My Favorite View of the Garden

I love a garden first thing in the morning, as the sun rises over the fence line and the plants glow with new light. The dew decorates the glowing plants with temporary diamond orbs, and the heat of the day has not wilted anything yet.

I hardly ever get to enjoy this state; I rejoice in the moment between feeding the birds and loading my backpack into the car for work. I wish I could linger, because the plants and bugs and birds would teach me things the science practiced at work will never discover, about the glory of God, His joy in creation, His love for detail in even the tiniest and most despised things (like green jeweled spiders), and His loving provision for us. It is amazing that He allows our work to matter in this process, but it does. If we do not plant, our harvest will be slim and wild-crafted, requiring many acres. If we tend our gardens well, that space will provide for an exploding diversity of nature and for many of us, bountifully. Those who say there are too many people in this world do not understand that God loves people, and would gladly show us how to accommodate ourselves and all the other creatures we value if we just asked, instead of ignoring Him and implying that others are not as worthy as we to exist. The "technology" is there already, if we just ask and look. It will be work (we were created to tend a Garden, remember?), but we can do it- without killing our offspring before they are born or forcing others into sterility. We can participate with Him in good stewardship. Just ask.

Free Concerts

Tonight we walked to a salsa and meringue(?) concert at the Levitt Shell in the park. It was fun to watch the kids dance before dark and the adults after dark. We did not stay the whole time, as I have a hard time sitting for that long, and I cannot do those dance steps. The concerts are free in the spring and the fall. They take donations. They needed more food vendors (some chips or popcorn would have been nice), but the crepe guys were quite good. It was a beautiful, clear, moonlit night, and perfect for dancing.

Spot and Friends

Here's Spot, napping on the back steps. She had a friend over this evening. Jorge, who was here for amorous reasons a few months ago, returned looking sadly beaten up today. Skinned up from ear to one eye, bare patch of pale white skin on one haunch, trying not to limp, but licking one front paw every few steps. I told him to spend the night in the garage if he needs to do so. He accepted some food, but kept his distance. Cats do that. Unless a cat is really bleeding or looks like it has a broken limb or a damaged eye or something, it is not safe to try to help them. If you do try, wear leather gloves with long cuffs ( like welding gloves) if the cat is conscious, and grab it behind the head where a mama cat grabs a kitten to carry it. You cannot and should not attempt to carry an adult cat by that fold of skin, but the reflex to go limp still works partially, and you can generally put one hand on the neck, the other under the abdomen or the hind legs (glove this hand, please), to get it into the carrier and to the vet. Have the carrier set up and open before reaching for the cat, and stuff it in the carrier quickly. Mine never liked the vet, and learned to associate the carrier with getting poked and prodded. Like I said, with an outdoor, semi-feral animal, I would not bother with a vet unless you suspect life-threatening injury. God provided these animals with amazing healing capacities, so we leave them to their own devices.

Sometimes Ugly Plants have Beautiful Flowers

Borage is not a pretty plant. It has large, hairy leaves. It looks a bit like a weed. But the flowers grow in clusters, and they look great, and except for the hairy parts, they are edible! They're also supposed to confer disease resistance to neighboring plants, and deter some pests. I'm growing it. Slugs will eat the lowest leaves, but they eat anything decaying. We'll see how it grows and lives.

First Green Beans

I harvested these today. Woohoo! It has begun! Lovely! It also rained this afternoon and cooled off admirably with a very short-lived windy storm. No air conditioning at home yet! Life is good. Must go to bed earlier- a group of robins has decided to hail the dawn Praising God at 4:30 AM every day. I like sleep. Must go.

