Grow Your Own: Sprouts and Microgreens

Pea shoots ready for my salad....

So, readers, you may have noticed I haven't written in a few weeks. I'm fortunate enough to have lots of work to do: live streaming cooking sessions with some of my classes, scaling up food production in the garden for local families and to contribute to the aggregated PopUp Food Hub, and working with a team to develop distance learning activities. And I've been cooking. A LOT.

One of my favorite virtual lessons I helped to put together was for growing sprouts and microgreens with what you have around. It all started about a month ago, when I took an online class offered by local microgreen farmers, Little Wild Things, and since then I have been growing and using sprouts on just about everything...

Celery sprouts on lentil soup

Kale microgreens on tacos

In case you'd like to try your hand at growing these inexpensive, easy, and nutrient-dense foods -- they are 4-6 times more nutritious than the full grown plant! -- here's a link to the instructions. 

It only takes about a week from when you plant the seeds to when you are devouring the fruits (sprouts?) of your labors. I found that I had reasonably good luck even with older seeds, like dried peas from 2016 that never got planted in the garden. Even with... popping corn from my pantry! (Who knew you could sprout that? Not me, until a couple of weeks ago!)

Let me know if you try growing some yourself... and of course what delicious dish you used your homegrown microgreens in!

Gardening has NOT been cancelled

A dear friend sent this to me a few weeks ago and I have kept it on my desktop ever since:

During relative seclusion and 10-hour days in front of a computer in recent weeks, I've made it a point to get outdoors -- safely -- and be around green things as much as possible. Though I did go into a bit of a weeding frenzy in the backyard garden after a couple brunch cocktails on Easter Sunday, most of my outdoor time lately has been spent at my school's garden. I think some days it's the best part of my week to spend a couple of hours shoveling wheelbarrowfuls of wood chips or digging up tenacious wire grass invading the garden paths. (It's a great workout, too -- thanks for allowing us to garden, Mayor Bowser.) I didn't even mind getting my shoes and pants completely soaked last week while repairing the drip irrigation system. Nor was I phased by getting sprayed in the face a few times on a warm, sunny afternoon as I fumbled to turn off the water source.

Many folks have walked past -- at a safe distance -- while I've been in the garden in recent weeks. Some of them have been kids and parents that I know, and who were excited to see that I was still nurturing the spaces they'd helped with earlier this school year. But many of the casual, garden-side conversations were with total strangers strolling past. A few stopped to ask how they might help, and a handful of them commented on how they pass by the garden regularly and are elated to see healthy, colorful living things thriving amid these times where it seems like all there is is bad news. (While I still support my local NPR station, I can't handle more than 30 minutes of news a day these days.) Gardens are a sign of hope, proof that life continues, and plants can nourish our bodies and souls.

Since I technically can't invite any of you to join me in the garden in person, let me offer you some virtual good news for your soul by way of the garden video I made for my students a few weeks ago. It is my first official stint on YouTube, but luckily I am behind the camera for most of it:

Yes, I love being in the garden. But when it comes down to it, nothing is as fun or rewarding as gardening with kiddos. I hope we can get back to this soon:

A community of gardeners

So it's August. It's hot as heck. And there's not much going on in my home garden. What can I say, the veg plants are the only things in town that seem to dislike the shaded plot out back this summer.

Aside from the ever-robust compost bin, it's pretty sad back there. But that doesn't mean the plants aren't lush in other parts of my life. Check out the growlab residents, all started from seed in my living room last month:

Those little lettuces, beets, and flowers were just transplanted to their new home in my newest FoodPrints garden during this weekend's School Beautification Day. Oooh, the kids are going to be so thrilled to see the thriving plants when they return to school tomorrow. I bet they'll be especially excited to see the 3 Sisters Garden plot, with heirloom popcorn grown taller than the parents who came to help me with garden cleanup on Saturday:

Many thanks to my former intern Jessica for plantsitting while I was visiting friends in Vermont and Connecticut for a couple of weeks, to the volunteers who have helped to water the garden daily through these hot summer months, and to the parents and community volunteers who came to help me dig up the grass between the raised beds, mulch paths, weed, water, and transplant this weekend!

