What I'm eating 6-27-15

Pork. Rutabaga. Pork. Rutabaga. Pork. Rutabaga. Pork and Rutabaga. Rutabaga and Pork. Bacon and Rutabaga with a touch of beets mixed in. Pork. Rutabaga. Pork. Rutabaga. Do you see a theme here? It's been about a month that P and R have comprised greater than 90% of my total caloric intake. Amazingly I'm not sick of either of them. They both still taste good to me at every meal and aside from my peanut butter fix I haven't craved other things.

I feel compelled to add that I am eating greens on a regular basis these days. I love salads and will gladly scarf down a platter of lettuce as big as my head. Greens just don't have many calories though. They can "ferment" in the colon and release fatty acids. For it to contribute a significant number of calories would require I pounds and pounds per day. I'll think about that if I run out of pork and rutabagas before the other staple roots come online.

The garden got off to a sort of slow start because of the heat and dry we had early in the spring, but I've had many people ask me about this year's garden and how much of its bounty I'm eating now. The short answer is, "just about only greens". Eating leaves is easy this time of year. I don't know if it is the limited staples or just a generally curiosity with flavors since my plate is so limited, but I've sampled a wider variety of wild greens this spring/summer than ever before in my life. In past years I've tasted things like clover after watching my cows munch away on them. This year I've actually eaten grasses - oats (the growing plant not the seeds), corn (see oats), orchard, timothy, brome, gama, big bluestem, - clover, plantain, lambs quarters, dandelion, Jerusalem artichoke, golden rod, comfrey, and sow thistle (really! ouch!). Some, like the comfrey, I just nibbled. Others I ate a number of leaves from. The sow thistle has a good, lettuce-like flavor, but the spines are, *ahem*, painful to chew. I might make and serve a salad of it if I feel up to trimming each leaf margin when the time comes.

With a bigger greenhouse I could have had regular fresh beets and turnips by now. Growing a substantial root takes time, warmth, and water. I did in fact consume some baby beets for dinner last night, but even so, I'm still going to need to rely on last year's rutabagas well into July. Good thing they've kept well.

-Edmund

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