Friday, May 2, 2014

right now, right now


It's been sunny and hot for days; the air smells of rain to come.  I harvested a full handful of asparagus in the dark tonight as I was fishing discarded socks out of the weeds.  

These photos are from last week.  Second half of April, let's say.  I was clearing #1 to chop and plant.  It is empty now, the hoe lying in the bed, waiting to be rained on.  If the seeds were in right now, and the compost and fertilizer stirred into the warm, busy soil, I could let it soak in the spring rain for a few days and then put up the hoop.  We'd have cucumbers for days by the end of June.  


Mercifully, I didn't know I'd have a chance.  I thought we'd all be drooling in the car all afternoon, doing our obedient thing.  So when we opted out, I forgot to try to get my kids to leave me alone long enough to get something done already.  I put a quilt out on the freshly cut grass in the front yard (grass cutter of the R-W household, you know who you are) and we tumbled and cuddled and wrestled and drank honey lemonade and rolled a ball for two hours.

I have no regrets.

(if you're curious: the kale went into an amazing salad Holly makes with marinated onion and olives and little cubes of cheese and was there citrus? Help a girl out.  There was a lot of thyme in that bucket and there is still a lot in the fridge even though I put it in everything.  The spindly, floppy inflorescences I put under the broiler and they got so crispy and salty and I packed them into a jar to bring on a parknic and we ate them with sauerkraut and arugula and frittata and sausage.  You know how parsley is, it goes in everything.  Including a quite nice pasta sauce I made and eggs and stems in the freezer of course.  Just tonight I finally braised the hell out of all those collards, plus two bunches of beet tops from the market.  And the spinach you can't see went into the frittata and also some sandwiches.)