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Author: theMan
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The Last of the Chioggia
I picked the last of the Chioggia beets on Thursday morning for Thursday’s market. Thankfully, no one bought them. These are my favorite beets. They taste as good as they look.
I had some Savoy cabbage left from the market too. When you look at a Savoy cabbage leaf from above, it’s as if you are flying over a lush, green, hilly landscape with white rivers flowing to the sea. No, those aren’t rivers, they are deep, fog-filled canyons where pterosaurs soar from canyon wall to canyon wall, hoping hapless earthlings will fall from the sky and into their monstrous beaks. If you put your ear next to a cabbage leaf, you can hear their bloodcurdling shrieks. Don’t listen to your mother. Go ahead and play with your food. Life is too short not to.
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The Secret to Happiness
Putting your face into a sunflower is the secret to happiness. You’ll forget all your troubles, and smile.
Tonight, a bumblebee has decided to spend the night in that sunflower. Some researchers think that maybe honeybees, at least the foragers, might dream. They spend up to a third of the time sleeping, and use this time to store memories, something humans do, so possibly bees dream too. What could be more pleasant than dreaming while you’re sleeping in a sunflower?
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What’s for Lunch? Not an Issue
What’s for lunch? It’s not a dilemma to ponder. The answer is in what I found in the garden while weeding: fresh kohlrabi, potatoes still warm from the ground, red tomatoes, kale leaves, and more. In less time than it takes to go through a McDonald’s drive-through lunch is served, and on fine china no less.
What else did I find in the garden today? How about giant romaine lettuce? I’m letting a few go to seed. They are as high as my chest. Soon their flowers will be out. This is what romaine strives to be. Just a few lucky ones ever get to experience the joys of blooming.
Nine potatoes which grew from an overwintering potato. Talk about interest. What are banks paying in interest these days, 0.01 to 0.02 percent? You might as well throw your money away. Plant a quarter of a potato, and in a year you could easily have nine, that’s 36 times the potato you started, or 3,600%. Don’t put your money in the bank, put it in potatoes in the ground.
And white flower beans 白花豆, yeah! This year’s harvest of these wonderful beans is on. I’ll have some for sale on Thursday at Bow Little Market.
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Dog Is My Gardener
Ena 枝那 is exhausted. What could tire out a dog so much? How about digging up onions and beans? I hadn’t planned on digging up this row of onions and beans today, but she decided it was time for them to come out of the ground.
She left a moonscape of elbow deep craters. She hasn’t learned yet to pile up the onions at the end of the row. Oh well, I was needing a bed for fall peas, I might as well put them here.
The trouble with gardening with dogs is that they don’t ask you first where you want to plant things or what things need digging up. When dog is your gardener, you’ve just got to go with the flow, and laugh a lot.
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Hatching Time
Mi-asa-hime’s 美朝姫 chicks hatched yesterday and today. Before I saw a chick, I knew they had hatched because when I got close to her, she let out a low growl to warn her chicks that danger was near. Hens never make that growl if they are sitting on eggs, just after their chicks hatch.
My first picking of potato seeds is over, and I have thousands of seeds to plant. Potato seeds are tightly embedded in potato fruits. To free them, you mix the potato fruits with water and break them apart in a blender. A few pulses does the trick. You don’t want to destroy the seeds. Then you let the mixture ferment for a day or two. Potato seeds won’t readily germinate without fermenting first. In a few days, the mashed potato fruits float and the seeds settle on the bottom of the water. You strain out the seeds and dry them.