fixing it with physics

whoo hoo, the beam's yellow pear tomatoes are ripening and tasting delicious.

looks like the fall garden is promising to make the spring/summer garden look just pitiful. so while the planning for next year's tomatoes seems to have found a permanent home in the front of my brain, the rest has been working on sowing and thinning seeds. i tried to space out my seeds appropriately when sowing, but since some them are so darn small and come a billion to a packet, i found that generally it's easier to just toss some seeds in the little rows and worry about carefully thinning them out later. now if your like me, and are always surprised and amazed when the little guys start poking their heads out of the soil, it hurts my heart to rip them from the life giving soil. BUT, today i realized that thinning can be a good thing. and that good thing is what i now call seedling salad. that's right folks, eat those seedlings. we did. and they were darn tasty. so let's take a look around the garden and see what's growing.

i headed out this morning with my notebook so i knew exactly how much spacing each veggie patch needed to be thinned.

here's the new pea patch where the in ground tomatoes used to be.
they're not sprouting yet.

a new lettuce patch. let's hope i do better at eating the fall salad greens before they bolt and turn bitter.

herb garden of basil and one sage plant.

the cilantro is sprouting!!!

the radishes are about 1/2 way to maturity.

more seeds a sprouting. these are either chinese cabbage or more lettuce.

swiss chard and some more chinese cabbage seedlings prior to today's thinning.

this thyme plant is over a year old and getting a little woody on the inside. not sure what i'm going to do with it. drying it and trying to separate the little leaves from the stems is a bitch. maybe i can dig it up and split it somehow.

even more seeds a sprouting.

leeks gone wild!!!!

can't cut from and eat this swiss chard fast enough. it just keeps growing and growing. at the top right of the picture are the mustard greens before i thinned them out a bit. the little mustard seedlings had a really nice peppery taste to them.

collecting the seedlings for the salad. who knew thinning could be so tasty.

i was doing good till the stupid piece of shit salad spinner decided not to work. i've only used the damn unfixable thing a handful of times. so i had to fix the problem with some physics. attach a coat hanger to the basket and go out to the front stoop and spin the basket in a big circle round and round really really fast so the salad doesn't fall out. see there, done. dried seedling salad. well at least the basket and bowl from the spinner will make a decent container to store the leftover greens in the frig.
(of course i had to find a way to sneak in a pic of the puppies)

so this week we did a pretty good job of eating out of the garden. and it only took me till the end of the tomato season to remember the beauty of the blt. seriously, where is my brain sometimes!!??!!.

BLT
organic bread
homemade mayo
homegrown basil
homegrown swiss chard standing in for the lettuce
homegrown HBPL tomato
bacon

and of course, today's seedling salad. seedlings dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar topped with tuna salad made with homemade basil mayo, farmer's market butter pickles, and capers. paired with a homegrown HBPL tomato and organic bread and butter.

hopefully next week i find some time to tell you about the grand labor day tomato take down and review a little canning i did this summer. but for now i leave you with the one picture i took at the william christenberry lecture we went to yesterday in augusta.