Last night I looked around to see how many bits from my garden I could include with dinner. I had a steak from the freezer (I have to buy, not grow, my own meat, zoning and yard size come into play here) but I had a lovely little white onion I sliced to saute with it, and I had a side of Swiss chard and a handful of baby carrots that I thinned from the carrot patch. It took me a while to learn that when thinning you need to do it by taking the largest of the particular plant, leaving the smaller ones to grow and fill the space. When you take the large carrot you have something there to eat, while if you take the small carrot you just have a skinny orange root. Onions you can eat just about any time, and this one I knocked over in the path a couple of week ago and was letting it dry out a little. This white one is one of many I planted last summer or fall to use as green onions, but I didn't use them all. This year they're growing the fat bulb and taste marvelous, once you knock off the part that grows up to the flower.

You guys all probably knew this, but in the past I haven't grown that many things that needed thinning, or had so few survive that thinning never came up. And I'm teaching my son about this stuff, even though he isn't incredibly interested right now.

On a completely different subject, I've been researching the aggregate feed question and why my gardening landscaping blog made it into a site unnamed and unlinked. I guess to keep this from happening again I must give myself a by-line and a link at the top of my entry even if it is clearly posted on my page. I'll write one with similar tags and do it this way later and see if that works.

SRS