Uni is over for the year, Summer is grudgingly arriving and the Night Gardener awakes! Well, the Night Gardener is always awake at night, but at this time of year his horticultural productivity rises dramatically. The winter kale crop has reached it's zenith as you can see. Our kale seeds were gifted to us by Peter Cundall and bare the name to prove it. While they were very slow getting started and ended up being consolidated to only a quarter of the large raised bed, they have exploded under the influence of a little dynamic lifter. Do I like eating kale? This is a question yet to be answered. An ancestral relative of the cabbage, sharing its distinctive aroma, I am curious to see if it can be substituted into cabbage based dishes. One in particular combines cabbage with bacon, butter and parsley to startling effect. Not sure if that's fair though, pretty much anything goes with that particular culinary trinity. Perhaps its a taste I'll have to acquire. It worked with cider.
Kale is not without it's ravenous enemies. Just this afternoon I noticed a plague of green caterpillars with near perfect camouflage! I'm fairly certain what I have here is the formative vessels of the White Cabbage Butterfly. Once you spot one of them all of a sudden they are everywhere. So far I have tried spraying with Spinosad and jumping up and down a bit. If that doesn't work, my next plan will involve bacon, butter and parsley, taking care to wash the spray off the little buggers first.
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