So last year I had a few leaves of Lamb’s Quarters in salads. Yesterday, I picked 2 quarts of tips and leaves, jammed them into a pot with a little water and butter, and cooked them for 10 minutes or so. They were delicious! Very much like spinach, except better. It just blows my mind that they’ve been under my nose practically my whole life (I’ve pulled up a thousand of them if I’ve pulled one), and I’m only now figuring out that they’re edible, and not only edible, but really good!
Archive for June, 2010
Lamb’s Quarters
7 June 2010Grape Leaves, Rain, and Bears
5 June 2010So I’ve started reading Stalking the Wild Asparagus, which I’ve known about almost since its publication in 1962, but have never read. I resisted reading it because I didn’t know what it was and it quickly became a cliche. But better late than never.
Anyway, I read about eating grape leaves in STWA and decided to give it a try, especially since the season was right and I knew of a wild grape vine on our property putting out a lot of new leaves after I hacked it back. I stuffed them with a mix of beef, rice, sunflower seeds, onion, parsley, dill, and olive oil (recipe from Joy of Cooking), and they came out very good. G ate them but D did not. Grape leaves, dill, parsley from our yard, beef from across the street.
Meanwhile, we’re on the verge of having too much rain. It’s raining hard again right now. You watch, now that I have 250 gallons of rainwater stored, it will rain every 5 days all summer and the garden won’t need any of it.
We also apparently have some bears living in southern Wisconsin now, and a few at least visiting our town.
First Salad
4 June 2010Had the first salad mostly from the garden tonight. Used looseleaf lettuce, a few baby beet leaves, a few kale leaves (from the stuff that survived the winter), a bit of the new purslane (from the seeds I bought — it’s lighter green, larger-leaved, and more upright than the common one), a little parsley, a leaf of swiss chard (which I don’t like raw much), plus some dill and chives. The chives are from a plant growing up between cement blocks underneath a maple tree — we surely didn’t plant it there, but it’s a big and healthy-looking plant.
You look at one thing and you think you can’t possibly have enough for salad for everyone, but then you walk around picking a bit from this and a bit from that, and pretty soon you have enough. It was awesome, too!
And More….
2 June 2010Yesterday I planted maybe 5 pepper plants and three eggplant plants. The peppers are jalapeno and hungarian yellow. M bought them at Miller’s, and we still have a lot left — not sure where those are going to go, or even if I want to plant them. There’s only so many hot peppers you can use.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here watching a thunderstorm roll in. I love t-storms, always have. Looking at the radar, it sure looks like we’re going to get it, but it’s not that dark outside. Wait, now I see that gray wall about a mile away that means it’s about to pour.
Which will fill up my rain barrels, assuming my distribution manifold works correctly (I need to come up with a better design that isn’t dependent on the slope of the thing). That’s about 250 gallons.
In the summer. What about in the winter? The need for water doesn’t go away in the winter.
Well, one thing I did a couple of days ago is put a 5-gallon bucket under the condensate pump outlet from the furnace/air conditioner. But that’s a drop in the bucket…so to speak. And doesn’t happen without electricity.
That’s something I need to think about. The basement would be the obvious place for water storage, but how to get water from rain/snow to that storage in the winter?
Ending and Beginning 