create
What people are shouting
Growing a Kitchen Garden instead of grass…
My front yard is now totally transformed into a food and flower garden. The grass still peeks through at times and I vigourously dig it out. Because so much manure was used the soil has become very deep and friable making weeding easy peasey. Grass is tenacious but so am I!
At the moment I have planted various lettuces, onions, garlic, celery, strawberries, cabbages, brussell sprouts, peas, raddichio, black Italian kale (divine!), and all sorts of herbs. I have rescued many shrubs and plants from clients gardens as well as throwing seeds all over the place..just to see what emerges. this year i have fallen in love with sages and have a slew planted in the garden. Some I started from cuttings taken from friends gardens and i am very excited to see how they will look when fully grown out. One is paticular is spectacular, Salvia mexicana “Limelight”..a wonderful full green habit with deep purple flowers with a lime green calyx. The combination is stunning.
I went to Malibu beach last Sunday and collected a few 15 gallon buckets of seaweed. I use the seaweed with worm castings and compost to make a fermented tea (one day steeping in a large bucket). The tea is then diluted , one part tea to 4 parts water. I drench all and sundry with this tea. It serves both as a light fertilizer for the plants as well as a medium to add valuable micronutients and microbes to the soil itself.
Enjoy the photos taken yesterday Nov 19th.
Bye for now.
John
It’s a large world after all!
Disneyland has quietly closed it’s signature “It’s a Small World” ride for a much needed face lift. Apparently the boats are bottoming out thanks to heavier than anticipated loads. That’s Disney speak for politely saying that we are getting fatter and the boats can’t handle the excess weight.
When the ride was built forty-three years ago American men and woman were on average 25 pounds lighter. The average weight for men in 1960 was 166 pounds and women were a scant 140. As of 2002 the average male weighs in at 191 and the female at 164.
So after 40 years of fad diets we are fatter than ever. Perhaps it is time to revisit the GreatGrub diet strategy of everything in moderation.
Disney handles the indelicate task of lightening the load by offering the booted tubsters coupons for free food.
“Oooh, I hope it’s not natures candy”
spoken by one of the neighborhood kids while waiting at the door for a Halloween treat
Today I ate a wild lobster. I am not sure I have eaten one before… I may have, but nobody has alerted me to the fact. It was served up with a butter sauce. It didn’t need it. It melted on the tongue. It was sweet and succulent while still conjuring the ocean. What a treat.
This is an astonishing story. I can’t help wondering, though, why they don’t just cut big carrots into small, bite-sized pieces.
Where are you Jamie Oliver
Our nation turns it’s hungry eyes to you
Today the New York Times published an article about the difficulties getting locally grown carrots into New York City school cafeterias. It’s an reasonable article and I encourage you to read it. But while reading about the absurdity of upstate farmers trying to figure out how to manufacture baby carrots to satisfy the red tape requirements of the bureaucracy to in the name of environmentalism, in the back of my mind I was thinking about Jamie Oliver.
Jamie is an example of a brave chef standing up for his beliefs and risking his good name in the process. The celebrity chef has badgered politicians, parents and educators to pay attention to the meals served in London Schools. He’s paid a price for passion. The news has jumped on reports of angry mom’s smuggling junk food into their hungry children all the while cursing the name of Jamie Oliver. But I tilt my hat to the young man who has affected change and brought the debate to the fore.
But what about the shining metropolis of Manhattan? Is there not one celebrity chef willing to take up the call? Childhood obesity rates are rising at alarming rates and the best we can come up with is manufactured baby carrots and the wife of a celebrity comedian promoting pureed vegitables in brownies. Is that really the best we can do?
Perhaps if you had pureed the eggs along with some broccoli and spinach and hidden that in your chocolate breakfast cake the meal would have been more palatable.
I had chocolate cake for breakfast. It didn’t go too well with my scrambled egg.
