Chilly

Our cool season has arrived with a grand entrance...the overnight low broke a record for the date.  I didn't catch it here, but the "official" low at a nearby airport was eight Celsius.  I'm still heat-adapted so I slept in for a change...the house stayed warm overnight. I confess to using a small space heater last evening while I was online.

The air pollution has been hitting me hard recently...strong chemical odors, heavy smoke, and a really strong bloom of red tide just off the coast.  Any one of those is enough to give me problems...it's another reason I slept late in my filtered indoor air.  This time of year people cut back brush and burn it...things are still very primitive here in a lot of ways.  We have curbside pickup of residential yard waste, but many don't use it.  It's a mystery to me why they don't. And of course larger landowners burn off hundreds of acres, as they've done since colonial times.

So I haven't done much outside.  I did set up more containers, and I finished getting the chipper/shredder ready for use.  I planted three 34 cm pots of mustard greens, I use a lot of those in salads, soups, and stir fries.  It's an easy procedure...mix the potting soil from recycled container soil, rock dust, vermiculite, and compost using a wheelbarrow and a hoe...line the bottom of a pot with pine twigs, cover the twigs with landscaping cloth, dump in the amended soil.

Then I plant about ten seedlings in each pot, set it on a rack of poles on concrete blocks, and cover it at night with chicken wire until the plants are big enough to hide the soil.  Some type of animal loves digging in freshly-mixed potting soil, they can really wreck my work overnight. Also the fire ants love the pots...finding your hands covered in stinging ants after pulling a couple of weeds is no fun at all.  So I rarely put the big pots on the ground to keep them away from animals, flooding, fire ants, and the back trouble I get from picking them up from the ground.  I put the smaller pots of seedlings on the carport overnight to protect them from snails, etc.

I'm enthusiastic to plant a wide variety of greens and beans this cool season.  I really think the tender raw greens fortify me, they're a good source of almost every important nutritional need of humans.  I don't eat much fruit, so raw greens and peppers are my main source of vitamin C.  I have hopes of planting more pac choy, radish greens, and mustard greens...plus chard, aurugula, mizuna, turnip greens etc.

For soups, my favorites are molokhia and mustard.  The former grows best in the hot season and the rainy season, the latter in the cool season.  But they're all good for soup, stir fry, or salads when young.  Well, no salads with molokhia...you have to cook those.

I didn't feel up to doing much today, but maybe tomorrow I'll mix more soil or start clearing brush and shredding it...always something to do.