Thursday, April 20, 2017

Foraging again in the rain


My Grandfather Fred used to say silly things like. "It's raining, let's have a picnic!"

As a kid I thought he was crazy. Who wanted to be out in the rain?
Right?

He'd follow up that comment with an explanation.
"You can't farm in the rain, you can't work in the garden in the rain, so what else is there to do? Why a picnic of course!"

It usually meant that we'd pack up in mom's station wagon and go visiting to other farms and relatives. It was always a mystery to me that we'd show up somewhere and the grown ups would gather around the kitchen table and talk while the kids went into another room to play.

However now that I am the grown up and I see rain coming down. I put on rain-gear and go for a walk.
My husband looks at me as though I've grown two heads and a third eye ball.
"Walk in the rain, are you nuts?"

Oh well. Not really.
"I can't dig in the garden, or do much else," I reply. "I may as well go looking for parsnips and leeks!"

And off I go into a very light rain.

I find parsnips at 'The Beach' easy to pull. I like keeping them out of a section of the neighbor's creek so that we don't have to deal with parsnip burns if the kids come down to wade and play in the creek later on in the year.
Besides, they are good to eat.

The leek patch needs a bit of thinning out so they have room to grow larger. Leeks come up, and after they wilt, disappear into the ground until next spring. They have a nice light onion flavor to them and go well with sauteed parsnips.

 Note the plastic bag over the camera. It is a plastic sleeve often used as a vet sleeve...
It covers the camera quite nicely and keeps it from getting wet.


I made my way back home and stopped to look admire the Mayflowers in the rain.


It may even have been fun to find an overhang of rocks to sit under and enjoy a picnic.

Don't you think?


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