No Platinum Card Can Compete

Three different colors of heirloom pole beans, a steaming basket and a
bit of olive oil. A dusting of freshly planed parmesean-reggiano and
voilà. A meal no yuppie could ever conjure with all the forces of
capitalism combined...

loquat love...

imagine a mango crossed with an apricot. and having whole boughs of them weeping over the cilantro and jimmy nardello and running strawberry plots... a more delicious heaven couldn't have been dreamed up by anyone...

a sad story.

back when i was a wee sprout, i had a tough ass cat named bosco. he was spunky and tough and a total battle cat with chunks missing out of his ears and scars across his face. i thought that unfixed farm cat swagger was the tuffest thing out there (aside from my neighbor dannyboy who could spit tobacco juice out his nose).

then one day bosco up and gave birth to kittens and my entire sense of masculinity came crashing down.

so it was when our "collards" up and decided to give birth to big old gabacho cauliflower heads....

(this whole permaculture interplanting thing sure wrecks havoc with your ability to remember what went where... mama's maps and everything...)

These Things Take Time...

Sure. We're on a Smiths kick. There's been a lot of Morrissey energy floating around. There was a sweet couple's serenade last night of How Soon Is Now? An almost-family-fieldtrip to see Los Esmiths play in East LA (the Chicano Smiths coverband). And we'd be lying if we hadn't been blasting "A Rush and a Push" at least three times a day. But it could be worse. Our homie next door has Tupac's "War Stories" on repeat at sunfall every single night. And La Señora across the street has been rocking Julio Iglesias like the motherfucker is on his last legs (he'll live forever... if there was ever an Immortal...)

In the span of four days, the pole beans went from 2" weak looking lil' nuggets on the edge of death (unlike Julio) to 13" harbingers of sorrow loaded down with 6" waxy, super sweet beans...

Sweet and Tender Fucking Hooligans

Up at 4am every morning to surf Ghost Point which only breaks when there's some lingering energy pulsing up from Satanic Acts in the Southern Hemisphere. This morning while the water heated up, I went out to give our beds an extra bath after the hellacious windstorms we've been having. In the gleaming moonlight I saw that some of the old heirloom Sunday Bloody Sunday beets were starting to bolt.

It was a black metal morning for sure so why not get all Nordic and have beets for breakfast? While the yierba steeped itself to 70º Celsius perfection, we chopped those nuggets up while burning churches and true love flitted through the old cabeza. Then,
out of nowhere, just as I was about to huck the second to last beet hunk into the steamer, the sagrada corazón appeared. Maybe churches were burning somewhere and maybe old neglected gods were returning to Earth, but in no uncertain terms, true love was hovering in the moonlit air...

Is it really so strange?

To wake up one morning with The Smiths rolling through your head and luke warm french press swill coursing through your guts to find that all of a sudden your barren urban ecosystem is completely overrun with mutant artichokes?

Early morning...