A recipe for venison

For years I have listened to gardeners and farmers in rural areas complain about deer eating their crops (or in the case of my ex-boyfriend's mom, their hostas). Seems people try all kinds of things, from scattering powdered wildcat urine -- I can't help but wonder what the job must be like to gather said urine -- to draping human hair around the perimeter to hanging bars of Irish Spring soap nearby, to deter the gentle but hungry ruminants.

I never had to deal with deer myself until I started working with a school garden within long-range spitting distance of Rock Creek Park this past fall. One day in mid-October, students and I planted a 3-foot by 20-foot block of kale seedlings; the next day half of them were chomped down to about 2 inches above the soil. Now, that's just rude. A mass planting of garlic around the perimeter of the single long garden bed seemed to help, but I didn't want to take chances with the other half of my crop so I invested in a few rolls of deer netting. (Really, though, they should call it human netting, since more often than not students and I got ourselves tangled in it during the harvesting process.)

I've just worked with volunteers to build and plant a few more garden beds at the school, but without a protective garlic border around each of the 8 new beds I fear I might need to do something to supplement the deer netting loosely covering the tender young veggies growing in them. Perhaps I should prominently post a recipe for venison stew... and get it translated into deerspeak?

Hardly hibernating

I don't know where folks get the idea that gardeners and farmers aren't working in the winter. The same goes for food educators. My goodness, there are gardens to plan, pieces of equipment to fix, seed catalogs to browse, bee hives to build...

And there are plenty of fun indoor lessons to teach! Seriously, it's freezing out -- what better time could there be to look closely at soil in the classroom? Here are some kindergarteners examining soil samples brought in by Zach, the farmer-in-residence at one of my schools:

The coldest months also tend to be when many garden/farming-related events happen, like the annual Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture conference up in College Park earlier this month. Or  the awesome and free annual Rooting DC forum, coming up at the end of February.

Among my favorite activities are wintertime seed swaps, like the one put on by Washington Gardener Magazine earlier today. My friend Mike kindly gave me a lift to and from Brookside Gardens (which I hear is quite beautiful when it's not under three feet of snow). There, we met other area gardeners, learned about winter sowing, and oohed and aahed at some of the unusual varieties people had brought along to trade. I even worked up the nerve to make a little pitch for folks to check out Slow Food Ark of Taste seeds, a few of which I had to offer at the swap. (Have I mentioned how I generally avoid public speaking because it is scary? Though it was a large group, it was a friendly crowd, and exactly the type of folks who would buy into growing and eating heirloom foods in order to preserve them. So I spoke up. Now where's my gold star?) It was so fun to see folks really stoked about the new varieties of tomatoes, flowers, and odd cucumbers they would be growing in warmer months, and a handful of them asked me about my white velvet okra seeds. "Yep, they can grow to be eight feet tall." Holy plantzilla, Batman!

This year, I'm going to try growing quinoa for the first time, from the heirloom seeds I got at the swap today. (Lord knows I eat enough quinoa to justify growing it.) And I'm going to attempt growing a bed of asparagus for the second time. (I think I got bad rootstock last year. Hmm.) Now, where will they fit in my limited garden space...? Wish me luck!

How does our garden grow?

Well, it's looking like another one of those bipolar DC summers: 93 and sunny one day, 62 and rainy the next. (I am not such a huge fan of the torrential downpours like the one Ollie and I biked home in yesterday afternoon, but I suppose it's good training for Ireland and Scotland, where I'll be kicking around in about a month.)

The plants are LOVING it. The snap peas and broccoli are exploding in the garden beds, potatoes are blooming, the herbs are going bonkers, and the spinach is experiencing some kind of miracle extended season now that I've won the battle with the leaf miners (and maybe the coverage from the volunteer sunflowers is helping the shade-loving greens), and even the kale is thriving.

How does our garden grow? Like a weed. (Not many of those, thankfully, since I've also managed to train an avid bunch of recess-time weeders. Nice.)

