Last night I cut the flower stalks off of the sorrel (Rumex acetosa) so that it might focus on leaves for sorrel soup and such. I used the leaves from the flower stalks in a salad. Once the leaves were removed, the flower stalks looked similar to little rhubarb stems. I thought a sour stem crisp for dessert sounded really good, so I chopped up the flower stalks, but them in a ceramic bowl topped them with some sugar and oats, and baked this in the toaster oven.
img: Dag Kvammen (Jan Mayen 2002)
I was impressed by how good it was, though perhaps anything sour would be good prepared in this fashion.
Published on
April 24, 2008 in
garden.
There are some volunteers in my garden that are particularly great. Neither of these was around much last year, if I remember correctly, and I didn’t plant either of them.
To the left is Myosotis
(Forget-me-not).
Below is Lunaria annua
(Money Plant or Annual Honesty).
Also, these are pictures of my actual plants.
Published on
April 21, 2008 in
garden.
Pictures of plants I pilfered samples of from a nearby lush community garden.
Lungwort (Pulmoniaria) looking somewhat vulnerable.
I thought the other one was a Fumewort (Corydalis), but after looking at the documentation I think it’s Fumaria.
As usual, these are just the best images I could find on the Web, not actual pictures of the plants I’m talking about.
Oh, I also purchased for $1 some seeds of Nicotiana sylvestris, as pictured in the last post.
Published on
April 17, 2008 in
garden.
This week I have planted a few things, and held back on planting things. I planted a rhubarb that I got from Cameron’s parents, and I planted sunflowers that Cameron requested. I planted a bunch of things associated with Cameron. The sunflowers I planted in the boulevard, the front garden terraces, the middle of the vegetable garden, and some in the side yard. The rhubarb I planted on the west side of the fence between the vegetable garden and the side yard. I spread the sunflowers out so that some of them will grow. If they all do it will be amazing.
Matt requested tobacco, but I haven’t found any yet. I’m sure I’ll find some Nicotiana species this spring to plant for him.
My tomatoes are growing very fast now, working on their fourth real leaf. The peppers and eggplant are both still working on their first leaves, and the basil is being sucked dry by whiteflies from the Kniphofia.
I need to take a break from the vegetables this weekend and plant the cyclamen, and maybe those damn Kniphofia. I guess I could plant some more roots and hardy greens and stuff.
Maybe I should get my fair-weather fixed-gear working again for when the rain stops.
Yesterday I planted summer squash. I planted two zucchini starts in each of two hills to the south of the zucchini patch. I planted cavili squash in the three hills to the north of the zucchini patch. 
Today I walked around green lake, picked up a chunk of Iris pseudacorus to see if it will grow in the foetid pool we have in our back yard. The only things that have been growing in it are algae, some unusually persistent land weed, and insect larvae. I stopped at PCC and picked up a much-needed big ginger root, an eggplant, a bottle of red wine and two pots of strawberry plants to compliment the three that Cameron gave me last year and a brownie.
I planted the strawberries and removed the tall grasses and Spanish Bluebells that were shading the strawberries from last year. Miles put the Iris in the barrel along with some other plant I found in the lake that looks like some kind of mint. Hopefully water mint. Perhaps they will be able to tolerate the barrel.
It was released with much fanfare recently, but I am waiting to install WordPress 2.5 until K2 gets a release compatible with it together. I read a post from them that said they were working on it, but they are perennially slow on the releases.
Last weekend I rode in the Taco Truck Time Trial, which was lots of fun. Nobody barfed. Steep hills were ridden on. During the after-party, it started raining, so we had another beer and waited for the rain to stop, but it started hailing and snowing, so we had another and waited it out, but we lost patience and sobriety and eventually went home, and the precipitation didn’t seem like that big a deal, or like it could be tolerated.
I am looking forward to bike camping this summer, and the european bike camping vacation. I’m looking for a nice place to ride to that will simulate riding to the crest of the Corsican mountains at the road to Corte. I guess it’s the Col de Vizzavona.
