Category Archives: Off the (Gardening) Wall

Thanksgiving garden fare

November 29, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

Part II of this post actually addresses garden-related topics.

Brief Meditation on the Market

We celebrated Thanksgiving with a Harry Potter movie marathon, courtesy of our web-savvy son. We were driven to watching pirated, poor-resolution versions from the computer, because we had typically failed to plan ahead, and you couldn't rent a Harry Potter DVD in this town for any money. We figure that everyone else, like us, was trying to remember the plots before going to see the penultimate installment, in a theater near you now.

Our Malian friend Abdoulaye will be happy to learn that we watched all of this on a new, 32-inch flat-screen television. Yes folks, we are moving up. As I wrote a while ago, when this potato specialist from central Africa came to the United States, he found himself living in a log house without cell-phones, cable, or a wireless internet connection, with a family that had never heard of 24.

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Posted in Food & Recipes

On injury and idiocy

October 27, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

So why haven't I posted in weeks? Well, in a way, because I went to Hawaii.

Early September was taken up with planning, and the rest of the month we were there, and since then it's been all about recovery.

But something else was going on as well.

As I finally realized while talking with my younger son last week, there's just no easy way to write about doing something really stupid, especially when one's stupidity results in major surgery for oneself and major inconvenience for a number of others.

But as my older son pointed out, no one would even know I'd done something dumb if I'd kept my mouth shut. People would just have thought I'd been unlucky. Accidents happen, after all, and cliff-diving isn't a risk-free activity. The dive was not in itself particularly outrageous: the cliff wasn't that high, we'd checked for rocks in the water, and I know how to dive. Ah, but there's the rub: diving badly was really really dumb.

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Posted in Personals, Travel

Foraging II: Mushroom soup extraordinaire

September 1, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

The mushroom soup I mentioned at the end of my last post was amazing.

After hunting around a bit online, I decided to use Hank Shaw's adaptation of a recipe by famed French chef Auguste Escoffie, Velouté Agnes Sorel. Actually, I adapted Shaw's adaptation, but even this third-generation version was wonderful: rich, thick, and tasty. On his blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, Shaw details how his version differs from Escoffier's, and I thought I'd continue that tradition by explaining how mine differs from Escoffier's.

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Posted in Food & Recipes, Out and About

We’re going to need a bigger harvest basket.

July 11, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

That's spinach on the left, and a major chard leaf on the right. I hadn't set out to make a major harvest, but when I lifted the cover off the greens patch next door, I found the spinach pushing the row-cover ceiling. So I got out the scissors.

I needed this. I've been digging for days, prepping plots that should have been planted two months ago. So I'm looking at all this bare dirt, wondering if I'm ever going to get on top of things, and at the end of the day, I actually get to bring this in.

What a relief.

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Posted in Food & Recipes, Vegetables

Gardening should get you dirty

July 9, 2010 by The Manic Gardener

Let me be clear: I HATE shopping, and will put it off almost forever. Nevertheless, as has been true all too often this spring, I spent most of my gardening time yesterday in the car doing errands. Gardening time! In the car! Ack! More money than I care to admit has gone into the garden in the form of fencing, amendments, row covers, strawberries, and a dozen other items.

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Posted in Personals, Tools of the Trade