The Calm after the Storm

If the power had gone out from the hurricane, we sure wouldn't have minded.  Behind the storm followed a gorgeous blue sky and light cool breeze.  It was the perfect weather and I spent hours outside, finally giving some love to the garden, which had been left to it's own devices for weeks.

The garden had grown into a monster.  The four tomato plants erupted like juicy red and purple Cherokee volcanoes, enveloping everything and blocking the sunlight to the root veggies.  Then winter squash vine outstretched above the tomatoes in overflowing tributaries.  Since I enclosed the beds with a protective wire fence about a half foot around the parameter, grass grew tall in areas the lawn mower would not reach.  Every trip to harvest I'd be jumpy, looking keenly at the grass for a snake.

Today was the day for Garden Reform.  I trimmed those puppies down!    Now it looks pathetic and emaciated! Sigh.

But, I harvested a ton of green tomatoes.  Why?

• It's late summer and days will be getting shorter so I'm not confident they'll ever ripen. 
• When they redden the stink bugs start to munch on them. 
• They looked so shiny and soft.

But really I think it came from the innate connection of man to food, molecule to mouth, mineral to taste bud... just something inside your biology guiding your actions, like an ant instinctually building an ant hill, a bird instintually building a nest.  It just felt like the right thing to do.

Now what are we going to do with all these green tomatoes?

Newborn okra preparing to burst forth.  Last year I wondered why all my okra was too hard to eat.  Turns out you have to harvest them young as they grow tougher with size/length. So bigger is not necessarily better.

A bee pollinating a pole bean.  These are yummy southern black beans.

WARNING:  Next photo contains explicit sexual content!

Oh yeah baby!  look at that hot bee-on-flower action! Sweet looking menage-trois.

These passion flowers only bloom for one day, and typically in the rain.  I counted over ten that bloomed following the hurricane.  The large carpenter bees go down on them all day long.  They really get in there and eat those ladies up.  Sometimes it looks like they even spend the night on the flowers.

And here is their first passion fruit love child peeking out it's head:

And how did the honey bees fare the storm?  Mari ghetto rigged hurricane armor consisting of concrete bricks above the roof and support beams along most likely the wind stream.

Trust in your instincts baby, they never fail.  Some searching the vast world of the internet revealed recipes for Lacto-Fermented Green Tomato Pickles.  They should be ready in about a month.  I didn't have any whey or yogurt on hand but strained milk-kefir instead.  It looks like it yielded kefir whey.  So I'm pretty sure this is going to work.  I made four batches according to Hippo Flambe's recipe, but added mustard seed to all of them, juniper to one batch and black pepper to another.

All in all a super successful day in the garden.