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as you can read below Betty MacDonald described Spring in a perfect way.
Spring is my favourite season.
What about you?
Wolfgang Hampel's new project Vita Magica
is fascinating because he is going to include Betty MacDonald,
other members of the Bard family and Betty MacDonald fan club honor
members.
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“Until I moved to the ranch, the coming of spring had been a gradual and painless thing, like developing a bust.”
Though I’m not sure pubescent girls would characterize bust
development as “gradual and painless,” I’ve never encountered such an
evocative description of spring as Betty MacDonald‘s in her 1945 classic book The Egg and I. If you are from Washington State, you’ve likely heard of
MacDonald and of this very funny book, which describes her experiences
living on a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula with no running
water and no electricity.
Ma and Pa Kettle (modeled after MacDonald’s slacker neighbors) originated in The Egg and I, and were featured in its 1947 film adaptation, starring Fred McMurray and Claudette Colbert. They may also have originated the concept of the “spin-off.”
Ma and Pa Kettle (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What I didn’t realize until reading The Egg and I, is that Betty MacDonald was a trailblazer in the art of food writing. “..there was so much of everything and it was so inexpensive and so
easy to get that it was inevitable that we should expect to eat like
kings,” she writes of Pacific Northwest bounty, such as fresh field
mushrooms, clams, oysters, steelhead salmon and Dungeness Crab “We’d go
on regular crab sprees –eat cracked crab with homemade mayonnaise
well-flavored with garlic and Worcestershire, until it ran out of our
ears. Have deviled crab, crab Louis and crab claws sauteed in butter and
served with Tartar sauce.” At the time, she notes, she could buy a
gunnysack full of Dungeness crabs for $1. Sadly, she was not a fan of geoduck.
It's the largest burrowing clam in the world, and a local favorite.
Still, all that natural bounty from the garden and berry bushes could be oppressive come canning season.
MacDonald describes herself as “lyrical with joy” when her pressure cooker blew up. “I was free! Free! F-R-E-E!” Her practical husband calmly picked up the Sears Roebuck catalogue and ordered her another. Global warming notwithstanding, MacDonald’s 1945 description of
Seattle springs holds true today: “Seattle spring was a delicate flower
of the pale gray winter –a pastel prelude to the pale yellow summer
which flowed gently into the lavender autumn and on into the pale gray
winter. It was all very subtle and we wore the same clothes the year
around (note that this was written long before the invention of fleece – our native dress) and often had beach fires in January but found it too cold for them in June..”
From Tim Jones' (a self-described minivan-driving soccer dad) blog "View from the Bleachers."
What she means is that despite the changes in season, we can be cold
here, all year round. I write this, wrapped in a blanket, looking out
the window as sunlight strobes on and off my plum trees, which are
already past their bloom. It hailed last week, and all this week the
weather has ping-ponged from lion-like to lamb-like and back.
So it’s lucky that we have seasonal bounty to warm and sustain us
and especially lucky that we can leave the growing to the trusted
professionals, yet still eat like kings and even can at our discretion.
Like most Sundays, this past Sunday I walked to the Ballard Farmers Market to see what was new for spring.
My favorite fish guys.
I emerged with beets, radishes, stinging nettles, jerusalem
artichokes and freshly caught salmon and had fun all week cooking
lighter spring fare. David Lebovitz was generous enough to share on Facebook that Amazon was offering a special promotion of Dorie Greenspan cookbooks.
I was among the lucky who nabbed Around My French Tableand Baking: From my home to yours for $10, including shipping. We ate Dorie’s salmon with tapenade and Jerusalem artichokes
roasted with garlic, and Three Beet Caviar with Endive and Goat Cheese
and Nettle Frittata with Garlic and Ricotta (the latter two recipes from
Deborah Madison’s inspirational book “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets”
Urged by Dorie Greenspan, I whipped up a batch of creme fraiche, and
while I was at it, replenished my supply of preserved lemons.