My Friend Spot

This is Spot. She moved into our garage several months after my previous cat died. She seemed wild at first, but now I can pick her up (no scratches), and she comes running every time I go out the back door. She meows very quietly, and like a kitten, though she has some white fur in the colored areas of her body, which may indicate older age. She sleeps a lot. She is small, a bit of a runt, but in her quiet way, she is a good cat. We have no signs of rodents, though the raccoons boss her around if I'm not out after dark. She tries to wolf down her food before they show up. Cats don't "wolf" very well, and since they are obligate carnivores (have to eat a meat based diet, though she does freely sample greenery), they throw up easily. This is something to know if you think about owning a cat. They can have trouble knowing when they are full, and if they eat too much, they vomit. If they have a hairball (groom them by brushing- they like it, and throw up less), ditto. Outdoors is a better place for that than inside, especially if you have hardwood or delicate floors. We used to throw my previous cat outside when she made hacking sounds. We didn't throw her hard or far, just far enough to land gently in the grass. This one is already outside, so I just scrape off the residue and wash the sidewalk with water. This way causes a lot less discomfort for us and the cat, and she still has posh sleeping accommodations in the garage. 

Memorial Day

Remembering veterans is a long and proud tradition in the South. Tennessee isn't called the Volunteer State because we like to bring extra to potluck dinners (though we certainly do that). The military volunteering for us started in the War of 1812. I had ancestors in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. One of my mother's father's brothers drowned shortly after coming back from World War I. My father's father and his brothers were exempt from service in World War II, and mom's dad had a damaged hand that probably kept him out. My dad served in Vietnam. 

I say all that to say that in the Southern US, with its monuments to the wars and the boys we sent there, many of whom never came home, the gratitude we ought to feel is ever before us. For my Dad, his service was difficult, even though he was not in combat (fixing generators on an air base that was shelled daily was not easy on a man from a family full of depression-challenged people). He heard so much from so many that the Vietnam war was useless, that he believes it himself, which means the risk of his life was useless. I do not think so. We had a job to do over there, and we did not let our military do it properly. If we had stayed the course and done what needed to be done for the people of Vietnam, would Pol Pot have dared to torture and kill millions in Cambodia? Probably not. Might our Vietnam veterans have led easier lives if someone had said," You tried to do something noble over there. You tried to bring freedom and light to people. You were not given the right tools to do the job, and some of the tools you were given had evil effects on you and the people you were there to help. We understand, and we are sorry, and we will do what we can to make it right."? Instead they were spat upon, turned into a caricature, and used for decades by the news media to generate anti-war sentiment, no matter how just the cause. 

I respect my Dad and the men of his generation who fought for us and the Vietnamese. They were given horrible tools to fight a horrible war, and they live with deep emotional scars. But the fact that they keep going is the bravest heroism of all.

Living in Hope and Joy in a Culture of Death and Fear

This is a culture where the news is generally scary. Everybody including the government is bankrupt and still borrowing. We're preventably diseased, but wanting the government and Science to find a cure instead of listening to ancient voices warning of hope in moderation and self discipline and (gasp) the universal, boring moral codes. We want the "good life" as defined by the advertisers and the fashion magazines, not the ancient and simple and narrow Way. A wide, broad way leads to death, and fear keeps us strapped in the car, speeding down the highway, pedal pressed to the floor, terrified to look behind or ahead.

But if you dare to pull off, to allow your eyes to be opened and your sins washed away, something happens. That broad way lined with billboards and blaring siren songs no longer calls so loudly. The exaggerated and sensationalized news, while serious and even devastating at times, is no longer world-shattering. Your world is not here exclusively anymore. In the words of one of my physics professors, you are "mostly local". I believe that our hope is not to be found in any of the "isms" (environmentalism, etc.) or frantic movements of modern times. In Christ alone we put our hope and trust, so that when this world collapses (as it has over and over, and will again), a better one awaits. That is real hope.

Tomatoes Coming

Look at this! Baby tomatoes! I'm happy. Tomatoes are one of summer's greatest pleasures, and getting them from the backyard is even better!

