes with horseradish and dill.

You can’t leave without dessert can you?  We couldn’t, that’s for sure.  Take a look at these treats.

This is a chocolate pot de creme with peanut butter cream and salted pretzels.

A brown-butter almond shortcake with strawberry gelato and cajeta caramel.

Some bourbon white raisin bread pudding with vanilla gelato and hazelnuts.

We’ll admit we were stuffed.  Well, with all this food, we were beyond stuffed.  If you are ever in Westport, Connecticut, Le Farm is a restaurant you must go to and enjoy.  We think you can tell a difference when you are eating really fresh and local ingredients prepared in such fun and inventive dishes like those served to us.  Tell us about your favorite farm to table restaurants in your neck of the woods?

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Our Rose of Sharon(s)

This is our Rose of Sharon shrub, otherwise known as Hibiscus syriacus.  Given that the shrub is over 10 feet tall, it is on the mature side and has been in the backyard garden since we moved to Glen Road.  The shrub itself is actually four shrubs that grow together to appear as one shrub.  Our little optical illusion.  In the Winter, you can see all four individual shrubs, but in the Summer they appear as one.

The two shrubs in the front of the cluster are the traditional pink Rose of Sharon variety.  The two shrubs in the back of the cluster are actually Rose of Sharon in a white variety.

The value of a Rose of Sharon shrub is its late-summer bloom, usually beginning around the start of August.  The Rose of Sharon is not a true rose and doesn’t grow like one.  There are a number of varieties in shades of pink, purple, blue, lavender, red and white.  The flowers are usually 3 to 5 inches in diameter.  The Rose of Sharon is a tall, bushy plant reaching as high as 15 feet.

Plants should be set in while still young and protected with mulch until they are well established.  Until they are mature like the ones we have, you have to be careful as they are susceptible to winterkill.  They grow in sun or part shade and they like moist, humusy soil with good drainage.

Pruning need only be done if you prefer a smaller plant.  You should cut back stems to laterals to control size and produce vigorous growth.  Remove dead or damaged wood when discovered.  Prune in the Winter in mild climates and in Spring in colder ones.

We’re very happy to have such a late bloomer in our garden.  We are a little surprised at how gorgeous the shrub has flowered given the hot temperatures it has had to live in over the last few weeks.  I have read that the Rose of Sharon is guaranteed to attract a hummingbird to come and feed on its blooms, but so far we have not seen any.  😦  Lots of bees feeding on it, but no hummingbirds.  What’s blooming now in your neck of the woods?

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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words – Attack Of The Never Ending Tomatoes

This is a new cluster of heirloom cherry tomatoes growing in our garden.  See the morning dew on them?  With eight tomato plants in the garden, getting enough tomatoes has not really been a problem this Summer.  Better yet, they just keep producing.  How has your garden been growing this Summer?