Every morning for the last week, I've woken up and thought to myself, how much will I be able to knit today? I hope it's a lot. But August has other plans of the green variety, I guess! Because when I look back at what I've done, there's been a lot more herb gathering than yarn squeezing. The garden is giving me loads of spilanthes, aka toothache plant. I wasn't sure what to do with it at first, until I learned that it makes for a quick fix for teething babies. Let them chew on a bud for 30 seconds or so without swallowing. Presto! Numb gums with reduced pain afterwards. And let me tell you, that has saved my bacon multiple times this…
Posts from the “Harvest Time” Category
I love this time of year. The garden outperforms itself with tomatoes and green beans. I’ve been getting a couple of eggplants, dozens of cucumbers, and several handfuls of jalapenos. Even the endive has held on. Enough food, in short, to make me love summer. In related food matters, I went to the allergist for some help with my recurring stomach troubles and consequent migraines. I tested as allergic to tree, grass, and weed pollen, and the allergist says I have oral allergy syndrome. Eating certain foods triggers an allergic reaction because the food protein is so similar to the pollen protein that my immune system thinks it IS pollen and reacts accordingly. In my case, GI trouble. I’m pretty sure it’s a huge cosmic joke. The…
Categories: Garden News, Harvest Time
I woke up feeling good on Saturday morning, and expecting my brother Nick for the evening. What do you do right before your house guest arrives, when you unexpectedly don’t have a migraine? Because my answer was, “go to the farm to plant broccoli seedlings and harvest curcurbits.” This was instead of my more typical, “scrub the toilet and sweep the cat hair out of the living room.” I joined Seth’s crew, along with a volunteer, an intern, and two work-for-shares. The process goes something like this: Use the tractor to form beds, then use the dibbler to dibble holes in the ground. Fertilize your seedlings by submerging them in fish fertilizer (not pictured because it looks as bad as it smells) then lay out a seedling at every hole you…
Categories: Harvest Time, The Work Farm
Seth has been teasing me all week with pictures. It’s his daily ritual. I ask him how his day is going, and he responds with a photo of fresh tomatoes, or mini sunflowers, or a pile of beets. This week it was garlic. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with it all. We’ve got no place to cure it,” he told me Friday night, after I asked him about his photo of the day. I nodded absentmindedly. When I went to the farm this morning, this is what I saw: “Oh, did I tell you? We picked 2500 pounds of garlic in two days,” Seth called me to as he pulled a farm cart over to the zucchinis. Huh. The garlic will…
Categories: Harvest Time, The Work Farm
A garden is not like a dog. If you stop paying attention to a dog, the dog will stop doing what you ask. If you stop paying attention to the garden, it still grows. Case in point? This week’s harvest. I didn’t think once about the garden for the past 10 days or so, and yet my garden grows. Sure, the weeds are there, but so is the zucchini and even more tomatoes — more everything. I feel like we’re in its heyday: these are the golden days of gardening. The Roma and Sungold tomatoes just keep producing. The sage overflows like a fountain, and the basil shoots up with abandon. I even got my first butternut squash and green beans — although I…
Categories: Harvest Time
At long last, tomato season has arrived. I picked what felt like 10 pounds of tomatoes this week, along with six cumbers and two zucchini. One of my neighbors gave me five heads of garlic, and another gave me a long skinny zucchini. All I need is eggplant, and I could turn the contents of my kitchen table into one awesome ratatouille. Next up: spaghetti sauce. And cucumber pickles. And stuffed zucchini? And I think I’m going to need a bigger kitchen.
Categories: Harvest Time
Six big ones and six cherries, to be exact. But then I ate most of them. Got a nice zucchini though.
Categories: Harvest Time
It’s not enough to last us a week. Heck, the tomatoes didn’t make it more than a day. But I am proud of our little garden harvests.
Categories: Harvest Time
We’re picking up steam in the garden. Seth and I gathered another quart-sized jar worth of sweet peas, which are starting to die out in all this heat. They’re tangled up with the bean vines, so I am careful with the clippers as I clear out the bed to give the beans room to grow. Problem is it looks as though someone is tatting lace with my bean leaves. It would be nice if I knew which bug to blame. There’s got to be a book out there called 1001 Garden Pests and How to Murder Them All or something. When we started this garden, Seth insisted we should let the pests be because they’re just doing what they do. But now that 80…
Categories: Garden News, Harvest Time
Earth Morning: an ever-growing tiny adventure 