Foraging for Sunshine, More Melvegas Pics

First of all, I'm sorry for disparaging gardenerds. The truth is that I am probably just trying to compensate for my own geekdom, or at least obfurscate it. I have tonnes of respect for the true gardenerds who know so much more about gardening than myself. I in fact don't qualify as one myself, my geekiness is manifest purely in enthusiasm.
But I also feel nothing is quite so badass as blind enthusiasm. . . in the spirit of which I share some more photos from mid-may in Melvegas:

our trellae: the stand-alone is for peas, sweet peas, and beans - the second layer, hanging from the house, is for zuccini, 3 types of cucumber and morning glory

The peas gettin goin - eggplant to the left

Korn!!

Onions, herbs & Gus, who loves to lie onto of seedlings

I agree with Laura, Gwar would make an awesome candidate for agricultural balladeers, but I also want to put in a good word for Korn, as well as The Black Eyed Peas.

Laura also put me in mind of some foraging I also got up to a couple of weekends ago: dandelions, baby! There are so many good uses for dandelions - I had no idea. You can boil the roots, you can roast the roots and make coffee of them, you can steam the little proto-buds, you can eat the leaves . . . but my favourite is the dandelion wine, aka liquid sunshine. I made a batch a couple of years ago, and by the time it was finished fermenting it was so potent 2 litres lasted for months, warming up the cold winter. Anyways, this year I thought I'd try it again so we got a small team together and gathered dandelion buds on Victoria Day weekend. Consequently I now have a big yellow gurgling batch of the stuff fermenting in my back porch. (or at least in my imagination it's gurgling)

Dandelion heads ready to be viciously stewed

If anyone in Cambridge wants Broccoli seedlings, I've got a bunch, also a few tomatoes.

badass plant propogation

I'm not sure how unlikely it is that I am a gardener, since being in the garden is the consummate memory of my childhood summers. This image is probably proof enough that I am indeed a "gardenerd". These are my pea sprouts earlier this year, growing up tender and fast. Here is my vegetarian confession: I like to eat vegetables voraciously. I find great pleasure in chomping full leaves of lettuce pulled directly from the head. Since I still had to wait a couple of days before making a feast of these pea sprouts, I set this wee dinosaur prowling among them, to, um, encourage them along. I'm sure the fruitarians of the world would be horribly offended.

But back to heads of lettuce. It reminds me of a conversation I had once about the cannibalistic overtones of the way we use the same words to describe human heads, and vegetables shaped like heads. There are the obvious heads of lettuce, cabbage and broccoli; there are also the melons and gourds. Perhaps I am simply trying to support the point that the desires for gardening are indeed significantly more layered and badass than we generally suspect. Also, gardening is probably completely fit material for the next ACDC record, although I think we might arrive at an even more significant and insightful cultural product by entrusting the album idea to Gwar.

Of course, guerilla gardening is a fairly well-known school of badass plant propogation. It's pretty cool, usually involving digging up asphalt and planting stuff. This weekend I engaged in a couple of types of gardening I'd put in the category of badass plant propogation (b.p.p). The first was gathering wild mushrooms. I'd say it's pretty badass because it can kill yuh, although it really needn't. Anyhow, on the vague advice of a friend, I looked into a fantastically statuesque bracket mushroom found growing on a log. It's really common at this time of year, it turns out. It's called Dryad's Saddle, and is best eaten small (bigger ones, more than about three inches across, get tough). It doesn't apparently have any very close poisonous look-alikes (you might want to verify this info), so it's a pretty safe bet. Other tips: if you leave it sitting pore-side-down on a piece of paper, the spores that fall out are white. Also, it smells like watermelon rind. It's very nice sauteed *immediately* in some oil... apparently the subtle flavours of wild shrooms dissipate within an hour or two. Hey, if you're going to go to the trouble of getting your mushrooms from the woods you might as well eat 'em fresh. I guess picking wild mushrooms is more gathering than gardening, but I *did* try to infect other logs with the spores while I was out... cultivating my fantasies of making a vast mushroom forest garden...

b.p.p. experiment #2 : embasilment. Def'n: the placing of basil seedlings in other people's gardens. I hit my landlord's herb garden right in the center with a nice fragrant cluster. (I tried to shyly embasil the edges of the herb garden sometime in the past, and my unrecognized efforts met their end under some serious weed killer). Let's be clear: there's a big difference between badass embasilment and first-degree herbicide.

Melvegas, May 07 09

Some pics from the beginning of May. . .

Seeds sprouting in my sprouter, getting ready for the seedling beds.
Seedlings getting ready for the garden.

Broccoli reaching for the sun