Newfangledness and lettuce.

Well, hi all!

This is a photo of my new lettuce and garlic bin! Pretty tasty looking, huh? I planted some lovely heirloom garlic cloves, then scattered seeds over the top. I have a mixed sweet greens & reds, Paris mesclun mix, an Asian mesclun that's good for stir-fries, and spicy micro greens. YUM! Yes, they're planted thickly. I figured I'd just thin right into my salad bowl, which is working great so far!

Unfortunately, the dreaded cabbage moth has visited. It's a pretty little white butterfly. It lays zillions of eggs on your greens. The eggs hatch and hungry little monster-pillars come out and munchmunchmunch. I've resorted to the BT again. *sigh*

Here's a shot of the intro to my garden:



Yeah, I know. It looks white trash-tastic. But it works. Here's the second half:




I've cleaned up since this photo, and put in another lettuce and garlic bin (with the wilting lettuce needed to be transplanted from the earlier photo). I've also destroyed both the grow-outs of the Purple Haze tester. I'm about half a second away from doing the same on the Power's Heirloom, since it has not once set fruit.

The black prince and black plum are producing nicely. Hopefully, they will ripen before any frost. Unfortunately, those don't taste as great as I'd like them to. The first black prince (picked and eaten in a lovely salad November 2nd) actually tasted kind of lame. It thought about tasting like a tomato, honestly, but I'd already swallowed by then. However, it was far better than the atrocious excuse for a tomato that was on a sandwich I bought today. If I'm paying $6.95 for a tomato-basil-mozzerella panini, shouldn't the tomato be amazing? I mean, it's only 33% of the sandwich ingredients. At an expensive bakery, no less. Actually, the basil was tough and lackluster, too. I need a panini press...

What I'm finding is that I'm excited by the thought of a tomato. That is, until I get a tomato that I didn't grow, or I didn't get from a market myself. Food service tomatoes are SHIT. No wonder I spent my early life thinking I hated tomatoes! I *do* hate tomatoes, at least the readily available ones! A real, flavorful, juicy heirloom tomato? Now that's where it's at! Some restaurants have the tomato thing took care of: P.F. Chang's, Claim Jumper, Twist in Atlanta... but they are few and far between. We need more tomato lovers!!!

Which brings me to this: I have begun a new blog. A Southerner's Guide to (surviving) Los Angeles. In it, I will detail the search for Southernness in the greater L.A. area. Good food and recipes and locales, hoo-ah! Come on over!