Crazy Car Man and I are trying to buy a house. We don’t want a big old house with loads of rooms and massive gold plated fixtures and fancy pants kitchens and bathrooms with open air bathing arenas. We have a budget, an A side of needs and B side of wants and a core list of absolute deal breakers. We find houses that meet the majority of A side, most of B side, within budget and with no deals broken and then we have to deal with the dreaded, most horrendous of all human beings in the world.
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Real Estate Agents, the Fifty Dollar Cauli and Stompin’ Landlord – The Crappiest Season of the Year 2011
I’m Awesome at Growing Corn
I’m not actually. I suck very very badly at growing corn. I had such high hopes when I planted the first batch of seed only to watch all 100 of them washed out of the soil by mega rain. That didn’t deter me – I live by the adage ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’ – so I tried again, planting a slightly smaller batch of 60 seeds, most of which lived to grow into kind of healthy looking corn plants.
They produced those thingys at the top that hold the pollen and they produced the thingys at the bottom that have the silks. The fact that the gales kicked in and the rains smashed down just as these two thingys eventuated should have been beside the point. I assumed it was a wet and wild ride for corn mating but I also assumed the deed had been done.
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The Good, The Sad and The Freaky
I would love to be a lady of the land – in much the same way that I’d love to be the lady who ate all the pies – but in both instances I don’t think my heart could handle the strain.
Farming is for the strong and for the gamblers. Or maybe the ability to gamble comes first and the strength is merely a subsidiary skill. Either way, so much of the process is left, quite literally, in the hands of someone else. In this instance, Ma N, who we all know is going through a bit of a tanty phase. And my goodness, is she not screwing up a lot of livelihoods right now?
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Bloated and Seedy
No, not me. I know it’s the season of over-indulging, but I’m at work until Wednesday and so can’t really indulge in an ‘over’ kind of way until then. Ask me at the end of the week, though, and my description of myself may more resemble the above. Or I may just be too bloated to get off the floor to answer the question.
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Garlic Snails
I know that a plate of snails swimming in garlic butter is a delicacy in some countries, and it is something I do plan to try at least once in my life – merely as payback for the things of mine they have eaten – and while I knew that garlic and snails went together really well, I didn’t know they went together really well.
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Hardcore or Mad – My Pursuit of the Third Sister
You know you’re either hardcore or mad when you spend your Saturday afternoon outside in the rain planting beans. Or maybe just desperate. Desperately hardcore or madly desperate, it’s all one and the same when the third sister needs to go in.
I wrote here about turning my Field at the Front into an experimental North American Indian field of food planted in a most companionable way. The corn went in and Ma N pulled the plug out of the great bathtub in the sky resulting in the corn seed being washed out of the earth and promptly eaten by birds. I shook my fist as the sky (a futile gesture but kind of satisfying in a Scarlett O’Hara kind of way) and railed at the birds for acting in a bird-like way (totally unacceptable behaviour when it’s to my disadvantage) before sighing in resignation and buying some more seed and planting it in tubs to ensure germination.
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1.52pm
Saturday morning was so hot I pulled the gardening shorts on for the first time since May. I sent up a warning flare first so people in the vicinity could put their sunglasses on before looking at the legs directly – it is akin to looking at the sun, the glare will leave leg shaped black spots before your eyes for days afterward.
The shorts and I zoomed up to the nursery to buy some potting mix, as some of the tomato seedlings are requesting an upgrade to business class, and on the way there I spotted the cloud.
It was black. It was roiling. It was moving in fast. It looked angry and like it might have some hail to throw on my cars and my garden. The nursery folk were outside pulling the lettuce seedlings undercover, always a bad sign, so I threw some money on the counter and a couple of bags of potting mix into the boot and headed home like the hounds of hell were on my heels.
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The Broc That Never Was
Romanesco Broccoli is an example of Mother Nature at her photogenic best. It’s mathematics and design and colour and food all wrapped up in one plant. It’s the Leonardo de Vinci equivalent of the the plant world – scientist, dreamer and artist.
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The Mounds Are Alive!
The beginnings of my Three Sisters companion planting extravaganza got off to a promising start. Mound creation turned out to be an entertaining experience for both myself and Crazy Car Man, and while Nick the Landlord (ancient Italian farmer of the traditional, chemical laden technique) looked askance at what I had done to his prime growing land before tottering off on his two walking sticks muttering under his breath about mad city chicks, I think he’s secretly interested in what’s going on.
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In flagrante delicto
Why are plants so rude looking? I can’t look at this borlotti bean sprout without my mind plummeting into the gutter. It’s not just me, is it??