Now Norma Knits

Lettuce Review

Recently a few people have asked about how to clean the creepy-crawlies or "extra protein" off the produce that comes in from the garden, and don't I find it off-putting? 

I wrote about this last year, and since I'm elbow-deep in planting right now, how's about we revisit the topic? This appeared in a slightly different version not quite a year ago:

After I cut the lettuce in the morning, I bring it into the house immediately, before it has a chance to wilt. (Sometimes I spray it with the garden hose first.) 

I fill a sink with water and pour in quite a lot of salt. I buy the cheapest salt I can find for this purpose. The salt pulls the earwigs, caterpillars, and slugs, if any, away from the leaves, and kills them (or at least makes them sick and, dare I say, "sluggish") so they wash down the drain. 

Let me stop here and add a little bit of a plea that, if you have any squeamish tendencies about a little bit of nature -- earth ("dirt"), insects, slugs or whatever -- being on your food, that you just get over it. It's natural and it's good. It's gonna happen, unless you want your vegetables and fruits and herbs sprayed with chemicals. Please just forget about it, clean your food as you should anyway, and eat it happily and with gusto. It's a terrible thing that so many of us has no idea where our food comes from and we are just so disconnected with the earth. TERRIBLE and sad! I consider it a good sign if lots of insects want to eat my food. I swear they know what good nutrition is better than we do. If they don't want to eat it, it's probably not worth eating. I would much rather accidentally eat an ant, or see a little slug on my lettuce that I then rinse down the drain, than to ingest toxic chemicals. I don't know, maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I swish the salt around in the water to dissolve it, and I sometimes add some vinegar to the water, as well, to better clean the veggies.

Throw in the leaves and soak and swish them around in the water for a little while. (Not too long, or they will lose flavor, and I imagine nutrients as well.) 

 

Gently pull them out in handfuls and place in a large bowl or colander while you drain out the first sinkful of water.  Look at the dirt and debris in there:

 

Sometimes there are more bugs and slugs, but this time there were hardly any. 

Now fill the sink (or basin or large bowl) up again with just plain water for a final rinse and do the same soak/swish maneuver. Pull the leaves out. Once in a while, if there has been a tough rainstorm that has washed dirt up underneath the leaves, you will have to individually wash some of the leaves under running water, but usually the sinkful-of-water method is my only method.

 

Abigail gave me my salad spinner for Mother's Day 1995 or '6.

This thing must have been used 4,999 times so far. It is the best! I usually take the leaves out of the sink and put them in here, spin them dry, and put the whole shebang into the crisper drawer in the refrigerator. This works the best of any method I know to crisp up and keep fresh salad greens. Love it!

Grab greens and devour as needed.

Now back to the present. Yesterday was a big planting day, but as you may have gleaned, a lot of my garden is already in and growing like gangbusters.  

Here are a few photos I snapped at the end of the day.

This is the bed of Romaine that I thinned last week. The thinning did it good, and it is almost so picture-perfect as to make me weep. The yellow flowers are some sort of Asian green that was a component of the micro-greens mix that I grew and ate earlier in the season. I allowed it to go to flower, to attract beneficial insects. Beneficial insects are the ones that pollinate plants and/or attack and destroy bad insects. It's a beautiful cycle and balance. Learn to love it!

Scallions and asparagus, drizzled in olive oil and sprinkled with fresh-ground pepper and salt, ready to be roasted for dinner.

And a fabulous rhubarb chard plant with an almost surreal-looking marigold.

Well, That Was Interesting

We were 10 minutes from Burlington yesterday when the pilot told us that our plane had an issue with its hydraulics and we were being diverted to Boston, which has a longer runway. Ahem. I know what's at the END of that Boston runway, which is a whole lot of ocean. But I am not that much of a worrier, so I was really all right. The people around me, not so much. They were a relatively large extended family from Canada who had just been on a cruise which had also been fraught with troubles. They went to dinner one evening, and then came back to find that the sprinkler system in two of their rooms had gone off and soaked everything. The cruise company put them up in a different room for one night, got everything cleaned for them, and then had them go back in the room with a huge noisy dehumidifier and bad smells. And then this. The lady next to me (about my mother's age, I think) kept asking me to repeat what the captain was saying, and I found myself in the role of telling her not to worry, that I thought everything was going to be all right, etc. She looked at me as we were coming in for a landing, and asked if I were praying. Poor thing. I told her I wasn't much of a prayer, but yes, [to make her feel better] I was praying. 

They said they have sworn off traveling from now on. My sister recently had a highly similar experience, and she says she has sworn off traveling, too. Isn't it sad? Didn't traveling used to be fun? Or was it always difficult, and that is part of the experience, part of the charm in the end, and part of the "good" memory that stays with one, after the acute pain has worn off... sort of like childbirth?

As I was getting off the plane in Boston, another woman who I'd struck up a conversation with back at the JFK airport had been looking for me to say, "Didn't I TELL you?!"  The "tell me" part was that she had said, "You don't want to travel with us today, I'm telling you." She was traveling with her elderly mom. They had left Florida that morning and their travels were filled with troubles and tribulations, as well. 

Anyway, it was a lovely soft landing in Boston, and the plane stopped well short of the big blue water. Then it was towed in to the gate, we were deplaned and eventually told that another plane would be coming for us. The downside was it was coming from Cancun. 

So Mr. Jefferies and I took the scenic route, you might say with some irony in your voice, from JFK to BTV. JetBlue customer service helped me to obtain a special gate pass from the security folks so that I could take him out to relieve himself and come back through security, since I no longer had a boarding pass. That was a big deal, and then, because we were there four hours, it needed to happen again, and Logan is just small enough that the TSA people remembered me/us, and there were a few eyebrows raised as to why I was going in and out so many times. It's the poop! It's because of the poop and the pee, people! This explanation was well received. Turns out everybody loves a Yorkie.

In the end, it could have been so much worse. Mr. Jefferies of course stole the show. He had at least half of the 150 people on that plane eating out of his hand. Or I should say, the other way around. People were giving him bites of their chicken, he handled the stress like a champ, and it was just the cutest thing I've ever seen. Several people could not speak English, but everyone could speak puppy or dog, and they all wanted him OUT of his carrier and they were playing with him and cooing and loving all over him. I'm pretty sure he's decided that traveling is Not So Bad now. 

And I got a good night's sleep last night, and this morning I have already harvested a ton of salad and asparagus and radishes, and now I am rarin' to go and get the rest of my vegetable garden in. 

Hello

It turns out that I've been unintentionally vague, misleading, and ambiguous the past few days, and in the process totally fuddling a few of my readers. Understandably so. I came to New York for a few days, and since I will be carrying a little pooch (and I think you know which one) back with me, I decided to come LIGHT -- with no laptop, no knitting ... no iPod, even. I envisioned driving to the airport, immediately hopping on the JetBlue aircraft that would be waiting just for me, and being magically whisked to JFK and then lower Manhattan in less time than it would take me to type this. Well. It didn't happen exactly that way. 

More than anything, when I was sitting and twiddling my thumbs at the airport because the plane was delayed, I regretted the decision not to throw the mini computer in the backpack. You have no idea how small the Burlington "International" Airport is until you are stuck there for a while. Everything shuts up at a ridiculously early hour, so you can't even get a cup of coffee after 5 p.m. or so. Thankfully the flight delay announcement was made just as the newsstand guy was about to turn off his lights, and I managed to get him to sell me a magazine. The BlackBerry can only entertain me for about 14 seconds, and I didn't even have my earbuds for the plane. 

But anyway....eventually I got here, where I'm spending a few days with the kids, helping Abigail wrap up and take care of loose ends at the end of her first year of law school, etcetera and so forth and sundry, and then I will be returning to the Green Mountains with The Boy this weekend. 

Yesterday Abigail treated me to a slightly belated Mother's Day present of a most wonderful foot reflexology session, a nice pedicure (complete with a final rub with a fresh lemon slice -- so refreshing!) and some other primping and preening at a really lovely salon. (Since I know someone is going to ask: Salon 25 in the Financial District.) Needless to say: Blissful! Then we met Ryan for lunch on Historic Stone Street, all of which is in the neighborhood. 

It turned out to be a bit on the chilly side for what I'd hoped would be an outdoor lunch of a light salad, and so instead we took an unexpected detour to an Irish pub, Ulysses' Folk House, for a traditional Irish carvery lunch. It was PERFECT. It was a bit on the spendy side ($63 for lunch for three), but after eating the delicious hand-cut, perfectly done, tender, perfectly seasoned sirloin steak, asparagus, carrots and salad (those were my side dish choices), we were extremely happy that we'd made the impromptu decision to duck in there. The mac and cheese in that place (one of the side choices that the kids both took) was the best I've ever had in a restaurant. 

And I ordered their Guinness ice cream. The presentation of the ice cream alone was worth the price of admission. It was served in a pint beer glass, the inside of which was coated in chocolate. The ice cream, which tasted just like Guinness and had cherries and chocolate chunks in it, filled up the glass, and a thin layer of whipped cream topped it. The whole thing looking like a well-poured pint of Guinness. Memorable, though while eating it I could not tell what the cherries were, except that I knew they were some kind of fruit. It was not until I got home and went online to read the menu that I confirmed that they were cherries. Wish I'd remembered the camera like a good blogger, but sadly I did not.