Every time I am in the school garden, there are about a dozen kids who stop to pick and eat mint, and I've been showing every kid who walks by how to harvest and eat lettuce and peas. Even with kids "accidentally" pulling up radishes and eating underripe strawberries, there is almost too much produce for us to utilize in FoodPrints classes. I'm going to have to start sending home kids with bags of vegetables again....

Luck be a ladybug

Yesterday I got a phone call from a fellow FoodPrints teacher that went something like this:

"One of the teachers accidentally ordered too many ladybugs for our garden. Want some?"

"Sure. It'd be great to knock down the aphid population over here."

"Great. There's about 5,000 of them. One of the parents will drop off the box in the main office. Put them in the fridge for a week if you aren't ready to release them yet."

"Oh. Okay." (Who orders five thousand too many? And is it normal to keep live beetles in the fridge on purpose? I wondered. But I am not one to look a giftbug in the mouth.)

I've ordered worms in the mail before -- three times, actually (and, no, not because I killed the first two batches, thank you very much) -- so I consider myself pretty experienced when it comes to the creepy crawly package opening. I could not have prepared myself for the tickly joy that was the release of thousands of ladybugs in the garden that afternoon. And since I had opted not to refrigerate them back into hibernation, they were ready to go as soon as I opened the two little baggies they were packed into. I was fortunate to have many dedicated garden assistants to help gently spread them around the 15 raised garden beds at Tyler.

Go get 'em, ladybugs!!

They are the coolest, cutest aphid devouring machines EVER.

Hawkeye

It's been awhile since I've written. Lest you think I've been sitting around eating bonbons for the past month, let me assure you that this is not the case. It's springtime at last, and I've been up to my elbows in teaching, gardening, lesson planning, cooking, spring cleaning, watching the Nats, and watching the garden like a hawk for any pests that might get the misguided impression that I am growing food for them. Apparently the leaf miners in my spinach and chard patches are slow learners. And it seems he squirrels eyeing my strawberries were not deterred by my incessant swearing at them last summer. They're back.

I recently learned from a naturalist friend of mine that rodents don't take a big bite out of my homegrown, hard won cherry tomatoes and strawberries purely because they are jerks, but because they are seeking moisture during dry times. So I'm doing a little -- admittedly high-risk -- experiment to see if tonight's thunderstorms tide them over for a day or two. Otherwise I may have to break out the grilled squirrel recipe....

Spring, is it really you?

Readers, I'll admit that the delayed onset of spring has made me a little grumpy lately. (Okay, since we're coming to the end of lent, aka Confession Season, I confess that cold weather generally makes me a less pleasant person, so there's been a lot of grump in my general vicinity over the past 6 months.) My god, it feels like I have been huddled up just waiting for the sun to come out and the soil to warm up for ages! Did I start the sweet potato slips on my windowsill too early this year? Have I set up the milkweed in the GrowLab at school for failure starting seeds in early March? Did my first ever asparagus bed bite it during the subarctic winter? These are the things that keep me up at night. (I know, I know: first world problems.)

Thanks to a motherlode of straw mulch, one lonely, 2-inch tall celery made it through the endless winter, along with a handful of strawberry plants and about a dozen leafy greens (kale, chard, collards, and what I just discovered is a tiny broccoli plant and not a cabbage after all). And the frost-burned garlic plants that didn't get pulled up by curious preschoolers are holding on. But it's looking kind of sad out there in the school garden.

We've had a few 60 degree days in recent weeks, at which point students and I would sprint out to the garden to plant. I suspect that the first few batches of seeds germinated and then froze to death during this past Saturday's freak snow flurry and below freezing daytime temperatures. (When I'm feeling more hopeful, I convince myself that there's a chance things never got warm enough for them to get going in the first place and they'll poke little green leaves above the surface soon. But did I mention how cold weather makes me less optimistic?)

Meanwhile, I planted yet another batch of seeds with kiddos this week: snap peas and onions, potatoes and larkspur all went into the ground. Arugula, spinach, lettuce, and radishes coming soon.... Go on Mother Nature, you keep teasing us with warm days, I'll keep planting more seeds. You may have wind and rain in your arsenal, but I've got the boundless optimism of kids on my side. We'll see who wins.

