Your eyes do not deceive you. This is a ripe, half-eaten homegrown tomato perched atop my backyard fence. Deposited by a squirrel no doubt. Looking outside my kitchen window, I witnessed perhaps the same squirrel running up my neighbors roof with a smaller red one in its filthy undeserving mouth.
How depressing. To avoid this I believe you either must pick them green and let them ripen inside or create a physical barrier with netting. I hate to pick them unripe because they don’t taste as good. What’s the point? But I’ve been so busy the net’s not quite situated right. Obviously. Need to work on that. But until then, it appears I’m writing off a chunk of my crop to the squirrels.
Yesterday I pulled up my first potato plant. To my delight there were two perfect little red potatoes on it! Red lasoda, to be precise. For some reason I was a little shocked. This is my first potato rodeo, so perhaps that’s why.
A closeup of the newborn taters:
It appears I could’ve had two more, had conditions been right:
I hadn’t planned on pulling these up, but I found myself wondering when these would be ready to go, so I just grabbed one. Earlier in the day, I had purchased a few new potatoes at Whole Foods. What an excellent opportunity for comparison!
Keep in mind the store-bought ones are organic and expensive ($3.59/lbs). Yet they still look a ton different. Mine are the pink ones:
I set up a taste test and steamed both sets. I was nervous mine might not taste a lot better. But there was no doubt, the fresh ones were about a billion times tastier. They had a much creamier, more potato-ey texture and taste than the ones from Whole Foods. The store bought ones had a bitter aftertaste that I probably wouldn’t have objected to had I not tasted the better ones.
I have probably thirty total plants that include two other varieties in the garden that should be ready to pull in the coming weeks.
Is there any more important DIY pursuit than that which improves one’s ability to appreciate TV?
I have not yet invested in a flat screen TV. Here in the bedroom, the TV I bought back in college at a Wal-Mart in Austin is still kickin’. It has traveled the country and seen the inside of more moving trucks than 99% of America’s TVs. I will never forget how my friend Jay, who was helping me load furniture into a U-Haul truck during afternoon rush hour in NYC, dropped it onto the Fifth Ave. sidewalk in front of my building. I was upstairs at the time. Jay felt so guilty and said it even bounced a bit. There’s barely a dent on one corner to show for it. And you would never know any of it happened from the excellent picture.
Anyways, a recent changeup of furniture in the bedroom meant that this TV was sitting about a foot lower than previously. This was a bit of a bummer, and it especially irked Michael who found it much more difficult to see.
I searched for an inexpensive way to lift it up. The solution had to be cheap, otherwise why not just buy a flat screen and retire the old TV to a lucky person on Craigslist.
Then, I found an easier and more elegant solution: the LINDEN table from IKEA, chopped off at the legs to perfectly accommodate the TiVo and cable box. It comes in birch or black. It has a slight Asian aesthetic to it. And at $29.99, the price is right. I used a hacksaw to chop off the legs and glued some thin cork on the leg bottoms.
I spray painted the table bottom black as it came unfinished. And I used a black Sharpie to touch up any chipped areas from the hacksaw. I rather like the finished result, I am thinking of submitting to to IKEA hacker:
In today’s newspaper I had a brief piece about a product offering from a specialty fireplace company. Earthcore Industries is now selling historic bricks that they dug out of New England harbors. The bricks were originally used as ballast on voyages from England during colonial times. They were dumped into the harbors and replaced with goods like tobacco for the return trip.
The bricks have a distressed, handmade look to them. Earthcore mainly uses them as firebrick, which is the lining of the inside of a fireplace. I would insert a link to the story online, but it doesn’t appear to be up there, which I fear will become the norm now that the organization has laid off so many people. Anyways, here is some useful info from the Earthcore literature about different ways firebrick is laid:
Some common firebrick patterns are: (1) herringbone (2) stack bond (3) basket weave (4) running bond.
One of the roses I planted in my front landscape this fall is called “Spice.” It’s an Earth Kind Rose, so designated by Texas A&M for it’s easy-to-grow nature that doesn’t require lots of pesticides or fertilizer.
Here’s another rose that some believe to be the true ‘Hume’s Tea Scented China.’ Right or wrong this rose produces the palest of pink, tea-like blooms on a 3 to 4 foot thick bush. The plant is twiggy in growth, more like our China roses and can mildew a little in the early spring. The flowers are good for cutting and have an unusual fragrance that probably earned it its name.
China roses are varieties that were brought to Europe from China in the late 18th century. Hume’s Blush Tea-scented China is said to be one of four stud roses that many modern roses are descended from.
As you see above I cut one of the blooms to brighten up my dreary desk. I may have to start collecting bud vases!
It has a strong, spicy green fragrance that would make a fine perfume. Here’s another photo from the Rose Emporium:
Last night I saw this film at the Magnolia. It was screening as part of the AFI Dallas Film Festival.
It’s an expose about the sad and dangerous way most American food is made. My takeaways:
It’s pretty obvious from all the salmonella and e-coli outbreaks that our food is not safe. This movie shows why in disgusting detail — from cows who wade knee-deep in manure their entire miserable existence to a processing setup that allows beef from a thousand cows to end up in a single burger.
Is chicken as appetizing when you know it’s been genetically engineered to have breasts so large it’s organs fail and it’s legs break when it tries to walk?
The part I knew least about was how litigious and secretive food producers have become. Just a few companies process the vast majority of what we all eat, and they appear to have ruined many people’s lives in their efforts to silence critics and protect their business interests. It has a tobacco-like feel to it.
The issue of cost came up a lot. Better food no doubt costs more. I like cheap food too. But something one farmer said struck me as true — if you don’t buy the cheapest car, why would you buy the cheapest beef? Why do you care if organic, free-roaming eggs are $3 a dozen if you are willing to buy a $3 latte?
It’s not surprising that this has a similar feel as Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” as the director said the same group of people produced it. I predict this movie, which opens in wide release in the summer, will be much bigger. Not everyone believes in global warming, but we (nearly) all eat the same burgers.
This fall I planted five different types of “Earth Kind” roses in my front landscape, all of them pink. I already had one in the ground from the year before, and it did so well I gave her some friends. Earth Kind is a classification awarded by the Texas A&M Extension, and it means the rose is easy to grow and doesn’t require pesticides, fungicides or a ton of fertilizer.
This particular variety is called Duchesse de Brabant. From the Antique Rose Emporium:
Teddy Roosevelt made this rose his favorite, often wearing a bud or flower as a boutonniere. It is very nearly our greatest favorite, too. The cupped pink flowers have a cabbagey roundness to them, as if they were picked from a luscious old rose painting. Nearly continuously in bloom, these roses can be counted on for a rich whiff of fragrance at absolutely any time of the day, even in the hot Texas sun. The apple green leaves are slightly wavy.
