Ysa's Corner

Reading: One of the libraries I use suddenly acquired 91 more ebook copies of The Gate of the Feral Gods (DCC book 4), so I'm reading that. I also started Abra Berens' Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables.

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Watching: We're halfway through Widow's Bay now and, I think, pretty invested.

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Materialism: In the last couple of weeks I've tipped over into desperately wanting new jeans that, y'know, actually fit well. (The ones I've been wearing for ages are passable but just not great, and it relatively recently occurred to me that I can probably get away with wearing normal jeans with metal bits [to which I'm allergic] most of the time, since I'm rarely out of the house for very long. And while years ago, the "coat the skin-touching metal bits in clear nail polish" didn't actually work well, there's always the option of just plain sewing fabric bits over those spots.) Yesterday I spent a truly appalling amount of money ordering an array of jeans from a couple of different stores, most of which will be returned...but hopefully I can get a pair or two I actually like out of it.

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Growing: The lettuce is still doing well! I think that's going well enough that we'll try it again next year and see how it does when the elevated planter is closer to the house (which it has to be after this season). I probably won't opt to grow spinach again; the plants are doing okay, but only three came up and they're not producing enough to Do Something With Spinach, so their leaves are just getting tossed into salads with the lettuce.

Meanwhile, the sole cucumber plant now seems to be serious about growing, and the tomatoes are flowering to varying degrees. Apparently we should go out and do a bit of hand pollination, and we really need to do a bit of pruning, at least on the three indeterminate plants.

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Foodstuffs: scruloose made the Easy Swiss Chard Stir Fry from Omnivore's Cookbook to use the rainbow chard from our first week of farmshare, and if making it again, would increase both the garlic and soy sauce and also make it in the wok rather than the deep frying pan, which wasn't quite up to the mass of the chard greens. Sadly, I didn't like it much, which I suspect is a general chard thing rather than being due to this recipe. But we may try it again sometime.

Farmshare from last week (week 2): onions, new potatoes, strawberries, beets, parsley (flat?), and celeriac. This time the fridge wasn't straight-up exploding with greens. We still have to use the beets and celeriac, both of which are new to me; I think in both cases we're just planning to roast them and see what we think.

Having a car of our own means being able to just...get up and go to the produce stand we really like (which does sadly mean lower odds of making it to the corner farmers' market on Saturdays, but I'm hoping we'll still make it there during berry season). We went both Saturday and yesterday morning. The summer strawberries are just wrapping up (we tried four varieties through them over the last few weeks: Brunswick, Laurel, Jewel, and Evelyn), and yesterday we were able to also get our first raspberries and cherries of the season (both were sold out by the time we got to the front of the line on Saturday, which is a bit alarming given that we got there within half an hour of opening time). All of the remaining strawberries got roasted yesterday.