I have a day off now where I'm not sick. Ideal time to get some blogging done that I've been meaning to do for a while.

So some of you know that I've been nurturing a little garden in my back yard this year. I've planted potatoes, turnips, carrots, radishes, peppers, and garlic. More potatoes and onions from last year's garden made an appearance on their own. Plenty of my stuff didn't work out. I've had a lot of failures (the garlic, for one). But I have had some serendipitous successes.

For example, the first crop of radishes I planted showed up but grew slowly. I found some Miracle-Gro in our basement and had the bright idea of applying some to the garden. It wasn't my best idea. As you can see, with the exception of the peppers, I have crop of root vegetables. Regular Miracle-Gro is primarily a Nitrate-based fertilizer, which encourages the growth of leaves. I found out later that I needed a primarily Phosphate-based fertilizer, which encourages root growth.

So my radishes bolted, that is, grew long stalks for flowers. In an attempt to keep them from going to seed, I pinched off the flower buds. But where I pinched one off, two grew on new stems. I kept up this futile process for weeks until it became too much to work. To add insult to injury, it was obvious that and root mass that had formed by this point was stiff from supporting the girth of the plant, and was woody and inedible. "FINE!" I threw up my hands in frustration and abandoned the plants. Over the next several days they the radishes celebrated their victory over my will by exploding in blossoms.

A week later I faced them in the garden and decided that they were serving no useful purpose. I started stomping them down flat. Then I noticed that the dense brush of radish was covered by seed pods. Big ones. A thought occurred to me. I consulted my trusty internets, and lo, I discovered that yes, you CAN eat them! People have been eating radish seed pods as long as they've been eating the roots. They taste delicately of radish and the texture is very similar to eating small snap peas or green beans. And because I fertilized the plants and frustrated them so by snapping off the flowers, there are TONS of them. So far I've made three or four meals with them, and I expect many more. They're great in stir-frys.

The death of my first round of potato plants (I think some bugs ate the leaves) hasn't been entirely in vain either. I dug up tons of little nuggety potatoes which have been quite yummy to munch on, baked and fried. There's just something about eating something I grew myself which fills me with pride. It'll be a long time before I'm able to compete with all the local Italians in Burnaby Heights, who grow immense beanstalks, huge zucchini plants, and trillions of tomatoes. But I'm learning!