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The Kitchen Garden – Flowers, Vegetables and Quotes

Giuseppa Sallustio

Photographer, Wine & Food, Travel Blogger at Nordic Lights & Mediterranean Landscapes

A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space – – a place not just set apart but reverberant – – and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s education

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Ein Herbst, der warm und klar, ist gut für’s nächste Jahr”. – Bauernregeln für September

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

George Eliot

Between the last days of July and the beginning of August I sowed sunflowers in the garden for the first time and this week they started blooming, so I enjoyed catching their bright smile and infinite beauty.

What kind of flowers would you like best to have into your own garden?

“When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can”.

D. H. Lorenz

“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

In these days, the garden is offering a vision of poetical space, where a palette of warm colors lets soft tones vibrate and shine to a mesmerising Autumn light.

A sprinkle of pink and golden shades for this September Monday bouquet made of home grown blooms to wish a good new week to everybody!

Someone would say that “Pink is not only a colour. Indeed, it is an attitude”. Would you wear your pink glasses to look at the new week?

“In the garden, Autumn is, indeed the crowning glory of the year, bringing us the fruition of months of thought
and care and toil.  And at no season, safe perhaps in Daffodil time, do we get such superb colour effects as
from August to November.”
–   Rose G. Kingsley
Petals of Autumn in the garden

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

November Sunday in the garden: sweet vanilla persimmons up on the tree are getting ripe and zucchini flowers are to be picked: they long for being filled with creamy ricotta cheese, tiny strips of pistacchio mortadella, chopped green olives and then fried in extra virgin olive oil.

It is the beginning of a new year and our Spring garden starts with new planting in the early months. Enjoy gardening, everybody!
Lagom: Not too little, not too much. Just right.

The glory of gardening:

hands in the dirt,

head in the sun,

heart with nature.

To nurture a garden,

is to feed not just the body,

but the soul.

Alfred Austin

On May 1st: Doing some work of finishing carpentry in the green terrace by polishing with some excellent oil for restoring and renewing the old (more than 20 years old) made to measure wooden pantry cabinets. It’s gonna be a well done work. Let’s enjoy a coffee pause now.

…and finally May arrived to bring sunshine, beautiful daisies and more moments for enjoying an amazing nature

A bit of poetry in the green terrace tonight. The magic of beams of light in the jars illuminates the little growing plants of tomatoes. Soon, we are going to have sweet yellow tomatoes for our appetizers.

Mother’s Day 2022/ Sieglinde apartment LE07503591000000616

“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.” —William Makepeace Thackeray

There is nothing better than picking up sun-warmed tomatoes and smelling them, feeling them and scrutinizing their shiny skins for imperfections, dreaming of ways to serve them. – Jose Andres

In the green terrace on Sunday afternoon

Some books are worth a reading and sometimes are worth a reading again, even after more than ten years from the first time, when it’s offered you the chance of doing it.

Works in progress on the balcony (Sieglinde Apt CIS LE 07503591000000616)

June is welcome with these small riping golden tomatoes on the balcony.

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, power and grace. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Vinca flowers on the balcony of August

Vibrant, elegant Mandevilla in bloom

Mandevilla flowers are still taking their own time to bloom and September month is still good time to keep on blooming. Taking photograph is to catch their beauty.

A basket of pomegranates from the garden: a generous harvest in October

November and its uncertain weather

Eat like a local

Last week, during a walking tour in the surrounding area of Lecce, in the South of Apulia, I took a pic of these gracious wild blue flowers blooming in the middle of ancient stones. Indeed, we love to have these vegetables cooked and served with legumes, which become a typical dish best appreciated in Apulia from locals, travellers and tourists. Can you tell about the name of these vegetables?

For celebrating December 8th

Pink marguerites daisies on my balcony

January 1st 2023

Dew drops on freesia leaves on January 1st 2023. It’s new life up on the terrace. Everything is sparkling and shines of the light of the new day.

Let’s keep on wondering..

Let’s keep on wondering..
Where does creativity come from?
Why?
What is the purpose of creativity?
Enjoy the day, everybody and make it sparkle 😊✨🌱✨

First Freesia flowers in February: Spring almost at the door

“And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Up on the terrace on March 1st

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”
― Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

Tulips

“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness ”
― Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above

Here come the hyacinths

It’s time to stand up on your toes and dance

Springtime

Springtime
“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

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