![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
In an exciting race against the impending rain, I
Now I'm going to enjoy a nice glass of King Eider vermouth before making dinner (lamb chops, glazed carrots, and frisee salad).
Oh, I did get a few drops of rain on me, but it hasn't started raining in earnest yet. So I declare I won the race.
- planted a Mariposa plum tree (to replace the Elephant Heart plum that had died)
- planted two six-packs of lettuce, since all my fall planted lettuce has bolted now
- scattered seed for
- a lettuce cut & come again patch,
- more spinach to replace the fall planted batch,
- a bunch of carrots (3 colors!),
- some radishes amidst the carrots, and
- more of my beloved Cylindra beets. I'm hoping that said rain will keep all of these seeds moist enough to germinate. I usually do better with transplants, but we'll see.
- and finally, I planted the second package of asparagus crowns! Yes, between being sick and the frequent (and welcome) rains, I hadn't managed to get the second pack of asparagus planted. But it's in the ground in one of the backyard beds now, and I have my fingers crossed.
Now I'm going to enjoy a nice glass of King Eider vermouth before making dinner (lamb chops, glazed carrots, and frisee salad).
Oh, I did get a few drops of rain on me, but it hasn't started raining in earnest yet. So I declare I won the race.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-22 05:52 am (UTC)Have you grown the multi-colored carrot mixes before? I'm currently harvesting one batch -- and am discovering that many of them are _really_ strong-tasting. Fine for cutting up small in soups & stews, but A Bit Much to eat raw. I think this is inherent in the cultivars, rather than having anything to do with my growing practices.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-22 06:29 pm (UTC)Oh, those catalogs full of lettuce greens! It's really astonishing how many varieties there are. Try Cardinale sometime if you can find it. It's a red Batavian, with large, crisp leaves, very satisfying and a pleasant flavor (top ranked in our red lettuce trial last year). Eventually it forms a head which gets perilously close to iceberg lettuce in taste & texture, so I generally harvest it as a leaf lettuce until that point.
I agree that some of the colored carrots aren't the pleasantest tasting. The UC small farm advisor here did a carrot tasting a couple of years ago (UC numbered varieties, not commercial), and many of the purple ones, in particular, were harsh tasting. Also some of the whites, although one white was fabulous. In any case, I had an old packet of Dragon carrots that I used up, and a packet of yellow carrots from New Dimensions seed, plus good old Nantes. I'll be lucky if any of these grow because I am an indifferent carrot grower, unwilling to give them the care they want.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-22 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 12:52 pm (UTC)My impression is that the sweet/mild-enough-to-eat-raw yellow carrots are a recent (less than a century ago) Dutch development, and that the darker-skinned ones, especially, are more like the bitter/medicinal wild form. Some of these, however, do turn very sweet if cooked for a long time.