So, I just had to post our lunch today, or is it dinner.  Our tomatoes have been SO incredibly good.  They’ve also been bursting at the seams, the rains have been so frequent and the humidity high.  Our horizontal tomato bushes (hardly ‘plants’) are going nuts, and it’s way hard to keep up.

BLT w/ S4L in the making

With tomatoes, we’ve had so many split fruit this year that we have only been able to take a small fraction to the Westside Farmers Market.  The best go to market, and the rest stay here for canning and eating.  But today, we made BLT’s from two of the nicest tomatoes we took to market… and nobody bought.  The crazy thing is, these are just incredibly good eating tomatoes, the kind everyone says “Oh, I wish I could find tomatoes like I remember from the garden when I was a kid.  Now THOSE were tomatoes!”  Well that’s what these are.

But the thing is, they don’t look like we remember them.  And I think it’s a problem of implanted memories, like the ones they worry about in criminal trials where witnesses try to remember details of something that happened years ago, but they include details and ideas that they may believe are actual memories, but are really just implanted ideas that have insinuated themselves over the years.

In the case of tomatoes, we’ve become conditioned to believe that these mystical tomatoes are red.  Perfectly red.  Uniformly and gorgeously consistently red.  Because that’s what line we are being fed by the grocery stores.  We can’t help it… Agribusiness has bred red tomatoes with long shelf life for decades now, and that’s what we see in the store shelves.  These tomatoes get red before they’re really ripe, so that they can be picked early when they’re hard and can be transported easily.  They’ve got tough skins so that they hold up to transport from big farm to distributor warehouse and warehouse to big box grocery produce section.  They treat them with ethylene gas to help ripen them up.  And the message is not just in front of us everytime we go to the produce section… and who (besides us) doesn’t go to the produce section?

These damn perfect red hard skinned tasteless bastards of agribusiness are sold to us with every TV commercial touting “Fresh!”.  Pizza commercials, restaurant commercials, pasta commercials, and in countless magazine articles.  Red.  All red, consistently red, inside and out red.

But it’s not where the really good tomatoes are.  It’s not what we grow to eat at Dragonwood, and it’s not what we sell (at least not very much).  We grow the tomatoes we want most to eat, and they’re not very red typically, they’re not very consistent, they’re just not usually “beautiful” to the modern consumer’s eye.  I’m not going to list off all the varieties we grow… and I certainly can’t pick every tomato out of the garden basket and tell you which it is (Mandy can, mostly).  They’re yellow and orange, purple and green, and usually inconsistent.  Some have green shoulders even when they’re perfectly ripe, and some have such deep purple insides that they look a bit rotten from the outside!  But I’ve learned the difference between conventional (red!) beauty and tomatoes prized for their taste.  I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this tomato season.  In fact, I want to thank all those customers at the market this week who didn’t pick the best tomatoes so that they could go into my lunch sandwich today.  But I do hope they (some of them) might read this, and at their next market go to the vendors who prize their tomatoes for flavor, who have mostly tomatoes that look funny (less than perfect red), and talk tomato with the growers, and take home a variety of funny looking tomatoes to relish.  Vive la différence!

Oh, I got off topic didn’t I?  We have no (capital L) lettuce these days, so our sandwiches had green bean slaw, which you can see in the photo.  It’s fantastic stuff… beans + non-iodized salt + time, and bingo, what a delish relish.  With a side of tomato wedges, all colors.  Mmmm.

Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum

How much can I say about this healthy breakfast treat?  A cup of coffee and a nice piece of Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum.  Ahhh.  Oh, and that’s my favorite coffee cup, a DaRo design original… Mandy has a handle free DaRo cup with a similar glaze pattern, our morning coffee ritual cups.  Too bad we don’t have zucchini all year round to start the day like this during all our Dragonwood seasons.

So, mowing our yard is not so much for keeping the neighbors happy at our tidiness (hah!) as it is a harvest.  Our gardening style is, as much as possible, to mulch the place like mad to keep the grasses and other bystanders somewhat at bay.  We just don’t have time for massive and continuous weeding operations, so we try to keep overgrowth at bay by burying it.  It works reasonably well, but takes massive amounts of mulch to do so.

Mulch raking in progress

We have two main sources of mulch.  The first, as seen in the photos above, is yard clippings.  This is my harvest.  I mow the yard in patterns amenable to raking, since I have no mechanized way of picking up the clippings…  I rake by hand.  So it takes several hours to mow the whole place, and several more hours to rake down the rows of clippings (after they sit for a couple days).  In a good mowing I get about 10 full garden carts of clippings (about the amount I can comfortably pull up the grassy hill).  Then I spread it out wherever it’s needed, or make a big pile for use later.

