One of the red cabbages did not make a head.  Each of its interior levels grew above the one before, forming a strange, flowery tower as it went.

Frankly, it looks weird.

Being a little weird myself, though, I let it have garden room.  It didn’t get harvested with all the others, either, but continued to add levels.

(If I were a serious gardener, of course, this mutant cabbage would have been removed quickly, to be replaced with something more productive or pretty.  But you’ve probably figured out by now that curiosity and playfulness and fun have equally strong presences in my garden as either of those two.)

As time passed, I even began to grow fond of this aberrant cabbage and, without realizing I’d done so, gave it a name, rather like I did with Mophead in last year’s kitchen garden.

After surveying the wreckage of our latest fallen tree and having a lovely encounter with a preying mantis a few days ago, I realized Pagoda was glowing in the half-light of dusk, clearly wanting to have his portrait taken.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t manage it without the flash.  But you get the idea….

I wonder how tall the structure can go before first frost.

Remember, it’s still not too late to enter into the random drawing for free blog-birthday presents.  Here’s the link to do so.  Entries will close tonight at midnight, Eastern Standard time.

I’ve been touched and honored by all your lovely responses so far.  It was a much bigger bash than I was expecting, and your kindness and generosity mean more than I can say.

Thank you for celebrating with me.

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I guess I have been pretty remiss at posting about the kitchen garden in general.  Not sure why that is.  It’s almost as if, when I softened the focus last autumn, I gave myself permission to incorporate the whole Earth into the blog — and that’s made visits to this small, restful little spot figure less frequently into our interactions here.

But I really do want to return to blogging about the kitchen garden more often in the coming weeks and months.  Not just because we’ll be leaving it soon (and I can barely type that without tearing up), but because it is the ground of my own daily interaction with Mother Nature.  This is where it gets personal.

I pay more attention to the tiny changes here:  the most insignificant creatures who show up to feast or mate or seek shelter capture my interest and take me out of myself and into the present moment.  The weather matters more to me because I never forget the beloved roots that need rain, the leaves that need sun, the delicate blossoms that refuse to set fruit if the temperatures climb too high.  When something is ripening, I’m the one who’s going to eat it.  (Well, either me or F.)

All of this life is going on right outside my door.  I’m so grateful.

Here’s an example.

These beans appear to me to be saying.  “Hey, thanks for the homemade support and all.  But if it’s all the same to you, we’ll just lean on each other.”

Obviously, the family heirloom is doing fine.  Better than fine.  It’s been thriving in this heat.  That shot was taken a few weeks ago, and those carefully-crafted supports F. and I put together with biodegradable twine and branches found on the forest floor… yeah, they don’t seem to need them so much anymore.  The mass of foliage is growing about two feet above the supports.

And because I’m not so anxious that I will accidentally render them extinct this year, we’ve been actually eating the beans much earlier in the season.  Last year, with the entire living heritage down to exactly 25 seeds, I would not allow any of the earliest beans to be picked, but immediately reserved them for seed.  This meant leaving them on the vines until the seeds were mature and the seed pods had begun to dry a bit in place.

Any bean-grower will tell you, the key to an abundant bean harvest is to pick early and pick often.  The plants tend to keep producing much more abundantly and over a longer season if one is careful to keep them picked.

Now that I have jars of these seeds in storage at my sister’s and mother’s houses, as well as in my own fridge, I’m able to eat green beans going and coming, and appreciate their special and, to me, familiar and well-loved flavor.  I’ve been eating these beans since I was a child, long before I learned that the seed had been passed down in the family through the generations, for over a hundred years, according to the oral tradition.

If you’d like a recap on the family heirloom seed and its saga of coming back from the brink last year, plus some beautiful meditative insights given to me while watching its restoration, here are the links to the relevant posts from the 2009 growing season.  The dark links marked with a star are the posts I rank highly, as fine examples of my own writing and photography.

• heritage (the basic background story)
• tangle * (the original homemade supports — I just love this post!)
• cosmos feeling a little droopy today (the erratic weather’s effects on the crop)
• you need them both* (the mixed colors of the seed)
• beneath the canopy (the real underside – plus delicious recipe from F.’s home country)
• not jack’s beanstalk (on growing beans as a children’s garden project)
• a cord of three strands (the family part of family heirloom)
• yin & yang* (one of my best  posts)
• the circle of life (deep thoughts about the seeds – a popular post)
• best 9 in ’09 (a recap of the 2009 season, family heirloom’s recovery celebrated)

Yes, I like to write about this bean!

