One trick ponies

If you absolutely must ride a one trick pony in the kitchen, clearly all reasonable minds would agree that said pony should be ONIONS.

But when you have approximately a metric shitton of ripe miniature tomatoes just outside your back door near the end of their season, why not color it up a bit?

Just added these right at flame-out.

From one to four!

Just repotted a single big healthy aloe plant into four separate plants.

Who knows - maybe I'm now responsible enough to take care of more than a single indoor houseplant.

Gardening!

What I'm doing with my convalescence: installing irrigation systems at my mom's house.

Holy tap root, Batman!

That's a Cherokee Purple tomato plant that was grown from directly sown seed. The tap root alone is over four feet long!!!

HERB GARDEN!!!

Just planted.

From left: basil, sage, lemon balm, rosemary. (Japanese maple providing the fork in the road background.)

The Great Brussels Sprouts Massacre of 2014

Longtime readers of this blog know that brussels sprouts are one of my favorite foods.

So I was really excited to grow some.

And they bloomed, from seed, with impressive vigor, and lasted through Sacramento's cold snap, and dry winter.

 But then, didn't do a damn thing except look pretty. No fruit whatsoever.

So today I finally tore them out.

Going to plant some stuff today: random extra seeds I had in the garage, and an herb garden out front.

After

See "Before", posted last week. Pulled out the pretty but non-producing Cavolfiore cabbage, and the prodigious but dry and fibery radish.

 

Not sure if I'll plant a summer garden to speak of or not: too many balls in the air.

Fresh OJ

c'mon: who doesn't like a nice glass of fresh squeezed orange juice?
The Valencia tree in the yard is just now sweet enough to juice and eat (the navel tree was good around Christmas.)

Before

 

See followup post "After".  

This is the last shot of the "full" garden before I pulled a bunch of stuff out. For a look back at where it came from (these plants were all from seed) check out this post. 

Sacramento gardening porn!

Living in an apartment in South Lake Tahoe has made me miss gardening. A lot.

Blowing back through Sacramento to fly out (three back to back to back trips in a row) but took some time to prune the citrus, and harvest a bit from the winter gardens:

This is the front yard: fennel, three kinds of lettuce, and some (unproductive) broccoli in the back. 

Same bed, from the other side: three varieties of kale, and (already harvested) broccoli. 

Back yard: from left (along fence): fava beans, cabbage, radish, and in far right near the other fence, brussels sprouts (which unfortunately don't look like they're going to produce.)

To get a sense of how the garden is progressing over the months, take a look back at this earlier post of the back yard and this earlier post of the front yard.

Winter gardening!

Most things survived unseasonably cold weather for Sacramento. I doubt the brussels sprouts will produce, but the radishes are showing fruit!

Winter garden in Sacramento

The lettuce and broccoli are kicking ass, as are the radish and fava beans in the back yard.

Winter garden

We'll see how it goes.

Today's study in contrasts is inspired by the fact that they are both roughly circular when you're only looking at thumbnail sizes in your photos folder.

First, some delicious FOOD PORN! (Oh, and to hell with those who say looking at food porn makes you fat: you're just not looking at the right stuff )

Anyway, above are vegan hot dogs from a couple nights ago. J's version on the left has (bottom) homemade sauerkraut, grilled poblanos, and dijon mustard; and (top) homegrown pineapple sage (about the most vigorous plant in our kitchen garden raised bed on the front porch), sweet (YUCK) relish, and dijon mustard. Mine on the right has pineapple sage, homemade sauerkraut, grilled poblanos, dill (YUM) relish, dijon mustard, and veganaise, with a side of grilled ONIONS!

And now to remind you of a previous fun topic, namely of the perils of not cleaning out your drains on a semi-regular basis (or at least the perils of you both growing your hair out.) The bathtub has been starting to not drain as quickly in the last few days, so this morning I cleaned out the drain. Big times here at Dangr-us Thoughts World H, lemme tell ya'.

Riding out now to bike bicycle tubes!

Garden porn!

Looks like we might have overwatered the red oak leaf lettuce - two plants died. But the (bolting) mesclun greens and herbs are going like gangbusters!

RETRO DIRT

This is returning unneeded dirt on my beloved badass bike Sitba. Around eighty pounds of dirt. Newly built and filled raised bed in the background.

I have no idea why, when I re-sized for posting, it turned black and white.

Raisin' the beds!

This is a set of raised beds I recently helped make in West Virginia, almost entirely out of scavenged and re-purposed materials. I built the top three; and helped a newbie raised bed builder with the bottom (closest to the camera) bed.

