June 9, 2011
Naturally grown food for those dear
Hello again everyone!
Goodness, all that rain and now it feels like August. The days of mild or predictable seasons are well over. Thankfully the thick layer of mulch all over the garden keeps the plants cool, moist and well drained, ie., all around adaptable to whatever weather hits them. Well maybe not the most severe, but you get my point.
In this heat tomato, tomatillo and cucumber blossoms are forming, chickpeas are blooming and podding, beans, squash and potatoes are just shooting up to the sky and spinach has bid us farewell until fall. Due to a lack of security a pony got his happy belly in one of our gardens and ate every last sweet corn stalk : ( Heartbreaking, yes, but thankful he did not make it to the far more nutritionally valuable sweet potatoes, cowpeas and winter squash also flourishing in that garden. We do have a small stand of baby corn (which doubles as popcorn if left to dry) in another garden, so you may get to eat some grass this season after all! Speaking of a lack of sweets, I made a huge mistake in my excited, though apparently partially blind, plan to have tons of sugar snap peas this season. We got one small packet of some really exciting sounding sugar snaps, way back in the winter, which I promptly planted, but thinking it wasn’t near enough I planted a good five times that in leftover Dwarf Grey Sugar seed. This is a variety we grew last year for shoots, but for some reason I disregarded that thought and assumed they were sugar snaps due to “sugar” being in their title. Silly me, they are a snow pea. While a letdown, they are decidedly delicious steamed, stir-fried, or fresh (depending on your tastes) and are abundant as can be. Our few actual Sugar Snap Pea plants are not the best producers, and in this heat have already gotten too starchy, so we may be without that crop until next season. While spinach has dropped out lettuce is still going strong thanks to our cucumber trellis which shades them from the intense “spring” heat. New in your baskets this week are dill and basil, expect lots more!
By my grandma’s request I’ve begun organizing photos by month, rather than one huge folder, so please enjoy May here: and June here:
That’s all I’ve got for this week, both my ma and my grandparents will be out here from California later this week so I’ve got some tidying up to do (I think they might appreciate a path to the tipi and a cleaner Bri and Josh to hug). As always, enjoy your veggies and let us know what you’re doing with them!
I leave you with a passage I love from Ruth Stout about the “completely reliable mystery involved” in the garden
And if “enchantment” sounds a little farfetched you have not yet opened your eyes and heart to the unassuming miracle of the performance of a tiny seed as insignificant-looking as a fleck of dust. If you put a tomato seed, for instance, into the earth, and barely cover it, it will send a tender green shoot up through the soil. . . Then this little, live thing keeps getting bigger and greener and more and more surprising. It covers itself with green leaves and later with yellow blossoms. Did you ever stop to wonder how it decided always to have them yellow?
Soon the blossoms fall off and, amazingly enough, tiny green balls appear. These keep getting bigger and fatter.
Now, the next step wuld be hard to believe if you hadn’t been taking it for granted all your life. These balls, having reached their full size, look abut them, see that green is the predominant color in their environment and decide to break the monotony. They begin to experiment, try a touch of white, then greenish-yellow, then pink, and finally a bright, gay red.
At last these pretty balls have reached maturity; they are satisfied with what they have achieved and relax. They wait for the kind person who gave that tiny seed an opportunity to fulfill its greatest possibilities to come and eat them. . .
To me it is almost awesome to look at a tiny tomato seed and then at a large, healthy plant, heavy with green, pink and red tomatoes, and think of the completely reliable mystery involved.
Have a wonderful week,
Bri & Josh
No comments:
Post a Comment