And then there was shopping and a wonderful -- WONDERFUL -- Italian dinner on Pier 17 where, hilariously and almost tragicomically, the handsome sailors walk around leering at anything in a skirt. Could they be actors? I mean, it was almost too obvious and cliché to be true. I noticed it, and said something to Abigail and Ryan about it. They probably thought I was just being "crazy me." And then later, they both noticed and confirmed my observation. Tooo funny. What is this, 1942? 

I just adore this neighborhood. It still shows scars of 9/11, but it's such a great place to live. It's incredibly comfortable to walk around, it has everything a person could want, and it's so friendly. Every day on walks, for example, Mr. Jefferies dips into the pet shop around the back of the building, just to say hello and to get a treat from the lovely staff in there. That's just one example of the kind of small-town atmosphere that permeates the area. I love it, I must say I'm a little bit jealous that the kids are able to live here, and I hope they get to stay here a good long time.

Mr. Jefferies and I will be heading back to Vermont on Saturday. He's becoming quite the seasoned little traveler.

Postcard #2 From NY

We got caught in the rain while out walking. It's brutal.

Postcard from New York

 

What I've Been Doing On Mr. Jefferies' Vacation

Well, there has been considerable work around here in the last couple of weeks, of both the gainful kind and..... the other kind. Actually, I think they are both gainful, but I need the one in order to have the other. Or something like that, right?

It's been HOT and SUNNY. HOT. Like 90 degrees hot. Yogurt-incubating-directly-on-the-kitchen-counter hot, for several days now. Unbelievable.

Once again with Mother Nature apparently going through The Change, she goes from frigid to hot flash in the bat of an eyelash, and now all the plants are showing signs of stress. Yes, it appears that the plums are DEAD. The fruit, that is. I am not even sure if the trees are going to make it. The spinach is threatening to bolt (for the non-gardeners that means to go to seed too early) from the heat stress, so yesterday morning I cut it all, as well as much of the lettuce and all the arugula. 

A spinach plant threatens to bolt. I'm sure there's a cartoon in there somewhere.

The spinach, arugula, and several of the lettuces and other greens all prefer cooler temps, and they, too, will bolt or turn icky in the too-hot weather, especially if it happens too quickly. Same goes for the asparagus and the radishes, both of which are growing at a rate that you can actually see with the naked eye, and I'm not even exaggerating one tiny bit. So I've been vigilantly watering, which helps somewhat, and I've been harvesting to beat the band. There has been no shortage of salad around here, that's for sure. And that's a good thing. 

Some other lettuces are a little more heat tolerant, and so far they are just as happy as can be.

Happy Romaine

Happy mixed greens and reds

Happy Buttercrunch

Something has been tunneling under and into my compost bins, and the last time that happened, the something turned out to be rats. It is the source of some very bad memories and resulted in a cascade of horrible events. It was when Vincent (my dear departed Bichon) was about a year old, and we called an exterminator who put rat poison bait stations all around, "guaranteeing" us that no dog or cat would ever eat it because it's too bitter. 

And so of course you know that Vincent ate it like it was the most delicious thing he'd ever eaten. And we had to have his stomach pumped and give him Vitamin K shots for a long time. I never want to go through something like that again. I hope it's needless to say, I will not be calling any brilliant exterminator to get rid of any rats. So I spent yesterday afternoon in the hot sun (did I already mention the HOT! SUN!?) emptying the compost bins and using the wonderful, wonderful compost to start a new garden. I did not find any rat babies as before, and thank the LORD I did not see any digging culprit, because the size of that tunnel was not small. I had visions that the LOST black smoke cloud was going to come out of there. I sure am glad that whatever it is or was decided to vacate the building while I was digging.  

So my muscles got a heeyuuuuuuge workout and the summer squash and zucchini got planted in the new "peninsula garden" that I formed jutting off from my main garden with the compost from the bin. One of those bins holds a LOT of compost. Check it out:

The lawn-mowing guy (aka David) is going to love this. Not.

Most of the garden got a foliar feeding of liquid kelp, which is of great value in helping plants in times of stress, and I'm very glad I just happened to have a part of a gallon of the stuff in my basement. I'd be quite sure Jimmy Hoffa would be down there, but our house was only built in 1987, so probably not. But maybe still!

In addition, some other things got thinned, namely the Romaine and the micro-greens.

Much salad eating ensued. I have realized that I am not overly fond of mustard greens, and the mesclun and micro-green mixes contain too high a concentration of them for my liking, so when thinning, I was ruthless with the mustards. I am allowing some bolted baby bok choy to mature and go to blossom. It is very attractive to me, as well as to beneficial insects.

However, this insect is not beneficial: 

An asparagus beetle. Do.not.like. It is lurking and waiting for me to turn my back for a few days so it can invite several of its friends to start chowing down on the asparagus. 

And the cucumbers were planted, guarded by a platoon of marigolds and shallots.

