Potato-Oh-My

Switching gears away from outdoors excursions, and to some outdoors experiments...

As an environmentalist and a bit of a health nut, I love the idea of the Slow Foods movement. While we have a long way to go to before we eat all local, organic and in-season, at least we work at it. Some day we'll know all the local spots to buy food, but we're still learning.

In an attempt at being a slow-er foodie, one of the crazy things I attempt to do is organic gardening. I say crazy because my gardening skills are weak, the neighborhood stray cat population sizable, and my garden maintenance haphazard.

One of the things I really wanted out of my garden was okra (so good in soup, although otherwise sort of snot-filled). So I carefully selected heirloom organic okra seeds, planted them, and nursed them tenderly all summer long.

This was the result:

One lousy pale-green pod. I really worked at those darn okra plants, too!

Lest you think my gardening skills are entirely so shameful, allow me to relate the potato side of the story. My husband, as a joke, requested that I plant the sprouted organic microwave potato that had been sitting on the kitchen counter for weeks. (You know the kind - they come singly wrapped in plastic.) I decided to humor him, chopped it into three hunks, and stuck those hunks in random spots of the garden. I completely assumed they'd just rot and die or be consumed by my sizable slug population.

Oh, no. They thrived, crowding out half the other lovely heirloom varieties of things that I planted. The result: