Happy Solstice

Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere, at least), a subject on which I've blogged before. We will be celebrating tomorrow night for various reasons - Saturdays are generally more convenient that Fridays in regards to preparations, and doing it on Saturday evening allows a journey to the Saturday morning Farmers' Market for some of the feast ingredients. In our generic-reconstructed-British-pagan seasonal celebrations, we like to consider what foods would have been available to our ancestors, and this year our meat choice was "birds". So last night involved a hunting expedition to the local Safeway for some game hens. The hunt was successful, and the results are now thawing in my refrigerator. Tomorrow I get to cook them.

Other feast ingredients, assuming the Farmers' Market cooperates, will be new potatoes (yes, all right, I know they're New World...), asparagus, wheat bread, organic strawberries (the small local kind that actually taste like strawberries) and cream. Oh, and the first half dozen fava beans from my garden. Rowen, being the brewer, will provide the mead, and another friend her traditional deviled eggs (if you've done something that many years in a row, it's traditional). And weather permitting, we will have a small bonfire...

On other topics, I've finally finished another chapter of The Ash Spear (see the sidebar for the stats), and am beginning to have something like momentum in my writing again. This will of course be derailed (does momentum run on rails?) by our local Fourth of July camping event, followed all too soon by the Cymdeithas Madog Welsh Course (the poem is about as finished as it's going be, I think, though I'm sure there are still grammatical errors). In the meantime I'm hoping to get one or two more chapters done before July!

Happy Solstice, all!

-GRG

Updates...

No writing this past weekend. Saturday's weather was too good - dry, sunny and breezy - so I spent the afternoon tilling part of the garden and preparing the long bed where I'm going to grow fava beans this year. It's been a tomato bed for the last two or three years and tomato diseases and pests were accumulating, so it was time for crop rotation. I didn't grow fava beans last year due to tomato-mania, but found a couple of new recipes I want to try more often. And the plants are reliable, hardy, and pleasant to look at. Favas are a form of the European broad bean which would have been grown in Britain in Gwernin's time (most of our current bean varieties are New World imports), and it's interesting that the Welsh word for "beans" is ffa.

I actually got the beans planted Easter Sunday, after the small amount of snow we had Saturday night had melted off. With another run of warm sunny weather expected this week, I should be seeing the first plants in 10-12 days. I was glad to get them planted this early - some years we still have snow cover/frozen ground at this point, but it's been a relatively warm spring. Fava beans don't mind a little frost, so the earlier they're planted the better.

In the cold-frame the tomato seedlings are still doing well - second true leaves on some the earliest ones now, and all remaining short and stocky due to the natural light and cool nights, a nice change from the spindly ones I've gotten in previous years when I grew them indoors under lights. I meant to take a picture yesterday while they were in the sun, but forgot - maybe next weekend.

-GRG