I’m ready for spring.
A tulip field in the nearby Skagit Valley.
Though Jeff is resigned to the fact that you won’t find me working
in our garden (I’ve finally had to stop bragging about the 50 bulbs I
planted on Daughter #1’s first day of pre-school 11 years ago), you will
find me happily in the kitchen.
Soon the sun will become a more familiar presence and our markets
will abound with fava beans (the fresh ones are labor intensive, but
great in so many ways, especially with pecorino cheese) and pea vines
and fiddlehead ferns and shoots of all sorts and morels, glorious
morels.
I first learned about Betty MacDonald when my kids were little and we read the hilarious Mrs. Piggle Wigglebooks,
in which kids were cured of their bad habits by this magical woman who
lived in an upside-down house (my favorite: the kids who refused to
take a bath and was allowed to get so dirty that her parents were able
to plant radishes on her).
When daughter #1 started kindergarten and I was perhaps a little
weepy, I decided that, like the mothers MacDonald wrote about, I would
greet her after school with a freshly baked cake.
It didn’t last long, but over the years I’ve tried various recipes
for French yogurt cake, which along with tartines, is a popular after
school snack a la francaise.
Dorie Greenspan has a recipe in her baking book, which I made this
week, and Molly Wizenberg has a nice, lemony recipe which first appeared
on her blog Orangette and can also be found in her book A Homemade Life. I’m including it here.
It’s a nice pick-me-up when the sun goes behind the clouds or you
are agonizing over the gradual and not always painless emergence of your
bust, or for that matter, the inevitable drooping of said bust at
mid-life.
I’m back East and this just made me
homesick. I’ll be back next weekend and have already decided which
Farmers Markets I’ll be dropping by. While everyone here, (NH), are
donning winter coats and scarves I’m perfectly comfortable in my very
Seattle clothing choices. I really enjoy your blog!
Thanks for the nice compliment!
Hurry up and return to Seattle. The sun has been shining and it’s been
at or near 70 degrees for the past few days. First time in a long time!
David Cameron was left dangerously exposed on Tuesday after repeatedly failing to provide a clear and full account about links to an offshore fund set up by his late father, as the storm over the Panama Papers gathered strength in both the UK and elsewhere around the world. The prime minister and his office have now offered three partial answers about the fund set up by his father Ian,
which avoided ever paying tax in Britain. The key unanswered question
is whether the prime minister’s family stands to gain in the future from
his father’s company, Blairmore, an investment fund run from the
Bahamas.
After Downing Street said on Monday that the fund was a “private
matter”, a journalist asked Cameron about it during a visit to
Birmingham on Tuesday. Cameron replied: “I own no shares, no offshore trusts, no offshore funds, nothing like that. And, so that, I think, is a very clear description.” He dodged the key part of the question about whether he or his family stood to benefit.Having failed to satisfy reporters, Downing Street issued a further
statement that Cameron’s wife and children also do not benefit from
offshore funds but again left the main question about the future
unanswered. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had called earlier in the day for an independent investigation,
told the Guardian: “Three times Downing Street has been asked to
provide a full and comprehensive answer. The public has a right to know
the truth. “We need to know the full extent of the links between Britain and the
web of tax avoidance and evasion revealed by the Panama Papers at all
levels.”
The leak of 11.5m files from the Panama-based Mossack Fonseca
continued to create uproar and upheaval around the world. The documents
were leaked to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them
with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, the Guardian, the BBC and other media organisations. The latest developments include:
The German justice minister, Heiko Maas, said the country planned
to introduce a new national transparency register to make offshore
companies disclose their owners’ identity.
France’s finance minister announced that Panama would again be blacklisted as an uncooperative tax haven.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced that he would set
up an independent judicial commission to investigate whether his family
was involved in anything illegal through ownership several offshore
companies.
Revelations that the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has secretly built one of the single biggest offshore property empires in Britain, owning dozens of central London properties worth more than £1.2bn through offshore companies supplied by Mossack Fonseca.
