modom (palindrome guy) wrote:
> We're ripping out the summer plants at the community garden and
> setting in cool weather crops. I'm going to plant a boatload of
> arugula and cilantro. Haven't decided what else. Any suggestions?
>
> The first season went pretty well. We had a few dropouts, as we
> expected. Gardening sounds nice to most people in the abstract.
> Sweating in the Texas heat and getting dirt in your shorts is a hard
> reality to face in the concrete. Okay, I admit that most gardeners
> didn't get dirt in their shorts. Okay, I admit that no gardeners got
> dirt in their shorts. I just made that up. But everybody got sweaty.
> that part was true. And the dropout part was true, too. We expected
> it, though.

There's a large area under the electric highlines near the local Lions
Club house. The city and the Lions, with a grant from one of the local
LNG plants is making it into a community garden. Looks really good right
now they have four of the raised bed garden plots built. Four feet wide
by twelve feet long looks like.

>
> Cow Hill's fall festival, the Bois d'Arc Bash, is this weekend and the
> community garden has a booth at the fête. One of us is an accomplished
> graphic designer and she's put together some nice posters about fall
> crops and stuff. I probably should just look at the posters to figure
> out what to plant this fall. Crowd sourcing this bunch is an iffy
> proposition.
>
> Bois d'arc is the local name for the horse apple tree. It's French.
> But don't rub it in. We don't pronounce it like French, anyway. We say
> "bodark."

The French name means wood of the bow, or bow wood, IIRC.

>
> Apparently the Caddo people who lived here in olden days used the wood
> from that tree for bows. Lord knows how they worked it. Bois d'arc
> wood is so hard that some of the houses in town are built on rounds of
> it. That's the foundation. Rounds of wood sitting on the dirt. It
> won't rot. Bugs won't eat it.

When I was a kid in Texas bodark was called Osage Orange, due to the
so-called horse apples growing on it (seed pods). Deer will eat the pods
too. Made many a long bow out of bodark cured in the attic. Even made a
few very heavy gunstocks out of it. Don't ever use bodark for fence
posts, you will end up with a hellacious row of bodark trees. Damned
wood will start growing as soon as it rains.

>
> Cow Hill boasts the second largest bois d'arc tree in Texas. We're
> number two! They gave it a name, but I can't remember what it is.
> Something like Bo, probably. Bo the bodark. I'd be willing to bet it's
> not named Skippy.
>
> Anyhow, the stalks of lemongrass I rooted and planted this spring have
> become hedges of lemongrass this fall. I gotcha lemongrass. More
> lemongrass than brains. So this afternoon, I took a break from hauling
> mulch to pull up some lemongrass for the community garden booth at the
> Bash. One stalk became about thirty in about four months. We'll give
> them away at the Bash to spread good will. And flavor.
>
> On another topic, I've just about completed the video piece I'm making
> for the show I'm in up in Wichita next month. It's about 2,400
> pictures of food I culled from PingWire ( http://pingwire.com/ ) over
> a few days back in July. Each image gets 1/2 second, so the video is
> 20 minutes long.
>
> The show is about food, so I'm also bringing some stuff I made
> recently: pickled okra, pickled watermelon rind, and pastrami. The
> pastrami was made using the Ruhlman and Polcyn recipe in
> "Charcuterie." I got the brisket from a farmer I know and I grew the
> vegetables I pickled. So everything's local. Of course hauling it up
> to Kansas will mean it ain't local anymore. What's a guy to do?
>
> Speaking of local food, has anybody seen the Know Your Farmer, Know
> Your Food initiative coming out of the USDA? The press release is
> he http://tinyurl.com/meokfg That and the White House kitchen
> garden and the new farmers' market signal a small, but perhaps
> important, shift in governmental attitudes towards food production.
>
> Okay, that's not something going on in Cow Hill. My mistake.