It’s always surprising how we go from that “is anything ever going to grow around here?” thing to “good god, more peas?!”  The garden’s starting cranking out food, and we’re already chest-deep in potatoes, peas, strawberries (and more strawberries), broccoli, lettuce, carrots, and onions.  Not, you know, literally chest deep.  That’d be crazy.

A veritable rainbow of spuds what I picked for lunch.  Consider these babies fried.  The straw mulching worked quite well.  Some of these I didn’t have to dig at all.  They were just lying in the mulch.  Laying?  Whatever.

All the garlic planted last winter.  Learned an important lesson there.  They do much better in well amended (i.e., soft) soil.  The patch I used for them this year was quite clayey, and the bulbs in the harder areas suffered.  As much as garlic suffers.  Maybe it was fun.  I don’t know.  In any case, they were small.

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Big day here.  Sitting in my office, slaving away for The Man, I heard this very loud… clucking?  No, more like… bokking.  Bok!… Bok!… Bok!…

It was loud enough that I had to get up and go see what was going on out there.  I looked in the coop, and I only saw three of the girls.  Uh-oh… could it be an escape?!

But then, I saw that Margaret was actually here:

Margaret apparently wanted a little time alone.  She sat there for about 10 minutes.

And left us this:

Our first actual (albeit comically small) egg!

Note the fake one.  I had this gag egg (hey, catch!) that’s made out of rubber, and I put it in there yesterday just to clue them in to the rationale for the little box with the flip top.  Seems to have gotten the message across.

Here it is:

It was actually remarkably egg-like aside from the reduced dimensions.  The shell was nice and hard, the yolk was bright orange, and the white stood right up in the bowl.

I will admit that, at first, I was a little grossed out at eating it.  I know.  That makes NO sense given my ease of eating some god-awful factory farmed pseudo-egg.  Still, I had a moment of thinking “oh man, think back, what have I fed her?… this thing just came OUT of that chicken!… ew…”

I got over it.  The micro-scramble was delicious.

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Not only do I loathe professional and college sports and use words like ‘loathe’, I take genuine pleasure from making flower bouquets.

There are suddenly more flowers for cutting in the yard than we have places to put them.

I’m afraid that the only word I can think of to describe the situation…

FABULOUS!

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If you’re a food garden dork, like myself, you may have run into this weird situation wherein you cook up a bunch of potatoes, and for some reason, some of them don’t… cook.  They get hot, they turn brown, but they stay crunchy and taste either bad or like nothingness.

This is, I just learned today after making a whole pan of them, called glassy potatoes.

So what causes glassy potatoes, Mr. Smartypants?  Well, I’ll tell you.  After a little research, I learned that they are caused by “secondary growth” of potatoes.  That makes sense.  I mentioned that I was harvesting the All Blues that came up from some I’d left in the ground from last year?  Two of them were sort of “scabby” on the outside.  Being a depression-era mentality type, I decided to “cut off the bad parts” and cook those up first so that my family wouldn’t have to look at them for dinner.

Indeed, they were sort of watery and translucent on the inside.  Otherwise, they looked pretty normal and weren’t soft or discolored.  I threw them into a cast iron frying pan with some onions and a couple of pounds of butter to make some fried potatoes.

Much later, they didn’t feel very soft.  Still, they were all nice and brown and crunchy on the outside.  In goes the cheese, and a couple big shredded leaves of collards.  Heart attack special– Southern Style.

The first bite was quite a let down.  Crunch.  Oh, that one must have defied thermodynamics and not cooked like the rest of them.  Nope.  Crunch, crunch, crunch.  Blech.

I’ve read that if you prepare a salt-water bath, you can tell a glassy potato because it will float where the ones that still contain some starch (that’s the problem, no starch left) will sink.  Seems to me, though, that knowing what I do now, it’d be pretty easy to see that characteristic crunchy, watery, translucence that  you see when you cut into it.

So, if there’s any chance that your homegrown spuds are “second growth” (e.g., they’re from a volunteer patch, you saved some from earlier, they look particularly scabby compared to the rest), cut into them and look for the signs.  If they look to be glassy, toss them.

can’t blog much… too hot… 100 degrees… global warming and/or mid-summer…

The poor chickens look like fish on dry land with their mouths hanging open panting.

Everything’s hanging like wet rags.

The sweat’s running down my forehead as fast as I can wipe it off.

Hot is what I’m saying.

Wilty Broccoli

Field of Potatoes with Blues in the Front

Walla Walla Onions (The overwintered ones from seed didn’t bolt.  The spring planted sets did.)

Great Clods of Snap Peas (Sugar Snap)

Lesser Clods of Shelling Peas (Cascadia)

Dottie panting in the heat.

Shirley (who is, by all accounts, a complete twit) is always panting.

Tomatoland looking into the farm.  That’s a bunch of beneficial insect attractors in the front.

Of the three Nova Spy apples growing on the new tree, my 5-year-old apparently decided to test one for ripeness by biting it.  He’s grounded forever.

Likewise, I believe my lovely wife tested the first ripe raspberry for ripeness by eating it.

A big ol’ cabbagehead.

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