Borscht, Baby

I like making borscht, a beet soup originally from Russia. I use a vegetarian version, and make substitutions, based on what I have. The original recipe is from a book I picked up in a used bookstore at Harvard, Nikki and David Goldbeck's American Wholefoods Cuisine. I added a bit of fat (original recipe has no animal products at all) by sauteing a diced onion in butter, then adding 3 cups water and one 8-ounce can tomato sauce (instead of tomato paste) after the onion was soft. I peeled and shredded together 3 carrots, 2 beets (from out back!), and one medium-large potato. I tried to shred in the beet stems to substitute for celery, but they were too fibrous and made a mess in the top of the Cuisinart. A fine dice would have been better.I used the beet greens, chopped, instead of cabbage. Added one bay leaf and some black pepper for spice, and served with sour cream. Cooked for a while as I picked, cleaned (though I still found a tiny, live spider in my salad!) and prepared the lettuce and nasturtiums for the evening salad (with almonds). You can eat this.

The only disturbing thing is the blood-red color of the soup, though it tastes fine. And we ate in the comfort of home, barefoot and happy.

Mystery Zucchini Chomper

Last week-end I had six promising zucchini plants, plus several squash-like volunteers in different parts of the garden. Now 3 of the zucchini are stubs, and so are some of the volunteer plants. Not licked to death as from slugs with ribbons of tissue hanging off, not skeletonized or shotgunned by caterpillars, but with the leaves cleanly chopped off and completely gone. A similar thing happened to the three pot marigolds I tried to grow, even when they tried to grow back. My husband's first thought was a rabbit, but with succulent young lettuces a few feet away, why would a rabbit go for zucchini leaves?  We're leaning toward raccoon, rodent too large to be scared of the cat, or the cat herself. I have known her to sample greenery fairly freely out there, and she does hang out there a lot.

I placed plastic forks (from our wedding 8 years ago next month), tines up, around each of the remaining zucchini plants as a guard fence, and around one volunteer. We'll see if there is more carnage in the morning, or tomorrow afternoon.

Cabbage Worms

This is cabbage from last year. There are 2 kinds of cabbage worms in my backyard: the imported cabbage worm, Pieris rapae, which is hatched white, turns green by eating your cabbage family plants, and becomes a white adult.

The other, the cross-striped cabbage worm, Evergestis rimosalis, is striped bluish-purple, black, and green. It would be pretty if it weren't pooping chewed-up cabbage pellets on your Swiss-cheesed plant. It likes to dig into heads as they form, to make catching it or spraying for it more difficult. I pick them off daily, sometimes twice, and most days this time of year get 20-40 off 13 plants. Things are getting Swiss-cheesy out there even though I'm catching many of them before they've eaten enough to get pigmented. What to do? I keep picking. Bt is supposed to kill them. I haven't tried it. 

This information came from the following sources:

http://ipm.ncsu.edu/AG295/html/index.htm

http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/casefile.htm

Gotta love those edus.

Balance

In physiology, everything is about balance. Maintaining homeostasis is very important; despite the changes in the environment outside your body, the inside needs to be tightly regulated for you to survive. For example, you have more bacterial cells in your large intestine than there are human cells in your body. We can characterize them by type, but a lot is unknown about what is happening in there. You need some of those bacteria to help you absorb certain vitamins. Others actually communicate with your colon cells (some for good, some for ill), and we're just starting to be able to listen in on the conversation- mostly in rats and mice. We know some of the meanest bacteria out there (e. coli, c. difficile, etc.) live in almost everyone's colon without making them sick, as long as things stay in balance. Throw it off with an antibiotic for a sinus infection, and the good guys are actually more susceptible to the antibiotic than the bad guys, leaving room for the bad ones to multiply and make you ill. Viva yogurt! The kind with live and active cultures, especially the kind with multiple species listed, can help, as can other fermented food (like kefir) with live (good) bacteria. The moldy stuff at the back of the fridge will NOT help.

It's true for plants, too. Too much nitrogen, and you'll get a lot of leaves, but not much flowering and fruiting. Too much water and they rot, too little and they wilt. Oy! Learning curves are steep sometimes.