The row embroiling Cameron picked up pace on Tuesday morning when
Corbyn responded to Downing Street’s assertion that the matter was
private by telling reporters: “Well, it’s a private matter insofar as
it’s a privately held interest. But it’s not a private matter if tax is
not being paid. So an investigation must take place, an independent
investigation, unprejudiced, to decide whether or not tax has been
paid.”
Later in the day, Cameron told reporters: “In terms of my
own financial affairs, I own no shares. I have a salary as prime
minister and I have some savings, which I get some interest from and I
have a house, which we used to live in, which we now let out while we
are living in Downing Street and that’s all I have.” Downing Street returned to the issue later. A No 10 spokesperson
said: “To be clear, the prime minister, his wife and their children do
not benefit from any offshore funds. The prime minister owns no shares.
“As has been previously reported, Mrs Cameron owns a small
number of shares connected to her father’s land, which she declares on
her tax return.”Downing Street also attempted to shift the argument back to Labour. A
source called on people “suggesting that Mr Cameron and his family are
benefiting from off shore trusts” to come forward with evidence. “The
onus is on them to put up or shut up. The prime minister has put out a
very clear statement.”As well as pressing Cameron, Corbyn called for a cleanup of Britain’s
overseas territories and dependencies, such as the British Virgin
Islands, which accounts for about half the companies named in the Panama
Papers, the Cayman Islands and Anguilla.He said the government should consider imposing direct rule on
British overseas territories and crown dependencies, which lie at the
heart of the allegations.
Advertisement
The
government had already scheduled a meeting of G7 countries in London on
12 May to discuss the overseas territories and crown dependencies. Tax
campaigners, however, said that government officials had been
downplaying expectations for months, telling them that tax would not be
high on the agenda and that instead the main item would be corruption,
such as the low-level bribery of officials. The shadow leader of the Commons, Chris Bryant, who was responsible
for overseas territories and dependencies when Labour was in power and
was involved in a standoff with them over transparency, said: “There is a
great deal of power the government has if it chooses to exercise it,
even without the nuclear option of direct rule.” He said he had pressed them to be more transparent and tried to put
pressure on them by refusing to authorise loans, but the standoff ended
when the Conservatives took power. The City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, also responded
to the Panama Papers. It said: “The FCA has written to a number of firms
about this issue, including those on our systematic anti-money
laundering programme, and we are working closely with a number of other
agencies who are also looking at this. “As part of our responsibility to ensure the integrity of the UK
financial markets, we require all authorised firms to have systems and
controls in place to mitigate the risk that they might be used to commit
financial crime. We have also today published our annual business plan
which identifies financial crime and anti-money laundering activity as
one of our priorities for the year.” In
the US, Obama addressed reporters at the White House, making the
highest profile intervention yet in favour of the global reform of tax
avoidance. “There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally
is a huge problem. The problem is that a lot of this stuff is legal,
not illegal,” he said. The US president said the leak from Panama illustrated the scale of
tax avoidance involving Fortune 500 companies, running into trillions of
dollars worldwide. “We shouldn’t make it legal to engage in transactions just to avoid
taxes,” he said, praising instead “the basic principle of making sure
everyone pays their fair share”. Only about 200 US citizens have been identified so far in the leaked
data, but the US justice department, which aggressively pursues cases
both domestically but internationally, issued a statement saying it
“takes very seriously all credible allegations of high level, foreign
corruption that might have a link to the United States or the US
financial system”.
Following in Betty’s footsteps in Seattle:
or some small talk with Betty
Copyright 2011/2016 by Letizia Mancino All rights reserved translated by Mary Holmes
We
were going to Canada in the summer. “When we are in Edmonton”, I said
to Christoph Cremer, “let’s make a quick trip to Seattle”. And that’s
how it happened. At Edmonton Airport we climbed into a plane and two
hours later we landed in the city where Betty had lived. I was so happy
to be in Seattle at last and to be able to trace Betty’s tracks!
