What am I up to?
And why?
|
||||||
|
Just a crazy photo I took with my phone today while shopping for dinner in Half Moon Bay’s Princeton Harbor. The birds are constantly on alert for a fresh load of fish processing refuse that comes regularly. Here, I even took a short video of one such fascinating fish waste feast: Pelicans feast on fish waste at Princeton Harbor It is that magical time of the year when everything turns orange. The air itself must be tinted — just look at this photo. We don’t get to observe the setting sun directly from our windows but its bright orange reflected light provides some truly dramatic lighting for Midtown skyscrapers in the fall.
Where have all the flowers gone? – you might ask this New York’s leading florist… Well, obviously, they have all turned into pumpkins.
 4 comments - (Comments are closed)  animalia, deer, flowers, insects, pretty pixels, pumpkins, vegetabilia  bumblebees, Fall, marigolds, nasturtiums, orange, pumpkins, sunset I planted them kind of late (mid-July) and kind of ferally (just a few seeds here and there on an undeveloped part of the slope), and still they grew!
They aren’t gigantic, these butternut squashes of mine — some are rather petite, to be honest. But I’m still pretty impressed with the harvest. I picked almost all of them, except for the tiniest/greenest ones, because it’s getting too rainy and they will otherwise rot. Or get eaten by one of my furry competitors. Lined up on the counter, they looked very cute, sort of like Russian nesting dolls that haven’t been painted yet… A new Halloween tradition, perhaps? — Instead of carving pumpkins, make some Matryoshkas out of butternut squash? The photo below came out overexposed and i really liked the effect, so I’m posting it too. Although the first one is true to color.
Favorite butternut squash recipes, please? 8 comments - (Comments are closed) butternut, pretty pixels, squash, vegetabilia butternut, matryoshka, nesting dolls, photos, squash How much do I love potatoes? Just look at this happy punim. They’d be on top of my desert island foods list, any time.
If you let them ripen, you can, theoretically, use . . . CONTINUE READING → Potatoes, mon amour 4 comments - (Comments are closed) animalia, feral trivia, potatoes, tubers, Uncategorized, vegetabilia desert island foods, earthworms, feral, harvest, potatoes, toads, tubers, zoo “Herr: Es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß,” said Rainer Maria Rilke in his widely celebrated poem Autumn Day. Which translates into English as “Lord, it is time. The summer was very big.” Having estimated the size of summer, Rilke then instructed the Lord to lay His shadow on the sundials, to let the winds go loose on the meadows, to command the last fruits to be full, and, last but not least, to make some wine. Scholars of literature still argue why the great German poet felt so bossy on that fall day. Perhaps he was — just like me — a little sick of air conditioning driving up his electric bill (over $200 a month compared to the regular $60 during the rest of the year) and reaching for the bottle?.. Frankly, I do not know. And I do not expect you, kind reader, to solve either this riddle or any of the aforementioned end-of-summer exigencies for me. I merely ask you to look at this photo — the last one of the season — and to offer a conjecture about its nature. What are we? . . . CONTINUE READING → One last photo quiz of the summer… Oh hello. Sorry to keep everyone in the dark about the results of the last photo quiz. It was a tough one — and radically different on the scale of scientific magnitude as well as photographic magnification.
