Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Strange Clouds, New Potatoes

Last night at sunset there were some totally weird clouds.  One looked like a huge exclamation mark, something that you'd see on the front page of a grocery store tabloid, captioned, Is God Trying to Tell us Something?  And to the left of that a very long, torpedo-shaped cloud, such as I'd never seen.  First picture shows the exclamation mark, and the leading or western edge of the torpedo cloud, the second picture shows the eastern end of the torpedo. 
I've never seen a cloud with such an unusual and definite shape.  I've no idea what such a cloud would be called, but no doubt that it was formed by the action of the upper winds.  It was an interesting, but not threatening sight.  

The night of the Pine Lake tornado we had been watching the sky, which was quite threatening.  Jim called me to the back door to see a massive cloud, roiling just north of us.  I took a picture, because it was the most awesome cloud I'd seen, and later we found out that at the time I took the picture, that cloud was pouring down a funnel on a resort about 45 minutes from us, taking 12 lives and leaving massive devastation behind.

In garden notes, today I picked lots of spinach, since it's begun to bolt, and we had boiled spinach for dinner.  There's a new row just coming up, but we won't be able to pick from that for a few weeks yet, so I'll baby along some of the smaller plants in the old row, and hope for several more spinach salads.

I couldn't resist the new potatoes anymore.  Here's the harvest from just one plant:
These are Red Norlands. Scrubbed, boiled briefly, buttered and sprinkled with parsley, they are divine!  We still have lots of potatoes from last year, and they are still fine, due to our excellent cold storage building.  I prefer to make mashed potatoes, potato salad, or oven fried potatoes from them when they are this old.  Now that we've tasted the new ones, I'll probably let them grow for the rest of the season, and then harvest them all at once.  Unless, that is, I get a yen for new potatoes again.

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