International edible gardening

Yes. Everyone should be ashamed of everything all the time, it is homoalbusmensrea; the 2014 zeitgeist.

I am on-line now as the rain hacks down with lightning and thunder - and 7 eggs separated, to put on a stirring youtube soundtrack as I whip the eggs for my Pavlova - the sugar measured, vanilla out, paper on the baking sheets, and oven preheated to 280 f. I thought about some Classical Persian Zarf music but too chaotic with the beater going - I think some klezmer set to volume 10, not too jolly always, but doable for as long as it takes to get the meringues in.

 

I am waiting for my wife and suddenly realized - I could post a picture of my big mower which I just got yesterday. The blade is a double flail and is on a fifty pound flywheel! Nothing stops that - when you shut off the power to the blade it keeps spinning for a couple minutes, it is designed to chew up brush and small trees up to 20 foot tall and four inches in diameter and mow grass and brush to any depth. V twin Honda, 26 horsepower engine. It weighs 650 pounds and is 6.6 foot long, 42 inch wide. This is under my house.

 

MrsK, makes me think of ortolans, the little thing, drowned in Armagnac; would look just like that - the cloth over the head to hold the aroma, and also to hide one from god during this excess - according to tradition.

 

Ortolans. Didn't know what they were called.

 

Oh, MrsK, a great photo!

Food is so much. It is certainly for our needs, but also for our pleasure and for our bonding with each other; food is even love and a sacrament which then means it can be a sin.

I am reading on the medieval times and think of Henry I, the good administrator and negotiator and power user, who died from the surfeit of lampreys at a banquet, the second most famous Royal food event after Alfred and his cakes.

MrsK, you had asked of karma, it is the great leveler, it is the buffer in a world of bell curves.

Bad people are mostly broken in spirit from harm they received; they come from bad parents, peers, environment, luck, bad genes - they are the 'bird with a broken wing'.

Good people have had it good and have gotten through the travails and associations of life with a positive leaning, which is a strength and happiness and epically good fortune.

When a bad person does bad it does not count much in the scoring we all karmically receive. A cat torments and kills mice, a rabbit does not - neither is bad, or good, for that.

Yet when a good person does bad it is very much scored against them. The corollary is when a good person does good it counts for very little. It is like a beautiful person being very attractive, it is their fortune, their blessing rather than their effort.

The bad are unhappy. Every cruel action hurts them in that it came from the hurt they received in being formed. The cards are so against them. They were set up, they were abused to the point they are now abusers. They are screwed from every way.

Good people usually have had good genes, family, friends, environment, luck. The writing the $125 check to Jamaican earthquake relief is not so much to their credit, but not doing so is to their discredit.

We each have very different gifts and blessings and harms handed to us and from the better more is demanded. Marxism, that demonic system dressed as benevolence, puts it well: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

But then 'Free Will' is the core consideration. Exercising free will is where karma brings out the score card, and it is a heavy card. Free will is when we act outside of the blessings or harms which formed us. Free will has every one of us acting below what we should be, by how much is where we are scored.

 

I have run amuck, as I do, and been buying the sickly plants as the full hot weather is here and most plants should have been planted months ago. So they sit all half dead and parched reduced %50, then more and more till the last dead things finally go into the garbage.

So I bought 4 grapes Mars, Thompson, Black Monukka, and a mystery one that were 95% dead, merely a wisp of green on 1 leaf, from a bin full of 100% dead ones. $6 total, and they can be returned; with original wrapping and receipt. Then two Bleeding Heart roots, 6 Calla Lilly bulbs, 4 large elephant ear bulbs - $3 total. And 4 kumquat trees $34 total (4 foot tall, spindly, in a one gallon pot, but in good condition with a good number of small, green, fruits - 20+ on each.)

I put the grapes in individual 3 gallon pots last evening and will plant the bulbs today, the trees are a bit of a worry though. Each had a glossy tag saying Calamondin (a sour, tiny, tangerine - good for marmalade and some Oriental dishes) but the nursery tag said Kumquat. The Kumquat is the most cold hardy of the citrus and I love them - Calamondin are cold sensitive. A mystery, what to do with them? I will gamble on them being kumquat and just plant without worrying about sheltered spots.



Picked my daily 1 and a bit pound of blackberries - now have over 20 pounds of them frozen waiting for the big syrup making and canning.

Also the incubator is put away (being bleached actually) and I do not know how many chicks there are - I put them out as cheeping eggs and one at a time chicks - I guess 10, but the hen has not been coming out with them yet - they are a total mix of colours!

 

You've certainly got yourself some bargains there Colne. Let's hope they survive and earn their keep!

 

Sheal,the rhubarb has died as it was predicted - but I saved the packaging and receipt - and will get a refund. They should not sell things that cannot grow here so I am glad to return them. I hope to grow some rhubarb as an annual this fall and spring. I also got some blueberries from someone we give eggs to, they are late this year but are about to really come on, blueberries do very well here and a couple people we know grow masses of them.

But I am off to the beach drum circle for the full moon.

A warm night with the storm held off - a video from earlier - sorry I said cantaloupe worm when I meant canna worm - Last month's drum circle was rained out but it is very fine out right now.

 

I am not a gardener, but am bound to lay in some plants for my 93 year old father who once won the allotment prize for variety of veg and flower. So, I have decided to hoof it to the new Spitifields market on the central line &

 

Because of your climate Colne plants grow and fruit a lot quicker than here, in light of this do you have a short growing season?