Wolfgang Hampel had told Betty’s friends about our arrival. They
were happy to plan a small marathon through the town and it’s
surroundings with us. We only had a few days free. One should not
underestimate Wolfgang’s talent in speedily mobilizing Betty’s friends,
even though it was holiday time. E-mails flew backwards and forwards
between Heidelberg and Seattle, and soon a well prepared itinerary was
ready for us. Shortly before my departure Wolfgang handed me several
parcels, presents for Betty MacDonald's friends. I rushed to pack the
heavy gifts in my luggage but because of the extra weight had to throw
out a pair of pajamas!
After we had landed we took a taxi to the
Hotel in downtown Seattle. I was so curious to see everything. I
turned my head in all directions like one of the hungry hens from
Betty’s farm searching for food! Fortunately it was quite a short
journey otherwise I would have lost my head like a loose screw! Our
hotel room was on the 22nd floor and looked directly out onto the
16-lane highway. There might have been even more than 16 but it made me
too giddy to count! It was like a glimpse of hell! “And is this
Seattle?” I asked myself. I was horrified! The cars racing by were
enough to drive one mad. The traffic roared by day and night. We
immediately contacted Betty MacDonald's friends and let them know we had
arrived and they confirmed the times when we should see them.
On
the next morning I planned my first excursion tracing Betty’s tracks. I
spread out the map of Seattle. “Oh dear” I realized “the Olympic
Peninsula is much too far away for me to get there.” Betty nodded to me! “Very difficult, Letizia, without a car.”
“But I so much wanted to see your chicken farm”
“My chickens are no longer there and you can admire the mountains from a distance”
But
I wanted to go there. I left the hotel and walked to the waterfront
where the State Ferry terminal is. Mamma mia, the streets in Seattle are
so steep! I couldn’t prevent my feet from running down the hill. Why
hadn’t I asked for brakes to be fixed on my shoes? I looked at the
drivers. How incredibly good they must be to accelerate away from the
red traffic lights. The people were walking uphill towards me as briskly
as agile salmon. Good heavens, these Americans! I tried to keep my
balance. The force of gravity is relentless. I grasped hold of objects
where I could and staggered down. In Canada a friend had warned me that in Seattle I would see a lot of people with crutches.
Betty laughed. “ It’s not surprising, Letizia, walking salmon don’t fall directly into the soft mouth of a bear!” “ Betty, stop making these gruesome remarks. We are not in Firlands!”
I
went further. Like a small deranged ant at the foot of a palace monster
I came to a tunnel. The noise was unbearable. On the motorway, “The
Alaskan Way Viaduct”, cars, busses and trucks were driving at the speed
of light right over my head. They puffed out their poisonous gas into
the open balconies and cultivated terraces of the luxurious sky-
scrapers without a thought in the world. America! You are crazy! “Betty,
are all people in Seattle deaf? Or is it perhaps a privilege for
wealthy people to be able to enjoy having cars so near to their eyes and
noses to save them from boredom?”
“When the fog democratically allows everything to disappear into nothing, it makes a bit of a change, Letizia”
“ Your irony is incorrigible, Betty, but tell me, Seattle is meant to be a beautiful city, But where?” I had at last reached the State Ferry terminal.
“No
Madam, the ferry for Vashon Island doesn’t start from here,” one of the
men in the ticket office tells me. ”Take a buss and go to the ferry
terminal in West Seattle.” Betty explained to me “The island lies in
Puget Sound and not in Elliott Bay! It is opposite the airport. You must
have seen it when you were landing!” “Betty, when I am landing I shut my eyes and pray!”