You Really Can Eat Every Part of the Beet

And it tastes good, too. With today's cool weather (a low in the 50s in late May in TN is a Gift from God- we're often AC-bound by now), I decided to roast some chopped sweet and white potatoes at 400 degrees F with olive oil, freshly-ground black pepper, and freshly-picked rosemary, and added one of our small beets, also chopped. What wonderful beetiness! It had red and white concentric bands on the inside. It was only an inch-and-a-half in diameter, so peeled it was small and good. To prevent waste and use the good leaves, I chopped the leaves and stems (like red celery) with some button mushrooms from the store and sauteed them in the pan after I finished frying the salmon patties. Quite good, and a very fresh, beety meal with roasted vegetables, purple-hulled peas from last summer, sauteed mushrooms and greens, and salmon patties. For dessert we had some of the season's first peaches (Flavor-Rich they were, just like their name) with strawberries. No sugar necessary! Beautiful.

The 11th Commandment

Thou shalt go to church, come home, eat a big dinner, and NAP. We do, almost every Sunday. Then I fix a treat, like muffins or cookies, when we get up. The world would be much closer to peace if everyone had a nice lunch every day, followed by a nap and milk and cookies before a few more hours of work in the afternoon. Why fight when you can have blueberry muffins? 

Scientists and Agriculture

These are pea plants from last year. Ignore the weeds and look at the leaves.
You'd think one of the top science journals in America would get things right, but in the past few issues it has made some references to agriculture that get on my nerves. 

1. In a recent news article about the publication of the cow genome, the author stated, "The barnyard door is now open." What's wrong with that? Most barnyards have fences with gates, not walls with doors. Barns have doors; barn-yards have gates. Small difference, but either the author grew up in a country with enough wealth to wall in its barnyards or he writes about agriculture without thinking about common farm vocabulary.

2. Same journal (remaining nameless as I may want to try to publish in it someday), issue at my house today had a computer rendition of a pea plant on the cover, looking at computer pictures of microbes. Cool picture, but the vine is almost leafless, and the leaves on it are totally wrong for the pea plants I have seen. They should be shorter and wider, not long and thin, and should be paired at the base. Neat picture in terms of artistic license, but bad in terms of scientific accuracy.

Which is the complaint I have against the modern scientific approach to agriculture. It approaches farmers with big-city contempt, and treats them like poor, ignorant peasants who just need to buy the latest scientific gizmo to be successful. It often treats the soil as a passive medium of known chemical composition (though they're just beginning to catalog the microbes in it), in which seeds tested in another climate under ideal conditions SHOULD be able to grow. Apply X herbicide, Y insecticide, Z fertilizer to this super-duper recombinant seed, and you'll get wonderful yields anywhere. Maybe.

The soil contains a whole miniature ecosystem, even in my backyard. All sorts of microbes, slugs, ants, worms, spiders, cockroaches, grubs, pill bugs, and other things I don't even know to mention cavort back there in the dirt. The soil is not a passive medium, and the farmer  (unless made so by his government) is not a helpless peasant. If scientists approached farmers as colleagues instead of consumers of designer products, maybe they'd get the vocabulary right. And they'd know what a pea plant looks like.

Blooms!

I'm no expert on flower gardening. I do alright with roses, but if you get the right varieties and keep them from drying out completely in really hot weather, they take care of themselves pretty well. The flower here is an amaryllis. They were in the backyard, where only one got good enough sun to bloom. There is still one back there, that I need to transplant after it dies back and goes dormant. It needs more sun to produce these glorious red blooms. I planted these in a bed with good sun, for a neighbor to enjoy. Whoever put in the confounded bushes seems to have randomly covered up a variety of flowers we are still discovering. Small, free, beautiful gifts from someone who once cared about making this house beautiful. 

Arise, O Sleeper

Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. This tree was down to one spotty leaf. Its branches were green and pliable, so I kept it watered and hoped. Look! It came back! It must have gotten cold-stressed over the winter. Now it is back, and even blooming again! See the buds? God gives bountifully! Now to remember to keep it fertilized...

