torquill | A slice of the life I'm trying to cultivate

"Hmm, I feel like some rhubarb cobbler for dessert."

Go downstairs, get shoes and flashlight, head out to the garden. Pull a good double handful of rhubarb stalks. Bring them inside, wash and trim them. Cut them into 1/2" pieces, as the plant variety is such that peeling is unnecessary.

Pull out a small casserole and dump the pieces in. Look up a rhubarb pie recipe for the flour:sugar ratio, eyeball the amount of fruit, and estimate amounts. Pour the flour and sugar mix on. Toss some oatmeal in a bowl, add a half-handful of brown sugar, a dollop of flour, and a few tablespoons of butter; mash it together. Cover the top of the fruit with it.

Look at a few more recipes, set the oven to 425F, toss in the casserole dish, and set the timer to 35 minutes as a first guess. Head back upstairs. Watch old TV shows while the aroma of cobbler wafts up the stairs. Go down and pull it out. Watch some more TV until it's cool enough to touch. Eat dessert. Elapsed time since the rhubarb was pulled off the plant: 90 minutes.

I can cook well enough I don't need recipes for everything. I have a garden which provides us with something we all love, year-round, 24 hours a day. I have an hour in my evening which I can devote to combining the two.

This is the life I'm slowly working toward, and I love it.

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Such an amazing feeling, isn't it?

I'm between crops on my garden this year, got a late start on the cool season stuff, but I've got sprouts for beets, spinach, radishes, arugula, sugar snap peas, and I've got cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage in from plant starts from the nursery I worked for this summer.

And all 7 of our fruit trees survived the summer, we'll have oranges soon, AND the strawberry and asparagus beds are coming along well.

The winter garden has been lost in the weeds here; I need to spend a couple of days resurrecting it. It'll be easier once the sprinkler runs tomorrow morning, as we had (another) enforced dry spell until I could fix a failed valve elsewhere in the system.

Not sure what will go out there -- I should keep the peas out of the sprinkler if I want them to survive in the spring, but I can still put in some garlic and multiplier onions. Maybe beets, again, though they take forever and I've forgotten them by the time they actually start to size up. Parsley! gotta plant more of that for certain. I've missed it.

I eat sauteed beet greens for breakfast a lot, I really tend to grow them for the greens more than the root, though I love the roots too - raw, cooked, cooked and then chilled, whatever.

You are aware that chard and beets are the same species, yes? The only thing distinguishing them is whether the individual variety has a tendency to grow a starchy root for storage. So beet greens are the same thing as chard, albeit with an added bonus of the root. :) (If you ever wanted just the greens without the time/space commitment of the root, chard will give you that.)

I like beets roasted, though more often I take the quicker option and just cook them in the microwave like sweet potatoes. I can't eat many raw before they start arguing with me.

We've got 4 raised beds, plus a little side patch of asparagus and a row of herbs in what was an ornamental border when I moved in. One is entirely strawberries and green onions, one is "square foot" style greens, carrots, beets and radishes, one has the broccoli and cabbage (and I just cleared that bed, loosened the soil that I oveercompressed this spring, added compost and planted it today), and the 4th still has the peppers, eggplant, tomatoes and basil in it. I'm not sure if I'm going to try to plant anything in that bed this season.

Grab a cheap bag of lentils or chickpeas. When the summer plants check out (I note we have a frost advisory tonight, so it may be soon), clear the bed and sow it thickly with the legumes. Rake them in a bit or cover it with screen to save the seed from the birds. They'll grow over the winter, start taking off in spring, and they'll be nice and lush around about the time you'd plant tomatoes and peppers. Turn them under, let the bed sit for a few days, and plant. They'll give you a gentle nitrogen boost and good organic matter, and they don't tie up the bed too long.

I like the sound of your life. I could live with this.

I've randomly followed you over from Mock the Stupid, and I would just like to say... I approve of the life you're trying to cultivate. ;) (And I know, your whole purpose for being must hinge on the approval of people you've never met!)

*Ahem.* Now I wander off, to likely never return again.

Carry on!

A slice of the life I'm trying to cultivate

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