It’s time for lunch. The weather is beautiful and warm. Who said to me that it always rains here? “Sure
to be some envious man who wanted to frighten you away from coming to
Seattle. The city is really beautiful, you’ll see. Stay by the
waterfront, choose the best restaurant with a view of Elliott Bay and
enjoy it.” “Thank you Betty!” I find a table on the
terrace of “Elliott’s Oyster House”. The view of the island is
wonderful. It lies quietly in the sun like a green fleecy cushion on the
blue water. Betty plays with my words: “Vashon Island is a big
cushion, even bigger than Bainbridge which you see in front of your
eyes, Letizia. The islands look similar. They have well kept houses and
beautiful gardens”.
I relax during this introduction, “Bainbridge” you are Vashon Island, and order a mineral water.
“At one time the hotel belonging to the parents of Monica Sone stood on the waterfront.” “Oh, of your friend Kimi!” Unfortunately I forget to ask Betty exactly where it was.
My mind wanders and I think of my mountain hike back to the hotel! “Why is there no donkey for tourists?” Betty laughs:
“I’m sure you can walk back to the hotel. “Letizia can do everything.””
“Yes, Betty, I am my own donkey!” But
I don’t remember that San Francisco is so steep. It doesn’t matter, I
sit and wait. The waiter comes and brings me the menu. I almost fall off
my chair! “ What, you have geoduck on the menu! I have to try it” (I
confess I hate the look of geoduck meat. Betty’s recipe with the pieces
made me feel quite sick – I must try Betty’s favourite dish!) “Proof that you love me!” said Betty enthusiastically “ Isn’t the way to the heart through the stomach?”
I order the geoduck. The waiter looks at me. He would have liked to recommend oysters. “Geoduck no good for you!” Had he perhaps read my deepest thoughts? Fate! Then no geoduck. “No good for me.” “Neither geoduck nor tuberculosis in Seattle” whispered Betty in my ear! “Oh Betty, my best friend, you take such good care of me!”
I order salmon with salad.
“Which salmon? Those that swim in water or those that run through Seattle?”
“Betty, I believe you want me to have a taste of your black humour.”
“Enjoy it then, Letizia.” During lunch we talked about tuberculosis, and that quite spoilt our appetite. “Have you read my book “The Plague and I”?”
“Oh Betty, I’ve started to read it twice but both times I felt so sad I had to stop again!”
“But
why?” asked Betty “Nearly everybody has tuberculosis! I recovered very
quickly and put on 20 pounds! There was no talk of me wasting away! What
did you think of my jokes in the book?”
“Those would have been a
good reason for choosing another sanitorium. I would have been afraid
of becoming a victim of your humour! You would have certainly given me a
nickname! You always thought up such amusing names!” Betty laughed.
“You’re
right. I would have called you “Roman nose”. I would have said to Urbi
and Orbi “ Early this morning “Roman nose” was brought here. She speaks
broken English, doesn’t eat geoduck but she does love cats.”
“Oh
Betty, I would have felt so ashamed to cough. To cough in your presence,
how embarrassing! You would have talked about how I coughed, how many
coughs!”
“It depends on that “how”, Letizia!”
“Please,
leave Goethe quotations out of it. You have certainly learnt from the
Indians how to differentiate between noises. It’s incredible how you
can distinguish between so many sorts of cough! At least 10!”
“So few?”
”And
also your descriptions of the patients and the nurses were pitiless. An
artistic revenge! The smallest pimple on their face didn’t escape your
notice! Amazing.”
“ I was also pitiless to myself. Don’t forget my irony against myself!”
Betty
was silent. She was thinking about Kimi, the “Princess” from Japan! No,
she had only written good things about her best friend, Monica Sone, in
her book “The Plague and I”. A deep friendship had started in the
hospital. The pearl that developed from the illness. “Isn’t it
wonderful, Betty, that an unknown seed can make its way into a mollusk
in the sea and develop into a beautiful jewel?” Betty is paying
attention.
“Betty, the friendship between you and Monica reminds
me of Goethe’s poem “Gingo-Biloba”. You must know it?” Betty nods and I
begin to recite it:
The leaf of this Eastern tree Which has been entrusted to my garden Offers a feast of secret significance, For the edification of the initiate.
