by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jul 21, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
In all my Tidewater summers, I have yet to see chicory growing along the road along with the Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. Go west just a short ways, however, and it starts brightening up the roadside. The arresting blue of a chicory flower has always been...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jul 14, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
I open the attic window and lean out. Crape myrtle flowers billow below me in a pink froth. It’s that time of year. Blooming crape myrtles line grassy sidewalks in small towns everywhere. White church steeples rise out of a sea of pink. Visitors from France gasp at...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jul 7, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
It is midsummer, and wild Turk’s Cap lilies curl back in the blazing sun. Blackberries disappear as fast as they ripen along Lucas Creek, and the orange witch fingers of trumpet vine flash through their brambles above the tide’s murky reach. Bobbing on a stem of cord...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jun 30, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
The winter was wearing on to spring, when I had a shock. I was making a sandwich, and used up the last of the bread and butter pickles. It was no big deal. I could just go down into the basement and get another jar. Except that—when I went down the stairs to get...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jun 23, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
The solstice has come and gone. Now all flowers are summer flowers, including the spring ones that linger. In that category I would place this white false indigo that sprang up in a place it was not planted, blooming in a season it wasn’t intended for. How cheeky it...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jun 17, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
Last week the newspaper reported that June 14 was meant to be Play-Outside Day. At our house, that day comes every day. There’s a garage full of bikes, cars, balls and bats There’s a playhouse for stirring up messy dishes with mulch and rain barrel water And then...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jun 9, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
I know summer is here when this enameled pitcher comes down off a high shelf. Its burnished orange is the only thing that will do for this wildflower bouquet, echoing the outrageous flaming of the first sprays of butterfly weed. And though larkspur, feverfew,...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Jun 3, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
For a hundred years now, summers have brought company to our farmhouse–sleeping bags on the attic carpet, picnics under the oaks, and joyous firefly-catching at dusk. Not to mention food and more food any and every hour of the day—like these Memorial Day lentil...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | May 27, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
Lisa’s garden this week is awash in beautiful colors. The cool flowers she planted last fall and wrote about all winter are bursting into bloom. They sat with their small but growing feet in the cold and damp of a miserable winter. And now they are shining like this...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | May 19, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
This afternoon Oliver Wendell Hertzler was put into the earth he loved–all but his spirit, which was received in a place he loved even better. With a few words and pictures, I celebrate the gifts he has shared with me and my family, especially in the last few...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | May 12, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
The dreamy blue of wild false indigo eluded us for decades. Our very first wild flower garden, back in the 90’s, grew from a pack of seeds scattered over the lawn and a few choice plants bought at the Virginia Living Museum native plant sale. One of those plants was...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | May 5, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
It was Mother’s Day morning. As special pancakes puffed in the oven, I slipped up to the guest room to open the blinds to the gorgeous May sunshine. I don’t remember which little boys had slept in the tousled bed, but I will never forget the dove. She sat a few inches...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Apr 28, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
I had just taken two loaves of cracked wheat bread from the oven when a package arrived. The sender was Bunni, my forever friend, my first neighbor and childhood playmate, and like me, a descendant of I.D. and Fannie Hertzler who first purchased the 1200-acre plot of...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Apr 21, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
The greatest delight in our farmhouse-yard-turned-suburbia is to let things grow. Yes, Robby mows the green weed/grass lawn. He carefully trims and sweeps the curbs. We never stop weeding. But all around, in the flower beds and corners and shady groves, we leave the...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Apr 14, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
Feathers rippling, dust scratched and tossed, red combs quivering…the busy sound of clucks and trills and every now and then the triumphant arching crow of the presiding rooster. My memories of chicken days on my parents’ Lucas Creek Road home don’t date back to...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Apr 7, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
When I was a girl, we had the novelty of an April Fool’s Day snowstorm. As if the calendar date weren’t unusual enough, the snow was memorable in that it fell on fully-unfurled dogwood blossoms. Up until that day, I had thought of dogwood blossoms as white. That day,...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Mar 31, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
This week, on the first hot day, when a bright dandelion was spotted, plucked, and offered to me without a stem, I was ready! For years, I had tried floating the things in little dessert bowls, but they always looked about to drown. Propping them up against the rim of...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Mar 24, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
Every year when the daffodils start to bloom, I meet nostalgia at every turn. Here are the ivory flowers with dark orange centers, the ones I dug from behind the barn after my mother died. Their radiance and fragrance take me right back to the time I spent with her in...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Mar 17, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
You might be wearing green, but on this cold, sleety, gray St. Patrick’s Day, you might also consider planting green! That is, if you want your colored eggs to nestle into a natural green nest on Easter morning.You will be able to bypass the tangle of pink and purple...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Mar 10, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
Everything and everyone on earth needed bonnets—or fur-lined parkas—these past few months, as winter twisted us in its icy grip. But today the words of Emily Dickinson resonate. The sun is finally blasting warm rays against the cold March ground. Last week I posted an...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Mar 3, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
I am so impatient for the first garden lettuce. Shaking brownish-green chunks out of a salad bag into a bowl is no longer cutting it for me. I want real lettuce: dark red, lime green, oak leaf, or deer tongue. I wouldn’t even care if slugs and spiders lurked along the...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Feb 25, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
It has been my season for unexpected gifts. Last night I returned from a week with grandchildren to find a jar of homemade hand lotion. I opened the lid and breathed in the aroma. Maybe it was just my recent bout with Valentine syndrome, but it smelled to me like...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Feb 17, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
My friendship with Lisa Ziegler began in the year 2000. I was standing in the Warwick River School parking lot, trying to be principal while my heart was aching. My father was in ICU at Riverside and I didn’t know how I could bear what this meant to me. Suddenly Lisa...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Feb 10, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
Cats notwithstanding, we have certainly had our share of big-eyed mice in and around our home. When we moved into the old Yoder farmhouse after it had sat desolate for six years, the mice welcomed us first. We were sleeping upstairs on the floor before our bed was...
by Susan Yoder Ackerman | Feb 4, 2014 | -Miracles in the Garden with Susan Yoder Ackerman
John and Everett never turn down a pumpkin pie that they can help make. Cinnamon rolls are always a big hit. And I’ve written before about the Soup’n’O’s that are standard fare, a basic chicken vegetable soup with alphabets which is requested...