GARDEN PORN!

See, I promised y'all some solid gardening porn, didn't I? I and DELIVERED, didn't I?

And oh, what the hell. How about some food porn?

Cameras. and tomatoes!

Okay, so in this post anyway, the tomatoes are really mostly a prop for the cameras. More gardening to follow!

This is comparing my existing digital camera, a Panasonic DMC ZS-19, 14.1mp, a nice camera that is about as feature-filled as you can get in a compact with the new, ultracompact Nikon S01 (10mp) I just bought because I really want something smaller and lighter I can carry around consistently in my pocket.

Both shots were taken with the camera on Auto mode, auto flash (neither fired), at the same distance. This is a screenshot, which of course has its own limitations, but shows the color represented the same way.

Really, the ultracompact S01 takes a pretty solid shot, at least in full daylight, with no zoom. (Haven't had the chance to compare them yet with moving subjects, in lower light, indoors, etc.) The green of the tomato plant is better represented in the more expensive and larger Panasonic, and the Nikon gets a little washed out at the outer edges (upper right) of the soil. But really, a pretty damn impressive showing for a camera that measures almost exactly 2" by 3" (smaller than a credit card!) and weighs only 3.4 ounces all in, with almost 8gb of internal memory. I prefer cameras I can take a memory card out of for easier downloading, but I'll deal.

What I really ought to do is another comparison that includes the DSLR Canon Rebel, and Canon Rebel XT.

I know: you're all waiting with baited breath, right?

Various and sundry

Hot off the digital presses, since I know y'all must be missing the food porn and gardening porn something fierce.

This is this year's crop of container gardening tomatoes. (Containers, in this case, are drilled out 6.5 gallon homebrewing buckets. I sold some brewing equipment through Craigslist right when we moved to Atlanta, and the guy who came to pick the stuff up noticed I was using old brewing buckets for gardening, said something like, "Wow -- you really must have a ton of brewing equipment!")

The larger plant to the left looks healthier, but it struggling a bit. Atlanta is a tough place to grow tomatoes, and buckets are a tough place to grow tomatoes.

Now on the left is the smaller plant, a Tumbling Tiger, with a couple delicious specimens picked and sitting on top. And that's our little baby herb garden with, I think, oregano and thyme. We finally gave up on some transplated hydroponic basil which did surprisingly well for a while, but then just wasn't having it.

Here are those Tumbling Tigers in action: sliced on toast with Better Than Cream Cheese, then going clockwise: sauerkraut, fried tempeh, sauteed broccoli, and caramelized ONIONS!

My favorite apron from my time cooking aboard ship has a silkscreened patch sewn on. The text is: "under the pavement  |  the forest".

I love exploring, particularly abandoned buildings and industrial sites. I particularly love it when nature takes back over.

I'm posting this from my college alma mater which many of you know. Yesterday I moderated a roundtable discussion of alums and friends about Occupy, caught up with one of my most important faculty mentors (K), and am going to a couple more workshops today, and get to just wander around and re-explore the place.

Above is a shot from my bike and hike this morning through the "pine forest." (See any pines?) (Stir any memories?)

It's a little hard to express how amazing this place is for me, and for many people.

Here's a toad trying hard to blend in on that same little path. 

Students here make stuff. Sometimes it's hilarious.

I'm lodged in the housing group (starts with "P") I never did officially stay in, but spent plenty of time in. The first time was when I needed to flee the rages of Fuckmonger, and an upper year friend invited me over. They were going out on an exploration of the former SAC bunker built into Bare Mountain. (Neat video in that link.) It's massive: almost 26 acres, and 44,000 square feet. Now owned by Amherst College and used as the Five College Book Depository, it contains nearly 500,000 volumes, filed by size rather than by subject, on over 8 miles of shelving. Here's a wonky article all about how it was set up and is used as a library depository. Its initial purpose (1957-71) was as the eastern communications hub for the Strategic Air Command, and it played a significant role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Back in 1993, however, it was in a strange transitional state of use, and, well, some students knew how to get in. And so we did. And wandered, climbed around, sat and spun around in really uncomfortable office chairs, went through piles of old records (mostly boring stuff like time logs.) For further details on this trip, we'll we'll have to talk in person.

This is only the second time I've been back to campus for any significant period of time, the first being June 2010. As of then, my mural was still up in the basement of the dorm I was housed in. I'm hoping to be able to go check it out today and see if it's still up.

Tomorrow: Boston for some friends, some Red Sox, some wandering.