I’m so excited you’d think I was the first person to ever have a little garden. By the way, when green tomatoes have some sort of blemish that makes them look like they won’t survive until they ripen, just pick ’em and cook ’em. I’m still waiting for my first fully ripe, fully proper summer tomato. The two tomatoes here are just cherry tomatoes. When I get that first tomato, I know exactly what I’m going to do with it. Photo to come in a week or so, I hope. Hey, it’s not fancy San Francisco Chronicle food photography, but it makes you hungry, doesn’t it?
Herbses
A friend tells me that I should clip my herbs before they bloom. Oh well. I’m learning. Here are oregano, sage, and catnip. I’ll dry the catnip and give it to some cats I know. I have a good stand of basil, and from that I had my first fresh pesto a few days ago.
Blooms du jour
A squash bloom
Bee balm
Road trip: The headwaters of the Dan River
Near Westfield on N.C. 89
The Dan River begins in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The area includes Stokes and Surry counties in North Carolina and Patrick County in Virginia. I took a little road trip through this area today. It was hot, but I just couldn’t take another day of sitting inside with the air conditioning running. The Jeep has no air conditioner, but it’s nice and cool if you take the windows out and keep moving.
The Dan River headwaters in Google Earth
A farmstead near Claudville, Virginia
Outbuilding near Claudville, Virginia
A cherry tree near Claudville, Virginia
A church near Claudville, Virginia
Theological innovation near Westfield, North Carolina. If you can’t read it, the sign says “Chestnut Ridge Progressive Primitive Baptist Church.”
Artistic innovation — a yard art factory near Mount Airy, North Carolina
Butterfly weed near Claudville, Virginia
A majestic poplar, as big as an oak, near Francisco, North Carolina
A cottage on Virginia Route 103
A cottage on N.C. 8 near the Virginia line.
Hay work is going on everywhere right now. With the price of grain sky high, the hay must be really valuable to the local farmers. These days, most of the hay goes into big, industrial-size bales.
Still, some people still make old-fashioned hayride bales, and boys still learn how to do it.
The big ones would be useless for hayrides!
At least the garden likes the hot weather
Baby squash
Baby tomatoes
Deckage
A little bit of deck goes a long way in making living in an RV more pleasant. The job took only a day, thanks to my brother’s skills and nice tools. His pneumatic nail gun really sped up the job. After the house is done, I plan to keep the little trailer as a guest house.
A ride up Booger Swamp Road
Yes there is a Booger Swamp Road. I believe it’s in Zip Code 27055 if you want to Google it for yourself.
Californians, here’s what young Carolina flue-cured tobacco looks like. This is the kind of tobacco that is made into cigarettes. This is on Center Road, one turn off Booger Swamp Road. I’ll try to show you more of the tobacco crop as the season progresses.
Here’s the farm machine du jour. I believe it’s a seed drill, and it’s probably out to plant soybeans. For some reason, I find farm machinery fascinating. This is on Shallowford Road near Lewisville. All three of these photos are in Yadkin County.
We do have readers…
I don’t know a great deal about who reads this blog, but we do get readers, and traffic has grown each month. Much of the traffic seems to come from Google searches for both terms (“creecy greens”) and photos.
The drama of daisies and stuff
Daisies are so humble, but it’s flattering when they choose to grow in the weedpatch beside your driveway. Around here people mostly mow them down.
Every morning and every evening I go out for a walk to see how the grass and clover are coming along. It’s chiefly in the morning that you notice a difference. The clover got off to a very slow start, but some of it is starting to look like real clover. It’ll be a red-letter day when the first clover blooms. I sowed three kinds of clover — red, white, and Ladino clover. I believe this is red clover.
This bank was skinned back to the subsoil when the bulldozer made the driveway. I’m still weeks away from a vigorous stand of grass, but the peach fuzz is promising.
A baby tomato. It’s amazing how fast things grow in raised beds.
Vidalia onions
The real thing
I would continue to testify that, awesome though California’s produce is, there are three things grown in the Southeast that California can’t duplicate: Vidalia onions (from Georgia, of course), proper summer tomatoes, and mountain cabbage.
Vidalia onions are showing up in all the stores here. The large ones can be expensive. The medium-size onions are very reasonably priced. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out, but I now understand the source of the soggy onions we had during the winter, both in California and here in the Southeast. The onions are imported from Central America and Peru. I’m guessing that they must be transported on ships with no ventilation, so the outers layers have already started to rot by the time they get here.
I’ll have plenty more on tomatoes this summer. I hope to visit a cabbage patch in Carroll County, Virginia, before too much longer.