At your service

Up until about a month ago, I'd never heard of a serviceberry. Thanks to a passing comment from the nature-loving, Michigander vice principal I work with, now it's one of my favorite plants ever. If I could resist devouring the berries the instant they're picked I might be able to come up with a recipe for them beyond "eat out of hand." They look kind of like blueberries, but I think taste closer to black currants. In short: they're delicious. And abundant right now.

According to Better Homes and Gardens -- which is not my usual go-to garden resource guide, mind you, but their snapshot in this particular instance makes a good case for why you should run out and get one to plant at home -- "Serviceberry is rare in that it offers interest in every season. It kicks off in spring with beautiful white flowers, which develop into tasty purple berries that attract birds in early summer. Or harvest the berries and use them to make delicious jams, jellies, and pies. The plant's bright green or bluish green leaves turn stunning shades of red and orange in fall, and its silvery bark offers winter appeal. You can grow serviceberry as a large shrub or small tree."

Wouldn't you know it, there are 4 of these berry-laden small trees at the school garden I maintain a few days each week. And I am clearly not the only one who loves them....

How can we get kids to eat more fruit? Plant serviceberry trees in their schoolyard. Nice work, Tyler Elementary outdoor classroom team!

Finders eaters

After being up to my elbows in berries yesterday -- making strawberry jam, balsamic roasted strawberry and chocolate chunk frozen custard, gin and berry cocktails, a glaze for part of a late lunch of swordfish and grilled asparagus, and of course scarfing a hearty handful of whole ones as I bustled around the kitchen -- one would think that I'd have had my fill of luscious red berries for awhile. Nope.

I'd splurged on a flat -- yes, that would be *6 quarts* -- of strawberries at the Bloomingdale farmers' market yesterday morning, and yet the discovery of one single, perfect, red berry in a planter next to the front steps as I came home this evening had me giggling like a schoolgirl. There's something special about harvesting ones I've grown myself. And getting to them before the neighborhood squirrels, I mused as I promptly popped the strawberry into my mouth. Rodents 0: Me 1. (Considerably better than last year's record -- rats 6: me 1.)

As I tell the kids at school: you need to be diligent if you want to get to the berries first. Keep an eye on those strawberry plants. They turn red, they're yours. Finders, eaters!

your friendly-neighborhood food educator

April showers

Well, we seem to be entering monsoon season this week in our nation's capital.

Yes, I know it's good for the plants, yadda yadda, but I'm ready for more sunshine. The ducks and frogs are going to be tired of this soon, too.

On a bright note, my lettuce and spinach out on the front steps are practically exploding out of their planter. At least I won't have to break out the rowboat to secure fresh salad greens, I guess.

The eye of the beholder

I tell you, when I got an email with this photo the other day, I was beside myself. A garden bed, just filled with healthy soil and compost, mulched around the perimeter, and all ready to plant! 3 feet by 8 feet by 10 inches of pure, unadulterated garden potential. Ohhhh.

I almost swooned.

The message came from a member of the Outdoor Classroom team, part of the group that helped to construct the 8 brand spanking new raised garden beds at Tyler Elementary a couple of weekends ago. Here we are all smiley and spent from our afternoon of sod wrestling and drillplay:

And now: one ready-to-plant garden bed. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.

What to plant in this very first bed? Snap peas! No, wait, spinach! Hold on: lettuce! Carrots! Radishes! Flowers! ... Maybe a row of each? Can't wait for school to reopen next week. Meanwhile, I'm spending spring break mapping out garden plans, digging up strawberry runners for transplanting, starting sweet potatoes on my kitchen windowsill, and daydreaming about warmer weather and snap peas.

Yeah, I'll probably want at least one whole bed of snap peas. I mean, the kids will.

Look what I did!

The adorable kiddos I work with have been cooped up by cold weather for too long lately.

When I told the kids in my section of VeggieTime this afternoon that we'd be having our first garden day of the season, the high-pitched squeals of excitement coming from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders moved like a wave through the group. Suddenly everyone had to use the bathroom, though I suspect some of the girls needed to check their hair since they saw me toting a camera today.

