Afternoon Adventure: Servant Life Tour at The Elms

I want to say something meaningful about all this horrifying news coming out of Boston, but I can't find the words. There's only so much sadness I can take in at a time, especially when it's on such a vast scale as the Marathon and a citywide manhunt. At some point I just need to turn off the news. Maybe I'm avoiding reality, but once you have the basic information, how helpful is it to dwell on tragedy that doesn't personally touch you?

Instead, I want to think about the still-beautiful things.

On Tuesday, Josh and I drove down to Newport to visit The Elms, one of the mansions on Bellevue Avenue. We listened to NPR for the first half of the trip, but after a while it got to be too much, hearing such gruesome details about limbs lost as we passed flowering trees and sparkling water. So we turned to a music station, though not without feeling a bit callous for enjoying such a beautiful day.

As we wound through the scenic downtown, stopping for pedestrians and peering at the porched and gabled houses in colorful hues, the sadness of the real world seemed to lessen. That only continued when we arrived at The Elms, the one-time summer residence of the Berwinds, who made their fortune in coal. Unlike some of the mansions in Newport (cough Marble House cough), The Elms is a tasteful spinoff of an 18th-century French chateau (but that must be an oxymoron in itself, right?). Lavish statues decorate the grounds and refined gardens, and the interior resembles a fine art museum more than a residence. But you don't get the sense that the owners were trying to show off their wealth quite as much as other Newport residents.

In the 19th century, Newport, RI became a summer playground for the wealthy of New York and Philadelphia. Families like the Vanderbilts and Astors constructed lavish mansions, which they called "summer cottages," and they spent their summers having parties and taking the sea air away from the city. They sent groups of servants to Newport a few weeks in advance to open up the houses and prepare for the summer season, and they hired summer staff to help out with the massive parties they threw almost daily. Today many of these mansions are still standing, and you can visit a lot of them thanks to the work of the Newport Preservation Society.

We've been on a number of "regular" mansion tours in Newport over the past few years, so we decided to go on the "behind the scenes" Servant Life tour. Instead of wandering through the lavish parlors and second parlors and bedrooms, we came in through the servants' entrance on the side, passing under wisteria grown specifically to mask the servants' comings and goings. We hiked up four flights of back stairs to the servants' quarters, which resembled dormitories more than anything else (and were not divided by gender, as in Downton Abbey). We went out on the roof, where the servants could take smoke breaks or hang out when off-duty, camouflaged by an immensely tall wall. And we plunged into the basement boiler room and peered at the coal delivery system, a long tunnel with its own delivery cart.

Our guide told stories of Mr. Berwind firing all 40 members of the summer staff at once for having the gall to request a full day off in the summer. Of 18-hour days when the Berwinds entertained friends and colleagues. Of Irish immigrants finding their first jobs at the mansion and moving on to bigger and better things, like working as seamstresses. The guide didn't tell as many stories as I was hoping for, but nevertheless it was a fascinating glimpse into the "downstairs" life of the Newport mansions.

As we drove back towards Providence, I could feel the solemnity of the real world creeping back in. But instead we rolled down the windows and let the wind ruffle our hair, and tried to stay in that bygone world of servants and wealth just a bit longer. Sometimes a historical afternoon adventure is just the escape you need.

Spring greening

Ah, spring! When a young lady's fancy turns to...plants?

Yes, it is all plants, all the time around these parts. When Josh and I go for a walk, I coo over the tiny purple stars blooming in the myrtle. I envy the flocks of daffodils cheering up the still-drab grass. I tend lovingly to the starts toughening up under my grow light.

Now that the weather is warming up, I'm slowly getting the plants ready to go outside. This is a process called hardening off, and you have to take the plants outside in the sun over a period of days, letting them stay out longer each time to get used to wind, sun, and fresh air. I've also started moving some of the biggest starts into actual containers for the official growing season. (You can see the results of using Cow Pots below--the roots just grow right through the pots!)

So far, I've had mixed results. The plants are hardening off just fine, but last week I left some of the snap peas and peppers outside during a rather serious few days of rain, which meant the plants went swimming. The poor guys got so waterlogged that I had to pour off rainwater on more than one occasion. But they seem to be perking right up now that the sun has returned, and I'm looking forward to moving more starts into containers.

And perhaps the most exciting news around here is that I got permission from our landlords to spruce up the yard! I've been busily drawing up plans and completing soil tests to prepare the yard for planting. Because we live in an old house (danger of lead) and the yard isn't huge, I'll be sticking with the container plan for my edibles and planting only ornamentals in the actual yard. But it's still tremendously exciting. Plus, it gives me more of a reason to admire other people's plants...right?

Spring cleaning

It's getting to that point where things just feel blah. It's officially spring but not quite warm, the kids are either bonkers or asleep at school, and the crust for my first-ever tart puffs up like a balloon.

Even food is less than inspiring. Josh made a big pot of white bean, kale, and sausage soup at the beginning of the week, and although last time we declared it a delicious keeper, this time something went wrong. The dried beans didn't fully reconstitute, so we had to crunch our way through soup all week. By Wednesday, when I'd eaten soup for two dinners and a lunch, I could barely stand to look at the leftovers.

(I have a tried-and-true abhorrence of leftovers served for more than two nights in a row.)

All of this makes me think that

• I wouldn't have made it as a pioneer, with the relentless winter meals of beans, salt pork, and more beans
• Mrs. Patmore would have thrown me out of the kitchen for my lackluster tart-baking skills
• It's time for spring cleaning

I've written about spring cleaning the apartment before, but today I'm thinking more about getting my taste buds ready for spring. Time to retire heavy stews and rich food for a while--I'm going to embrace fresh vegetables and fruit, with plenty of salads and light meats and fish. Of course, I'll still save space for indulgences like apple charlotte (coming soon) and homemade ice cream, but there's something exciting about freshening up the kitchen pantry for spring. And I can only hope that making fresh changes in one corner of my life will help lend inspiration to other corners, too. (Middle school children, I'm looking at you.)

The wearing of the green

Almost all the seeds I planted a few weeks ago have sprouted, and my seed tray is now a veritable wonderland of tiny green sprouts and tendrils.

While I love all the phases of the growing season (except perhaps pest control--haven't figured out a green way of combating aphids yet), this is definitely my favorite. I kneel down in front of the seed tray at least once a day, murmuring sweet nothings into the seedlings' unfurling ears. Maybe this makes me crazy...but that's fine.

Looking at the moss-like cover of the tiny lobelia sprouts puts me in mind of lush gardens and winding paths leading to secret hideaways. It's my someday dream to build a Secret Garden, as magical as the one at the end of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel, and meanwhile I have to be content with filing away inspiration and images for later. The website Gardenista has been particularly fun to pore over--it's full of beautiful gardens from around the world, as well as advice on how to create your own.

Tell me, do you save ideas for someday gardens or someday houses? And is Pinterest good for this sort of thing? I'm tempted, but so many kinds of social media make me wary.

Starting seeds

Earlier this week, it was finally starting to feel like spring. The air lost some of its chill, birds chirped in the tree outside our dining room window, and the first crocuses poked up from neighborhood yards. Of course, this morning it's snowing, so we need a good dose of cheer to pick up our spirits. Let's talk about this season's garden.

I ordered seeds from Fedco and Vesey's, two small-batch, cold-weather plant vendors recommended by Henry Homeyer. Both are great because their plants are bred to withstand northerly climates, and Fedco sends a limited number of seeds. This way I don't feel guilty for wasting seeds. In the end, I may have gone (slightly) overboard for my modest container garden, but they all looked so good! Two small packages arrived with the seeds a week later, and I looked through them longingly as I waited for the right planting day.

The last frost for Rhode Island lands somewhere between March 30 and April 30 (specific, I know). I decided to start the earliest seeds (4-6 weeks before the last frost) over the weekend, and I spent a lovely few hours setting up my grow light and arranging pots and growing material.

This year I'm trying out Cow Pots, these super-environmental seed starter pots made of composted cow manure. Once the seeds are ready to transplant, you simply put them in the planting medium, pot and all, and the pots gradually degrade while giving your plants a jolt of natural fertilizer. They sounded awesome, and they (barely) smell at all. Josh was wary, but so far he hasn't complained.

Here's what I planted:

• sweet peppers
• hot peppers
• spinach
• lavender
• cosmos
• sugar snap peas
• tomatoes
• lobelia

My sown seeds are now sitting patiently under the grow light, and I may or may not be excitedly checking them at least twice a day for progress. No signs of life yet, but it's early days. If you're planting a garden this year, have you started seeds yet? What are you growing?

Maple sugaring (II)

Last week I wrote about my family's maple sugaring tradition. Today I'll add an amendment: while we love most of the maple sugaring process (tapping trees, collecting sap, boiling it down in the evaporator), we have a hard time with one part: finishing the syrup.

This is the part where the syrup has been boiled to the right consistency, but you have to filter out the minerals and sediment in order to package it. First you heat up the syrup to the boiling point, and then you run it through a wool filter. It's a long and slow process, mostly because the syrup gets all gummed up in the wool filter (what with residue and all that). Once you finally have enough syrup, you have to heat it up again in order to hot-pack it. Still, this is nothing more than filling fresh pint or quart bottles and sealing with a special cap. It's much less involved than canning.

So yes, my family loves one long and slow process (boiling), but somehow we can't make ourselves love another long and slow process (filtering). I know, I know. The idiosyncrasies of the human mind!

As a result, we've made syrup for years without going through that final step. Since the syrup's never been hot-packed, we have to keep it in the freezer. So we have a freezer full of maple syrup.

Ah, problems.

Just before I flew back to Rhode Island, my dad and I spent an afternoon and evening filtering and packaging a few quarts of syrup. We discovered it's best to do this when you can walk away for a while; that way, the intensely slow drip of the filter won't drive you completely insane. In fact, it was actually kind of fun.

But while this process may seem extremely old-fashioned and back-to-the-land, it's actually a "modernized" version of the earliest maple sugaring. The Chippewa and other Northeastern Native American tribes were the first to harvest maple syrup, long before the Europeans set foot in North America. The Chippewa collected sap in much the same way as we do--a makeshift spile let sap drip into a bucket, and it was boiled until syrupy--but they created a different end product. Instead, they turned most of the syrup into granulated maple sugar, which was more easily stored throughout the year. By working the syrup in a special trough, they could turn it into fine granules that were then stored in birch bark containers. The Chippewa drew on this store throughout the year for ceremonies and special meals.

No matter which way you finish, maple sugaring is a labor-intensive process that shows you where your food comes from, beginning to end. And that's something to savor.

Maple sugaring

In our family, February and March are the maple syrup months. Temperatures dip to freezing at night and warm up during the day, so the sap runs easily from the trees. Evenings are spent out in the sugar shed, boiling sap down to golden syrup in a gas-heated evaporator. On weekends, we enjoy pancakes with maple syrup fresh from boiling.

My parents started this grand maple sugaring experiment the year I was born. Initially it was a small operation: one or two taps in the trees, yielding just enough sap to boil on the stove. My dad reminisces wryly about the time he forgot the sap on the stove while he was painting the nursery, and the pot boiled over into a sticky, burnt mess. Since then the project has slowly grown. My dad transitioned to a secondhand evaporator (a channeled metal container that heats up the sap evenly), and we invited my first-grade class over on a field trip. (Fifteen little first-graders standing very close to a hot metal evaporator...there was at least one melted winter jacket.) We helped tap trees and ate cornbread with fresh maple syrup.

After we moved to a new house, the improvements continued: refined heating apparatuses, a new evaporator, special sets of plastic bags to collect the sap. We've visited bigger farms during Maple Madness, Northeast Ohio's maple sugaring festival (yes, it's that big here). We've seen a huge farm that collects sap via plastic tubing, with special machines that jump-start the boiling process; we've shyly toured an Amish operation that heats entirely with wood. There are so many options for processing sap, and yet there's nothing I love more than our own.

Dad's trying out bright blue polyethylene bags this year. They're not as scenic as those metal buckets you see in postcards, but they're much easier to empty. When we've collected enough, we hike back to the red sugar shed in the backyard to start boiling. In some ways, this shed is the culmination of this ongoing project: a rustic space set aside just for maple sugaring, warmed by a wood stove. When I was in high school, Dad set up a radio and speakers out in the shed so we could listen to the oldies station and sing along while we watched the sap. I've since run off with that radio, but standing around in the quiet listening to the sap boil is perfect in a different way. We have a chance to talk, and sometimes Mom hikes down to take photos, and I get the sense that this is one thing that will never change.

Planning the garden

Today I taught my first session with a new group of students: little guys (to me, anyway), 4th - 6th graders. We talked about reading and books and the program we'll be starting tomorrow. The kids were fun, energetic, and so genuine. I always maintained that I could never teach anyone younger than 7th grade, and yet...I'm looking forward to this semester.

I don't want to get all cheesy on you guys and talk about new beginnings and whatnot, but with January being so gloomy, it's hard not to dream about a fresh start. And since I'm in the middle of a crash-course fresh start at school, I've been thinking about beginnings in other areas of life, too. Lately of the green variety: the garden.

Last summer I tried out container gardening for the first time, ambitiously calling it my "kitchen garden." There were tomatoes, spinach, snap peas and lettuce. The squirrels probably enjoyed more of its bounty than I did. And yet there was something so satisfying about growing a tiny garden from start to finish. I watched my little seedlings obsessively, bending down to check on them every morning, and when they moved to bigger containers I stuck my finger in the soil every few days to make sure they had enough water. My dad and I traded tips on growing the best tomatoes. When autumn arrived and it came time to clean out the pots for next season, my heart ached a little bit.

But! Now it's time to plan for this coming season. I've hunkered down in the dining room with library books and an organic gardening text recommended by a friend. I'm taking notes on what plants to grow together and what seeds to order from catalogs. And over the weekend I fell for a few pots of herbs at the farmers' market, because who wouldn't? They now sit on my great-grandmother's plant stand in the living room.

So here's my tentative plan, in containers once again:

• snap peas
• peppers
• kale and spinach
• carrots
• herbs: parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (try growing those together without breaking into song); lavender, oregano, cilantro, and dill
• flowers, just because

Ambitious? Yes. Doable? Uncertain. But planning the garden makes January a little less gloomy, and there's something to be said for that.

Are you planning a garden? What will you plant?

"Field Notes" notebook: Column & Stripe.