Tomatoes and green beans

There really was something I wanted to say about tomatoes but, like so many things of late (like the last 7 years or so), it's slipped the surly bonds of earth and disappeared into the ether.

I will answer something that Friend Cherylyn asked me in yesterday's post. Why take off the "armpit hairs" on the tomatoes? To review, what I call armpit hairs are the side branches that sprout between two larger leaf units. I pull them off because they like to grow into their own entities. When they do that, they take away some of the life force that the tomato plant could be putting forth to make me some more tomatoes. So there.

Oh, I remember what the magic tomato comment was now. Has anyone else noticed how tomato plants have an unsettling resemblance to poison ivy, in certain parts of their incarnation? I am very unsettled by this. Poison ivy is my nemesis, my bane. It must not be a part of my life in any way whatsoever. But I know that these little guys are little tomato plants, so I leave them alone. When I catch them out of the corner of my eye, though, they make me jump.

I picked a double handful of green beans this morning, and a pocket full of assorted sugar snap peas and snow peas. Yes, I'm very excited! My half-runner beans are going great guns as far as twining prettily up their trellises but the bush beans are the ones putting out the goods for me. I think I'll plant some more and also some lettuce, if I can ever get out there without being eaten alive by the mosquitoes.

The assorted green stuff is going to go in tonight's supper, which is entitled "Oxtail Scrounge Soup". When I don't want to cook and we're going to have leftovers, the children refer to them as "Scrounge", as in, "We're going to have Scrounge for supper because we have so many leftovers." The oxtail in question is, itself, a scrounge item as I took it out of the freezer for another batch of soup which it didn't get to go into. So I've pan-roasted and boiled the oxtails, peeled and cut up some carrots that were really close to being compost material, and I'm scrounging around for more to put into my soup. The finishing touch will be my fresh green beans and snow peas/sugar snap peas. Crescent Dragonwagon, in one of her wonderful cookbooks, stated that fresh green beans in her soup were miraculous, or something like that. I guess we'll see. Hopefully the Oxtail Scrounge Soup won't be a total loss. It would be nice if I could turn odds and ends into something good to eat.

Until tomorrow!