The Empty Cabinets of my Mind

Update on the Petunias

If you follow my gardening blog, you will know we bought a past-season 6-pack of petunias at the local garden center for $1.99 and washed the dirt off the roots to plant in our AeroGarden Deluxe:

  
The photo on the left shows them the night they were converted to hydroponic plants and the photo on the right shows them 5 days later.  Talk about jump-starting an indoor garden!

I put five plants in the AeroGarden and now here is the sixth, in one of my juice container planters filled with hydroton rocks:

I had rather expected it to die, but it bloomed instead. 

One of the four cuttings I put in the Gel2Root cube did die; the other three are OK so far, as are the two cuttings simply put in a glass of water.   

We had no idea what color any of these would be as there were no blossoms on the plants when we bought them, only large green seed pods, which I cut off after washing all the dirt off the roots.

Here is my petunia grow log.

Frugal Living at its Worst!

Now I have seen everything.   While enjoying a sandwich at a local restaurant, the server took a quick smoke break, outdoors, thank you. 

When she finished her phone call, she opened the door to come in, but after taking a last drag, tossed the rest of her cigarette onto the sidewalk.  Before it had time to extinguish itself, we saw another woman, who certainly must have be lying in wait, rush up and without missing a step, pick the still-smoldering butt up off the pavement and take a drag as she rushed off. 

Usually, I approve of frugality, but this is taking it a step too far.  It is not unusually to see underage kids from the high school crowd pick butts up of the street and smoke them, but I had never before  seen someone take a drag on a stranger's discarded butt before the saliva even had time to dry, while it was still burning. 

Barf Alert...

We do live near a resort town, however, where people interested in recycling cigarette butts have a field day.  Since smoking is no longer allowed inside the resorts, outside every door there is a receptacle, usually full of fresh butts. 

Ready for recycling?

It is a friendly little town, where strangers sometimes start a conversation while sharing a bench, and one time while we were chatting with a young woman from the Midwest, she noticed the ash can next to her and started picking out the longest butts as we were talking.  She showed me her own invention, a special container she had fabricated just for collecting such treasures.  She was quite proud of her foresight, and said she took it with her everywhere. 

"Well, good luck," I said, "I've got to be going!" 

Speaking of Gardening...

We ate a lot of stuff out of our AeroGardens today.  Breakfast was one of my favorites, a quick and easy skillet meal that is delicious and packed with nutrition.   I call it Ann's Breakfast Scramble:

Two cooked diced potatoes
A quarter pound of Chorizo
Bitter Garden Greens
Two eggs

We aren't heavy eaters, so this dish serves two if accompanied by warm tortillas, cold fruit, and juice.

Today we ate rather late, so our side dish was a few stalks of lettuce from the AeroGarden, with mandarin orange slices instead of salad dressing.  The lower leaves are Romaine and on top is Grand Rapids Leaf:

I pressure cooked a whole pot of new white potatoes in their skins and refrigerated them ahead.  To make the scramble, I pull the skins off the cooked potatoes and diced them and sauted them in a large skillet with chorizo.  Any spicy sausage would probably do if you cannot get good chorizo where you live.  

When the meat is cooked and the potatoes are browned, then I mix in as many greens as I can afford to steal from our indoor gardens. The rule is to take up to 1/3 of each plant, no more. 

What are bitter greens?

Mizuna, arugula (rocket), sorrel, watercress, or any of the dark green salad vegetables that has a bite.  I used what we had on hand, a little fenugreek, some chicory (Italian Dandelion),  mizuna, Asia Red Amaranth, and lots of lambsquarters.  Magenta Spreen is my favorite variety of lambsquarters to use for this dish,    I used the Herb Scissors sold on AeroGrow's accessories link to slice the greens into strips.  A round pizza cutter would work too. 

When the greens turn dark and a little limp, I make a space in the center of the pan to drop the eggs, turn the heat down some and scramble them first in the middle of the pan, adding  black pepper.  Then I mix them lightly with the rest of the ingredients.

Magenta Spreen, aka Lambsquarters

Fenugreek

Chicory (aka Italian Dandelion)

Amarath

Mizuna

All of the bitter greens pictured above were started in the AeroGarden and then moved to passive hydroponic contains such as described HERE. 

The other green we cooked today was straight from the AeroGarden and my recipe and photos are here:  Beans with Verdolagas.

 

These Boots are Made for Gardening

Ok, you know I don't have any dirt and do all my gardening indoors or in porch containers filled with liquid nutrients.    But, shhhhh, we have a little country place where I like to go out and stomp around.

One time when we were out there I was chatting with the neighbor, who sometimes rides by on her horse.  We were having such a nice chat I didn't notice that I was standing on an ant hill.  All of a sudden, I felt something sting, and looked down to see an army of tiny little ants spiraling around my ankle like a living bracelet. 

Dunno why they waited until they had me surrounded until they started biting, but even if the formic acid in the ant bites is therapeutic, one such vaccination is quite enough for a lifetime.  A bite from just one of our infamous Mohave "green" rattlesnakes would be much worse, though, so I have been warned:  next time I will wear boots:

work boots 

I was looking at the red Wolverine durashocks on the Woverine manufacturer's site, but discovered that Work Boots USA ships free and has a better price.