every day is a good day
Before your wheat is ground and made into bread, this is what it looks like, golden sheaves of spiny heads of wheat.
Swiss chard stalks look like candy sticks. The colorful stalks are worthy of their own dish. The Costata Romanesco, a ribbed variety of zucchini, is beautiful too. I much prefer it to the smooth, regular varieties of zucchini.
The chilly, dewy mornings hint of fall. It’s down in the low 50s when I head out early in the morning, cool enough to put on a light jacket. On mornings like these, kale leaves are jade jewels. In the hoop house, the tomatoes keep ripening. It may be chilly in the morning, but midday, it’s over a 100º in the hoop house. The tomatoes soak in the sunshine and trap it inside, turning redder with each sunbeam they soak in.
A surprise today was finding some white flower beans 白花豆 ready to pick. The handful made a great side dish for supper. A few more weeks and I should have buckets of these.
Chickens go nuts over potatoes which is why they are banished from the vegetable garden. A few years ago they dug up the entire crop of potatoes and ate them all. It’s not that they went looking for potatoes, but while digging for their favorite food, earthworms, they uncovered the potatoes one by one.
This pile of potatoes came from a single plant, nearly four and a half pounds, over two kilos, of potatoes. This was a potato that came up from a potato I missed when I was digging up potatoes last year. My experience is that potatoes which overwinter do better than those planted in the spring. My guess is that throughout the winter, they are growing roots so that when spring comes, with a well developed root system, they are able to grow more vigorously. The trick to planting potatoes in the fall is to have beds that stay well drained through the rainy winter months. If they sit in water during the winter they will just rot.
Fresh onions are the jewels of the garden. The whitest of whites, the most beautiful greens are those of freshly dug potatoes. While I was cleaning the onions in the garden this afternoon, Ena 枝那, slept peacefully next to me. You can’t ask for more than to have a sleeping dog at your side to keep you company while you work.
Vegetables can be so beautiful and colorful, you pause to pick them. Maybe I’m not that hungry today. I’ll make due with potatoes and kale and leave the brilliant chard to color the garden.
The magenta spreen never fails to disappoint. Neither do the white flower bean blossoms. I will miss these flowers when the chill of fall puts an end to their blooms.
What is better than apple pie? A ripe apple that has been in the hot sun all day long. Pluck it from the tree, bite into its warm flesh, and an explosion of apple goodness will blow you away. It’s much better than an apple pie fresh out of the oven.
You’ll find apples in stores year round, but if you have an apple tree, you know that these are seasonal fruit and need to be eaten as soon as you pick them.
The white flower beans are developing nicely. In another month, the first should be ready for picking.
There is no doubt that Sven, our Swedish Flower Chicken rooster, is the father of the young, colorful rooster next to the watering can. The young rooster may even be more flamboyant than his father.
Sorry market folks. These plums are too good to sell.