"Okay, okay, let's make sure everyone who needs to use the restroom does that first, then I'm going to need some help getting all of this stuff back outside. Hey, stop fiddling with that trowel -- put it back. Now, let's hope it doesn't decide to rain again." I crossed my fingers, and we piled into the elevator with two carts filled with compost, seeds, gloves, and garden tools. (It never ceases to amaze me how exciting using the school elevator is for elementary schoolers. Why is that?)

We made our way out to the furthest two raised garden beds and I explained the first task: remove last season's dead plants. Boy did they love pulling things out of the beds.

With minimal training, I think some of them could earn at least a silver medal if unearthing plants ever becomes an Olympic sport. (I've heard talk of yoga making it into the Olympics one day, so you never know.) I mean, there were some BIG roots in there. One in particular took six different people loosening things up to finally get it out! "Look what I did!" I heard from across the garden. "No, look what I did!" And another. And another. Here is the victorious team of root pullers -- they're tougher and more determined than those beguiling smiles might suggest:

By the handful or the armload, all of our plant scraps went down the hill, through the snow and puddles, and into the compost bins:

Then it was time to mix in some aged compost and get planting!

If I was surprised by how much they enjoyed pulling up plants, I was downright astounded by how much they loved digging, finding any excuse to use a trowel or a hand fork to... well... to move soil around. Most of it stayed in the beds. And we planted a few packets of seeds and watered everything using recycled milk carton "watering cans."

In a month or two, with decent weather, periodic watering, and a little luck, we should have some spinach, kale, beets, carrots, and swiss chard to nibble on. Mmmm, eating: my favorite part of gardening.

Holy shiitakes!

I was swatting away flocks of hungry mosquitoes and pinching off endless limbs from some of the most gigantic tomato plants ever on Sunday afternoon while Kenton napped on the couch upstairs. (Yes, I have a real couch in a real upstairs at the new place!) As I stepped back to marvel at the growing pile of tomato branches and the single red tomato produced by the 5-foot plants, I leaned to the right of the back yard's single raised bed to see if I might have missed any errant plant bits that needed to be removed. I suddenly noticed some growths on the oak logs propped against the shaded fence...

HOLY SHIITAKE, another harvest! A real one!!

After two years of near dormancy, save two shrooms a couple of months ago, one of my shiitake logs presented a rather generous peace offering. (Maybe it knew I had contemplated donating them to the great compost pile in the sky not too long ago.) I scampered up two and a half flights of stairs with close to a pound of gorgeous mushrooms and as we admired them piled on my kitchen table I began to scheme how best to prepare and enjoy this most delectable and unexpected fungal feast. In a stirfry? Sauteed with butter and loaded onto toast? Was I somehow out of tamari?? Noooooo!

In the end, they ended up sauteed in thick slices in butter with homegrown garlic and thyme and a generous helping of sherry. Served over a bed of creamy rosemary grits, Kenton agreed they might have been the most delicious mushrooms ever.

I may or may not be checking the logs twice daily now.

Final harvest at 1343

It was sad to have to pull up the giant cucumber vines and two-foot-tall flowering okra shrubs in the garden earlier today, but what is a renter to do when the house she's been living in goes on the market?

Earlier today as I uprooted and composted a gardenful of plants at the height of their productivity, I harvested, discovering a few slightly overripe cukes and a rather large zucchini hidden under elephant-ear-sized leaves. So there's that. And I'm looking forward to trying my hand at some feta-stuffed, pan-fried squash blossoms at Meredyth and Greg's place, where I'll be staying for the next couple of weeks til I move into my new place.

It's the little things that we gardeners celebrate, and this final harvest is one such thing:

 

I was tempted to leave the thriving plants they were, but who knows if the people who will be moving in this fall will even want a garden. Though the soil has been improving over the past handful of years' diligent weeding and composting, maybe the new folks will use the back area for a parking spot for their SUV. It could happen. I try not to think about it too much, and comfort myself with the reminder that many of the herbs are in pots and the mushroom logs are transportable. (I also recognize that it's the ideal time for my landlady to sell, as home values in my neighborhood have skyrocketed in recent years. No harm, no foul.)

