Peeking into the rock

It's been a while since I wrote about food. It seems a little wrong to natter about my dinner while we have sociopaths and psychopaths taking advantage of the surge in the class war (that is, the ruling class's war against the other clases), but okay, I'm doing it anyway.

From time to time I write a post about "how I'm eating now." Sometimes the motivation is managing my "multiple issue" health, sometimes it's something else. Right now my motivation is largely frugality again. I refuse to be deprived of deliciousness by mere poverty. I live in the middle of such abundance, and I have all the time in the world since I can't work & lack the strength to do anything else in a sustained way, so making food that meets my nutritional needs, is tasty, and is cheap--though it may be time-consuming--is a reasonable path for me.

A few years ago I discovered that it is quite easy to make a kind of soft cheese from whole milk and an acid (that first time it was inadvertent, my coagulant was yogurt because that was what I was trying to make). At the time I didn't pursue it much because I had no idea what to do with the whey that was left over--depending on details it can be three or four times as much whey as cheese.

Last year I experimented with using whey as the liquid when making bread (using the sponge method outlined by Gail Sher in From A Baker's Kitchen). The results were so good that I started making the cheese (and sometimes yogurt) on purpose to get the whey. I've ended up with enough cheese that I've had to experiment with uses of it. Though sometimes I have more whey than I need for bread, too, so I've gotten in the habit of using whey for any baking and much grain cooking. Since my usual coagulant in Meyer lemons (that being what I have in my yard), all of this food has a little of that fragrance in it.

So all last fall and winter my routine has been, about twice a month or once in three weeks, to make about a pound of this cheese and enough dough for three or four loaves of this bread. I started out with half-white & half-whole wheat all purpose flour, but now I use bread flour for the sponge and a variety of other flours in the later stages. The amount of dough I make has increased, since I now make pizza and dumplings loosely based on pirozhki, or fried bread, or whatever. I bake two or three loaves and put one or two lumps of dough in the freezer for later.

Obviously I haven't done it this month since I am trying not to leave a lot of stuff around when I fly out on the 24th, but I still have two lumps of dough in the freezer which I will bake up this weekend: one will be a pirog (like pirozhki, only large), to form my dinner, breakfast, and lunch while I am traveling. I have half a roast chicken in the freezer, some of which I will eat on the weekend and some of which will go into the pirog along with what else I have (a lot of dried store mushrooms because the Grey Bears bag had way too many mushrooms several weeks in a row, many onions,  some carrots, some pickled cabbage and kosher dills, and a yard with a lot of small overwintered greens of various types, some herbs, and green garlic in it. I say pickled cabbage instead of sauerkraut because I only let it try to ferment naturally for a few days and then I packed it with vinegar and stuck it in the fridge. It wasn't very nice at first and I was going to throw it away but after sitting in the fridge for a bit it has developed, not the best sauerkraut flavor, but something nice enough for sandwiches and so on).

Gosh, the parenthetical was longer than the rest of the paragraph.

I can say it's really a relief that some of these greens have naturalized in my yard. Most of the year I can honestly take or leave arugula, but right now I can throw it into any melange of food, cooked or raw, and it lends a nice nutty and pungent note to the whole, not to mention being the greenest thing you ever did see and it also grows in pretty little clumps all over the yard which will become immense patches later. I also have some determined feral kohlrabi and celery root that never made roots but which have really nice leaves and stems. The kohlrabi leaves are mild and tender, rather like kohlrabi the root, while the celery root leaves are strong tasting. Zack never saw much point to celery till I made him taste these leaves. I also have parsley, though not much yet, and this year's turnip greens in baby form, and dill seedlings. Since dill never lasts long for me before going to seed (cilantro neither), I decided this year to plant it densely and eat it young.  There are still a few kale plants I missed when I cleaned up the old (three and four year old) ones, and I just grab them whenever I see a nice leaf. 

I also have the usual perennial herbs for my region: oregano, sage, rosemary, lavender, thyme, spearmint and also persian mint and lovage and horehound (which I mean to make throat drops of but I haven't acted at the right moment yet). Basil doesn't do spectacularly well for me, but I find mint takes its place quite well especially when mixed with parsley. Parsley is the Great Underrated Herb. I think we're accustomed to seeing the tightly curled kind used as a garnish, where it hasn't been treated kindly before serving because nobody's expected to eat it, and occasionally dried flakes. Its flavor does not keep all that well even when you buy it flatleaved and fresh, but when it is new and lush it has a flavor like heaven. I really like it more than most herbs and vegetables. I keep trying to increase my stock of it but some years it all goes to seed in its infancy and I can't figure out why. 

