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lettuce up to the job
Thursday, July 2 2015
Gretchen had to be at the literacy office all day starting early (for us) in the morning, so it was my job to take the dogs for a walk. I took the firewood gathering gear but didn't use it until I was only about a quarter mile from home on the Stick Trail. Below the trail, I felled the bone-dry skeletal remains of six-inch a Red Oak trunk that produced a nice big backpack load. But the wood was so dry that it only came to 95.5 pounds when I later weighed it.
Later I did a complete mow of the yard, a task only made slightly more difficult by the presence of puddles and sheets of flowing water across about 10% of the area that I mow. The blade would occasionally dip into the water and be momentarily slowed, but this also seemed to clean the blade and the undersurface of the deck (which is usually thickly-crusted with compacted lawn clippings), improving the performance of the mower.
Another outdoor chore I completed today was the weeding of the garden, particularly the somewhat-fallow main garden patch, which currently is home to a robust patch of lettuce, a younger, smaller patch of lettuce, sunflowers (five of which are entering the rapidly-growing phase), several soybeans, a good many bush beans, three pole beans, and some bedraggled-looking pea plants. The weeds had been getting out of control. My solution was to dig a big pit in an unused part of the patch, pull up as many weeds as I could, and then bury them all in the pit. Thus the surface of the pit was weed-free, as were some of the areas I'd pulled weeds from. In the process of weeding, a found a whole separate patch of lettuce that I'd planted that I'd apparently given up on. These plants were thin and anemic, but perhaps now that they're not choking in weeds they will rally. As for the newly-weedfree patch above the unmarked grave where I'd interred all those weeds, I used it to start yet another lettuce patch. Lettuce is a very important part of our diet here, and it's great for once not to have to buy it from a store.
Gretchen took advantage of all the lettuce to make a cabbage-onion-quinoa filler for use in a wrap made using a leaf of lettuce. Normally I'd be skeptical of such a thing, but back when she was taking her vegan chef course, she had a unit on raw food, and the resulting lettuce wraps then were addictively delicious. It helps to have a great lettuce, and (for once), the lettuce from our garden is up to the job.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150702 feedback
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