Reaping and Preparing to Sew

 

After two days of lows well below freezing, and hopefully behind us now until late fall, I set off for a morning of foraging. My first stop was the asparagus patch which had quite a haul despite perhaps a third of it having frozen and wasn't any good anymore. The tips are starting to be more loosely organized and so it won't be much longer before the asparagus harvest is done for the year and we'll leave the shoots to bolt. 

My second stop was to look for gray morels. The first two times I have looked, it has been too dry and a bit on the early side. Since then we got some much needed moisture and the ground looked prime for finding morels but with two days of below freezing temps at night, I suspect it put a damper on them for now. Some years are like this where it yo-yos between too much or too little moisture and heat and we just never find too much until the yellow morels come out a bit later. However the next two or three days are supposed to get up into the 60's so there may be one last shot at finding some gray morels this coming weekend before the yellows start popping.

For those new to the blog, gray morels are prized by me because they are more firm and hold up to cooking better and have an earthier flavor than yellow morels. While the yellow morels can be up to five times the size of gray morels, their flesh tends to fall apart easier if not picked right away and they have a much more mild flavor. I'll eat both kinds with relish but I prefer the grays if I have a choice.

Although not on my list, my traipsing through the woods usually means I run across a few remains of whitetail deer. usually at this point they are too far gone to tell if their demise was age related or perhaps one that got away from a hunter this past winter. I usually just look for antlers to add to my collection and move on. 

With my wife off on the west coast for a medical conference, and taking one for the team by bring along her mother, that meant I was allowed into the greenhouse which is typically out of my domain unless the water barrel needs filled. As I have written before, we are going to focus on tomatoes this year but I didn't quite expect how many of them my MIL had planted. Above are two trays of tomatoes that won't be long in this greenhouse before being transplanted to the garden.

Then I found some pots of some that were evidently planted a bit earlier as they were a bit bigger.

But even they were short compared to the two plants on the end. However those two I had picked up on a whim while looking for other seed at our local plant nursery back in early mid March. They had been pretty stunted looking back then but have certainly grown out of it. To the left are some oak trees that my wife started last spring by sticking a few acorns into dirt. If they leaf out again this spring, I will probably sew them around our lawn in places that could use a nice oak tree.