The Lows

With gardening as with childrearing, the highs are very high ("I love you, Mommy!") and the lows are VERY low ("I wish you weren't my mommy!"). Some nasty pest - probably a slug colony - nibbled off all my potted mesclun over the course of 48 hours. So discouraging, I didn't even have the heart to snap a photo of it before I angrily upended the pot and destroyed all the slugs clinging to its bottom. The kids enthusiastically pointed out ones I'd missed until we were sure we got all the ones that were visible.

After bedtime, my son called me in to tell me that he couldn't stop thinking about "things that I know probably aren't going to happen, or not for a very very long time" like meteors crashing into our house or volcanoes erupting. I told him that scientists now can detect those things before they happen and they give people warning, so our family and all our friends can go to a safe place far away. I couldn't help adding, "But I won't tell the slugs, so the meteor will crash into them." It's like war up in here.

Tomatoes and Plums

EVERY DAY.  I remembered AGAIN! I even had a helper picking many unripe tomatoes for me... well, maybe they'll ripen a bit on the windowsill.

Also harvested a few leaves of container lettuce - nice, since I haven't had much luck with that venue before - and a couple strawberries. F YOU, SLUGS! Have I shared my slug repellent? I use broken eggshells everywhere I think the little bastards might crawl to get at my few but luscious berries. Works just fine, if the timing is right (scatter them a day or two before the berries are fully ripe), and much cheaper than the beer method, which after a few weeks I realized was a) costing me, and b) getting my kids a little too comfy with the nasty smell of old beer.

In less good news, I picked up a couple pounds of plums at the Berkeley Bowl this week intended to make freezer jam from them. As usual, it turned out as a sauce. Boy, is my freezer full of varied fruit sauces and syrups. I need my Jam Mentor friend to come over and walk me through it step by step. She has such a sure hand with jam, that (she told me this week) she tried to make syrup, and it turned out as jam.