Lehman’s Country Life

Part I: Art Meets Science 
       If I were to tell you I spent the weekend arranging for the reversal of esterification, or more succinctly, hydrolysis of esters by a base, would you know I was talking about saponification? For those of us who promptly forgot everything we learned in Organic Chemistry as soon as final grades came out, none of these terms are exactly household words. But for as long as people have been making soap, combining fats or oils with a base such as lye, they’ve been employing this amazing chemical reaction and have, over time, turned what was once a basic, no-frills cleaner for everything from bodies to laundry, into a lovely and infinitely varied luxury.
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Autumn is here, and the herb garden is getting ready for a long rest. You have carefully tended to your herb garden throughout the growing season. Now comes the time to reap your harvest to get you over the winter until the garden awakens in spring.

You have a variety of choices to preserve your herbs. For fresh herbs all winter, you can dig some of the plants up and pot them into containers to make a garden for your kitchen windowsill. Or you can dry or freeze your herbs.

Harvesting Herbs
Most homegrown herbs should be harvested before the plant blooms. The exception to this rule is herbs from the mint family – mint, dill, and oregano, for example.
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I saw a glorious sky this morning. I tried to keep my eyes on the road long enough to get my kids to school so I could capture it in the photo above. As teens and pre teens my kids find it embarrassing to have a mom who goes running off into cornfields looking for the perfect angle in which to see the play of light and shadows thru the corn stubble with a camera! Such is life when your mom is an artist!

I find the beautiful scenery and Amish farmland in the Kidron area to be so inspiring! Today was one of those days in which my inspiration tank got filled to the brim. The ‘big sky’ started the day off. Then, while talking to a carpenter at work, my eye caught the intriguing wavy patterns of the wood grain in the slivers of lumber left on the ground while the crew built a garage. (I saved them to use later in a mixed media landscape collage!) Inspiration can come in such strange forms sometimes! I have stopped making excuses for getting excited over these kinds of finds and instead am grateful to be able to find treasures in the unexpected things in life. It does make it hard to stick to a schedule, though! Who would understand being side tracked by wavy slivers of wood? Maybe that’s why I am writing this so those of us with our heads in the clouds aren’t always told, “Hurry up! What are you looking at??? Come on! Do you know what time it is???” Likely not since I am enthralled with visualizing and planning out my next art project while looking at this pile of odd shaped pieces of wood! Who thinks of schedules and time when being inspired? That’s worth something, isn’t it?
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