Less than two weeks ago I semi-retired my old Canon Rebel XSI with an upgrade to the new T2i that shoots 1080p digital video. Yesterday I went out to Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm and started recording the flowers, bees, turkeys, chickens, the windmill, and a little bit of anything else that looked kind of interesting. After about four hours of unscripted shooting, I left for home and transferred the footage to my hard drive, and start importing it into Adobe Premiere. Don’t do something for 15 years and you are sure to get rusty and more certain than that, the software you may have once known to some degree has probably undergone some radical changes. I struggled some, watched more than a few tutorials on YouTube about editing video with Premiere, and by midnight I had a rough cut. Looking at my cut footage this morning there was some obvious need for further massaging of the video. But by the middle of the day, I felt that this was the best I was going to do after introducing myself to Hi-Def video and reacquainting myself with editing and so less than 36 hours after I embarked on this experiment, I am done. Here is the result with music by Joe Hisaishi.

A few days after my last plot update I replanted some lettuce, planted a bunch of herbs and fenugreek, transplanted two cauliflower seedlings, and did some thinning. Today’s photo is of sorrel that is now two days old. The cress and Genovese basil have also sprouted, I’m still waiting on parsley, chervil, lime basil, Thai basil, and lettuce leaf basil. The fenugreek started sprouting within a week of dropping it into the soil. It appears I planted the original planting of lettuce too deep, the new crop is already coming up and looks great. Maybe the corn mache was also too deep as it’s been slow to sprout so next to those rows I dropped some southwest greens called quelite and huazontle into the dirt with a thin cover, slowly they are emerging. Other failures in my plot are my golden beets which seem related to the viability of the seed while the red mustard seems to have suffered the same fate of the lettuce with being buried too deep. Now I know that the tiniest of seeds need the shallowest planting. I’ve been thinning cabbage every so many days as I try to choose the most robust plants to take to maturity – sauerkraut here we come. Eleven cloves of garlic have sprouted, every time I go to the farm they are the first things I check on. The plot was seeded on September 21st and my first harvest occurred on October 27th only thirty-six days later. On that day I pulled half a pound of radishes and cut a mix of almost two pounds of arugula, mezuna, and Tokyo bekana – we are still eating salads from those greens. On October 29th I picked a half-pound of radishes and then on the 31st another half pound of radishes along with a half-pound mix of arugula, mezuna, and Tokyo bekana that was all used for a salad shared on the farm for dinner. Yesterday I picked a bit more than a pound of radishes including my first mantanghong “Beauty Heart” radish – my favorite.

This is my little vegetable garden out at Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm. Because I volunteer out on the farm and help with Rob’s website I was given a 12 foot by 14-foot patch to plant what I wanted to. The area with little growth in it is supposed to be lettuce but these really small birds that can fit through the chicken wire are nipping off the tender leaves before much of the lettuce gets a chance to take hold. Most everything else is doing well though, as you can see. I have planted three types of chard, red mustard, orach & chual (two native southwest greens), green wave mustard, Tokyo bekana, mizuna, arugula, cilantro, salad burnet, spinach, mache, chives (which have not sprouted yet), five types of carrots, two types of radish, beets, collard greens, rutabaga, turnips, broccoli, cabbage, and borage. In the center row of the plot I planted about a dozen different varieties of garlic, the first clove just sprouted yesterday. I still have an old bathtub sitting next to my plot where I need to plant more herbs. The herbs are special for Caroline so we can make a Frankfurt specialty called Grüne Soße (Green Sauce) made of borage, sorrel, cress, chervil, chives, parsley, and salad burnet – its been fifteen years since she last tasted this famous Frankfurt culinary treat.

Taking time away from iTunes for a volunteer day out on the farm. On February 19 I started recording our somewhat vast collection of CDs and scanning their covers, but after nine straight days of that, I needed a break, and out to Tonopah Caroline and I went. After returning from our snowshoeing trip to Yellowstone I have been immersed in the world of my and Caroline’s computers, migrating both of us to Windows 7. Between upgrading from the various Windows betas that are being released and recording, scanning, and organizing our music, I have not taken much time out on the farm this season. Sure is nice getting caught up with my stuff, though.

Was out on Tonopah Rob’s farm today when I spotted this guy. You can bet that when I crouched down to capture an image I was praying hard that this wasn’t some kind of leaping monster.