My Semi-Wild Friends

The boys are back, wanting the food I'm not serving right now (the good chow), and water from my plant-watering buckets, and a rest on the cool metal of the cars in the garage. They do not like getting their pictures taken for some reason. They are active hunters, and they patrol a regular route through the neighborhood. It includes our alley and driveway, which is a blessing. We've been completely free of rats and mice since Spot moved in, and they followed to put us on their route. Though she is smaller, a bit of a runt, she has a surprising amount of control over the boys. She can tell them to go away when she wants, and they do. The boys are powerfully beautiful cats as well as functional neighborhood patrollers, so I thank God for them.

Side-Dressing

If I were the "perfect" "organic" farmer, I would have beautiful black loam out there with huge and healthy plants sticking insect free out of it, but I'm a science grad student, so I have clay soil with bits of wood chips and decaying leaves sticking out, and some plants thriving, with others struggling. My green bean plants have something going on that is causing some yellowing of some lower leaves, with thinning between the veins. I thought it was a fungal infection, but I see no white or black or reddish brown. It could be a micronutrient deficiency like magnesium or manganese or boron (my soil was low in boron on the tests). These minerals are important in tiny amounts for all living things, for the active centers of enzymes. When you eat plants, you get these nutrients by breaking down their enzymes and building your own for your own purposes.

I decided to side-dress the plants (put fertilizer on the ground close to them, trying not to hit the leaves, to be watered in by the next rain) to try to solve the problem with a 5-3-3 fertilizer (not terribly high in NPK) with lots of micronutrients in it. I hope it helps.

Secret Evil In The Heart Hurts

I didn't see it coming. Under cover of night, a tiny slug (tiny white lies do no harm, right?) ate its way from underneath into the heart of this button on a courageous cauliflower plant. It had already been eaten to the ground by the slugs once, and had grown back to be the first plant to produce. Yes, it was a button, but it was cauliflower! 

But the slug 

did its damage under cover of night and the shelter of the covering cauliflower leaves. I could not find it until last night, when it finally nibbled away part of the leafy cover to reveal itself and its ruinous 

damage. According to what I have read, cauliflower does not produce secondary heads like broccoli. This head will be all for this plant. I should also try again in the fall for better results. For now I will leave the plant alone to see what it will do. Maybe it can make something good of the situation. We will see. It illustrates how harmful harboring vileness in our hearts can be. Our society is now as full of vileness as my backyard is of slugs (I've caught more than 7300 now). Hard to keep it out, but pray hard! And keep that warm soapy Bible-verse water ready to drown what does get through.

What Do You Do When Feeling Blue

I do not shop, or watch trash TV, or eat donuts by the dozen. I've learned that when I feel bad (like this afternoon when I went to work, and all of the flasks of cells for the week were contaminated, and had to be disinfected and trashed), I should do one or more of the following:

1. Take a nap. I may be sleep deprived, and could wake up seeing a new side to things.

2. Take a walk, or do more vigorous exercise like jumping rope or taking out some more bushes. Endorphins are cool!

3. Cook a really good-for-you meal. This is good for stressful times balancing work and home, because the nutrients give you the fuel to try to meet expectations.

I came home and found a low-sugar recipe for whole wheat blueberry muffins from Eat Right America(good hot with a glass of milk), and prepared them. I used 100% whole wheat flour, not half-and-half. Yummy. I'll be clearing the boards to start an asparagus-bok choi-chicken stir fry here soon. Cooking lets me demonstrate competence at SOMETHING, even when something at work didn't pan out. AArgh. Let the chopping begin.

Cats are Conservatives

How do I know? My husband recently found a LARGE bag of cat food on sale for $10. That's less than twice what I pay for the usual fare when it isn't on sale in a much smaller bag, so he bought it. They ate the cheap food the first night out of extreme hunger (I was home late from work, exhausted, and had forgotten to pick it up). They haven't touched it since. The birds will eat it, but the cats won't.

Cats do not like change. They adore routines- if you feed them at the same time every day, go out to the garden at the same times, sit down to pet them at certain times, they will love you for it. Change the routine and they will announce their annoyance in no uncertain terms. A lot of times the language is nonverbal: staring with disgust at the food bowl, turning a back to you when you go out to pet them, keeping distant instead of coming to you for a scratch behind the ears. 

