Teresa Howell's blog

 Grocery carts are notoriously hard to steer, especially in January. That’s when they must deviate from their usual rounds—the chip aisle, the bakery, and that portion of the frozen food section where the ice cream is—and seek out healthier, or at least lower calorie, choices.

As the year winds down, thoughtful people examine the previous twelve months.  They draw conclusions from their actions, and resolve to do better in the upcoming annum.  It’s a good plan, and I have no problem with good plans.  It’s the implementation that always gets me. 

My dad used to talk about some elderly neighbors of ours, Roy and Flossie Webb, who were “so tight they even fried squash blossoms.” Any deviation from meat, potatoes and a vegetable, preferably soggy, was viewed with suspicion in our neck of the woods. I do not come from one of the great culinary traditions—all of our “old family recipes” are from the label of a cream of mushroom soup can. The Webbs were from the South, and perhaps had higher culinary expectations than the rest of the neighborhood did.

Years ago, I came across an essay by Benjamin Franklin called “Fart Proudly.” He’d written it in response to a request from a European scientific society, which asked Franklin to submit a proposal to them. Franklin thought the society was pompous and pretentious, so he proposed a study of human flatulence, and the means whereby the odor might be improved. Farting, Franklin claimed, was the result of eating foods that were good for you, and therefore, farting itself was good for you, the social drawback being the smell.

I was up at dawn the day I harvested my sesame crop. Actually, I got up at dawn to go walking--a practice that I should be keeping up-- but long-standing tradition says you get up at dawn during harvest.

I hate to break tradition, especially since as a crop, sesame has a longer tradition than most. Sesame seeds were first cultivated some four or five thousand years ago, probably on the Indian subcontinent. Since then, sesame seeds have been used extensively in Asian cuisine. It’s also used in Africa, where it’s called benne seed.

When Elizabeth came back from vacation last month, Beth, Elizabeth and I went out to lunch to catch up. We were chatting about the garden, when Elizabeth asked me, “Have you noticed any blossom-end rot?”

“Well,” I said, “I think it’s just these jeans. But then, I am a decade or two past my twenties.”

“More like three decades,” Elizabeth said. “But I was talking about the tomatoes.”

Oh.

Travel in the summer is dangerous for me. This year, as I drove through Fallon in the middle of July, my car developed a mysterious pull to the left, and came to a complete stop in front of Workman’s Nursery, where plants were on sale at half price. Three flats later, I managed to get the car back on the road, only to need another emergency stop at Flower Tree Nursery, where six gallon-sized pots finally stabilized the car enough to make it home.

A gardener in Nevada faces many challenges. Beautiful spring days coax fruit trees into bloom, just in time for a hard freeze to cancel the crop. In July and August, the sun sucks the juice out of the hardiest plants. Wind-borne sand strips paint off houses and leaves off plants. Drought and Mormon crickets get anything left.

But Nevada gardeners can count on one thing—the purity of the soil. It’s either pure sand or pure clay, unless you’re lucky enough to be in one of the low-lying basins where salt and alkali collect.

We had a serious incident at our house last fall involving a hot biscuit and the last spoonful of some blackberry jam my friend Becca put up. So this March, when she mentioned that she needed to thin out her blackberry bushes, I showed up at her house the very next Saturday, spade in hand.