Mamaliga

…but I’ll just eat the Prunus persica (aka peach), thank you! After 3-1/2 years the Madison peach tree that my wife Steph planted is happy and producing more that it can bear (literally). I had to prop up its tiny branches with bungee ropes hooked to an improvised wooden tripod so they won’t break off. It produced abundantly this year (about 50 to 60 peaches) with no pesticides, growth hormones whatsoever. The proof is the worm! Last year we lost all 16 but 2 of them to the bloody squirrels (we hates them!), but this year we observed that if we leave the lawn to grow long enough, they seem to hesitate to walk over it. Not sure how much truth there is in this theory (beside the fact that we have a pretty un-kept back yard lawn), but it looked like each time they wanted to approach the peach tree, they kept stopping by the driveway border then turning back hissing mad as if their evil plan failed. I guess it’s a more humane way to keep them out of our trees than I previous thought of [ahem], and I won’t go into details here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

Check this out. My wife, who’s doing the gardening in our household, found three Morel mushrooms in our back yard! What’s going on? Are we sitting on a gold mine and not know it?

It is amazing how many interesting wild things can grow in our small backyards. The only thing is to just look for them. Pretty soon we’ll stop going to the grocery store to buy our produce. That would be heaven in the Chicago Northwest Suburbs. Well, at least a hint.

Now, if I can convince the mayor that there is no harm in having a small chicken farm in our backyard. And probably a cow and a goat in one side of the garage. Fresh eggs, fresh milk and so on. After all, we live in Organic America! Everyone in urban Romania has a mini-farm in one degree or another. They cannot afford living otherwise.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

This whole organic food concept cracks me up sometimes. There is a multi-billion industry built on it. The modern American culture became so “fat hydrogenated” that produced a whole anti-movement (rightly so) to bring back the original food production standards of natural cooking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]