An Iris Blooms In November

I've never had one bloom this time of year; it's one of the ones I transplanted because they were getting too crowded, which limits their blooming. I moved the rhizome in early September and here we are two months later and it's blooming.

It's been a busy weekend. We went to buy our tickets for the Placer County Art Tour that we do each year. We got the map and headed out to one of our favorites, but the gate was closed. So then we decided to go to a nearby winery that we like: Fawnridge. It's small and unpretentious with nice people running it. The husband still has his day job teaching psychology at two community colleges. They were the ones who told us we were a week too early for the art tour. So we tasted and bought some delicious wines including a port that I'm going to use on a pork roast I'm fixing today.

A photographer from the Sacramento Bee was there; she was delighted to see tasters because she was hoping to get some photos in the tasting room. There is a brouhaha going on in this county about wineries and their tasting rooms. Most of them are small and you travel down, sometimes private, and usually dirt roads to reach the tasting rooms. The county has written an ordinance that would restrict the operation of tasting rooms during most of the year. It's 18 pages long. Nevada County, which is right next to Placer, has a one-page ordinance. Anyway the Sacramento Bee is doing a story on this and wanted to have pictures at a small winery's tasting room. We obliged. I was ready for a nap after tasting wine at noon. The winery web site is: http://www.fawnridgewine.com


The Fawnridge winery owners also told us about the "100-mile diet" during the course of our conversation about the importance of buying wine locally. No, you don't have to walk 100 miles but you do try to make sure the food you buy was grown and produced within a 100-miles radius of your home. It's a great way to reduce carbon. The web site is: http://100milediet.org The web site allows you to put in your zip code so you get a map of what 100 miles looks like for you. Ours includes San Francisco. The couple who wrote the book live in Vancouver, B.C. so the web site can handle Canadian postal codes.

Thanks to them I've discovered more sources of locally grown meat and vegetables. My favorite place is Flying Mule Farm. They actually farm the old-fashioned way with mules. The farm raises goats, lamb and vegetables. In addition I found a farmer's market that stays open all year in nearby Auburn. It's a lot more fun to shop this way. My Prius produces less carbon than those huge semi trailer trucks that deliver to big grocery store chains.

Today, I just got off the treadmill and am going to spend the rest of the day quilting. It's 80 here today.