Day: November 17, 2023

2023 · National Day Calendar

National Homemade Bread Day 2023

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Homemade Garlic/Rosemary Bread

Yeast bread calls for us to slow down. We need to spend time with each other as we work the dough and let it rest and rise before baking. Quick breads allow a special treat to share and enjoy with coffee or tea.  Other homemade breads, such as donuts, pretzels, muffins, and biscuits, add variety to our everyday meals. Making them with friends and family brings joy and an opportunity to exchange recipes.

Those, who make homemade bread commit to using good ingredients and investing in the time. They make it not only because they love the flavor, but also because they know the people they love to do. Homemade bread enriches the flavors of our meals and the flavors of our conversations, too.

Bread is full of symbolism around the world, across cultures and religions. In our lives, bread is valuable. We consider our livelihood to be our daily bread. We are making it, breaking it, consuming it as part of our faith. Bread can be exciting if it’s sliced or boring if it’s white. There’s a bonus bread, too. However, it seems a bit messy if it’s buttered on both sides. Then again, when we roll in the dough, it’s messy, too. Bake it, and it becomes heavy bread, but it means the same thing.

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2023 · Connecticut · 🍂🍁 Autumn 🍁🍂

🗺🧭 National Hiking Day 2023 🧭🗺

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Hiking wasn’t always the fashionable pastime it is today. Before the Subarus and the Jeeps and the Patagonias built an industry around the activity, walking – of any kind – was considered an activity for the impoverished or the vagrant. The Romantic era of the Victorian years inspired the likes of Walden and Thoreau to reconnect with nature and that, in turn, inspired the landscape architects to design parks with excellent walking trails (looking at you Frederick Law Olmsted of Central Park fame). Walking then became something of the educated, the unhurried, the luxurious. 

Until John Muir came along and walked his way through the Sierra Nevadas in California and demanded that not only hiking, walking, meandering, sojourning, whatever you want to call it to be accessible to every American citizen, but that the country should actively preserve natural areas of pristine ecology and beauty. So in 1890 he petitioned to create the National Park System and we were endowed with “America’s best idea” – Yosemite and Sequoia National Park. But even before Muir, on the east coast, a small group of people had banded together in 1876 to form the Appalachian Mountain Club, which aimed to protect and preserve all hiking trails along the historic mountain range and develop new ones. 

Resource: https://nationaltoday.com/national-hiking-day/

2023 · Days of The Week · Flower Friday · Our Greenhouse

Wild Pansy

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Viola tricolor is a common European wild flower, growing as an annual or short-lived perennial. The species is also known as wild pansy, Johnny Jump up (though this name is also applied to similar species such as the yellow pansy), heartsease, heart’s ease, heart’s delight, tickle-my-fancy, Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me, come-and-cuddle-me, three faces in a hood, love-in-idleness, and pink of my john.

It has been introduced into North America, where it has spread. It is the progenitor of the cultivated pansy, and is therefore sometimes called wild pansy; before the cultivated pansies were developed, “pansy” was an alternative name for the wild form. It can produce up to 50 seeds at a time. The flowers can be purple, blue, yellow or white.

Resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_tricolor