So these 2 or 3 weeks I didn't buy groceries and I didn't go to pick up a Grey Bears bag. This means I'm being inventive with what I have. I ran out of milk, cream, and even cheese, and then discovered how dependent I normally am on dairy products in general. I still had a pound of chicken livers, so that and onions, green garlic, quantities of greens and herbs from the garden, and three asparagus spears (my asparagus is delicious but not prolific), made three meals. Lentils and mostly turnip greens and arugula but also those same herbs made a nice stew. I'm attempting to cook these recalcitrant pinto beans to make an almost vegan tamale pie. I don't know what I'll do if they refuse to soften (I think it's because I put the dried tomatoes in with them when they were still raw). Maybe drain off the delicious juice and toss the beans and start over with-- what do I still have, garbanzos? I made a salad of tuna, potato, carrot, peas, and all the pickled things I had at the time (the last of the artichokes, some beets, some kosher dills, I didn't think of the cabbage though now I can't stop thinking of it)-- sort of like if you started out thinking maybe you'd make a Salat Olivier and couldn't find all the exact things and then couldn't stop putting other things into it. I made a Waldorf salad (which if you make it right-just apples, nuts, raisins, celery and mayonnaise-or-whatever-dressing-you-prefer, is much nicer than most people think). I made apple fritters. I used up the pizza things I had stashed to make pizza. I used the rest of the tomato sauce I made for that to cook carrots in. 

So most of those things came out well and I've had a good time eating them. The pizza was a little eccentric but I get to have eccentric pizza, right? I made a weird coffee tapioca, having sieved the tapioca to try to prevent the frog-eggs texture which I thought would be weird with coffee, and it tastes good enough but it does have a bit of frog egg to it and it kept me up ALL NIGHT LONG so maybe I won't do that again?

The beans I'm cooking are really really yummy and I think they are cooked but they will never be really soft. I wonder if they will cause stomach distress if I use them anyway?

I know I've been slagging on the people who want to sell me that we can "fight cancer with nutrition." Every word of that phrase sets my teeth on edge. I do believe in nutrition in a sort of general way, though I'm pretty well convinced that for everyday purposes most people's metabolisms are pretty flexible and if you're giving yourself a pretty good diet with enough of the basics, you'll do okay for a long time. When you have various physiological challenges including genetic dispositions and acquired deficiencies or metabolic disorders, you have to pay a little more attention, naturally. And then, on an entirely different hand, nutritional chemistry is fascinating, so I don't blame people who get wrapped up in it for reasons of enthusiasm.

But the nutritional cancer treatment people tend to push one of two overlapping agendas--one that boils down to variations of the regular "healthy diet" versions that are duking it out in the marketplace, or one of several crazy crank diets that eliminate whole categories of food or that ask you to ingest megadoses of micronutrients. As for the first: if a healthy diet worked against cancer, I wouldn't be here today. As for the second: just no.

I am, however, eating well. (woops, I scratched the back of my head and came away with another little clump of bristly grey hairs) I'm paying attention to protein and vitamin-rich vegetables, most of which are coming from the Grey Bears bag or my garden (or kitchen, as I have suddenly become entertained by sprouting peas and alfalfa, and I got a little mushroom kit for ducks). This is only a bit ramped up from my usual. I'm back to eating somewhat less starchy food, but that's because I was told that the cancer treatment could raise my blood sugars, and I don't want to cross over from pre-diabetes to diabetes if I can help it.  But I'm not up to doing a severe no-carbohydrate diet unless I have to.

So what am I eating? That's the fun part. Last week's Grey Bears bag had triple mushrooms because the driver doesn't eat them and neither does his wife, so I dried all the prettiest ones and made a big mushroom-green onion omelet out of what was left and I am still working my way through that for my breakfasts. I also got a two-pound bag of cauliflower florets, so I made cauliflower moussaka which I have been eating for lunch or dinner. My pea sprouts came due so I harvested them and ate half of them in chicken broth with sesame oil and tapatio salsa, with snow peas and kale flowers and green onions from the garden along with some turkey meatballs that fell apart. I'll eat the other half probably tomorrow, I don't know exactly how. I also had a pile of broccoli, which I finally cooked today and grated cheese for the traditional broccoli-and-cheese casserole I will make tomorrow. Today I made split pea soup with precut coleslaw from last week's Grey Bears bag and herbs from my garden and dried tomatoes I made last summer in it and alas dried onions because there were no more ready green onions in my yard and no fresh ones in the Grey Bears bag.