Discovered by British scientists and patented as Fruitflow, this substance “can help maintain a healthy blood circulation by preventing blood from clotting, according to clinical trials.” (Source: Tomato seeds are the healthy alternative to aspirin) So, I’ve always thought that the seedy slimy core of a tomato is its most delicious part and, therefore, have always been skeptical of any recipes instructing you to discard the seeds (I have no objections . . . CONTINUE READING → A tomato seed a day… 2 comments - (Comments are closed) feral trivia, pretty pixels, tomatoes, vegetabilia fruitflow, harvest, heart, photo quiz, tomatoes
It was correctly identified as a member of the nightshade (or potato or Solanaceae) family that also includes Mandragora (mandrake), belladonna (deadly nightshade), Lycium barbarum (Wolfberry), Physalis philadelphica (Tomatillo) , Physalis peruviana (Cape gooseberry flower), Capsicum (paprika, chili pepper), Solanum (potato, tomato, eggplant), Nicotiana (tobacco), and Petunia. Just like any normal family, a healthy balance of pretty, functional and toxic…
However, nobody recognized it as an eggplant, so there is no official winner this time around. Ironically, the plant itself did not produce winning results either… Something ate all of its leaves, leaving it looking rather sad. . . . CONTINUE READING → Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Japanese Eggplant Flower Comments are closed animalia, eggplant, feral trivia, harvest, insects, pretty pixels, vegetabilia agapostemon, eggplant, photo quiz This photo quiz comes courtesy of my friends Kapa, who generously allowed me to re-post it, and Murzik, who generously alerted me to Kapa’s original posting of this stunning image. What am I? You probably don’t want me to limit your fantasy with any hints here, do you? Ok, ok, here’s one: sometimes you eat them and sometimes you don’t. But at the end of this fun game I’ll tell you why you might want to reconsider discarding them, even when a recipe instructs you to. To say that I’m impressed with *husband*, the winner of my previous photo ID challenge, would be a gross understatement. How did he do it? I still don’t know. But yes, it was indeed Oka Hijiki (also spelled Okahijiki), aka Seaweed Mustard, aka Saltwort, aka Salsola Komarovii — a close relative of common tumbleweed. Have you not heard of it? Neither have I, until my Japanese seed shopping spree this year. When read its description on Kitazawa Seed website, I knew I had to have it: Also known as “seaweed on land,” this variety is considered to be one of the healthiest greens eaten in Japan. Loaded with vitamins, it is usually sold in Japanese markets in very small packets. Oka hijiki is used in many Japanese dishes and is excellent simply steamed for a few minutes and eaten with mustard or vinegar. I’ll dedicate a separate post to it soon but now let’s turn our attention to the new quiz: What am I? 12 comments - (Comments are closed) feral trivia, herbs, leafy greens, pretty pixels, vegetabilia kitazawa, mustard, oka hijiki, photo quiz, photos, salsola, seaweed |
 
Custom Search
|
|||||
|
Privacy Policy for www.feralgardener.com: The privacy of our visitors to www.feralgardener.com is important to us. At www.feralgardener.com, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use and visit www.feralgardener.com, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties. Log Files As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site. Cookies and Web Beacons We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums. We also use third party advertisements on www.feralgardener.com to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites). Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy. You can chose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts. AdSense Privacy Policy Provided by JenSense Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||||
Between the fishermen’s loot (the crab season apparently just started), the seagulls and the pelicans, there is a lot of instagram material there… (Do you follow feralgardener on instagram?)
Last year I, too, planted some pumpkins and was very excited about cooking all kinds of stuff with them. They grew big and pretty but turned out to be completely inedible. So, this year I decided not to plant any; yet, this one somehow grew on its own!
And I’m very happy it did. First of all, it proves that my feral gardening method works. And secondly, even though it isn’t large enough to turn into a carriage or round enough to be carved into a jack-o-lantern, it 
And that’s why I saved the best for last. I’m talking about the latest photo quiz, of course. Those green cherry-sized tomato-like berries, as correctly identified by both Kristik and Husband, are the proper fruit of the potato plant. Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) and tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) are basically brothers (or sisters); so, if you confused them in the quiz, it was for a good reason. Just make sure not to confuse them in real life: potato berries, according to my sources, are poisonous and contain toxic compounds glycoalkaloids, that affect the nervous system and can cause weakness and confusion. (Wait, am I sure I haven’t been eating them? Because that would explain a lot…) These toxins are also present in other nightshades, like tomato and eggplant, especially in their foliage, and also in the potato tubers that have turned green due to photosynthesis. Wikipedia assures, however, that potato poisoning is quite a rare occurrence.
Congratulations to Anna who figured out the mystery! The image in question is a tomato seed under the microscope. The photo comes from The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2010 via my biologist friend Kapa (who originally came up with this quiz). The outer, translucent, sphere of the seed is filled with a special gel that contains a substance which, according to Kapa, “we will all probably be consuming in large amounts 20 years from now.”
The time has arrived to reveal the vegetable behind the flower of our penultimate photo quiz from a few weeks ago. It was an eggplant, a Japanese Choryoku hybrid, to be exact. Here it is again, photographed flirting with a different bug, our old friend Agapostemon.
recent comments