Musings

Very tall red okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) with very, very long pods—up to 10 inches or so! I didn’t know there was red okra. I didn’t know okra got this tall! I didn’t know okra pods got this big!

Over in Piedmont Park is a small vegetable garden, labeled “Community Garden,” located on perhaps the best soil in the park. Until today, we’d only seen the Community walking by. This morning several adults had about two dozen youngsters gathered outside the garden doing some lessons, it seemed to me. I will find out next time I walk by if they also did weeding, harvesting, etc.

We also toured the booths at the Atlanta Arts Festival, but didn’t spend any money though I was tempted by the pottery of Ken Jensen of St. Augustine. We took samples of several flavors of Lärabars, an energy bar with only a few ingredients, all with names you’d recognize, and no soy or chemicals. I had never tried them before. I’ve only sampled the Key Lime flavor so far, and it was tasty, but fairly high calorie for the volume—which would be most excellent for backpackers.

Posted at 4:24 PM | Comments Off on Red okra

The other day I mentioned that we have a reasonably prolific pear tomato. Yesterday I mused about anthropomophizing in my interior landscape.

These trends continue today…

Perhaps I’m simple, but this sure looks like a golden pear tomato cowboy to me. Jaunty and all.

Like the green hat?

Let’s see, I was going to post a picture of a wood duck, in profile, nicely sunlit, taken down at the park. But.

But the camera or the customized photo transfer software/script captured the pictures and put them, um, nowhere. The Guru is standing by to tweak the problem. When we do the next download.

In the meantime, he’s distracted me by noting this brand new camera from Canon, the PowerShot SX20 IS, which sounds pretty cool. Of course, our current camera is mighty cool; it’s a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 we bought earlier this year.

Posted at 4:01 PM | Comments Off on Where’s my horse?

Soon after I took yesterday’s picture, the pumpkin vine* transported to the compost pile next door. Today’s picture, incidentally, is from a year ago exactly—’tis the season?—and is not of the fruit of that vine, which seems to have been sterile.

NB: The squash/pumpkin genus is Cucurbita, and Cucurbitas are native to the New World.

Posted at 7:36 PM | Comments Off on Cucurbita memories

Sorry for the lousy picture, but this is all the proof there is that today we made a test batch of applesauce from the early trees SW of The Grove. They have good color and very few worms, so were pretty easy to process. And, yes, that brilliant pink is the real color!

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

Attentive readers may remember that I mentioned the fires north of Newberry in 2007. Fires in this area mean the blueberry plants will be extremely productive upon recovery. We picked and picked the bounty produced by those fires two years ago….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Blueberry hill

Don’t ask me how to pronounce it, but back in Old English days that’s the word that referred to the color orange, and it meant yellow-red.

Then came the fruit from distant lands to the east, and with it the name that was then, for obvious reasons, also applied to the color.

This specimen’s known as a naked orange around here, since it’s lost its zest….

Posted at 7:24 PM | 3 Comments »

Yesterday, the Pepper Couple arrived and today we transformed many peppers into hot sauce and other delicacies. Wonderful!

FYI: botanically, peppers are berries….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Pepp(er)ing up life in ATL

Hands down, this is the oddest tomato we’ve seen this year. It’s from a healthy plant that produces yellow pear-shaped tomatoes, about the size of a cherry or grape tomato.

Posted at 5:55 PM | 1 Comment »

I basked in warm fuzziness toward wild critters all day—until I saw this!

Posted at 7:00 PM | 5 Comments »

The half-dozen Rutgers tomatoes I planted are on the edge of kicking into production (the ones we’ve picked so far are down to about $2 each, haha), and I think we’ll have plenty if the Baddies don’t get into them. So far so good. The little pear-shaped yellow tomatoes are like tomato candies—just a great treat. The patio tomato looks nice, but is only beginning to set; it must not have liked the replanting process or something.

I’ve been watching for late blight, but so far I think we’re clear (perhaps it’s just a bit too dry for it to flourish). Funny that this is the same “fungus-like oomycete pathogen” as caused the Irish potato famine.

* AKA water mold; they are “a group of filamentous, unicellular heterokonts, physically resembling fungi” and related to diatoms. AND, heterokonts, or stramenopiles, are “chromists with chloroplasts…”—heck, read it yourself.

Posted at 10:37 PM | Comments Off on Oomycete*? Say three times fast!