Every week for the last month or so I have also done a wee bit of baking. I still do this simultaneously with a casserole-or-something in the oven (one week it was a lamb pot roast) to conserve the use of gas and stack up the kitchen time. Anyway, what I make are lightly-sweetened cookies or bready cakes that fill the place of treats without overstimulating the sweet tooth or giving the body too much sugar at once. They are often peanut butter or oatmeal variation cookies with dried fruit or carrots or something in them. Those are easy to make, K and Zack like them, and so they are good for my purposes. Like I say, they don't make me want to clear out the whole lot in one sitting, though they do taste nice to me, and so I think they help me eat in a more balanced way,

When I want something like ice cream I have either yogurt or cottage cheese--whole milk in either case, which I'll explain in  moment--with fruit, or my homemade lower-sugar jam, or a bit of both. Or I might mix a spoonful of peanut butter and jam, or peanut butter, a bit of honey, and sunflower seeds. These things are not a lot less calorie-dense than ice cream, but they don't make me want moremoremore, and they please me very much, and they are pretty nutrient-dense.

There are a few reasons I use whole milk products. One: they make fat-soluble vitamins more available that are implicated in the absorption and use of the minerals that dairy products are good for. Two: they taste good. Three: they seem to me to be better emulsifiers. Four: they seem to satisfy my appetite more quickly in most cases, though there are times when I can eat nice crackers with butter or blue cheese on them much longer than it seems is reasonable. So when I am being sane I just don't start those things.

I was going to go on with a precis of the garden but this has gone on long enough, so that will have to wait for another time. I would like to say for the record that I moved the coral bells and a nice baby parsley plant today and finally got the basil, cardoons, and mignonette into the ground, leaving the purple clematis, the miscellaneous blue salvia shrub, the white passionfruit,and  the purple flowers from Ellie, still to be planted out or transplanted, as is appropriate for various reasons.  I spent nearly two hours in the yard and ended up a bit short of breath, which I think is because I'm anemic again but the oncology nurses do not think I am anemic enough to treat--but the labwork was just before the last infusion and the shortness of breath is after. In any case it's not severe enough I can't wait a few days.

The chapter I am working on is maybe the penultimate chapter of the book, depending on how many words it takes to write the things that are happening now, but it is more likely the chapter before the penultimate one. Oh, I'm sure it is, no matter how long this stuff goes, because certain things need to be in their own chapters.

( oh how I do go on about writing insecurities )

I kind of read Octavia Butler's Fledgling this week too. I skipped ahead to the trials because I am a wuss. It made me wonder just how much of her work is about blending. I will have to read more and re-reading more and figure this out. Also I read Emma Bull's Finder, which was fun enough that I inhaled it but I was also annoyed by its callowness.

On another front, I'm cleaning up the yard to make it pleasant for Frank and Hana when they come later in the month and also so I can see just how much progress I've really made back there. Which is a lot. I have planted a line of coreopsis along one side of one section of the brick path from the garage to Zack's, and parsleyalong the rest of it (and it's still not quite enough parsley for all Zack's and my needs). The front yard is almost cleaned up. After my hand heals from the carpal tunnel release surgery I'm having on Monday, I'll plant the two different abutilons and the one salvia I have in the corner by the almond tree. I have a couple of California milkweeds to plant--they have mousy looking litttle white flowers but they haven't, unlike the other milkweeds, been sprayed with BT to fight light brown apple moth. It's the law, but it makes the milkweeds toxic to the Monarch caterpillars too. So if I had bought one of those pretty ones I would have had to put a net over them for some time--a few months? I forget--to keep from poisoning the animal we're planting it for...

