Broccoli flower followup

I almost forgot...the broccoli flowers are pretty good. They gave the broccoli a lemony taste. I'd advise that if you let the flowers bloom that you not also try to eat the largest part of the stalk; that was a bit tough and cooking didn't really make it more edible. This is a picture of them in the colander in the sink:

Lesson of the Day

I learn something new every day. Most of these lessons, I don't seek out. They just come to me on their own. Today I learned that broccoli is a flower, that those little green knobs atop the crown are flower buds. I didn't learn this in a gardening catalog, in an encyclopedia, or even from Wikipedia. I learned this as I went out into the garden this morning. My little florets are giving way to little yellow flowers. Oh, well. Supposedly those are edible too. Hopefully they're good.

Grandfather and Gardening

My grandfather was a farmer (in miniature), with a half a city lot dedicated to his garden. He had his own tiller and at least twenty tomato cages. I remember the deep freezer in the basement, full of gallon-sized freezer bags of tomatoes. Once I dug a hole that was about five feet deep and began a compost pile. He preferred chemical fertilizers, but he let me tilt my windmill. One year we built a very solid, very sturdy trellis that stretched at least 15 feet. It supported the most wondrous pole beans. The next door neighbor complained about it; I thought it was genius. We talked other designs and blueprints that rattled through his head. He told me about his idea for a mechanism to lower the top of a convertible. That was the year I began to picture him as an engineer and wonder if he would have been if he had the opportunity.

After high school, I didn't help in the garden anymore. Summer classes, summer jobs, and finally moving out of state kept me away. He teased me about being too much into email to do any real work anymore. So it's been a very long time since I've coaxed food from dirt.

This year I started my garden. I spent hours upon hours removing sod (basically I pulled up lots and lots of grass with a spade). I joined the Garden Resource Program and have been hooked up with seeds, plants and all kinds of organic dreams. No pesticides for me. It's a small garden, half of my postage stamp backyard. And yet I feel like my Grandfather's child: I am a farmer. Today I cooked with basil that I harvested; my lettuce and spinach have been making appearances at my table; I know now what a potato plant looks like; and I do believe that this is the week that I cook home-grown kale.

Wednesday Farmers Market at WSU!

Next Wednesday (June 3rd) starts the farmers market at Wayne State University. This makes me smile. I work nearby so every Wednesday between 11am and 4pm I'll have the chance to go pick up produce grown in Detroit. The market was piloted last year. Once I bought some acorn squash that had been harvested less than an hour earlier.

Here's a flyer. Seed Wayne hosts the market on Cass Ave, across from the Detroit Main Library (check out this Google map).