Monday, July 06, 2009

Finding food

I have a garden. I'm not very good at it. It least, I'm not very good at it right now. Twelve years ago I was better at it, but then, my husband did more of the work on that one.

But I like the idea of it. And I like going out in the morning to see what I might find. Maybe some tomatoes are ready, or a squash, or I might find some beans, or asparagus, or some radishes might be ready.

Gardening can be sort of like an Easter egg hunt for adults.

Lately I am wishing that I did not use up so much space on the more ornamental stuff. I am not going to eat the elephant ears. I probably won't eat the pumpkins (if the plant even produces any fruit, which so far it hasn't). I'm not overly fond of sweet potatoes, but it will be fall before I can eat those anyway.

I'm getting a few tomatoes. I have yet to see any fruit on my eggplant. Tomorrow or the next day I will pick my second squash. I've picked a few radishes. I have turnips, but I'm not really into turnips. I got a few peppers earlier, but right now it is really too hot for the plants to produce much. I got a few beans, but those were just some that I planted as an experiment. The beans I really wanted to eat didn't even sprout. I got lots of asparagus earlier, but that is mostly done until next year, and I miss it.

As I am trying not to spend any money, I am really missing it.

There was this thing called eating down the fridge. You try not to buy any food for a certain amount of time and see what you can make from stuff in the freezer and pantry. So I had thought that I would have done that for fun with some other bloggers if I had heard about it in time. Now it feels like I'm doing that for real. I can't go out to dinner, and I'm trying not to go to the grocery store much either. I can't buy any non-essentials, and I can't waste gas going out if I forgot to get something.

So I'll be looking at what I can make for dinner and thinking that the stir-fry would be better with water chestnuts, but I only have a few left, and I should save them until I run out of the other stuff. And the soup would taste better if I had another can of tomato sauce. Stuff like that.

So I'm cleaning, and I found five cans of water chestnuts, four cans of tomato sauce, and a few other things. I guess that I was so tired the day that I bought them that I didn't finish putting them away.

Cool.

Not as cool as if the bees were back and I was getting lots of squash, but cool anyway.

4 comments:

Ananda girl said...

Your bees have left? I've heard that cell phones are bad for them and it's making them die off. That's terrible. We need bees! I'm deathly allergic, but even I am pro bee.

dmarks said...

I've heard that the bees were dying because of a fungus.

The cell phone idea would be easy to prove, or disprove, by checking bee populations in wild areas that are out of cell phone range.

Ananda girl said...

we have cell phones... one per person in our house and we still have bees, but I try not to use mine outside around them. I don't know where I heard that.

Finding the unexpected food was a bit of luck!

laughing said...

I would say that about 80 to 90 percent of the bees got in a spaceship and left. It is really weird. I saw some when the honeysuckle was blooming, but not just a lot of them. Still, I thought that there were some that wanted to hang around my house, and I was happy about it. But they seem to have left now. The honeysuckle is finished now, but I thought that the crepe myrtle would keep them around, though I can't say for sure cause the plant mostly flowers over my head, so I wouldn't see bees from that anyway.

But I very rarely see any bees on my vegetables when I want them. I hardly see any bees except at the botanical gardens, and I thought that there should be more there too.

I have an emergency cell phone. I don't talk on it much, but I do have one. Someone bought my husband one, cause they got frustrated that they couldn't find him one day. He never even activated it. I think it is still in a box somewhere.

But I don't suppose it matters that I don't talk on the thing, it just matters that I live somewhere that there are towers so that I can talk on the thing. If that even is the problem.

I had heard that there was an announcement that they had found the virus or the fungus or whatever that was killing the bees, and that it was mostly gone and the bees would recover, and then everybody put it out of their minds. Only now that doesn't seem to be it, but everybody is acting like the crisis is over.