If you’re new here, I hope these posts are a helpful primer about the kind of thing that goes on here at the blog.  If you’ve already read all of that stuff — well, hey, I’m glad you’re still along for the ride, my friends.  That means a lot to me.

In either case, I wish you a beautiful Monday!

Namasté, y’all.

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This is a rain-spangled red cabbage.  I took this photo yesterday at dusk.

What does it mean?

Nothing.

(Well, other than that we may be making more coleslaw or sauerkraut in the next few days.)

It doesn’t always have to mean something.  Three focus posts in a row make me start to feel like everything must have deep symbolism or guidance for my life.  But nope.  Sometimes it’s just a ripening cabbage.

Honestly, I’m just glad to be moving on to other areas of interest here.

Can you tell I get bored easily?

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The June bugs arrived, right on time. But the heat wave was a little early.

My apologies for being absent from the blog for a few days.  I believe my motivation to do anything at all has evaporated as quickly as the perspiration from my skin.  We’ve been enduring several days of heat indexes flirting with the 100º mark* — without central air conditioning.  I’ve felt like I’m melting.

In the heat of the day, all I want to do is lay around with the blinds drawn.  Maybe if I’m feeling spectacularly energetic I’ll read a book or daydream.

Leo demonstrates ideal heat-of-the-day behavior.

The temperatures and heavy humidity are akin to some of the worst days in July or August, and of course I’m disappointed because my glorious June days, the best of the summer for gardening, have been replaced by this monstrous heat wave, 10 days and counting.

Today the high came down a few notches, to within about 10 degrees of the average temperatures for this time of year, and F. and I took advantage of the morning hours to build the final supports for the family heirloom half-runner beans, which are really beginning to run.  It was still so muggy out at 10:00 a.m. that my sunglasses fell off when I bent over to pull a weed:  the ear pieces slipped off my sweat-slick ears.  Gotta love that.

Cross your fingers for the Victory Garden; won’t you?  Some things are really struggling in this heat, even with adequate moisture, and the tomatoes have stopped producing flowers, which I’d been warned would happen if we went five days in a row topping 92 degrees.  That means there will definitely be a gap in fruit production later on in the summer… which is fine with me as long as it’s not the end of fruit production.

Of course, some crops thrive in the heat, like the aforementioned beans and those stars of the summer garden:  okra.

Okra seedlings, early June.

But the best plan for human beings seems to be energy conservation.  Me, I’m just riding a wave of lethargy and looking forward to a weekend of family affairs in the Atlanta area, knowing I’ll be spending the night in my sister’s lovely home, staying cool as a cucumber with central air.

I would sound even more excited, but I’m still a little warm from packing the car just now, so I’ll keep it low-key.

Have a wonderful — and hopefully cool — weekend, everybody!

*That’s Fahrenheit, obviously.  It’s about 38º C.

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I say hair decoration.

One of the additions to the garden this year is potatoes.  Last year we began the work of creating a garden in May, far too late for potato planting.  I could have planted them in the late summer/early fall, too, but with the tomato plants still pumping out a few fruits into late September, I didn’t have the heart to kill them in time to make room for their botanical cousins.

The history of the potato is a fascinating one.  It was F. who first told me the story of how this nourishing tuber finally caught on in Europe.  I believe he delights in it as a true-life demonstration of human nature.

A French military scientist, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, had realized the potential of the potato as a food source when he was repeatedly taken prisoner during the Seven Years’ War… and managed to survive on a diet of potatoes.  Parmentier convinced King Louis XVI, who was looking for famine insurance (maybe he had an intimation of the guillotine history was preparing for him?), to give the potato a try.

The King was persuaded.  (I like to imagine that happening over a serving of potatoes au gratin, fragrant with the best French cheese money could buy.)

But they had to think of some way to get the farmers to want to grow this new and exotic crop.  Efforts to introduce the potato to Ireland in the late 1500s had ended in disaster, when the cooks charged with preparing them for an introductory banquet tossed out the tubers and instead served the leaves and stems — which are fatally poisonous to humans.  The whole incident led to a ban of the potato in the English court and a general suspicion in the British Isles of this nutritious, but misunderstood food source.  And of course, rumors of their deadly reputation spread to the Continent, as well.

So the King and his advisors cooked up a scheme to change perceptions.  Potatoes were planted in about a hundred acres of unused land on the outskirts of Paris.  These fields were heavily guarded by well-trained, royal troops, night and day, thus giving the impression that this crop was a royal treasure of sorts, the King’s special reserve crop, a very refined delicacy indeed.