I hope they adjust and eat the new stuff, or they'll have to eat the birds for a while (and thus indirectly eat the cheap stuff) until we use it up.

Overuse Injuries and Healing

I'm prone to overuse injuries due to my hypermobility. I injured both hands a few days ago at work, reactivating the tenosynovitis in one thumb joint and messing up the wrist of the other hand enough to cause numbness and intermittent pain. I had decided to push a few too many things through a syringe filter. Doc fixed the wrist with a "crunch" this evening, and advised ice in addition to the rest and night wrapping (in neutral position with the thumb at the side of the hand- get advice on this from a physical therapist or chiropractor or orthopedist) I was already doing. It was amazing to feel the numbness leave immediately, and all fingers (and thumb) reporting for duty without pain. If you find a good chiropractor, KEEP THE NUMBER!! I highly recommend Cole Pain Therapy Group in Memphis. They do physical therapy as well as chiropractic manipulations, they don't go neck-popping crazy on you, and they help you heal. Which, if you've had conventional doctors tell you to go away until the damage is done, then come back when they can give you drugs and surgery (a rheumatologist had the nerve to tell me that when I was a TEENAGER), is a wonderful, wonderful blessing. Hope comes in many forms, and it's a rare find when it comes with a white coat.

Bugs and Slugs

My chard is holy, and I do not mean sanctified. My carrots aren't able to get very big before something eats their greens to nubs. It is not out there when I look for slugs at night, nor when I survey for cabbage worms in the morning. Some carrots have come back and appear to be growing, though, so all may not be lost. I've hand- captured 7,104 slugs in the past 7 weeks in the backyard. It's getting a bit wearying in combination with long workdays.

Something has even snapped off 2 corn plants (so far) about a centimeter above the ground! I'm sad that my losses will be higher this year, but grimly determined to grow what can be grown back there. It is too important to keep the knowledge alive, and to extend my knowledge as much as possible, to let a few (or even 7,104) competitors get me.

Harvesting and Insecticide

Today I harvested one green onion (out of 3), 2 sugar snap peas, and a nasturtium flower. All went into dinner. It weighed a total of half an ounce. 

Verdict on the green onion: it had more pepper taste and less sliminess than those at the supermarket sitting under that water spray for who knows how long. I'm wondering if I still have time to interplant some more somewhere. Can't go near the wall of green beans according to the companion planting guides, and that's where I have space amid the surviving lettuces and radishes and carrots. 

The nasturtium did not taste radishy yet. It is at the back of the wall o' beans shown above. It really will be a wall of beans here in a few months. 

I saw a group of ants on the fence as I was harvesting the sugar snaps, and turned over a leaf to see a herd of aphids. Insecticidal spray time! I sprayed the cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower, too. Seems to be reducing the number of cabbage worms encountered. That is good!

The Corn Is Planted

Here is some of this evening's work: putting in corn seedlings from the germination test and planting corn in the ground to try again, this time in the bed that gets the most sun, in the middle. It's starting to look like a garden.

Interesting thing tonight- the slugs started climbing the garage and flowerpots before it started raining. Do even SLUGS have instincts we have lost to climate-controlled life? Just a thought, though I do like air conditioning in July more than I like predicting the rain. My bursitis lets me predict storm systems a lot of the time anyway, especially in winter. 

I'll be posting pictures from the garden over the next few days, for my records, weeds and all. Let's keep 'em growing.

Back from A Camping Feasibility Study

Sorry to express it in such a geeky way, but I embraced my inner geek a long time ago. This week-end we decided to do a mini-vacation to Mansfield, Missouri, to the Baker Creek Seed Company Spring Planting Festival. It was great fun!

We left on Saturday afternoon in the rain. It had rained, sometimes heavily, for much of the night. My husband grew up with a farmer Dad, and when he was small, they went camping on rainy days. As he said "The crops were being watered and the hay was too wet to take up," so they would pack into the old Pontiac and head for the hills. Black hills, that is. They lived in Nebraska, and often the Black Hills were north of whatever system was watering the farm. He was very excited to go camping in the rain.

