Vegetables

I am not talking about us, hahahah.

I have a serious question. If you were to go out to a farm to pick a vegetable or fruit, what would you want to find to pick? How much would you want to pick.

My other question is, do baby vegetables appeal to you? Say a baby squash or a baby cucumber, or a baby turnip.

Maybe a baby beet????

All hydroponically correct, of course.

Love,
Betty

Without a doubt...tomatoes.

Funny question, Betty...

Of course, I love some okra, too.

ducks to avoid the slings and arrows from fellow writers who abhor okra

I like to go to the farmer's markets and buy stuff that's been picked that day, mostly because my allergies go absolutely nuts when I actually get in there and start picking. Last time it happened I swelled up like a balloon and needed copious amounts of benadryl. Not one of my pretty days - think Will Smith in the movie Hitch.
My favourite picked fruits and veggies...baby anything (especially beets), apples, strawberries, cranberry, carrots, broccoli, beans, tomatoes, potatoes...practically all of it except for lettuce. I'd probably even eat okra if I found it somewhere...but I find lettuce really annoying.

Tomatoes for sure - but I have never had a hydoponically grown one that had that "backyard" taste.

Sugar Snap Peas, to eat raw or in a salad.

Okra - very young and tender.

The baby squash are good. Have you ever had fried squash blossoms? Don't get mush younger than that!

Wow. I can't believe you, Pam. No lettuce? To pick from the garden I like most everything, but would have to say carrots and spinach are tops on the list. But not too little. The babies need to get a little bigger.

Geeesh. I guess I'm in the minority with a garden. Even so, we go to the farmer's market for special things. Everything is Bio or Organic. Of course one cannot grow everything one needs and then there is the season to consider. Tomatoes don't grow in the winter and therefore imports are required or canned goods.
By the way, have you ever seen Okra in a can? If so, either remove the labels or just don't tell anyone.

This year we planted: Tomatoes, potatoes, lots of lettuce, cucumbers, Zucchini, string beans, peppers, Kohlrabi, Leeks, Broccoli & Red beets I also have some raspberries & strawberries, some fruit trees (apple & pear) and grapes.

Maintaining a garden is much work but the rewards are worth it. Not just good things to eat but savings. Our freezer is stuffed full and will serve us well over the winter. All these things I learned from my childhood. We grew our own food and then much was preserved for the winter. The cold cellar was always full with potatoes and the canned goods.

For me, forget eveything mentioned except the cucumbers, tomatoes and tender lettuce. Deep six the okra, the squash, the turnips and the beets, or better yet destroy the entire species.

I just gotta love the acorn squash and spaghetti squash. They are a yummy alternative to potatoes. Our growing season here is too short to have much of a successful garden, but we do get cukes, broccolli and squash almost without fail. But carrots hava a hard time of it (bugs get to them), and tomatoes almost never get to ripen.

Broccolli - almost forgot how much I hate it. You can enjoy my share, Zada.

What about nuts, Dick. Do you like nuts? They could serve as a substitute for those vegetables you hate.

I'm with Dick on the squash, turnips, beets, and broccoli. Also don't eat spinach, turnip greens, "poke sallet", or any of the other green things that we used to pick wild in the field. Forget about dandelions and asparagus too. Oh, add artichokes to the list. Don't know if mushrooms are vegetables or not, but I won't eat one under any circumstances.

I really like fresh tomatoes, but not the overly pink pulp filled things that they try and pass off as tomatoes today. I like the old fashioned red tomato that still tastes like a tomato. Love cucumbers and lettuce, carrots and onions, and it’s almost impossible to fix a bean or a potato in a way that I don’t like. Unless, of course, you smother them in one of the above vegetables that I simply won’t eat. I like peas and green beans, peppers and raw cabbage (in slaw) but I don’t eat cooked cabbage. And I do love nuts. Most any kind, but I’m partial to pecans and cashews.

Wonder if any of you ever tried wilted salad? If not, here ya go. Oh, I don’t eat it anymore, cause it’s not so great for heart patients, but it sure is good. Fry a few pieces of bacon until it’s crisp, lay aside. Break some tender lettuce into small pieces, put it on your plate, and chop a bit of onion into the mix. Crumble the bacon into pieces and sprinkle on the lettuce/onion mix. Pour the hot bacon grease over the salad until it is covered, salt and pepper it, and prepare yourself for a side dish such as you’ve never tasted before.