Is it one living thing. That has become divided within itself? Are these two who have chosen each other, So that we know them as one?
The
friendship with Monica is like the wonderful gingo-biloba leaf, the
tree from the east. Betty was touched. There was a deep feeling of trust
between us. “Our friendship never broke up, partly because she was
in distress, endangered by the deadly illness. We understood and
supplemented each other. We were like one lung with two lobes, one from
the east and one from the west!” “A beautiful picture, Betty. You were like two red gingo-biloba leaves!”
Betty
was sad and said ” Monica, although Japanese, before she really knew me
felt she was also an American. But she was interned in America,
Letizia, during the second world war. Isn’t that terrible?”
“Betty,
I never knew her personally. I have only seen her on a video, but what
dignity in her face, and she speaks and moves so gracefully!”
“Fate could not change her”
“Yes, Betty, like the gingo-biloba tree in Hiroshima. It was the only tree that blossomed again after the atom bomb!”
The
bill came and I paid at once. In America one is urged away from the
table when one has finished eating. If one wants to go on chatting one
has to order something else. “That’s why all those people gossiping
at the tables are so fat!” Betty remarks. “Haven’t you seen how many
massively obese people walk around in the streets of America. Like
dustbins that have never been emptied!” With this typically
unsentimental remark Betty ended our conversation.
Ciao! I so
enjoyed the talk; the humour, the irony and the empathy. I waved to her
and now I too felt like moving! I take a lovely walk along the
waterfront.
Now I am back in Heidelberg and when I think about
how Betty’s “Princessin” left this world on September 5th and that in
August I was speaking about her with Betty in Seattle I feel very sad.
The readers who knew her well (we feel that every author and hero of a
book is nearer to us than our fleeting neighbours next door) yes we, who
thought of her as immortal, cannot believe that even she would die
after 92 years. How unforeseen and unexpected that her death should come
four days after her birthday on September 1th. On September 5th I was
on my way to Turkey, once again in seventh heaven, looking back on the
unforgettable days in Seattle. I was flying from west to east towards
the rising sun.
Perhaps
the first plant I could recognize and name as a child was the daffodil,
a welcome sight and fragrance after a long New York winter. And
although native to the Mediterranean, daffodils (Narcissus species) have
been in Virginia since at least the middle of the seventeenth century.
Beginning in the 1890s, Gloucester County became a
center of daffodil production for much of the eastern United States.
Much of this revolved around “wild” or naturalized daffodils that were
cut and shipped north. By the middle of the twentieth century, this
industry was rapidly dying off for a variety of reasons. But Gloucester
County still has one daffodil breeder of note and continues to celebrate
its floral heritage with the Daffodil Festival on the last weekend of
March. More on that later.
The various Narcissus species, hybrids and
cultivars are commonly referred to as either daffodils, jonquils or even
simply narcissus, the latter especially when referring to the paper
whites commonly forced indoors. The term jonquil is commonly used in
certain regions for any daffodil, but technically refers only to one
group that has narrow reed-like foliage. The various daffodils are
divided into 13 divisions—or 12, if you believe some sources—that are
based on flower shape and heritage. For example, Division 1 daffodils
are called Trumpets, since the central portion or trumpet is quite long.
Regardless of division, colors range from yellow to white, perhaps with
some pink or orange in the trumpets. If you seek out specialty
nurseries, hundreds of cultivars are available.
All daffodils have similar cultural requirements.
As for the amount of sun they want, the more the better. Part sun, or
about six hours per day, is sufficient, but less sun than that will lead
to reduced blooming, even though the plants may soldier on for a long
time. And sunlight in a deciduous woodland does not really count as full
sunlight. As for soil, good drainage is important to avoid bulb rot. If
your soil is unusually sodden, either amend it with gravel or put
daffodils in a raised bed.
