Harvest time, I mean. And at least in this, it has been a lucky year. Let's just not talk about the eggplants, okay?
Amish Paste Tomatoes |
Aconcagua Roasting Peppers (banana for scale) |
Life in Oakland, California
Once upon a time, like around 1991, when the animated Disney version of Beauty and the Beast first came out, we had a young friend who worked in a Berkeley movie house. For me, yes, actually for me, he "liberated" parts of the in-house cardboard standee - the portion that contained my best buddy Lumiere.
Now Lumiere knocked about my studio for a while, and then he moved on. To the attic, to be exact. Where he lived in quiet and peaceful retirement until last week, until someone had the really stupid idea of cleaning out the attic. That someone will remain unnamed, at least here.
And so was Lumiere awakened again: Nope, it wasn't Prince Charming, and no kissing was involved. Instead, it was Luna and I, armed with a feather duster and determination (in truth, I had the duster and determination; she was sleepy and pretty useless).
Lumiere has moved on once again, to be with my niece who is an art director for Cold Open, one of those marketing agencies for the entertainment industry. Kinda sounds like we've come full circle, eh?Same mother sunflower plant, grown from seeds saved from last year. But since the bees are doing the heavy lifting of moving around the male pollen, any sunflower could have been your daddy.
It's been the powerhouse, the workhorse of the kitchen here for nearly forty years. Banana smoothies for me - no prob. Mixing massive amounts of basil for pesto for the freezer - easy peasy. More, more, and yet more of velvety smooth squash soup - kids' stuff.
Promise. We ate or gave away all the other ones. And most definitely, the last post about squash for a very looong time. Promise.
It's been raining, and it's supposed to rain again. What better time to head out to Tennessee Valley for a hike.
A packet of seeds, a pile of compost and a long growing season later, we got some new housing stock. Potentially. All related, and all still connected. (Since then, they have been cut off the vine and moved onto the porch for shelter.)
I'm not yet hopeful, perhaps just wishful, that they will cure properly (or at least some small number of them won't rot out completely) and become new homes for the next generations of wrens.