Adventures in Ethics and Science

Nearly three months after we sowed the seeds in our raised garden beds, it feels like we're on the edge of a change of seasons. The days are still quite warm (with temperatures in the mid-eighties for most of the past week), but the days are definitely cooler, and the hours or sunlight grow shorter every day.

In the garden, this means that we're starting to look pensively at the slow-growing root vegetables (notably the carrots and the onions).

"Are you gonna be done soon?"

The rainbow chard and mustard greens are still overproducing what we can eat. Our strategies for keeping up include:

1. Cutting the greens into thin strips, frying them up with olive oil and crushed garlic, mixing them into ricotta, and layering them into lasagna.
2. Cutting the greens into thin strips, frying them up with sesame oil and crushed garlic, and serving them alongside dry-sauteed string beans and gyoza.
3. Bagging the greens and giving them to coaches.

Tomorrow night I'm going to try to make a chard gratin that feels less like a heart attack in a gratin dish.

The lettuces are also continuing to produce with abandon. Luckily, we like salad.

The soybeans, it turns out, are pretty unambiguous about reaching the end of their productive life. Pick the pods, and the leaves and stems fall right off the stalks of the plants, as if to say, "It's been fun, but we're outta here."

By my count, there are less than a dozen soybean plants still standing. Given their service to the soil in bed #1 (and the 30% off sale at our neighborhood nursery), today I planted artichokes among the not-yet-dead soybeans.

So far, I've been drying the soybeans we've harvested, keeping them on hand as a source of protein to tide us over when the zombies take over and disrupt Trader Joe's supply chain. From about 28 square feet of garden, we've got ... about a cup of dried beans. (But there are more pods waiting to be harvested! And during the zombie times, we won't need to eat at standard-American-protein-intake levels!)

In other garden news, the cabbages are developing distinctively cabbagy forms.

In addition to turning some of this into coleslaw and using some to make stuffing for dumplings, I may try to make sauerkraut or kimchee out of some of this cabbage.

And the broccoli plants are starting to look like broccoli.

We've also pulled up some daikons this week, destined to be shredded and pickled. And the kohlrabi are starting to thicken up in the right places.

Also, the scarlet runner beans finally figured out how to climb.

We've been pulling up some wee turnips (which the sprogs insist upon eating raw), and soon I think the beets will be ready for harvest, too. I'll probably keep them in the ground until Thanksgiving (if I can be that patient).

The bush beans are having their last hurrah.

When they're done, I'll be putting in some spinach and Brussels sprouts seedlings.