A special guest post from Barbara Flanagan, author of Flanagan’s Smart Home: The 98 Essentials for Starting Out, Starting Over, Scaling Back.

I can’t wait to get outside and mess up my backyard! Summer lets me turn my little yards—front and back, neat and not—into vegetal laboratories.

This year I’ll raise my annual tomato curtain—10’ x 20’—dotted by tiny heritage tomatoes of many colors. The curtain rod is invisible: a stainless cable stretched taut between two brick walls. After planting a tight row of tomatoes, I hang panels of 10-ft. high panels of plastic fencing (like stiff netting) stacked to the ground. When plants take off, I start my daily ritual: weave the shoots into the netting, harvest the new fruit, and snack while I chat on the phone. The tomato curtain expands through October, and yields a nice supply of indoor-ripening fruit right into December.
The front yard, a former flat lawn, is a now a slope of usable herbs planted ornamentally (17 years ago, and pre-fad). I chose ornery, quasi-invasive, flowering herbs like St. John’s wort, fern leaf tansy, and thyme. Each season, I watch them try to overtake each other, then replant the winners to rebalance. Each spring I plant seeds for nasturtium vines, and watch the edible flowers trail lightly over the front yard like lines butterflies. By September, the yard is a layered with herbal perennials holding herbal annuals aloft.

At dinnertime, I harvest mesclun and arugula growing in terracotta pots at the front door. As small hedges of sage and chives rise up, I move the pots to fill empty spots as I’m adding basil, parsley, cilantro , and rosemary seedlings—and some wildly colored Swiss Chard–to the mix.
This month I’m doing two new experiments. The first: figuring out an elegant composting ritual to replace my haphazard ways of amending soil. The second: organizing the stuff I bring back from kayaking and hiking trips: beach stones, bark, rust, driftwood, etc. Maybe I can get a building permit for constructing a grotto…

–Barbara Flanagan

Cooking Jewish isn’t just about the holidays–it’s about the rich tradition of flavors generations old and the new twists we put on them. Judy Kancigor’s trip through old handwritten family recipes, and the “improvements” she’s made on them, mixes the nostalgia of your grandmother’s cooking with the ease of clear-cut instructions. Cook right out of the book or use Judy’s tips to perfect your own recipes–at the very least try adding her toffee walnuts to your kugel! Packed with recipes for any occasion, Cooking Jewish is a cookbook you’ll pull out over and over again for old favorites and new inspiration.

“The language of friendship is not words but meanings.”

-Henry David Thoreau