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.

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."

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.

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.
--

modom