Reading this week:

• Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
• The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

I’ve got adventures planned for this weekend, but in the meantime a garden update. The biggest thing is that my pigeon pea has finally really grown into the pigeon pea forest I wanted. The whole yard of pigeon pea is about 6-7 feet tall, and I like to duck in between the rows and be in my pigeon pea forest. The photo at the top is taken inside the rows at about eye level to give you the real good on-the-ground feel of it.

My biggest surprise this year is that it seems that pigeon pea is primarly pollinated (around here anyways) by these rather large beetles, so as I am wandering around in the pigeon pea these guys keep taking off and flying around with a loud buzz. I took some glamour shots:

The pigeon pea, as evidenced by the beetles, is still flowering and isn’t ready for harvest yet, but most of the rest of the garden is. The groundnuts (peanuts) are almost ready, though I don’t really know how to tell when they’re ripe. They’re edible but not like, the peanut you (I) expect so I’m giving them some more time. The soya, however, is ready to go. Tell you what though man, beans are a hassle. They’re low to the ground and you have to shuck them and I only have so many podcasts downloaded. I guess protein is cool but yeesh.

The other day, however, I yanked the season’s first orange-fleshed sweet potatoes out of the ground, so that was a momentous occasion. They’re pictured above, along with the soya beans. I’ve been harvesting carrots for a while now, but I thought I would show them off. Carrots have consistently been my best and easiest crop. The white thing is supposed to be garlic; garlic was the very first thing I planted, a while back, and it seemed to grow really well, but now it won’t go beyond that stage into like, garlic. The bulb above though still tastes like garlic, and I don’t know if I just need to wait longer but I won’t be around forever and so I’ve just been pulling it up and using it like that.

To celebrate this bountiful harvest, I made soup. I make soup every night for dinner, so that’s not actually special, but this soup was mostly stuff I harvested like, just that day, so that’s pretty neat (I also added some market-bought onion and tomato and of course spices). It was thoroughly edible, if I do say so myself.