Dandelion Greens

2 May 2009

Picked some dandelions from the back yard today. It’s a gorgeous, sunny, breezy day, and it was nice laying out in the lawn picking them. And now that I think of it, that’s the first harvest of the season!

One of the good things I remember from my childhood was visiting my grand-aunt and uncle’s farm out in Lebanon, Connecticut. My aunt was a fantastic cook, and we had some memorable meals there. She was a big fan of dandelion greens, probably because they didn’t cost anything as much as for any other reason (frugality being a virtue she valued above most others, like many from her generation). She would often serve them as one of the vegetables with a meat such as spare ribs, and even though they were quite bitter, since she harvested them all summer, they somehow went with the meat really well.

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Anyway, I washed all the ones I harvested this morning, then had some of them as a salad with my second breakfast (along with 4 of C’s eggs, scrambled) and put the rest in the refrigerator to cook for dinner tonight. They have a very mild flavor, with just a hint of bitterness.

CR’s chickens are getting more and more of their food from pasture this time of year. With those eggs and the greens picked less than 30 minutes before they wound up in my stomach, that should be about the healthiest meal ever.

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I cooked some dandelion greens for dinner, just boiled them for a very few minutes with some butter. They were okay, but the bitterness seemed more pronounced.

I bought a copy of Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Bradford Angier yesterday at Borders. I’ve wanted a wild edibles book for a while, and this looks like a good one. It’s certainly fun to browse, and I strongly prefer illustrations over photographs.

And speaking of shopping, I tried to browse the sale DVDs at Borders yesterday, and I could barely do it. I’m so used to shopping online that trying to look through stacks and stacks of physical items was immensely annoying. To find the book I wanted, I immediately asked for assistance instead of spending 15 minutes looking as I would have 5 years ago.

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Saturday

2 May 2009

This post talks about the difference between what I’m doing and what I should be doing. If I want to be honest, I can’t blog about only the successes and happiness in our lives.

Today is Saturday, so that means that DW is at work until this afternoon and I have both boys at home. And that means that this is my chance to have an influence on them, to be their father, to make them into good humans.

It also means that this is my time to get some stuff done around the house, especially, this time of year, yard and garden work.

So, we hang around in the house for a while this morning, playing and reading while waiting for it to warm up outside. Around 9:30 am or so, it’s warm enough and we’re pretty much done with being inside. We go outside. I move the vegetable plants out of the greenhouse and into the sun and water them all. Meanwhile, the boys are picking dandelion flowers and putting them into a bucket for me. I didn’t ask them to do that, but that’s fine.

By the time I get through moving and watering (maybe 10 minutes tops), they’re done with being outside and ready for a break — inside. There’s a ton of work to do out there, but I can’t leave them inside by themselves (because they’ll probably end up fighting) and I can’t talk them into staying outside with me. So we all go inside.

Frustrating. Am I asking too much of them? Will this work when they get older (they’re 4 and 6)? Should I just insist that they stay outside? How much should you pay attention to the stated wishes of 4- and 6-year-olds?

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First Potatoes UP!

29 April 2009

Yippee!

Let’s see, that’s 11 days since I laid them out on the sod.

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Also, finished pounding in the fence posts today and got about half the fence put up.

Dug in the leaf compost I got last week, dug up lots of quack grass and dandelions. We’ll have to plant stuff pretty soon and just deal with the weeds, then go after them again after harvest. Not perfect, but that’s the best we can do.

Found some software called Garden Planner, haven’t had a chance to install it yet (http://www.smallblueprinter.com/garden/).

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…and more

27 April 2009

Planted another 30′ row of potatoes. Sure hope they start coming up soon….

Was reading a bit about potato bug control yesterday, and it appears that the options are hand-picking or heavy-duty pesticide. I’m not going the pesticide route, so it looks like it’s hand-picking into soapy water (with the soap in there just to break the surface tension so they’ll sink and drown).

And while I’ve done that before, and I don’t think of myself as excessively squeamish, it’s a pretty disgusting job. Neither the adults nor larvae are small, and they lay lots of eggs. Before you know it, you’ve got gobs of bug guts on your fingers.

But one thing that was mentioned in what I read yesterday was wearing gloves, and I was thinking thin rubber gloves would work quite well. Just so long as I don’t get the guts on my skin, I think the job will be a lot less unpleasant.

The other non-pesticide part of control is not planting potatoes in the same place two years in a row. That’s not an issue this year since all the potatoes are going on top of sod, but it’s something we’ll have to plan for after this year.

And speaking of planning, we haven’t planned out where we’re going to plant everything in the garden. I’m inclined to do that with some kind of software, although nothing leaps to mind as lending itself to that purpose. There’s probably something online…and no matter what I end up doing, I’ll post a copy of it here.

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More Potatoes

26 April 2009

Took advantage of a break in the rain to plant another 30′ row of red potatoes in the garden today. Used straw to hold down the newspaper this time and two wheelbarrows of dirt from the garden to cover the potatoes. This photo shows the new row plus the previous row covered in leaf compost.

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It’s too wet to do any other work in the garden this weekend, but it’s time to plant swiss chard and probably other things.

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