Bamboo Shoots

I bought a bamboo shoot at the Maplewood Farmers Market at Schlafly Bottleworks from the lady at the Ozark Forest Mushrooms booth. She sold them with this brochure (pdf) from the Extension Office of Washington State University. I peeled the shoot, sliced it into rings, and boiled the slices for twenty minutes. According to the brochure, you can then serve it just about anyway you would any other vegetable -- on a salad, in soup, stir-fried, etc. We thought the flavor was pretty delicate (reminds me of Heart of Palm) and so decided it would suit us best on a salad.





If you haven't been to a Farmers Market this spring, things are really popping out early. I bought a chicken, beet leaves, and mushrooms. There were all kinds of other greens available as well as radishes and chives. I saw a sign that said strawberries, but they must have sold out before I got there. Also, lots of plants for your garden.

Class Field Trip 2

For the second Sunday in a row, we got up before sunrise to meet our photography class at the Missouri Botanical Garden, two hours before it opened to the public. The azaleas and tulips are spectacular.

More photos on my flickr page.

Evening light at the Garden

We stayed at the Missouri Botanical Garden after volunteering at the Archive during the day on Wednesday. It was fun to see how active the ducks and geese were at that time of day. The azaleas were brilliant.





More photos on my flickr page.

Photography Class field trip

Rick and I are taking a photography class through the Missouri Botanical Garden. Today's adventure was a field trip starting two hours before the Garden opened to the public. I took 269 photos, but culled them down to 21.

The Japanese Garden has beautiful light at 7:00 in the morning.



The class is called "Understanding Exposure," so I took many shots of this white bridge to get a good exposure.



The tulips are blooming with more to come.



Many more photos on my flickr page.

Celery Growing In St. Louis

Rick and I are volunteering in the Archives of the Missouri Botanical Garden. I am cataloging the slides of Walter Hodge, botanist and photographer, a collection numbering in the tens of thousands of photographs arranged alphabetically by genus. I might get through the Acers (maples) next week. Rick is scanning the same slides that I cataloged in the fall of 2009, the photographs by Jack Jennings whose work graced the annual Garden calendar for decades.

Rick's work contains a fair amount of downtime as the slide scans, so he has been reading old issues of the Missouri Botanical Garden Bulletin. An article he read last week has to do with growing celery in St. Louis and was published in March, 1915. Here is the link to the 1915 volume on Botanicus; the celery article starts on page 41. According to the article, "it is possible to grow good celery on a small scale and with but little effort." It also says that celery "is a garden product good only while perfectly fresh. Its flavor and crispness are soon lost after the plants are removed from the conditions surrounding their growth." If that's true, we both believe we may have never eaten a good stalk of celery.

Another reason to grow celery is that it is number 4 on the list of highest pesticide load. So, celery is a great candidate for growing instead of purchasing conventionally grown and marketed stalks.

There are late and early varieties of celery. The article mentions three early varieties that are recommended for St. Louis: White Plume, Golden Self Blanching, and Golden Heart. Of these, only the Golden Self Blanching variety seems readily available now. The White Queen and Giant Pascal varieties "should be selected for winter use." White Queen is available at Kitazawa Seed and Giant Pascal is available from several seed companies.

Much of the celery article explains how to blanch or bleach celery. We found this confusing in all details from "why?" to "how?". I think, to start, I'll try the Golden Self Blanching variety and look for some modern sources about how to grow celery. If anyone in the St. Louis area is growing celery and would like to offer me a demonstration, I would love to see your garden in action this summer.

Sunday Transcendentalist Quote

From Ralph Waldo Emerson's address at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, as quoted in The Concord Quartet by Samuel A. Schreiner Jr.

The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicated with sufficient cleanness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity, --a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man, --is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.

It's really no wonder that we have become a nation where most of us don't go to church with this in our past. But, I think the Transcendentalists would be disappointed in us as a society. We don't take the time and effort that we used to put into church and seek God in the woods or in our hearts.

Sunday Transcendentalist Quote

Emerson, reflecting on a Higher Power, before it was called that:

I find this amazing revelation of my immediate relation to God a solution to all the doubts that oppressed me. I recognize the distinction of the outer and inner self; the double consciouness that, within this erring, immortal mind, whose powers I do not know, but it is stronger than I; it is wiser than I; it never approved me in any wrong; I seek counsel for it in my doubts; I repair to it in my dangers; I pray to it in my undertakings. It seems to me the face which the Creator uncovers to his child. It is the perception of this depth in human nature, this infinitude belonging to every man that has been born, which has given a new value to the habits of reflection and solitude.

This is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal during a trip to Europe that he took after relinquishing his pulpit and before writing Essay on Nature, as quoted on page 26 in The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Friendship that Freed the American Mind by Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr.