Gardening: my economic activity for the day

My job at the whale farm hasn't quite begun yet, so I have finally gotten around to planting my fall garden. I had planted some stuff last year and I was surprised to see that after our 4.5 inches of rain the other week, chard had voluntarily sprouted itself. So I planted more chard, beets and cilantro.

My garden is very small. The Man says that gophers will destroy any attempts to plant food. Last year I gathered a bunch of big plastic pots, maybe 3 gallon sized, and so instead of a normal garden, I planted my garden in the pots. I used dirt from the ground and compost mixed together. Some of the pots have planting mix, too, but I ran out of that. It doesn't seem to matter much. The plants will grow.

While I fiddled with my pots, I heard a strange noise. I thought maybe I was about to be attacked by insects. I looked, but it was only the neighbor's chickens staring at me and making little buzzing noises. I've wondered if I put nests in our back yard if the chickens might defect over to our side. They certainly like our compost bin. I have a chicken nest somewhere I bought for our big white bird. She wasn't interested in it, despite how many times we've called her a big white chicken.

Last year I grew lettuce in my garden. I decided to go for beets this time instead. With beets you can eat the roots and the leaves. I made a beet green soup once and served it with feta cheese and crusty bread. The Man thought it was delicious. I think he would have turned up his nose if I had told him I was making beet green soup before he tasted it.

After I planted my garden, using a big spoon from the kitchen and a watering can—that's how high tech I am—I noticed that our tiny little tangerine tree is covered with fruit. There is so much fruit, the shrub (I can hardly call it a tree) is almost more fruit than leaves. So I picked a big bag. I wonder if pulling off the fruit and leaving a big hunk of peel still attached is bad. That is what seems to happen every time.

Nothing tastes better than tangerines. My little green bird likes them, too. I'm not a fan of oranges. I like tangerines and grapefruit best of the citrus fruits.

I also picked up some large, ripe passion fruit that fell off the monster vine that is taking over the yard. Our big white birds likes those. She'll eat a passion fruit bigger than her big head.

Since I've become mostly locked out of the corporate world (and I'm kind of wondering if that is really so bad) I've come to the conclusion that I need to grow more of what I eat and eat a lot less. The 20 minutes I spent today in my little garden was my economic activity for the day. Let's hope it earned me enough to buy a beer down at the Irish session tonight. At the very least, I've got a thousand calories or so of tangerines in the fridge to show for my efforts. And about 50 calories of chard sprouts to show for no efforts at all.