Each year I try to grow cukes, I fight a valiant battle against the bugs, and the bugs usually win. I'm hoping the mass planting of marigolds will help. Same goes with the summer squash and zucchini -- they're surrounded by bastions of marigolds. This effort was helped greatly by the fact that David misunderstood how many marigolds I wanted him to buy when he volunteered to go to the farm and dairy co-op for me the other day. (He is volunteering to go to the Co-Op for me on an alarmingly regular basis lately. I'm quite sure he thinks I'm flirting with the big strong farm boys down there because of my frequent visits there with Mr. Jefferies. I have absolutely no idea where he would get such an outlandish idea. None at all.) 

So he tells me the story: 

David walks into the store and is staring at the piece of paper in his hand -- my shopping list. A big handsome guy looks over the counter at him and asks, "Can I help you?" 

David looks up and blurts, "SWEETCAKES!" 

True story.

David, you see, needs reading glasses, but most of the time he forgets to bring them. 

So Mr. Handsome Farm Man looks at David -- I'm sure without any measure of mirth at all -- looks at the list, walks to where the bird-feeding supplies are, and hands David four suet cakes. 

So anyhoo. I also asked him to get two packs of marigolds. I meant two six-packs. And he got two FLATS. Each flat has, I don't know, ten or twelve six-packs. 

I didn't laugh. I just planted.

 

And planted. 

And planted. 

And planted.

I'm still planting.

And I'm pretty sure I'll be doing my own farm co-op errands from now on. 

Terrier Tuesday - City Party Vacation Edition

Alpha's note: This is the missive I got late last night from Mr. Jefferies. I think he's been partying too much. Srsly. Look at those pupils in that photo below -- does that look right to YOU?! But this is his space on Tuesdays, so here goes: 

Sup.

Firsts, let me apologize for any mispells or bad types.  I'm doing this on my Berry cuz I'm on the road.  I'm visiting moms and pops in New York because apparently even though they were too young when they had me and couldn't watch over me appropriately and then shipped me off to live with Alpha they still get the right to see me every now and then.  Whatevs.  I'm a city dog at heart so it's cool.  Anywayyssss....

Flew here Jet Blue style.  Not first class cuz Dad is CHEAP, but coach.  Gross.  Regular people everywhere.  But it's okay cuz I'm crazy adorable and the hotties (stewardes's) were all over me.  They were like, "Awww...look at the little puppy!  Can I pet him???" And I was like, "Whatever it takes for you to slip me a few mini Vodka's!"  It's cool though, the flight was quick and I pooped before we left which was KEY cuz I hates pooping in airplane bathrooms.  Anywayyysssss.... then we landed and Dad drove me back to his crib in the Citay.  First thing I did was hit up the currency exchange to switch out my Vermont money for USA money.  Then I got my shop on.  Hit up Tifany's on 5th and Ferragamo (puppy needs his italian loafers!).  Thought about going to Saks but their prices are way inflated.  I'm like, "YO, I need to look good but I ain't rich!!!" LOL. Seriously though.  Super expensive.  Anywayyyysss....

Been going on lots of walks through the city, which is cool.  Totally forgot there are sooooo many dogs here!  I was like, "YO! Jeff ain't in Kansas No Mo!"  Huge dogs too.  And they all love me.  And by love I mean want to eat me and stomp on me.  But it's cool.  I took out this one guy, a bull mastiff I think.  He stepped on my chest and I was like, "You want some of this?" and then I went all Kung Fu Panda on him.  There was a sexy lil Chihuahua thang watching so I had to bring out the guns, you know.  That was the last anyone saw of the bull mastiff.  

But I'm crazy tired right now.  I just spent about 2 hours with my new lady friend (pic below).  I'm too much for her - new york ladies can't handle this mountain boy!  Heyyy Ohhhhh!  

Alpha, if you're reading this, see you soon!  I know you miss me!  Gonna get my tan on tomorrow cuz it's supposed to be NY HOT! Then maybe a mani/pedi with Dad cuz appppareeennntttlly he's into that now.  New York I tell ya.  Alpha, if I'm asking for a skinny double mocha latte when you get here, please get me back to the green state stat!

Loves

Your boy Jefferies.

 

The First Sermon From Pastor Norma, Church of the Cold Frame

Pastor Norma:  Well, I hope you don't mind, but I'm very busy today, so rather than give you a regular Cold Frame Church sermon, which is really only a bunch of dirt-y words, I will ask the church choir to sing for you. 

And so, without further ado, here they are, the newest hot gospel singing group, The Nightshades, singing their debut megahit, His Cold Frame Keeps Me Warm at Night:

Red Scarf Discount Incentive & Giveaway from Juniper Moon Farm!!!!!

Go here!  Go here!  Tell her Norma sent you.  ❤

Gulp.