Once the potatoes were mature, the military men were given a single night off duty.  And, as an understanding of human psychology would predict, the citizens of Paris and farmers from the surrounding rural province went into the fields and stole the tubers to taste and to plant in their own fields.

And the potato became an overnight sensation.  As, frankly, I would expect.  Imagine never having tasted a potato before, and then taking your first bite of creamy mashed potatoes, or cutting open a fragrant potato baked in the ashes of your fireplace for the very first time, or swallowing your first warm spoonful of potato soup during the chill of winter.  This humble little tuber must have seemed like a miracle.  No wonder the French ended up inventing French fries.*

My personal favorite detail of the potato’s history goes perfectly with the photo at the beginning of this post:  Marie Antoinette was known for wearing potato flowers pinned to her trademark curls.

I don’t know whether this was the Queen doing her part to further her husband’s stealth campaign,** or whether she took to doing so after the imported plant had suddenly become popular.  Maybe lavender and gold just looked pretty against her ash-blonde locks.  Either way, she was a trendsetter.  Soon all the ladies at court were wearing the poisonous blossoms in their hair.

Didn’t I just mention dancing with flowers in our hair a few days ago?  Must be a theme.

*Yes, I subscribe to the theory that the French invented the fry, and not the Belgians.  (Sorry, Belgians.)  Because Thomas Jefferson clearly was eating fried potatoes, so good they ended up in his diary around 1810, long before any mention of Belgians eating them circa World War I — and they were served to him by his French chef at Monticello.

** I kind of hope this one is the true story, that she was doing her part to relieve famine, too, in spite of the way she would be unfairly maligned by history, rumored to have uttered that ridiculous “let them eat cake” line, and later despised by the masses for making decisions for the country when her husband fell into severe clinical depression and became incapable of making any, himself.  I find her story so compellingly tragic already.  Yet this one little charming detail added something poignant to the picture, at least for moi.

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Our DSL woes are hopefully (cross your fingers)  over now.  There was a short in the wire, and so even when it was “fixed” before, the problem kept recurring.   This house has been around a long time, and the wire may have been old or damaged somehow.

The repairman delicately suggested that it might have had a “rodent” nibbling on it under the house.  Knowing Leo’s predilection for small-animal destruction, though, I’m pretty certain we’d have long since been made aware of any resident rodent populations.

Anyway, that was weird.  Several days without internet access, which was just enough time to realize I spend too much time online now — and not enough on the regular, everyday writing.  It’s so funny when you realize I began a blog, and got into blog reading (and from there the whole online world), all as a result of wanting to build my writing confidence.  I was an extremely disciplined, but private writer, who churned out page after page for no one to read.

Now that I’ve gotten used to a regular audience, my daily writing discipline has evaporated.  Can I have both?  Probably.  But in moderation.

On Wednesday, I finished up the last of the freelance work in my backlog, so that there was neither internet access nor day job to keep me busy.  I suddenly had huge swathes of time at my disposal.  My pace slowed way down, and I had more of those deep, contemplative moments that make life so rich and deep and beautiful.

Anything I’d wanted to do, but put off because I didn’t have time, I now could do it.  Paradoxically, I found myself choosing to do nothing most often.  Or rather, the things I was doing weren’t the kind of things you could check off on a to-do list.

Stare at the wind ruffling the trees.  Stand still at the kitchen window with the light off, just long enough to convince the shy goldfinch, now wearing his sun-bright mating plumage, that all is truly safe for a visit to the feeder.  Have a nap while the soft music of the rain comes in through the open windows.  Take a walk up the hill to photograph the towers of cumulonimbus clouds as a backdrop for the unfurling new growth of kudzu.

Cuddle the purring cats for far longer than usual.

Eat sugar snap peas barefoot in the kitchen garden, with the sun shining down hot, directly on the top of my head.  Snap a picture to remember the moment by:  two developing young peas, growing like crossed swords.

Of course, life does continue.  There are dishes to be washed, errands to be run, and F.’s studies are ongoing.  A new batch of work will be arriving at the end of this week, so this idyllic freedom is just an intermission. Still, I think it has held some important lessons for me in my year of focus.  At the very least, week 20 has shown me exactly where the majority of my time is spent.  This information is crucial for reevaluating one’s schedule and priorities.

Not that I did anything so constructive.  Yet.  Maybe that’s for week 21.

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