Cath

Good thoughts for your sweet dog too.

Also working through an enormous (for us) Christmas ham. "Eternity is a ham and two people." (Dorothy Parker) Safeway always has that 99 cents a pound sale this time of year and I always fall for it...there are a ton of great soups and such that can be made using ham, but it does become a stretch.

Also seed sowing tomorrow. Begonia boliviensis from a plant that produced literally millions seeds this year, Crithmum maritimum (an odd find at Annie's Annuals that yielded what looks like viable seed -- love the look of the plant), some Caesalpinia, regal lilies, Satureja spinosa...this sowing will be from seeds I either gathered myself and want to increase or were so kindly sent to me. I have yet to find time to prowl through this year's seed catalogs.

I'm all in for whining about "winter" and we don't even really have winter here, especially this year. It's not that cold now but there's a ton of brown plant matter from an earlier cold snap that needs to be dealt with, along with pruning the roses.

When living in Massachusetts I occasionally wore all my clothes to bed, so I totally sympathize -- once it got to minus 25F.

Salsify was a lot of work for little to eat, peeling a slender root, then shredding, then forming it into shapes and finally breading and frying. It was slightly reminiscent of oyster but not nearly as good as the real thing. But all this is from ancient memory, as I am ancient, and this happened when I was a child. My father, who never ever cooked, not even so much as a sandwich, was a gardener and one year he grew salsify, hearing that it tasted like oysters which he loved. (He grew up near the ocean and developed a taste for seafood but spent his adult life landlocked in the middle of the Midwest at a time when oysters were not readily available there.) My mother, being unfamiliar with salsify, would not cook it. So one day when she was shopping he decided to cook the salsify. We, being fascinated by the novelty of our father cooking, took a keen interest in the proceedings and ranged ourselves around the stove. All I remember, aside from a faint recollection of the taste, was that he cooked some while we watched, then we ate some and this was repeated several times over. We excitedly told our mother about this new way of cooking and suggested she do it the same way but that fell flat, very flat.

Cath

The wild plant I collect most eagerly is stinging nettle, Urtica dioica, the earliest delicacy from the garden. We keep a patch of it for the early shoots and later for the butterfly caterpillars to feed on. You have to pick the shoots while they are still more purple than green and don't sting. I make a really delicious soup from a litre of nettles. We eat it with a poached egg or hardboiled egg halves. It's full of vitamins, too, but that's not my reason for eating it, more a bonus.

Of course, this might have been one of the reasons said daughter was known as 'the filthiest girl in the world', still getting dinner on her forehead at the age of 12......

Mariannese, nettles are eagerly awaited by same girl who swears she can tell the difference between annual and perennial nettles (one is 'creamier' than the other).

I never realized, Marianne, how many uses Urtica dioica has. Wow! Clothes, medicine, food...and the taste does sound delicious. Truly a spring tonic. My experience with nettle has, aside from gingerly collection of vouchers for floristic surveys, mostly been of unfortunate encounters in the field (the ssp. holosericea is native here). Not for me, who recognizes and avoids it, but for students on field trips who blunder into it and thereby create some memorable moments -- sigh.