Sunday is Funday

5 days til Thanksgiving, today's high was 80°, and rainfall for November is 1/2" over the average. Everything's back to normal! Even with a warm day I can tell it's Fall because this is the only sun the courtyard gets all day. But chair cushions can stay out all day (if it's not raining) with no worry about them fading.

Turkeys are 29¢ a pound with $25 purchase and so much else is on sale I'll make two $25 trips before Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, the garden is bountiful. The mustard, bok choy, chard and peppers below were sauteed and then piled with garlic on a pizza. Green beans steamed.

Tomorrow starts salad twice a day to keep up. Always with a garlicky Caesar dressing and three-day old bread toasted with herbs as croutons. Left, red tip lettuce, window box is cilantro, Romaine, arugula.


Harvest time for lemon basil. Too much lemon taste for pesto but dried leaves are a tasty addition to tortilla soup and pintos. Didn't plan ahead, tho. The humidity's so high lately the salt is clumped in my shaker and why didn't I think there's no place to dry basil leaves in this climate? (Also note how the weeds are back all over the courtyard with weekly rain. Arrggh)
The ceiling fan is on 24/7 but they're still moist. Wonder if tying the branches with twine and hanging them in my winter coat closet would be aromatic or a disaster..
For the longest I've wanted to make a seafood dish with cubed crab, tomatoes, cukes, mango, and avocado stacked in layers inside a can with the bottom removed so it can be pushed out in place on the plate. If you've noticed, almost all cans have rounded bottoms making it impossible to open the bottom with a can opener. Found the perfect cans for appetizer and entree sized seafood stacks.
One of the biggest lessons a farmer learns is patience. No one rushes Mother Nature. I planted 24 garlic bulbs a month ago. None were sprouting so I didn't expect them to break ground until Dec. One came up within a week and 3 weeks later, still the only one, was 10" tall so I feared they had been treated with a non-sprouter I'd heard commercial growers use. I can fix that. I searched the bin and came up with these three sprouters to plant next to them (not on top of them because Mother Nature bats last and loves little tricks).

On this morning's walkaround I found 11 of the bulbs have now broken ground. I have plenty of room elsewhere (those bell peppers will stop bearing eventually) and one can never have enough garlic.