Food/culture/travel and the Demented Gardener

[Tweakette]

I do this every time we go somewhere interesting just before gardening season - I get obsessed with planting whatever it was I just saw, or "tuning" the garden to reflect where I just went.

The worst case I had of it was after we got back from New Orleans in March a few years ago. I became obsessed with growing okra, and cream peas, and creole tomatos, and a host of other plants that just don't do well in northern New England. The okra actually did ok - I got some small (and slightly woody) pods off of it. The cream peas never came up and the tomatos didn't ripen in time.

Then another year we went down to visit some slightly "yuppie" friends of ours in early spring. I came back with visions of rows of radicchio, arugula, and other expensive and nasty-tasting yuppie salad parts dancing in my head. The radicchio looked beautiful, but was so bitter I couldn't swallow a bite (learned the hard way it needs cool weather only). DH pulled out the arugula thinking it was weeds.

This year we went to Pennsylvania in May to visit relatives, and on the way through spent 2 days in Amish country just to look around.
Now I've got a garden full of cabbage and potatos, plus some "Amish Paste" tomatos and a bunch of heirloom Amish watermelons that probably won't ripen before November.

Thank God at least we visited someplace where they grow sensible vegetables this year!

Thanks for listening, this was cathartic. Especially after I realized I have nearly 100 feet of potatos in (3 30ish foot rows) and DH said to me "what the he## are you going to do with all those potatos?".

Tweak

 

[duffyo]

Tweak,
Boy can I relate. But I do flowers instead of veggies. Saturday
I did a Master Gardener's Plant Clinic at Home Depot. They put our table right by the checkouts in the Garden Center. I spent 4 hours watching what people were buying. After we finished, I went out side, got a cart and spent $40.00 on flowers LOL. I planted them this AM
Duffy

 

[Sarrah]

Tweak I think this is a great idea. You will find something eventually that grows really well and you will like it a lot I bet.
I do this with things we eat dinning out. I love asian food and I've had a lot of success with asian vegetables. I switched completely to those Dow Guak I think they are called or Yard long beans because of dinning out.
Keep it up gal, you'll get a reward one of these days.
I bet it will be the same with the flowers duffyo.

 

[A.T.Hagan]

I had the same problem the time we visited Monticello in Virginia.

Thomas Jefferson was probably the premier horticulturist of his day and he kept excellent records of what he grew and how he did so.

Might not have been so bad had not the head gardener been on site at the time. I was pestering the docent giving us the tour so much that he finally went and fetched the fellow for me and we talked a mile a minute to the point my wife and friends finally fled to go look at other stuff.

Alas! A good deal of what Jefferson was able to grow on his Virginia mountaintop is simply not going to work here in North Florida.

But I am growing the same sort of figs he grew. I've got them all but the Marseilles fig which I recently found is more commonly called a lemon fig here in the Deep South.

I thoroughly enjoy looking at the gardens in Southern Maine when we go to visit the wife's folks, but at least with those I know better than to get worked up about trying to grow a lot of that stuff here.

Just as well, rhubarb and beets are not fit to eat anyway. I could clean a pie cherry tree though. I like them just as they come off the tree. Love their apples too, except for the McCouns, which is Gaelic for stone.

.....Alan.

 

[Tweakette]

Figs!! Hmmmm, wonder if I could grow those up here.. just kidding...
I haven't been to Monticello yet, maybe I shouldn't go, considering this "problem" of mine . I'm glad I'm not alone though!

I need to stay out of the South in the spring, because it gives me ideas that just don't work up here. At least this Amish bender I'm on lately is doable, mostly.

The one thing that I really want to grow (and keep trying, and losing trees) is peaches. We're in zone 4 and there's a peach that's barely hardy up here (Reliance) but either the rodents get them or the cold does.

Hmmm... figs....

Tweak

P.S. It's funny - the Macouns are my favorite apple!