We did not get north of the storm. Saturday night the rain stopped, and we camped in Historic Davidsonville State Park in Black Rock, Arkansas (pop 717). We were the only tent campers. I rented the tent very reasonably from work, but it smelled like wet, dirty socks. We had fun  cooking out under a lean-to my husband rigged up with a tarp and some rope. We slept in the tent and awoke at the 5:30 AM insistence of a hoot owl. We made oatmeal on a propane camp stove. We took everything down and headed for the showers. You could not adjust the water temperature, but it was nice and warm, and the showers were very clean and new-looking. By now the temperature outside was cooling, and I put on a part-wool sweater under my rain jacket. It started raining again. We toured the abandoned site of Old Davidsonville. Even the courthouse was gone. The town had started about when my ancestors settled in middle TN, in the early 1800s. Some of their buildings and cemeteries are still around. Nothing was left but bits and pieces at Davidsonville. 

We then headed for Mansfield. On the way we stopped at the tenth largest spring in the world, to watch almost 10 million gallons of water an hour gush over a dam, and tour an old, no longer used hydroelectric facility. It continued raining.

We arrived at the festival to be directed to park in a pasture, complete with fresh cow patties. We heard 2 gardening speakers, listened to an afternoon showcase of exceptional musical talent (I didn't know kids that age could do a Bach fugue on recorders), ate marvelous food (the restaurant charged for drinks, but took donations for the food), toured the stores (seed store was tempting, but I have no more ROOM!) , and tried (at first) to avoid the increasing muck. I wished I had my muck boots. 

We checked the on-site camping- a green, grassy field, but with puddles, rain, and a biting wind. We decided to come home, and stay longer next year if the weather is better. A little more music and we headed home, after a friendly Larry and company pulled us out of the parking area with a backhoe and chain.

Camping is definitely a feasible vacation for us. It is inexpensive, and can be fun under trying conditions if you keep a good attitude. We had fun. and I feel like we were gone and resting for many days. I knew we were in the right neighborhood when we drove through a small town and there were no bars on the pawn shop windows! It was a good break.

First Harvest Report

A fraction over one ounce (including the sugar snap pea day before yesterday) is the total so far. I never realized that sugar snap peas were so light! 4= 1/4 ounce. Yes, I pick them young, but you want to avoid unpleasant stringiness. It is small, but it is a beginning.

First  harvest report tomorrow, with masses and everything! Today I wanted to point out where to go for good recipes.

When you grow your own food, shop at a farmer's market, or join a CSA, suddenly you have lots of veggies to deal with. This is a good thing, but it sometimes necessitates learning new and creative ways to deal with beets or greens. What to do?

1. Your public library is an Awesome Resource. You can check out that book on Italian or French or Indian or Chinese cooking without spending a fortune, only to find out you really don't like that style of cooking very much. Ours is building its vegetarian/ vegetable-based section to a magnificent thing.

2. Blogs galore exist with recipes for every cooking style imaginable. Here are some cool ones:

http://simplyrecipes.com/

http://www.101cookbooks.com/

http://cheaphealthygood.blogspot.com/

These are a tiny sampling of the ones I have bookmarked- family style, Californian, and New Yorker. You can find Indian cooking videos from Manjula's kitchen on You-tube (these are especially helpful, because a lot of Indian cooking is passed mother to daughter, and thus is difficult to get from a written book), and even blended styles in some blogs. 

3. Do not discount the farmer's groups (Northwest Cherries, Sweet Bytes (for sweet potatoes),  The Mushroom Channel, Pulse Canada), which often post recipes to encourage people to purchase their food. I hate to call food a "farm product", though it is, simply because I consider that an inadequate description. Food is ideally something grown with care, nurtured through spring floods, bug onslaughts, and summer droughts, and finally brought to the table in triumph and joy. This beauty a "farm product"? I think not. Go fishing online- you might come up with something good.