Daffodil bulbs should be planted at a depth equal
to about three times their diameter, so a two-inch bulb should be six
inches deep. Six inches is also a good distance between bulbs. Farther
apart and they lose visual impact; closer, and they will require
division sooner. Bulbs will look funny planted like soldiers in a
straight line, so if you have ten bulbs, better to either plant them in
two groups of five, or in a staggered double row. If you are planting a
very large number, you can avoid an overly orderly appearance by picking
up a handful and tossing them to the general area in which you wish to
plant.
There are any number of “new, improved,
back-saving!!” bulb planters out there. Use whatever works best for you,
which might just be an ordinary trowel or even a garden shovel. And
remember: nothing says you have to plant one bulb at a time. You can
take a spade and dig up a good-sized hole with one or two punches, and
then throw in three to five bulbs. For even larger areas, a rototiller
might be the quickest option. And do the bulbs have to be pointy-side
up? That’s the ideal, but the shoot will always get turned around and
pointed toward the sky anyway. If you’re in a hurry, ensuring that the
bulbs are at least on their side would be a good compromise.
Amending your soil with compost will definitely
give your daffodils a boost, but there’s no need to fertilize when
planting—which of course is not now, but in mid-to-late fall. In very
early spring, a balanced fertilizer—about 5-5-5 or 10-10-10 is
best—should be sprinkled around the plants just as their foliage
emerges. (You can also do this in the fall, but that assumes you’ll
remember where your daffodils are!) And speaking of feeding your
daffodils, we all know what to do with their foliage, which is there to
provide nutrients for the bulb, right? Doing nothing is perfectly okay.
Or when the foliage turns yellow and lies on the ground, you can throw
some mulch on it if the sight offends you. Do not cut the foliage off
while it’s still green or tie it up in cutesy knots! That prevents
movement of nutrients down to the bulb; plus, it takes a lot of valuable
gardening time.
But back to Gloucester County. The annual Daffodil
Festival takes place on the last weekend of March and includes the usual
attractions: a parade, a queen, entertainers, a race, a car show, and
of course, daffodils. (A full schedule is available on the county’s
website. There’s also a link to the history of daffodil farming in this
corner of Virginia.) On Saturday they will be running frequent buses
over to Brent and Becky’s Bulbs for tours and shopping. Brent and Becky
Heath own a business that has been in the family for several
generations, at one time operating as the Daffodil Mart. Although they
now sell many other types of bulbs, daffodils are still a specialty,
with over 200 varieties available.
Once planted, daffodils tend to naturalize, meaning
they spread slowly, but never seem to become invasive. Part of their
secret to longevity might be their poisonous nature: deer and other
critters don’t bother them, so you can enjoy your host of daffodils for
many years.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club, founded by Wolfgang Hampel, has members in 40 countries.
Wolfgang Hampel, author of Betty MacDonald biography interviewed Betty MacDonald's family and friends. His Interviews have been published on CD and DVD by Betty MacDonald Fan Club. If you are interested in the Betty MacDonald Biography or the Betty MacDonald Interviews send us a mail, please.
Several original Interviews with Betty MacDonald are available.
We are also organizing international Betty MacDonald Fan Club Events for example, Betty MacDonald Fan Club Eurovision Song Contest Meetings in Oslo and Düsseldorf, Royal Wedding Betty MacDonald Fan Club Event in Stockholm and Betty MacDonald Fan Club Fifa Worldcup Conferences in South Africa and Germany.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club Honour Members are Monica Sone, author of Nisei Daughter and described as Kimi in Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald's nephew, artist and writer Darsie Beck, Betty MacDonald fans and beloved authors and artists Gwen Grant, Letizia Mancino, Perry Woodfin, Traci Tyne Hilton, Tatjana Geßler, music producer Bernd Kunze, musician Thomas Bödigheimer, translater Mary Holmes and Mr. Tigerli.
Betty MacDonald fan club got fans in 40 countries.