Today, a few of my seeds started sprouting. It looks like a 5th grade science fair project on my front windowsill, with all of these cups that have seeds and dirt in them in different stages of growth. The cucumbers were first, a variety called (appropriately enough) Early Russian. In addition to the Early Russian cucumbers, I have in the works:
- Suyo Long Cucumbers
- Reverend Morrow’s Long Keeper Tomatoes
- Southern Night Tomatoes
- Green Grape Tomatoes
- Roma Rio Grande Tomatoes
- Yellow of Parma Onions
- Serrano Tampequino Hot Peppers
- Quadrato Asti Rosso Peppers
- Purple Beauty Peppers
- Pandora Striped Rose Eggplant
- Thai White Ribbed Eggplant
And those are just the ones that needed to be started indoors this early. Ask me how many times we ate eggplant last year. Probably not even one plant’s worth, I would guess. But if all goes well, we’ll be up to our ears in vegetable matter this summer, which is a prospect that is both thrilling and overwhelming at the same time.
One quality that has rubbed off on me from my husband is the inability to see food go to waste. Before meeting him, there would be times when things like whole packages of chicken and untouched heads of lettuce were tossed out because I hadn’t gotten to them before they went bad. I have slowly adopted new habits (meal-planning, frequent use of the freezer) that have helped address this, and I now try to be more flexible with my 30-days-between-eating-something-and-having-it-again rule. I guess you could say I have become a little more adult in my approach to food.
Watching these small seeds send tentative shoots out into the world, I can’t imagine ever letting the fruits of their labors go to waste, so I guess I better start collecting eggplant recipes and figuring out creative ways to use purple peppers. In the meantime, I will just try to enjoy the simple magic of a seed, plus a little sunlight and water, becoming something much more complex (and delicious).
So, Fabulous Thing #98: Maybe I don’t have a black thumb after all.
eggplant pie? eggplant … casserole? oh dear. well it will make for very pretty garden pictures.
I am sensing a lot of babba ganoush in my future…