However, I wish I'd known before the springtime transplanting of heirloom plants Kenton and I started from seed that I would not be there to revel in the bountiful harvest come late summer. Then again, knowing me I probably would have planted them anyway. Oh, to witness the beautiful, purple and cream colored okra blooms unfurl in the late morning as I sipped my morning tea, even if only for a few weeks, was worth the pain of having to uproot them prematurely. (What, was that too dramatic? Try reading Michael Pollan's Second Nature. My ode to okra is comparatively subdued.)

After the better part of six years cooking and gardening in the formerly dicey and now unequivocally hip Columbia Heights neighborhood, it's time to move on to the next backyard plot about a mile and a half down the road. I may or may not have left the strawberry plot and the raspberry bush for the new owners....

Fun with fungi

"Here I am, all ready for eating," I hear a little voice call from under my back porch.

Another small voice chimes in, "Me, too!"

No, those aren't the imaginary voices of the microgreens I started a handful of weeks ago. The cutting lettuces and baby spinach have a higher pitched, chirpy tone when they're ready. There is something calling out that has a distinctly... fungal... lilt.

(In case you're worried about my mental well-being, let me assure you that I don't actually think my mushrooms are talking to me. Everyone knows that mushrooms don't talk. They sing.)

Is it possible that at long last, my homemade shiitake logs have fruited? Those beautiful logs that Jeff hauled over in the trunk of his car, lugged from the side of the road in Takoma Park, where Park Service crews were chopping up a large white oak felled after a heavy thunderstorm back in the late summer of 2011? The ones that he and I drilled, inoculated with hundreds of shiitake spore plugs, and meticulously covered with melted beeswax (to keep nondesirable things from reproducing in the depths of the nutrient-rich logs)?

Those logs were a LOT of work to get ready for mushroom growing, let me tell you, and I was perhaps not overly kind in my references to the non-fruiting logs over their year and a half of seeming dormancy. I may have audibly maligned them when six months went by, then nine months with no sign of even a single, tiny shroom. Grrr....

I got so irritated after about a year that I lugged them around, finally forming two makeshift raised beds under my back porch "so that they could at least serve some function instead of just sitting there taking up space." Becky came to visit soon  afterwards and seeded the beds with spinach, baby chard, lettuce mixes. At least I had some salad greens through the late summer and autumn of 2012. Now could it be that they were just slow growers, that those previously unfruitful (har, har) fallen-tree chunks have taken off at last, that I am about to be up to my eyeballs in fresh, organic, homegrown mushrooms?? They look promising...

I called Jeff yesterday, when I discovered the two sizable (probably shiitake) mushrooms sprouting out of the logs, excitedly telling him about our maybe-successful-after-all mushroom log development. He congratulated me. He also recommended a few nearby hospitals "just in case." There is a high probability that they are shiitakes, being that the logs were stuffed with shiitake spores. But what if they're not?

To be honest, I am a little nervous. What kind of end to a life story would that be: death by misidentified mushroom consumption in one's own backyard? Tell me honestly: don't mine look like the ones cousin Caroline and I harvested from her shiitake logs at Mountaindale Farms a couple summers ago? At least a little bit?

Anyone want to come over for mushroom stirfry tonight?

Spring has sprung

This weekend may be one of the most gloriously beautiful spring weekends on record. I did my darndest to spend as much of it as possible outside. (I have the bug bites to prove it.)

Saturday afternoon I made my way out to Northern Virginia for a garden consultation with mom. After a delicious lunch -- we're related, so of course there would be a proper lunch #2 -- we took a walk about the front yard and then a field trip to a local nursery for supplies.

Oh, boy, do I lose it around pretty flowers and vegetable seedlings -- it's a good thing mom and I got out of there within an hour or I'd have spent my entire tax return. (Oh, wait: I owe money this year. Damn it. Well, all the more reason to get myself out of the heirloom tomato section asap.) Then she put me to work back home, transplanting some beautiful purple sweet potato vines into the front beds, pruning shrubs, and taming the overactive rose bushes along the side of the house. I made it out of there before she got me digging holes for the geraniums -- there were a LOT of geraniums -- and I absconded with dad's car to whisk Kenton into the city for the remainder of the weekend. Dinner out on the back patio was just lovely. I do believe that's when the nefarious ankle biting happened. (Silly me, I thought it was too early for mosquitoes, and was focused on the wine and the pleasant company of our friends Patricia and Peter and the experimental winter squash lasagne. Oooh, but they sure itch now.)