Have you tried growing rhubarb in a trough underneath your house, it may well cope better there.

That's a real mean machine you have invested in and a tough Honda engine, they're hard to beat!

A couple of ideas for your unidentified fruit.
1. Chayote Squash
2. Breadnut

 

No, those are big in the Cajun community and called merletons

I think it is some kind of obscure melon - I had a variety of 2011 seeds given out by the garden club, gotten from who knows where - and I planted a number of them relying on memory - then most never came up and I have no idea of what and where I planted.

Our growing seasons are all year, there never needs to be a day when something is not ripe. But then they are different - August is too hot for tomatoes, they need nights to cool down to 75f (24c) to set flowers - which we do not get from June to September. In July the plants have little fruit set in June which ripen, then in mid Sept the second crop of tomatoes planted in August are setting fruit for the autumn. We have high summer tomato less - but get the Asian beans, okra, and all peppers - some squash and melons, cucumbers, then.

The heat is the killer of rhubarb, the roots die of rot. You can grow it as an annual by planting in the fall, which I plan to try.

I will get a picture of the banana grove in front of the cottage - it is phenomenal how grown up it is - but the dahlias have not made it, root rot with the six inches of leaf compost; live and learn.

I wish I could go. I want some good jerk seasoning, or general Jamaican seasoning for soup - but not too hot. Summer we have soups based on peppers, okra, beans daily - and I do a lot of Cajun or creole (those being what that time of year had here) and think I need to add Jamaican.

I spent 4 years working as part of a Jamaican crew - working in the ceilings of factories at night; 12 hour shifts, living in hotels, living out of the trucks, I have a bit of nostalgia for it - we were USA's #1 industrial lighting crew (we really were.) (me and 4 Jamaican men).

 

So great to go with you through your garden. I just came back from the Spitifield market in leyton, which sells wholesale to shops, bringing back a wheely and shopping bags, of ornamentals. Now I wish I had vegetables and fruit trees. How fascinating. You are a real gardener!

 

"Today is Friday the 13th and a full moon. That won't happen again until 2049"
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/12/580119...e-13th-and-a-full-moon-that-wont-happen-again

Yesterday actually. The day before we had mistakenly gone to the beach to join the Drum Circle that happens at a secluded fire pit - but the wrong day. So last night again we went there, and the moon was visible pretty well with clouds being just a trace, watched a gorgeous moon rise over the Gulf waters - red orange and huge, making a long red shadow along the water - but no drum circle.....I hope the guys have not moved off to somewhere else. They are a group of new hippies - a creative anachronism bunch; the drumming is quite good - a subdued fire, families and couples, dancing and talking. Very pleasant, no alcohol or unseemly behavior, just drumming as the moon rises and then continues as the all the beach becomes brightly lit in moonlight, as it does in the warm Southern nights.

Sesame happens to be my sister; I had told her I posted pictures here so she could show them to my parents, and hopefully she will stick around.

So here is the exact fire pit - see it ringed in signs saying what you may not do? No fireworks without a permit, no dogs, (I ignore that one) no glass containers



This is in January, digging sand for the garden - I get close to 1000 pounds a load, 700 anyway, clean, but rather fine, sand a trip.

I am off to the farmers market where I will trade eggs for blueberries - and give a pavlova base to the same seller so they can try it themselves.

 

Hi Ses @sesame, nice to meet you.

Sorry about no drum circle... always wanted to attend one of those; having one on a Gulf beach seems a brilliant idea. As long as people have voices to raise and feet to stomp, there will always be music.

MrK & I are very pleased with life this evening, having brought home 3 new budgerigars this afternoon to increase our flock to 5 budgies, 1 dog and 2 humans.

Been thinking about your take on karma, @colne. I like it. Free will has each of us acting below where we should be: whose idea of should?

 

Now come on - given choices about everything who is always going to do the thing one should rather than what one wants - not me.

So a nice time at the market - a tiny one, but a good bit of organic from the serrious growers, and less so from the ones who also buy some of their stuff, but still, to have variety it needs to not be ridged. It is on the beach and very pretty, a nice breeze and huge trees and lots of sea birds to watch.



I got home an hour ago and picked basil - I have several varieties, most flowering, so I cut them back although I do not know if that will extend their season or they are getting done - any idea? Then I cut back 4 kinds of mint and mixed them together too, and took a bunch of oregano I had been given, and some parsley - and stuffed the dehydrator.

That is the little oven I bake in warm months



And here was an annoying bit - a lovely swallowtail butterfly was hovering over my potted lemon in front of the house but he was very hard to get. The old film cameras took the picture instantly and so just click and get it - the new have a delay and one only gets a shot of where he just was. (reminds me of firing my ancient flint lock rifle, pull the trigger, the hammer with the flint drops into the steel pan sparking your priming powder which lights the powder load through a touch hole and finally the gun discharges. I could never hit the simplest moving target with it - and same with this butterfly.)



And here is a pavolova made into a crisp meringue by long baking - and packaged to give to the berry person. They told me to make them and sell them. My eggs are known as the very wildest of any - with the chickens in the forest all day and with the extras I feed them. I guess people do not bother making stuff like this themselves - I never did till it was mentioned on this thread.



So off to plant some yellow lily bulbs given to us by a seller - I can always cram in one more thing. I did get the callas, elephant ears, and bleeding hearts planted - and now I will also be sticking in some more sweet potato slips and purple okra - if my wife brings home the okra seed from a friend's house.