Eat My Yard

It was a lovely sunset. I forget how fabulous the sky can look when a color other than grey is up there. We had cocktails and olives next door to a tiny Thai restaurant where an aged baseball player was being (good naturedly) hassled to autograph a picture. Who was he? I have no idea but the photo was 50′s era baseball hunk, think Joe Dimaggio. I think we were in the presence of greatness.  I wouldn’t know, but the sky certainly lent an aura of street corner badassery.

It seems I’ve forgotten how to post pictures and blog entries simultaneously. That’s what happens I guess when you hate technology as much as I do.  So bothersome.  Anyway, I’ve broken my silence to share, nay warn, of the perils of waiting too long to eat one’s artichokes.  Recently instead of a gobsmackingly good artichoke, which is what I thought I’d be eating, I ate something which was mostly fibrous hair. The heart really wasn’t there anymore and the stem was woody. Also the points on the ends of the petals had become  pokey. I guess if I was a donkey this would have been fine, as it was a lot like eating a thistle, but it turns out artichokes that are just about to open are no longer people food. You’ve been warned.

Here is some Darth Maul dip. That is all.

March is also rain, endless cold rain. Yesterday morning there was snow but it quickly turned to rain.  At least the trees are pretty.

I’ve moved the first set of starts out to the greenhouse. Kale, arugula, 3 kinds of lettuce, and something called deer tongue (I’m betting it’s a lettuce) are holed up in a drafty plastic house while the wind rips through the walls and sets the wind chimes to wailing.  I haven’t had a moment to plant the snowpeas. Stupid rain.

Last fall in a fit of preparedness I planted purple sprouting broccoli which, sometime mid winter, I decided were actually collard greens and almost harvested several times. Luckily my sheer laziness and disinclination to tromp through mud gave them time to put out these darling little purple trees. They are almost too pretty to eat, but I will force myself.  The whole debacle has made me question whether I’ve ever even planted collards.  It’s quite possible I’ve been merrily stewing broccoli leaves with ham hocks and later wondering why the broccoli never comes up.

Those of you with close reading skills may have noticed that this blog went dark some time ago.  Lately though, I’ve been missing a dedicated place to complain about the weather (fuck you buckets of freezing rain!) and hatch schemes like the indigo garden where violet hues reign supreme.  If I can just get eggplants, Cherokee purple tomatoes, Thai basil, purple haze carrots, johnny jump-ups, huckleberries, blueberries, purple pole beans, and clairvoyant children all going before I eat the purple broccoli,  my dream will be realized.  Also I have fairly regular encounters with absurdity which I like to jot down because it makes scenarios like the man feeding crows french fries who saw me watching him and screeched  “NOT FOR YOU” even though I don’t eat old french fries out of garbage bags, and then the crows doing appreciative dances in the air around his head and also yelling at me,  seem like a good story versus  “I am loathed by crows and the homeless.” So I’ve dusted off the ole blog just in time for planting season and apparently daylight savings time.