GARDENING 2010 EJP MUSIC SITE
| May 31, 2010 : Week 6 | Very Green |
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It's warm again! The thick air, light clothing & feeling of freedom despite no change in responsibilities. My plants are growing!
The starters are still too small for the Earthbox, which is alarming, but I will be patient. We have only had 9 solid days of good weather
after a bout of, well, let's not even go there again. It has passed. This week I am most hopeful for the green onions & the green beans. I'm sure this will change on a weekly basis as it did last year. I also recognize that this blog is meant for GARDENING, but FOOD is an inseparable part of that. I am planting eatables! So, it worth noting that I have concluded to be vegan. It has been fun & challenging. Although the food choices I make aren't that complicated, a whole new plethora of questions have arisen. How to respectfully interact with other people & how to be a responsible consumer. When that is possible & when it may not be. It has made me become more serious about my garden & increasing the desire for a yard to call my own. To provide food for myself and partner. |
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| Mom & Bulbs | Bulbs & Knife |
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I spent the past weekend in Ann Arbor with my family & family to be. Among the many activities I had a chance to talk to my mom about her
garden & what I'm trying to do with mine. My grandpa, her father, is always pawning off bags of onions, jars of tomatoes, bottles of homemade
wine on her. By transitivity she usually attempts to pass them on to me, yet this year I took a minibag of the over 5 pound bag of green onion
bulbs. And hey, they are growing! I asked my mom what I was planting though. As they come up they look
like, well, green onions, scallions. But with a larger bulb, how long to let it grow? What do you usually do? Mom had a couple onions growing in the back, which were actually from summer 2009. So although they were from a different "batch", it was about the same thing. The stalks were thick and tall, about three feet high, leaving the illusion that a big fist-sized juicy onion grew below. When she yanked a couple up they were small, pink & white striped bulbs, no larger than your ear. While the bulbs were tasty looking, the stalks were too thick and rough to believe they tasted good. And they don't. The advice that was given was to either grow immature bulbs & sweet green stalks, or mature bulbs & rough, bitter stalks. In the past three weeks I have expanded the green onion portion of the garden. I have added two big tomato cans with an onion in each, and added two bulbs to the big trough. With the added can space I now have 10 bulbs growing. I'm going to let some mature in the cans & devour the others in the coming weeks (which I should probably do soon since the birds found out it's a tasty treat). It's a good thing grandpa gave us so many. | |
| Feet & Cotton | Duck Couple & Cotton |
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Plant Memory #2 The cottonwood trees are spreading their seed. I can't ride my bike without getting cottony fuzz up my nose or become nostalgic for how this time of the year felt when I was a kid. How the cotton would form white tornadoes in the corners of the garage & stick to the safety straps of the lifejackets. The transition period between routine & freedom, the clean break of summer. Oddly enough there are female & male cottonwood trees. It is the female trees that are more robust, loud, & cottony. Male trees simply distribute pollen silently in March & April, a prelude to the May & June outburst of opaque female seed. They tend to grow near wet areas such as rivers & lakes, which would explain their overpopulation in Pinckney & the thick clouds that surround the bike path in Lincoln Park. They have always been one of my favorite trees. By far the loudest, with large leaves that wave a friendly hello on your best days & will echo your sorrow with melancholy cries. HTML Comment Box is loading comments...
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