( and I also go on and on about my new knees )

On the Zluta front, even though I don't know what I'm doing, we're reaching a place with the backyard barking that is bearable, I'm able to let her go out there freely for many hours a day before she decides to try to provoke the killer dog next door. My current method of breaking that up is to almost silently head her off, distract her with thrown apples, and herd her or carry her inside. Less shouting--which ramps her up-- and no hose spray--which excites her and is actually a reward, However, when I water the yard, I let her play in the hose as much as she likes. Yes, it is still warm enough for her to get wet outside. Though I turned the heater on today. It's set in the low sixties: I think 66 for a period in the afternoon.

Speaking of communication, she is using the wiggle method of communicating her needs much more than the open-mouthed, toothy swarm method. I try to respond immediately but sometimes I'm in the middle of a thing and she has no patience. I've had to exile her only once every couple-few days this last two weeks (it was getting to be two and three times a day, which is too much). Of course, part of this is her general greater contentment now that I am driving again and getting her to the dog park five days out of six.

She has an unfortunately tender stomach, apparently, and apparently I guessed wrong about her food, so that's a work in progress.

I had a moment of either slight cowardice or wisdom and decided to get dropped off by car at the library instead of walking both ways to the farmer's market. Except I'm not sure I shaved any distance off: the farmer's market might in fact be midway between my house and the library. Walking back wasn't all that far, but I guess I'm not ready to carry a bunch of stuff yet. It was a bit unpoleasant for a while. I reminded myself I used to weigh more than all of my current weight, the books and the veggies combined, but it didn't cheer me up much. And now I've been home for an hour and a half, still wating for the tylenol to kick in and contemplating tramadol. But it's not bad. I did it, and even though it hurts, I didn't harm myself.

At the library I got a tree gjuide, and another Lisa Goldstein book (because she's always readable) and a Jay ake book and Oliver Sacks's Oaxaca Journal, about a fern huntuing foray he took with a group of enthusiasts. I love his endless interest in everything.

Brought in a meal of wax beans, so that's nice too.

I actually have something good to say about my garden this year. I may have mentioned that I hired a friend to  work with me in the yard to bring it up to standard. For the first month and change we worked together twice a week, now it's once a week. She did all the things that took normal strength and height, and I did the pokey little things. At this point I can climb ladders just fine but hinestly it's sort of ineffectual to send me up a laddder when it's the apple tree or the jasmine vine* because I still can't reach the highest stuff. I do the plum tree, the fig tree, and much of the lemons trees myself. Another factor is Cassandra knows more about this stuff than I do, so it's good to have her in there making good cuts.

Anyway, this is where we're at. The mist-forest Guatemalan salvia has been completely refurbished. It had become a thicket of dead branches maybe twelve feet tall, and now all the dead stuff is gone and I have a revitalized stand of the monsters growing on a neat little berm. The detritus has been pulled off the compost heap and the compost heap has been revitalized and put back into action.

The former  (and possibly future) berry bed has onions and turnips and possibly carrots and celery roots if they ever deign to sprout. The asparagus barrel is producing. The rhubarb looks fat and tropical. The newest of the recycled cement beds has kale, arugula, and radhishes growing in it.

The narrow bed that had kale and potatoes in it last year is ready for tomatoes when the Cabrillo College mother's day plant sale happens. It will have  mostly black Russian varieties because they did well last year (so rumor has it, I was in Prague). It already has some mystery volunteers, and a Mexican marigold, the huge kind.

The other recycled cement bed still has last winters' brassicas in it. Since I fed them with acidp-lover's fertilizer, they still have not headed but they have magnificent, succulent leaves which I will treat like cabbage until the Cabrillo College mother's day plant sale, at which point I will put in cucumbers.

Along the wall of the garage I have put felt growning bags full of sunflowers and other flowers. They are growing apace. When we get to it, I'll have Zack put in a box there and I'll move the Jerusalem artichokes which are currently in aging barrels there along with some other sun-lovinf stuff. I really like Jerusalem artichokes. And shelling homegrown sunflower seeds is a pain, so mostly the sunflowers are for looks and to share with wildlife.

Besides that, I have plans for two more boxes: one under the southern edge of the deck, where I have a lot of flowerpots of different types and a barrel of mint and Jerusalem artichokes; and the other, in the sunnier spot under the apple tree, where I have a mound this year where I am about to plant a mixture of pole beans (runner, blue lake, yellow flageolet, purple something, and long) in a teepee, and maybe a couple of lettuces. After Emma got too old to play in the been teepee I would always sprinkle a few lettuce seeds in the middle of the teepee, and they liked growing there, sheltered from summer sun.