Sunday was spent largely outdoors as well. That morning as I perused the stands at the Dupont farmers' market I was unable to resist the lure of herb transplants. Thankfully limited by the cash I had on hand after doing the bulk of my shopping for the week, I biked home with two little plants in my pannier, along with quite the haul of produce, cider, eggs, bread, and yoghurt. Kenton joined me out in the garden for some brunch and then some garden time. Doesn't he look serious, meticulously recording in my garden journal the varieties of and arrangement of seeds planted in the hand-rolled newspaper pots?

Yes, awfully serious fun. Heirloom burgundy okra. Wisconsin pickling cucumbers. Four different kinds of basil. And lots more than I might have space for, should they all germinate and become legit plantlings. But we'll figure that part out later.

Meanwhile, I was crawling around some of the planters and in-ground beds, cleaning up and reseeding some of the flowers and salad greens. And some seeds I'd saved from last year. Celosia. Marigolds. Bell peppers. Jarradale squash. And putting in my new sage and thyme additions, of course. It felt good to have my hands in the dirt after so many months. I can't wait to see what does well this year. I'm a little behind on my March Madness seedling bracket, but my money's on the hot peppers.

When nature attacks

I was just minding my own business, humming quietly to myself while picking some zinnias at cousin Caroline's farm when I found myself suddenly and inexplicably under attack. Who does that?? I mean, seriously, what kind of self-respecting bee stings a woman behind her ear? Jerk.

I wonder if it might be the long lost cousin of this guy....

Out, out, vile spot!

"It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour."*

Ever notice how after working with tomato plants your hands are stained brown for days? I looked like a veteran cigar roller after my stint in the Windsor Crossing hoop house tying up and pruning tomato plants for 3 hours on Tuesday afternoon. (Well, maybe an avid smoker with a habit of tromping through swamps: I think I may now have a seasoned pair of garden/farm-only work pants and shoes.) My hands were still stained this morning, as if I'd meticulously tattooed every crack and crevice with henna. Don't even get me started on the ground-in dirt under my nails....

Today, I found myself plucking yellowed and browning leaves on some of the tomato plants I am watching over at the North Columbia Heights Green over the summer months. Brown hands again. (I swear I wash them. Repeatedly.) Luckily, I hang out with lots of farmers, who are familiar with such cosmetic discoloration, and are thus unperturbed. But I think it alarms my friends with desk jobs.

I recall cousin Caroline saying something about stained hands and tomatoes awhile back. I believe it was when we were pruning a row of heirloom nightshades last autumn. My hands were brown for nearly a week that time! Had I only known before tonight that this "tomato tar" damage is preventable: just rub your hands with something acidic before you start pruning -- vinegar, say, or a green tomato -- and you should be able to avoid sepia toned extremities. Beware: there does not appear to be a way to remove the stains from hands or clothes once they're there.

Another bit of trivia for you: tomatoes are related to tobacco plants.

Yep. I first learned this in my master gardening class this past winter -- both are susceptible to the insidious tomato mosaic virus, which is often spread by folks handling tomato plants after a smoke break. (One would think that the very idea of virus-laden cigarettes would induce people to quit, but apparently folks don't often know they're infecting other plants and the virus does not appear to affect humans. Still: gross!)

So, friends who don't want diseased tomato plants, I'd suggest not feeding your nicotine habit while pruning the nightshades in your vegetable patch. And for those who want to avoid being known as Ibti Brownhands, maybe rub a little bit of vinegar between your fingers before you head out to stake your tomatoes. (I wonder if simply reaching into the pickle jar for a pre-gardening snack will do the trick....)

*Five points to those to correctly identified the line from Macbeth! (Once an English teacher, always an English teacher.)