With a new garden that is essentially a blank canvas, I’ve been trying my hand at garden design. This is my first project.
Category Archive: Diversions
Fun things like photography, food, gardening, expat life, and so on which are not directly related to converting churches or sacred architecture.
Aug
12
Garden Cuisine: Berry ice creams
Our weedy little berry bushes keep producing, and this time I include a couple of recipes for ice cream using the berries I photographed for my last post on food from the garden.
Jul
29
Garden Cuisine: Eating the fruits of weeds
A post about the simple pleasures of taking advantage of the gift of weeds. And a bit of messing around with the camera as I take a break from plastering.
Jun
27
Garden Cuisine: Red Currant, Sage, and Lavender Pork on Paper-thin Zucchini
Continuing the series on recipes using produce from the garden, this time taking advantage of the bounty of zucchini and red currants, and the dry astringent flavors of sage and lavender leaves. This recipe features pork, but this can be easily substituted, or even vegetarianized. Includes a link to sources of “happy meat” in Germany.
Jun
19
Garden Cuisine: Lemon Balm-Asparagus Risotto
Having a garden is changing my cooking style slightly. This is the first in series of posts about what I’m doing with our produce. This recipe takes advantage of the last few days of (white) asparagus season here.
Jun
11
YouCapture: Flowers
I’ve been having a bit of trouble with taking pictures of lobelias and other intensely blue flowers. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, or if the chip in my camera isn’t up to snuff any more, but the very blue wavelengths just aren’t picked up properly. The lobelia photos I took all look …
Jun
09
Fragrant Roses and Times Past
A search for a strongly scented rose for our front garden, focusing on Old Garden Roses.
Apr
24
The Benefits of Trimming an Overgrown Hazelnut Tree
The house came with an overgrown hazelnut tree. I found the hard work of trimming the tree gave several benefits, some unexpected. I include a recipe for cured hazelnut-smoked goose breast.
Apr
06
Adventures in Brown-Thumb Gardening: Strawberry-Herb Hanging Baskets
I have a brown thumb. This has been well demonstrated to me by numerous crunchy brown houseplants. Any plant under my control generally looks vibrant and happy for a few months, and then suddenly dies. Then I give up on plants. I tend to forget about my ineptness if I haven’t had to care for …
Feb
19
Two fun images from the search
Following a request in a comment to yesterday’s post, here are two more fun images from our house hunt. One of the schoolhouses we looked at had been used to house Kurdish asylum seekers in the nineties. This was the last time that particular house had been occupied, and there were still some remnants. There …
About the author, this blog, and our church.
Together with my spouse, I bought a redundant church in a somewhat randomly chosen spot in Germany in early 2011 and we are working on making it habitable - and fabulous.
This blog is an account of our conversion adventures. I've also developed quite an enthusiasm for church conversions, and church architecture in general.
The building was built by the New Apostolic Church in the 1970s. It has lots of fundamental architectural features in common with gothic chapels (soaring ceiling, single nave, huge pointed windows, layout, etc.), but expressed using a modernist/post-modernist architectural vocabulary.
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