Heh. Summer sun. Santa Cruz isn't as foggy and San Francisco, but we do get a high haze most days, morning and evening.

We habve cleared out most of the mess from the side yard and the front yard now too. I'm not at this time planning to plant anything new out front, just cleaning up what's there. I may plant drought-tolerant ferns in the side yard. The flower seeds I planted in March don't seem to have made it.

Gradually I am lining every walkway and raised bed with mostly parsley, as well as rocket (arugula to you fancy talkers) and occasional flowers. I put beach poppies and horehound together in one sunny spot because they both have interesting textures. Also I love horehoud inordinately just because.

My herb pots on the deck are doing very well. They include more parsley because I should always have that to hand, and also I have been sticking all the weird little cloves of garlic that are annoying to peel into the pots. Everytime I cook now I am cutting up a bunch of parsley and garlic greens. And lemons, I have more lemons than I can use. Fortunately the neighbors know this and knock on my door regularly. I need to feed both the front and back lemon trees.

I have a potato forest in an older bed under the plum tree and I think this may be the spot where I start a mushroom patch. When we move the basement door to inside the garage, I would like to plant another dwarf fruit tree in a spot in front of where the door is now. If apricot trees did better in my soil I would plant that. The apricots from my old tree were hauntingly delicious but the tree just was too sick to live. So maybe a pear, or a kumquat?

The apple set a better amount of fruit than last year, so I think I just need to take better care of it this year and I'll get a nice crop. The plum set a "smallish" amount in its terms, which means a fuckton of a lot, really, because the plum is a fruit-bearing fool. The prune is still too young to flower, let alone bear fruit.

I took Truffle took Antonelli Pond, which is an old-time irrigation pond which now belongs to the University or the City, I forget which, and functions as a public park. It has a memorial fishing deck, a portapotty, and a few benches and picnic tables and garbage cans. We like it. It's low-stress but fun.

But she didn't want to be there. This wasn't an attack of the Dread, it was "yow! there's something interesting over there!" and she led me in the direction og the tiny bleating and goaty smell-- down the road to the open field next to Long Marine Lab (also University property). So okay, we went to see the goats.

Actually she felt that she was close enough at say ten meters or so. So we stood there and watched the goats, and she made it quite clear that sniffing the goats from that distance was entirely entertaining enough for her, and eventually she stgarted trotting away--down the side of the field, towards the beautiful cliff, and I said okay, we'll do that.

But then we got to the first scrap of shade and she positioned herself there and made it clear that she had gone far enough in any direction, shade is really where i is at for old dogs. And I said, okay, we can stay here for a while but eventually we have to go somewhere. And after a few minutes I decided it was time, and we would walk back to the car. But no. Old dogs still wanted to explore a bit of Antonelli pond, the bit we never get around to going to. Then I made the executive decision that old dogs need water and old ladies want to go to the plant nursery, and anway we came.

She likes the plant nursery. It smells interesting, and we go to the one where dogs are allowed to ramble. She rambles around till she finds a nice coll place and then lies down and waits for the staff to give her treats.

I got seeds for flowers and herbs, and also I got a blue salvie and forget me nots, and I also got a new hose, some fgloves, and a new hose tip thing. I have hired a friend to help me in the yard, which makes me work more. It's looking pretty good.

I realize that I started this journal to keep track of my writing progress, but I've been using it mainly to complain. But I have been writing and writing all along.

So, this is what I did today:

Words today: 1019
Chapter  32 wordage: 2182
Total wordage (estimated as I have not been bothered to set up the master document or write down accumulated words): 170K
Estimated till the end of the draft: 3 more chapters? 15 K more words?

Writing anxiety of the day: All novel long these guys have been terse and uncommunicative.  Suddenly they're talking and talking and talking. Too much dialog? Is it in character? Is anything they ever do in character? Am I in character? Who am I? What am I?

happy little details of the day: workers talking about the strike in the same coal mines Yanek's unit was supposed to be protecting during the war, and which are owned by the relatives that disowned him before birth; and the beer being the same brand as I referenced in the green people story set in the same place a hundred years later.

Tomorrow: more goddmaned angsty dialog. Maybe some action on the factory floor.

On another front, I punted and put the violetta and violetto (yes, those are their names) artichoke plants into large pots for now, meaning that I transplanted some oregano and moved some freesia bulbs. I know it's not the time of year for the bulbs, but screw it.