I love wilted salad, Don, but my grandmother always added a dash of
vinegar to the bacon grease. When I fix it today, I may use lettuce,
but often use spinach. Delicious.

We used to sometimes use spinach greens also, Brenda, and that's about the only way I will eat them. Don't recall using vinegar though.

This is one of the food dishes that I miss.

I bet, Don. I love all fried foods. A perfect meal for me is crispy fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and biscuits with real butter, and chocolate cake for dessert. Needless to say, especially since I'm older, I try to avoid them all.

I never tried wilted lettuce but other than that Don's list could have been written by me. I like all those things. I wonder if any of this is helping Betty.

zadaconnaway wrote:

Wow. I can't believe you, Pam. No lettuce? To pick from the garden I like most everything, but would have to say carrots and spinach are tops on the list. But not too little. The babies need to get a little bigger.

Lettuce is one of the few things that annoys me -- it's a lot of work to get it to a standard I enjoy, and then you add dressing (and for me, it's all about the dressing), and the darned stuff starts to wilt. Blech. I like the veggies to have some body to them.

It was only when I married my wife of 31 years that I realized that
some people judge food by TEXTURE rather than taste! She has never been
a hearty eater anyway, with many strange hang-ups about food. Her
mother told me that when she was a kid, not only did she not want
different foods touching each other on her plate, she had to have a
different fork for each!

On the other hand, I ate anything my mother put before me. A few missed
meals will make a hearty eater of most anything! LOL. That's what God
made catsup for.

I may have posted this before, but here, from The Last Of The South Town Rinky Dinks, is my take on meat.

My Daddy was a hunter, and a lot of the time we had whatever Daddy had killed that day.

If Daddy went into the woods and killed some kind of critter, you can bet that he was going to have Mama cook it. We called it meat. Sometimes we had fried chicken, sometimes we had beef roast or pork roast, steak, ham or bacon, and the rest of the time we had meat. I still get a little suspicious when I'm not exactly sure what is on the table before me. There are a lot of things that will fry up crispy brown and tasty looking, but I don't bite into anything until I know for sure what it is.

I thought of that story while I was writing my post, Don. I didn't have
much to worry about with my mother or dad. My dad didn't eat wild game,
and mom didn't like cooking it. If I cleaned the occassional rabbit or
squirrel and cut it up where it looked like chicken she would cook it
for me.

Now my grandmother on the other hand... being from the older school of
survival, would try anything. She could make rabbit n' dumplins that
were to die for.

Don,
I didn't list some of the vegetable things you mentioned, I listed only what I had in my garden this year. Spinach is a waste of time to grow, in my opinion. When cooked it takes a huge amount and there's not much left. Used raw in a salad is good.
Dandelion is something from my childhood that I'll never forget. It was the worst thing ever to be placed on my plate. My mother would pick it and then cook it with bacon fat. We were forced to eat it because we were told we needed the iron. I tried to hide it in the mash potatoes but that still didn't help. I often choked on the stuff when swallowing because it was stringy. In later years I learned that people placed dandelion in salad. We tried that and if young tender dandelion is used, it blends in well with a mixed salad.

Since Betty started this thread on vegetables, I'll stay away from commenting on the meat.

When I was a kid we were sent out in packs to hunt for and pick dandelion greens. Like Abe, I had to eat 'em but hated it. Seems that when we weren't picking dandelion greens we were walking the railroad tracks looking for coal. Once in a while the fireman on a passing train would see us and throw out a shovelful.
One more green I hated: swiss chard.
But I do enjoy a good spinach salad now and then. Back in the hey-day of restaurant salad bars I would return to the table carrying a bowl filled with everything except food that actually qualified as salad.

Here is a shot of Betty's vegetable plot. The amount of work that went into this staggers the mind. Here is what she said:
"Tomorrow we get the 2000 strawberry plants. In these pictures the irrigation is not yet in. What a lot of work this has been.
"This system was developed for places that do not have viable soil for growing food. It is genius! A plot the size that we have installed could feed a small community of people."

That is so neat! Literally!

We'll soon have to come up with a new name for Betty.
Strawberry lady? Greenthumb Betty? Garden Betty?

Strawberry Betty...Farmer Betty...Fasig Farms...Fasig Fruit and Fantasticals