Our Babies

Well, as I said, E and I are committed to the garden this year.

And, I’m a tomato-lovin’ fool.

So, I’m trying to grow several varieties of tomatoes from seeds.

Basically, I’ve got a *grow room* in our garage:

And, it’s so cool.

When they first sprout, they look like this:

And, then, less than 24 hours later, after exposure to the one cool flourescent and one warm flourescent bulb, they look like this:

In the interests of safety in numbers, I planted roughly 250 seeds of somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 breeds of tomatoes and tomatillos. Even with the new construction, this summer, we have space for maybe 20 plants of this type if we want to have a summer garden with vegetables of any other type. It should be interesting to see how this plays out…

I take back *everything* I ever said about the winter garden

Tonight, E became an official winter garden supporter, when he stated the phrase above.

Until now, he’s been conflicted. It’s nice to have a garden year round, and it’s a fun hobby, plus, it keeps me less stressed, and it provides us with some nice additions to meals. But, at the end of the day, it’s mainly dark green leafy things, which, frankly, if you ask him, suck, compared to the glorious harvests of summer.

That is, the winter garden sucked until tonight.

Silly me, I waited ’til now to apply pork to the situation. What was I thinking? Pork makes everything better!

Herbed Pork Chops over Brussel Sprouts and Red Onions

-2 large pork chops, washed and dried
-2 sprigs fresh marjoram, leaves removed from the stem
-1 large sprig fresh rosemary, needles removed from the stem
-2 sprigs lemon thyme, leaves removed from the stem
-1 red onion, sliced into 1 cm rounds and chopped into quarters or sixths
-2-3 T olive oil
-1/2 meyer lemon, in quarters, seeds removed, ready for squeezing
-black pepper
-sea salt
-2 T pickled horseradish purée
-and, of course, from the winter garden, 1 stem of fresh brussel sprouts

1. Pre-heat oven to 400F. Wash and Prep vegetables. Remove all brussel sprouts from the stem, wash thoroughly, cut the stem-ends from the sprouts so that they have a flat end to set in the baking dish. (NOTE: If you are using a 9X13 Pyrex dish, remember to keep it fully on the counter while chopping brussel sprouts on the cutting board. Otherwise, it will weigh the cutting board down, on the portion of the cutting board that is not on the counter, and you will have many shards of pyrex to clean up…you could even lose a few brussel sprouts that had been placed in the dish…theoretically speaking.)

2. Layer onions and brussel sprouts (chopped stem flat-side down) into a baking dish.

3. Mince herbs. Mix with olive oil, salt, pepper, and horseradish. Sprinkle 1/2 the mixture over brussel sprouts and onions in the baking dish.

4. Wash and dry pork chops. Spoon mixture on all sides of pork chops and layer on top of vegetables. It should look more or less like this:

5. Place into pre-heated 400F oven for 10 minutes. At the 10 minute bell, remove the dish and flip the pork chops (they should be white on the side you put down and slightly pink on the side you put to the top). Squeeze 1 lemon wedge over the chops and vegetables. Return the dish to the oven and turn heat up to 500F, and set the timer for 10 minutes.

6. At the timer, check the dish. Turn the pork chops one final time. Squeeze the other lemon over the non-lemon-flavored side for another 5 minutes of heat.

7. Remove from the oven. Arrange on two plates, and allow it to sit for 5 minutes before eating a delicious meal (which could look something like this):

8. Enjoy! (And enjoy the validation of the winter garden because these truly are the best brussel sprouts you’ve ever had in your life!)

Winter Garden Update

Well, it’s been 7 weeks since we built the winter garden boxes and planted the first transplants and seeds. What have we learned?

1. Swiss Chard grows quickly, and is tasty or bitter depending on your perspective. If it gets an aphid infection that you don’t treat soon enough, the leaves will all curl and be useless and you have to cut it down to nubs. I hope some of them come back…

2. The Japanese cucumber plant in the pot is still going strong and producing cukes like crazy. Definitely the most prolific plant of the year:

3. The Broccoli, Cabbage, and Cauliflower seem to really like the soil and were doing quite well other than some holes in the leaves we were trying to identify. The peas seem to be flowering and growing well, too:

4. The first set of onion seeds all sprouted, we even had to cull, and the peas seem to be flowering and growing reasonably well. You can see the Chard between the peas on the left, and the onions on the right, trying to make a comeback:

5. The brussel sprouts seem to be growing well, but they too, have the holes in the leaves. In all of the plants with holes, they started as small shot-like holes, and then grew each week:

6. We planted two carrot seeds per indentation, and about half of the indentations sprouted. My gran tells me 50% is great yield. I’m not so impressed…

7. The beets are very sorry looking. We planted 9, 5 sprouted but 2 were destroyed by the squirrels digging nearby for their lost nuts (stupid, forgetful squirrels). To date, 3 are still hanging in there — 2 red and one yellow:

8. The French radishes were the easiest winter thing to grow from seed. They all sprouted, and produced radishes in 4 short weeks. They just keep getting bigger while we wait to eat the rest:

9. The transplanted greens for salad have been my favorite part of the winter garden. Very few pests. Arugula, I love you! Spinach, and mixed salad pack — you guys are awesome too. We regularly trim the outer leaves for fresh salads and then the baby leaves in the middle continue to grow outward. The parsely and chives on the far right are nice to have for fresh accents to meals (just like the herb box) Greens fresh from the plant are amazing:

