Showing posts with label home gardens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label home gardens. Show all posts

Saturday, December 04, 2010

One Potato, Two Potato

This morning Alex decided to re-dig her garden and plant turnip seeds.

The spot she was going to use was the site of potato failure this past spring. She got lush green plants, but they just kind of cooked in the summer sun, without blossoming. And if they didn't blossom and wither, they don't make potatoes, do they?

Wrong!

At least a couple of the plants made potatoes, because around the end of warm weather, some more green potato plants came up. The freezes last week turned them black, ahh, poor potatoes.

But when Alex began digging over there, well, what do you know? POTATOES!!! A couple of them look a bit gnarly, but those light-colored ones -- "new potatoes"  -- have skin so tender it rubs off with a thumb, and when freshly sliced, with a hint of salt, were THE best potatoes I have ever crunched down raw in my life. They were even better than the ones I raised back East, and that's saying a lot.

Now Alex has got her bearings with the potato growing. She has a plan.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Life Is All About The Each Days

This is the south forty. Corn.

I never planted corn from seed before that I can remember. I've grown tomatoes, peppers, onions, spinach, parsley, lettuce, radishes ... but corn? No.

So we planted sweet corn in a swath in our front yard. I have no idea if it will produce edible ears in that unamended heavy clay junk that passes for soil; and though I may have had fantasies of growing enough corn to put up for the whole winter, I don't actually believe that is going to be the case. Maybe the corn is too close together, maybe the seed was crummy (the germination rate sucked) ... whatever. We haven't got any eatin' ears yet, but two things commend this crop in a suburban front yard: A couple rows of corn look beautiful, and the sound of the afternoon breezes rattling the stalks is like food for the soul. We love the corn, and I will probably want to plant more again next spring.

Bernie grilled more spectacular chicken today. Dear God, thank you, it was so good. We swam in the pool, too -- thanks to this late heat spike, the pool is usable.

And we had a bit of excitement today, as well: our neighbor is going out of town for a few days and we find ourselves in custody of two female dogs.

A short aside -- except for the all-too-short couple weeks of my puppy Pumpkin (35 years ago) and the conqueration of my household by Grace Louise, a gray-cream calico kitten (20 years ago), all our pets have been male. (We don't count Molly; she is not a pet, she is a curse.)

Anyway, our household is baby-sitting a golden lab named "Honey" and a German shepherd named "Zena." They are ladies. They are hefty animales.

Howie has made known his antipathy for clumsy womens by showing his teeth and snapping (not biting) and looking crazed from his reclined posture at Bernie's feet. Both clumsy womens said, "Hey, dude, no problem, geeze, what a crab" and kept a good ten feet away from him. Sebastian just crawled under an end table and pretended the ladies weren't there.

We took all four of them to a fenced park and let them run and make acquaintances before we brought the girls into the house. They did fine. They're fine here.

Zena is a big girl German shepherd, though, and having her here has made us miss Babe so much. He was so big, so dark, so exuberant ...

Zena would have hated him.