softening the focus

You may notice that the focus of this blog is subtly shifting as the autumn progresses.  As the plants in the garden grow fewer in number, one of my concerns has been that it not get too visually boring — for you or for me.  There’s only so many different photos I can take of cardinal climber vines slowly dying in the golden autumn light.  (Although that number is surprisingly large, actually.)

So I’m softening the focus a bit.  I’ll be going back to the origins of the Victory Garden last spring.  But keep in mind I didn’t have a blog then, and so my photos were mostly taken as personal documentation.  I rarely thought of photographing the progress that we were making.  I was mostly just … doing it.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’ve decided to start bringing in the images from further afield.  Sometimes that will be just a few feet from the boundaries of the kitchen garden, such as when I showed y’all that lovely scarlet dogwood seed.  Sometimes the shots may be far removed in chronology.  And I’m definitely going to continue showing you kitchen scenes, shots taken of our summer’s bounty, and details that might not have been covered in the overflowing abundance of summer.  The garden provides many more than seven different views every week in peak season, and we certainly couldn’t cover all that territory as it was happening.

But I may go a bit farther than that now, into the woods surrounding our house, perhaps even some views taken in town or on my various expeditions and adventures and Artist Dates.  There is so much to see now that my eyes are not trained so narrowly on my tomato plants — although I do believe that narrowed focus was responsible for me learning to see those plants a lot better, and perhaps learning to photograph them in more interesting and attractive ways as I considered what I wanted to show you all on the blog.

This photograph is of some chrysanthemums that ended up in an old San Pelegrino Limonata (yum!) bottle, sitting in the soap dish in our bathroom.  They seemed so full of light that morning, an almost misty, soulful glow, that I really couldn’t resist.  F. thought I’d gone nuts when he walked down the hallway and saw the flash coming from the bathroom door.  The best shots were sans flash, however, just showing their natural, dimly-lit beauty.

I hope y’all will enjoy this photo and the softer focus of Victory Garden Redux as we progress into wintertime.

As always, I would love to hear your comments and ideas about this new direction.  I do sometimes do requests.  If there’s something you’d love to see here, or a question you want answered about the experience of organic gardening and our first year of serious kitchen gardening in a small space, please let me know in the comments or by e-mailing me at gardenforvictory <at> live.com.  (Obviously replace that <at> with an @.  Just trying to confuse the bots.)

Namasté, y’all.  And may your day be full of light!

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