10. So far, 41 of the 42 garlic cloves we planted have sprouted. I’m holding out hope for the last one because it was 40/42 ’til this AM when the late-bloomer 41 poked through, so perhaps 42 is just even slower. I can’t wait to have 42 heads of gourmet garlic next year! Also, at the far end, we planted more onions and 6 artichoke seeds. Supposedly, artichokes are hard to germinate and take up 3 feet of space per plant. We were shocked to find the 5 of the 6 seeds sprouted despite serious squirrel destruction in this box (they are much more attracted to plain dirt than dirt with plants, so next year we will intersperse the transplants with the seeds more evenly). We surrounded the artichokes with onion seeds, most of which were decimated by the squirrels. So, in a month or so, we’ll probably cull 3 of the artichoke plants and try with a third round of onions.

11. Remember the book about the Very Hungry Caterpillar?

12. Yeah, we finally figured out what was causing the tiny holes in our plants. At first, we just saw lots of black dots on the plants that seemed to grow bigger over time, and some of them were darker green. The Big Book didn’t have anything to say about the balls, so I’d spray them off with the hose and we made plans to spray the plants with Neem Oil Spray in hopes that it would ward off whatever was the problem:

13. It turns out, the balls are caterpillar poop that grow as the caterpillars (and consequently the holes in the leaves) grow (see the right hand of this leaf for super-small balls, the first sign we saw when we had small holes):

14. For some of the plants, I fear we did not act quickly enough:

15. But finally, we had an afternoon caterpillar genocide:

In our terrible scientific experiments, we learned that they will drown in plain water, but try to climb out. If you add bleach to the water, they don’t try to climb out. The neem oil spray also kills them if they are drenched.

16. The moral of the story is that this guy is not the friend of your cabbage, brussel sprout, brocolli, or cauliflower plants:

If you see one or more of these guys, and then you see small holes in your leaves, act quickly. I think next year we’ll try to proactively spray with neem oil.

Snippits

HOUSING: Monday (you know the day the S&P lost almost 9%) we made an offer on a house. They countered the next day, and we found out that a house we really liked sold for way less than it was listed and we were very disappointed that we hadn’t been the ones to successfully low-ball the sellers on that one. So, we let the counter-offer expire and we looked at another house on Wednesday. We haven’t found anything we’re in love with, so we’re still in process…

GARDEN: We’ve finished two boxes of the winter garden, and now I’m just waiting for my shipment to arrive from the Gourmet Garlic Gardens (don’t you love the Internet?) to plant the third box (which, in addition to the garlic, will be full of things to over-winter, including artichokes, red onions, and white onions). The winter garden currently looks like this:

TRAVEL: After 5 years of flying Delta back and forth between California and Atlanta, we finally *almost* had enough miles to get free flights for Christmas and New Year’s. Round-trip flights were the most expensive they’ve ever been since we started this regular trek — it would have cost $1400 for the flights we wanted. So, instead, we bought $220 worth of miles and paid the $37 per person fee and we’ll be flying to Atlanta on miles. And, we decided to spend most of the Delta miles savings on our New Year’s trip to Savannah, Georgia.

LAWYERING: Work is relatively slow for me for the first time since I started working as a lawyer, really. I’m definitely enjoying it, although, of course, I have a slight fear for the economy and hope that it doesn’t stay too slow, too long.

RUNNING: I dropped a recent race because my sister couldn’t do it with me. We got last-minute invitations to a wedding on the date of my next race, so I’ll be skipping that one too. So, it looks like I’ve got my favorite half marathon as the only remaining race I’ll be doing this year. But, my speed efforts continue to pay off, so I look forward to trying to set a PR at that one before building up distance for 2009’s spring marathon(s).

I think that covers it.

On Privacy

Today, I attended a 3/4 day long conference on internet privacy. That wasn’t how they billed it, but that’s how it ended up playing out.

Many very smart people said many smart things, and most of them have my brain spinning and thinking and evolving. Perhaps if I collect my thoughts I’ll post something useful. Probably not, though.

Acknowledging that I probably won’t think, write, and post or be anything close to useful in that manner, I feel I should offer something. So, here it is:

Today, as counsel to many small cutting edge companies who struggle with many of the issues that were discussed, the most striking comment, to my ears, came from Lauren Gelman. She said (according to my notes),

Now, anyone can speak to the world about whatever they want — but our stories aren’t just about ourselves, they affect third parties.

I think, from the first person publisher privacy standpoint, that summarizes the whole ball of wax. Sure, you’ve always been free to tell your story from the street corner, but it used to require so much more effort. Now, it’s easy. And you can bring along your acquaintances’ reputations for the ride.

This is not to say that there isn’t a huge discussion to be had regarding the entities who are collecting data, combining it with other data, mining it, and introspecting into our lives. That is a different and immense issue.

This is just to say that on the harms we can do to one another by exercising this new and ridiculously free, unprecedented power to publish to anyone in the world without a governmentally imposed filter — I think Lauren’s got it.

We’ve never been so free to permanently speak to millions about our neighbors, acquaintances, exes, and so forth.

It’s a brave new world y’all…