Language of Food

By 9:30 Saturday morning we looked like a stand at the Farmer's Market. Pictured here are regulars and newcomers (at least three others worked but were not in the picture, including me). I'm grateful that the Community Garden can help compensate for my mistakes. In my own garden, my winter squash and pumpkins had too much nitrogen (from chicken manure) so they grew a lot of vines with few fruit.

I mainly learned some Spanish vocabulary for weeds and insects. I found out that the weed we call 'red root' is actually grown and cooked for food in Mexico. The name I understood was 'treis.' (And here we grow and sell a lovely Mexican weed called poinsettias:). Some helpers today spoke English and Samoan, one spoke Spanish and the rest English. But when a fellow gardener shared a cucumber drink, we had no difficulty understanding how to "share and enjoy" the bounty. We had 10 overflowing bags composed of chard, tomatoes, cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, corn, carrots, patty pan squash, green beans and onions.