Also: neighbor had a baby so I took their dog for a walk.

And: I tasted my horseradish leaves (raw) and they are kind of like arugula, not very much like the roots at all.

I cut down the watersprout that was coming from below the graft on the almond tree in time for the gtreencycle pickup, which leaves me free to fill the can again this week, which I definitely ought to do.

I had a lot of sprouted garlic, so even though they say to plant in October, I put them in the window box with the alyssum. Also I planted snap peas, pole beans, and yellow chard, in paper egg cartons and a pierced tofu box respectively/  The kale I planted a few weeks ago is still at the cotyledon stage, but they are tall cotyledons and ought to bedeveloping true leaves any minute. Naturally, the parsley is still thinking about whether or not to sprout -- it looks like three or four have decided to try it out, and the others are waiting to see how it works out. I had a lead on free kale starts, but I have so much kale in the egg cartons and more seeds after that, so I don't think I should follow up on it.  Give the other guy a chance, you know.

Really, six vegetables is pretty optimistic, considering that most of my yard is still suffering under the piles of construction debris. Anyway, my absent-mindedness in years past is serving me well this year, because I have all these seeds to plant. And yes, they all seem to be viable.

Speaking of peas, I have a two-pound bag of shredded iceberg lettuce from Grey Bears, so I have decided to make peas, lettuce and herbs soup, especially after reading that this would be a way to use up the three cups of whey I have after converting my roommate's sour milk into ricotta (I thought I was making yogurt but I let it get too hot so I got actually quite nice ricotta, which is probably better, given that ricotta is more expensive than yogurt anyway). It's quite simple, by the way: I had three cups of sour low-fat milk, to which I added a third of a cup of natural sour cream and two-thirds of a cup of natural whole milk yogurt, and then I let is sit for a while, and then I warmed it up and tried to keep the temperature in the recommended range but it got a little hot and it separated more than yogurt ought to so I warmed it up some more and then I scooped it into a napkin spread on a sieve and squeezed all the whey out. I tried to make "whey ricotta" out of the resulting whey, but there wasn't enough left. I realized afterwards that the whey that the blogs were talking about was from making cheese with whole milk, and not low-fat milk, so not the same thing really.

Am I an insuifferable foodie? Or just bored and poor? I only make jam from free fruit. I only made my own peanut butter (at home, instead of in the machine at the hippie store) because decent peanut butter reached six dollars a pound. (it was not an unqualified success -- the nice inexpensive peanuts from Trader Joe's apparently have a lot less oil in them than regular peanut-butter making peanuts)

When I pruned the plum tree I brought in some budded branches, but they haven't advanced much. The almond tree looks like it's thinking about bursting out any moment. It's not long until other people's plum trees will be blooming, but mine is always last, and so are my plums (they are not ready until August). I had a dream about racking and bottling the wine, and among my stepmother's effects I found a half-drunk bottle of my best year's product, and it tasted pretty good.

Also: Andrew Marvell has been talking to my lemon trees. My, I have a lot of lemons. I have not counted them, but they seem as numerous as my mother in law's used to be, and she used to get a thousand lemons a year. These are not quite ripe, in general, but they have dropped a huge number of nice ones. That's unusual, and I think it is because of people trying to reach the best ones up top and knocking some off. My next door neighbor on the other side has carte blanche to use as many as she wants, and she is short like me and getting frail. Anyway, my kitchen has rather too many lemons in it at the moment, especially considering I still have a lot of marmalade left from last year.

head thing notes: I found a forty-six dollar check from the last time I was on unemployment a year and a half ago. It was good for a year. . .

Apparently you can get good results versus the apple maggot by bagging the apples when they are young.

I'm not better at all, but I have to move around or I won't get better. At least I'm better enough that I'm not sleeping all day, anyway. So I weeded for les than an hour -- meaning I made a few tiny fragile dents in the massive jungle that is my backyard -- and I found myself muttering
"no sorrel, no dock, no feverfew, no violet, no borage, no nasturtium, no blackberry . . ." Doesn't that sound like an Elizabethan garden or something? (maybe they didn't have the nasturtium yet, though) They're all thugs. They need to be rooted out with vigilance, which I do not do because, one, I am lazy, and two, I always get laid up in the spring.

Seasonal note: summer's on its way. I had to water several plants today. Drought is close at hand.