Spring at our Bed & Breakfast in the mountains of Western North Carolina is zooming right along, and very beautifully we might add. A few days ago, we highlighted what’s currently in bloom at the Inn. Here are some more blooms, which seem to be increasing daily. Yay, Spring!
We got great news last week from our friends at Chimney Rock Park, a beautiful state park in the Hickory Nut Gorge area about 30 minutes south of the Inn on Mill Creek. The park is named for a huge granite monolith called the Chimney, on which you can stand and see awesome views that span for miles. Here’s a photo we took looking up at the Chimney in 2009:
We’ve had some amazing weather the past two weeks…amazing in that we’ve had all four seasons wrapped into one! Small flurries, thunderstorms, warm sunny days, you name it. So, it’s nice to see that Mother Nature is being consistent with the gorgeous flowers and flowering trees now in bloom around Asheville, Black Mountain and Old Fort — our beautiful neck of the woods. Yep, Spring is still our favorite season.
Whenever we visit Painter’s Greenhouse, one of our favorite nurseries in our area, it’s tempting to take home flats upon flats of gorgeous plants and flowers. Painter’s is amazing. But we’ve learned to pace ourselves {“we” meaning Brigette}, and with a list in hand, we recently headed over to the Painter’s Greenhouse Herb Fest: live music, fabulous food, and plants everywhere.
Our creeping phlox in the Pool Garden (a garden that used to be a swimming pool) is blooming profusely and when it returns, that signals the return of butterflies to the Inn. Here are our first two winged visitors of the season…with many more to come. We’ve counted up to 40 butterflies at one time on the phlox, which provides a purple splash of color in the middle of the Pool Garden this time of year.
For our March recipe, we’ve picked one of our popular fruit side dishes: apple crisp. Rather than serve out of a large dish, we make ours in individual portions of appley goodness topped with a fabulous crumbly topping. One entree we like to serve with our apple crisps is Dave’s vegetable and ham quiche (with homemade sausage balls on the side as well).