Pumpkins like mulch

In this photo we used it to extend the new pumpkin patch farther out into the yard.  The pumpkins are looking happy to have the extra space, here in this foggy dusky summer evening shot.

Our other main source of mulch is wet hay.  When, over at the family farm, the weather doesn’t cooperate and a pile of hay comes in that’s too wet to store and isn’t immediately needed for the horses or sheep, then a trailer full appears at Dragonwood.  We used that in the new pumpkin/corn/potato/squash patch as we sowed seedlings to make a good base for all the pathways between the plantings.  That particular patch (about 16×100 feet) was well mulched to start and has fewer weeds by far than those garden patches we didn’t manage to mulch so thoroughly.  As in the pumpkin photo above, our use of mulch around the edges has expanded that patch to about 20 some feet wide and 120 feet long now, an easy way to grow the field by mulching down the grass on each side :-)

And if you’ll excuse me now, I have a lot of raking to do.

So, to follow up my last fishin’ post, here’s a quick photo I took of the bluegill and bass heaven where I caught ‘em.

Bass and bluegill heaven (at least as far as my fly casting is concerned)

Just a perfect spot for fly fishing around the edges without getting your feet wet and (almost) never snagging in anything behind you (thanks sheep and horseys).   Next time I just might wade in to get out a little farther from shore.

I went fishing tonight, at a family farm pond.  I haven’t had my fly rods out in about 20 years or more, and haven’t seriously fished for much longer.  But Brian said he threw three worms in last week and caught three nice bluegills, and the weather was just so cooperative today, and I finished all my mowing, so about 7pm I was over there with my two 30-some year old rods and my 40-some year old vest and ready to fish.

My goals for the evening were modest:

1. Find out if my equipment still works.

2. Find out if my muscle memory for fly casting still works.

3. Drop at least a few flies into the water right where I intended to drop them.

4. Catch a fish.

… and if those work, then the list expands to:

5. Catch a keeper.

It was a beautiful evening.  When I first arrived at the lake a heron flew away, the goose flock was at the far end of the lake, a kingfisher rattled away across the lake to a dead tree, and a doe and fawn were getting a drink down near the geese.  The day’s wind had died, making the pond flat as can be, and the sky was gorgeously colorful, with little yellow rims on the little puffy clouds.

Unfortunately there was not a fish rise to be seen on the pond surface.  Nada.  But I paid out some line and started flexing my arms and working the line and dropped my little red dry fly out near some lily pads.  More nada.  I fished ten minutes without a bite, but I met my first three goals pretty easily.  It’s hard to kill decent fly fishing gear, and I’m just not that out of shape, so I focused more on #4.  I changed rods and put on a white streamer fly.  About then a fish rose in the lily pads, and then rose again a little closer to the edge of the pad cluster.  I dropped my fly right next to the pads, but had a bit of excess line paid out by my feet.  So the fly rested there a moment longer than I intended while I gathered in the excess and when I finally took up the slack (it’s only been a few seconds, really) Bingo, Fish On.  Forgetting for the moment that I was fishing for little bluegills and not lunker bass or Bahamian snappers, I reared back with the rod to set the hook and a 6″ largemouth bass flew out of the water across 10 feet or so and landed in the weeds near my feet.  Oops!  He was fine and swam off a moment later.

Brian came over the hill and beckoned to go to the other side of the pond.  It was a good choice… my side faced west into the sun.  I followed, and caught and returned another small bass, and then Brian said Hey What Do You Think The Bucket Is For?  Turns out we were keeping our catch to stock the little swamp drainage pond that sources most of their mosquitoes.  Natural pest control.  Brian just made my Goal #5 a lot easier.  I caught that same bass, or his brother, about three casts later, and then suffered a little drought.  The fish just weren’t rising, and weren’t biting.  Brian had tried a worm, a popper, a frog and back to the worms and had only caught one bluegill.  But as the sun got lower, all of a sudden they started hitting my flies just about every cast.  Only once did I get a hit at the surface… all the rest were on a fairly fast retrieve, pulling in the line to make the fly act like a minnow trying to escape.  I caught three in three casts at one point.

It was a great evening, and I even got home before it was completely dark, in time to shut up the chickens for the night.  We filled up a stringer plus a couple more in the bucket… I think we took 11 or so fish (half bass, half bluegills and sunnies) to the mosquito pond.  I caught twice or thrice what Brian caught, which is a first for me.  I never catch more on flies than the bait fishing folks I’m with.  But he did have 1 year old Sophie in his arms most of the time, and he did switch bait and tackle a fair bit.  Maybe next time I’ll try taking Sophie for some of the time.  Maybe.